Can White, American Christianity be Forgiven After November 5th's Election of the Most Morally Bankrupt Man in History?

Baptist News Global: The (unforgiveable) Sins of the White, American Church

"In recent decades," says retired United Methodist, former Southern Baptist pastor Martin Thielen, "the sins of white Christian American have been fully ecumenical."  These include

• the poisonous political partisanship of the conservative, Evangelical church
• the subservience of women
• the denomization of the LGBTQ community
• the scourge of white, Christian nationalism
• the depraved, pedophile priest scandal of the Roman Catholic Church, with almost no accountability for abusive priests or the bishops who covered it up
• endless and ruthless battles over human sexuality

"Of course, these sins (and many others) in the American church didn't form in a vacuum," he says.  
"From the earliest centuries of Christianity, the church has engaged in horrific behaviors, including the Inqisition, the Crusades, witch burnings, bloody religious wars, child abuse at indigenous boarding schools, indifference during the Holocaust, and a steady stream of intolerance, racism and sexism, just to name a few," he says.  

As an institutional expression of the Christian gospel, found in the New Testament, preached and taught by Jesus, that's a terrible record.  Defined by a set of virtues known as the Beatitudes, found in both Matthew's and Luke's record of the gospel of Jesus Christ, which include, among other virtues, the blessedness of humility, mercy and peacemaking, labelled as the "salt of the earth" and "the light of the world," and placing the highest value of faith practice on loving God with all of one's being and existence, and loving our neighbor as we love ourselves, it is a testimony to the strength of the gospel itself that Christianity became the predominant faith of Europe, and by extension the Americas, in spite of its record as an institution.  

The institutional church isn the church that Christ established.  There's a clear difference between the practice of the Christian gospel outlined by Jesus in the gospel accounts, which was a lifestyle described as both "salt" and "light," to be lived as a set of principles aimed at lifting people up, addressing their needs, including spiritual and emotional needs, and physical needs as necessary, and the church that has become anchored to its property and assets, and has intoxicated itself on wealth and power acquired from becoming a pawn of the political state.   Jesus reinterpreted the old covenant, lifting the practice of the worship of God out of theocracy and into a spiritual kingdom open to all of the people of the world.  But centuries of Christian leadership has turned it right back into the very thing that Jesus didn't want it to become. 

The very essence of the Christian gospel can be discerned by reading just a couple of printed pages found in Matthew's gospel, from Chapter 5 to 7.  In addition to the virtues found in the beatitudes, Jesus laid out what placing faith in, and practicing, the Christian gospel would look like.  At the very top of that long list of practices, all of which are aimed at lifting people up, not putting them down, is the commandment to love God as one loves themselves, and then, to equate loving God with loving our neighbor in the same way, defining "neighbor" as encompassing all of the other human beings with whom we come in contact.  

To be accurate, there have been Christians down through the centuries of the church's existence who have resisted the temptations of worldly power and wealth, in the same way Jesus is said to have resisted those temptations, in the narrative just before the Sermon on the Mount appears.  But looking at the long history of institutional Christianity, throughout its more than 2000 years of history, the overwhelming record that the church has made for itself greatly overshadows the kind of church existence that Christ preached, and admonished the church to follow.  The world would be a much different place if the church had fulfilled its purpose to live the gospel of Christ, instead of to become a theocratic, politically driven institution.  

"Like many other Christians," says Thielen, "I've chosen to forgive the church for its long list of infractions, including the ones it inflicted on me, personally," he says.  

In his own personal testimony,  Thielen explains the process of deconstruction and rebuilding of his own personal faith.  He talks about having lost faith in a literal Bible, the Evangelical church and its tradition doctrines, in the providence of God, in institutional religion, and in the traditional view of God that those of us raised in a more conservative tradition were taught to accept without question.  But in spite of that, he has retained his faith in God, love for Jesus and the values of the Christian gospel, appreciates the good that the church does in spite of its massive flaws, engages in Christian ministry, and experiences community with other Christians.  He says he is on a hiatus from institutional Christianity right now, living a Christian life free from traditional religious trappings.  

Can the White, Conservative, Evangelical Church in America Survive the Results of the November 5th Election? 

Thielen says that what pushed him into his hiatus from the pastorate and the church was the support given to Trump which helped him win the election.  There's no question that he could not have won without the support of countless white, Evangelical church members, who couldn't have provided that kind of support for someone as morally, ethically and spiritually bankrupt as Trump without complete abandonment of the principles and teachings of the Christian gospel. 

I agree.  Trump supporters simply separated their convictions from the politics, an act of direct disobedience for, and defiance of the Christian gospel.  And from my own perspective, while I still hold all of my values, care about the church, engage in the ministry, and work on living a Christian life, which includes believing in and worshipping God, I can't go back to an identity which uses the same terminology, and I have completely separated from any church that remotely looks Evangelical.  Part of the reason for the intrusion of licentious Trumpism into their churches is that their doctrine is wrong, and their theology, the perception of God that they worship, is wrong. 

It's not so easy to forgive this grievous apostasy of the branch of Christianity in which I grew up.  When this has been part of your life, starting at a relatively early age, in my case, before I can even remember, it is difficult to discern truth, because, in their fierce defense of their own perspective, they proclaim themselves as being fully righteous and doctrinally correct, while everyone else who doesn't subscribe to their biblical literalism and the legalistic fundamentalism it produces is wrong.  Their is no graciousness in their treatment of other Christians who do not share their own narrow view of the gospel.  

Southern Baptists actually split over the issue of biblical inerrancy, as the majority of the churches rejected what its universities and seminaries were teaching.  The end result of that split was that conservatives retained control of the trustee boards of the mission boards and seminaries, purging professors and inserting Jerry Falwell-Jack Hyles-Lee Roberson type fundamentalists in their place.  The more moderate churches formed their own fellowships, withdrawing from the SBC, while the universities and colleges escaped fundamentalist control by declaring their trustees self-perpetuating, some of them, like Wake Forest University and Baylor University establishing their own theological seminaries.  

White, conservative, American Evangelicalism will survive this current political captivity, but not intact.  In fact, denominations, and independent churches identified as Evangelical, including the fundamentalists, the Pentecostals and Charismatics, and a large swath of independent, non-denominational churches have seen as much as 30% of their membership and attendance dry up over the past decade, clearly the direct result of the intrusion of right wing extremism that includes a good dose of licentious Trump politics.  This intrusion, similar to what the Apostle Jude alluded to in his epistle, v. 4, has changed the nature of the church so much that it is no longer Christian in its identity.  And so, those whose convictions and conscience won't let them remain are either leaving, or they are purifying their congregations from the pulpit, making it uncomfortable for the right wing political extremists to stick around. 

Many, such as Thielen, have switched to more liberal churches in more liberal denominations.  Some have formed new churches, committed to keeping politics out, preaching against the heresy of Christian nationalism and the anti-Christian philosophy of white supremacy.  They will survive by deliberately keeping their congregants in ignorance, but will lose a lot of their influence.  It took over 80% of white, conservative Evangelicals to get Trump just enough of an edge to win this time, a considerably higher percentage of a shrinking number.  And if the second Trump administration becomes an even worse train wreck than the first one was, and I think it will, it will permanently damage American Evangelicalism.  

Forgiveness is unconditional in the Christian gospel, but it never abrogates the consequences of our actions.