In a recent Sunday New York Times there was an article purporting to explain why so many Christians support the current occupant of the White House. It turns out that these people have a rosily distorted memory of the old regime of White Christian America. They long for a return to the days where there was, apparently, no crime, and no annoying Gay or Trans people always in your face; when Black people stayed in their literal and social place, there were no Hispanics around at all, the Bible was read in school, everyone stood for the Pledge of Allegiance and saluted the flag, there was no abortion, no extra-marital sex, women stayed home, the police were respected, veterans revered, churches were full, and America was on top of the world. Among other things. That’s they way they “remember” it, or how it was told to them by their parents and grandparents. That is the great America that the current occupant of the White House promised to restore.
While this may come as an interesting eye-opener to readers of the New York Times, it was old news to me. I grew up in and then worked in the Presbyterian Church for over half a century. When I started in ministry, I thought my job had to do with helping people follow Jesus Christ. But I quickly discovered that many of my congregants assumed my job was to somehow bring back the glory days of the 1950’s. I was supposed to go out and haul back to church the people who stopped coming. At the very least I was expected to share, articulate, and encourage their denial, bargaining, anger, hatred, paranoia, and scapegoating over the loss of those apparently wonderful days. In my first church, I was eventually informed that I did not teach what they were used to being taught. The understanding that some had of Christianity was different from mine, and had, as far as I could see, nothing to do with Jesus Christ at all, except using his name.
Their Christianity was about patriotism, policing others’ sexual morality, stopping change, rugged individualism, and not drinking beer. None of these are things with which Jesus is concerned in the New Testament. (Except that he does appear to have been more a wine guy.) The only change they seemed to appreciate was when the State decided to construct a new prison nearby. That was popular. I lasted less than three years there.
It turns out that Christianity has always had a split between two versions of the faith. One is the popular, egocentric, conformist, conventional, patriotic, privileged, rules-based, controlling religion of people who benefit from and support the establishment, which is to say the Empire of the time. The other is people seeking to follow Jesus Christ.
We see this split in Jesus’ ministry, where he was continually sniped at and conspired against by the guardians and keepers of the establishment religion of his own time. Those respectable religious people eventually connived with the Roman government to have him executed. The things Jesus was doing and saying: like including all sorts of people in his group, performing healings and exorcisms, breaking many of the establishment’s complicated rules, offering people forgiveness and a new lifestyle in community, questioning basic social pillars like the family, were deeply threatening and offensive to the religious leaders, whom Jesus called “hypocrites.”
We see this split in Paul’s letter to the Galatians, where his mixed community of Jesus-followers is existentially threatened by an invasion of privileged, establishment, rules-based, conformist, conventional religious leaders. They required circumcision and Torah-keeping as a way for Gentiles to become officially Jewish, which they considered a prerequisite for being Christian. That way they would stay safely within the Roman system. Since that was the system that crucified Jesus, we can see why Paul got so apoplectic about this.
We see this split in the Book of Revelation, where John identifies and criticizes those who cave in to the lure of fitting into and accepting the benefits of Roman culture. He spends most of his book graphically describing the imminent gruesome collapse of that system, warning Christians that if they participate in it, they will perish with it.
And so on into Church history. There has been this division between those who want to uphold, defend, feed, and benefit from the establishment religion and culture, and those who seek to follow Jesus Christ.
These two ways have never been compatible, as much as we might like to imagine that we can follow Jesus somehow and still be loyal to whatever may be the prevailing nation, economy, civilization, religion, or moral regime. Jesus says we cannot serve both God and what human authorities define as wealth. There is simply no compromise between the Way of Jesus and the ways of the world.
Jesus says to seek first the Kingdom of God. He does not say to seek first to restore some imaginary idyllic past. He does not say to seek first “success” as the world defines it. He does not say to seek first money, fame, and power. He does not say to seek first what is good for America, or white people, or families, or property owners, or men. He says to seek first the Kingdom of God.
The Kingdom of God is not White Christian America. It is the life of compassion and justice, non-violence and humility, equality and forgiveness, simplicity and inclusion, honesty and community that Jesus demonstrated. The Kingdom of God is about reversal that turns the world’s standards upside down so that the poor, hungry, sick, powerless, and excluded get what they need, and the rich, in the words of Jesus’ mother, are sent away empty.
In the days of that supposed greatness of White Christian America, we still had overt racial segregation, oppression, and lynchings. Violence against Gay people was routine and written into laws and even psychology textbooks. The options for women were severely limited. America was propping up and installing brutal dictators all over the world, even to the point of teaching torture. Our national wealth was being sunk into an insane nuclear arms race. There was abortion, and it often meant the death or maiming of women. There was adultery, but it was okay for men. And we were beginning to enslave ourselves to large corporations. We were not even conscious of what we were doing to our own health (everybody smoked, seatbelts didn’t even exist) or to the planet.
White Christian America squatted on stolen land. It profited from the labor and resources of others. It remains blissfully unconscious of how severely the system is tilted in their favor, giving them all kinds of advantages. Now that there has been a slight movements towards leveling the playing field, some wail like petulant children about all they are “losing.” They even convince themselves they are persecuted for their Christian faith, which is not true. There is not one thing for which White Christian America is supposedly “under attack” that is a matter of discipleship of Jesus Christ.
All they are losing is status, privilege, control, and the right to impose their own agenda, which they equate with the gospel, on others. Is there someplace in the gospels where Jesus instructs his disciples not to bake wedding cakes for Gay people? Or to deny contraceptives in employee health care plans? Is this even good evangelism? Or just bitter, hateful anger about loss of influence? And it makes Jesus and Christianity look oppressive, thus feeding into the very narrative they are resisting.
The only antidote to such attitudes, I found, was to bring people to an encounter with the actual Jesus Christ we find in Scripture. I am not going to say that even this had much of a direct effect, or that I was particularly proficient at it. But occasionally the good news would get through to people. Mostly I hope I was planting seeds.
And occasionally those seeds would germinate in people’s experience in the larger world. They would encounter Gays, immigrants, African-Americans, poor people, and others they had assumed were the enemy, often in their own families. I am hoping that some exposure to what Jesus actually did and taught prepared them to accept and love these “others.”
And that is what Jesus is about: loving and accepting those deemed as others, and bringing them into the family of God.
I am not going to say that there isn’t a lot wrong with the way the world is headed. Capitulation to and compromise with our contemporary culture is often as harmful as idealizing the 1950’s. But through it all the only question in the hearts of Christians needs to be, “How do we follow Jesus here and now?”
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