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.

Feel the Feeling: American Religion

John Wesley

I mentioned in my most recent posting that religion for many in American society  has deteriorated into little more than sentiment and that I don’t have a lot of sympathy for that.  I am hardly rigid about dogma and I think that our moral theology has been paralyzed by the magisterium’s total inadequacy of meeting the intellectual challenges produced by the explosion of knowledge in the reproductive, behavioral, and social sciences, but the last thing I want is the confusion of warm fuzzies for genuine faith or an emotional narcolepsy for sound spirituality.  We Catholics have a fine Tradition and while I don’t want to see it embalmed by the wing-nuts, neither do I want to see it cast off by those of silly and shallow intellectual ability.  It is a living Tradition and it must be nourished and encouraged to grow and develop but it also must be embraced and allowed to sink its roots into the community of the Catholic faithful.  Americans have a long tradition of our own, however, of confusing feelings for grace and opinion for Truth.
In 1735 Anglican priest (and later founder of Methodism), John Wesley sailed from England as a missionary to the American colony of Georgia.  On ship he encountered Moravian Brethren, a German pietist sect with its roots in Jan Hus’ fifteenth century reform movement. Wesley was deeply desirous of the emotional conviction of the Moravians but, being thoroughly English, was not by nature an emotive person.  In fact, Wesley was anything but emotive.   He was Oxford through and through, having been a student at Christchurch, and elected a fellow of Lincoln College.  As a student there he had been one of the first members of the “Holy Club”—a group of students who met regularly to discuss their spiritual life and who devised a regular schedule of prayer and devotion by which they shaped their Christian lives.  Methodism began as a pietist movement within the Anglican Church and spread to American Anglicans as a result of the preaching of the “First Great Awakening.”   
Wesley did not stay long in America.  An unhappy love affair which Wesley handled badly compromised his ability to serve in priestly ministry and he returned to England.  He never lost interest however in the American mission and after the American Revolution was very concerned that the Anglican Church was unable to consecrate bishops or ordain priests for the new nation as the canons of the Anglican Church at the time required of all ordinands an oath to the King.   Wesley, though not a bishop himself, ordained several men as ministers for those Anglican/Methodists.  He also ordained Thomas Coke, an Anglican priest, as “Superintendent” of the American Methodists.  Coke began using the title “Bishop” several years later.  Almost from the beginning, Methodism had encouraged lay preachers, but Wesley’s ordaining men to the ministry was a far more radical step.  This ordination of clergy by a priest (Wesley) rather than by a bishop forced a break between Wesley’s followers (Methodists) and Anglicans and in 1784 the American Methodists constituted themselves as the Methodist Church in America.   
English Methodists have preserved their ties to the Universities and while the preaching was often “evangelical” it was not theologically naïve.  In America the story was different.   The preachers sent by Wesley were University trained intellectuals who were men of deep personal piety.  But Methodism spread like wildfire in the new American nation—particularly on the frontier.  The movement known as the Second Great Awakening revitalized American religion and especially pushed the Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian traditions.  While there were a handful of Methodist ministers who had been University trained in England, Methodism grew far faster than the ordained clergy could care for and lay preachers shaped the movement far more than ordained clergy.  These lay preachers most often had no formal theological training and preached not from sound doctrinal foundations but simply passed on the emotional style which had led to their own conversions.  Theology became irrelevant; feelings were the only sign of grace.  Methodist theologians Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon relate the following incident in their book when Willimon was preaching in a Presbyterian Church:  

“Dr. Willimon, could you recommend a book that explains what Presbyterians believe?” he asked. “Why would I have such a book?” Will asked. “That’s the trouble with you Presbyterians you’re always reading some book, you ought to be like us Methodists and feel a warm tingle down you back.”

Bishop Willimon was obviously being sarcastic about the triumph of feeling over theology among Methodism when he related the incident, but the problem is not limited to Methodism.  When I read some of the neo-trad blogs about why women should wear veils in church or even about a preference for the Extraordinary Form of the Latin Mass, it comes down to what makes a person feel “religious.”  “Liberals” are often no better—every Mass has to be a “heavy, deep, and real” experience.  We need to move beyond the subjective—not to exclude the affective dimension but not to be limited by it—and develop liturgies, doctrinal formulations, and ecclesial structures that are rooted in our authentic Tradition but which can move beyond old forms to find new ways that resonate with contemporary society while preserving the essential features that have guided us from the times of the apostles.   

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. 

Reformation Today! 1

The Son of Man came not to

be served but to serve

(Matt 20: 28)

I think that when we bring up the subject of Reform in the Church what we most need today is a movement to restore the Church to its role as Servant in imitation of its Master who came not to be served but to serve.  All this commotion about the Affordable Care Act and what it purportedly does to our “rights” as Catholic Americans is centered about the idea that we, as Church, should be able to dictate the norms of behavior to the larger society in which we live.  That premise needs to be seriously questioned, but even more we need to take stock of the reality of the declining influence of the Church on our society.  It is unrealistic to think that the Catholic Church can have the political influence on American life that it had through most of the 20^th century.   While some may either grieve or be angry that we can’t shape public policy as we once did, I believe it presents us with the opportunity to be once again the Church that Christ established and not the Church built by human power. 

Years ago I was struck by a passage in William Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas’ Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony, (Nashville:Abingdon, 1989) in which they critiqued mainline Protestantism in the United States  for its delusions about a lost ability to determine societal norms.  Hauerwas and Willimon wrote:
Everything needed to be reexamined, and the failure of the old answers, seen now more clearly by the glow of the furnaces at Dachau and the fires of Hiroshima, demanded new questions.  The world had shifted.  Mainline American Protestantism as is often the case, plodded wearily along as if nothing had changed.  Like an aging dowager, living in a decaying mansion on the edge of town, bankrupt and penniless,  house decaying around her but acting as if her family still controlled the city, our theologians and church leaders continued to think and act as if we were in charge, as if the old arrangements were still valid.

Well, we could rewrite this today to say

Everything needs to be reexamined and the failure of the old answers, seen now more clearly in the glare of the clergy sex-abuse trials and the investigative lights of numerous financial crimes and ‘irregularities,” demands radical reform.  The world has shifted.  Catholicism in the Developed World—and in particular in the United States—can no longer plod along as if everything has not changed.  Like an aging dowager, living in a decaying mansion on the edge of town, bankrupt and penniless, house falling into ruins around her, but acting as if her family still controlled the city, the Holy See and our own American bishops, continue to act as if they were still in charge, as if the old arrangements were still valid.     

If I am critical of Cardinal Burke for his antiquated pomp and Archbishop Lori for his high-handed ways and the Institute of Christ the Sovereign Priest for their living in a world of make believe baroque revivalism, and Carl Anderson for his shabby influence pedaling at the Roman Curia, and Bishop Olmstead for his ill-informed autocracy, and Cardinal Law for his unrepentant lack of shame, it is because they are holding our Church hostage to a world that exists any longer only in their own fantasies of power.  Gentlemen, the ancien regime is over and it ain’t coming back.  The toothpaste ain’t  goin’ back in the tube.   You—we—simply have no power anymore to chart the course of American society.  Get over it.  Wake up and smell the coffee.  Move on!

And if I am behind the good women of the LCWR and I tend to canonize people like Dom Helder Camara and Archbishop Romero and Bishop Tom Gumbleton, and Sister Joan Chittester,  and Dorothy Day and Social Justice and L’Arche and the Jesuit inner-city schools it is because I believe these are the first fruits of a new age for the Church, an age that will be characterized by service to society rather than exercising power over it.  And as one who looks to the Gospels for guidance, I say “gratias tibi, Domine.”  

The Origins of Radical Catholicism XXII: Fear strikes to the heart

Ok so we agree that it is not a good idea for the pope to reconcile himself to progress, liberalism and modern civilization—or at least we agree to that if we are faithful to the teachings of Pius IX and the syllabus of errors (published 1864).  It is interesting to see how in the nineteenth century the papacy grew very frightened of the world around it.  In the century since the French Revolution had destroyed the old alliance between Throne and Altar, a world in which the Church could no longer dictate its decrees to the populace and expect government and society to enforce them, the Church was like a child who had lost her mother in the mob and had no idea how to carry on for herself.  Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon use a wonderful image in one of their book comparing the Church (in their example Protestantism, but if fits for 19^th century Catholicism as well:  “Like an aging dowager, living in a decaying mansion on the edge of town, bankrupt and penniless; house decaying around her but acting as if her family still controlled the city, our theologians and church leaders continued to think and act as if we were in charge, as if the old arrangements were still valid.” (Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony, Nashville:Abingdon, 1989, p. 29)   Leo XII, Pius VIII, Gregory XVI, Pius IX—none of them seemed capable of realizing that the old order was over and a new day had dawned.  It was an age of the bourgeoisie, not the nobility; an age shaped by rational thought, not religious doctrine; an age of democracy not absolutism; an age of people thinking for themselves, not of being dictated to.  Catholicism was seen as a relic and few people thought it would outlast the secular power of the popes.  They were wrong, of course, but the Church survived by—despite the syllabus of errors—adapting itself to the modern world—maybe not fully and certainly not happily, but adapting none the less.  All that being said, Leo XIII who became pope in 1878 seemed to usher in a new era.  He was a man who was practical, yet wise.  Leo liked liberal thinkers—we have seen that with Gibbons and Newman. But the fact of the matter is that when he realized the implications of modern thought for the faith, he panicked and he put his views of Doctrine and Society in separate compartments—air and watertight.  Remaining a social liberal, he reacted strong to liberal theology affected by higher biblical criticism and the critical spirit of contemporary Protestant dogmatics.    Leo established the Pontifical Biblical Commission not to suppress higher biblical criticism completely but certainly to restrict its growth by establishing some strong limits to what conclusions biblical scholars could come to regarding Divine Inspiration of the Scriptures and Scriptura inerrancy. 

Leo’s successor Pius X, unlike Leo, was no liberal.  A man of deep personal piety (he would one day be canonized a saint) he was no intellectual and was frightened of new ideas.  He was more than frightened; he was actually paranoid of modernism and reacted precipitously at the slightest accusation of modernism, directed towards any theologian.  In 1907 he issued a list of 65 theological propositions he considered to be “modernist “and heretical.  Pius’ concern was to assert the authority of the Pope and Bishops over Scripture and theology so that the role of theology became not an understanding of the faith as found in Scripture and Tradition, but justifying the faith as defined by the magisterium.  The Catholic approach to understanding the scriptures were all but reduced to the most crass fundamentalism ignoring the insights of linguists and historians.  Like the Syllabus of Errors, this condemnation (contained in the papal brief,  Lamentabili Sane Exitu) shows just how frightened the Roman authorities were of authentic scholarship.

There were several agendas at work.  Fear was one—and a legitimate fear of people losing their faith if faith were subject the critique of reason.  Indeed, as many of the points that Pius X had condemned have found their way into Catholic audiences in mid-twentieth century, we have seen a grave decline in religious practice in Western Europe and—to a lesser but still dangerous extent—in North America.  I think there was also a sense of insecurity when popes and bishops, lacking the intellectual expertise of the scholar, cannot hold their weight as equal partners in the discussions, begin to claim a higher authority not subject to critique by scholars.  And I think even further that the Church itself—or rather the men at the helm—were just plain terrifiedthat the bark of Peter would come apart at its seams amidst the turbulent waves of late 19^th and 20^th century intellectualism. 

In the end modernism offered a threat to Church authority by empowering voices other than the pope and bishops to discuss doctrine and practice.  Modernism was not an issue in the United States—frankly the Americans were not sufficiently serious scholars to ask the deep and penetrating questions.  The American Church has always been a Church of businessmen and lawyers (bishoply businessmen and lawyers, but businessmen and lawyers nonetheless) rather than intellectuals and scholars.  Nevertheless to the men behind the desks in Rome—who were not intellectuals themselves, at least for the most part, the independent spirit of both the Americanists and the Modernists made them appear to be interrelated—that wasn’t good for the traditional degree of autonomy which the American Church enjoyed.    
The image today is Pope Saint Pius X