The Church That Cries 'Wolf'

Writing for the British Christian website, Christian Today (click here for the website), Mark Woods (no bio) wrote an article on why we American evangelicals should not look at ourselves as victims as society's mores change (click here for the article). This is a needed message because, from what I have observed, many an evangelical leader, be they teachers or pastors, have opted for describing our future as containing certain persecution.  Portraying American evangelicals as the victims of future societal attacks has become a cottage industry for the benefit of certain teachers only. And the effect that such widespread teaching is rather predictable. The effect according to Woods is an ever tighter circling of the wagons. Another effect that was not noted by Woods is that such an expectation of persecution and suffering makes many listeners more compliant to certain teachers.

Woods documents that American evangelicals perceive a growing difficulty in living life as a Christian by citing a Pew Research survey. What has changed that gives evangelical Christians their belief? According to Woods, the Obergefell v. Hodge appears to be the straw that broke the camel's back and despite that, Obama added another straw with his bathroom bills. Much has been written in various Christian websites warning us that granting the LGBT community more freedom will result in us evangelicals being persecuted and marginalized. But here, Woods cautions the Church that because society has grown to exercise a greater tolerance for the LGBT community, we cannot afford to think of associating our troubles with changes that make persecuting the LGBT community more difficult.

Citing a book written by Andrew Brown and Linda Woodward on how the Church of England lost the people of England, Woods gives American evangelicals a warning. That warning says that churches that become congregational by being counter-cultural can lose touch with society by becoming more and more both antagonistic to society and inward. Yes, such churches might succeed in drawing like-minded people who like end times, us vs. them scenarios. But as they draw more and more such people, they sacrifice their ability to stay in touch with society. Woods sees this happening in America and tells American Christian conservatives that they need to better to determine which battles to fight with society and which ones should be avoided. To fail to learn how to appropriately choose its battles with society, the conservative Church will condemn itself to becoming more ineffective in reaching out and speaking to society. With that goes our ability to evangelize.

What Woods says is true. American Evangelicals are, to an extent, making themselves irrelevant to society as they act like a child who  picks up his own game and leaves for home because his friends are winning all of the time. Thus we are isolating ourselves from society and feeling justified in doing so. But Woods misses another perspective. That one is from the Left. That perspective says that the Church is just another institution of indoctrination that maintains the status quo for the benefit of the those with wealth and power. From this perspective, the American Evangelical Church would be succeeding in removing itself from society over issues like society's increasing acceptance of the LGBT community and same-sex marriage because these issues themselves allow the Church to believe it is preaching God's Word while it remains silent on the very important sins committed by those with wealth and power. This analysis pretty much fits the American Evangelical Church despite the fact that it blames society's elites for promoting changes in societal sexual mores. It fits because the most serious crimes of those with wealth and power lie not in the promotion of certain sexual mores, but in maintaining an economic system based on exploitation and an imperial foreign policy that serves their own financial interests at the expense of many lives.

Woods' comments are worthwhile in reading. He just needs to add more perspective to better speak against the legitimate concerns he has about the current direction of American evangelicals.
This current direction kills two birds with one stone. Those two birds consist of the Church feeling like it is fighting the good fight while fulfilling its mission of supporting the status quo for the benefit of those with wealth and power. Yes, what Woods says about American Conservative Christians is true, but he could have said more that would have supported his case that American Evangelicals are sabotaging their own chances and influencing society. 

How Shall We Christians Then Not Vote

Mark Woods (no bio available) has just written an excellent article regarding how Christians should not vote (click here). And the diving board that helped him go head first into this topic is Ted Cruz. 

Woods objects to Cruz's personality and campaign for 3 reasons. First, Cruz favors the Republican view on issues like climate change. Second, Cruz's personality suggests to Woods that Cruz seems to be far more interested in winning than on being right. Last but not least, Woods believes that Cruz has so identified his campaign with the Bible that he feels that Cruz has co-opted the Scriptures. And it is this last perceived characteristic of Cruz that has broken the camel's back for Woods.

But Cruz is not alone in co-opting the Scriptures, other Republican candidates have too according to Woods. It's just that Cruz won Iowa because he outdid his Republican rivals in so doing. 

What tipped Woods off about Cruz co-opting was a statement Cruz made after he had won Iowa. He cited a verse from Psalm 30 to the crowd that said that joy comes in the morning following a night of weeping (click here for the verse). He then equated his win in Iowa with Iowa's way of telling the world that morning is here.

Indeed, Republicans have for years sold Evangelicals on the idea that a vote for them is a vote for God's program. What Woods did not mention is that Republicans have used the abortion issue to do this. For how can a Christian vote for a pro-choice candidate when such a candidate sanctions the murder of unborn children in the womb? The result of such reasoning is that abortion has made many evangelicals 'single-issue voters.' 

Some Christian writers have become sensitive to the single-issue voter label. Joe Carter, writing for the The Gospel Coalition website, just wrote an article trying to correct this perception (click here for the article). In his article Carter stated that single issue Christians should vote on is justice, not abortion. However, he asks how can anyone who is pro-choice be sincerely concerned about the human dignity of people who are in other dire situations. So he implies that though one should not vote for a candidate because that person is pro-life, Christians should not vote for any candidates who support woman's choice to elective abortion because it isn't possible for anyone who is pro-choice to care about justice.  

Woods' solution to the problem he sees is that while Christians should let their individual convictions determine their vote, they should not allow the Christian label to be attached to a particular political party or candidate. That is because once we have done that we have allowed our faith to be constrained by our political views and thus have corrupted the faith rather than vice-versa. Woods notes the irony here because rather than relying on the First Amendment's statement on the freedom of religion and Jefferson's 'separation of Church and State,'  Christians who allow their faith to be dictated by their political beliefs are becoming American counterparts to Muslims who support theocracies in nations like Iran and Saudi Arabia.

This equating Christianity with America, however, is a practice that is older than the Republican Party. In fact, it is a practice that is older than America's life as a nation. In reality, such a strong association between America and the Scriptures is done in order to ride the coattails of Christianity to obtain some degree of authority for their own political position or embrace self-aggrandizement or both. 

Woods' article is really excellent and should be read because this blogpost cannot do it justice in this brief review. However, we could add one point here. Even though we should never attach the Christian label to political positions or campaigns, it is legitimate for both individual Christians and the Church to tell society and  the State that certain practices are unacceptable. In other words, and I think I've written this before, while we cannot identify any single candidate or political party as being the one Christians should support; both individual Christians and the Church should be more than willing to speak prophetically to society and the State in denouncing its sins and injustices. Yes, elective abortion must be one of those injustices preached against. But other practices or results such as an ever increasing wealth disparity, immoral wars (a phrase that is sometimes almost redundant), and destroying the environment are also wrong and immoral and thus must be opposed. In this way, both individual Christians and the Church itself can speak prophetically to the world without risking the corruption of the faith.  

A Much Needed Change Of Pace

Here, in America, the Conservative Christian Church is bound and determined to prove what nonConservatives say about it: That the Church is just another institution of indoctrination to maintain the status quo for the benefit of those with wealth and power.

How does the Church work to prove their theological rivals correct? It does so in two ways. The first way is that the Conservative Church in America tends to stay silent on system and societal sins that benefit those with wealth and power. The second way works its magic much in the same way that our economic system accomplishes the same task. Just as the demands of the jobs of many people leave them with too little time or energy to be informed by their own society and the world, so Conservative Christian leaders tend to teach a piety that leaves too little time and energy for their flock to pay attention to the system and societal sins around them and in the world. This is despite the fact that we seem to have no problems with working long and hard to try to legally prohibit the personal actions of others in society.

We should note that because of how piety is taught in America, Conservative Christians here don't have time to be informed about the world near to them and far away, the priority of paying attention to these system and societal sins are relegated to that of being a luxury rather than a necessity. And if we believe that we are pious but haven't had time to learn about and respond to these sins, then ignoring of these sins and our possible complicity in committing them can't really be a sin in and of itself.

We should add that there are instances where the Conservative Christian Church is willing to spend time and money to address a public issues like Israel and same-sex marriage. But when it does so, it either is avoiding challenging those who maintain the status quo of society or it unconditionally supports it. The Conservative Church here seldom, if ever, challenges the maintainers of the status quo, those with wealth and power, in terms of the following: economic exploitation, destruction of the environment, and war and militarism. But Israel and issues revolving around sex are a different matter.

Now that is in America. If we cross the pond, we see Christians reacting a different way to the status quo. In this week's version of the Christian website Christian Today,  we see two articles that address social issues and they do so in a way that could rub the managers of the status quo the wrong way. The first article is written by Angus Ritchie and concerns whether the Church should take a stand on the housing crisis in England (click here). This of course has to do with controlling the price of housing. The second article, written by Tim Jones, lays out a solid case for why today's bailouts being forced on Greece are 'immoral' and 'unbiblical' (click here).  What we want to stress here is not necessarily the details of the situations being written about; rather, we are emphasizing the fact that a nonliberal Christian website is addressing these issues though the web site doing so is not American.

In Ritchie's article about the Church's responsibility to enter the fray of Britain's housing crisis, part of the Church has been battling to help peopleobtain a living wage. However, the status of that wage is being threatened by the rising cost of housing.  Thus, it is the Church's responsibility, according to Ritchie, to maintain the livability of the current wage by trying to control housing costs by various ways from work that creates new partnerships with housing associations to pressuring the various levels of government into helping.

In contrast to the call to action seen in Ritchie's article, Tim Jones' article on Greece is more of an FYI opinion piece. But in his article, Jones provides the necessary information for the reader to realize that the current series of bailouts being forced on Greece is really being given solely to support Greece's lenders by the fact that a vast majority of the money being lent is going to these institutions rather than to Greece and that the costs of the bailouts is that foreign governments are determining the new labor laws that will be enforced in Greece along with new austerity measures. This is despite what Jones cites the IMF opinion that austerity measures have hurt Greece's economic performance let  alone have caused much suffering on the people.  And in hurting Greece's economic performance, these measures all but ensure that Greece will never be able to pay its debt and thus will continue to need more costly bailouts. 

We should note that to read some of the American Conservative Christian websites on Greece's ongoing crisis would lead one to conclude that it is those who live off of pensions who are the reason for Greece's debt. That was never the case. And yet, that narrative supports the maintainers of the staus quo: the lending institutions and the governments that are working hand-in-hand with the banks to rob the Greeks of all their benefits as well as control over their own government.

Rather than saying anything more, both articles referenced here must be read. For perhaps after reading about what is going on, we American Conservative Christians might finally realize that there are other sins that need to be publicly addressed than sins of sexual immorality as important as important as those sins are.






References

1. http://www.christiantoday.com/article/britains.housing.crisis.why.the.church.needs.to.join.in.the.fight/58632.htm
   
   
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   http://www.christiantoday.com/article/greece.why.the.deal.forced.on.it.by.the.eurozone.is.immoral.and.unbiblical/59028.htm
    

Is Sheldon Cooper A Metaphor For Today's Conservative Christians?

Sheldon Cooper is, perhaps, the key character in the popular tv show, The Big Bang Theory. The crux of his humor relies on his extreme self-absorption and how it enables him to respond in such inappropriate ways that it becomes very entertaining. Of course the entertainment value is heightened by the fact that his inappropriate responses do not touch our real lives.

Philip Hammond, who is a British conservative political figure, just wrote an opinion piece for the Christian British journal website Christian Today on how his government should respond to the persecution and even martyrdom of Christians in various areas of the world (click here for the article). And though the title of the article is put forth in the form of a moral declaration stating that we should not tolerate the persecution of Christians, the article itself served more as an advertisement for Britain's conservative political party than anything else. Hammond states that Britain has the political capability to identify and make recommendations regarding the persecution of Christians around the world the form of its Foreign Office's Advisory Group on Freedom of Religion or Belief. And though Hammond talks as if freedom of religion is its main concern, his focus is specifically on the persecution of Christians. As he mentions this office, he asserts how a conservative government will definitely protect religious freedom. It is a claim he makes again in his last paragraph. 

But while we are on the subject of how we should respond to the persecution of Christians, self-asorption often affects how many of us Christians think and respond. For while we are rightly concerned with the plight of many of our fellow Christians around the globe and correctly call for our governments to protect them, our concern for religious freedom might be because of tribal concerns more than a love for religious freedom.  And examples of violations of religious freedoms which we ignore will illustrate this point. For where are our concerns for the religious freedoms of Palestinian Muslims and Christians as Israel continues to confiscate property in their brutal occupation of the Palestinian territories? Where was the Egyptian Christian response to the Egyptian government's treatment of the Muslim Brotherhood?  Where is the concern of us American Conservative Christians for the religious liberties of those from the LGBT community who do not share our religious view of marriage?

With our partisan defense of religious freedom, what many of us Christians have demonstrated is that we prefer to imitate many in the world by only loving our own than to follow Jesus' command to love all including our enemies. And what adds to the tragedy is that our self-absorption, which is all too obvious and offensive to the world we preach to, blinds us from seeing ourselves for who we are. In all too many instances, we are Sheldon Cooper at his worse.