The Shadow of the Sword

As the streets of Egypt continue to roar and rumble with the discontent of the Egyptian people, most of the online chatter I hear from my progressive and liberal brethren and sistren seems to be enthusiastic.  Mubarak was, without question, a despot and an autocrat.  He was the classic military dictator, ruling his nation through the power of his connection with the armed forces and some pretty heavy-handed police-state unpleasantness.  For Americans, he seems no friend of democracy or tolerance.

But the challenge we face as Americans is that he was our despot.  His power is a reflection of ours.  Mubarak's armed forces were and are largely equipped and trained and supplied by the United States.   Those M-1 Abrams tanks we see rumbling the streets of Cairo are built in Egypt under contract with General Dynamics. 

Now that Mubarak is certainly gone, the protection his fist of American iron provided to minority groups in Egypt may also soon be gone.  Here, I'm thinking of the largest remaining Arab-world population of Christians.  The Coptic Christian community is ancient, and is 8 million people strong.  It's about 10% of the overall population of Egypt.

They look at the entropy on the streets, and they don't see the Velvet Revolution that freed the former Czechoslovakia from repressive communist rule.  They don't see the same peaceful and passionately democratic impetus.  It's just anger and frustration at decades of repression and decay.  It could be good, sure.  That is my hope and prayer.  But to my eyes, it is functionally leaderless, a populist venting that could quickly sour.  Revolutions against despotism may seem exciting in the abstract, but they are all too frequently horrors, populated by the glazed eyed depredations of Jacobins and Bolsheviks.  And the Al-Ikhwan would all too happily take Egypt to that familiar bloodstained room.

The Copts know this.  It isn't that they loved Mubarak.  There wasn't much to love.

But following the collapse of a despot, elements of a society that have only been held back by the power of the sword can rise up and prey on those they view as enemies, or scapegoats, or unbelievers.  The Christian community in Egypt is justifiably worried about this.

It's a reality that we as comfortable American Christians just can't quite grasp.  We look to a despot, and we see an oppressor, someone who must be overthrown.  But for as much as we hate government...particularly and justifiably dictatorial governments...the chaos engendered by mob rule and the rise of movements that direct popular anger against a convenient "other" are often equally unjust.

For Christian faith, this seems a dilemma of sorts.  We have a challenging relationship with power.  The power of the sword is not the power of Christ, and has been set against the purposes of his Reign since the moment He challenged it.

But while we do not live by the sword, even the most uncompromisingly committed of us live in its shadow.  Take, for example, the Amish.  They are, without question, followers of Jesus who take his uncategorical rejection of violence seriously.  They will not bring harm to another, even to protect themselves.

Yet they are, as we are, under the protection of the sword as wielded by our Republic.   The laws that provide a balance of justice between us, preventing violence and predation, those laws protect...even those of us who have moved on to the one Law.  

It has always been...and will remain...an awkward tension.

My Milkshakes Bring the Boys to the Church

As a progressive pastor, I struggle mightily with how to respond to the incursion of certain cultural expectations of appearance and dress into the life of a congregation. I tend to believe that church should be an informal place, in which we do not strive and struggle with one another to "dress right." This is partly theological, and partly because I have apparently inherited the fashion sense of my British forebears. Recently, for instance, I wore a tan shirt and khaki pants, meaning I'd disappear completely in some desert settings. My fashion sensibility is painful to behold.

But my complete lack of fashion sense is not at issue here. The question I've been mulling over for a bit was stirred by a recent post over at FreeThinker777: Is there even such a thing as inappropriate attire for women in the church?

Men..even Christian men..have trouble not thinking with Mr. Johnson. An attractive woman will still draw the attention of a man's little brain even if she dresses like an Amishwoman.

If you're a Christian man, and a woman's appearance inspires you to violate Matthew 5:28 in surprisingly creative ways, you've just got to look past it. Get over it. Do not judge her, and see past that halter top...past, not through, sinner...to the child of God that she is. It takes some effort, but if you're going to claim to be a Jesus follower, the responsibility lies entirely with you, my friend.

Then again, what is culturally expected of young women in our [begin bad Russian accent] decadent capitalist society [end bad Russian accent] is that...well...they need to be "hawtt." Or perhaps that's "sexii." I can never keep up with the lingo these days.

Wearing clothes that are specifically intended to draw physical interest is something deeply and intensely socialized into most females of the species. I'm convinced that the relentless media bombardment of gyrating pop tarts, airbrushed celebrities, and product spokesmodels has taken that deeper, to a point at which "casual" for many American women and girls doesn't mean "casual" at all, unless casual means uncomfortable. Many will then dress into that societal expectation, which is reinforced by their peers and by those of us with XY chromosomes.

I'm never sure how to respond to that when it manifests itself in a congregational context. On the one hand, I uncategorically refuse to be judgmental. What you wear does not make you more or less loved by God, and if God is omniscient and omnipresent, we're all nekkid before the Lord all the time anyway.

On the other, I've already told my praise team I'd rather they not sing Hillsong's "My Milkshakes Bring the Boys to the Church." Yeah, I know it's catchy. I don't care. When someone shows up at church showing a whole bunch of leg...and by that I don't mean me, because the psychological trauma that would inflict on my congregation would be deep and lasting...I do struggle with how to respond. Can I even mention it without coming across as somehow belittling them or singling them out for condemnation?

That our consumer culture has hypersexualized women don't make it ok, and at a pretty deep level, I want church to counterculturally resist the relentless marketization of womanflesh. The answer to that is not some Christian version of the hijab. The era of gendered oppression within the Body of Christ needs to be put well behind us.

The answer is also not the peculiar embrace of consumer sexualization that comes from some corners of the progressive movement. Those academic feminists who view aggressive sexuality (for women) as a means of empowerment seem, at some pretty fundamental level, to be articulating a sexuality that is fundamentally at odds with the agape love ethic articulated in the Gospels.

I would suggest that the goal for Christians is not to be judgmental towards individuals who are simply reflecting their culture...but rather, to ask the community as a whole to consider the depth to which our society has driven women to carefully, assiduously present themselves as having primarily surface-level value.

How individuals respond to that realization is entirely up to them.