When you look at someone through rose-colored glasses, all the red flags just look like flags
— Wanda Pierce, Bojack Horseman
I am tired and frustrated and worn out, and last week I finally admitted it to myself.
For the past couple of years I have been struggling with what to do about my church. I’ve written too many times here about the specifics, but the basic dilemma has been and remains “this church’s priorities are fundamentally incompatible with what I believe God’s to be, but if everyone who cares about this leaves there will be nobody left to speak up.”
It’s an impossible balancing act to figure out — what influence do I have on the direction of a larger institution? To what extent am I complicit just by attending? Is staying an act of sacrificial love or a way of sinfully separating myself from places I could really dwell in God’s presence? Is the stress that this causes keeping me from fully engaging in other ways I could be loving my friends and neighbors? Will I lose the friendships I have if I leave? I’ve talked through these issues with countless people I deeply trust and I honestly feel more unsure than ever.
Friends who left months or years ago ask why I still attend with a tone that betrays a sincere worry for me. Others believe the best they can do is to seek change from within, continuing to attend with a conviction I admire even as I see how much it’s hurting them. The answers to these questions are deeply contextual and person-specific and carry an uncertainty that eats away at me no matter what I do.
All this to say I do not know if this decision is the correct one. It’s been influenced by a number of events, many of which I can’t share without betraying friends’ trust. I can’t in good conscience continue to attend this church on Sunday mornings, but I’ll keep participating in my bible study (I adore the two couples who lead it) and our nonprofit partnerships.
But the question I’ve really been struggling with is “how did I get into this position at all?” If I really believe that “loving my neighbor” is near the center of Christian ethics, how did I end up worshiping somewhere that plainly doesn’t? Why did I choose to become an active member — vows and all — of a church that actively enforces a “women can’t hold most leadership positions” policy?
Why didn’t I, from the beginning, hold my place of worship to the same moral standards I’d subject a school, or a workplace, or even a quick fast food stop to? (Would you eat at a McDonald’s that had an official “only men can be managers” policy?)
This is the story of a lot of things I got wrong.
In a conversation with a very confused friend, I once referred to Jonathan Brugh as “the really attractive one” in What We Do in the Shadows. When she pressed me on this choice of words, we came to realize that at some point Brugh’s character refers to himself as “extremely sexy” and I’d simply believed him and internalized the description.
In the best cases, this kind of naive trust leads to memorable late-night friendship moments. But in the worst — and even the typical — case it can lead to real harm.
When my church highlighted the value they put on diversity, I believed them. When a pastor used another church member’s volunteer work as an example of our church’s care for the local poor, I took him at his word. When another pastor asked our advice on how the church could better serve us (in a new members’ meeting) and spoke eloquently about the need for complementarian churches like ours to uphold the dignity of women, I was proud to hear how much he cared.
(If you’re not familiar with religious jargon, “complementarianism” is a buzzword for a specific sort of Christian misogyny, where conservative gender roles are codified into really strict gender-based rules regarding who’s allowed to lead, who has to submit, the purpose of women’s lives, and so on.)
But I shouldn’t have been.
I should have noticed that my church was the least diverse church I’d come across in Hyde Park by a significant margin. I should have asked why the only data point we had for “our church cares for the poor” was a single member volunteering at another church’s ministry. I should have noticed that the leaders never seemed to act on any of the feedback they made sure we saw them listening to, and I should have realized that a church that really cared about the dignity of its women could always just stop being complementarian.
It is really easy to say you care about something — and it probably helps recruit people to your church! But it’s not the same as actually doing something, and I should have been looking for actions rather than its words:
Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? (James 2:15-16)
I made other mistakes too. Just a year after the 2016 election, I was still the sort of liberal who thought my Christian duty was to understand why my poor, silenced fellow countrymen had felt the need to rally against the rights of immigrants and refugees. I’d fallen for the then-popular take that people who liked what Trump was doing just had a different set of values: not the “cosmopolitan ideals” I was used to but still equally valid.
Yes, we should generally be nice to people. No, we shouldn’t become the thought police or permanently cancel our friends over poor decisions. And I don’t think people who disagree with me should be kept from participating in the life of the church.
But at the same time God really does takes sides on this sort of question: cruelty towards immigrants is evil, regardless of whether or not they’re documented. Not letting in refugees our country can afford to support is a sin. It is your Christian duty to help pay for healthcare for your neighbor who can’t afford it. When my church refused to make clear statements on caring for the vulnerable (one of the most central themes of Jesus’s ministry), I took it to be “open-minded” and “pursuing unity” when I should have recognized it as the sin I was studiously avoiding identifying in myself: plain moral cowardice.
At the same time as I was patting myself on the back for my openmindedness, however, I didn’t bother to examine the bias I had against left-leaning churches. There is a stereotype in Evangelicalism, one I’d absorbed uncritically, that “mainline” denominations like Lutheranism and Episcopalianism are in some way “less serious about their faith” or “put their own desires ahead of God’s.”
These denominations are not perfect — mainline churches tend to struggle with evangelism and in my opinion are too willing to compromise on basic Christian beliefs (e.g. it matters that Jesus really was raised from the dead.) But when I finally started attending Episcopal services on campus I learned that these churches are full of people who take their faith much more seriously than I do, who’d sacrificed more than I could ever imagine to follow God, in whom the holy spirit was much more vibrant than at many of the “safe” but stagnant churches I was familiar with. A number of conceptions I’d heard were just straight-up false — the “Episcopalians don’t believe in sin” line rings a bit hollow when the Episcopalians talk about social injustice and the Evangelicals reduce putting kids in cages to a “policy disagreement.”
And so I avoided churches that really could have been good fits for me because I assumed right out of the gate that they weren’t “serious.” And conversely I assumed that a church that “took the bible seriously” would automatically be a healthy place to grow. A lot of this stems from a somewhat naive view of the bible I held. As I summarized this view in a previous post:
The bible is God's word, intended to teach us everything we need to know about faith. The correct way to answer a moral question is to understand the words of the bible, as they originally meant in their historical context, and apply the resulting moral standard directly to our lives. Any passage in the bible, as its original hearers would have heard it, is completely true in the modern sense. The bible is completely sufficient for understanding the Christian faith, and attempts to "move beyond it" are incorrect.
In that post I gave some reasons I now think this view is questionable (and in fact incompatible with the bible’s own witness) — see also here and here — and I also should of course have recognized that “talking about the bible” and “living out its message” are not the same thing. But for the purposes of this post I want to focus on how this point of view severely clouded my moral compass.
If the only ethical requirement in life is to “follow the words of scripture”, then every sort of moral disagreement reduces to “a difference in interpretation.” There are passages in the bible that read as kind of sexist, and if somebody feels convicted by them to behave sexistly then who am I to judge? Is it really fair for me to be upset that my church won’t talk about sins (climate change, colonialism, spiritual abuse) that aren’t explicitly mentioned in the bible? I can do my best to argue for my perspective, but can I really blame somebody for acting on a sincere conviction?
I can and I could and I should have. Christian ethics isn’t about whose biblical interpretation best fits the grammatical or historical context. It isn’t about whose theology best fits into a systematic (and ultimately man-made) framework. The bible contains literally hundreds of reprobations and not a single one of them proceeds along these lines. The singular theme of Christian ethics is how we can throw our entire selves into the life and work of God.
And so while the bible is an important tool, any sort of interpretation that ignores the clear work of the Holy Spirit is wrong — and moreover bad. Amos preached to a people who celebrated God and his words, but he declared their worship worthless because their reading of his law left out the poor. Jesus’s elite opponents did their best to follow the Torah, but he rained down curses on them because they didn’t see what God was doing in their present. The Southern Baptist Convention was founded to support a particular reading of scripture — specifically a reading that celebrated and affirmed American chattel slavery. Everything about this was evil and the ensuing spiritual rot continues to drag down the SBC today.
The people who believe women can’t hold leadership positions in churches today are sincere and base their positions on a way of reading scripture that makes sense to them. And what they’re doing is sinful, and hurts people, and leaves a serious stain on the church’s moral witness.
If you look around with an open heart, there is really no question that the Holy Spirit is empowering women to lead churches — two of the three best preachers I’ve ever heard are women. My relationship with God is deeper and more passionate and ultimately more holy because of them and other women who led me in a variety of ways. Which means that not only does the Complementarian position denigrate half the population, but it also imposes man-made rules that attempt to silence God’s word and stop God’s own action in the world through his people. There are few sins more serious than this, and I was wrong to overlook it in a church merely because the leadership quoted the bible and held their views sincerely.
Behind my baggage and my naivety, however, lies the sad truth: I really, really wanted to like this church. From the very first time I attended I felt welcome and genuinely loved — people I’d just met cared for me and opened up to me and made me a part of their lives in beautiful ways.
And when you sincerely love people, it’s easy to give them the benefit of the doubt. It’s easy to assume they couldn’t really mean what they said about women, because that would be insane. It’s easy to assume that people who’ve loved you well must also share your desire to love the marginalized. It’s easy to overlook every sort of red flag because you really want to join a community that’s been treating you so kindly.
It’s easy to “fill in the gaps” with your own hopes, and that’s exactly what I did. I heard that “we are passionate about following God” and assumed that “following God” meant the same thing to the leaders as it meant to me. I assumed that behind complementarian bend to bible-reading, we would all be on the same page about treating women fairly. (I definitely let my privilege blind me here — I don’t think I realized women weren’t allowed to hold leadership positions until at least a year after I took my membership vows.) I assumed that if I brought some of the symptoms of the church’s racism problem to the attention of my pastor he would take the issue seriously.
I was wrong. And in my church’s defense, I don’t think they said most of the things I assumed. I just wanted this to be the church for me, and I let myself construct a version of it that had never existed.
I don’t know.
Maybe this is a helpful exercise and maybe it isn’t.
But writing this has given some sort of closure, and I’m thankful for that. Barring any surprising developments (e.g. if I were forced to leave my bible study) I’m going to try to stop writing about this church, which has caused me far too much pain and cost me far too much sleep and sanity over the past couple of years. I am all poured out and I’m ready at last to be poured into again.
Fin.