Blog Posts
Sometimes I want to be a Christian Nationalist
Photo by Josh Eckstein on Unsplash
This post originally appeared on Rev. Angela Denker’s Substack newsletter, I’m Listening.
Much has been written about the terrifying parts of Christian Nationalism: about the violent and greedy legacy of an American Church built on a never-ending quest for wealth, status, and power in middle-class white America.
That’s not what I’m writing about today.
Instead, I want to write about the myopia I find myself in - and maybe you find yourself in - as we stand amidst the wreckage of a compromised church, look back at our childhoods, and lament with embittered eyes how our once cherished memories have become tarnished.
Sometimes it would be easier to champion, uncompromisingly, a strong and central Church, one that can afford to take for granted its place at the center of American community and life.
I’m thinking now not of what became megachurches, with fancy stages and glittering lights and pyrotechnics and pastors with bestselling books. I’m thinking of what came before: white steeples with rows and rows of pews, filled with families. I’m thinking of what most Catholic parishes, and mainline and rural churches today look back at as their glory days.
While we often think of America’s past as a devoutly Christian one, instead statistics show that church attendance in the U.S. likely peaked in the 1950s. The postwar period and Baby Boom also represented the height of denominationalism, and the advent of Christian publishers and Christian radio shows.
White Christians’ memories of church in these years are often nostalgic, lacking the context that these were years still of segregated schools and Jim Crow laws in the American South, years before women could become ministers in most denominations or even before women working outside the home was considered acceptable (in white, middle-class America, that is — poor, working class women, and women of color had long been employed outside the home as a matter of necessity).
A sense that in the 1950s all was “as it was supposed to be” betrays a hint of racism among white Christians, because these years were not equally good ones for Black Americans, and for non-white Americans in general. Black American soldiers were largely denied access to the life-changing benefits of the G.I. Bill, and just a few years before the 1950s, Japanese Americans had been forcibly confined in internment camps.
Still, for those of us raised in white churches in 1980s and 90s, and for parents raising kids in white churches in the 1980s and 90s, there was by and large a sense of furthering or clinging onto the church’s central place in society that was experienced by Baby Boomer parents in the 1950s and 60s.
For this reason, many of us attended “program” churches, churches that used an “attraction” model focused on “young families.” These churches employed attractive guitar-playing young men as “youth pastors” and organized regular youth events and mission trips in order to build a sense of community among kids in the church.
There were well-established and extensive Sunday school programs, usually led by women who perhaps in another life could have been astute CEOs, organizing dozens of volunteer teachers, managing curriculum and music lessons for hundreds of children every Sunday.
There was VBS in the summer, the aforementioned mission trips and camps for older kids. There were countless “service opportunities:” visits to shelters, meals to serve and pack, yards to clean up. Once I even joined a group of junior high kids for a round of neighborhood caroling.
My church had a phenomenal youth and family ministry staff. Just excellent. While, as usual, the senior pastor got the lion’s share of the credit for the church’s astronomic growth in the 90s and early 2000s, I wondered later if more of that credit should have been extended to the youth and family staff. There were programs galore. Not just Youth Group but a variety of events for kids of all ages.
Randomly this week, as I drove from leading church alone on Sunday morning to catch my fourth grade son’s flag football game, where the other parents just stared at me when I said I’d missed the earlier game because I was at church, I thought about 456 Club, our church’s group for fourth, fifth, and sixth graders when I was that age. We went bowling and to Dairy Queen. I remember meeting with our new youth staff member, a young woman, to talk individually about what I thought might be fun plans for the year ahead. I remember how cool and unique that was. A 20-something woman was interested in spending time with me! She wanted my opinion!
There was real value in what sometimes seemed like activities that were “just for fun,” like waterpark trips in the church’s old blue bus, or scavenger hunts at the local grocery store, or playing church games like Sardines before plopping down in the dilapidated couches across the road in what we called “The Fish House,” after the symbol of the fish used by early Christians.
Church was a place where I knew adults who weren’t related to me valued my opinions. I met married couples and young adults who gave me the chance to share brief talks as part of youth group in high school, a Monday night activity called The Living Room.
It was all innovative and energetic, and it took a huge amount of coordination, planning, and financial support - as well as adequate staffing.
Me after my fifth grade First Communion at church growing up. These are happy memories: ones I’d wanted to re-create for my kids — but so much has changed.
As a stereotypically busy high school kid, I took it all for granted, showing up sparingly when I didn’t have sports practices or games; using the service projects as ways to fulfill school requirements for National Honor Society.
After all, just in my little suburb, there were tons of churches with equally rich offerings for kids and families. For a brief period in high school I left my mainline youth group and flirted with Evangelicalism, attending a different local congregation that also hosted a purity retreat as an alternative to our school’s “abstinence-based” or “abstinence-only” sex education.
This was in a blue Midwestern state (Minnesota) where megachurch Evangelical culture was slower to take hold, and mainliners and Catholics still make up the majority of Christians, even today.
And still the influence of popular Christian culture weighed heavily in my experience — sometimes in ways that seemed really positive! Just like I bet many of your churches, my church had that infamous poster, listing popular 90s musical groups and suggested “Christian” alternatives. (I remember always thinking that maybe, unfairly, Christian musicians were just people who couldn’t make it in the “real” music industry). I was cynical and untrusting and suspicious in a lot of ways, and I still attended the purity retreat and the Teens Encounter Christ retreat; and I still worried about what it might mean if my (nonexistent) boyfriend and I were “unequally yoked.” I still gossiped and slandered the SAGE group at my school as it was first getting started, laughing about it with my friends. SAGE stood for Straight and Gay Equality, and I’m embarrassed today that my gut instinct was to stand against it, probably in my head because of my Christian faith, even if my church never explicitly talked much about sexuality (JUST DON’T HAVE SEX!) was the basic message …
I remember my mom, a pastor’s kid herself, sometimes uncertain about the glossy and glitzy messages she saw us getting sometimes at our church, with a lack of theological or Biblical depth. We had a band, projector, and Dominos Pizza before Confirmation every Wednesday night, and then my mom attempted valiantly to teach our small group and go over our “memory work.” No one had ever done their verses. One kid famously preferred to never actually speak during small group, during which his eyes were always half-closed.
But we had to meet in the kitchen, because the church was so packed with teenagers every Wednesday night: three sessions of Confirmation, 4:30, 6, 7:15. A rousing success. Church Councils today would dream of it.
I remember my mom (how she had the energy to teach Confirmation after teaching school all day, I’ll never know) one day getting fed up and going to talk to one of our pastors about the fact it seemed like kids weren’t learning much in Confirmation. It wasn’t like how she’d remembered studying the Catechism and getting in-depth into the Bible.
I’m not sure exactly what the pastor said in response, but as I remember my mom telling me, it was something about how he empathized and agreed with what she was saying, but he tended to land on the side that it was better that the kids were at least here. They were here. They were at church.
As all these memories flood back to me, positive and negative, mostly I feel kind of sad when I remember church growing up, because there’s so many rich memories. I remember my dad teaching Sunday school with my friend’s dad, and yelling at the boys for tipping back their chairs. I remember being in the church plays, speaking at Baccalaureate, going on mission trips in 15-passenger vans to Philly and Richmond, Va., and sleeping on the floor in church basements; making PB&J sandwiches on an assembly line for dinner.
My kids probably won’t have these memories of church. It’s not for lack of trying. When I first became a pastor, I worked so hard to try and find a church where I could serve where my kids could have the experience I did, leading me to two calls at very large churches in Orange County, Calif., and here in the Twin Cities.
On staff, though, running a church with a $1 million+ budget is exhausting, particularly in the 2010s and 2020s. There’s this constant sense that you’re propping up a system that was never built to last. So much of your budget is going toward mortgages on massive buildings. You can’t afford health insurance for your program staff. Nobody has time to volunteer anymore, because all the parents work long hours and then move on to side hustles and ever-increasing sports and music commitments. Everybody has mounting debt and no one can afford to tithe much.
I don’t really want to be a Christian Nationalist, but what I mean by the title of this post is that sometimes I miss and even long for what churches built on money, power, and status gave to me as a kid. Everything I had came at a cost, though I didn’t really realize it then. And it was mostly all good stuff! But sustaining all those programs and all that staffing and all those volunteers (many of whom were women who didn’t work outside the home, functionally working for free for the church) came at a high cost. As society changed, the churches who did programs successfully like my own just kept moving the target forward. Like American businesses and real estate, we thought the bubble could never burst. And then it did. It is. And we’re living now in the sticky mess left behind.
My kids probably won’t get a church with tons of ready-made programs built for them, where they’ll attend Confirmation class with 200 of their middle school classmates, like I did.
They won’t have the option of four different mission trips or a National Youth extravaganza at a hotel.
They won’t take a bus to camp with dozens of their friends from church.
I don’t know if they’ll get to attend a baccalaureate service.
I’ll make sure they skip the purity retreat.
And in truth it’s probably a good thing: that my kids won’t attend a church built around their enjoyment and satisfaction. They’re probably spoiled enough as it is. But as a parent who wants their kids to know and follow Jesus, what do you do instead?
What does a non-christian-nationalist American church look like?
Luckily, we have lots of examples. It looks like a church that’s just barely getting by. A church with a few kids and a ragtag choir. A church with a part-time minister. A church with a building that’s constantly in need of repair. A church whose building isn’t primarily used for worship. A church with an organ or piano that’s out of tune.
On good days, when I’m hopeful and reminded that Jesus didn’t die and rise again to make America Christian but instead to save the world — I’m also reminded to shift my thinking.
We - us white American middle-class Christians - invested so gol-darn much into getting people “here.” Just get them to church. Attract them. It’ll work out.
It didn’t work. Look at what the word “Christian” means to most Americans today. Doesn’t have much to do with the ministry and witness and life, death, and resurrection of Jesus — it’s more about politics and social issues and, sometimes, violence.
So if it was never about getting “them” “here,” maybe I should focus on the fact that my kids will be “there” as in out in the world, with some sense of what it means to follow Jesus in the world. As often as possible, “we” will be “here” for worship: whether that’s in person on Sunday mornings, or online, or at another time during the week. And we’ll pray before meals and dinner. We’ll talk about death and life and how Jesus stands for justice.
Maybe the kids will be OK. Maybe I can let go of giving them what I had in church, and focus instead on teaching them to follow Jesus in pursuit of a better world, for everyone.
Angela Denker
Angela Denker, author of Red State Christians: Understanding the Voters who elected Donald Trump (Fortress: August 2019), is a Lutheran Pastor and veteran journalist who has written for Sports Illustrated, The Washington Post, Christian Century, and Christianity Today. She has pastored congregations in Las Vegas, Chicago, Orange County (Calif.), the Twin Cities, and rural Minnesota.
Twitter | @angela_denker
Facebook | @angeladenker1
Blog | https://angeladenker.substack.com/
Website | https://www.angeladenker.com
Church Anew is dedicated to igniting faithful imagination and sustaining inspired innovation by offering transformative learning opportunities for church leaders and faithful people.
As an ecumenical and inclusive ministry of St. Andrew Lutheran Church, the content of each Church Anew blog represents the voice of the individual writer and does not necessarily reflect the position of Church Anew or St. Andrew Lutheran Church on any specific topic.
All I Did Not See: Daunte Wright
In Junior High my church youth group took a trip to the Brooklyn Center Community Center. At that time, it was the coolest pool around. They had multiple waterslides and a huge area for swimming, with big windows you could see from the nearby highway.
At that time, Brooklyn Center was more than 70 percent white, a blip on the map between Brooklyn Park, where my mom taught school and I went to the dentist and the pediatrician, and the state's largest city, Minneapolis.
Time and places and demographics shift over the years in America, and with them our cultural consciousness shifts. My dad told me that when he was growing up, North Minneapolis was where all the "rich people" lived, while his dad returned from World War II, and his parents got a Quonset hut in the suburbs.
When I was growing up, the New York Times called North Minneapolis "Murderapolis," which may as well have been code for saying "where the Black people lived" in this majority white metro area. I grew up in Maple Grove, then an outer ring suburb surrounded by cornfields and gravel pits, bordering Brooklyn Park and Brooklyn Center to the west.
My young mind couldn't comprehend nuance, then. Later on, I worked for a Congressman and was shocked to see he lived in Minneapolis, which I thought of as downtown office buildings or neighborhoods full of small, older, run-down homes. I didn't know then how close extreme wealth and poverty lived to each other, how one made the other possible.
I didn't see then, when I rode the church van to slide down waterslides at Brooklyn Center Community Center, how the world around me was changing all the time. How Brooklyn Park and Brooklyn Center were rapidly becoming majority-minority suburbs, and Maple Grove was increasingly filled with shopping, restaurants, and new schools — and upper-middle-class white people. My school district split on racial lines. The East side of the district, where my mom taught, was mostly students of color. Lots of recent immigrant families and families living in poverty attended schools in Brooklyn Park, while I open-enrolled to a brand-new high school on the far west side of Maple Grove.
Back then when people talked about "good schools" and "good neighborhoods," I didn't realize we were talking about racism and redlining. When the DARE officer visited my school to teach us about drugs, and I later found out he went to my church, or his wife knew my mom. I didn't realize that on the other side of my school district Black parents were having "the talk" with their teenage kids and younger, afraid of their Black sons being killed by police during a routine traffic stop.
My parents never told me that I had to put my hands on the steering wheel and say "yes sir," if I got pulled over. I was so naive the first time I did get pulled over for speeding, during high school, that I pulled to the left side of the highway. The officer got out, saw a blonde white girl behind the steering wheel, and calmly told me I had better get back on the road and pull back off to the right.
I've been pulled over a number of times since then in Minnesota. I've gotten speeding tickets and once a ticket from looking at my phone. One time, I'm embarrassed to say I didn't have my license with me, and the officer took my word for it and gave me a small ticket for something else.
American Christians talk a lot about grace, me included, but we don't seem to have the same grace for every American.
People talk about how sick they feel for former Brooklyn Center Police Officer Kim Potter, who despite 26 years on the police force claimed she grabbed her gun by mistake instead of her Taser, killing Daunte Wright just 2.5 miles from the Brooklyn Center Community Center where I swam with my church youth group in the 90s.
Kim Potter seems to automatically get a lot of grace from the same people who say that Daunte Wright should have done everything different. He shouldn't have "resisted arrest," he shouldn't have had a lapsed car registration, he should have showed up for his hearing, even if the notice was mailed to the wrong address. He shouldn't have moved addresses, even if a global pandemic hit people living in poverty hardest. He shouldn't have had a child at a young age, even though American health coverage disparities too often deny birth control and sex education to people living in poverty.
In a lot of conversations among white American Christians, Daunte Wright gets very little grace, as did his parents before him, an interracial couple without a lot of money raising a Black son in Brooklyn Center.
When I grew up I thought that in America all it took was hard work and doing the right thing in order to succeed. I didn't see the layers and layers of inequity that my whiteness rendered invisible, making it easy for me to point to individual decisions and think that someone's misfortune was somehow their fault. Surely, I had nothing to do with racism in Minnesota — even when I heard people in my hometown call Brooklyn Park "Brooklyn Dark."
I thought doing things like giving to the food shelf or volunteering at a shelter would mean I was making all the difference I needed to make. I saw white high school-aged volunteers from church playing with kids of color at the shelter in Minneapolis, and I thought we were so great: earning all of these community service hours for our college applications. I didn't see or understand what these kids' parents were going through and why they weren't there.
I learned about slavery and the Civil War and the Underground Railroad and abolitionism and Civil Rights in school and at church, and I assumed that because I grew up in a northern state, and my ancestors weren't Confederates, that I could somehow situate myself on the "right" side of American history, ignoring the Indigenous people my ancestors killed and displaced in Minnesota. I didn't see that the stories of slavery and the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement continued on today, and that in his time Martin Luther King, Jr., was tracked by the FBI, hated by most white Americans, and called a Communist sympathizer, just as leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement are called today.
I believe that part of the experience of faith is that of ongoing revelation, and that as God continues to reveal truth to each of us, sometimes growing in faith resembles fumbling around in a dark and shadowy room, unable to decipher what is right in front of our eyes. I have felt this way often over the past five years or so, as Hope and Change faded into Blood and Soil — and American Christians worshiped at a golden altar of power, money, and hatred.
After George Floyd was killed under Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin's knee last year on May 25, just 5 miles from my house, I attended a protest march for clergy members, and another one in downtown Minneapolis. I learned about a training in civil disobedience that was being put on by a national leader in the movement. On a hot June Saturday in a church parking lot in South Minneapolis, I learned about the intricate strategy and organization behind peaceful protest and civil disobedience. There was purpose and order and instruction and rules.
Revelation means confusion and shadows and uncertainty and then sometimes seeing, clearly, what you once did not see. After attending that training, when I see Black Lives Matter protests, like the ones happening in Brooklyn Center this past week, I see strategy and engagement. I see two opposing sides attempting to spread their narrative. I see law enforcement resistance to the protesters' narrative, which holds law enforcement culpable for playing its part in violence against Black Americans, and unlawful use of force resulting in deaths of unarmed Black Americans in encounters with police.
The tear gas and flash bombs tell a narrative story of chaos and violence. Whose violence do we notice? Who do we hold responsible? Who gets grace and forgiveness? Who is the threat? Ask yourself these questions — and then imagine the answers are the opposite of what you think. See how your understanding shifts. Ask yourself who you imagine "rioters" to be, and wonder why you think this and if it's really true.
Growing up white in Minnesota, there was so much I did not see. There is so much I do not see. Ensconced in my quiet neighborhood in a corner of Southwest Minneapolis, I have ample opportunity to willfully close my eyes and tell myself the same stories I once naively accepted as fact, about the story and the narrative and the violence and the actors and their race — while at the same time pretending that I could live in a post-racial America.
What a lie.
Daunte Wright is dead. George Floyd is dead. Another grieving mother. Another grieving daughter.
I cannot see with anyone else's eyes. Only my own limited vision. But with humility, I can begin to chop down the logs in my own eyes, to see in front of me all the things I never saw before, the stories I wasn't told, the tears shed in silence, the videos of arrests and deaths the white public never got to see that replayed themselves in generational trauma for Black and Indigenous Minnesota families.
White America is seeing anew in Minnesota what Black America has lived for far too long. Shattering of illusions always feels devastating for those who've built stories of ourselves around those illusions: land of the free, home of the Brave, the American Dream.
Many White Americans want to know the facts. The "whole story." We want to believe it's only about interactions of individuals: Daunte, the 20-year-old who resisted arrest; Kim, the longtime officer who made a mistake. It has nothing to do with us or the institutions we fund. I still feel that way when I first hear another awful story. I have to fight against my own selfish stories of self-preservation.
Just as the rain falls and the sun shines upon us all, no matter who we are, so too are we all inextricably connected in the human family. It's about us, whether we believe it or not. Maybe before we can see the truth of America's racist past and present, white Americans have to first grow comfortable with all we see when we look in the mirror. When we admit to the racism in our own life story, when we feel the pain in the depths of our souls that comes from this deep, entrenched national sickness and sin, only then can we begin to submit to change the story of America's future.
Angela Denker
Angela Denker, author of Red State Christians: Understanding the Voters who elected Donald Trump (Fortress: August 2019), is a Lutheran Pastor and veteran journalist who has written for Sports Illustrated, The Washington Post, Christian Century, and Christianity Today. She has pastored congregations in Las Vegas, Chicago, Orange County (Calif.), the Twin Cities, and rural Minnesota.
Twitter | @angela_denker
Facebook | @angeladenker1
Blog | http://agoodchristianwoman.blogspot.com
Website | https://www.angeladenker.com
Church Anew is dedicated to igniting faithful imagination and sustaining inspired innovation by offering transformative learning opportunities for church leaders and faithful people.
As an ecumenical and inclusive ministry of St. Andrew Lutheran Church, the content of each Church Anew blog represents the voice of the individual writer and does not necessarily reflect the position of Church Anew or St. Andrew Lutheran Church on any specific topic.
How Much Hate to Make a Hate Crime?
How much hate does it take to make a hate crime?
Love the sinner.
Hate the sin.
Love the sinner.
Hate the sin.
“But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you …”
- Jesus Christ (Matthew 5:44)
Never mind Jesus’ words. White American Christians know it’s just fine to hate, as long as you hate the right people.
Hate has brought more people to white Christian churches in America than love has.
Hate spawned whole new white denominations: the Southern Baptist Church, formed to keep Black people enslaved.
More recently, the North American Lutheran Church, formed in 2010 to prevent LGBTQ people from being pastors or being married in the church.
Christians have fundraised on hatred, explicitly or implicitly, suggesting that we could “love and welcome all,” but Jesus, well, he definitely was a white American guy who liked flags and guns.
Now, eight more people are dead in Georgia.
The suspect, a 21-year-old White man named Robert Aaron Long, of Woodstock, Ga., said the shootings weren’t racially motivated, even though six of his victims were Asian American women, and white conservatives have spent the last year blaming AAPI people for the COVID-19 virus, calling it KungFlu or the China Virus, and leading to a documented rise in incidents of violence against Asian Americans, according to NPR.
Long said he suffered from sexual addiction, and according to the Cherokee (Ga.) Sheriff’s Office, he “blames the massage parlors for providing an outlet for his addiction to sex.”
At age 21, living in an unincorporated section of a Georgia County not far from one of America’s hubs of thriving Black culture, Atlanta, in a state where Democrats won two Senate runoffs in January, tilting the balance of power in the U.S. Senate away from Republicans, Long straddles the lines of two Americas. His America: male, conservative, white, Christian, and Southern — is losing.
The Washington Post’s Sarah Pulliam Bailey wrote an extensive article about Long’s ties to the Southern Baptist Church, specifically an ultra traditionalist and conservative offshoot called Founders Ministries, which lists the church where Long was baptized as one of its member congregations. Pulliam Bailey interviewed Long’s former youth minister, Brett Cottrell, who said Long’s father was “considered an important lay leader in the church,” and the family attended morning and evening activities on Sundays, as well as meetings on Wednesday evenings and mission trips.
Were these the tools of Long’s radicalization? Building blocks and indoctrination of the hatred that would lead him to go on a killing spree?
Once we would have thought that these past church activities only added to the shock. How could it be that this good, “church boy,” would turn into a killer? We would call him a “lone wolf.” We’d wonder about mental illness, about family trouble. We’d tell Long’s story as an individual, rather than explore his place in a pantheon of angry, white, male, conservative, Christian mass shooters.
Maybe it’s something about the “culture.” A parenting issue. We don’t say that when the accused is White.
But the sheriff’s office said it wasn’t a hate crime. Cottrell said Crabapple First Baptist Church in Milton, Ga., had several non-white members. The pastors never preached about racism.
They didn’t have to. A message got through loud and clear that preached the supremacy of whiteness: who was good and worthy of forgiveness, a place in God’s Kingdom. Always KINGdom. Because God is a powerful white American man. Rich, too.
The Washington Post captured a video of the sermon preached by the Rev. Jerry Dockery at Crabapple Baptist this past Sunday. Dockery told his congregation the apocalypse was near. He suggested America had had “45 presidents in our brief history.”
Joe Biden is the 46th President of the United States, but many conservatives, including conservative White Evangelicals, deny that Biden was legitimately elected, a line of messaging promoted by former President Donald Trump.
The sermon talked about Christ waging war. About a dragon deceiver thrown into eternal torment.
The Revised Common Lectionary, a set of Bible readings used by the Roman Catholic Church and most American mainline denominations, had an assigned Gospel reading this past Sunday that included this line from Jesus, “Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him,” - John 3:17.
But that type of Jesus: inclusive, universal, loving, forgiving; was nowhere to be found at Crabapple First Baptist.
And so Long learned to hate.
He learned to hate the non-white Americans whom his denomination originally decreed should be kept in chains.
He learned to hate women, whom Southern Baptist doctrine deemed were under the “headship” of their husbands, and unfit to preach or lead men in Bible studies, or serve on leadership boards at church.
He learned to hate himself, when for whatever reason, his relationships didn’t conform to the pattern his church had taught him they should: a domineering man and a willing woman. He sought out sexual satisfaction and dominance, not intimacy, at the hands of vulnerable Asian women, in massage parlors across Atlanta.
His brain was hopped up on hatred. His church told him he was dirty, impure. His church told him they were destroying the America his family of White men had built and dominated for generations. He chafed under COVID restrictions. He sought comfort in his faith. His faith told him Jesus was calling him to wage war, to take up weapons, to force women and non-white Americans to submit to him, or pay the price.
And of course he knew how to obtain and fire a gun. Because guns, more than love or forgiveness, are sacrosanct among too many White American Christians. We are like those in the crowd who shouted: Crucify Him! We prefer killing to life itself, even though we are approaching our High Holy Day, when we supposedly claim that Jesus’ greatest victory was the triumph of life over death.
Instead we glory in killing machines and slaughter ourselves in the process.
Where is that triumph today in America?
O Death thy sting … it hurts. We are gathered at the tomb but we are denying our own death, so that we cannot be resurrected.
For white Christians, our so-called faith rings hollow.
Perhaps Long will not be prosecuted under a hate crime statute. Prosecutors and law enforcement officials say those cases are notoriously difficult to prove.
But I ask this of all those who claim the name of a Savior who commanded us to love: how much hate does it take to make a hate crime?
In Georgia. In America. We have blood on our hands.
Angela Denker
Angela Denker, author of Red State Christians: Understanding the Voters who elected Donald Trump (Fortress: August 2019), is a Lutheran Pastor and veteran journalist who has written for Sports Illustrated, The Washington Post, Christian Century, and Christianity Today. She has pastored congregations in Las Vegas, Chicago, Orange County (Calif.), the Twin Cities, and rural Minnesota.
Twitter | @angela_denker
Facebook | @angeladenker1
Blog | http://agoodchristianwoman.blogspot.com
Website | https://www.angeladenker.com
Church Anew is dedicated to igniting faithful imagination and sustaining inspired innovation by offering transformative learning opportunities for church leaders and faithful people.
As an ecumenical and inclusive ministry of St. Andrew Lutheran Church, the content of each Church Anew blog represents the voice of the individual writer and does not necessarily reflect the position of Church Anew or St. Andrew Lutheran Church on any specific topic.
Jesus is in the Streets
“You do have a choice. You don’t have to be a part of the world of the lynchers. You can join the other America.” -Anne Braden
Four words.
What can I do?
I can’t count the number of times I’ve been asked this question in the last five years by white Christians from diverse parts of the theological eco-system. The way I hear the question varies tremendously, depending on my mood; more responsive to the news cycle than I like to publicly admit. Now, as the nation reckons with news that the police officers who killed Breonna Taylor will not be charged in her death, I’m bracing to hear it again.
On my best days, I hear it as genuine: “I’m newly waking up to the catastrophe of white supremacy in our land, and I don’t know where to begin.” As someone also raised in the belly of the beast of whiteness, I feel compassion when I hear the question this way. I remember my own confusion and disorientation. I recall the sense of being truly lost when, as a student at Union Theological Seminary, Black, Native, and Latinx Christians demanded I open my eyes and engage the gospel in a different way. For so long, I didn’t even know what I was seeing when I looked in the mirror of my own racial history, and the histories and contemporary habits of the white institutions — including the church — that had formed me. I surely didn’t know what I was supposed to do. Those days were lonely and difficult.
But other times I hear the question differently.
It can sound like an attempt to put one’s “good concerned white person” credentials on display. As if the asking, in and of itself, contributes to justice somehow. And I can feel in my gut that it doesn’t matter what I offer back because the asker doesn’t plan to take me up on it.
Sometimes, especially of late, I hear despair. Those of us who are white are so used to having the systems in which our white lives unfold simply respond when we make demands of them. More of us have stepped into the racial justice struggle since young people rose up in Ferguson, the same place from and of which a group of clergy and theologians wrote a year after Michael Brown was killed: “We found the church in the streets among people whom many of us did not recognize and the voice of God called us to join it.”
It’s a new experience for white people to discover systems that don’t just magically give way to us. Our question thus exposes a truth: we’re not ready.
We’ve not prepared to be in this long-haul journey Black people have been walking generation after generation.
However I hear it, I’ve always tried to take the question seriously as part of my own slow, imperfect commitment to living anti-racism as a white Christian. To give a helpful answer: we must do our own work to understand how whiteness and white supremacy is shaping us every day. We need to plug in hard with people of color-led organizations; support them with time, energy, and resources. We have to recognize we have power in predominantly white organizations, workplaces, and institutions, and get loud, courageous, and savvy, interrupting and challenging the many ways these institutions — including the church — are harming Black people and other people of color.
But I’m finding I can’t take it seriously anymore. As Black grief and outrage passes the tipping point, that question has increasingly sounded like an obscenity; a noisy gong, a clanging cymbal. I went to bed Wednesday night after praying for Breonna Taylor’s family, Black Lives Matter leaders and protestors in Louisville, Black and Latinx students enrolled where I teach, Black clergy across our denominations and woke up determined to start responding with four words of my own.
Stop asking that question.
Stop asking that question: What can I do?
It’s passive. It’s individualistic. It centers the presumed needs of white people; needs we presume but which are not actually real, because for generations and with increasing visibility, clarity, volume, and desperation Black people have told us and told us and told us.
The question reveals the sinful malformation white Christianity has perpetuated and produced. And we are close to the point past which repentance will be too late.
To be sure, there is much we need to do to become the siblings, comrades, and co-conspirators that people of color in this nation desperately need and have always deserved. In the predominantly and historically white church, this includes reckoning with white U.S.-American Christianity’s institutional embeddedness in legacies of white supremacy and colonial-settler capitalism and understanding that, short of such reckoning, the same institutions so embedded simply cannot morally and spiritual form us the way we must be if we are to hear and respond to the voice of God calling us to join the church in the streets.
This is bitter dross.
Given the moral and political capital and, yes, the financial wealth of white U.S.-American Christians — yes, denominations are shrinking but collectively white Christians are rich — a meaningful break with white supremacy towards and in radical support of Black communities would have already meant the full birthing of that other America of which Anne Braden speaks.
Instead, after collectively enabling the demonic to be unleashed in this land, even justice-inclined white Christians who are horrified, have institutionally equivocated while children have been wrenched from their mother’s arms at the border. We’ve allocated to committees the work of crafting careful statements that may result in a BLM banner draped on our church building but failed to determine to completely and utterly participate in shutting this nightmare down; this nightmare we are watching and that Black, Native, and Latinx people are living.
We’ve continued weekly worship inside our sanctuaries — or, now, on screens — while, all this time, Jesus has been dying in the streets.
Dear white Christians, there are no more questions to be asked right now. Not by us.
There are only questions being asked of us.
What will you/I do (white Christian)?
What will we do (white church)?
In response, there can no longer be any equivocation. Only one answer reflects the gospel in this year of 2020; a year when Black women are killed while sleeping in their own beds and Black men are found burning in ditches.
Four more words; the only words I/we dare utter as prayer, confession, commitment and promise while we move our bodies out of our sanctuaries and into the places where the church is tending to the body of Christ:
“Join the other America.”
Jennifer Harvey
Rev. Dr. Jennifer Harvey is professor of religion at Drake University. She has a Ph.D. in Christian Ethics from Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York. Her most recent books include the New York Times Bestseller Raising White Kids: Bringing Up Children in Racially Unjust America and Dear White Christians: For Those Still Longing for Racial Reconciliation. Dr. Harvey is also ordained in the American Baptist Churches (USA).
Twitter | @drjenharvey
Website | jenniferharvey.org
Church Anew is dedicated to igniting faithful imagination and sustaining inspired innovation by offering transformative learning opportunities for church leaders and faithful people.
As an ecumenical and inclusive ministry of St. Andrew Lutheran Church, the content of each Church Anew blog represents the voice of the individual writer and does not necessarily reflect the position of Church Anew or St. Andrew Lutheran Church on any specific topic.
Church Anew is dedicated to igniting faithful imagination and sustaining inspired innovation by offering transformative learning opportunities for church leaders and faithful people.
As an ecumenical and inclusive ministry of St. Andrew Lutheran Church, the content of each Church Anew blog represents the voice of the individual writer and does not necessarily reflect the position of Church Anew or St. Andrew Lutheran Church on any specific topic.
Deepen Humility and Compassion with the IDI
As Christian public leaders we are often learning new ways to navigate conversations and relationships with people of diverse cultures across churches and communities. Every interaction is an intercultural interaction, whether we realize it or not. Even if it seems like there are many shared cultural expressions (such as food, music, or dress), beneath the surface there are always deeper cultural dynamics and how we respond could make all the difference in someone understanding a sermon or feeling authentically welcomed into a congregation.
How to Lead More Effectively
One tool that can help us gain deeper insight about how to effectively engage culture is the Intercultural Development Inventory, a research-based assessment of intercultural competence. As a qualified administrator, consultant, and coach of the IDI, I’ve had the joy of working alongside church leaders as they discover a new cultural self-awareness and understanding of others. This work is developmental, meaning it involves an ongoing process of learning and is “about the journey, not the destination.” None of us knows everything about our own culture, let alone others, so the journey requires humility and compassion.
We can offer an authentic welcome and genuinely meet people where they’re at with practices that respond to the multiple dimensions of our cultures—honoring the ways we are alike just as much as the ways we are different. The research suggests that if we overemphasize our cultural differences it can result in fragmentation, but if we overemphasize our commonalities it can result in conformity. The sweet spot is finding a balance in how we approach cultural sameness and difference, developing behaviors that are cross-culturally responsive.
One Body, Many Parts
We can respond in ways that are culturally specific only when we learn the specifics of other cultures. As faith leaders, our context may include people who are more diverse than we even realize. Beyond the easily observable differences of race, gender, and age (which can each be complex in their own ways), a closer look may reveal there are also differences such as:
Family background
Education
Work experience
Socio-economic status
Sexual orientation
Abilities/ disabilities
Many others
Increasing our awareness of these differences and learning how to respond in ways that are affirming and accommodating can help deepen a sense of safety and belonging within any community.
The apostle Paul paints a vivid image of what this culturally-response community can look like in 1 Corinthians 12:12-27. He wrote this letter during a time not unlike today, when faith leaders were asking how to respond to the differences they found in the church.
Should they deny and dismiss differences?
Uphold one way of being as better than the other?
Treat them all as the same?
Or is it possible to embrace the unique particularity of each and over time, learn how to adapt for their sake?
While all of the ways may have worked for them in various spaces, Paul’s invitation was to practice living as “many members of one body.” He emphasized that each member’s individual differences didn’t make them any less valuable as part of the body. In fact, he further asserts, the diversity of each member is vital for the body to function properly. And if one part is in need, it serves the well-being of the whole body if that part is given specific attention and care.
This is also the developmental journey we are invited to take through the work of interculturality. It becomes an ongoing process and practice of learning how to more intentionally respond to culturally specific differences with compassion and humility. In many ways, it is learning how to love more deeply.
Beloved Community
Intercultural development can be one tool that helps us live more fully into the vision given to us in scripture. What Dr. King and others called the Beloved Community, a culture and society of equity and justice, becomes more possible when we lovingly tend to both the ways we are alike and the ways we are different—appreciating commonalities while adapting to differences.
Of course, this takes patience and grace. More than anyone else, Jesus showed us how to embody this way of being. He moved across cultures with a profound self awareness and a transformational empathy, always able to illuminate the particularity of his experiences to speak to a universal truths. When we deepen our work of engaging culture, we not only deepen the impact of our ministry, we also follow Christ in bringing us closer to the Beloved Community God has called and created us to be.
Connecting With Others
We don’t do this work alone. There are a number of extremely helpful tools and resources in the field of interculturality. When engaging with the Intercultural Development Inventory it is important to do so with a Qualified Administrator who has the training to accurately interpret the results given by the assessment. They can serve as consultants and coaches providing learning opportunities and sharing best practices to support you on your developmental journey.
Both QA’s ourselves, my friend David Scherer and I are offering a second round of our sold-out course on interculturality and anti-racism online this October. There are two tracks: Faith Leaders Course and Standard Course.
This article originally appeared on The Faith+Leader and is republished with permission.
Joe Davis
Joe Davis is a nationally-touring artist, educator, and speaker based in Minneapolis, MN. His work employs poetry, music, theater, and dance to shape culture. He is the Founder and Director of multimedia production company, The New Renaissance, the frontman of emerging soul funk band, The Poetic Diaspora, and qualified administrator of the Intercultural Development Inventory. He has keynoted, facilitated conversation, and served as teaching artist at hundreds of high schools and universities including in New York, Boston, and most recently as the Artist-in-Residence at Luther Seminary where he earned a Masters in Theology of the Arts.
Church Anew is dedicated to igniting faithful imagination and sustaining inspired innovation by offering transformative learning opportunities for church leaders and faithful people.
As an ecumenical and inclusive ministry of St. Andrew Lutheran Church, the content of each Church Anew blog represents the voice of the individual writer and does not necessarily reflect the position of Church Anew or St. Andrew Lutheran Church on any specific topic.
Resist Nihilism
“It’s all a matter of opinion, right?”
Try this line in a biblical studies classroom if you’ve never witnessed spontaneous combustion. It will set the professor’s hair on fire. This is a repeatable experiment. I hope my students aren’t reading.
I hope Dr. Eric Barreto’s are.
When someone says, “It’s all a matter of opinion,” conversation stops. If it’s all a matter of opinion, evidence doesn’t matter. Reason doesn’t matter. There’s no point in listening to one another. We might as well give up.
We resort to “It’s all a matter of opinion” when facts make us uncomfortable.
Students use it when course content stretches their faith. In the Covid-19 age, people use it when the demands of safety threaten our businesses and when we want social interaction. We trot out “It’s all a matter of opinion” to wiggle out of tight spaces.
Danger alert: “It’s all a matter of opinion” is nihilism in action. And nihilism is deadly.
Discernment is healthy. We have strong theological reasons to be skeptical of our values, our assumptions, and our capacity to know the truth. Jesus warned the Sadducees, “You know neither the scriptures nor the power of God” (Matthew 12:24). We’re in the same boat. Our perceptions are limited. Moreover, our perceptions are clouded by sin. It’s like we’re looking into a distorted mirror, dimly lit (I Corinthians 13:9).
We must also confess, most important things do involve opinion. This is true for theology, ethics, biblical interpretation, and even history. Experts disagree. One reason we can’t find common ground on the Covid-19 pandemic is that science involves opinion: the experts’ opinions have changed as research expands. That’s confusing for all of us.
But cynical people, many of them extremely well paid, are at work to promote nihilism in our society. They want us to give up on the distinctions between true and false, between right and wrong.
“Some people say.”
“Many people do that.”
”The experts have been wrong before.”
“The science is unclear.”
These are wolves in wolves’ clothing. Wolves wear fine dresses and suits.
The wolves want us to give up on truth: What can we really know, anyway? They would have us set aside ethics: It’s all relative, isn’t it? They deny the possibility of dignity: Look at those sorry dogs over there. Even beauty means nothing to them: smells like money.
The wolves sure don’t want us looking out for one another, fostering the common good: It’s survival of the fittest, baby. Dog eats dog.
Jesus, the Good Shepherd, guards us from the wolves. And he demands that we too protect the vulnerable: “Guard my sheep” (John 21:16). Wise as serpents and harmless as doves, we do not abandon integrity.
Now, biblical authors love tricksters. Jacob wears animal fur to trick his father into mistaking him for Esau. Tamar disguises herself as a prostitute, then holds to Judah’s ring and staff as security. Jael allows Sisera into her tent, gives him milk and a blankie.
But another thread runs through scripture. Integrity. Proverbs instructs, “Truthful lips endure forever, but a lying tongue lasts only a moment.” (12:19,). Jesus expects his disciples to speak a direct yes or no, no frills (Matthew 5:37). Paul insists on the integrity of his communication (I Corinthians 4:2). Revelation acknowledges disciples who bear the testimony of Jesus, no matter what the cost (12:11).
Educational psychologists have identified a common pattern among college students. College introduces them to diverse and conflicting points of view and to problems that haven’t been resolved. A natural reaction is to embrace relativism: “It’s all a matter of opinion.” Hopefully, students remember the lessons of relativism. There really are diverse perspectives, and they do have value. But then they learn to embrace commitment in the face of complexity. Some answers are better than others. Some are just wrong. Evidence counts. And the truth does matter.
For those of us in the United States, the next few weeks will bring a blizzard of bull. Followers of Jesus will not be deterred. Our calling is to foster truth, grace, dignity, and beauty in the midst of confusion. In so doing, we can contribute to the healing of a broken culture.
Greg Carey
Greg Carey is Professor of New Testament at Lancaster Theological Seminary and an active layperson in the United Church of Christ. His books include studies of apocalyptic literature, the parables, the Gospel of Luke, and the ethics of biblical interpretation. His most recent books are Stories Jesus Told: How to Read a Parable and Using Our Outside Voice: Public Biblical Interpretation. In addition to serving on multiple editorial boards, Greg chairs the Professional Conduct Committee of the Society of Biblical Literature and serves on the Leadership Team of the Open and Affirming Coalition of the United Church of Christ.
Facebook | @gregc666
Twitter | @Greg_Carey
Facebook | @LancasterTheologicalSeminary
Twitter | @LancSem
Church Anew is dedicated to igniting faithful imagination and sustaining inspired innovation by offering transformative learning opportunities for church leaders and faithful people.
As an ecumenical and inclusive ministry of St. Andrew Lutheran Church, the content of each Church Anew blog represents the voice of the individual writer and does not necessarily reflect the position of Church Anew or St. Andrew Lutheran Church on any specific topic.
Liberty! (Gospel, That Is)
Calls for religious liberty have amplified over the past few years. The conversation took place, as everything seems to these days, around the topics of sex and sexuality. Two Supreme Court cases framed it. In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014) a corporation defended its religious conviction that it should not be required to include certain kinds of birth control in their health insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act. And Masterpiece Cake Shop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission (2018) that asserted that providing a wedding cake for a gay couple would violate their religious convictions. In both cases the Supreme Court upheld the religious liberty of Christian-owned businesses who qualify under specific conditions.
Nobody wants to hear my opinions on Constitutional matters. As Paul would say, may it not be! Instead of pursuing the constitutional question, let’s examine what freedom means in a Christian context. Let’s think about gospel freedom.
Best I can tell from the New Testament, gospel freedom means a very particular range of things. According to Luke, Jesus inaugurates his ministry by proclaiming emancipation to those who are held captive and releasing those who are oppressed (4:18). Gospel freedom entails liberation from various kinds of suffering, including physical ailments (13:12, 16).
Gospel freedom also entails the power to overcome sin. Jesus promises that sort of freedom to those who abide in his word and thereby know the truth (John 8:31-37). And Paul proclaims that the power of the Holy Spirit frees people from the power of sin, making us free to live righteously (Rom 6:15-23).
There’s lots more to say about gospel freedom than we can discuss in this forum. But I want to foreground a different dimension of gospel freedom, one that runs counter to the language many Christians use today. Paul considers it freedom that Gentile men who follow Jesus need not submit to circumcision. “For freedom Christ has set us free,” he writes (Gal 5:1). But in the same context Paul adds a warning:
For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (5:13-14)
Gospel freedom and civic freedom are related, but they are not the same thing. Gospel freedom is the capacity to live for God and for our neighbors.
Gospel freedom is not the privilege to do whatever we may want, even when we think we’re right. Gospel freedom is liberation to do good.
We see this pattern elsewhere in Paul’s letters. Paul could marry and expect the Corinthians to support him and a wife. He has that freedom, but he does not exercise it (1 Cor 9:1-8). Believers may “know” there’s no harm in eating food that’s been offered to one of the gods—but they must never use their liberty in a way that hurts someone else. Even if they think they’re correct (1 Cor 8:9). In all things, Paul appeals to the example of Jesus, who yielded his heavenly identity to live and suffer for others (Phil 2:1-11).
Gospel freedom, then, looks outward, not to one’s own privilege but to the benefit of others.
In contrast, many Christians today understand religious freedom as the absolute ability to live out their convictions. During this coronavirus pandemic, quite a few state governments have banned large indoor gatherings, including religious services. But some Christians have protested that their religious liberty had been curtailed. Nor is it rare to find Christians who refuse to wear masks, claiming they are exercising their freedom—both civil and religious. These Christians do not understand freedom as an opportunity to protect their neighbors.
On Sunday, August 9, the New York Times featured a story, “Christianity Will Have Power,” that examined the loyalty White evangelicals have shown for Donald Trump. No other demographic group supports Trump to the same degree. It’s important to specify White evangelicals because relatively few non-white evangelicals support Trump. The reporter, Elizabeth Dias, attributes the phenomenon to the fear that America is growing increasingly hostile to evangelical Christianity and to White evangelicals’ hope that Donald Trump will stand up for them.
Other experts have identified the same concern. Evangelical historian John Fea likewise attributes a good measure of White evangelical support for Trump to cultural fear. And four years ago the pollster Robert P. Jones penned The End of White Christian America, documenting demographic trends will soon reduce White Christians to less than half the population.
Dias’s story is long, but I noted that the words “free” or “freedom” appear a dozen times in the story. Dias writes on the basis of her travel to small-town Iowa this past spring. The story’s first appeal to freedom comes from a wife and mother whose Christianity is important to her:
The religious part is huge for us, as we see religious freedoms being taken away…. If you don’t believe in homosexuality or something, you lose your business because of it. And that’s a core part of your faith. Whereas I see Trump as defending that. He’s actually made that executive order to put the Bibles back in the public schools. That is something very worrisome and dear to us, our religious freedom.
Another Iowa mom expressed similar concerns. Dias reports:
She said she heard talk of giving freedoms to gay people and members of minority groups. But to her it felt like her freedoms were being taken away. And that she was turning into the minority.
I have opinions about freedom for LGBTQ persons and freedom for racial minorities.
I have opinions about the freedom of Christians.
Most of all, I aspire to live the freedom that pleases God and benefits my neighbors.
Greg Carey
Greg Carey is Professor of New Testament at Lancaster Theological Seminary and an active layperson in the United Church of Christ. His books include studies of apocalyptic literature, the parables, the Gospel of Luke, and the ethics of biblical interpretation. His most recent books are Stories Jesus Told: How to Read a Parable and Using Our Outside Voice: Public Biblical Interpretation. In addition to serving on multiple editorial boards, Greg chairs the Professional Conduct Committee of the Society of Biblical Literature and serves on the Leadership Team of the Open and Affirming Coalition of the United Church of Christ.
Facebook | @gregc666
Twitter | @Greg_Carey
Facebook | @LancasterTheologicalSeminary
Twitter | @LancSem
Church Anew is dedicated to igniting faithful imagination and sustaining inspired innovation by offering transformative learning opportunities for church leaders and faithful people.
As an ecumenical and inclusive ministry of St. Andrew Lutheran Church, the content of each Church Anew blog represents the voice of the individual writer and does not necessarily reflect the position of Church Anew or St. Andrew Lutheran Church on any specific topic.
Trust and Conspiracy in a Pandemic (Matthew 14:22-33)
The social media post pointed to a video promising deliverance from the pandemic, an assurance that things are not as dire as they seem. Nor, the video suggested, do we need to worry so much. It promised to provide a glimpse behind a curtain trying to show a truth that “they” want to keep from us. The truth, you see, was right there if you just chose to believe that a litany of scientists, experts, and leaders were not really interested in your health but in your continued delusion. It’s all a conspiracy, but now you had the chance to get in on the secret “they” didn’t want you to know.
The video had been widely discredited, of course. Even the social media giants — too often reticent to stand proactively against propaganda and conspiracy theory — had taken down the videos in order to keep others from being deluded.
And yet this social media post defiantly wrote, “Deny this if you choose. I believe it. That is my right.”
Others have written and researched the sources of mistrust that nurture conspiracy among Christians in particular. Scholars have recently traced the proliferation of a sense of persecution among white Christians and its link to believing that racism against Black people and communities is overblown.
The sociologist Samuel Perry posted data on Twitter that suggests that Christians who feel persecuted are more likely to “disregard COVID-19 precautions” like increased hand-washing and wearing a mask in public. Robert P. Jones recently wrote about his research showing that white Christians were significantly more likely than others to deny the persistence of structural racism and to advocate for Confederate monuments to remain.
Jones concludes, “The results point to a stark conclusion: While most white Christians think of themselves as people who hold warm feelings toward African Americans, holding racist views is nonetheless positively and independently associated with white Christian identity. Again, this troubling relationship holds not just for white evangelical Protestants, but also for white mainline Protestants and white Catholics.”
Too many Christians miss a critical element of faith, of what it means to believe something.
Faith is not just a matter of thinking the right things or saying the right words. Faith is fundamentally a confession of trust, an embodiment of how we relate to God and thus to one another as children of God.
Faith is not just a yes to doctrine but a yes to the God who created us, the God who saves us, the God who draws us to new life. And that “us” in the last sentence is important, for God’s creation, salvation, sanctification have a communal dimension and import. In Christian faith, it’s never just about me but about us. And thus faith in God necessarily implicates the trust we share with our neighbors.
The embrace of conspiracy among far too many Christians is at its core a crisis of (mis)trust and thus also a crisis of faith.
When some Christians choose to trust the one doctor who confirms my preconceived expectations, the one person of color who diminishes the impact of racism, the one politician who promises a return to greatness, then we see a crisis of faith, not just in God, but in the diverse stories and generous genius God has created.
We could talk more about why Christians have become so easily seduced by these conspiratorial whispers. However, I want to close with something else.
Instead of theologies that lead us astray, that misshape our sense of trust, that delude us with fanciful narratives, what theological convictions drive us to a critical hope that is both properly suspicious of the propensity of the powerful to harm while also nurturing a loving trust of our neighbors, especially those neighbors marginalized by powerful structures?
This last Sunday many churches read from Matthew 14:13-21, the story of Jesus’ proliferation of bread to share with 5,000 men and an uncounted number of women and children. The miracle here is not just a magic trick, a sleight of hand, a special effect meant to dazzle the crowds. No, the miracle is one of abundance in a place where the disciples only see what they lack. “This is a deserted place,” the disciples inform a Jesus who has healed the sick and proclaimed good news with every step he has taken (v. 15).
There are no desolate places when Jesus is present. There is enough to go around, more than enough when Jesus sets a table before us.
This upcoming Sunday we encounter Jesus striding on the sea and calming the winds and the waves in Matthew 14:22-33. First, bread in the wilderness. Now, calm in the eye of a storm. Notice what Jesus tells his disconsolate disciples: Do not be afraid. There is nothing to fear, for I have drawn near to you.
I wonder if the thirst among too many Christians for a conspiracy theory that makes sense of a world seeming to be spinning out of control is a way to reach out for something solid in a dissolving world, a reality that seems to be slipping through our fingers.
But in reaching out for a hidden truth that makes it all make sense, we miss that Jesus is already there with us in those places that seem foreboding and lonely and dangerous.
Jesus’ very presence is the assurance of God’s promise of new, abundant life.
Let’s be clear. The other side of conspiracy is not naïveté or an unquestioning trust in those deemed experts or those who wield power over us. A critical perspective is indispensable. We know that the powerful have enacted terrible regimes of oppression in the past, occluding their actions and justifying their treatment of the powerless. The Tuskegee Experiment was real. So is systemic racism.
But it is vital that we nurture a faithful sensibility that can distinguish between cries of oppression which ring in God’s ears with compassion and the privileged fear that the comfortable may lose their unmerited place in the structure of a broken world God is setting right. It is crucial that we discern the difference between fears rooted in a sober look at the world as it is and promotes our survival and fears of loss and scarcity rooted in a twisted vision of one’s neighbors.
Do not look to the man behind the curtain pulling the strings. Do not look for the code that explains it all. Do not look for the conspiracy that contorts and changes to explain every wrinkle and incorrect prediction.
No. Look to the Jesus who offers us bread in the wilderness, a bread that nourishes us to notice that we are not alone, a bread that teaches us that there is always enough in the reign of God. Look to the Jesus who strides on the waves, who beckons us to the water, who delivers us when we cry out, “Save us.” That Jesus draws us close and reminds us not to fear but to love God and neighbor alike with every thought and word.
Eric D. Barreto
Eric D. Barreto is the Weyerhaeuser Associate Professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary. His passion is to pursue scholarship for the sake of the church, and he regularly writes for and teaches in faith communities around the country.
Twitter | @ericbarreto
Join Us for a FREE Event
Being Church Today
Monday, August 17 | 10:30am-1:00pm CDT
Church Anew has gathered a diverse group of Christian thought leaders to ignite innovation and imagination for leading congregations in a time like this. These keynote speakers will amplify the voices of local leaders from the Minneapolis area, who will share stories of how the church is leading in our own context, particularly in response to systemic racism in our communities.
Church Anew is dedicated to igniting faithful imagination and sustaining inspired innovation by offering transformative learning opportunities for church leaders and faithful people.
As an ecumenical and inclusive ministry of St. Andrew Lutheran Church, the content of each Church Anew blog represents the voice of the individual writer and does not necessarily reflect the position of Church Anew or St. Andrew Lutheran Church on any specific topic.