Where did you learn to be good? Are you good? Are you a moral person?
If you answered “more or less,” or if your answer was unequivocal, then where did you learn to be good? You may have learned to be good from your family, or from your community, or from your religious background.
I am bringing this up because I, like many other people, have responded to some recent revelations about a huge evangelical denomination with a minor crisis of spirit. The release of a nearly 300 page report into the ways in which allegations and incidents of abuse and assault were handled in the Southern Baptist Church has led me to reflect upon the role that religion, particularly evangelical faith, plays in the moral life of people, and of the church and culture.
Remember when Jesus was approached by the rich young ruler? The young man asked Jesus what had to be done to acquire eternal life. There was a problem with the question. Eternal life, life abundant, is not something that can be acquired like a house or a car or status. There was a problem also with the address. The young man said to Jesus, “Good teacher …”. Jesus remarked on the address itself:
“Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone.”
That response has helped my minor crisis of spirit. Only God is good.
My consternation about the story of Southern Baptist Church is that some leaders of such churches set themselves up as good. They claim the place of moral arbiter for other people, indeed for society as a whole, while, as the report shows, protecting not those in their care who have been abused, but protecting the institution of the church, their own power and their own wealth and standing. In the end, such misguided protection of the institution will likely be the major component of its ultimate downfall. The gates of hell will not prevail against the church of Jesus, but the hell of some church leadership may do in various expressions of the church. Christian faith should not protect such distortions of Christian faith.
My struggle of spirit has been this: I think that I learned a great deal morally from the church, but I cannot say that I am better than people who did not learn morality from the church. Many people learned morality elsewhere, though to be fair, in our culture there is a moral framework that emerges, at least in part, from religious tradition and understanding. In my case, my moral life has been shaped by what I saw in Christian faith, by what I have read and largely, I hope, by what I see in Jesus as I seek to live out a hopeful Christian faith. While this is true, I see also a terror that has hurt so many people in church circles. Countless people have been told that they are immoral or that some action of theirs requires discipline from the church, all while some of the people issuing such condemnation and directing such discipline have been disturbingly immoral in ways that directly contradict the way of Jesus.
One of the items that is getting attention in the report is an e-mail written by a leader in the SBC who argues that if the allegations of abuse come out then the evangelistic mission of the church will be set back. Think about that for a minute. If you grew up in a church, then such a statement maybe leads to a minor crisis of spirit for you as well. The powerful were protected even as the victimised were attacked and ignored. This was done, as the e-mail states, out of a motivation to protect the message of the gospel. How possibly could covering up abuse protect the gospel? Is a so-called gospel that requires such deception really a gospel worth believing at all?
If I feel the spiritual pain of this kind of thing, I can only imagine what people feel who suffered judgment or abuse or were disciplined within authoritarian church settings. I have been aiming to direct my prayer over the matters to be on behalf of such people and on behalf of church leaders who have had the courage to speak out.
There were times, in my experience as a pastor of an evangelical church, when I have been accused of being against the church. I can actually see why such accusations arise. If you are willing to talk about the immoral things within the church, then you can be considered to be against the church. It might be that some people who speak in such ways are anti-church, perhaps with good reason. It is also true that speaking in such ways might mean you are for the church and see that dishonesty and pretense will ultimately not help the church, and that they ultimately show a lack of confidence in the faith.
Is it possible that the same feeling, “Why not burn it all down?” could come from those motivated for good of the church, and from those motivated against the church?
Or is it just a few bad apples?
In reading multiple articles about the report on the SBC I returned again to a question I have had in my mind. Why would anyone listen to the church on matters of sexual morality? I ask this question not only to point out the obvious, but also with the sense that people should be able to seek guidance from religious institutions about such important matters.
Time and time again I recall the words of Pope Francis when he warned people to be careful about rigid moralism. Rigidity, he said, is always hiding something.
Is it the case that a greater degree of moralism and rigidity, such as in the SBC around sexuality, should be trusted less, not more, as a moral guide.
For now, I am grateful for Jesus’ words, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone.”
Amen.
This morning, after I finished writing this entry, I came across a story that many of you may have seen already. The story exists in a context similar to that of the report into the SBC. There are hundreds of troubling things about the story and the accompanying video, most of which have to do with the victimization of a teenaged girl. One troubling aspect, apart from that, is how the Pastor uses his oratory and claim to be doing God’s work to manipulate the congregation. If this is how he talks about his own reprehensible behaviour, how could he be trusted for any of the things he said for years about God, about faith?