On the Partisan Mind

Late last week, I woke early and puttered into southeast DC on my scooter.  I was headed to a formerly industrial area near the DC Navy Yard, where I planned to spend a day amongst members of a different Jesus tribe.

My own tribe is rather particular.  I'm a cradle Presbyterian, the child of a storied old church in downtown Washington.  It's the church of Lincoln, of Eisenhower.  The pastor who baptized me, and who was a regular guest at my house?  He preached the sermon that helped put the words "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance.  Let me note, because history warps weird: that same pastor also marched with Dr. King in Selma, and fiercely opposed our misbegotten war in Vietnam.  

I've been part of the PC(USA) since before the PC(USA) was the PC(USA), and after years of conservative flight, we're now a very uniformly progressive gathering. 

The purpose of my day last week was to attend something called The After Party.  There, I intended to listen to the voices of evangelicals lamenting the toxic direction of American political discourse, and challenging how the partisan mind has seeped into the faith.  Two of the three primary speakers...Russell Moore and David French...have been vigorously outspoken about the poisonous impact of Trumpism on the Christian witness, and their presence was a significant draw.

It was, I will say, a very different experience than attending Presbyterian gatherings.  The event was held in the worship space of an evangelical congregation, which was...as such spaces tend to be...a sleek conversion of a former industrial warehouse.  The seating, theater-style.  The tech, stunningly sophisticated, with a board exceeding the width of my congregation's sanctuary, gimballed cameras, and a primary ultra HD screen that spanned the entire front wall.  To my oldline sensibilities, such spaces parse as functional rather than sacred, but one has to appreciate the depth of the functionality.  

So it didn't look like most progressive Christian events.  Meaning, pastel fabrics wantonly festooned everywhere, like someone set off a grenade in a Michaels.

The attendees were a diverse mix of races and genders, as evangelicals tend to be.  There were also plenty of folks in their twenties and thirties, which was...different.  The oldline, progressive as it has become, remains remarkably and increasingly old.

It was a vigorous, intellectually bracing, remarkably grace-filled day of engagement.

I'm not sure, from my conversations and observations, if there was another mainline liberal in attendance.  

This got me to thinking about the partisan mind and progressivism.  

In this gathering, at least as my frank and remarkably civil conversations at table about queer folk and inclusion were concerned, I felt very liberal.  In mainline gatherings, I almost invariably feel like a conservative.  Decades of reimagining and reframing and deconstructing have created discourse that...to my soul...often wanders from the heart of the narrative.  Justice is a worthy fruit of the Gospel, but when it supplants grace as our purpose, we are no longer telling the same tale.

There is a point, without question, when the partisan mind...the mind that divides, that is motivated by hatred and resentment, that embraces the useful falsehood...infects any movement.  This is true of left and right.  If we understand that Christian faith is not and cannot be a creature of the saeculum, that disciples of Jesus are committed to the Gospel first and foremost, then there are places where we set bounds against our partisanship for that highest principle.

Unlike the bat from Aesop's fable, which claimed allegiance to whatever party held power, the Christian witness is to affirm commonality wherever it can be found, but also to retain integrity of witness to our own tribe when partisan conviction subverts the call to grace and redemption.

Faith and Coercion

My recent musings about voluntarism lead me, inevitably, to think about the role of coercion and social pressure in religion.

As in anything that involves human beings, participation in religious communities is often something folks do because they've been made to do it. This goes well beyond the "Oh Yes You ARE Going to Church Today, Young Man" hectoring that occurs nearly every Sunday morning in every Christian family that has a tweener.

Coercion to participate in religious life goes far deeper than mom threatening to take away your screen time. For many, it has deep sociological and theological roots.

Sociologically, that coercion occurs in communities that have religious homogeneity. If you're in certain portions of the American South, you just go to church. It's what people do. If you don't, there are significant social judgments made, and significant pressures applied. It's not quite the same in practice as the pressure to be a Shiite in Iran, but the essential principle is the same. You are faithful because you will be culturally penalized if you aren't.

The same can be true in microcosm within a faith community. If those who are part of your immediate circle all hew to a particular creed, that creed can easily be conflated with the bonds of friendship and family. If you don't believe, then, honey, you are so getting cut off. If you question or resist, we won't like you any more! No more Ski Trips for Little Ms. Questions!

Theologically, religion can be coerced through the implicit and explicit threat of eternal existential narstiness to be inflicted upon the heretic and infidel. For those with a spiritual bent, this can be a terrifying thing. One's whole life can be woven up wracked with fear at the many ways you may not be adequate, and the fires of Hades are brought out again and again like a damnation sorority paddle, which is then applied vigorously to the tushies of backsliders. Better do what Pastor says, sinner.

That theology, though, is the theology of the Law. It's just a way of enforcing compliance, and as such, it's a form of worldly power. Legal structures stand on the foundation of the coercive power that underlies them. They draw their power from the knowledge that they will be enforced, and that failure to comply with them will result in unpleasantness. But even though it is practiced by fundamentalists and condemned by atheists, coercive theology is not meaningfully Christian.

We are, after all, no longer under the sway of the Law. The next time you hear someone going on about believing so you don't have to dip your sorry behind in the Lake of Fire, it's helpful to remember that this really ain't the point of the Gospel.

Still Saving...Please Don't Turn off X

Most of this probably comes from my Presbyterian upbringing, but there's something I've never understood within the evangelical movement. What I find particularly baffling are statements like: "It's been six years since I was saved." Or "I got saved watching a Billy Graham revival on TV." Or harder still: "Have you been saved?"

Maybe it's because I'm running a different Spiritual OS, but ce ne computez pas. I do understand the need for powerful spiritual experiences that help define and reinforce our relationship to God. I do feel and have felt the intensity of a sudden heart-driven response to the divine presence.

But I think we're overreaching when we try to define those moments as the specific point in time when we "were saved." In fact, defining salvation in that way can be deeply counterproductive, for two reasons:

1) It's just too easy. Praise team cranking, pastor belting out the percussive alliteration, you get caught up and swept up and Badda boom! Badda Bing! I'm saved! If your spiritual growth never needs go beyond that moment, it's too easy to end up in a stunted and static faith.

2) It doesn't leave any room for the realities of our ongoing stumbling and weakness. You've been saved, gol'dangit. Justified! Sanctified! Washed in the Blood of the Lamb! Preacher said so himself when you came up to get baptized. How can you possibly be struggling? How can you possibly still be tormented by doubts?

Salvation is, instead, a life-long process of building a relationship with God, the Beloved Community, and the world around us. It is a growing, living, dynamic thing. We are, as Paul said to his dear friends in Philippi, always "working out our salvation with fear and trembling." If we approach our theology of salvation in that way, there's room for those days when prayers hang dead on our lips, or those nights when one little glass of wine somehow becomes a whole bottle, or when we find Firefox inexplicably pointed at www.scarlettjohansseninlatex.com.

Instead of viewing those stumblings as evidence that somehow gettin' saved musta not took right, we can instead see those difficult spiritual times as particularly challenging moments in our salvation walk. They are hurdles to overcome, a part of the journey, not evidence that we've deluded ourselves about God's love for us.

So to the question "Have you been saved," the only answer I can truthfully speak is, "I am still being saved."