And none of them are conservative Evangelicals.
Those Christians who are remaining faithful to the gospel message of Jesus Christ, and to a biblically guided, doctrinally and theologically honest practice of Christian principles are labelled as liberal, progressive, moderate, or some other descriptive adjectives used by conservatives to cast derision and disrespect, and accuse those they are labelling of apostasy and heresy. But it's the conservative Evangelicals, the "religious right," the fundamentalists, Pentecostals, Charismatics and other right wing pseudo-Christians who have distorted and misinterpreted the Bible, and attempted to use it to advance a cause it was never intended to advance, including the Heritage Foundation's "Project 2025" that have become a godless cult.
Speaking Truth to Power
Bishop Marian Budde had Trump in her sights, in the front row, as she spoke truth to power. His response resembled the spinning head, green pea-soup spitting character of Regan MacNeil, played by Linda Blair, in The Exorcist. She stood her ground, backing up her words with Biblical support. The fact that she is exactly the opposite of what any conservative Evangelical would consider to be an ordained messenger from God--an ordained woman, and a liberal Episcopalian--just underlined the truthfulness of her words and the conviction that they brought.
That certainly got my attention.
Growing up Southern Baptist, I've had to work on getting an awful lot of bigotry and prejudice out of my own life. The absolute nature of the fundamentalism in which I was raised never sat very well with me, but I wasn't in a position to dispute much of it, since the preacher's words were considered as equal with the Bible when he preached, especially from the pulpit. And the explanation given to attempt to reconcile the contradictions I was hearing from college professors at the Baptist university was that the school had been "taken over by the liberals," and what the professors taught was heresy.
But that turned out not to be the case at all. In fact, I discovered, much to my own personal satisfaction, that there are theologically educated Baptists who remain true to the core values and doctrines originally preached and taught by founders of the Baptist faith, in its original confessions, that are rooted in the gospel of Jesus Christ, and are labelled "flaming liberal heresy" by the fundamentalists of the extreme right, who have abandoned the early Baptist confessions.
I really wish I would have been more decisive in moving away from the cult of conservative Evangelical identity toward the more liberal, Quaker values that are a natural extension of intellectual acceptance of the Christian gospel which is much more centered in living out the core values of Christ's teaching than accepting dogmatic statements about what must be professed and confessed in order to be "saved." I might have avoided a lot of the frustrations and disappointments I've experienced, even in my career choices, if I had simply walked away.
Boldness Pre-Dates Bishop Budde's Sermon
It's difficult for many people on the political left to embrace any kind of alliance with any group that identifies as Christian. Many American political liberals see any kind of Christian practice as intellectual failure, and a betrayal of rational thought. I would think that pure progressive liberalism would embrace free conscience, regardless of what it produces, and would see those who have made the connection between one of the most powerful cultural influences in the world, and its alignment with their own political views in a way that has the power to protect and preserve American Democracy, and there are many who do see it this way.
The Episcopal Church has, for a long time, stood squarely on the core values of the Christian gospel. I remember, when I was a high school student, seeing a sign outside of an Episcopal church building in Tucson, Arizona that proclaimed, "It is a sin to build a nuclear bomb," and directly linking that message to Matthew 5:9, "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God." When I asked my Sunday School teacher in the Baptist church where I grew up about it, I was told that dropping the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were necessary actions to bring about God's will, and was told that the Episcopalians were in error when it came to understanding and interpreting the Bible.
It would have been a very bold move for me at the time, when I left home and went off to college, to find, and join an Episcopalian church. I was a student at a Baptist university after all, and I didn't want to cause my parents more grief than the whole leaving home experience already had caused. But during that first semester, when the university held a "spiritual emphasis week" with church services held in the middle of each day, the guest speaker was the pastor of a Baptist congregation in Houston that was much different than the one in which I grew up. In fact, in both preaching and in practice, it sounded and looked much more Episcopalian than Baptist.
On the Sunday following his last sermon at the university chapel, he was the guest speaker at a Baptist church not far from campus that was much like the one in Texas where he was pastor, and I discovered it, much to my own delight, and joined it. The preaching and teaching opened up a world of liberal, progressive Christianity to me, along with what I was learning in the required Bible classes at the university, that I didn't know even existed among Baptists who, by remaining true to the original Baptist confessions of faith dating back to the early 1600's, identified them as "flaming liberals."
Doctrinal purity is not only impossible to achieve, it's a major distraction from the point of the Christian gospel, which is not intellectual assent to correct doctrine and theology, but living a lifestyle influenced by values which enhance human existence and link people together, believing that we are all created in God's image. We're capable of rational thought, so that we do not become subject to blind obedience. Some American Christians, because of their tradition and their past, have learned from their history and avoid repeating it. And I am particularly grateful for all of the clergy, Protestant and Catholic, who are now rising up and pointing out the contrast between the selfishness of MAGA and the grace of the Christian gospel.
The two things are mutually exclusive. Embracing MAGA is abandoning Christianity, and embracing Christianity requires complete abandonment of MAGA.
It's the "Liberal" Mainline Protestants Who Remain Faithful to the Christian Gospel
It would be redundant to repeat the themes from the corruption of conservative Evangelicalism by extremist right wing politics. John Fugelsang does an excellent job of that in his book, Separation of Church and Hate, in which he points out the contrast between the Christian gospel and the MAGA political objectives as incompatible. There are others who have also pointed this out, among them liberal Missouri Baptist journalist Brian Kaylor, editor of an independent Baptist news journal, Word and Way, and author of The Bible According to Christian Nationalists: Exploiting Scripture for Political Power who does an excellent job of documenting the errors of conservative Evangelicals in interpreting the Bible when it comes to far right wing politics.
Starting with Bishop Marian Budde, the Episcopal Church is zeroing in on the flaws in the theology and doctrine that has been produced by mixing right wing Trumpism with conservative Evangelicalism. When the Bible is used to justify practices in politics that are contradictory to the principles of the Christian gospel, that's an abuse of what conservative Evangelicals claim is the core issue which separates them from liberals, the doctrine of Biblical authority. Separating the scripture into "verses," and then considering the meaning in a "verse by verse" manner robs the text of its authority, and its context, which, according to conservative Evangelicals, is theoretically infallible.
If the Biblical text is infallible, then it cannot have dual meanings for different eras and periods of time, or it would not be infallible.
The fact that there are American Christians who have a strong grasp of the context of the Bible, and how that has impacted American history, helps them point out error when they see it.
Yes, I Have a Lot of Regrets
We get caught up in our own lives, which narrows our focus, and we live within the scope of our existence. I was moving in a particular direction, with family, established friendships, even career choices, and I never really thought about whether what I really believed could be perceived through that, even though I was intentional about my left wing politics and about my efforts to focus what I believed to be true about Christianity, as I expressed it, so that I distinguished myself from conservative Evangelicalism enough to make a difference.
I don't regret the loss of some relationships I've had that have more or less freed me from the obligation I feel to set people straight when I have had enough of listening to the twisted, illogical and blatantly distorted attempts to justify the departure from Christianity that supporting Trump's MAGA cult requires. I have enjoyed discussions in which I can watch the horror come over the face of a MAGA conservative Evangelical who realizes that I've built a Biblical case for a liberal doctrinal point or theological concept that makes them look like a heretic arguing against it. I've had former friends give me knowing looks when they tell me, "I told you going to that seminary would cause you to become a flaming liberal," or try to cite some scripture verse to trash education and reason that they can't actually argue against convincingly.
I regret that for about half of my adult life, because of family and peer pressure, I let myself be bored to tears every Sunday morning, trying to occupy my mind productively during a harangue attempting to pass as a sermon. I finally got to the point where I could turn the time over to something enjoyable, and I've filled several notebooks with notes contradicting points made by the preacher in the pulpit.
After one sermon that provided a particular abundance of theological and doctrinal error to challenge, I got a call during the week from the pastor who had preached it. We went to lunch, where he disclosed to me his own dissatisfaction at having to insert right wing political points into the sermon to please the congregation who had been growing discontent at his attempt to keep politics out of the church. He had chosen career over conscience. Well, he earned a six-figure salary in a Baptist church of fewer than 250 active members, and that was an easier job than being a funeral director.
I got a couple of great points out of that conversation. One, that's when I determined that I did not want to find myself in the same position, and I made a commitment to be completely open about how my Christianity leads me to support candidates who are, for lack of a better way to describe them, "woke." The other was that a church where the pastor must violate his own concience in order to tickle the ears of the MAGA majority among its membership is not a Christian church. That is, in fact, a denial of one of the core doctrines of Christian faith, which is that humans are created in God's image, demonstrated by their having a free will and a free conscience, and should be subject to no coercion.
Though I think the labels that give different Christians separate identity can sometimes stand in the way of unity, I appreciate the fact that it has been the Episcopal Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America [ELCA] and the United Methodist Church, the United Church of Christ, the Presbyterian Church United States of America [PCUSA], and the left wing, flaming liberal Baptist churches that have severed ties with the Southern Baptist Convention, joined hands with their African America brethren, and other like minded Baptists who are pointing out, clearly, that Christianity and Trump's MAGA cult are mutually exclusive.
I do not regret identifying as a Christian, one who experience has helped grow into understanding that this is a faith more about lifestyle than it is about getting the doctrine right and registering on the clipboard passed down each row every Sunday. The corrupt, constitution-violating, law-breaking, human disrespect that we see from our current administration is neither patriotic American, nor Christian. Our free conscience is worth fighting for, and I won't reget identifying as a Patriot and a Peacemaker.
No comments:
Post a Comment