Last summer, the recently retired minister Ray Ortlund announced that he had been appointed a canon theologian, a teaching office in the Anglican Church of North America (ACNA). That a recently retired minister who held a PhD and had taught in evangelical seminaries would be appointed to such a role is not terribly surprising, save for one thing: Ortlund has not been an Anglican for a day in his life, nor was the church he attended in any way affiliated with the ACNA, nor, so far as I can tell from publicly available information, did Ortlund have any intentions of moving to an ACNA church.
When he retired, he pastored Immanuel Church, a non-denominational church in Nashville. Prior to that, he had served for a number of years in the Presbyterian Church in America. Nevertheless, Ortlund is now a canon theologian in the ACNA.
Even as this strange announcement came from Nashville, another announcement, seemingly no less strange, came from Chicago. Esau McCaulley, a canon theologian in the ACNA, New York Times contributor, and bestselling author of Reading While Black would be attending the Progressive Baptist Church, a centuries-old black church on the south side of Chicago. (Despite its name, Progressive Baptist is not a theologically progressive church. The church had actually been part of the Southern Baptist Convention briefly, though they left in 2020.)
These moves both happened against a broader backdrop of much turmoil within America’s traditionally white denominations as all appear to be plausibly headed toward division or other significant transformations in the near future. Thus both Ortlund and McCaulley’s moves suggest something more general about the state of American religious life, and especially Christian life. They provide a picture of American Christians reckoning with the rapidly ascendant secularism of post-Obergefell America and the racial politics of post-Obama America.
In short, in a time when the conflict between our faith and our nation is abundantly obvious, many Christians are choosing who they want to be in their foxhole; they’re searching for the group where they have the greatest hope of fruitful ministry during a time of adversity and testing. The relationships and affiliations one maintains during seasons of plenty look quite different from those we desire during drier periods. And many of us are finding that the more obvious traditional dividing lines within the American church do not necessarily reflect the coalitions forming during this time of upheaval.
For black Christians in particular, the pull toward the black church is understandable as participation in white churches could be exhausting even under relatively more favorable conditions. In many cases, black Christians moved into traditionally white denominations due to theological commonalities, only to find themselves alienated as the racial dynamics of white denominations made addressing problems of justice practically impossible. The realignment now under way flows from both the obvious dissonance between Christian faith and the American regime and differences within the church as to the nature of that dissonance.
Negative World America
In a 2014 essay in The Atlantic, Alan Noble asked if Christian morality was still acceptable in American society, particularly Christian teachings on sexuality and gender. The answer to that question is complex, of course, given the passing of anti-transgender laws in a number of red states as well as the wave of pro-life laws passing in those same states. But in the culturally and socially elite institutions which broadly shape American public life and the American social imaginary, the answer to Noble’s question at this point appears to be “no.”
Indeed, conservative urbanist and cultural commentator Aaron Renn has suggested that, as of 2015, Christian identification shifted from being a basically neutral characteristic relative to one’s standing in American life to a negative influence. To be a traditional Christian in today’s America is a mark against you if you desire to rise to mainstream positions of social prominence, power, and influence. And where that leaves the white American church, which has little historical experience on the margins of American life is a yet-to-be resolved problem.
Understanding the centrality of this problem, or perhaps of this fear, helps to make sense of divisions that, at first, look rather odd. The forces driving today’s ecclesial realignment are not immediately recognizable as theological in the way that the causes of other ecclesial ruptures throughout history have been. The 16th century Reformation concerned the authority of the church and how individual people are made right with God. The 19th century modernist controversy questioned the possibility of miracles and of the supernatural more broadly.
The recent divides opening up in the American mainline concern the place of people living in same-sex relationships in the life of the church, which implicates theological questions concerning sexuality, ethics, and the human body. In each case, the theological stakes of the debate were clear and the reasons for division were similarly clear.
Naming the Divide Within Conservative Protestantism
Today’s divisions within evangelicalism, in contrast, can seem almost aggressively non-theological. No one on either side of this culture war fight amongst conservative Protestants, for example, is taking the mainline’s position on LGBT individuals and the church. Even the far “left” of the debate makes affirmation of Christian teachings regarding sexual behavior and marriage central to their public witness. Nor is there some broader theological downgrade that sees one side or the other drifting away from Nicea or even the broadly shared elements uniting theological documents such as the Westminster Confession of Faith, the 39 Articles, or the Baptist Faith and Message.
The things driving Ortlund into the ACNA or Russell Moore and Beth Moore out of the SBC do not seem to be primarily about agreement or disagreement with a church’s theological confession. Indeed, the theological questions that historically divide various species of Protestantism or even Protestants and Catholics seem to be dissolving into the culture war ether, replaced by politics. (Compare the cultural coverage of Catholic discernment blogs with Baptist discernment blogs sometime.) Yet to describe these divisions as non-theological is not actually correct.
The core question dividing many Christians in America right now is this: When did America become hostile to Christian faith and practice? For those on the right of the contemporary debate, the answer is “recently.” Renn plausibly dates the change to 2015 with the Obergefell ruling and the intense backlash against Indiana’s and Arkansas’s religious freedom restoration acts. Though he develops a broader and deeper critique in The Benedict Option, which takes a more Milbankian approach to the problem, Rod Dreher’s more recent book, Live Not By Lies, favors a narrower reading, starting with the ascent of “wokeness” in the United States or what Wesley Yang has called “the successor ideology.”
For these thinkers, the pre-Obergefell world certainly wasn’t idyllic. Many of these same figures are harshly critical of the second Bush administration, for example. But prior to Obergefell there was a broadly shared set of cultural assumptions that left room for Christian identity as an acceptable lifestyle option, at the very least. There was something lingering in the air that still spoke of a day when America’s elite institutions were more friendly to some Christian concepts and ways of thinking or even were explicitly Christian themselves. In the aftermath of Obergefell, the ascent of President Trump, and the growing acceptance of transgenderism, that space which allowed traditional Christians to maintain standing in elite American cultural institutions has been dramatically shrunk, if not eliminated altogether.
On all of this, the “left” side of the divide is likely to have little disagreement. Certainly, Russell Moore has written extensively against Obergefell and transgenderism. His former colleague at the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, Karen Swallow Prior, recently wrote against abortion and in favor of the highly restrictive Texas anti-abortion law in the pages of the New York Times. Meanwhile, McCaulley’s Reading While Black, is, amongst other things, an attempt to retrieve and explain the conservative theology of the Black church in America for both progressive black academics and conservative white evangelicals. McCaulley’s new colleague at Progressive Baptist, the Rev. Dr. Charlie Dates, is of much the same mind as the other figures.
This conservatism is reflected in the preaching of Dates, who routinely preaches for 45 minutes to an hour and whose sermons frequently exhort his congregation to repentance over personal sins, prayer, Bible study, and many other elements you’d sooner find in white conservative churches than white progressive churches. This conservatism also reaches into the debates over sexuality and gender issues.
After Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke suggested that non-affirming churches should lose their tax-exempt status in an LGBT townhall event in 2019, Dates, responded from the pulpit saying,
Anytime a Democratic candidate for president can go on a CNN panel and say that any church or tax-exempt organization cannot speak prophetically even into the sexual ethics of our culture without having their tax-exempt status taken away, then I can’t stand for that cause that ain’t true! Take my tax-exempt status back. I tell you one thing you can’t take back from me, you can’t take the Word of God out of my heart!
Dates is not unique in taking this view. Retired Redeemer Presbyterian pastor Tim Keller, regularly viewed as representing the “left” wing of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), was one of the primary authors of the PCA’s recent study report on sexuality, a report which condemned hook-up culture, gay marriage, and the sexual revolution while endorsing a strictly conservative vision of marriage and family life. Meanwhile, the ACNA’s January 2021 pastoral statement sounds many of the same notes as the PCA’s report, suggesting the emergence of a consensus on sexuality shared amongst the PCA and ACNA. You will not find defenders of the successor ideology amongst the “left” of the contemporary debate within evangelicalism.
So what divides the factions, if not opposition to recent cultural changes in American life? To find an answer, we need look no further than Dates’s sermon in which he condemned O’Rourke’s comments on CNN. Minutes before attacking O’Rourke, Dates also condemned those who would establish too-strong bonds between the Republican Party and American Christians, saying:
Don’t you let nobody think that if you’re going to be Christian in America you got to be a Republican. There ain’t nothing intrinsically Christian about being a Republican. We cannot marginalize women. We cannot be misogynistic. We cannot go grabbing women by any parts of the body we want to grab them by. We cannot leave the poor on the fringes and alone and broken and without programs to help them. We cannot ignore systemic injustice and racism. There’s nothing intrinsically Christian about that!
Dates’s approach to the problem of the church’s place in American life is both straightforward and complex: In Dates’s framing, America has never really been a Christian nation. The majority of Christian believers in America have, rather, practiced a kind of accommodated Christianity that adjusts itself so as to not disrupt the status quo of American life with its emphases on acquiring wealth and power and status. Even if that status quo involves gross injustice, many American Christians have been prepared to look the other way or even to aid the injustice in the name of ministry. The reason that white Christians such as Russell Moore and Beth Moore and many others in the SBC, PCA, and ACNA have found themselves at odds with predominantly white denominations is, at least in part, due to the fact that they have begun to identify, address, and condemn this spirit of accommodation.
America Was Never a Christian Nation
In our early days, (white) American Christianity accommodated itself to slavery, even adopting liturgical practices in southern churches that reinforced the logic and norms of the plantation, as Yale theologian Willie James Jennings recently described in his book After Whiteness.
More recently, many white Christians have likewise demonstrated a willingness to tolerate rampant poverty in the name of protecting property rights, sexual misconduct and abuse in the name of protecting a certain depiction of masculinity, and a general indifference to character and virtue in the name of securing political power.
The idea that the Christianity practiced by many in America is an attenuated faith accommodated to socially sanctioned injustice is not a new argument. In 1829, a free black man named David Walker published an Appeal in which he aggressively condemned slavery and other forms of racial injustice in America. Strikingly, he did so on explicitly Christian grounds, arguing that America couldn’t possibly be a truly Christian nation because her own conduct plainly contradicted Christian teachings:
(Defenders of slavery) forget that God rules in the armies of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth, having his ears continually open to the cries, tears and groans of his oppressed people; and being a just and holy Being will at one day appear fully in behalf of the oppressed, and arrest the progress of the avaricious oppressors; for although the destruction of the oppressors God may not effect by the oppressed, yet the Lord our God will bring other destructions upon them.
Walker was not the only one to make such arguments, either. Roughly 20 years later, Frederick Douglass would say much the same thing in the epilogue to his Narrative on the Life of a Slave, arguing that the Christianity of Christ and the Christianity of America’s slaveowners were entirely different religions:
Between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference — so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.
Dates would echo this argument in his sermon given after the murder of George Floyd:
The problem with white supremacy killing black women and black men in America is an error of theology. It is a failure of the white mind and the white power structures to remember from where breath really comes. What is American history if not the thievery of breath from black anatomy?
And so the divide within evangelicalism, even if it might appear to be chiefly affinity based, has an undeniable theological component. Can we isolate the American church’s frequent toleration of gross injustice from the broader question of the American church’s fidelity and commitment to her Lord? Can justice and righteousness be kept separate from one another?
If the divide roiling conservative American Christianity right now concerns the question, “when did America stop being a Christian nation?” it is because one side of that divide now thinks America never really was all that Christian to begin with.
So what will this mean for the future of Christian faith, practice, and communal life in America? That remains to be seen. But it is unlikely that individual congregations and even whole denominations can long endure in the face of such a division. If American Christians are being more explicitly ostracized and excluded from the halls of power and if their status in America is more uncertain and in-doubt, it is only natural that individual Christians and churches would seek out like-minded people with whom they can ride out the storm, to whom they can offer support during this season and from whom they can expect aid and assistance. But to what end will these communities of believers labor?
If the conflict between the American regime and Christianity is of recent vintage, then the task is one of restoration, it is one of enduring a storm and leveraging what power we still have, which is even now considerable. It is the work of regaining our position of centrality and influence in the life of the American republic. The goal, in other words, is to retrieve the post-war era’s functional Christendom that ruled in America from the late 1940s until the past couple decades. Something like this, of course, is precisely the promise of the Trump campaign, with its goal of making America great again.
If, on the other hand, the conflict between the American regime and Christianity is centuries old and implicates not only America’s racial sins, but also many economic injustices, then the work for Christian communities to attempt is not a restoration of a recently lost silver age, but rather a wholesale re-evaluation of the life of the American church, of her moral commitments, and her prophetic witness to a nation that has always been defined by grievous injustice and whose church has, too often, been lukewarm in its zeal for justice and its concern for the poor and the disadvantaged.
Thus the right wing of this debate will continue to embrace Trumpism and whatever policy items and broader agendas that can be linked with the goal of restoration. It is likely that this embrace will probably more and more pronounced as the years pass, even incorporating figures who once held out against it. The left wing, meanwhile, will attempt to embody a vision of the church’s life in America that assumes a sharp divide between America as she has historically existed and the teachings of Christian morality, which is more likely to see America as one of the powers and principalities of Scripture than as a shining city on a hill.
What exactly this will look like in practice is an open question. There are models out there, but mostly they belong to Christian traditions that have been outside the American magisterial Protestant mainstream. The Radical Anabaptists offer one vision. The Black church offers another. Dissident Catholicism would offer still another.
But this will be largely uncharted territory for white Christians in the PCA, SBC, and ACNA amongst others, all of whom are generally far more assimilated into the mainstream of American life. It will mean a trek into the political wilderness, for in this project they render themselves unaccepted to both of America’s dominant political parties. It seems it must be these dissident Christian movements and especially the Black church that will lead here, for they knew 200 years ago what many white Christians have, to our shame, only discovered more recently.
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I wonder what role age (chronological context) plays in this divide. How would the answer of the average 65 year old compare to the answer of the average 25 year old? Are older or younger persons more likely to view America as a Christian nation that needs to be reclaimed or a pluralistic nation that requires our faithfulness? Does a rural/urban divide affect our position? Does geographic position (East Coast, Midwest, etc.)?
Man, this is a disappointing read. This sort of serves up the characterization of the aloof evangelical intellectual that Matthew Loftus, elsewhere on MereO, has tried to argue against. A sort of above-the-fray argument that bemoans division while it also, intentionally or not, makes appeals consistent with the respectability politics of the day.
The main thesis here is that the new dividing line is the question of “When did America stop being a Christian nation?” This is a framing sure to belittle the right; is there *any* respectable answer available here other than that “it never really was one”? Certainly neither Dreher, Renn, or any others mentioned here on “the right” have ever argued otherwise.
No, the new fault lines clearly emerged out of the post-George Floyd political upheavals. Through that and other concurrent events, “critical theories” moved from the academy to the mainstream. Our cultural gatekeepers – seemingly overnight! – adopted the language of systemic injustice, which promoted an already ascendant identitarian politics into a triumphant status as America’s new social ethic.
This was not new for Charlie Dates, or for the black church in general. But for broader swaths of the PCA, SBC, or ACNA, this added new distance between the prevailing social ethic of the church and that of its surrounding cultural context. The dividing line that appeared, then, was between those who would adopt the new cultural language and framework, and those who would not. The innovation has not occurred on “the right”; it has happened on “the left” and has alienated those who have adopted it from their own institutions (Moore, Prior, etc).
We would do well to remember this dynamic, because it will likely play out again and again as our American context becomes increasingly post-Christian. Those closest to positions of cultural power (urban churches, pastors with columns in the Atlantic, etc.) will be continually tempted to adapt to the changing social mores, and will see Christians who fail to do so as “entrenching” or something of that sort. And the rank-and-file whose social context provides little temptation to adapt will increasingly view their “elites” as betraying them.
” The main thesis here is that the new dividing line is the question of “When did America stop being a Christian nation?” This is a framing sure to belittle the right; is there *any* respectable answer available here other than that “it never really was one”? Certainly neither Dreher, Renn, or any others mentioned here on “the right” have ever argued otherwise. ”
This is a carefully calculated device to split away the bulk of low-engagement conservative evangelical sentiment (which really does have a sort of primal myth of Christianized patriotism) from a class of very-online conservative intellectuals like us. It’s a good technique by Meador when deployed against someone like me, since it cuts to the heart of my discomfort with Trumpism — not as something new and horrible, but as a simple extension of a vacuous civil religion imprimatur that I remember (and remember disliking) from 40 years ago.
I very much want to live in a radical vision of Christianity that critiques both the old Eisenhower-era mainline-Christian caesaropapist consensus that evangelicalism weirdly inherited, but also fiercely critiques the new corporate-woke civil religion of the 21st century. Trying to load my side up with all the baggage of all the annoying flag-wavers I have to sit beside in the pews every Sunday is an undeniably sharp stiletto to wield against me. It’s a fine enough blade to pry me away from the shrinking pockets of familiar culture and leave me totally alone, feeling adrift in Dreher’s world of liquid modernity. It’s an awareness that my real tribe is something like the Anabaptist identity being marketed here — but closer to what Anabaptist thought was a few decades ago than what it will be a few decades in the future. (The Mennonite church I attended in college is now “open and affirming.)
I fear that loneliness greatly, but it’s hardly a basis for any new identity I could share with Meador’s left-on-race-right-on-sex tribe — it instead leaves me feeling soured toward the one who makes it, and also vaguely envious of the relief that would come from being an unambiguously tribal Trumpist.
I’m kind of in the same boat. But I walked away from White Evangelicalism in 2016, and starting attending the local ECUSA church. After five years, I can’t say that I know a single person besides the rector on a first-name basis. I’m happy with that. I’d rather meet friends outside of the church based on common interests. In my case, that involves running and guns. The key to being happy in church life is to lower expectations to a very low point.
That’s a pretty sad view of the Body of Christ.
Frankly, I didn’t experience much fellowship when I was in the PCA. After church most people just talked about what had most recently appeared on the opinion shows on FOX News. I don’t see where that contributes much to the building of the Body of Christ. I suppose if you believe that Judge Jeanine is divinely inspired, such conversation may seem to serve some sanctifying purpose. But if you don’t believe that, you’re probably better off leaving as soon as the benediction is given.
Having had The Great Crisis of my own life resolved by Eucharist, I admittedly, inwardly rolled my eyes when the Bishops recently announced an initiative for a three-year emphasis on that which we revolve our lives around.
I now see their wisdom.
+++
“Eucharistic communion…confirms
the Church in her unity as the body of
Christ. Saint Paul refers to this unifying
power of participation in the banquet of the Eucharist when he writes to the
Corinthians: “The bread which we
break, is it not a communion in the
body of Christ? Because there is one
bread, we who are many are one body,
for we all partake of the one bread” (1
Cor 10:16-17). Saint John Chrysostom’s commentary on these words is profound and perceptive: “For what is the bread? It is the body of Christ. And what do those who receive it become? The Body of
Christ – not many bodies but one body.
For as bread is completely one, though
made of up many grains of wheat, and
these, albeit unseen, remain nonetheless
present, in such a way that their difference
is not apparent since they have been made
a perfect whole, so too are we mutually
joined to one another and together united
with Christ.”” [‘The Mystery of Faith, A Pastoral Letter on the Holy Eucharist’, Bp Steven Lopes, citing Pope John Paul II]
There’s a good deal of cherry-picking and boundary-smudging in the attempt to define different figures as being “conservative” evangelicals here. Sometimes (when necessary for the argument) this means something related to a broader set of cultural commitments. Other times (when necessary for a different set of arguments) it means something more closely related to affirmation of a limited set of historical creeds and culturally-inert denominational distinctives.
The names being dropped here are very carefully chosen to avoid any difficult taxonomic dilemmas. For example, citing McCaulley, a genuinely insightful theologian with contributions to exegetical practice that only partially overlap with racial justice issues, makes it much easier to craft a message of “whence this incomprehensible reactionary hyperventilation?” than talking about Jemar Tisby, who has basically been playing for Team Kendi for the last year and pumping garden-variety partisanship on his social media feeds. But I saw more Tisby books last year than McCaulley when I last visited my parents’ big-tent evangelical church. You can easily write an article lamenting the fear that McCaulley is being excluded from one definition, but you can’t write a similar article that either writes Tisby (or Kobes Du Mez, or the other people I’d be more apt to identify as the “real far left” of Nicene-orthodox evangelicalism) as either “in” or “out”. You just need to cordon off the question entirely when writing a piece like this, or the clean “It’s all Trumpism’s fault” narrative begins to wear shabby.
Similarly, it’s hard not to see a certain type of true-Scotsmanning at work in this quote:
“No one on either side of this culture war fight amongst conservative Protestants, for example, is taking the mainline’s position on LGBT individuals and the church. Even the far “left” of the debate makes affirmation of Christian teachings regarding sexual behavior and marriage central to their public witness.”
So when Russell Moore is interviewing Shane Claiborne for Christianity Today, does that imply that he’s somewhere out beyond even the far left of the debate on culture war issues? If so, why is CT interviewing someone “beyond the far left”, when they’d surely never interview anyone “beyond the far right”? If not, then a quick jaunt over to Red Letter Christian suggests that there’s little daylight between his positions on SSM and the dreaded mainline. And he’s hardly alone in his age cohort, at least judging by PRRI surveys of millennial evangelicals over the last few years.
There’s a nagging suspicion in conservative evangelical circles (and here I’m using that in the broad cultural sense!) that the sort of people who get derided as evangelical elites are essentially biting their tongues on sexuality issues until the Boomers die off. Periodically this suspicion gets confirmed by a major figure (e.g. Gushee) being set free by retirement and immediately going full-woke or (e.g. Eugene Peterson) having to leap to snatch back a premature trial balloon. And even if you want to arbitrary draw the line so it excludes Tisby, Gushee, Claiborne, etc, and just leave the “far left” to consist of Beth Moore, it’s still increasingly difficult to find Moore herself saying much of anything about LGBT issues other than expressing regret about her past opposition and praising Hatmaker in a “let the reader understand” sotto voce tone. If I told you I suspected that she was sandbagging a stance that was functionally in favor of sexually-active same-sex marriages, what public quote could you find from the last few years to prove me wrong?
Overall I want to see a church that’s (1) big enough to include both race-conscious and race-neutral approaches toward racial justice issues, without claiming one of those two stances is the only biblically acceptable one, and (2) small enough to require people to affirm that same-sex marriage is morally wrong. But it seems like there’s a growing set of institutions that want the world to be the other way around. Constant use of “white supremacy” rhetoric to describe anyone who prefers a previously uncontroversial 60s-liberal colorblind approach toward race issues (cf. your quote of Dates above) doesn’t feel to me like “conservatives are cruelly running perceived elites out of evangelicalism”. It looks a lot more like those elites trying to drive the plurality of unwoke laity out of evangelicalism. It’s this shift toward escalating rhetoric on race but evasive rhetoric on sexuality that makes any amount of pamphlet-orthodoxy feel flimsy and insubstantial beside the stronger signals detected in emotional fervor and publication bias.
What business does the church have in saying whether civil same-sex marriage is morally wrong or not. Civil marriage is simply a set of default legal rules concerning mutual obligations with respect to property and progeny. I don’t see why the church should have any particular opinion on such issues. The church should have no more to say concerning the morality of civil marriage than it has to say about the morality of intestacy laws. The opposition by certain Christians to civil same-sex marriage was always rooted in homophobia.
Im fine with churches refusing to perform ecclesial marriages for same-sex couples. But I couldn’t care less whether the lesbian couple down the street has a civil marriage license or not.
Thanks so much Edward. I resonate with much of your sentiments. I really believe that the “left” side of the cultural moment is going to fracture within the next two decades over the sexuality issue and the impulse to privilege sociology over theology. Jake’s framing of the question is right but there is another crucial question: How do we understand the present church’s self understanding in relation to historic Christianity? The trend on both sides is too diminish the need for theological retrieval as they are animated by the present concerns but what would happen is that the frameworks of the moment would become increasingly attractive. Drawing the line on conservative sexuality is not enough, the bigger worry is what we do with history and historic Christianity especially its failures. The move to expunge the slaveholding puritans or to demonize the Rev MLK are both symptoms that we fail to see church history as our shared history in Christ. I understand that there has been a hatred for the theology of slaveholders but why not retrace and shore up on Nicaea. As an African, I can mention how a lot of prosperity pastors within a section of the black church have turned loose on milking Africans. Yet the solution does not lie in discarding the wisdom from the black church. Latent in the American church even in the “white conservative” spaces are resources to move forward as a church together. If the African American began to center historic commitments and retrieved the theological heritage of Africa (like Thomas Oden and Kwame Bediako attempted) the ripples would impact Christianity in Africa. But perhaps now is the time where iconoclastic work and fundamentally starting from a very negative vantage point on church history especially from the reformation onwards. But hopefully afterwards, the Lord will visit his church with a renewed sense to embrace our history as our own even in its shamefulness. And to find buried in the rubble helpful resources for loving our neighbors better and loving him above all.
“If the divide roiling conservative American Christianity right now concerns the question, ‘when did America stop being a Christian nation?’ it is because one side of that divide now thinks America never really was all that Christian to begin with.”
This really resonates, except that I would specify *white* conservative American Christianity (and you may not disagree). Some of us are trying to preserve what others of us are working to dismantle. And in the face of such resistance to dismantling are also considering just walking away and building new things and looking for other traditions with more integrity for fellowship/guidance.
Odd to see Keller cast as “left” though… he strikes me more as a “moderate” in a very hard “right” leaning subgroup of white evangelicals. And I think he has been loosing respect recently among younger conservative American Christians who still love Jesus and the Bible but have thoroughly abandoned any idea of America as ever being a Christian nation.
I agree on Keller. He wrote the foreword for the recent book by Eric Metaxas. Metaxas is more vocal and flamboyant. But I doubt that Keller and Metaxas disagree on much. They just have different modes of presentation. They may disagree over the value of Trump in moving America towards a more authoritarian and hierarchical society. Even so, Keller’s politics has always struck me as promoting something along the lines of a herrenvolk democracy.
[…] some of Gomez’s critics — including religious ones. Within Christian circles, Jake Meador argues at Mere Orthodoxy, the “Christian nationalism” discussion is less about whether greater […]
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[…] of Gomez’s critics — including religious ones. Within Christian circles, Jake Meador argues at Mere Orthodoxy, the “Christian nationalism” discussion is less about […]
“Can we isolate the American church’s frequent toleration of gross injustice from the broader question of the American church’s fidelity and commitment to her Lord? Can justice and righteousness be kept separate from one another?”
I’m interested in whether or not enough time has gone by that we can begin to apply this same type of question to other sects of Christianity besides white evangelicalism.
For instance…I lived in Minneapolis, where 500 + carjackings, untold violent assaults and robberies, and now 100 murders have shaken the city in 2021 alone. One of the frequently cited issues is the release of violent and dangerous offenders onto the streets due to progressive bail and carceral policies carried out as personal fiat by individual judges. The progressive activist wing of Christianity within Minneapolis has literally NOTHING to say about the victims of violent crime. like, NOTHING.
No little girl killed by a stray bullet, no mob beating of an elderly Asian woman, no assault or killing of innocent Black people by career criminals who are walking around due to policies born out of 1960s Progressivism and swirled with a little Civil Rights Movement Jesus Sauce is ever mentioned. I’m serious. NEVER. Can I say it again? They don’t talk about crime. If they do, it’s discussed in terms of the root cause idea, which I believe is a provable fallacy but that’s beside the point.
Is a person being murdered by someone who shouldn’t be walking around on the street NOT a gross injustice? And when an entire wing of the Christian movement promotes these types of policies, nay, FIGHTS for them, isn’t that also “toleration of gross injustice?”
For that matter, when will I see a deconstruction project devoted to Liberation Theology? Or Womanist Hermeneutics? Or the Black Tradition?
Is Black Christianity (not the Liberation wing but the Traditional wing) not patriarchal? Sexually conservative? Prone to theological errors and missteps born out of experience and sociological viewpoints?
The concerns brought up in all of these types of articles are not the concerns of common folk. They are by the academy, for the academy, and filtered down into the minds of people who care about what the academy thinks.
My former hometown of Minneapolis (home to the most peaceful burning of 1500 businesses and murder of 3 people ever recorded) only recently voted to REfund the police. The highest numbers for this ballot measure came out of the most Black neighborhoods hit the hardest by crime. Think Charlie Dates has an ear to the ground of everyday working class Black people? I doubt it. Think Jake Meador even knows a working class Black person? Doubt that too.