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ultimatecranston · 4 years

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Lamenting and Responding (and More)

Haven't written much in while, but I am repurposing this email/letter I sent Saturday to folks in the Christian Political Response group that I started back in 2017. It's audience is intended to be Christians, but it's non-exclusive and reveals some of my thinking.

How to process what we’re seeing in Minneapolis and elsewhere:

· Jonathan Walton and his Experiential Discipleship team at InterVarsity have put together a collection of foundational resources, including a Liturgy for the Lament of Racial Injustice and a document to help us process and respond to the murder of Ahmaud Arbery (sadly, tragically and infuriatingly, we’ve seen multiple more examples since).

· New Life Fellowship Church in Queens is hosting a Grace & Race Webinar on Thursday, June 4, from 6-8p ET. You can register here.

· Redeemer members and attenders may be interested in Redeemer’s Grace and Race Ministry’s statement on this subject here.

Reflections: I haven’t done a lot of reflective writing recently due to work and school commitments (and some laziness), but I wanted to put some things down on paper, so feel free to read or not, but these are my own thoughts, ideas and opinions on topics related to faith and politics. These are a bit hodgepodge, so I apologize in advance.

Qualified immunity: If there is a legislative or judicial policy change that could come out of the continued evidence of police brutality (often race-based), then it might be a roll back on qualified immunity protections. Though this wouldn’t do the heart transformation of the gospel, it would change incentives in a way that could save lives and protect civil rights. Qualified immunity is judge-made law that provides legal privilege for certain types of government officials (including police officers), which often makes it very difficult for victims of civil rights abuses at the hands of these protected officials to receive justice.

You can find calls to end qualified immunity from publications as politically diverse at The New Republic and National Review and two very different Supreme Court justices – Sonia Sotomayor and Clarence Thomas – have expressed problems with this legal doctrine. The Supreme Court is considering 13 different cases that involved qualified immunity and could announce as early as Monday that it will take up one or more of the cases (9 of the 13 cases involve police violation of civil rights, often violently, some lethally). Let’s pray the Supreme Court grants cert for these cases and considers them in good faith.

Putting yourself in scripture: In the Ahmaud Arbery link from Jonathan Walton above is an activity where we write ourselves into scripture, for instance, through psalms of lament. Related, The Park Forum published a devotional yesterday (recalling another post from 2018) called “How to Read Prophetic Judgment.” In it, John Tillman notes that we like to be the subject of comforting prophecy, but we put others in the path of afflicting prophecy. From Isaiah 30:12-13:

Because you have rejected this message,

relied on oppression

and depended on deceit,

this sin will become for you

like a high wall, cracked and bulging,

that collapses suddenly, in an instant.

It’s easy to interpret this passage in our time as judgment on the United States, judgment for the nation’s original sins and the inability of its espoused tenants (often built on lies) to overcome the sin that dwells deeply within it (book plug for 12 Lies That Hold America Captive by Jonathan Walton). That all may be true, but I fail to be transformed by the gospel when I refuse to admit that that I am the “you” in that scripture, that I have rejected this message and that my sin is like a high wall, cracked and bulging, that collapses in an instant.

I pray that we make sincere efforts to not assume that it’s all the bad people who are “you” – that they’re the ones being judged. G.K. Chesterton once was said have responding to the question, “What’s wrong with the world?” with the answer “I am.” This is the sort of humility that our discourse needs right now, and Christians are uniquely situated to provide it, but we fail so often.

On hypocrisy: Speaking of failing to live up to our standards or possibilities, I want to put in a good word for hypocrisy. I am well aware that Jesus makes a point of calling out the hypocrisy of the Pharisees (see Matthew 23). The Pharisees were espousing one set of virtues and then intentionally using those espoused virtues as a cudgel to oppress the poor and profit at their expense. That kind of hypocrisy is definitely bad, and even the hypocrisy I’m about to describe is certainly not good, but let me explain.

A hypocrite is someone who proclaims moral virtues while living a life that doesn’t match those proclamations. By that standard, we are all hypocrites. As Christians – and as humans – we all have deeply held beliefs about what’s good and right, and we all daily fail to live up to those virtues. Max Scheler was both an ethicist and a womanizer, and, when questioned about this hypocrisy, he argued that “the sign that shows the way to Boston doesn’t have to go there in order to do something useful for the rest of us.”

Obviously, the calling for a Christian is higher than the calling for a German ethicist. It’s not just good enough to say what’s right and to point to Jesus as the ultimate fulfillment of virtue and truth. We are also called to testify to our changed lives and the power of the gospel to do so. I fear, though, in this age when “authenticity” is considered superior to righteousness, that we who are wrapped up in our culture are too fearful to proclaim gospel virtues because we can’t live up to them. But when we mix our proclamation of virtue in the public square (and with friends, family and co-workers) with a humble testimony of failure and sinfulness, we can start to transform our culture. We see this powerfully modeled by Paul in Romans 7, and he was never one to shrink from the public square.

On news, disruption and truth: In an age of instantaneous reactions and viral videos (some of which give a one-sided depiction of events intended to provoke and enflame), I encourage us (and myself especially) to eschew the 24-hour news cycle, particularly if you’re finding that news reports are not driving you to scripture and prayer. Sometimes I obsess over being informed but just end up anxious and, while being anxious, getting a very shallow perspective of reality via social media.

This summer, our small group is reading a book by Alan Noble called Disruptive Witness, “disruption” being having a double meaning in reference to our disrupted, distracted lives and also the way we need to witness disruptively due to the post-Christian culture that many of our secular friends grew up in and have been hardened by. Saying no to a culture of disruption by avoiding the social media-driven news cycle is one way to be counter-cultural and also to bring your household some peace and calm.

There is one new outlet that I think demonstrates how to cover politics and current events without forsaking depth or succumbing to the pull of click-bait content. It’s called The Dispatch, and for those of you looking for some dissonance in your news (without the bad faith of FOX News), the conservative Dispatch might be a good place for you to find news analysis and political/legal podcasts. It’s run by men and women of good faith in a world where there are plenty of trolls and bad-faith actors, and I think it’s important that we have outlets like this, even if your politics don’t align with it. For instance:

· In his newsletters, David French gives a nuanced perspective on the complicated history of evangelicalism and abortion rights;

· French debunks some of the legal fallacies that led far-right Twitter to say that Ahmaud Arbery was killed in self-defense;

· In a podcast episode, foreign policy expert Thomas Joscelyn discusses U.S. foreign policy (especially in relation to China) with hosts Sarah Isgur and Steve Hayes.

Final words: If you made it this far, well, that’s surprising. I pray for safety for you and your family, for your transformation daily via the gospel and scripture, and I pray for our institutions – the family, the church, the government, the media, the academy and more – to be restored as formative places that seek the public good rather than self-serving platforms for personal aggrandizement. We’re very far from there. Lord help us!

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ultimatecranston · 8 years

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Why are so many evangelical Christians supporting Trump?

Oct. 15, 2016

The headline of this post is a question I have been asked often the last few months, and indeed Donald Trump has held his support among white evangelicals even as other demographics have abandoned him in the last week. What I think the questioners are really asking is, “How can a large subset of the population that professes to espouse family values, sexual purity, charity, honesty and repentance support a presidential candidate who shows very little evidence of believing in any of those principles and, indeed, often mocks them?”

It’s a good question, and it’s one that, I’m sure, political scientists will study for years, regardless of the result on Nov. 8. I am not equipped to offer a definitive answer, but as a Christian -- an evangelical, born-again, whatever loaded term you want to assign to me -- and as someone who has scoured the news and social media to understand and learn more about the forces shaping this election cycle, I am attempting this response.

Religion in the public square

Let’s start with some groundwork: the idea of bringing our religious, deeply held values into the public square. This is something against which secular people have warned for centuries. They insist that, in order to have civil dialogue about politics or culture or anything else, we need to keep religion out of it. One’s religion, they insist, should be a private matter, kept within the walls of your home and place of worship. Allowing it to inform your viewpoints only unnecessarily muddies and charges the debate.

It’s an argument that held sway for years, especially among people of my parents’ generation. Religion, to them, is something they don’t want brought up at dinner parties or in televised debates or from the pulpit. It’s personal, they say.

There are two problems with this idea, as noble as its intentions may have been:

1) It’s impossible. If you are a religious person who seriously believes in the religion you follow, it cannot help but alter how you see everything. My church has a saying that the gospel -- the good news that Jesus came and died for our sins so that we have the hope of eternal life -- changes everything. It changes how we relate to our friends and our co-workers, our spouses and our children, how we think about the books we read, the movies we watch, the way we spend our time and money, and of course, it transforms how we believe our nation would best flourish.

2) Everyone is religious. This is something that I didn’t really think about until I started attending my church here in New York. People often think that there are those who have religious beliefs and those who don’t -- the religious and the secular. Science can’t even prove that human rights are a good thing. There are a lot of things that every person believes about how we make a great society that cannot be empirically proved. Sure, there might be sociological studies that are convincing to some, but societies change and studies are just that -- they’re not science.

If I say it’s good for us to force companies that contribute to pollution to pay for their pollution through taxes, cap and trade regulations, etc., and you say, no, we need to encourage business to grow so that people have jobs, and the cost of that is for society to foot the bill for that pollution, we have two different perspectives. Neither can be empirically proven to be right in the same way that we can prove how photosynthesis works. These are political positions built out of our personal views on what’s best for society. They are based on beliefs, on faith, if you will.

Correlation vs. causation

So, none of us are able to keep our faith beliefs out of the public square, but I still haven’t addressed how the faith beliefs of evangelical Christians have informed their political positions.

There is a lot of correlation rather than causation here. Katharine Hayhoe is an atmospheric scientist and a professor of political science at Texas Tech University. She’s also an evangelical Christian who is married to a pastor. She was recently profiled in the New York Times.

She wrote a piece for Prairie Fire Newspaper called “Climate, Politics, and Religion.” In it, she talks about the constant pushback she got as a professor in Texas who described the truth of human-caused climate change, something that 97 percent of scientists agree on. Nonetheless, the numbers show an obvious link between religious affiliation and climate change concern.

What Hayhoe shows, however, is that the link is really between Christianity -- specifically Christians who are white -- and conservatism, rather than a causal tie between Christianity and climate change itself. It’s not so much that Christians don’t believe in the science behind climate change; it’s that conservatives don't, and the lion’s share of evangelicals who identify as conservative take the conservative political position. Liberal Christians are not troubled by the idea that climate change is real and serious.

Why are evangelical Christians so conservative?

This leads us into the next question: Why are evangelical Christians so conservative? The conservatism of evangelicals as a political bloc has been a reality in America for so long (perhaps four decades, if not more) that it seems like a silly question to pose. In fact, the relationship between the Republican Party and Christianity in America is so strong that, when my sister-in-law came to the United States from overseas to go to college last decade, she asked her sister (my wife), “If I’m a Christian, does that mean I have to like Bush?”

(Forgive me if my political history in what’s ahead is not ironclad.)

It wasn’t that long ago -- well, maybe 40 years is a long time -- when Jimmy Carter, an evangelical Christian from the South, was elected president as a Democrat. A lot of politicians speak the language of Christian belief, but if there is any modern president who has walked the walk of his faith, it is Carter. Simply examine how he has spent his time since leaving the presidency -- his work for peace on so many foreign-policy fronts, his work with Habitat for Humanity and aid to developing nations. His faith wasn’t merely a ploy to get votes but an expression of sincere belief. (Side note: I seem to have a soft spot for “failed” presidents -- John Adams, Ulysses Grant, Carter.)

Even as Carter tried to serve the nation out of his faith -- an attempt the voters deemed a failure in 1980 -- his successor Ronald Reagan had already started reshaping conservatism’s relationship with Christianity. Before him, George Wallace and Richard Nixon used racial dog whistles like “law and order” as a signal to white people about a degrading society, Reagan used terms evangelicals would understand like a “shining city upon a hill,” a paraphrase of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in the gospel of Matthew, to tie together Christianity and politics in a more powerful way than ever before.

To Christians, most of whom saw the proliferation of abortion and the rise of the sexual revolution as terrible markers for the direction of society, Reagan’s message of positivity (“morning in America”) and the nation as a Christian example to the world was compelling. Though I don’t question the sincerity of Reagan’s faith, there’s plenty of evidence that his strategy was primarily politically motivated. He found a new way to rally a subset of the population -- some evolution of Nixon’s “silent majority” -- to get elected. On the other hand, although his record is rightly criticized in many ways, Hayhoe did point out, Reagan was quoted in 1984 as saying, “Preservation of our environment is not a partisan challenge; it’s common sense.”

That said, it was the Reagan Revolution that cemented an entangled alliance between conservatism and evangelical Christianity that has only deepened since. And when, in his first inaugural address, Reagan said, “Government isn’t the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” he -- it turned out -- pitted conservatism as the staunch opponent of government for at least the next 35 years. That line has now become a mantra for conservatives, who don’t bother to point out that the beginning of Reagan’s sentence was “In this present crisis.”

Over the years, as conservative thinking has evolved, government as the problem has slowly morphed, for some, into the establishment as the problem, that basically anyone who is in power is suspect, prone to conspire against us and is perhaps even a criminal or in office illegitimately.

That’s a problem exacerbated by how people get their news. A study from 2014 showed that 47 percent of conservatives get their news from Fox News and 88 percent of conservatives trust Fox News while distrusting 24 of the other 35 news sources named in the survey.

I sometimes wonder what I would think about politics and who I would be voting for if I got all my news from Fox News, Breitbart, Drudge, etc. Of course, many would say that my sources for news -- The New York Times, Slate, The Washington Post are part of this larger media conspiracy. I am an avid reader of conservative thinkers like David Brooks and Ross Douthat, but to a tea party member or Trump supporter, they are sellouts, stooges of the liberal media conspiracy.

Finally we arrive at 2016 and Donald Trump. If you consider yourself a liberal or secular person, you might be thinking, sure, I can see why an evangelical Christian is conservative, but Trump is not conservative, and doesn’t his character and the tone of his campaign make him impossible for a moral Christian to support, no?

A Christian approach to politics

Here we hit on a central theme of Charles Drew’s book Public Faith: A Balanced Approach to Social and Political Action, which I discussed with my bible study group over the summer. Written to a Christian audience, Public Faith primarily attempts to answer two questions: 1) How do Christians meaningfully bring our gospel-based worldview into the public square? 2) How can the church be unified when it includes people on opposing sides of the political spectrum?

First, Drew encourages Christians not to panic because God rules over everything. Both sides are framing this election in apocalyptic terms -- such is the hate, fear and distrust that partisans feel about the other party’s nominee. A Christian, though, should never fall for that. We believe there is only one apocalypse, and that God is sovereign over that, just like he is over everything else.

Second, Drew encourages Christians to see God’s glory first and to seek it worldwide, not just in America. The America firstness of the Trump campaign should alarm Christians, who believe we are brothers and sisters with all people in all nations of the world. Psalm 97 reads, in part, “Let the earth be glad; let the distant shores rejoice.” To quote Drew, it does not read, “Let America be glad.”

Third, Drew warns against the idea of America as a Christian nation. He writes that America has never had the special relationship with God that Israel had in the Old Testament. Therefore, our goal must not be the “preservation of America” but the “revelation and exaltation of the name of God in whatever way he sees fit.”

Fourth, he encourages Christians to avoid two common extremes: “privatism” and “statism.” I described privatism without naming it earlier as a response to the secular call to keep faith out of the public square. This can lead to spirituality that is “personally engaging but culturally irrelevant.” But again, Christians believe the gospel changes everything, and that includes our culture.

Politically engaged people, however, tend to stray toward statism, wherein either everything is the government’s fault or the government can solve everything. It leads to things like stealth politics: for instance, judges running for office and not being public or even lying about their faith positions so that they can get on the bench and, say, uphold abortion restrictions. These tactics go against the gospel -- Drew writes that community life must be built, not imposed and that God cares about both means and ends.

Finally and most importantly, Drew encourages Christians to follow the Golden Rule. And here I’m either directly quoting or closely paraphrasing the author because the words are powerful. He writes that Christians often appear to be religiously self-serving when it comes to public life, but that Christians should defend non-Christians’ rights, committing to the God-given dignity of every person. Christian love is undergirded by Christ’s ability to promote his kingdom in any setting. We undermine our own religious freedom when our only agenda in politics is a selfish one.

Choosing up teams

I think a lot of the reason why evangelical Christians have not split from supporting Trump in large numbers is because many are putting their political identity ahead of what should be their primary identity -- a child of God, saved and forgiven by the grace of God.

Now that is harsh. I do think it’s possible to be an evangelical Christian and to vote for Trump without defying Drew’s principles. I’m not saying that all Christians who vote for Trump will have sold out their faith, but I do think we would have seen far more significant defections of Christians from the Trump camp -- much like we’ve seen from Mormons -- if we were all truly living out of Drew’s principles rather than just trying to get a win for our team.

(Christian friends of mine who are voting for Trump sent me this article, which argues why voting for Trump is a morally good choice for a Christian. The most convincing arguments have to do with judges’ impact on issues like religious liberty and abortion, and the rest primarily hits on conservative bedrocks, like lowering taxes, that don’t seem to have a direct connection to gospel-centered Christianity.)

The my team/your team aspect of politics has led to two camps that are more entrenched and less willing to hear reasonable opposing opinions or even acknowledge facts from opponents. Matthew Yglesias of Vox wrote about a new book by Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels called Democracy for Realists. It shows that political ideology can shift, but it primarily shifts with the team. My own analogy:

Al Gore was the voice of climate change for years. Al Gore was Bill Clinton’s vice president. I don’t like Bill Clinton. I don’t trust Bill Clinton. I don’t need to see the science to know that I’m on the opposite side of wherever Bill Clinton is on climate change.

It’s a troublesome reality, but it helps to explain why Christians who might otherwise disavow Trump find it impossible to do so. Love him or hate him -- he’s the captain of “our team” and we need our team to beat their team and their despised captain, Hillary Clinton.

Oh, Clinton. It wasn’t until a few months ago that I realized just how hated and distrusted Clinton is by a large swath of the population, a swath that goes well beyond just Trump supporters. I’ve never seen a candidate evoke such distaste in his or her opposition, something no doubt stoked by Trump’s rhetoric, but stoked out of glowing embers. This summer, when I was trying to come to grips with why so many people were still supporting Trump, whom I believed to be obviously unqualified to be President, the only intellectually satisfying answer was that so many people hate Clinton. And many Trump supporters believe her to be just as dangerous to the country as Trump -- for some good reasons, like her secrecy, hawkishness, coziness with the big banks; and for some questionable reasons, like her position within the established elite, a “pay-for-play” foundation and various conspiracy theories. She is the living embodiment of what many Republican partisans stand against.

More Christianity or less?

So, where does this leave us? It leaves me thinking about a Nichiolas Kristof column from Sept. 8 called “What Religion Would Jesus Belong To?” It’s a provocative headline, no doubt. He opens with the premise that modern religions, as practiced, hardly resemble their founders, a concept teased out in Brian D. McLaren’s book The Great Spiritual Migration, and quotes from McLaren form the heart of the column. Kristof links the increase in “nones” in America -- those with no religious affiliation -- to Christianity in America straying from Jesus’ vision.

Kristof points out that about half of self-identified Christians in America can’t name the four gospels or don’t know who Job is or, in the case of Catholics, don’t understand the teachings of the Eucharist. His solution is to fret less about doctrine. McLaren, for his part, advises worrying less about whether biblical miracles are literally true. They say, by doing so, we can spend more time tackling the human needs around us.

Just like with the seculars telling Christians to keep their beliefs out of the public square, I have no doubt that Kristof and McLaren’s encouragement to spend less time considering doctrine and miracles comes from laudable motives. At the same time, I couldn’t disagree more.

Let me get this straight: Kristof says Christians are spending too much time fretting about doctrine, but yet Christians don’t know who wrote the gospels? It doesn’t sound like self-identified Christians are spending much time at all on doctrine (although being able to identify the writers of the gospel is not a doctrine but a test of biblical knowledge).

McLaren says we should stop worrying about whether miracles are actually true but focus on what they meant. What they mean, if they’re not true, is that they are fables, that there is no powerful God behind them, so what’s the point of following what this impotent (perhaps non-existent?) God put down in a book? Is it even God’s book at that point?

Adhering to Kristof and McLaren's ideas would take us even further away from Jesus' teachings than the politicized or liberalized versions of American Christianity already have. I say, let’s do the opposite.

Kristof wants to get to the heart of Jesus’ message? Here it is: God’s love for his creation was so great that Jesus came -- leaving the perfect unity and community of the Trinity -- to live as a suffering human among people who mostly rejected him, including some of his closest friends. Then, instead of taking political power to establish an earthly kingdom where God’s law reigned and lawbreakers were punished, he died for his enemies. Why did he do it? Because he wanted a relationship with us. The only way God could bridge the gap between his perfect holiness and his sinful people was to take on the punishments -- the sin -- of those people and reestablish our relationship with him.

What does that grace, that love, do for our willingness to work for social justice and serve the poor? What does that do to our perspective on the importance of politics, political policies and our role in it? Everything, I’d say.

And miracles? If Jesus didn’t perform his miracles, particularly his final miracle -- rising from the dead -- than the religion is a fraud. Jesus gives us three options: he’s either a madman who believed he was God but wasn’t; or he was a manipulator that convinced some people he was God but wasn’t; or he was, nay is, God.

The first two options force us to reject Christianity out of hand. There’s no grace, no forgiveness of sins, no final judgment or reconciliation of God with his creation, no love that overwhelms and punishes evil. What use is any of that to help us live good lives, to live lives of integrity? No more use than a Mitch Albom book -- and even less use than that, since the author of our book would be a fraud. There’s no baby in that bathwater.

The miracles are essential. The doctrine is essential. They allow us to have hope that, no matter how the political process goes from now until Jesus returns, he will return and make all things right. We humans cannot bring on the apocalypse by the election of Trump (or Clinton). That’s what Christians should be proclaiming. We need more of that kind of hope, built on that kind of self-sacrificial love, in our political discourse. More of that will lead to better candidates, better policy, humbler discourse, more empathy.

This is how Christians should be meditating on and talking about this election. And since we’re not doing that, we deserve derision, we deserve charges of hypocrisy, we deserve to be maligned. We need to live out of our primary identity, and that is not Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal. It is sinner saved by grace.

#christianity #2016election

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