Dr. Francis Collins is a devout Christian who has never been hesitant in talking publicly about his faith. Thoughtful, responsible churchgoers ought
FILE – In this May 7, 2020 file photo, National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins speaks during a Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee hearing. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, Pool, file)
to pay attention to his advise.
NPR has posted an article by Tom Gjelten accompanied by a 4 minute video describing Collins’ advice to the country.
The fact is that both rates of infection and death from covid19 are MUCH higherthan they were earlier in the year when the initial lockdown orders were issued.
This past Wednesday, more than 3,500 Americans died of covid….in a single day. The virus is running rampant in large part because people are ignoring medical advice and listening to right-wing disinformation campaigns instead.
Why are any churches continuing to hold on sight congregational services right now at a time when the virus is infecting and killing more people than ever before?
All those who continue to insist that the new infection rate is itself proof that lock downs and isolation don’t work are conveniently ignoring the fact many locations across the country have never abided by the lock down measures or mask wearing from the beginning.
Below is an excerpt of the NPR article, or you can read the entire story here.
With COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths at record levels, a top public health official called on religious leaders to keep their worship spaces closed, despite rising protests from some church leaders.
“The virus is having a wonderful time right now, taking advantage of circumstances where people have let their guard go down,” said Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health. “Churches gathering in person is a source of considerable concern and has certainly been an instance where super spreading has happened and could happen again.”
Collins, himself a regular churchgoer who speaks often about his Christian faith, discussed measures that church leaders can take to protect their congregations in a Zoom conversation on Thursday with Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.
“Most churches really ought to be advised to go to remote services, if they’re not already doing so,” Collins said.
While I know that his numerous books have been helpful and encouraging to many Christian people, his advice on overcoming racism illustrates why evangelical thinking is a dry well when it comes to promoting the public good in society.
Here is an excerpt. I have a brief analysis at the bottom.
Recent racially charged incidents including the tragic death of George Floyd have stirred ensuing riots and torn open the rawest of wounds – racism. Judging a person according to skin color is an ancient sin. For that reason, God gave this ancient solution.
In the earliest words of Scripture, God spoke: “Let us make human beings in our image, make them reflecting our nature so they can be responsible for the fish in the sea, the birds in the air, the cattle, and, yes, Earth itself, and every animal that moves on the face of Earth” (Genesis 1:26).
Embedded in these words is the most wonderful of promises: God made us to reflect his image.
No one is a god except in his or her own delusion. But everyone carries some of the communicable attributes of God. Wisdom. Love. Grace. Kindness. A longing for eternity. We are made in his image.
There you have it in a nutshell. Evangelicalism’s basic problem — individualism.
And this individualism keeps evangelical leaders speechless on matters of systemic evil, problems that require changes in such things as law, government, and public policy.
Lucado invites his readers to believe in Christ — and I hope many will — as if that is all that needs to happen for the world to be a better place. But calling more individuals to repent and convert offers nothing to relieve the racial distress facing black communities today. Such global transformation won’t happen until Jesus returns.
Besides, a good number of people in the African-American community are already in Christian churches looking for Jesus to come. And they still can’t feel safe in their own neighborhoods when the police drive by.
What does Lucado have to say to them? “Keep praying for the cops to repent so they’ll quit choking your husbands to death”?
I don’t think so.
Revving up the evangelistic engines is great for addressing personal salvation more broadly — something every church should do — but waiting for society to change one soul at a time is a counsel of despair for people suffering beneath a corrupt system of racial discrimination right now.
Besides, a good many of the people who serve the corrupted ends of our corrupted systems of government and policing already profess their Christian faith even as they dutifully play their assigned role in the rotten machine of systemic discrimination.
I wonder how many of the cops who are mistreating demonstrators across this country would tell Mr. Lucado that they have already “asked Jesus into their heart”? I’d wager a good number of them.
Life is not that simple.
When society needs both/and solutions to its problems, too many evangelicals offer nothing but one-sided answers to complicated questions. And this is our great failure. It is a failure of spiritual maturity, a failure of intellect, a failure of compassion, a failure of cultural acuity, and a pathetic expression of down-right laziness.
I believe that political engagement is an important task for the Christian church. I don’t buy the rationale that says secular politics is a distraction from gospel priorities. On the contrary. Political engagement is demanded by gospel priorities when properly understood.
If believers in Jesus Christ take his Lordship seriously, then submission to our Savior King requires us to behave as citizens of God’s kingdom in every element of our earthly citizenship. Politics in the public square is unavoidable.
The question is, what does that mean in practice?
I know that I am not alone in believing that the church needs to be
Rev. Jerry Falwell
politically active. The African-American church has always understood this fact. Jerry Falwell helped American fundamentalists and evangelicals finally come to grips with this, too. Obviously, maintaining this conviction makes for strange bed-fellows nowadays.
So, is Christian political activism nothing more than the public expression of privately held religious preferences; preferences created by the kind of neighborhood you grew up in and whether it was on the right or the wrong side of the tracks?
Answering this question is crucial in the present era of “Christians for Trump.”
I am firmly convinced, and quite happy to debate anyone who cares to
MIAMI, UNITED STATES – JANUARY 03, 2020: Evangelical supporters of Donald Trump are being led in prayers inside the El Rey Jesus church. – PHOTOGRAPH BY Adam DelGiudice / Echoes Wire/ Barcroft Media (Photo credit should read Adam DelGiudice / Echoes Wire / Barcroft Media via Getty Images)
disagree, that the evangelical church’s uniform support for Donald Trump, the Republican party, and their policy agenda, has exposed the thorough-going secularization of American Christianity.
It is symptomatic of the wholesale debasement of genuine Christian faith into unabashed, nationalistic civil religion. And that is the definition of American apostasy.
This damning secularization of Christian thought and action is, perhaps, the most influential legacy of the Religious Right. Anyone who takes his/her
Ralph Reed, founder of the Faith & Freedom Coalition
marching orders from partisan political strategists (like Ralph Reed, for example) has abandoned the Lordship of Christ. The ethics and righteousness of God’s kingdom do not align with any of the Republican or Democratic party agendas given to us.
Obviously, many religious conservatives think otherwise. I don’t doubt the sincerity of their convictions, but sincerity alone doesn’t manufacture truth. Aristotle and Ptolemy sincerely believed that the sun orbited around the earth, and they were sincerely wrong.
The question becomes: Which partner is leading in the evangelical dance with politics?
Is your partisan, political commitment leading your life of discipleship?
Or is your citizenship in the kingdom of God leading your political commitments?
We all know what the correct answer is. And, of course, members of the Religious Right insist that they are living out that answer, for example, in their support of the “pro-life” movement, their fight for staff-led prayer in public schools, and their hostility against equal rights legislation for LGBT human beings.
All of this begs the question. How should the Christian’s citizenship in God’s kingdom transform the way we live out our American citizenship? If Jesus’ teaching about kingdom righteousness becomes our benchmark for public engagement, then what elements of our partisanship (whether to the right or the left) must be thrown away and replaced with Jesus’ new kingdom ethic?
Here is an historical example:
Members of the Confessing Church. Bonhoeffer is in the 2nd row at the far left
When the “Confessing Church” (composed of German, Protestant leaders who opposed Hitler’s attempts to control their churches) began its resistance against Nazi religious policies, debating these questions eventually led to a deep divide in their movement.
Everyone agreed that resistance to Nazi attempts at manipulating Christian worship services and determining church membership was every leader’s duty before God. But where should they draw the boundaries? The leaders often disagreed over which acts of resistance were (a) necessary expressions of Christian faith (so everyone could support it) and which actions were (b) merely an expression of personal political preferences. Seldom was there unanimity on this question. In fact, bitter arguments sometimes erupted threatening the organization’s future.
Of course, those accused of being “too political” or “unspiritual” in their
A Nazi German “Christian” flag
proposals responded by pointing out that it was impossible to separate the gospel’s ethical requirements from one’s evaluation of a patently immoral government policy. (I will ignore the ghastly role played by Martin Luther’s “two kingdoms” theology in the German church’s submission to Hitler).
The angry differences that erupted among these sincere, committed
churchmen exposed the differing horizons of their moral universes. After all, isn’t immorality in the eye of the beholder? Well, it shouldn’t be if everyone claiming to be a disciple of Jesus actually “fixes their eyes on Jesus,” as the writer to the Hebrews insists we should (12:2).
Every Christian’s moral universe ought to align with Jesus’ example of living as a righteous citizen in the kingdom of God.
Among all the members of the German Confessing Church, the leaders most remembered and applauded today are those who traced out the most expansive moral universes, with boundaries unconstrained by partisan politics or subservience to government authority.
After the war, surviving members of the Confessing Church sometimes admitted that, for all the risks they had taken (and some were imprisoned and/or executed), they had not gone far enough. Their ethical boundaries had been too narrow. They had not always acted as faithful citizens of God’s kingdom.
Martin Niemöller (who was imprisoned) became one of the most outspoken in lamenting the fact that the Confessing Church had never publicly
Karl Barth’s statement on the failure of the Confessing Church to defend Jews throughout Europe
condemned Hitler’s policies of anti-Semitism. They had never publicly defended their Jewish neighbors. Nor had a single church leader publicly opposed the Nazi eugenics program that took thousands from their medical asylums and sent them off to die.
This is our challenge today.
Every Christian’s lifetime goal must be the conformation of one’s own moral universe to the righteousness of God’s kingdom as taught and modeled for us by Jesus of Nazareth. As our Lord said in the Sermon on the Mount, “Seek first the Father’s kingdom and his righteousness, and everything else will follow” (my paraphrase, Matt. 6:33).
I once preached a message on those words of Jesus in a white, middle-class, Protestant church where the elders nearly banned me from the pulpit. [There were two services. An elder walked out of the first service in protest. I was summoned to a meeting with the others before the second service. At least one of them believed that I ought not to preach again).
The goal of my message was to pose this challenge: How should our commitment to live as righteous citizens of God’s kingdom here and now shape the ways we think and behave as earthly citizens of an imperialist nation with a massive military budget that loves to make war?
IF we want to take Jesus’ words seriously, that we seek God’s kingdom righteousness first, then we MUST grapple with these kinds of questions. And change our behavior accordingly.
Tragically, those church elders were spiritually crippled, straight-jacketed inside a minuscule moral universe grossly deformed by their American first, nationalistic, Republican party world-view. They were not interested in seeking the Father’s kingdom and righteousness FIRST in EVERY area of life. They were not thorough-going disciples of Jesus Christ.
We are currently facing a spiritual pandemic that is killing evangelicalism and its public witness.
An American “Christian” flag
The church is infected with a deadly political virus called partisanship. That partisanship is an ugly symptom of our deeply rooted secularism. In pursuing the cause of militaristic nationalism, we have taken our eyes off Jesus.
Huge swaths of the church have been coopted by the commercialized, smoothly marketed messaging created by high-paid political operatives who began courting evangelicals during the Reagan presidency. Rather than seeking God’s kingdom, we seek victory for their side, predominantly Republican, in the next political campaign.
This brand of herd loyalty is easy to implement. Whereas, conforming our lives to the pattern given to us by the suffering, crucified Jesus of Nazareth is far more difficult and costly.
Following a crucified Savior entails suffering, but it also demands carefully focused, consistent thinking, from top to bottom. How must Jesus’ kingdom-directed life and teaching transform the way we address our contemporary problems? There is no political playbook from any party providing easy answers to that question.
Take for instance the “pro-life” movement. The label itself is an example of a very self-conscious political framing. The words pro-life do not honestly describe the movement. As many others have pointed out, the pro-life movement is not actually pro-life. It is anti-abortion and pro-birth, but the movement’s pro-life interests vanish quickly once a baby is delivered.
For example, it is a demonstrable fact that publicly funded preschool programs, the WIC nutrition program and Head Start, to name only a few, make significant improvements in the future prospects, health and well-being of young children, especially those growing up in poor communities.
Yet, conservative “pro-life” voters typically back policies intended to defund these sorts of community assistance programs that give a leg up to our most vulnerable citizens. In this regard, supposedly pro-life conservatives most often vote anti-life.
Worse yet, these faux pro-lifers support politicians who want to slash the budgets of social benefits programs and in order to channel those funds to
A US bomber over Afghanistan
the ballooning budgets for military contractors and our wasteful Pentagon. Instead of helping to enrich the lives of America’s most vulnerable, our tax dollars are spent on expanding assassination programs, and devising new weaponry intended for the efficient slaughter and impoverishment of hungry people around the world who happen to stand in the way of American empire.
That is the opposite of pro-life. It is pro-death, pain, exploitation, and suffering.
But what about the Supreme Court?! (I hear certain readers ask). This is the new clarion call among today’s pro-lifers. Overturning Roe vs. Wade is the end-all-and-be-all of to a pro-life political victory.
It’s true. Adding anti-abortion advocates like Gorsuch and Kavanaugh to the court may eventually lead to that result. But in the meantime, America’s highest court is now stacked with justices who regularly act to strengthen corporate power against the interests of the working class.
For example, Justice Kavanaugh only appeared on the president’s list of nominees after his decision as an appeals court judge to support a trucking company’s decision to fire one of their drivers. The driver violated
Brett Kavanaugh at his Senate confirmation hearing
company policy by leaving his truck unattended in order to walk to a nearby convenience store. The truck had broken down in a blizzard. After calling for help and waiting, the driver soon found that he could no longer feel his legs. He feared that he might die of hypothermia as he waited. Should he stay with his truck? Or should he walk to a nearby convenience store to warm up?
What would you have done?
Judge Kavanaugh, the latest pro-life darling, determined that the company was justified in firing an employee who refused to lay down his life for their sixteen-wheeler. That ruling won Kavanaugh his contentious nomination. And the vast majority of evangelicals stood to cheer. (I won’t even begin to comment on the vile conservative abuse spewed out against the women who accused Kavanaugh of sexual abuse).
Was Kavanaugh really a pro-life nominee?
America’s broken, corrupted “justice” system serves the political purposes of bi-partisan mass incarceration laws filling our jails and prisons with people of color who are slapped down by onerous convictions, while white people – especially wealthy white people – receive a slap on the wrist for committing identical offenses. This country’s “injustice system” has become a calcified showcase for the most racist, Jim Crow artifacts in a nation where all people are notequal before the law.
Why did the NYC police department implement its “stop and frisk” policy in black neighborhoods but never on Wall Street? I suspect they would have collected more cocaine stashed comfortably in the sleek suit pockets of hedge fund managers than they ever discovered in the hands of African-Americans walking to the market.
Yet, American evangelicals regularly rally around the bi-partisan flag demanding that officials get “tough on crime” – excepting, of course, the white-collar crime flagrantly committed by men like Donald Trump, Jared Kushner, and their corporate donors.
Tell me again. What, exactly, is pro-life about any of this behavior?
America’s population is now separated by the greatest economic divide between the haves and the have-nots since the Great Depression. That divide expands and deepens year by year as a result of government, economic boondoggles ensuring that wealth redistribution is always moving upwards to further enrich the already rich. All the while, most evangelicals link arms with the wealthy, corporate interests who exploit the poor and the working class.
There simply is no excuse for any Christian supporting the policies of either party which perpetuate national behaviors so cravenly antithetical to Jesus’ teaching about the righteousness of God’s kingdom.
Let’s call such public behavior for what it really is, especially when it is endorsed by a majority of evangelicals: grotesque displays of hypocrisy, partisan blindness, and anti-Christian thinking.
Such misguided thinking is an investment in the work of the anti-Christ. The resulting behaviors reveal the overt repudiation of Jesus’ Lordship over his church.
Genuinely pro-life behavior begins among the citizens of Christ’s kingdom who live it out in the streets by enhancing the lives of those who most need help. That includes influencing the culture around us, our society, our leaders, and our nation, by working to enact consistent pro-life policies for all people everywhere.
To further stretch our moral boundaries, evangelicals should be in the forefront of calling for the US to abandon its budget-breaking quest for global supremacy, a quest that tramples other nations underfoot like discarded human refuse left behind for global scavengers to devour.
Now that would be pro-life.
Jesus is clear. His kingdom’s pro-life values declare:
The first will be last, and the last will be first
Woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your reward
Woe to those who neglect to do justice
Woe to you who are well fed now, for you will go hungry
Our Lord welcomes every immigrant and asylum seeker with open arms.
Our Lord prioritizes the poor. He picks them up and cares for them. He does not ridicule them as lazy creators of their own hardships.
How can any society be positively influenced by a secularized church that long ago exchanged the mind of Christ for the distorted thinking of this evil age?
How can the church show others the importance of thorough-going pro-life policies when we are incapable of implementing them among ourselves?
American evangelicalism has become the useless salt described by Jesus: You are [supposed to be] the salt of the earth, but once that salt loses its saltiness, it becomes useless, good for nothing. It can only be thrown out onto the dirt (my paraphrase, Matthew 5:13).
Jesus’ words address the American church today.
No, Donald Trump is not the church’s greatest friend. He is another in a long line of anti-Christs. He is a parasite who has attached himself to the Religious Right in order to exploit their evangelical base for his own political benefit.
Evangelicals are president Trump’s useful idiots.
I am sorry, but any purported “Christian” who cannot perceive these facts about our president, American politics, and our nation’s behavior throughout the world has become a spiritual alien who knows little if anything about God’s kingdom.
Such people are spiritually malnourished, perhaps even dead, after suckling at the swollen teats of American civil religion, that secular, bastardized gospel which subverts Jesus’ kingdom values while substituting the depraved values of this fallen world.
God’s kingdom is what truly matters. The church is its citizenry. All of which entails much, much more than simply “getting people saved.”
Saved for what?
Jesus calls us to love indiscriminately. To prioritize people in need, no matter who they are. Yes, personal acts of benefaction are crucial, but that is not enough. The scale of America’s social problems is so vast that our government must play a major role in rectifying our problems. Only true citizens of the kingdom of God possess the vision necessary for developing the required solutions.
Will a mass movement of the Christian church stand up to demand that our government take greater and greater steps towards mercy and justice for all?
My title for this post is an attempt at summarizing a current online debate, involving Greg Gilbert, Scott McKight and others, about the nature of the Gospel message in the New Testament.
Honestly, I don’t follow “theological debates” online for a variety of reasons that I won’t go into here, so I confess that I am only responding to a good post I read today at Patheos from Michael Bird. (This is a very old, very tired debate.)
Michael is an excellent New Testament scholar, and I recommend that you read his new post, especially if you have been following the debate online. Michael is spot on in his conclusions.
(As a side-note, I originally tried to hook my blog up with the Patheos blog site, but couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to do it. Given the site’s drift towards right-wing craziness, it was probably for the best.)
“Gilbert wants to make the cross and a transaction within the atonement the centre of the gospel with kingdom and kingship as a kind of back story. McKnight and Bates emphasize Jesus’s kingship, Israel’s story, fulfilment of Scripture with justification and forgiveness as benefits of the gospel. Gilbert is not entirely absent of kingdom/kingship, but neither are McKnight and Bates arguing for ‘mere kingship.’
“Truth be told, I think that Bates and McKnight have the better end of the argument in terms of what the NT emphasizes. If one surveys Acts 2:29-36, 13:32-33, Rom 1:3-4, 1 Cor 15:3-4, and 2 Tim 2:8 then it is pretty hard to deny the fact that the gospel is a king Jesus gospel – it is a bit of slam dunk for my mind. The gospel is a royal summons to believe and obey Jesus as God’s messianic king, a king who has shown his might and power by laying down his life for his people to make them right, forgiven, and reconciled, etc. Or, as I define the gospel in my Evangelical Theology: ‘The gospel is the announcement that God’s kingdom has come in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, the Lord and Messiah, in fulfillment of Israel’s Scriptures. The gospel evokes faith, repentance, and discipleship; its accompanying effects include salvation and the gift of the Holy Spirit.’”
Further on in his post, Michael addresses the New Testament passages that explain “justification by faith,” the touchstone for evangelical orthodoxy in many people’s minds.
I would only add to Michael’s argument by pointing out something that is widely overlooked: the apostle Paul only talks about “justification by faith” in those letters where he is combating some sort of Judaizing influence within the church. “Judaizers” were the folks who insisted that Gentiles must become good Jews in order to become real disciples of Jesus. This meant circumcision and adherence to the Torah.
So, Paul’s argument for “justification by faith alone apart from works (signifying works of the law)” always (maybe I should say only) arose in a very specific polemical environment. That does not offer much of a basis for insisting on its “centrality.”
To my mind the conclusion is pretty obvious.
Justification by faith was not the irreducible, central component to Paul’s way of understanding the work of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.
It was one important aspect of the gospel. But not its essence.
For both the root and the branch of the Good News, we must turn to Jesus of Nazareth. What was essential to him?
Read the New Testament Gospels and the answer becomes obvious: the Kingdom of God and the Lordship of Jesus over God’s kingdom.
Today’s edition of Haaretz has an editorial by Fiyaz Mughal explaining the religious logic of Muslim fundamentalists – extremists (to use his word) who are using the corona virus pandemic as a recruitment tool. The headline reads “Jews and Apostate Muslims Deserve Punishment.”
Click on the title above for the entire article. Or read an excerpt below:
” . . . extremist individuals and groups are using this period of trepidation to try and promote hatred, racism and extremism. Their narratives are simple and sound much like a broken record, though they will have some traction with the disaffected, misinformed and unaware. They are feeding off fear, and – especially for modern societies – the unusual and dispiriting experience of individual powerlessness in the face of the pandemic.
“The narratives espoused by Muslim extremists are depressingly familiar: the ‘other’ is blamed. One target is inevitably history’s favorite scapegoat, the Jews. But ordinary Muslims are in the extremists’ sights as well. . . .
“As Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, director of research at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism notes, ‘Jihadis see the [coronavirus as] manifestation of the wrath of God, both upon the non-believers for their rejection of God’s law and crimes against Muslims, and upon those Muslims who have forsaken the duty of Jihad.'”
In a similar vein, the internet is swamped these days with US church “leaders” proclaiming a similar, if not identical, message.
Obviously, one religion’s fundamentalists are not much different from another’s.
Whether “Muslim” or “Christian,” jihadists all sound alike.
I’ll offer only one example. You can easily find more if you look. Watch the clip below:
So, what’s the difference between this man and an ISIS spokesman?
The tightly woven communities of Haredi (Ultra-Orthodox) Jews in Israel are being devastated by the covid19 pandemic. Their neighborhoods are the nation’s “hot spots” for this contagion.
Check out any of these recent articles from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz — here, here, and here).
The explanation for this tragedy is simple: insular, anti-intellectual religion very similar to American Fundamentalism.
First, Haredi families do not allow their children to attend school with “unfaithful unbelievers,” which includes non-Haredi Jews. Their children are required to attend Haredi religious schools with strict curricula where they can only mingle with other Haredi children.
Second, the Haredi curriculum excludes the study of modern science so their communities are ignorant of even the most basic knowledge of modern medicine. In addition, they are forbidden from listening to the radio or watching TV. They live in an information bubble.
Third, they are convinced that faith and Torah will always keep them safe. A firm enough belief in God, the authority of Scripture, and their tradition is all they need to be protected from infection.
Of course, this means that they must continue to gather together in the synagogues for services.
The government finally is deploying soldiers to Haredi neighborhoods in order to enforce government quarantine orders. These soldiers are frequently attacked, physically, by the devout who accuse them of being Nazis and the enemies of religious freedom.
Does any of this sound familiar?
Soldiers in Tel Aviv challenging Haredi man. Haredi folks have been very slow to wear face masks
Now, thousands upon thousands of these fervent believers are now dying, notin spite of their faith, but because of their faith.
I know. A fringe of religious-right, anti-Semitic nutcases are saying that their suffering is God’s punishment for being Jews. (Oh dear Jesus, please deliver your church from such destructive, apostate imbeciles. Amen.)
The obvious American parallel to this part of the Israeli story is seen in the U.S. pastors and churches that continue to defy the medical advice coming from places like the Center for Disease Control and the National Institute for Health by continuing to hold weekly services.
Jerry Falwell, Jr. is good friends with Fox & Friends, is as president Trump
Or University presidents such as Jerry Falwell, Jr. at Liberty University, who parroted Fox New/president Trump talking points about the covid warnings being a “hoax” propagated by “Trump haters” and now insists on keeping the university open.
I cannot help but wonder how many of their followers are living inside their
own information bubbles, sealed off from the rest of the world by the disabling combination of Fox News with a heavy dose of Christian radio and TV.
Many of them subject to an irrational fear – propagated by their leaders – that our government is just waiting for the chance to shut down Christian
Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne leads his congregation during a service Sunday, March 29, 2020 at The River at Tampa Bay Church. [Photo from Facebook]churches.
I am sure that most of us are now familiar with the mug shot of Rodney Howard-Browne, the mega-church pastor arrested for endangering his Tamp Bay congregation by continuing to hold church services.
Please, if your pastor is anything like Howard-Browne or Jerry Falwell, I urge you to find another church (or synagogue).
I had obviously taken the wrong bus. I thought I was going to the Kenyan Museum of Natural History. Instead, I was let out on the side of a road facing a large open savanna with a few scattered trees. I decided to try again tomorrow, but in the meantime, the savanna was new to me and waiting to be explored.
As I wandered into the grass, I quickly noticed a woman off in the distance praying beneath a tree. She was shouting with a loud voice in Swahili with her arms in the air. I decided to pray for her. Having no idea to whom she might be praying, I asked the Lord Jesus to show himself to her if she were praying to another deity, and to bless her with positive answers to her prayers if she were praying to him.
Wandering further into the open grassland, I discovered a large warthog who seemed quite comfortable with approaching strangers. So, I sat down close enough to share in his morning activities. After all, how often does one get a chance to share a seat with a wild warthog?
I communed with my new, multi-tusked friend for no more than a few minutes when the woman who was praying approached me and asked to sit with me. I said, Yes, of course, and asked her about her morning prayers.
A smile spread across her face as she told me about her relationship with Jesus Christ and her desire to preach the gospel, in America if possible. I quickly began to ask about the Lord’s work in her life. How did she become a follower of Jesus? Where did she live? What about her family?
I then heard a very sad but revealing story about faith and suffering.
She lived in the nearby slum; tin roofs covering cardboard shanties
A Nairobi slum bordering opulence
bordering the prairie just visible on the horizon. She had been a Christian for about one year. During that time, her husband had left her and taken away her children. He and his family objected to her faith in Christ and wanted nothing to do with her. The children were forbidden to see her.
She shared one successive story of heartbreak after another, yet each chapter of her loss was punctuated by some declaration about the goodness of God; how much He loved her, and how much he had done for her.
Eventually, my curiosity got the better of me. The details of her story were tragic. While the statements about the Lord’s goodness were non-specific. I finally asked, “Can you tell me about one specific way in which God has shown His goodness to you recently?”
She paused. I waited. After several moments of thought, she looked at me, smiled and said, “My heavenly Father sent His one and only Son to die on the cross and rise again so that He can forgive me of all my sins. Since my Father has done that for me, what more does He ever need to do to show me His goodness?”
I knew in that moment I was sitting in the presence of an African Saint.
Here was a poverty-stricken, maligned and persecuted disciple of Jesus who was also filled with the joy of the Lord. She was daily experiencing the power of Christ’s resurrection and the hope of eternal life made possible by Easter morning.
She was suffering but not beaten down; oppressed but not defeated. The world had been against her, but she knew that Christ was for her, and that was enough.
That woman will forever provide a model for me to emulate. I have never had reason to weep as she had. Yet, her eyes and her heart were set on Jesus, and no one could wipe the overflowing joy from her face.
I pray that this Easter season, I will take a few more steps to becoming more and more like her.
(This is the third in a series of posts addressing questions about the cultural captivity of the church. You can read the previous posts here and here.)
During my last semester as a college professor, I came across a surprising article in the weekly student newspaper. At least, I found it surprising; though in retrospect, I should have been known better.
It was a detailed review of a newly released computer game. I didn’t pay any attention to the game’s title because I was so caught off guard by the fact that the student newspaper at a Christian college had no qualms about praising, and encouraging others to buy, the latest graphic game of military slaughter.
The reviewer described in bloody detail the game’s improved graphics, enhancements that depicted the bloodshed more realistically than ever. (I wondered how he knew what realistic blood splatter looked like.) The game was the newest “first person shooter” game. (That is, a game where the player holds the computer gun in his/her hand, then points and shoots at human figures on the screen in order to survive and accumulate points).
All in living color, of course.
I initially considered writing a letter to the editor to express my dismay, but I thought better of it. Why not wait to see if anyone else shared my dismay.
No one did, apparently. Or, perhaps they were biting their tongues like me. Several weeks passed with no response.
So, I devised a better plan. I would submit my own article reviewing the latest version of my favorite sex game. (No, I have never played any such thing, but I assume that they must exist. My imagination was not strained at all by concocting one ex nihilo.)
My review would go on and on in effusive detail praising the graphic depictions of the female (or the male) anatomy – in living color, no less – and the many arcane, sexual positions available as the player scored more and more points by scoring with more and more sexual partners.
Then, at the end of my imaginary review, I would admit to my satire and ask a simple question: Why, dear reader, are you preparing to write a letter to condemn my fictitious review when you had nothing to say about an earlier review glorifying a graphic, bloodthirsty game of war, complete with exploding bodies and crushed skulls?
What kind of moral calculus is that?
I wish I had gone through with my plan, but I didn’t. It was my final semester before moving on, and I didn’t quite have the energy needed for another campus-wide controversy. In my experience, many readers of that particular newspaper had difficulty recognizing, much less appreciating, the art of satire. And my days as an educator were coming to an end.
But my questions remain.
Why is bloodshed and human slaughter, the kind of violent acts that our Lord Jesus explicitly prohibits, so much more acceptable to Christian people than images of nudity and sexuality?
No, I am not diminishing the destructive power of pornography. But is pornography any more corrosive to the human psyche, any more more dehumanizing for those who participate in it than a blood-thirsty killing game that transforms a player into a butcher, that desensitizes him to the horrors of murder, pain and human suffering?
At least sexual intercourse was God’s idea, and He blessed it with the bonds of marriage.
But human violence arose from the sulpherous heart of original sin. Our Creator rendered his eternal verdict over this brand of wickedness when He cursed the first murderer, Cain, and banished his blood-stained hands from his presence.
Does the church think or act any differently than the rest of our violent society when it comes to this problem of casual, gaming violence? Murder as entertainment?
I don’t know the definitive answer to this question, but I suspect that on average, we are no different than anyone else in the neighborhood who relaxes after school (or work) by watching a computer screen filled with atrocious, bloody acts of human carnage created by yours truly.
Lt. Col. Dave Grossman has written a fascinating and disturbing book examining the psychological effects of violent video games on children and adolescents. It’s entitled Assassination Generation: Video Games, Aggression, and the Psychology of Killing (Little, Brown and Co., 2016).
Grossman excerpts the findings of a medical report presented to Congress in July 2000 by a coalition of 4 professional medical, psychiatric and pediatric associations. Their congressional report concluded that:
“Well over 1,000 studies…point overwhelmingly to a causal connection between media violence and aggressive behavior in some children…[V]iewing entertainment violence can lead to increases in aggressive attitudes, values and behavior, particularly in children. Its effects are measurable and long-lasting…[it] can lead to emotional desensitization toward violence in real life.” (10-11)
Grossman also compares first-person shooter games to the military training methods used to desensitize soldiers to killing on command. He says:
“Violent video games teach kids to kill using the same mechanisms of classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and social learning employed to train soldiers.”
What happens when a depressed teenager who is addicted to violent video games and feels that the entire world has become his enemy grabs a family gun and walks to the local mall?
We all know the answer to that question. We have seen on TV time and again.
Sadly, this is the kind of world we live in.
What are the people of God doing to address the social plague of daily violence traumatizing our school children? Placing armed guards inside our churches is the devil’s own suggestion, though I have seen and read about many churches doing just that.
But surely, everyone can understand, that is not the way of Jesus.
We need to examine ourselves and confess to the many ways in which we have eagerly conformed to a godless society. We are unable to find wisdom in the mind of Christ because we are too busy entertaining ourselves (for hours and hours) with the latest version of Call of Duty and Modern Warfare 2. So, we turn to armed guards instead of the Spirit of compassion.
Ask yourself this question. Can you imagine Jesus sitting for hours in front of a computer screen, laughing with glee and giving himself high-fives over his rising body count as he plays Call of Duty: Black Ops?
How many throats could Jesus slit?
The question answers itself.
It is long past time for God’s people to return their eyes to Jesus, the lamb of God, prince of peace, our suffering servant who came not to kill but to be killed. What does he ask of his church today?
(This is the second in a series of posts that I am calling The Cultural Captivity of the Church. You can find the first posthere.)
I recently attended a Sunday morning service where the sermon topic intended to answer the question, “why do we sing together during worship?” (Check out my series about the Biblical understanding of worship vocabulary here.)
The message had three points. We sing “worship” songs together because it:
Stirs our faith.
Helps us to remember the truth.
Connects our emotions to the truth.
At no point was there any discussion of the lyrics or the content of these songs; of the importance of understanding and reflecting on the words we are saying, and whether they are appropriate words; of how or why the words we repeat may help or actually hinder us in remembering and becoming emotionally connected to “the truth.” (The clear implication was that we simply trust our worship leaders and sing – with more enthusiasm and raised hands, no less – whatever we are shown on the big screen.)
Don’t misunderstand me. I do not begrudge the fact that each of these things may happen when we participate in well-planned, well-led, congregational singing with meaningful content. And I agree that they are three important experiences when song leaders lead well.
But notice the final outcome of this three-point outline.
From beginning to end, the message is entirely self-centered.
The clear implication is that we attend congregational worship and sing praise songs purely and simply because of what it does for us.
So, I should go to church because of what I can expect to get out of it. I worship my God because of the things that I expect him to do for me.
The further implication, then, suggests that I can determine whether or not a service “has been a good worship service” by how it makes me feel. Did it excite me? Did it make me feel happy, or elated, or boisterous, or whatever – fill in the blank here.
In fact, the message’s final application was a rather guilt-manipulating insistence upon louder singing from more people with many more hands lifted higher into the air. Apparently, the outward measure of worship “acceptable to the Lord” is measured by our conformity to denominational traditions about public, physical gesturing and emotional elation.
I couldn’t help but wonder what a Roman Catholic visitor might say about the absence of their traditional kneeling benches and the fact that this church never provides time for a congregation of sinners collectively to confess their sins.
I am sorry, but devoid of any broader context reminding us of God’s holiness (see my series on holiness here), of God’s majesty and his worthiness of our adoration, such messages are nothing more than lessons in religious self-gratification. (Note – the speaker did offer a 30-second introduction about glorifying God. But it was so brief, so hurried and so undeveloped that the speaker left the impression that God’s nature was incidental to the things he had to say about music.)
Why do I offer this Sunday sermon as my first illustration of the cultural captivity of the American church?
In 1966 Philip Rieff, a professor of sociology at the University of
Prof. Philip Rieff
Pennsylvania, wrote an extremely insightful book entitled, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud (check out the 40th anniversary edition, published by ISI Books in 2006).
Reiff was a keen social critic who observed a self-destructive trend in American society. According to Reiff, the public role of traditional, Western religion had been to function as a faith community that defended (and even enforced) moral standards and ethical expectations in society.
But American life after Freud had begun to shift dramatically.
In post-Freudian America, the purpose of all religion was purely therapeutic; that is, religion is now supposed to cure our ills, not point out our wrongs. How will we know when that’s happened? The church will become a principle agent in teaching us to feel good about ourselves. Our spiritual, that is, egocentric, dreams will be realized.
Let me share a taste of Reiff as he first quotes and then critiques a British spokesman for this new “therapeutic Christianity”:
“’Any religious exercise is justified only by being something men [sic] do for themselves, that is, for the enrichment of their own experience.’ Attached as [this writer] is to the word ‘Christian,’ the writer even seeks to make Jesus out to be a therapeutic…
“What then should churchmen do? The answer returns clearly: become, avowedly, therapists, administrating a therapeutic institution – under the justificatory mandate that Jesus himself was the first therapeutic. For the next culture needs therapeutic institutions…
“Both East and West are now committed, culturally as well as economically, to the gospel of self-fulfillment…Grudgingly, [church leaders] must give way to their Western laity and translate their sacramental rituals into comprehensible terms as therapeutic devices.”
Sadly, professor Reiff was a secular prophet. Though he lamented this social transformation (rooted in an American abuse of Freudian psychology) as the growth of an “anti-human” culture, his predictions have been realized.
Worse yet, American Christianity jumped on board this therapeutic railway, stoked its engines to overflowing and commandeered the controls.
Rather than challenging our culture, we have surrendered to it, replacing the glorified Lamb of God with a cosmic therapist whose greatest achievement is to help us ensure our emotional well-being.
Rather than proclaim the gospel of Christ which confronts a culture of self-centeredness, we float with the prevailing current wherever it takes us, as long as it helps us fill the seats, maintain the budget and grow the church.
And to add agony to agony, we are such inept students of our times, so unreflective, so lacking in self-awareness, and so ignorant of Biblical theology and church history that many evangelical leaders are dining happily with the devil while imagining they are exorcising the demonic.
(This is the first in an unspecified number of posts that I will periodically produce addressing what I believe is the #1 silent killer of Christian faith in America: the average believer’s failure to recognize the dangerous, cultural smog polluting our spiritual lungs every single day. The posts will consist of various thoughts as they emerge from the mists of my own mental confusion. I have been thinking about the issues involved for a long time, but have held off on posting my thoughts for reasons that I no longer feel are binding. So here goes. Please, let me know what you think.)
Here is my thesis:
A primary responsibility of every Christian leader in every Christian congregation is to help God’s people learn to see through the lies, distortions and misrepresentations of reality that are created for us by our culture. (I begin by assuming that knowing reality fully requires knowing Jesus Christ.)
The most dangerous distortions are those that warp our perception of the things that matter most – questions of human existence, meaning, purpose, responsibility, and, of course, a right relationship with our Creator.
So here is every Christian’s challenge: We spend the majority of our lives
swimming through an unfiltered stream of cultural pollution. No, I am not condemning all things secular. Neither am I suggesting that we should try to jump into a different, a more Christian, stream. I am afraid that’s not possible, despite the testimonies of its many proponents.
I am afraid that we are what we are where we are. Period.
Our culture permeates everything, usually in ways that we don’t understand or even begin to recognize. Which is one important reason why the oft-repeated arguments in favor of solving our cultural problems by creating an alternative, Christian culture with Christian schools, Christian unions, Christian political parties, etc. is always doomed to fail.
These attempts at “engagement by means of alternatives” will always fail to address the problem because, first, we cannot extricate ourselves from ourselves. We will always be the people creating the alternatives. We are bound to who we are, where we are, and where we come from, alternatives be damned.
Secondly, even if we withdrew into the hinterlands of the furthest wilderness, we will always bring the pollution along with us. The source of that pollution is a part of us, buried deep within, because we are all fallen sinners.
Thankfully, this life is not painted solely in tones of black and white. The question is not about who is good and who is bad. Everyone and everything in this world are always a mixture of both.
Even a polluted stream can contain elements of its original, God-ordained balance, the biological diversity including fish, insect life and vegetation that makes it all worth preserving.
Sadly, however, those polluted fish now have no choice but to breathe the dirty water, inhaling the pollutants along with the oxygen. Human beings have so successfully polluted this planet that scientists can find mercury polluting the flesh of those flightless, tuxedoed birds coddling their eggs on the ice flows of Antarctica.
We are like those penguins and those fish.
The church’s cultural corruption is every bit as universal, which is why working to learn how to recognize the problem, working to learn how to address the problem, working to learn how to remedy the problem together within the Body of Christ is an essential part of spiritual maturity.
It is also a non-negotiable requirement of responsible church leadership.
Every Christian leader ought to be making this challenge a central ingredient in his/her job description. How do I recognize cultural corruption within the church? How do I learn to see it within myself? How can I help others to do the same? Then, having learned to recognize it, what can we do about it?
How can we survive swimming in this culture without being suffocated by its corruption? And, in what, precisely, does its corruption consist?
These are the kinds of questions we have to ask ourselves.
I’ll give you a hint of where I’m going with this argument.
The usual suspects of sex, divorce, alcohol, and tithing are the not church’s greatest threats. They are significant problems, but they are not the “heavy metals” of our cultural corruption. They are only the bacteria that eat away at a weakened body already diseased.
their support of the “pro-life” movement, their fight for staff-led prayer in public schools, and their hostility against equal rights legislation for LGBT human beings.
everyone claiming to be a disciple of Jesus actually “fixes their eyes on Jesus,” as the writer to the Hebrews insists we should (12:2).
describe the movement. As many others have pointed out, the pro-life movement is not actually pro-life. It is anti-abortion and pro-birth, but the movement’s pro-life interests vanish quickly once a baby is delivered.
of bi-partisan mass incarceration laws filling our jails and prisons with people of color who are slapped down by onerous convictions, while white people – especially wealthy white people – receive a slap on the wrist for committing identical offenses. This country’s “injustice system” has become a calcified showcase for the most racist, Jim Crow artifacts in a nation where all people are not equal before the law.
collected more cocaine stashed comfortably in the sleek suit pockets of hedge fund managers than they ever discovered in the hands of African-Americans walking to the market.
Let’s call such public behavior for what it really is, especially when it is endorsed by a majority of evangelicals: grotesque displays of hypocrisy, partisan blindness, and anti-Christian thinking.
long line of anti-Christs. He is a parasite who has attached himself to the Religious Right in order to exploit their evangelical base for his own political benefit.
For both the root and the branch of the Good News, we must turn to Jesus of Nazareth. What was essential to him?
headline reads “
are required to attend Haredi religious schools with strict curricula where they can only mingle with other Haredi children.
her arms in the air. I decided to pray for her. Having no idea to whom she might be praying, I asked the Lord Jesus to show himself to her if she were praying to another deity, and to bless her with positive answers to her prayers if she were praying to him.
vocabulary 
congregational singing with meaningful content. And I agree that they are three important experiences when song leaders lead well.
lifted higher into the air. Apparently, the outward measure of worship “acceptable to the Lord” is measured by our conformity to denominational traditions about public, physical gesturing and emotional elation.
therapeutic; that is, religion is now supposed to cure our ills, not point out our wrongs. How will we know when that’s happened? The church will become a principle agent in teaching us to feel good about ourselves. Our spiritual, that is, egocentric, dreams will be realized.
distortions and misrepresentations of reality that are created for us by our culture. (I begin by assuming that knowing reality fully requires knowing Jesus Christ.)
to address the problem because, first, we cannot extricate ourselves from ourselves. We will always be the people creating the alternatives. We are bound to who we are, where we are, and where we come from, alternatives be damned.
dirty water, inhaling the pollutants along with the oxygen. Human beings have so successfully polluted this planet that scientists can find mercury polluting the flesh of those flightless, tuxedoed birds coddling their eggs on the ice flows of Antarctica.