Bringing (False) Christianity Into the Public Square

OKLAHOMA CITY — It is one of the prime paradoxes of the 2016 election: A twice-divorced candidate who has flaunted his adultery, praised Planned Parenthood and admitted to never asking for God’s forgiveness is the favorite of the Christian right.

The above appeared in the New York Times about two weeks ago in an article outlining the paradox of American Evangelicals supporting the political ambitions of a –well a not very evangelical, in fact somewhat of a counter-evangelical –candidate.  The article was referring to Donald Trump, officially a member of the liberal Protestant denomination the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)  The article continues:

Mr. Trump is winning with evangelicals, as he does with other Republican primary voters, by promising uncompromising immigration and trade policies and a hard-driving leadership style. “Evangelicals see all that’s going down, and they just like somebody to be strong and stern and consistent on issues,” said J. Hogan Gidley, who was a senior adviser to Mike Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas and onetime Baptist pastor, before Mr. Huckabee quit the race.

But this is only once facet of the enigma.  Candidate Ted Cruz, himself a declared evangelical, has earned the reputation of being a liar for his campaign’s creating the misimpression just before the Iowa Caucus that fellow candidate Dr. Ben Carson was dropping out of the race and that Carson supporters should switch to Cruz.  Carson was not, at that time, dropping out of the race and the Cruz strategy was exposed as nothing less than a bold-faced lie.  Amazingly enough—for a proposed Christian of any stripe, evangelical or mainline—Cruz repeated this strategy of deceit before the Hawaii caucus.  Sort of makes me wonder what Cruz thinks of John 8:44? 

I have to admit that I have always been distrustful of so-called evangelicals because I don’t find very many of them, well, evangelical.  While I will—in fact in my respect for them, will gladly—accord some Protestants such as the Mennonites the honor of being called evangelicals, I think most evangelicals with their mega-churches and prosperity gospel panderings are religious frauds.  Forget Pat Robertson or the late Jerry Falwell and certainly Franklin Graham—whitewashed sepulchers, beautiful on the outside but inside filled with the bones of the dead.  I’m sorry Rick Warren and your Saddleback Church but you are just a bit too pallid and you, Joel Osteen, beneath the charm and the silky words there is no substantial echo of the Gospel of Christ.   And as for your little corner “bible Church” that encourages, even be it so subtly, hatred and prejudice towards Muslims, Gays, Catholics, immigrants, mixed race families, evolutionists, and other nonconformists, I can only wonder what εὐαγγέλιον to which they hold, ‘cause it sure ain’t the Gospel of Christ.  Evangelical comes from the Greek word εὐαγγέλιον, which means “good news” and specifically the news of a victory.  The Greek word for Gospel is εὐαγγέλιον because it is the Good News of God’s Victory in Christ, the Victory of Christ over sin and death which is the authentication of his message of the Kingdom of God.  A true evangelical announces the Good News of the Kingdom of God, the central message of Jesus which he handed on to his disciples to be preached to the four corners of the earth until the end of time.  Sorry Senator Cruz but a liar lacks the “call” to be a witness of Christ’s victory.  And those people who rally behind you because they, like you, have an erroneous understanding of what it means to be an evangelical, are no more than those about whom Jesus refers to in Matthew 7:21.  I am not saying that they aren’t good people or they aren’t Christian or they won’t be saved—I am only saying that they have invested in a Christianity without roots, a “faith” that is all about the fluff and the froth and the feelings but which doesn’t require the radical commitment of discipleship. 

The article in the New York Times continues:

Mr. Trump is winning with evangelicals, as he does with other Republican primary voters, by promising uncompromising immigration and trade policies and a hard-driving leadership style. “Evangelicals see all that’s going down, and they just like somebody to be strong and stern and consistent on issues,” said J. Hogan Gidley, who was a senior adviser to Mike Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas and onetime Baptist pastor, before Mr. Huckabee quit the race.

“You’re voting for a president; you’re not necessarily voting for a pastor,” said Less McNiff, a retired human resources executive who heard Mr. Trump address thousands at the Oklahoma City rally on Friday. “He’s not necessarily orthodox, but I like the fact that he’s strong.”

Linda Sharp, an elementary school music teacher from Moore, Okla., who attended the rally and plans to vote for Mr. Trump, said, “He’s made moral choices that are not stellar, but I lay that against his business plan or the economic growth for America, and I choose that.”

But her husband, Phillip Sharp, who is pastor of Heavenly Heights Baptist Church in Oklahoma City, cautioned those who would argue, like the younger Mr. Falwell, that voters should choose a strong leader rather than a pious one.

“I don’t know that Trump is the person to bring God back into our country, but I think if we don’t we’ll have much bigger problems,” said Renae Ehler, an insurance saleswoman from Davenport, Okla., who planned to vote for Mr. Trump. “The business part of things, I think, is going to make a big difference.”

Well, I’m not sure if the above “evangelicals” see the discrepancy here between the faith they profess and the “faith” they vote, but at least they are honest and not trying to wrap their candidate in the pages of the Bible.  There’s God and there’s mammon and hey, when it comes down the bottom line, no man can serve two masters and they are casting their lot with mammon.  I appreciate their honesty but I expect more of someone who bedecks himself or herself with the jewels of evangelicalism. 

Now, just to be fair.  Neither Senator Sanders nor Secretary Clinton meet the litmus test of authentic Christian evangelicalism, but nor do they profess to nor do they pander to that audience.  Senator Sanders seems to be a fine man and is, of course Jewish.   Secretary Clinton has a bit of a shadier record in several respects—including truthfulness—and she is a member of the United Methodist Church.  Mainline Methodists used to be evangelicals but then a lot of people used to be evangelicals until it got just a bit too demanding.  Speaking of Methodists, however, one of my favorite Methodists—whom I understand isn’t much of an evangelical himself but who articulates well the call to Evangelical Christianity—Duke University Professor Emeritus   Stanley Hauerwas has a great story about Evangelical Christianity (the authentic kind) and our Christian commitment to life in the public square.  The story is about one of my favorite American Christians, Clarence Jordan who was a mentor to both former President Jimmy Carter and to Millard Fuller, the founder of Habitat for Humanity. 

Clarence Jordan was the founder of the Koinonia Farm near Americus Georgia.  It was set up to be an interracial community before anyone knew what civil rights were all about.  Jordan himself was a pacifist as well as an integrationist and thus was not a popular figure in Georgia, even though he came from a prominent family.

The Koinonia Farm, by its very nature, was controversial and, of course, it was in trouble.  McClendon reports that in the early fifties Clarence approached his brother Robert Jordan (later a state senator and justice of the Georgia Supreme Court) to ask him to legally represent the Koinonia Farm.  Robert responded to Clarence’s request:

“Clarence, I can’t do that.  You know my political aspirations,  Why if I represented you, I might lose my job, my house, everything I’ve got.”

“We might lose everything too, Bob.”

“It’s different for you.”

“Why is it different?  I remember, it seems to me, that you and I joined the church the same Sunday, as boys.  I expect when we came forward the preacher asked me about the same question he did you.  He asked me, ‘Do you accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior.’ And I said, ‘yes.’  What did you say?”

I follow Jesus, Clarence, up to a point.”

“Could that point by any chance be—the cross?”

“That’s right.  I follow him to the cross, but not on the cross.  I’m not getting myself crucified.”

“Then I don’t believe you’re a disciple.  You’re an admirer of Jesus, but not a disciple of his.  I think you ought to go back to the church you belong to, and tell them you’re an admirer not a disciple.”

“Well now, if everyone who felt like I do did that, we wouldn’t have a church, would we?”

“The question, (Clarence said,) “is Do you have a church?”

(from: Stanley Hauerwas, “The Insufficiencey of Scripture,”  Unleashing the Scripture: Freeing the Bible from Captivity to America,  Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1993.  pp. 50-51.)

I don’t know, I read the gospels pretty much every day and I can’t help but think that if Jesus wandered into most of our churches and heard our views on universal access to health care, on immigration, on the death penalty, on warfare, on the poor both here and abroad, on violence as entertainment and on weapons of violence, on care for the environment, on the gross disparity of wealth in our society he would wonder whose disciples we are.  We clothe ourselves in the sanctimonious veneer of anti-abortion slogans and “Defend Marriage” jingles and that let’s us think we are good Christians while most of the world beyond our doors suffers unbelievable deprivation and we piously tell them “Go in peace, keep warm, and eat well,” without giving them the necessities of daily life.  The consequences in the short run could be fearful; in the long run they are catastrophic.

Post-Newtown Choices 2

"Adoration of the Shepherds"

by Gerard van Honthorst  1622

In a recent post I mentioned a person whom most Catholics have not heard of and most evangelicals have forgotten—Clarence Jordan.  I thought I might have mentioned Jordan in a previous posting but checking back, I don’t find that I did.  Sometimes I find that I become to “Catholic” but not “catholic” enough in the way I focus this blog.   In any event, Clarence Jordan (1912-69) was an Evangelical Protestant from west-central Georgia who from his youth was conscious of the plight of the African American and white sharecroppers in his State.  To help with this problem he studied agriculture at the University of Georgia but then was convinced that the problem was not only a matter of economics but of spirituality.  He attended the Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville and earned a Ph.D. in New Testament Greek.   He never presented himself for ordination but he remained a New Testament scholar throughout his life, able to translate the scriptures on sight from their Greek original into contemporary American English.  In fact he produced the “Cotton Patch” edition of many New Testament books—a paraphrase of the scriptures in the language and culture of the American South.  In his adaptation of the Christmas story Jesus is born not in a stable but a garage, and laid not in a manger but an apple-crate.  And at the end of the stories, Jesus is not crucified at the instigation of the High Priest and Sanhedrin, but lynched at the urgings of Baptist preachers.  Explaining his “adaptation” of the story, Jordan wrote: “they crucified him in Judea and they strung him up in Georgia with a noose tied to a pine tree.”  Of course Jordan was not the first to take the story and give it this sort of a twist.  Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in his novel The Brothers Karamazov, has Christ brought for an interview before the Grand Inquisitor, representing the powers of the Catholic Church, who condemns Christ to death.  (In the end, however, the Inquisitor allows Christ to leave rather than consigning him to the stake to which he had been condemned.)

In 1942 Jordan and his wife, Florence, along with another couple, Martin and Mable England, began Koinonia Farms, an interracial commune modeled on the early Jerusalem Christian community described in the fourth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles.  This sparked a huge outrage among the locals as it was against the law for blacks and whites to live within the same household.  The community was dedicated to the principles of racial equality, ecological responsibility, common ownership of possessions, and a rejection of violence.  How un-Georgia could you get?  It also turned out how un-Southern Baptist could you get as according to theologian Stanley Hauerwas, Jordan was dis-fellowshipped from the Convention.   As the Civil Rights movement began to pick up momentum, Koinonia Farms became the target of much violence but Jordan and his friends  remained committed to what they saw as the path of Christian discipleship.  Millard and Linda Fuller came to Kononia Farms in 1965 and Jordan’s example and inspiration led them to the establishment of Habitat for Humanity.   Another American influenced by Jordan’s Christianity is President Jimmy Carter.   Clarence Jordan died in 1969.  Consistent with his evangelical life he was buried in a pine-box in an unmarked grave on the Farm at a funeral attended by family and the neighboring poor.  In many ways, Clarence was a Protestant Saint Francis—a man whose love for the Gospel led him to follow Christ in his poverty and his passion for the poor.  He gives us something to think about and reflect on this Christmas season.  The baby came for a reason and the work he began isn’t finished yet.  Clarence took up the work for the span of his years.  There is a need for others to take up that work today. 

O Wisdom!

The incipit of a medieval

copy of the Book of the

Wisdom of Solomon.

 The Church is coming close to Christmas—on Monday we started the O Antiphons.  The O Antiphons are a series of seven antiphons sung at the Magnificat of Vespers from December 17 to the 23^rd.  They build in drama until the final:

O Emmanuel, Rex et legifer noster,

exspectatio Gentium, et Salvator earum:

veni ad salvandum nos, Domine, Deus noster

 

           O Emmanuel, our king and giver of the law,

hope of the gentiles and their Saviour:

Come to save us, O Lord our God.

I love these antiphons and look forward to them each year.  In the liturgical reforms following the Second Vatican Council they are also used as the alleluia verse at Mass.  Some priests adapt them for the strophes of the penitential rite.   And of course the hymn Veni, Veni Emmanuel (O Come, O Come Emmanuel) is based on a very close adaptation of these marvelous hymns. 

The antiphons themselves go back at least to the eighth century where it is recorded that they were sung at Vespers both at Rome and at the Abbey of Fleury in the Loire Valley.  This indicates that their usage was widespread in the western Church pretty early on and some claim that they may even come from the fifth century.  On the other hand, as there is no trace of them or their influence in the Eastern Rites, it is not likely that they were much  earlier than the fourth century.   

The first of the O Antiphons is O Sapientia

O Sapientia, quae ex ore Altissimi prodiisti,

attingens a fine usque ad finem,

fortiter suaviterque disponens omnia:
veni ad docendum nos viam prudentiae.

 

O Wisdom, proceeding from the mouth of the Most High,

Stretching  from one end (of the earth) to the other,

powerfully yet gently ordering all things:

Come to teach us the path of prudence.

 This morning I heard Dr. Richard Land, president of the Ethics Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, say that he would prefer to see teachers and school administrators armed (with guns) in the classroom as a means of preventing the sort of violence we saw last week at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown Connecticut.  Dr. Land is not a stupid man—he holds a D.Phil. from Oxford—but obviously neither is he wise.  Wisdom and Knowledge are not one and the same thing, and neither, for that matters, is wisdom and intelligence.  Nor, to be honest, is intelligence and knowledge.  Intelligence is a capacity for knowledge but does not itself fulfill the potential it offers.  It is not enough to be intelligent, one still has to acquire the knowledge. Knowledge, for its part, is something that we acquire, hopefully to whatever capacity our intellect gives us.  Wisdom, on the other hand, is—at least in our Catholic tradition—an infused gift.  It is something that only God can give. 

I would not be inclined to look to the Southern Baptist tradition for Wisdom—nor for that matter, ethical gravity—as it is a denomination historically founded on the most base racist principles.  The congregations  associated with the SBC certainly did not do themselves gospel-proud during the Civil Rights movement and the SBC distinguished itself in advocating racism when according the theologian Stanley Hauerwas it excommunicated Clarence Jordan, one of the most saintly evangelicals in the history of American religion.  Of course, to be fair, Jordan brought down censure on himself when in his popular telling of the Gospel story relocated from the first-century Holy Land to the twentieth-century American South, he has Jesus not crucified but lynched by the Church leaders.  Dr. Land, for his part, has a history of making comments that if not deliberately racist certainly betray an ignorance of racial sensitivity.  He also was vocal in his support of George W. Bush’s bringing the nation to war against Iraq.  His comments today on NPR show a consistency with his views of an America that fits H. Richard Neibuhr’s Christ of Culture model in which religion sells itself out to support a prevailing socio-economic and political culture rather than challenge that culture with the Gospel.   In other words, Dr. Land is one of those “let’s make the good news bad news” sort of people.  But then again, as this blog has pointed out, we have plenty of “Bad-News Christians” in the Catholic Church too.  Calvinists and Jansenists drink from the same poisoned well.    

Let’s give some meditation time to the First of the O Antiphons

O Wisdom, proceeding from the mouth of the Most High,

Stretching  from one end (of the earth) to the other,

powerfully yet gently ordering all things:

Come to teach us the path of prudence

And ask Wisdom how best to order all things in this world of violence and human anguish so that teachers don’t have to carry guns for children to learn in peace and safety.