It seems like every day I wake up to some new absurd and dystopian headline. It might be that some court in Alabama has ruled that an embryo is a person, it might be that some 35% of American voters support a guy who wants to end Democracy, or it might be that some Air Force pilots are convinced there are aliens flying around over the ocean. These are certainly bizarre enough, but there’s another one that trumps them all in my book.
I don’t believe you have to be a Christian to have a certain degree of respect for the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. His primary message of love and acceptance for all transcends Christianity and is the very fabric of happiness and healthy living for religious and philosophies around the world. The Christian Church has not always done a great job of personifying this message and has even been the perpetrators of great atrocities in the past, but there is a current movement going on in Evangelical churches that threatens to make even The Crusades and The Spanish Inquisition look tame.
You may have heard the Reverend Russell Moore (or even your favorite pastor) lament recently about the new trend in Christianity. In case you haven’t, hear what Moore had to say in this interview:
This concept that Jesus is “too liberal” for modern Christians is problematic on many levels. First, of course, is the most obvious. Jesus of Nazareth was pretty much the most liberal person you can find in antiquity. Despite being Jewish, he insisted that relying solely on the laws was not a good way to be in communion with God. Jesus emphasized the importance of love as the basis for all things. As I have written in this space before, this was an idea so revolutionary that it transformed the zeitgeist for some two thousand years and counting. Now the armies who would co-opt the name of Jesus but discard the heart of his teachings are growing.
Now let’s take this one step deeper. One of the primary sources of care for the poor and outcast comes from our nation’s churches, and rightly so. Jesus, after all, is quoted as having said that whoever cares for the “least of these” are caring for Jesus, himself. The Christian Church should serve as an extension of the teachings of the person whose name is on the building, otherwise what’s the point? Of course, right from the start people, including Saul (later Paul) of Tarsus, started coopting Jesus’ teachings for their own purposes and that effort appears to be on the verge of hitting critical mass.
The proliferation of megachurches across the country has transformed the worship experience in many ways. On the one hand, they have bookstores and coffeeshops inside and they generate enough revenue to potentially make a strong positive impact on the world. On the other hand, the theology being taught varies greatly. Some champion politicians openly from their pulpits, some misrepresent the teachings of Jesus and some miss the point of the teachings altogether. I was once in such a church where the young pastor in his standard uniform of blue jeans, untucked shirt and a dinner jacket told the congregation that if you don’t accept a particular dogma then Jesus’ teachings don’t matter.
I don’t think there is a more perfect way to miss the point! You’re telling me God came down to Earth in human form, taught for years while he was here and those teachings don’t matter??
I suppose that if we have decided the teachings don’t matter it becomes easier to use Jesus’ name to endorse corrupt politicians, condemn the LGBTQ+ community, claim God’s will is raining down on (insert embattled enemy here), or to advance any other personal or political agenda. A preacher standing on a stage in front of thousands of people portraying a particular set of views as “handed down from God” is every bit as dangerous as armed conflict. It’s also eerily similar to what we see going on at political rallies across the country staged on behalf of the former President of the United States.
The ultimate insult, then is the Christian Nationalist insistence that the Founding Fathers didn’t really mean the Church and State should be separate when, in the first clause of the Bill of Rights they wrote: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” It was Thomas Jefferson, himself a Deist and not a Christian, who insisted that there should be a wall between Church and State because he and his fellow Founders remembered all too well that which we seem to have forgotten. The Europeans who fled England and settled in North America were fleeing the tyranny of the Church of England. They didn’t want to come all the way over here and establish the same thing they just left!
I was raised in what was, for the time, a large church near downtown Houston. St. Phillip Presbyterian had several hundred members, most of whom were at least acquainted and many of who were close. We had church friends over to the house, we went on family retreats together, we had potlucks after church – it was truly a community. I know the megachurch model emphasizes small group study and within those groups they attempt to create that same sense of community but it just doesn’t feel the same to me. It all feels very commercial, and the increasingly concert-style presentation of the core service itself is a complete turnoff. The music is often crass and commercial, the singers are too perfect and sing what amounts to throwaway love songs for Jesus, and it seems to be in this barren soil where the seeds of hypocrisy and heresy take root.
Perhaps at its heart the message of Jesus really isn’t all that popular. We pick and choose which parts we can live with and ignore the less convenient parts. The answer to “What Would Jesus Do?” is simple. It’s one word. “LOVE.” It’s a hard answer to swallow, especially for those who want to weaponize religion on behalf of special interest groups and pet causes. But if you want to build a church that attracts thousands of congregants, apparently you need a Starbuck’s in the lobby, a carnival on the stage and a message of populism carefully targeted to the community surrounding the church.
For a religion ostensibly built around a man who believed it to be his mission in life to make people uncomfortable, that seems oxymoronic to me. There’s nothing “weak” about being a “liberal.” On the contrary, the ability to show kindness is a super power. The willingness to look past and grow beyond our own judgments, ingrained beliefs and stereotypes to love our fellow human beings for who they are is what it truly means to be a Christian, in my view. We lose site of that message at our peril.
-B
Ishmael's Legacy 