I am hurting.
Evangelical Christianity has been my religious home for as long as I can remember, and I intend to stay no matter how often I have to specify that I'm not that kind of Evangelical. Jesus is too wonderful, too gracious, too merciful and faithful for that.
But the last few years have laid bare something I've been trying to ignore for a long time: American Evangelicalism is not well. Fundamentally, systemically, unwell.
We tried to follow God, sincerely as best as I can tell.
We read the bible, a book I still believe to be good.
We prayed and prayed that the Lord would hear us.
And now almost 300,000 people are dead of COVID, a substantial fraction because Evangelical-fueled conspiracy theories led people to hurt their neighbors. Failing to love your neighbor is a sin.
And now hundreds of children still haven’t been reunited with their parents, having been kidnapped by the darling of “pro-life” Evangelicals, many of whom in fact support the kidnapping. Failing to take care of immigrants is a sin.
And now a substantial fraction of Evangelicals continue to insist, against all available evidence, that Joe Biden somehow stole the election from Donald Trump. Bearing false witness is a sin.
And so somehow the shining city on a hill, in striving to be a beacon of holy righteousness, lost its way and became exactly what it feared: “a dwelling for demons and a haunt for every impure spirit”
I have spent the past few months struggling with what, as ordinary Christians, we are supposed to do about this. The systemic failure of a religious community to stand for justice is not new: indeed, it's one of the central themes of the Old Testament prophets, taken up in the New Testament by John the Baptist, Jesus, and James.
But each of these sources is frustratingly silent on practical ways for members of broken communities to lead each other to repentance, back to the God who so desperately wants our allegiance to him and his justice.
So I've been trying to better understand some of the sources of how we went so wrong. There are three major areas I think have led Evangelicals deeply astray, and I want to spend a couple of posts discussing why they’re so harmful, and perhaps how we as ordinary Christians can do something about it. This post will cover the first. (Will there be a part two? Who knows! I certainly don’t.)
A focus on "black and white" sins, over and above central Christian ethical principles.
The (incorrect) belief that Christianity is "under attack" in the US
A systematic failure to distinguish facts from convenient lies
A focus on "black and white" sins, over and above central Christian ethical principles.
Near the end of his life, Jesus cursed the religious leadership of the time for their hypocrisy, saying
Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.
Matthew 23:23-24
There's an obvious distinction between tithing spices and "justice, mercy, and faithfulness": there are clear-cut rules telling you how much of each spice to tithe and what precisely you owe, whereas "mercy" is a vaguer thing: how much mercy do have to show before I’ve fulfilled my “mercy” requirement? This, presumably, is why the deeply pious Pharisees didn’t pay much attention to it.
American Evangelicalism is traditionally known for taking strong positions on sexual ethics. Today this is typified by opposition to things like pornography, sex outside of marriage, and same-sex marriage, while previous generations took stances opposing things like legal divorce and mixed-race marriages. For better or for worse, these draw clear dividing lines: you are either canoodling, or you aren’t.
More important moral issues, on the other hand, are a lot harder and a lot more nuanced. In what ways are we called to support our brothers and sisters who are struggling financially? To what extent do we have to fight against injustice in the criminal justice system? What is the best system to help our country “take care of the sick”, and what is the government’s role in this? Each of these is a foundational moral question, but there may not be a unique, precise answer we can call “the Christian answer”.
The result is that Evangelical Christianity has a tendency to label questions like “can I have sex outside of marriage?” as “moral” questions to which there is a “Christian” answer, in contrast to “political” questions that Christians are allowed to disagree on. This means we get to shun churches that disagree on moral questions as “apostate”, while churches who have all but abandoned Christ’s love for the poor remain “orthodox” as long as they say the right words about interpreting Paul.
(To be clear: there is room for disagreement on political questions. If you vote against expanding Obamacare because you believe it will destroy the economy, I would say you have been dangerously misled but I don’t think this is a sin, per say. On the other hand, if you vote against expanding Obamacare because you don’t think you should have to pay for poor people to get healthcare, then (unless you are on the brink of poverty yourself) this is a sin, full stop. Intentions matter, especially in political questions with lots of uncertainty.)
And so we end up with people like Albert Mohler, a highly-respected figure in the Evangelical community, writing that “Christian principles” compel us to vote for Trump. In Mohler’s defense, he acknowledges Trump’s defects of character and reminds his readers that elections are about choosing the better candidate, not about choosing the perfect candidate.
From there, though, it goes completely off the rails. If you read the whole thing (I don’t recommend it), pay attention to what “Christian principles” means to Mohler. Besides a tiny bit of lip service about racism and immigration, Christianity is largely reduced to a buzzword for opposition to abortion and LGBT issues and support for “religious freedom”, which is again a buzzword for opposition to LGBT issues. And so, in the mouth of one of the foremost teachers of Christianity today, the deeply challenging, humbling, empowering, demanding teachings of our Lord are reduced to voting against LGBT people and (misleadingly, as I’ve previously argued) “against” abortion.
I think we need to pay attention to how standard Christian practices can unintentionally encourage this. The center of communal Christian moral formation is, at least in theory, found in sermons and bible studies. In each, a typical format is to pick a single text and exposit what it meant in the ancient world (or at least within its literary setting), followed by a discussion of what it means for our lives today.
There are very good reasons for this: closely following a single text means that, even as a newcomer, I can check for myself whether or not what you're saying fits the text. It means (at least in theory) that we are discussing God's word and what it means, not just listening to some pastor's opinions on life. And it means that everyone has something to add to the conversation, since everyone has the same access to the bible's words.
But it also tends to lead us to focus on the simplest, easiest-to-state applications, and it can keep us from deeper thinking about moral issues. Rather than talking in the abstract, here are three specific ways I see this happen:
One of today's biggest moral crises is climate change, which requires drastic action right now. There's an obvious Christian argument for caring about climate change, starting with our duty to be good stewards of the earth, but largely centered on the deeply human crisis that will appear in the coming 30-100 years if we don't act, killing millions of our most marginalized brothers and sisters and condemning many others to poverty and hunger.
This is urgent and our failure to act is fundamentally evil, and therefore churches should be talking about this sin constantly. But they aren't. And I think part of this is because it's hard to get there from a single passage of the bible -- you'd have to pick a passage that mentioned justice for the poor, spend a lot of time summarizing the current state of climate science and what precisely our actions are doing for your congregation, and then draw a connection (and presumably get accused of "reading your own views into scripture").
In struggling to navigate this tension, the church has given up a significant part of its duty to teach its members right from wrong, and we need to right this.
I recently got a raise, and now make $37,000 per year. Even after taxes and rent, this makes me incredibly wealthy on a global scale, and one of the major themes of the bible is that it’s a sin for the rich to ignore the plight of the poor.
Deciding what to do about this is really really hard -- where do I donate? How do I engage without getting a savior complex? Are there better ways I could be helping? Should I really be donating to my local, overfunded church, when there are so many better uses of the money? These are foundational moral questions every single middle-or-upper-class Christian needs to answer for themselves, but they’re hard to address in the standard bible study format, especially if you’re trying to draw applications directly from the text.
The history of (particularly white) Evangelicalism on race is… strained, to say the least. The theological predecessors of white Evangelicals generally supported slavery and opposed MLK, and even now it’s not as uncommon as you might hope to hear outright racist things about “why the South Side [of Chicago] is so poor”, even from other churchgoers. There is a painful history of deep sin here, and it’s going to take a serious and honest reckoning with our past and with the ways we still hurt our brothers and sisters of color to fix it.
Some of the most powerful reconciliation and reparation work I’ve seen has been from Evangelicals I deeply admire, and it came about in part because they were willing to step out in faith instead of staying in "safe, traditional interpretations".
We need listen deeply to other voices, and be willing to admit learn from them. Tell me how black, Latino, and indigenous theologians interpret passages! Set aside space to educate your white congregants on racism, and listen to what your congregants (and neighbors) of color need from you that you aren’t providing them. Stop using “critical race theory” as a liberal bogeyman, or as a codeword for being “un-American”, but step out in humility to learn and to unlearn. Stop talking about “the Christian position” on race relations, especially if it demands unconditional forgiveness from black people and doesn’t ask for the least bit of repentance from the white people who’ve hurt them. Use your church's resources and power to fight racial injustice, regardless of how "political" it makes people think you are.
So where do we go from here? I think that, as Evangelicals, we need to bring complex moral issues into our bible studies. We need to bring up questions of ethics, of how much we need to give, of how our principles apply to climate change, for two reasons. First, these are important ethical questions, and we need to fight against the part of our collective Christian subconscious that says these aren’t “real” questions in the same way “Arminianism vs Calvinism” might be. Second, because these are important questions, we ought to grow with our Christian brothers and sisters in understanding them. Let’s use the same circles we use to understand the bible to understand the world, and our roles in God’s plan for it.
We also need to confront painful things, particularly as it regards race and American history, and we need to recognize that a real moral education includes not only learning values from the biblical text, but learning how the world is. If you do not understand the history of racism in this country, or what we did in Latin America or Vietnam in the 20th century, or what we’re currently doing on the Mexican border, it’s easy to be misled about theoretical arguments about what love of neighbor may or may not require. It’s harder to do that when you’re confronted with the acts of unthinkable evil performed in the name of our country and our God.
We also need to think really, really hard about how to reform Evangelicalism. And we need to read books by more qualified people who are doing the same! If you have any you’d recommend, please let me know!
This post doesn't have a real ending because I don't know what to do. So, like the end of the Gospel of Mark, I leave you unsatisfied in the hopes that it spurs you to action, and that if you come up with ideas you'll tell me so I can try them out too.
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