It’s difficult to write anything concrete about calls for “unity” because the word can mean so many different things. At times it’s a necessary corrective, a call to remember that those we disagree with are still people and deserve our love and a chance to repent. Other times it’s something closer to gaslighting, an insistence by powerful men that discussing their misdeeds is a form of “disunity.”
Within the Evangelical church recently it has come to mean something more specific: an understanding that our shared belief in Jesus is more important than any other belief, and (as expressed by a sermon in my own church last week) that it is absolutely imperative that churches retain a healthy intellectual diversity in whatever have been decided to be “non-gospel” areas.
It’s easy to give sermons like this as long as you focus on the general principle of intellectual diversity, because you can quickly win your audience over by bringing images to mind of divisions over the specifics of tax policy or nuances related to precisely what sort of lockdown might be acceptable. But as soon as you branch out you very quickly realize that, as with many things, there are healthy and unhealthy sorts of diversity:
American Evangelical history gives us plenty of examples of unhealthy diversity [cw: racism/slavery in both bullet points]:
In the mid-1800s, the American Tract Society (an Evangelical group devoted to spreading Christian literature) decided to remain neutral on the question of slavery, which it believed to be necessary to stay in a “fraternal” union with white slave-owning Christians.
(As is typical in this sort of discussion, the feelings of the slave-owners who were causing the harm were given a lot of weight and almost no consideration was given to the humanity of the people they were hurting.)John Piper, a very prominent Evangelical pastor, has repeatedly lent his platform to Doug Wilson, a self-proclaimed “paleo-confederate” who writes tracts supporting the institution of southern slavery and insisting that our current view of it is anti-biblical and shaped by “abolitionist propaganda.” Piper has gone so far as to recommend that people read Wilson’s book on slavery and to “both-sides” a 2013 debate between Thabiti Anyabwile and Wilson over whether defending chattel slavery is bad. I spent some time looking, but was unable to find any evidence that he’d publicly repented from this.
So the real question isn’t whether “unity” and “intellectual diversity” are good or bad in some vague abstract sense, but whether or not the church’s mission is served by indulging a particular point of view, and whether or not it’s worth leaving a church over a given disagreement.
These are really difficult questions that can’t be answered by general calls to unity or insistence that “the gospel” supersedes all other issues. At some level you have to stop to look at what is actually happening. And what I see happening again and again at my church is calls to unity justifying and covering for serious institutional failures.
Here are just a few examples of what this can look like in practice:
Last week, my church announced that starting Christmas Eve we would be moving indoors without masks. No explanation for why we wouldn’t take the barest minimum of precautions to love our neighbors was ever given, although the policy was eventually rescinded after a very stressful couple of days for myself and others. Among other things, I threatened to leave the church permanently over the policy and was told I needed to be more “understanding”.
This whole mess was explicitly mentioned in the “unity” sermon, which left a bad taste in my mouth. If you screw up and negatively mention the fact that you were called out on it in a sermon on “unity”, it doesn’t feel like you’re taking your mistakes very seriously.
My (predominantly white, upper class) church is in the process of moving to Woodlawn, a predominantly poor and black neighborhood. Our lead pastor believes ideas like “white privilege” are “too controversial” to mention in church because they might alienate our conservative attendees, so we haven’t had any serious conversations about what a healthy multicultural, multiclass church might actually look like.
Is this undermining our ability to build such a church? Our lead pastor talks about this as a philosophical debate we shouldn’t get worked up over, but the fact that we keep alienating local predominantly black churches and losing people of color as members might be a sign that we have some unfixed issues. But it’s a lot easier to accuse the people we’ve hurt of a lack of unity than it is to confront our own racism.
On the other hand, ideas like “women shouldn’t preach in church” and “gay people should seek counselling” are not considered “too controversial” to preach from the pulpit. It goes without saying that preaching horrible things about my friends makes it harder to feel comfortable inviting them to church to meet the God who’s being misrepresented.
If your words are wrongly driving our friends away from God — that is, undermining the gospel — then you can’t also ask us to be okay with them in the name of “unity for the sake of the gospel.”
Every serious scientist agrees that climate change is real and is going to absolutely devastate the world, especially its poorest people, without serious action. Jesus calls us to love the poor above any other people. As far as I can tell, my church has never given a sermon on climate change, or even discussed taking any actions whatsoever to mitigate it.
In this case, our call to “unity” is in explicit conflict with our call to love our neighbors. If you decide to care about the global poor, you will alienate members who don’t believe in climate change. If you decide to stay quiet for the sake of fraternity with your climate change-denying members, you are committing a terrible act against the global poor. Who do we care more about unity with?
I’m not an expert in how to pursue racial reconciliation, how to fight climate change, how to support LGBT people in religious settings, how to fight sexism, or any of these things. And yet because of how my church keeps alienating actual experts on these things until they leave, I constantly find myself being “the voice” of these positions.
This is bad for my church, because they’re getting my garbled thoughts instead of real expertise. But it’s also really really bad for me, because it takes away my opportunity to learn and actually grow from people who do know (and, in worse moments, it can convince me I already know things that I desperately need to learn.) My spiritual development is seriously hindered by the fact that my church isn’t doing anything to help me learn to love people better. (Shoutout to my campus’s Episcopal ministry for accepting me and giving me somewhere to grow spiritually!)
But what really bothers me about talk of “unity” is the elephant in the white Evangelical Church: huge amounts of time and expertise and money, from Fox and Newsmax to the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, have gone into convincing white Evangelicals to believe in conspiracy theories, to distrust people who look different from them, to tie a holy faith to a deeply unholy nationalism, and to treat their marginalized neighbors with every sort of callousness and cruelty.
When I hear calls for “unity” in the church, to avoid “splitting the church in two”, I hear a call to pretend that this situation is okay.
I affirm that we should love our neighbors who are trapped in disinformation bubbles, especially since seeing through many of the lies and deception techniques takes education that not everybody has access to.
But the “calls to unity” are more than that. So often they turn into calls to stay in churches that have fundamentally lost sight of the gospel — that rail against LGBT people but have nothing to say about poverty, that think baking a cake for a gay wedding or letting a celibate gay pastor preach is somehow a bigger affront to God than promoting conversion therapy, that talk about loving their neighbor while denouncing vaccines and calling any sort of justice for the poor “socialism”.
Or perhaps churches that have replaced the very political, very anti-oppression gospel with a sort of safe, otherworldly centrism. Christian unity then demands that we talk about our church’s support for racial reconciliation while members of our leadership denounce BLM as a “Marxist conspiracy theory”, or that we skim over passages about the need to fight for the rights of the poor and the marginalized to reach a safe “everyone just needs Jesus” conclusion, or that we assume holding a one-morning-per-month service project in our new nearly-ten-million-dollar-building is somehow fulfilling our church’s obligations towards to poor.
I am not saying everybody should leave such churches — indeed, I’m still at my church because of the hope against all hope that despite all this anxiety and frustration maybe I can push it to be a little bit more neighbor-loving.
But if your calls to unity don’t include a call to repent of actual sin, don’t distinguish “differences of opinion” from “dangerous conspiracy theories” and don’t include a real path to unity with the people your church’s actions have marginalized?
Then maybe the unity you’re looking for isn’t Christ’s after all.