Megachurches and Authoritarianism

So here's a completely non-controversial take:

Megachurches have primed Christian America for authoritarian rule, and have contributed to the collapse of republican virtues.

My church is very much not a megachurch.  We're a little community church, and thriving as a small church pastor requires letting go of the idea that you have more authority than your lay leadership.  Formal authority is meaningless in the little church.  What matters is care, relationship, and a willingness to be discipled by the Christians around you...and that includes pastors actually listening to and learning from the gifts and witnesses of their co-workers in Christ.

My church is also Presbyterian.  Being Presbyterian means a bunch of different things, but on a practical and functional level, it means that the beating heart of the church is lay leadership.  The Elders who are elected into leadership of a Presbyterian congregation make that church what it is.  My task, as a pastor and Presbyterian Teaching Elder, is to proclaim the Word, administer sacraments, and support my fellow Elders as they guide the church.  I am, to use the small "c" catholic ideal for the soul in the leadership, a servus servorum dei -- a servant of the servants of God.

I ain't the one in charge. That's not to say my role isn't important to the well-being of the congregation.  But I am not the "unitary executive" of my congregation.   

That has always been the Presbyterian vision.  It was so fiercely a part of Presbyterian identity that was a potent source of radically antimonarchist sentiment.  Presbyterians, back when we were a significant force in American life, were always the foes of kings and tyrants, those who would deny power to the people and claim it all for themselves.

There's a reason the American Revolution was called "The Presbyterian Rebellion" by the supporters of King George.  For Presbyterian pastors who forget this truth, and imagine they can rule their churches like a king or CEO, well, you're gonna get reminded of that real danged quick. 

But the Presbyterian age is waning.  

Our numbers are in decline, and not just in my withering branch of the tradition.  Taken as a whole, the Presbyterian tide has ebbed in America.  Taken all together, liberal and conservative flavors combined, we are less than half of the four million total souls who considered themselves Presbyterian at the midpoint of the last century.  

In our place have risen nondenominational corporate churches, ones where the pastor is conceptualized a a CEO.  Those leaders are explicitly entrepreneurial, and they quickly become the central focus of the life and the mission of their churches.

Many of these churches do the good work that their scale enables, and many of those pastors work hard to maintain a humble servant heart.

But.

But many do not, and following the Face on the Jumbotron can become profoundly dangerous to the soul of the church.  Driven by the More is More ethic, Pastors devolve into celebrity influencers, chasing more and more followers and more and more influence.  They become the sole authority, the whole power, and the source of all truth.  They choose their staff and their board.  Congregants in such gatherings become pastor-focused, not Christ focused, trapped in a parasocial relationship with a single charismatic authority.

This cultic enthrallment is dangerous for personal discipleship, and is just as dangerous for the spiritual integrity of the Pastor in the High Pulpit.  As Karl Vaters put it in his excellent DESIZING THE CHURCH,

You cannot build your brand and develop your spiritual maturity at the same time.  They are heading in different directions.  That doesn't mean you can't promote your church, an event, or a ministry.  But promoting ministry for the betterment of others is very different from promoting your identity for the glorification of self.  (DESIZING, p. 84)

From that, it's not hard to see how this now dominant model of church life has impacted the political predilections of American Christians.  We have been trained to see authority as vested in a single figure, one who is centered as the source of all authority.   

And just as the power of bishops and cardinals once affirmed the divine right of kings, so now the power of the CEO pastor and the Christian celebrity influencer "blesses" a new breed of authoritarian. 

With that expectation reinforced from the heart of a politically compromised faith, the people cry for a king, and AmeriChrist, Inc. is all too happy to oblige.

A Letter to Sam Harris about Nonviolence

Dear Sam:

A couple of years ago, I read my way through your Letter to A Christian Nation, that bit of provocative neoatheist polemic that sold so very well.

Although you're a bright guy, it was an impressively shallow bit of writing, one that tried to articulate Christianity through the peculiarly clouded and simplistic lenses of anti-theism.  Provocative and simplistic sells, I suppose.

Nothing good has ever come of Christianity, or so you argued.  Ever. It is terrible and hateful and violent.

In your writing, you anticipated a response: "Well, er, what about Martin Luther King and the whole nonviolent civil rights movement?  That was grounded in the churches, and in Christian faith."

But you had an answer, which you expressed in your book.  That wasn't Christianity.  That was MLK  stealing an idea from Gandhi, who got that idea from the Jains.  You had a bit of a forbidden crush on the radically nonviolent Jains back then, one that eventually got you into trouble with the "all-faith-is-icky-poo-poo" crowd you run with.  

But you confidently presented this thesis: Nonviolence had nothing at all to do with the teachings of Jesus, or with the faith that rose from his teachings.  Having actually bothered to read the Gospels and the Epistles, that felt wrong to the point of being a little bit insane, but gawrsh, you were just so confident.  Let's take a look at what you said, why don't we:

While King undoubtedly considered himself a devout Christian, he acquired his commitment to nonviolence primarily from the writings of Mohandas K. Gandhi.  In 1959, he even traveled to India to learn the principles of nonviolent social protest directly from Gandhi's disciples.  Where did Gandhi, a Hindu, get his doctrine of nonviolence?  He got it from the Jains. (Letter to a Christian Nation, p. 12)

Now, Jains are awesome. I love 'em too. And I loves me some Gandhi. I find common cause with everyone for whom truth and love for others matters.

But I recently came across something that makes your statement seem even more off.  I was reading Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.  Being a pastor and all, Tolstoy's passionate, heartfelt Christian faith led me to read more Tolstoy.  He wasn't just a novelist.  He was also the founder and leader of Christian anarchosyndicalist communities in Russia, and wrote extensively about abandoning force and power in our relationships with one another.

And in that reading, I came across something interesting.  It's a sequence of letters, part of the very real history of humankind.  Follow this link, and you can read them for yourself.  Gandhi, you see, did learn nonviolence from the Jains.  But he also paid attention to the world around him, and to other faith traditions.  One faith tradition he found remarkably inspiring was Christianity, and so he sought out Tolstoy, one of the most eloquent Christians of his day.

Early in Gandhi's career, he wrote to Leo Tolstoy, asking permission to print up tens of thousands of copies of one of Tolstoy's writings on nonviolence, to be circulated in India.  They corresponded back and forth, and their mutual respect was powerfully evident.  Gandhi, for his part, describes his relationship with Tolstoy as that of "...a humble follower of that great teacher whom I have long looked on as one of my guides."  Gandhi went so far as to create a community, in which he and others lived out the values Tolstoy taught.  It was called a "Tolstoy Farm," on which Hindus and Muslims and Christians worked side by side.

There are other influences on the both of them, of course.  But Christian faith was an influence on Gandhi.  Meaning: your statement about nonviolence, bold as it is, isn't just wrong about Christian faith understood theologically.  It's also materially and provably incorrect as a matter of historical record.

So, a suggestion, should you choose to ever make that argument again in one of the talks you give.  Human history, like the interplay of neurons and the the fabric of our time and space, is a complex and interwoven thing.  When you reduce it to the clumsy binary negation of anti-theism, you are no longer describing the real.

Just be aware of that.  It matters.

Peace and Blessings,

David

The King You Have Chosen

During a conversation last night with another pastor who serves a congregation here in the Washington Metropolitan area, we found ourselves noting just how...well...rich everyone in DC is. Not everyone, mind you. There is plenty of poverty here. But when you step back for a second and look at the population in and around our nation's capital, you realize just how much money there is here.

That foundation of wealth just got a little bump upwards this week, as defense contracting giant Northrop Grumman committed to relocating it's headquarters to the Virginia suburbs of Washington. In fact, they're likely to locate themselves within walking distance of my home, right near my high school, in an office park where me and the missus...well...we used to...err..."hang out" in the empty parking lots there on occasion when we were dating. You know, talking about politics.

Ahem.

In the Forbes list of the wealthiest counties in the United States, for instance, six out of the top ten counties are here around the Beltway. That's a supermajority of American wealth, kids, the kind of majority that lets you ram any legislation you want through the hallowed [buttocks] of the Senate. Loudon, Fairfax, Howard, Fairfax City, Arlington, and Montgomery all have pretty stunning levels of wealth. How stunning? The median household income here in Fairfax is $106,000. Nearby Loudon County has us beat, with a median household income of $110,000. That's more than twice the national average.

Now, many of those households are two-income. Many fall below that level. It is worth noting that the folks who skew that median upwards are not federal workers, but rather the impressive array of industry lawyers and industry lobbyists and defense contractors. Civil servants aren't the folks living in the 10,000 square foot homes in Potomac and Loudon. Associate Vice Presidents of General Dynamics and Executive Counsels for Lockheed Martin are.

Honestly, though, the blame for this peculiar skewing of wealth to the power elites lies not with the increasingly fat cats here in Washington. This, my fellow Americans, is the government you want.

It's right there in the Bible, in 1 Samuel 8. We Americans have an obsession with defending ourselves, with being sure that we have the weapons and organization needed to protect our national interests. That's why military spending, which is the primary generator of inside-the-Beltway wealth, is entirely off the table as we consider ways to reduce our insane national debt. Only slightly crazy folks out on the margins like myself even think about cutting military spending.

That obsession should be familiar. It is the very same desire that spurred the demand of the Israelites for a king. We want that centralized power, because in that centralized power lies our ability to organize and plan and research the various ways to crush America's enemies under the boots of our shiny new orbital battle platform.

But, as with any king, our demand for that power has a cost:

This is what the king who will reign over you will do: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive grows and give them to his attendants. He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. Your menservants and maidservants and the best of your cattle and donkeys he will take for his own use. He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, and the LORD will not answer you in that day. (1 Samuel 8:11-18)

Jerusalem and Washington. Saul and the Military Industrial Complex. Six of one, a half dozen of the other.

For a nation purportedly steeped in Judeo-Christian values, it's impressive how utterly clueless we are about this.

"Those who do not know the Bible are doomed to repeat it."