Religion

A little more on evangelism

Coppo di Marcovaldo [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

I made a commitment to a friend that I would post a bit more on this subject just to clarify a few things. My apologies to people who consider themselves evangelical who thought perhaps I was trashing the concept itself or all evangelical Christians. Let me state this as unambiguously as possible: I do not hate evangelical Christians. What I dislike is evangelical culture and many of the teachings that lead to what I call “friends with an agenda” and inauthentic relationships.

Not all people who consider themselves evangelical Christians do these things, of course. That’s because a person is separate from an institution. Not only that, there’s a big difference between “churches that evangelize” and “evangelical churches.” The former applies to any church that encourages people to tell others about their faith in Jesus. The latter refers to denominations that are built on the premise of evangelism. So churches like mine (Lutheran) and mainline Protestant churches (Methodist, Presbyterian) are not considered “evangelical churches” despite the fact that they may do some evangelizing. However, some churches that evangelize can and do encourage behaviors that are far closer to evangelical denominations and evangelical culture.

There are some specific aspects of evangelical culture that are more common in some churches than in others, and those are the things that concern me most. For example, Calvinism and its offshoots always make me a little (or a lot) irritable. Some specific things common to evangelical culture (which may or may not be true of a given church or individual):

Belief that people are either born bad or become tainted at some randomly appointed age (“age of accountability”)
Pressure to work Jesus into conversations with non-Christian friends, family, and co-workers
Belief that “salvation” means rescuing from eternal suffering after death
Encouragement to make friends with people for the express purpose of converting them
Hosting large-scale events to which people can invite others in order to either hear a salvation message or see the church in a positive light and return at a future time
Pressure to bring friends and family to church services
Door-to-door visits, mass mailings, newspaper ads, or in-church handouts used to bring people to church, frequently containing ambiguous, misleading, or provocative language in order to pique interest

None of that has anything to do with genuine relationships, no matter how hard a church tries to sell it as such.

When I was in college, I worked at a Christian camp. One part of our work was to present the message of salvation to the kids under our care. Now, let me just say, I love this camp. My own kids now go there, and I have no complaints about what they’re being taught. I am glad that they’re hearing about Jesus in a caring, fun atmosphere. If I had a problem with evangelism in general, I would not send my kids to camp–end of story. But as both a former employee and director, I am fully aware that the camp counselors often come from different backgrounds and may have learned things that are different from what our family and our church teach and believe.

This particular camp is a day camp, but there’s one overnight trip. As part of that, the counselors deliver a gospel/salvation message. One year, back when I was working, the other counselors decided to present the message in the form of a skit. In this particular atrocious story, a group of girls is in a car wreck, and they all die. One of them goes to heaven and the rest to hell. The last part of the skit is the girls, being pulled down by Satan, shrieking at their friend, “Why didn’t you ever tell us?”

I could not make this shit up.

I wasn’t part of the skit. My campers were all six and seven years old. They were absolutely terrified. One of the girls sat with me by the campfire afterward and sobbed, telling me she was scared that her parents were going to hell and that it was all her fault. It took an hour to calm her down. Needless to say, when I became camp director, I put a ban on that kind of skit.

Instead, they did the one about the teenage party girl who wants Jesus to leave her alone so she can get drunk and do some unspecified “bad” thing.* But, you know, Jesus loves her anyway.

Which is the other part of this–telling people that they need God because on their own, they are worthless. There’s a persistent, stubborn belief that Christians are good because we have the Holy Spirit and non-Christians are bad because they don’t. If a Christian screws up, then it’s because “we’re all still sinners.” If a non-Christian screws up, it’s because they didn’t have godly morality. If a Christian does good things, it’s because of Jesus. If a non-Christian does good things, it’s only out of selfishness or accident. Being convinced of the “truth” of these things is the only way some churches can get people to share their faith. It’s as though they’re saying our religion (yes, it is a religion) isn’t good enough on its own–we need to convince people of their need for it first, either by devaluing them or frightening them.

Which, when you think about it, is absolutely necessary if you believe that the fate of one’s soul rests on a specific set of beliefs.

Is it any wonder that my teenage self was terrified for the eternal souls of my family? I was the lone Christian, both in my immediate and my extended family. Skits–and teaching–like the one above are the reason I told family members that being gay was on par with being a rapist, in hopes that it would scare them into getting saved.

I was sixteen when my Jewish grandfather passed away. The Sunday following his death, I sat through a salvation message in Sunday school, watching a video on the eternal fate of the unsaved. By the end I was crying because of my failure to present the gospel to this man I barely knew and had been forbidden to tell I was a Christian. One of the adults made some noncommittal noises about Jews being “God’s chosen people.” It didn’t help. What if one of my neither-Jewish-nor-Christian family members died without knowing Jesus? Looking back, I truly think these people did not know what to say to me, because what I was going through was completely alien to them, far outside the reaches of their insight.

This is the screwed up kind of evangelism I’m talking about. Not the average, share-your-faith-because-Jesus-rocks kind of evangelism. I mean the sort that tells children they are “deeply broken” and frightens people into telling others about God. The kind that genuinely believes more than two-thirds of the world’s population–billions of people–are destined to fry eternally for the crime of unbelief.

I can’t get behind that. If that’s your bag, please find someone else’s eternal soul to fret over. If my failure to pressure people into belief in Jesus results in their damnation, then I don’t think I want to spend forever with that kind of God anyway.

______________________________

*Probably sex, but these were little kids, after all. We can scare ’em about hell, but forget sex.

Why I don’t need a video to prove I’m not “like that”

LGBTQ+, Relationships, Religion

At this point, I’m not sure who’s reading this and also has some knowledge of the NALT (“not all like that”) project. I also don’t know who’s reading this and also might be either upset by or supportive of the project. Either way, I want to explain why I’m okay with the project, but I won’t be making a video.

Some years ago, when I was first trying to figure out how to love and serve LGBTQ people, I could’ve used something like NALT. I was in a situation in which I didn’t know any other Christians who believed same-sex relationships were not sinful (though I knew a few who thought the “condition” of being gay might be okay so long as one didn’t act on that). I knew exactly two gay Christians. And trans* people? Hell, they didn’t even exist in that world. Just to be clear, I wasn’t necessarily looking for other straight allies–just anyone who had a different view from the conservative one. When I went seeking, all I found were organizations that wanted my money. It took about two years of actively pursuing it to find others, and then it was only because I decided to open a Twitter account and follow people who looked like they might be progressive. Believe me, I understand the desire to find like-minded people.

One of the reasons I kept up the effort is that I have a lot of LGBTQ friends, family, and acquaintances in my offline life, and I had done a lot of damage with my religious posturing. I’m lucky some of these people decided they still like me. I suppose I thought I needed to make things up to them somehow. I had been so trained in “love the sinner, hate the sin” that I wasn’t sure anymore how to just love people. Of course, I do know better these days, and I no longer need an outside source to tell me how to care for my friends.

I also have a lot of friends, family, and acquaintances who are not LGBTQ. By now, the majority of those people should be aware of where I stand on things, whether it be in regard to Christianity and LGBTQ people or feminism or the doctrines of total depravity and hell. I don’t feel the need to explain or defend myself. The people close to me don’t need me to say anything else; they already know I’m “not all like that.” In fact, some of them have used those exact words to describe me. I had to laugh once when my cousin said she was telling a friend about my husband and me and she said we were Christians but whispered, “But they’re not like that“–and apparently, the other person knew exactly what she meant.

All of that is why I see no need to make a video to announce to the world that I’m “not like that.”

That’s why I’m choosing not to participate in the NALT project. My offline loved ones don’t need it; I’m not a big enough online voice to be noticed by megachurch pastors; and it won’t do anything to help my online acquaintances. On the other hand, I’m not going to write a blog post condemning the project. I know far too many people who have found it to be meaningful and powerful. I know straight allies who have found each other, I know LGBTQ Christians who have, some for the first time, heard the message that their spiritual and sexual identities are not mutually exclusive. I know people–cis-het and otherwise–who want to use this as a way to stand up to bullying anti-gay pastors. I can’t slam the project on the grounds that some people don’t care for the terms used or don’t see the project as helping them or their loved ones directly, even though I do understand where those feelings come from.

One of the criticisms I’ve heard about the project is that it’s taking some kind of “easy” way out of being a “real” ally (and yeah, that’s mostly something I’ve heard cis-straight people say). I’ve seen online arguments about it and a good deal of the sort of rage usually reserved for Mark Driscoll or Hugo Schwyzer. So tomorrow, I’m going to talk about being an ally, walking that fine line, and what it really means for something to be easy or hard in that context.

What are your thoughts on NALT? Will you make (or have you already made) a video? What might be some better alternatives for people who don’t want to make one?

Forbidden Fruit

Religion

This morning, I participated in a discussion which reminded me of all the things I gave up over the course of my years as a conservative Christian. When I began deconstructing the legalistic platform on which I’d built my faith, I discovered so many things that I’d never properly given myself permission to do or enjoy. That’s the funny thing about fundiculturalism–it seeps in and permeates everything until it can be hard to know the difference between something that truly is inappropriate and something that’s merely taboo.

There was a list of things I wasn’t supposed to listen to, watch, wear, and do. I’m not joking. At one point, a former church instituted a boycott of certain products because they advertised during television shows considered immoral. In high school, I swore off any music that wasn’t instrumental or explicitly Christian. Those were the days when we were taught that backmasking was real and that there were people who truly had come out of “satanic” cults where they performed human sacrifice.

In addition, whenever something or someone didn’t meet the church’s expectations for tone or behavior, it suddenly became something to be explained away or avoided. Some of my fellow Gen-Xers who were involved in Christian culture in the 1990s may remember when we were all supposed to stop listening to Amy Grant because she “sold out” and had “secular” hits, for example. There was also the time the Canadian teen show “Degrassi High” was booted off Approved Christian Island because one of the characters had an abortion. (The show was probably only on there in the first place because one of the actors was supposedly a Christian. Honestly, it wasn’t a particularly “Christian” show and dealt with a lot of realistic, mature themes.)

What I find sort of disturbing about the whole thing is that it never seems to touch any Christian who has managed to remain on the correct side of the behavior-policing flavor of the moment. So long as a professing Christian isn’t divorced, gay, unmarried but singing about something that sounds vaguely sexual, acting in movies with “immoral” themes, or publicly saying anything that challenges mainstream theology, that person is completely safe. It’s why, despite the sheer volume of bizarre beliefs, Kirk Cameron consistently gets a pass. He regularly acts like an ass, but he’s apparently not doing anything naughty. Rob Bell, on the other hand, couldn’t even publish a relatively innocuous book that sort of almost kind of hints at universalism without being labeled a heretic.

At the same time, Christian “leaders” are frequently allowed the freedom to either screw up royally (“Look! He’s really, really sorry!”) or simply say the most vile things without being called on it. For the life of me I can’t figure out why Mark Driscoll continues to enjoy such popularity nor his sermons so many contortions of apologetics. There is simply no excuse for defending this man or his strangely hypersexual theology.

And right there is the problem with fundiculturalism. The distinction made between right and wrong is skewed so that “braless” selfies are bad, bad, bad but commanding wives to “service” their husbands orally is entirely acceptable. Loving, committed gay couples trip the gag reflex, but churches cover up rape and sexual abuse. Music, clothes, and movies are monitored but not whether we’re taking care of “the least of these.” Fifty Shades is taboo because of all the sex but not because of the overt domestic violence. Bullies and abusers get a pass because we extend “grace,” but victims and survivors frequently don’t.

How did we get to this point? How did we arrive at a place of such legalism? I can’t answer that. What can say is that I’d rather listen to “Highway to Hell” than a Mark Driscoll sermon or give my teenager Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye than Joshua Harris’ I Kissed Dating Goodbye. I’d rather hang out in the company of people the church considers misguided or sinful than sit at the feet of most of the well-known preachers.

If you’re coming out of fundiculturalism, what things are you trading in? What have you been denying yourself?

Stop hate-watching the survivors

Religion

This post happened last week (trigger warning for policing how people heal from abuse.) Dianna Anderson has a good response regarding healing and recovery. From that angle, her post is a must-read. I want to approach Richard Clark’s post from a different perspective.

I absolutely agree with Dianna that it’s wrong to tell people how they should heal–what form that should take or what the time frame must be. Doing the work of a survivor is good and important work, and some might even call it holy. Clark doesn’t really have any business policing that. But there’s something else that he’s missing, and I think it’s related to tone-policing.

First, one of his biggest mistakes is assuming that the people who are (as he calls it) “hate-watching” and/or “mocking” the church are Christians–or religious at all, for that matter. Quoting Scripture and talking about when and how Jesus used mockery are irrelevant to people who don’t believe the Bible to be a sacred text. Just because someone used to be part of a church doesn’t mean that person was ever a Christian, is one now, or ever will be one. There are many possibilities there, none of which Clark bothers to acknowledge. Telling people outside the church how they should write, speak, or behave and putting it in Christian terms is like trying to apply U.S. federal laws to Canada.

Second, Clark fails to see that this isn’t like someone getting bad service in a restaurant and venting about it afterward. It’s not just a casual visit to a church, deciding it wasn’t a good fit, and looking elsewhere. We’re talking about long-term abusive teachings and behaviors, many of which were perpetrated on underage people for years. Damage done in childhood takes a lot to overcome, and it’s pretty disturbing how many people have had similar experiences at the hands of pastors and teachers within the church.

Third, there’s more at stake here than individual people’s recovery. This is about the ways in which the church has, as an institution, continued to wound people deeply. If you see a house on fire or someone committing a crime or a person in need of immediate medical attention, don’t you have an obligation to at minimum call emergency services? That’s what so many of us have been doing in our own ways–we’ve been writing, teaching, and speaking about this problem and working actively in our day-to-day lives to help end the abuses at the hands of religious leaders and institutions.

Richard Clark and others don’t appear to be heeding our words. At least, when they write about “hate-watching,” it’s a little hard to tell that they’ve heard us. We don’t want just to vent about the abuses at Mars Hill or John Piper’s teachings or Westboro Baptist’s protests or tweets about children being deeply broken. We’re not using the Internet as an electronic therapist. We don’t merely want to be heard and acknowledged. We want it to stop.

I’m exhausted from those within the institution telling me I’m doing it wrong or I’m “hurting my cause” or I’m “hate-watching,” because we’ve tried every possible way to say the same things and not one of them has ended these abuses. We’ve tried the quiet polite way; the humorous way; the angry, ranty way; the sarcastic mocking way; the pleading way. We’ve written, shouted, set it to music, and created artwork about it. We’ve asked for those directly hurt to be heard and we’ve asked for the allies to be heard. And yet it continues. What the hell else do you want us to do?

I’m tired of hearing about how we’re all just seeing oppression everywhere (and implying it doesn’t really exist), even in the face of solid evidence that it does. The primary problem isn’t the score-keeping of who is more oppressed or whether sometimes the same person who holds privilege in one situation lacks it in another. For example, I’ve lately seen statistics floating about on the percentage of college-educated women and women’s earning power. That’s great, but it doesn’t erase institutionalized sexism–particularly within the church. It certainly doesn’t give anyone a free pass to ignore misogyny when they see it. The problem isn’t whether a given church has made a commitment to battling oppression but that church as an institution still perpetuates it.

I’m weary of being told that people/churches are imperfect, because that’s just an excuse for ignoring those who have been hurt. Of course churches are imperfect and people are imperfect. But why shouldn’t people and churches work toward being better? Why should any form of bullying, abuse, or oppression be allowed to continue? We have a responsibility to tell people that these abuses are occurring, and the church as an institution has a responsibility to put an end to the damage.

When these well-known pastors stop hurting people with their teaching; when the church begins to care more about children living in poverty than about the “pre-born”; when more money is spent on those in need than on our buildings and programs; when helping the sick, hungry, and homeless becomes a priority; when justice for victims trumps policing what women put on their bodies; and when all the institutionalized oppression ends, we will surely have no more need to use our words to express our outrage. Until then, we will use any method we can to get people’s attention.

Richard Clark, you’re trying to fix the wrong problem. Stop hate-watching those of us who criticize the church and help us do something to end these abuses.

What safe space?

LGBTQ+, Relationships, Religion

Remember last week when I (probably somewhat rudely, I’ll admit) said, “Fuck living in the tension”? I just want to take some time to clarify that. Many thanks to the Christians expressing their “grief” over the SCOTUS decision yesterday for helping me to figure out what was bothering me that led to my statement.

First, I want to make it absolutely, perfectly, 100% clear that I was NOT talking to any of my LGBTQI friends or family or strangers on the Internet. That remark was solely intended for my fence-sitting straight Christian brothers and sisters. It’s important that I emphasize that, because dialogue about LGBTQI issues and faith can never, ever begin with me–which is actually why I abhor “living in the tension” so much. That phrase is aimed at straight people and meant to imply something like, “How the heck do I love gay people when I really think they’re outside God’s will?” It’s a really bad place to begin any kind of conversation; you can’t go into something with the idea that another person needs to convince you of the validity of their identity and how that looks to them.

What sparked my fury and my desire to try again to explain to the nice straight people what we’re all doing wrong was this post at A Deeper Story. See, my issue is absolutely not with any LGBTQI people who are learning what it means to honor their identity and be a person of faith. That’s a respectable journey, and no one–NO ONE–needs my, or anyone else’s, permission to take it.

The problem is that straight people all seem to think we’re entitled to an opinion on someone else’s identity. That conversation at A Deeper Story? All about straight angst because we have feels about homosexuality. This goes for both sides of the “debate,” by the way. You know that thing people do when you tell your story and the first thing they do is derail and start talking about themselves? Yeah, same thing.

Here’s a newsflash: It’s not about you. Whatever your personal opinion–even if you’re sure it’s “biblical”–about LGBTQI people, that’s all it is; it’s your opinion. You do not need special times and places to write about it, because there are people all over, on both sides, who share it. You do not need “safe space” to be sad about marriage equality. You are not entitled to determine someone else’s humanity or their faith.

What has long bothered me, though I didn’t quite have the words for it, was this idea of inviting people to the table to talk about how we should handle relationship with LGBTQI people. It bothers me because it’s still the people with privilege sitting in our positions of power making decisions about who is welcome and in what capacity. That’s not how it should work.

You really want to have this conversation? Then I suggest starting with actual LGBTQI people who are working out their identities and their faith stories. You want links? Come back tomorrow and check out my Friday links round-up, where I’ll connect you with a whole bunch of people. After that, try doing a Google search for things like “LGBT Christians” and “Queer Theology.” Whether you agree or not isn’t important; what’s important is that you see what Christians identifying as LGBTQI are saying about themselves.

Before I get hate mail or protests along the lines of, “But I know a gay person! And that person appreciates my honesty that I don’t approve of the lifestyle!” please take a moment to think about that. When was the last time you “appreciated” it when someone chose some vital part of your life and disapproved but said “I love you anyway”? I honestly don’t care whether you approve of my friends and family or not. Either way, it’s not terribly helpful or loving to remind them all the time what you think, and it’s not your job to have an opinion about someone who has reconciled his or her faith and identity.

I just don’t understand why there’s this need for such anxiety, unless deep down you’re worried that if you don’t help people get this whole gay thing under control, they’ll wind up in hell. Seriously? Stop with the hair-pulling already. Here’s some suggestions for Things You Can Do with Your Christian LGBTQI Friends:

Have a nice cup of tea or coffee
Exchange conversation about the blessings in your life
Talk about ways you’re hurting and listen to theirs
Make a play date for your kids
Go see a live band
Ask them how they see their faith/identity/sexuality, without explaining what you think of any of those things

I stand by what I said: “Fuck living in the tension.” But it applies to straight people who use it to have discussions about whether we should include them in our worship. Until we upend the conversation and start viewing it the other way around, we will never be able to come to the table together.

The water and the wine

Faith and Spirituality, Religion

On Sunday, my son received the sacrament of baptism.

This was not something we told him to do; we didn’t suggest, coerce, or force him into it. In fact, he has been asking for about two years. For a number of reasons, it wasn’t until this past weekend that he was able to do so.

I have to admit, I love baptisms. This is true no matter what method is used or what the circumstances. There is holy beauty in the symbols of cleansing, renewal, and rebirth. Long after I became a Christian, I learned that various types of baptism are used in many different religious traditions. Even within my own, baptism takes many forms.

I have never been comfortable with any Christian teaching about baptism that creates too many rules. I don’t simply mean the rituals we use or the words we say or the prayers we utter. I mean those who want there to be strict guidelines on the method used or how old the person must (or must not) be or whether or not the person has been deemed by external evaluation to be a “real” Christian. The truth is, the Bible is pretty murky on these points.

There will be people who believe that my son’s baptism wasn’t “real.” They might think he’s too young for a believer’s baptism or that it wasn’t enough because he wasn’t fully immersed. I honestly don’t care. That moment when our family honored God and long-standing Christian tradition was beautiful and holy, and anyone who wishes to make it less than it was needs to spend some time examining his or her motives.

Before the Big Day, our pastor came to our house to talk with our son about his baptism. Just to make it clear, this wasn’t some kind of test. She didn’t whisk him away to another room to grill him on the finer points of his salvation while his father and I sat on our couch biting our nails in anticipation. She came to our home, a place of comfort and safety for him. She talked with him about the running symbolism of water throughout the Bible–and we all discovered that he likes rather obscure stories. (Our pastor suggested a story he might remember involved parting water; instead of Moses, he named Elisha.) She explained how everything would go during his baptism and asked if he had any questions. (He did, but they weren’t pertinent to baptism; fortunately, our pastor is a gracious woman who understands children.)

We did have an entertaining moment regarding communion. Our pastor told our son that he could take communion after he was baptized. He had already occasionally taken the elements at our previous church, but he was curious because this church uses real wine. He informed our pastor that he would take the wine instead of the grape juice (which they do offer as an alternative). She replied, “That’s up to your parents.” I told my husband later that I was okay with it, but my fear was that our son would do what I would have at his age–take a sip and spit it right back out. In church. With everyone else watching. My husband offered to buy some wine so our son could taste it, to which he said, “Never mind. I’ll just have the grape juice.”

So on April 7, my nine-year-old was baptized. He did not stand in front of the church to give a testimony about his faith. He wasn’t dunked in the Jordan River. But our pastor poured out the life-giving water on his head and anointed him (formed the sign of the cross, for the uninitiated) with oil. He was baptized alongside a small baby, the son of a family friend (which in itself was a happy surprise, though it is not entirely my story to tell). He was welcomed in as part of both the church family and God’s family. Once he was baptized, he received holy communion, kneeling before God with his fellow believers (and had grape juice instead of wine).

In a few years, he will have the opportunity to confirm his faith. Perhaps he will choose to do so; perhaps not. When he is grown, he will make new decisions about his faith. This moment was not the beginning of his journey, nor was it the end. It was a stop along the way, a moment that held meaning for his nine-year-old self. My hope is not that he travel my spiritual path but that he will learn to navigate his own. He has already made one choice; there are many more to come. For now, we will honor the vows we made to give him all the love, help, and support he needs along the way.

A little more on evangelism

Why I don’t need a video to prove I’m not “like that”

Forbidden Fruit

Stop hate-watching the survivors

What safe space?

The water and the wine

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