In which our regular writers toss around
subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Brandi Miller tweets, “I drafted my divorce papers with
evangelicalism a long time ago. Tonight I serve them.” Glennon Melton
asks, “Does a Love Warrior Go? YES. If that’s what her deepest wisdom tells her
to do.”
Tom: What do you think, Immanuel Can? Imagine your fellow churchgoers
voted for an immoral, bigoted incompetent with no regard for the dignity of
women, as Rachel so delicately puts it. Something worth leaving your
church over?
Over the Plate
Immanuel
Can: Ha. You’re pitching underhand fastballs today,
but this one’s over the plate: No, of course not.
Tom: I think not either. I’m picturing those first century gatherings of
the saints within the borders of the Roman Empire, some of them thousands of
miles from Jerusalem, made up of Jews and all sorts of Gentiles. We can be sure that in Christ’s church, disputes over culture, politics, gender and class are not new phenomena.
They are not something the Lord Jesus failed to take into consideration. Donald Trump did not catch the Lord by surprise.
IC: No, I guess not. But he did catch the liberal progressives. So
many tears ...
Endangered Special Needs Kids
Tom: You’ve read the Evans piece. Her complaint is that the community
that introduced her to Jesus has aligned itself with values she doesn’t
recognize, powers that she says “oppress”. She sees President-elect Trump
as a danger to special needs kids, survivors of sexual assault, minorities in
predominantly white communities, Muslims and so on, and those who voted for him
as “aligned” with the values she ascribes to him.
IC: Wow. Well that's the political Left for you: so much “sound
and fury”, generally signifying nothing.
Tom: Let’s leave the relative merits of the candidates aside, since the
election’s over. I’m more concerned about the motives Evans ascribes to her
fellow believers, many of which I think are entirely in her own head. Have you
been getting dirty looks for wearing your “Trumpslide 2016” t-shirt to prayer meeting?
IC: Heh, heh. Mine’s in the wash right now.
No, I don’t have one. I do, however, want to get a “My Kingdom is Not of This
World” shirt. That’s what a Christian should wear, at least when it comes
to politics.
Things That Are Above
Tom: Yeah, that’s where I really want to go with this. My cat got me up
before 6:30 this morning, as she is wont to do, and I was reading this:
“If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.”
This is who we are, IC. First and foremost, we’re not
Republicans or Democrats or Conservatives or Liberals or nationalists or
globalists or pro-Trumpers or whatever. We have been raised with Christ. If this is how I identify myself, how
can I worry too much about whether the guy or girl beside me votes for Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders, or even if they have what I might think is a
bad attitude toward men or women or minorities or whatever? If they do, that will all come out in the
wash as they gradually become more Christ-like. If, on the other hand, maybe it’s my attitude that’s a problem, this too
will eventually wash out.
The problem comes when you see yourself
primarily as something other than “raised with Christ”.
Love Warriors Unite!
IC: In this case,
it’s worse than that. These women have declared that they are more committed to
those they call “the oppressed” than they are to those whom they know are
bought by the blood of Jesus Christ, and who are (if they are saved) their
eternal compatriots and the beloved of God. In fact, they will happily throw over
all the “evangelicals”, as they call them, in order to strike their Social
Justice Warrior pose.
We
must wonder, are they trying to impress the Lord, or the world?
Tom: Well, it’s all
there in the self-identification, isn’t it? If you’re a “Love Warrior”, you’re
as obdurately sectarian as the Corinthians who identified as “of Paul” or “of Apollos”. You’re in a club — a really exclusive club of only those Christians who have adopted your definition of love — and that club is more important to you than being genuinely
identified as a follower of Jesus Christ. So whether you’ve joined the Transgender Support Club,
or the Gay Support Club, or the Feminist Club, or the Men’s Rights Club, or the Persecuted Minority Club, it’s
still fundamentally a club. You’re saying your Christianity comes second to your real first love, which is being this thing, whatever it is. And at all costs.
Losing Touch with Our Primary Citizenship
I
must say though, you have to be pretty creative to come up with an evangelical
Donald Trump as Oppressor of Special Needs Kids Club. You’re in a class where
you ought to be writing Hollywood movie scripts, since there’s not a single
thing said or done by Trump or anyone else on the Right that would lead any
normal human being to such a conclusion. That one is an RHE fantasy.
IC: Even so, let us
grant them that everything they imagine is true — how would that justify
abandoning the people of God? How is that “Christian”? And how much help can
those “Christian” women be to the lost, now that they’ve decided that salvation
comes second to social justice?
Tom: This is the problem.
IC: If we lose touch
with our primary citizenship, we need not think that we’re going to be
of any use to anyone, really, after that. We’ll just become exemplars of
self-righteousness, modeling the same attitude that takes people to a lost
eternity all the time.
Okay,
Tom … what do we tell these people, or others considering their course of action?
Two Masters
Tom: No man can serve two masters. And no woman can either. Are you about social justice, or are you about Jesus
Christ? Sometimes you can’t have both.
I’m
not saying all evangelicals — and especially all evangelicals that voted
for The Donald — are good people or mature Christians. They may well not
be. They may have voted for him for all the wrong reasons, like starting a race
war, or fear, or just to put the destructive finishing touches on what they
perceive to be a system that, for them, is already comprehensively broken. On
the other hand, they may have voted for him for perfectly intelligent reasons
you have never considered.
But
if you and they are really saved men and women, THEY are your people in a way that
the Democrats, the black community or other ethnic communities, the Sisterhood, marginalized groups and even the fearful mothers of special needs kids are not.
Take Back That Chicken Casserole!
This
actually comes out in Evans’ article if you read it carefully. She’s not even
aware what she’s writing. Consider this:
“These are the people you worship with each week, the people whose kids hang out with your kids, the people who brought you a chicken casserole when you had surgery, the people you call with good news, the people you’re now wishing you’d spoken with more bluntly, more honestly.”
Wait. These people were there for you in times
of crisis. They connect with your children. But you’re happy to throw them
under the bus without stopping to ask first what may have led them to vote for
the other guy? That does not compute!
IC: Wow. That’s really self-absorbed. It’s kind of breathtaking,
actually.
Losing Market Share to the Episcopalians
Tom: Yeah. So the problem is not that these people are
failing to behave like Christians. It’s not that they’re failing to show love.
It’s not that they’re uninterested or self-absorbed. No. The problem is that
they don’t share your particular political bent. They don’t love your candidate
and they don’t share your social obsessions.
How bizarre is that?
Tell me, IC, if folks with these sorts of priorities
ship themselves off to Episcopalianism as RHE has done, does it really matter
to the Church of God? Admittedly, it should
matter to the people leaving, and it will definitely affect their Christian
walk and their enjoyment of the things of God. But in the end, does it change
anything about how the Church should do business?
IC: Yes, it matters if we lose bewildered, childish and errant
Christians to the larger world of religion or to atheism, if that’s what is
happening here. But also, sometimes one has to say, “If they had been ours,
they would not have gone out from us.” In some cases, the people we’re talking about aren’t really Christians; and the
evidence is that they have little love and concern for the children of God. If they can just walk out, maybe we should just let them go. Keeping them
around might be really toxic.
Loss of Faith in What or Whom?
Tom: Evans finishes by talking about her own loss of faith:
“Losing your first faith is like losing a dear family member or friend, and as with any other death, you sense its absence most profoundly in those everyday moments when it used to be present — in a beloved hymn, in a Bible verse or prayer, in a strained relationship that used to be so easy.”
I’m reading between the lines here, but it
almost sounds like what she calls her lost “faith” was in a particular sort of
people rather than in the Lord Jesus. There’s a real danger of conflating the
two things, because people will always let you down in one way or another. I
mean, Peter let Paul down at one point. He let the Lord down. We don’t write
him off for that.
IC: Yes. In fact,
I’ve just been reading about the broad-scale pattern differences between how
men and women tend to experience “loss of faith”. I think it needs another
post to deal with it. But if what I’m reading is right, your intuitions are
good there: these folks seem far too focused on the relationships they imagine
they have with people, and nowhere near concerned enough with their
relationship to the Lord.
Justice for humankind is important; but one thing history certainly shows us is that it
never comes “socially”. After all, how can we even find justice
when we’ve lost focus on the Just One?
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