There are so many troubling images from the acts of domestic terrorism, insurrection and lawlessness on the American Capitol yesterday (January 6, 2021). For people who make any claim or association with Christian faith, no doubt the images above are upsetting. These are pictures I took of my television screen while watching the breach on the Capitol.
Trump discerned that many evangelicals cared about having opponents more than they cared about having faith. He then cast himself as their champion in the fight and they willingly marched.
There are a myriad of factors that lead to something like this: social, political, cultural. However, if you see the name of the One that you claim is the hope of all history on multiple large banners draped over railings during a violent coup attempt, you should face the truth that some theological and ecclesial (church talk and church life) ways have contributed to this. Some reporters who were in the midst of the mob noted that they frequently heard the insurrectionists say that they were doing the work of Jesus.
Shortly after coming to faith I recall walking around the foyer and halls of the Baptist church that I attended at the time. For some reason I had been identified already as someone who might have some leadership potential. I think that merely being interested in my faith, merely talking and acting as if faith mattered was appealing to older people in the church. Having not come from a family that was a key part of the church, having not had the faith pressed upon me by parents, I had to make sense of the moral and social and theological architecture of that faith on my own. Walking around the foyer and the halls, looking at the bulletin boards, I remember seeing posters and notices that referred to abortion and homosexuality. I was not entirely sure what abortion was. I knew what homosexuality was, but as a young person who was not familiar yet with scripture or political stances, I was not familiar with what the church had to say about it. Very quickly I learned that one word summed up the stance of the church in regards to those two matters - opposition.
It is a kind of growing up moment and it can be troubling. At a young age, or perhaps as a novice adherent to a particular movement or cause, you begin to realize who that movement or worldview opposes. I remember being troubled then. I remember thinking, “What have I signed up for?” I think that right then I determined to not be defined by being opposed to something or particularly by being opposed to people. I had higher hopes for faith than that.
When Donald Trump came to office largely due to the support of the evangelical church, I knew that it was a straight line from the oppositional posture I had noticed as a young teen to the angry, fearful, and in the United States, nationalist expression so pervasive in the evangelical movement. The evangelical movement that supported Trump demonstrated that it had long ago ceased to be a movement of faith and had become a movement of fear. It became not a movement of trust in God, but a movement of fealty to a narcissist who won the loyalty of the movement for largely one reason. He discerned that they cared about having opponents more than they cared about having faith. He then cast himself as their champion in the fight and they willingly marched.
If you watched the coverage live, those “Jesus 2020” and “Jesus/Trump” and “Jesus Saves” banners were visible in frequent shots and angles. The day after, it is actually harder to find those images in online coverage and on television. Why is that?
It might be because the press does not want to perpetrate the association. We want to say that these people were thugs. They were “not Americans” or “not Christians” or even “not truly Trump supporters”.
The truth is that they were Trump supporters, they were Americans and very many of them were proudly Christian.
I was the pastor of an evangelical church for over 25 years. It is not for me to judge whether I succeeded or not, but in all of that time, I tried to speak a faith that could not be defined by opposition to the world.
The church in which I was employed for most of those 25 years had a decidedly conservative heritage. Other churches in the same denominational sphere would regularly speak against homosexuality and would (still do) bar people who are gay from leadership. Eventually, in 2019, I left the church. There were reasons for that leaving that had to do with governance and disagreement with the Board of Elders, but during and after my leaving I was accused of being “too open”, of being “universalist” (implying or stating that most people don’t go to hell). I was accused of maybe not believing in hell at all, or maybe even of being accepting of homosexuality.
The problem was that a faith that did not have this oppositional understanding would eventually be deemed unacceptable in such a church. This is not to say that everyone in the church lived an angry oppositional way, not at all. I shared moments of true grace and hope and love with people there. I knew people who clearly experienced what they felt as the loving presence of the God. Many people (at times including those who were willing to identify enemies to the faith) acted selflessly, helping others, giving time and energy and money in a desire for people to know God’s love.
The most difficult moments for me in the church were the moments in which I knew that a person I was speaking with or praying with or working with had a genuine faith and love, but then I heard from them a note that made me wonder if they still saw their faith as something that required the identification of enemies and opponents.
Why was the evangelical church so easily duped by Donald Trump? The groundwork for such a deception was laid over a period of decades. The leaders of a political movement of Christian nationalism weaponised a number of issues. The most familiar of these were abortion and homosexuality. Any deviation from the evangelical view on these issues was treated as totally unacceptable. These issues were then placed within the frame of a worldview that used terms like “worldly” and “secular” as derogatory accusations. This created a series of enemies who could be spoken about as dangerous to the faith, dangerous to the nation, or even worse, dangerous to the eternal destiny of other people. You can see the connection between this and those who stormed the Capitol yesterday. I wonder how many evangelicals main criticism of what happened is simply that it “went too far”.
There is a theological failure in this. When Christian theology is determined by those who see opposition and maintenance of a culture or worldview as most important, the faith becomes a faith of gatekeeping. Many of you have been deemed unacceptable morally or spiritually by religious gatekeepers. You have been told that you believe the wrong thing. You have been told that you support the wrong people. You might think that it is okay for two women or two men to be married. You have been told that there is no possible way this is biblically acceptable. Often the first weapon marshalled against you, if your views or actions are deemed unacceptable, is scripture (one particular interpretation of scripture). The trouble for me was that all the way along I was learning the same scripture. I came to love it and to see in it a call to love all people, and a faith that speaks about the renewal of all things in Jesus. I came to see that the gatekeepers, often self-appointed or chosen by a system of careful perpetuation of religious ideology, relied on people like you and me somehow accepting that these gatekeepers must have theological heft and true understanding.
I’ll tell you something that I thought then and know for sure now - many of them, most of them perhaps, lack such depth and understanding. It is largely not worth listening to their words. If your faith, your church, the words from the pulpit, and the leadership are primarily words about how other people are wrong, if they are primarily words of warning about the dangerous worldliness of people who think differently, then please know that those churches have failed to present a Christian faith and theology that has ultimate worth and that can be of any lasting blessing in the world.
Most evangelicals did not storm the Capitol yesterday, but evangelicalism should be called to account if there is hope in moving forward. It was not just the banners draped over the railings of the buildings that conflated the name Jesus with hatred.
Below is a screen shot of Fox News from this morning, the day after.
Notice that the network that promoted mistruths about the election and fomented the actions that led to yesterday’s events, also promotes Ainsley’s Bible Study and Billy Graham and Battle for the Holy Land.
It was not only in the images of yesterday that I winced at how the name of Jesus was spoken and displayed. The evangelical church did not only line up behind Donald Trump at rallies and marches, it also supplied many of the lawyers, judges and government workers who pretended that this man, this obvious narcissist, could in any way further a cause of faith. He has only set witness to that faith back, and the first victims are the ones who willingly promoted the idea that he could represent Christian faith in the world. I know some of these people. I count some as friends. I feel a pain that they have come to think that their faith could be reflected or served in any way by Donald Trump.
If your faith, your church, the words from the pulpit and the leadership are primarily words about how other people are wrong, if they are primarily words of warning about the dangerous worldliness of people who think differently, then please know that those churches have failed to present a Christian faith and theology that has ultimate worth and that can be of any lasting blessing in the world.
We can consider why ambitious politicians or culture warriors might sign up for such a project. There is a calculation for such people. They look to ride the power of the obviously unfit and mad king for their own gain, thinking that they can abandon ship at just the right moment (Oh, Mitch Oh, Lindsey). However, why did many average evangelicals support such obvious moral and spiritual vacancy?
One reason why is because of a theological and cultural way of seeing that has been shaped by opposition. The sermons they have heard for years have contained words of warning about other people, about people of other faiths, about people of other sexual identity. Their very faith has been described in these same sermons as a faith defined by moral success or failure particularly in a few key areas determined by the gatekeepers and their tribe (sex, sexuality, politics, media). Some of the best people I have ever known have been victimized by such hollow theological expression. Some of these victims have become perpetrators, thinking that they are passing on a meaningful faith, honestly longing for their children and others to believe what they believe, and somehow seeing themselves as failures if their kids walk away from such theology.
I am all for dissent. Much of my life and work as a Christian pastor has been shaped by dissenting from largely accepted descriptions of faith within evangelicalism. In history faithful Christians have changed the world by dissent that cost them so much more than my dissent ever has. (People I see as theologically heroic; Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Etty Hillesum, Karl Barth, Marilynne Robinson, Fleming Rutledge, Rosa Parks, Jimmy Carter, even my own father, (etc. etc.) refused to accept a faith that was marked by fear.)
My hope is, that many more Christians will part company with a way of faith that has been dominated by warning against other people. Don’t listen to it anymore. Your faith can be better than that, it probably already is.
“Most people are better than their theology.”
-David Goa, passed along from his Dad
Don’t think that to be Christian you have to listen to voices of fear and hate and division. You may be so immersed in a particular brand of evangelicalism that leaving it would seem like abandoning faith altogether.
I have known a number of people who have become much healthier emotionally, spiritually, even physically by leaving church. If church has propagated a fearful faith, and if you have become so impacted by it that you can’t work through matters in your own life, it might be better to simply leave. I love the church, but when you actually love the church you don’t pretend that it has not hurt some people terribly. I wish it were not true, but in some cases people would do better if they left. To cast this as somehow “God is done with you” is also a tactic of the self-appointed gatekeepers. God does not love you more if you go to church. God does not even turn his back on you if you seem to turn your back on God.
You don’t have to leave, though. There are actually voices speaking Christian faith that don’t angrily or in feigned parental love (example: “Friends, I hate to have to say this …) rail against the world. These sermons are often spoken in places with large stages and big video screens, churches that are made to be more cool or hip or relevant, but where the mantle of authority still presents condemnation and opposition masquerading as faith.
I am not saying that people in these churches are not Christians. I am not even saying that the pastors who speak in such ways are not Christians. I would not feign to make such a judgment. What I am saying is that too often they are presenting a vacant, empty, weak, childish, even primitive understanding of Christian faith. Then, to protect their own small kingdoms, they warn against people who present any different understanding of Christian theology. Let me tell you, though, there are better, more hopeful, enduring and long-held Christian theological perspectives.
It is okay to walk away from fear-based theology. There are better ways of understanding. The Christian faith in many ways, has been co-opted by the worst of evangelicalism. You don’t have to walk away from faith. You can just walk away from such terrible theology.
Todd I see in you and in your words a true understanding of what it is to be a Christian.
I hear you. Myself, I feel like the still, small voice amid the gatekeepers.
However, my bravado compels me to stand firm. Sometimes all it takes is a whiff to move the brick that brings down the building. If I can open one mind I will feel a measure of success.
The one brick has moved. I have had success with at least one mind.