Not long ago I had conversation with two old friends about a topic I have written about previously on this blog (here and here): regaining a unified church after Donald Trump’s presidency.
Their church has essentially undergone a split, both numerically and spiritually, sparked by the contentious political debates fomented around president Trump and his “America first” policies.
One of my friends, who is a staff member at the church, explained the various efforts – including programs focusing on collective reconciliation – the church leadership has been pursuing.
She lamented that, so far, nothing has proven particularly successful. Many members who left the church (mainly Trump devotees) appear to be gone for good. Political antagonisms remain. They are now sublimated beneath the surface of their community’s life, but they continue to be subtly divisive.
Of course, I felt compelled to offer my perspective. I won’t repeat it here; you can reread by previous two posts if you want to catch up. Let me just say that I am not a great fan of this prevalent urge “to reclaim the old church community.” I believe that it is fundamentally misguided, and I told them so (in a nice way; really, I was nice).
However, I was more than a little insulted when they both laughed in my face. (I am not exaggerating.) Their message was clear: “Oh there goes crazy David again with his weird ideas about the church! Don’t you know that church unity is essential?!”
As you can guess, this part of our conversation went nowhere. And I will admit that my thinking on this matter will undoubtedly sound “weird” to many, but then the Bible can be a very weird book.
The problem, as I see it, is that those, like my friends, who remain emotionally distraught over the supposed “loss” of church unity, generated by the politics of Donald Trump and his MAGA movement, are chasing after the wrong goal.
They have set their eyes on an abstract concept of Christian togetherness, instantiated for them in the physical presence of familiar faces, when they should be “setting their eyes of Jesus” (Hebrews 12:2) and what it means for Him to be glorified.
These two objectives are very, very different.
Let me explain what I mean by sharing a few thoughts recently prompted by a book which has motivated me to write about this topic one more time.
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Dwight L. Moody (1837-1899) was the nineteenth century equivalent of the
evangelist Billy Graham throughout the English-speaking world.
As a young man in Boston, Moody had been a committed abolitionist actively agitating for the end of slavery in America. But as his revivalist career began to develop, and he became more and more well-known, Moody was faced with a challenge.
The remarkable book by historian Edward J. Blum, Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and the American Nationalism 1865-1989 (Louisiana State University, 2005), lucidly explains the nature of Moody’s challenge and the ominous political, social, cultural challenges that confronted every public, religious figure in the aftermath of the Civil War.
That challenge concerned the unity of God’s American church.
The Civil War had embedded a seemingly permanent split between the northern and southern branches of American Christianity. Bridging that gap and healing those wounds, bringing the church together again as one unified, national community, was a major concern all throughout American society at the time.
A large number of national, Christian leaders, including Moody, decided that solving this problem meant that all political discussions must be set aside. This included any mention of slavery, black equality, or human rights. Instead, pastors and evangelists were to focus only on the “spiritual” demands of personal salvation and individual piety.
To further calm these divided waters and work towards unity between the north and south, Moody segregated his southern revivals in order not to offend southern churchgoers. After the war, he would openly praise “the lost cause” otherwise known as the southern rebellion. Unsurprisingly, a majority of black churchgoers, their friends and family boycotted Moody’s crusades.
Black leaders like Frederick Douglas and Ida B. Wells excoriated Moody’s betrayal of Christian morality for the sake of unifying the white church. One “negro” representative at an annual conference of the African Methodist Episcopal church wrote:
(Moody’s) conduct toward the Negro’s during his southern tour has been shameless, and I would not have him preach in a barroom, let alone a church.”
Frederick Douglas said (among many other things) of Moody’s segregated revivals:
Of all the forms of Negro hate in this world, save me from that one which clothes itself with the name of loving Jesus.
Ida B. Wells also condemned Moody for his version of “Jim Crow revivalism.”
Blum concludes that Moody’s Jim Crow strategy for church unity proved to be a major factor in the eventual reunion of northern and southern all white churches by the close of the nineteenth century:
Highlighting social consensus at the expense of social reform, Moody’s revivals contributed to the. . . spiritual justification to an ethnic nationalism centered upon whiteness.
Yes, white churches rediscovered unity across the Mason-Dixon line, but at what cost? Was it the type of unity Christ wants for his people? We dare not forget who was finally excluded from this long-sought unity.
Moody abandoned his previous Christian principles in order to accomplish a sociological result.
Consequently, Moody helped to infuse a permanent state of all pervasive segregation throughout the white and black churches in both the north and the south. Something that had not been true before the war.
But what Moody accomplished was not unity but a pernicious, intractable brand of sectarian division within the church.
Moody also helped to banish social reform and the ethics of political/social behavior from the evangelical vocabulary. His focus on personal piety at the expense of public, political ethics is still keeping evangelical churches on the sidelines of today’s continuing conversations about racial inequality.
This unbiblical separation of the spiritual from the political also continues to infect today’s efforts at reuniting the post-Trump, evangelical church.
Learning to tolerate opposing political opinions is a far cry from grappling with the outlandish moral failures exemplified in many of those opinions and their resulting policies. The first is called learning to live like an adult. The second is called learning to think and behave like a genuine disciple of Jesus Christ.
By refusing to talk about slavery; by failing openly to condemn the enslavement of fellow human beings; by embracing pro-slavery brothers and sisters into all white churches without any expectation of confession and repentance, Moody and those like him became guilty, not only of rank moral failure, but of an egregious betrayal of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Misguided obsessions with unity for unity’s sake are replicating similar mistakes today. Seeing “Trumpers” and “Non-Trumpers” worshiping together again, in their pre-2016 blissfulness, is a fool’s dream about a bogus, vanilla brand of artificial fellowship.
Now is the time to talk about Christian ethics, both public and private, political, social, and cultural. This is the conversation that ought to take center-stage in any genuine attempt at church unity.
Was supporting Donald Trump and his policies a moral position for any of God’s people to take? Yes, or no? Defend yourself from scripture, chapter and verse.
Obviously, people will remain divided, but the substance of the divisions will have been altered; they will become clear: these are now ethical, moral fault- lines created by different understandings of Jesus Christ, the nature of the Good News, the arrival of God’s kingdom, and what Jesus requires of his followers.
Not everyone will want to hang around once the “political” differences are described in this absolutely necessary, moral framework. People may leave to attend other churches. Let them.
So what?
Moody’s slovenly strategy for church unity was a pig in a poke.
Once again, the church is being sifted. It happens. For cryin’ out loud, don’t we remember what the apostle Paul said?
The time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. (2 Timothy 4:3)
No doubt there have to be differences among you to show which of you have God’s approval. (1 Corinthians 11:19)
