Living on the Outside

Living on the Outside

I live on the outside. I am a 5 on the Enneagram. That means, among other things, that I am the outsider. I know the Enneagram is right about that. For my entire life I’ve felt like the outsider in nearly every environment I’ve ever been in. My natural inclination is to stand on the outside of things and observe. I observe and analyze far more than I participate. Maybe that’s why I enjoy photography. The photographer is an observer of scenes not a participant in them. I don’t know why that’s how it is with me, it just is. It’s an important part of who I am and of who I’ve always been. I’ve always felt myself to be an outsider, but today in the land of my birth I feel more the outsider than ever. In recent days I’ve found myself wondering how I ever ended up living my life in a country with which I am so out of touch. To use Myers-Briggs terminology for my condition, I’m an INFP in an ESTJ culture. I’m pretty much the opposite of what most of American culture is. I guess that’s always been true, but today it feels more true than ever. Here are some of the ways that dominant American culture and I just don’t fit:

1. I value spiritual things over material things. I know that money can’t buy happiness. It can’t preserve youth. It can’t prevent death. The dominant American culture of which I am a part is all about making money. That old saying “the business of America is business” is true, and I am no kind of businessman. I don’t value commercial virtues. I can’t sell anything, and I don’t want to. Yet in my culture I cannot avoid being bombarded by SELL SELL SELL.  It drives me nuts. The mute button on my TV remote helps, but of course it can’t block out the selling altogether. In advertising I don’t typically see useful information, I see people trying to get my money to benefit them not me. The commercial world turns me off. I’ve always thought of business as what you do when you can’t do anything else, anything more worthwhile, like practice a profession (and contemporary usage to the contrary notwithstanding business is not a profession), like be a doctor, or a teacher, or a pastor. Spirituality has to do with relationships, and in true spirituality the other in your relationship, be it God, or a spouse, or a child, or frankly anyone else, is more important than you are. Spirituality is about losing yourself in relationship. American culture is about aggrandizing yourself at the expense of others. I suppose that’s a kind of relationship too, but it is relationship that doesn’t value relationship. It only values the self.

I left the practice of law, which was well on its way to killing me, to go to seminary and become a small church Christian pastor. To my culture that move makes no sense at all. Law is prestigious, ministry isn’t. You make a lot of money in law, or at least you can. Small church pastors barely make enough to live on. Lawyers make headlines, pastors don’t unless they’ve done something monumentally stupid like damning gay people or predicting the end of the world or are saints of the faith like Martin Luther King, Jr. Being a lawyer led me to burn out and depression. Being a pastor led to deep personal satisfaction and a sense of fulfillment, and to my culture that’s just wrong. It should work the other way around. For me it didn’t.

2. I’m an intellectual in an anti-intellectual culture. I’m far from the most erudite person in the world. I’m not even the most erudite person I know. But I have always valued and to some extent pursued the life of the mind. I have more advanced degrees than I know what to do with—Ph.D., JD, M.Div. I know that ideas matter. I know that how we act is grounded in how we think. I know that cultures change from the top down. I’ve often said that in 1637 Rene Descartes said “Je pense, donc je suis,” I think, therefore I am, and the world hasn’t been the same since. That’s how culture operates. Some lone person sitting at a desk somewhere has some new insight, expresses it, and over the following centuries it changes the world.

My culture is anti-intellectual. It thinks generals are more important than philosophers. It doesn’t just not care about ideas, it is deeply suspicious of people who have ideas and who think ideas matter. At best it dismisses them because it doesn’t want to deal with them. At worst it attacks them and their ideas because those ideas are new and challenge the culture’s long-held beliefs and prejudices. Just look at who we made president in 2016. Donald Trump is the least intellectual president we have perhaps ever had. He doesn’t think, he reacts. He has no guiding ideas, no concepts that ground his actions and give them form and direction. He has no time for people who think. In his disdain for the workings of the mind he reflects the anti-intellectualism of the people who elected him. He is a symptom of the unthinking nature of mass American culture, and we are the worse off for having elected him to the highest office in our land. Yet I shouldn’t be surprised that we did that. Trump is symptom not cause. He is a symptom of a lot of things about America, its anti-intellectualism being prime among them.

3. I teach and practice Christian nonviolence in a violence mad culture. American culture is the most violence prone mass culture of any so-called advanced nation in the world today. We solve problems by shooting at them. When gun violence kills our school children we say put more guns in schools. We maintain an enormous military that devours an absurdly large amount of our national budget and keeps us from doing many far more constructive things. We say everyone in the military is a hero whether they have done anything heroic or not. We don’t call teachers, nurses, pastors, musicians, or artists heroes, though they contribute to life in far more constructive ways than the military does, or at least some of them do. Even our progressive Christians are loath to list nonviolence as one of their values or commitments. The Phoenix Affirmations, for example, don’t mention nonviolence as a central precept. Yet there simply is no doubt that Jesus, the one we Christians supposedly follow, taught and lived radical nonviolence. Not passivity but nonviolence, which isn’t the same thing. When I preach nonviolence I’m called unrealistic. I’m told nonviolence doesn’t work, never mind that in my lifetime it ended British rule in India and apartheid in South Africa. Our country is grounded in violence, violence against the British, Native Americans, Mexico, and Black Americans from slavery on among others. We are a frontier culture that worships the gun. Our popular entertainment consists almost entirely of different versions of the myth of redemptive violence.[1] So does our foreign policy. My commitment to nonviolence perhaps more than anything else about me puts me outside the American mainstream.

So I am an outsider in my own country. I don’t fit. Most of what I see of dominant American culture repulses me. I value the spiritual over the material, the intellectual over the unthinking, and nonviolence over violence. My culture’s values are the reverse of mine. Well, so be it. I’m not going to change American culture, and I sure can’t change the history that gave rise to that culture. I’m never going to fit in, so perhaps I need to stop letting that truth irritate me as much as it does and look at the matter a different way. See, there is a crucial role for the outsider in any culture. The outsider is the only one who can truly critique a culture. Every culture needs outsiders who are willing and able to call it on its failings. Who are willing and able to see through its defenses and its self-delusions to its true essence and to name that essence for what it really is. Who can identify its myths and see through them to its real identity. Who can and will identify those myths as the idolatry that they truly are. I think that’s actually what I’ve been doing for a long time. My audience is small, nearly nonexistent actually. Again, so be it. I’ll keep writing. I’ll keep posting essays on my blog. They will continue to be the essays of an outsider in American culture. Perhaps they will serve some useful purpose precisely because come from where I live, on the outside.

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[1] If you don’t know what the myth of redemptive violence is read The Powers That Be by the late Walter Wink.

Reflections on Billy Graham

Reflections on Billy Graham

Billy Graham died, and we are loath to say anything negative about the dead. Yet for me Billy Graham was a negative factor in American Christianity. Yes, he perhaps attracted a great many people to faith, but it was attraction to a version of the faith that is largely negative and whose day has come and gone. Here are some of the things about Graham’s faith that I find negative at best and destructive at worst.

His Christianity was fear based Christianity. He saw humans as hopeless sinners and God as a stern judge who would eternally punish sinners who did not repent and turn to Jesus. Fear based religion has its power I suppose, but it is based on a misunderstanding of grace and draws people to the faith for the wrong reasons. It has people fear God not love God, or at least it has them fear God first and love God only for overcoming their fear. Graham’s faith was mostly about a supposed afterlife rather than being about this life. Fear based faith always is. Graham didn’t get it that because God is a God of universal grace no one ever need fear for their soul’s eternal fate. Graham didn’t get it that Jesus didn’t come to save souls in an afterlife, he came to teach us God’s ways for this life. Like all fear based faith, Graham’s Christianity was ego centered and selfish. It was about personal individual salvation, not about remaking the world. The world is moving beyond fear based faith. Graham never did.

He was a Biblicist of the first order, that is, he thought of the Bible as the literal, inerrant words of God. I have written extensively against Biblicism elsewhere, so I won’t go into detail about it here. Suffice it to say that belief that God wrote the Bible is simply untenable. The Bible contains far too many impossible things and far too many contradictions for it to be God’s work. Moreover, seeing the Bible as God’s words rather than human words locks ancient cultural understanding and prejudices in as divine truth, which they most definitely are not. Graham may have drawn lots of people to the Bible, but he drew them an understanding of the Bible that will not hold up and that the world and the Christian faith are already moving far beyond.

He never got over condemning gay people. His condemnation of LGBT people is of course grounded in or at least buttressed by his Biblicism. He was technically correct when he said that the Bible speaks of homosexual acts negatively every time it mentions them at all. What he never understood is that while the Bible has a very few passages that mention homosexual acts, it says nothing about homosexuality. The ancient world from which the Bible comes had no understanding of homosexuality as a naturally occurring variety of human sexuality. Thus it says nothing about our contemporary understanding of homosexuality. Graham perpetuated Christian bigotry against LBGT people. He could and should have known better.

He was an anti-Roman Catholic bigot. He opposed the election of John F. Kennedy to the presidency precisely because Kennedy was Catholic. American Evangelicals have long harbored misunderstandings of and prejudices against the Roman Catholic Church and people who find their connection with God within its teachings and practices. Graham reinforced those misunderstandings and prejudices by repeating them to enormous audiences. He did Christianity and the world at large no favors with his preaching of anti-Catholic bias.

He probably wasn’t a racist, or at least he outgrew his native southern racism. He did however harbor prejudice against Jews. He engaged in anti-Jewish banter with Richard Nixon in the White House. When Nixon’s man Haldeman said publicly that Graham had done so, Graham denied it. Then the Nixon tapes came out, and everyone could hear him doing it. Being a bigot is bad. Being a hypocrite about it only makes it worse.

He was in bed with secular power. He loved associating with American presidents, especially Richard Nixon. He didn’t get it that Christianity when properly understood is radically anti-imperial. Late in life he said he regretted having been as political as he was in his ministry. There are several things wrong with that statement. First of all, the Gospel of Jesus Christ is precisely political. It is about how we live together in human community, and that makes it political. Graham wasn’t wrong for being political, he was wrong for advocating the wrong politics. I’ve read that he was a registered Democrat, but he supported conservative political positions over progressive ones. He seems to have loved being associated with men in power, and he never called them to repent of oppressive, violent political opinions and acts.

He could be a blind fool, as when he said there was no religious persecution in the Soviet Union. In 1984 a Soviet front organization invited Graham to preach in the USSR. He accepted. While he was there the Soviets pulled the wool over his eyes about the reality of religious persecution in that country. They showed him a Potemkin village Baptist church in Moscow that the Soviets used as a show piece to deny that they oppressed religion. Graham bought it. He didn’t understand how Soviet propaganda worked, setting up show pieces to prove to the world the exact opposite of Soviet reality. He said there was no religious persecution in the Soviet Union. About that he was just flat wrong, and it wouldn’t have been at all hard for him to discover the truth about religious persecution in Communist Russia. He didn’t bother. He bought what the Soviets sold him. In buying what the Soviets sold him he was nothing but a fool

He raised a son, Franklin, who is a flat out bigot. Billy Graham was bad on social issues, but his son Franklin is far worse. Franklin takes things like his father’s anti-Semitism and carries them to the extreme. We can assume that Franklin learned his bigotry from his father. No, you can’t always blame the parents for the sins of the children, but there is a direct line from Billy’s failing to Franklin’s religion of hatred.

So I guess you’ll have to excuse me. I see virtually nothing positive in Billy Graham. Like I said, he may have drawn lots of people to the faith; but he drew them to a literalistic Evangelical faith that will kill Christianity if we can’t move beyond it. So I pray for peace for his family in his passing. I do not mourn the passing of a hero. Billy Graham was nothing of the sort.

Symptom Trump

Symptom Trump

Ever since the 2016 presidential election I have been asking myself: How could it have happened? How could this country have made the utterly unqualified, incompetent, American fascist Donald Trump president? On its face it doesn’t make a lick of sense. Sure. We’ve elected bad presidents before. We elected George W. Bush twice, and he was simply awful. We elected Ronald Reagan twice, and he was just as bad. We don’t have a great track record when it comes to electing presidents. But Donald Trump? Really? They don’t get worse than that. True, he didn’t win a majority of the popular vote; but our presidential elections don’t depend on the popular vote. They depend on the electoral college vote, and Trump isn’t the first candidate to win the electoral college with a minority of the popular vote. Enough Americans voted for him in enough states that he won the electoral college, and that’s what made him president. How could it happen? There’s got to be an explanation somewhere. Bizarre, dangerous electoral results like this one don’t come out of nowhere. So where did this one come from? I have been wrestling with that question since Trump’s unexpected victory in November, 2016. I want here to work through what I think is a possible explanation of Trump’s disastrous victory.

The explanation begins with the realization that the United States of America is an empire. European settlement of North America was an act of people from European empires—Spanish, French, British, and others. So we European Americans got our start here as a manifestation of empire. The nations of the Americas, including the United States, were once colonies of empires. Our European American ancestors may have rebelled against their colonial status, but they never rebelled against the concept empire. Instead they adopted it, or at least we white people of the United States did. The American nation spread across the North American continent through a series of imperial acquisitions. We bought the Louisiana territory from the French empire. We conquered much of the west through wars against Mexico. Those were imperial wars of expansion. We competed with the British Empire for control of the northwest and nearly went to war with it over the slogan “54'40" or fight.” We bought Alaska from the Russian Empire. The American empire took land that belonged to someone else, namely, the Native Americans. Taking other people’s land is a hallmark of empire. Then we expanded our empire beyond the limits of the North American continent. We colonized Hawaii and other Pacific islands. We took control of Puerto Rico and the Philippines. The basic nature of the United States has been imperial from its very beginning.

After World War II we became not just an empire but the dominant world empire. We engaged in a protracted struggle with another major world empire, the Soviet Union, for control of the whole world. We call that struggle the Cold War, but it wasn’t always cold. We fought the Soviets or their surrogates militarily in Korea and Vietnam. We very nearly got into a nuclear war with them in October, 1962, over the Soviet empire’s desire to strengthen its position in Cuba and threaten our empire with their nuclear missiles. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and we became essentially the only world empire. Yes, there were other powerful countries, China chief among them. Yet none of them had the worldwide political and economic power that the United States had. We had fought our major imperial rival and had won. We were on top of the world, or so we thought.

We were the dominant world empire, but here’s the thing about empires. They always collapse and fall. Every empire there has ever been has done it. Some have been conquered by other empires. Think of the Aztecs and the Incas conquered by the Spanish for example, or the Persians conquered by Alexander the Great. Some fell because they they were attacked from without and decayed from within. Rome is the best example here. Some declined because their overseas colonies wised up and demanded and fought for independence. Here think of Great Britain as a good example. Empires decline and fall in various ways, but they all decline and fall.

When they do, bad things often happen within them as people fight back against decline and fall. Rome was attacked from without by the Huns and others, but it also decayed from within. The government lost control of the provinces. What had been the most powerful military in the world was no longer able to fight off supposedly less civilized peoples from the north and elsewhere. As Rome was attacked Christianity abandoned Jesus’ commitment to nonviolence, thereby betraying him and one of his central teachings. Empires always think they will last forever. Hitler called the Third Reich (which means the Third Empire) the “thousand year Reich.” There has never been anything remotely like an empire that lasted a thousand years. Rome lasted maybe six hundred, which is a very long time for an empire to survive. Most last a matter of a few centuries or less. Some, like Hitler’s, last only a few years. Empires decline and fall in many different ways, but they all decline and fall.

The American empire has clearly entered its declining phase. We arrogate to ourselves the role of policeman to the world, but we are a hopelessly ineffective policeman. We choose which bad guys we’re going to go after. Most recently we’ve chosen Iraq, Afghanistan, and various expressions of Islamist terrorism. We’ve been fighting in Afghanistan for over fifteen years with no end in sight. Our invasion of Iraq, which clearly violated international law, produced only chaos and destruction and led directly to the rise of ISIS. We’ve been able to do nothing to stop the horrendous civil war in Syria. If anything our halfhearted military efforts there only make things worse. We and other nations have perhaps stopped Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, but we sure haven’t been able to stop North Korea from getting them. We did nothing to stop genocide in Cambodia or Rwanda, I suppose because we didn’t see our imperial status challenged by the regimes that conducted it in those countries. We project our imperial military power all over the world, and it truly is impressive military power; but history mostly proves its limitations. When we apply it things generally turn our badly.

Then there’s our position as the dominant economic power in the world. It isn’t at all clear that we still are that. China either has assumed that position or very probably soon will. We export most of our manufacturing to low wage countries. Our economy has become one based only on consumerism. Traditionally at least that’s a weak reed against which to prop a nation’s economy. We don’t so much create value as we move it around. The titans of Wall Street have replaced the titans of industry as the leading figures of our economy, and all they do is make money off other people’s money. We still claim to be the richest nation in the world, and maybe we are. Still, we have an enormous amount of poverty for such a rich country; and we seem unwilling or unable to do anything about it. Our health care system is a disaster, leaving millions of people unable to access it or having to access it as charity cases that the rest of us pay for. The moneyed interest have such a stranglehold on it that the obvious solution, a single payer universal system like those in every other developed country, doesn’t stand a chance of enactment. Racism remains a central characteristic of American culture. It is expressed more as institutional racism than in expressly racist laws, but institutional racism is if anything even more insidious. We imprison far more people per capita than other developed nations, and a disproportionate number of the people we imprison are Black. We enact tax laws that so obviously have the effect of redistributing income upward that we can only assume that redistributing income upward is the intention of the politicians who enact those laws. The gap between the ultra-rich and the rest of us is enormous, and it gets worse every day.

Of course every country has its problems. The significant thing about the US today isn’t so much that we have problems as it is that we are unwilling to address them in ways that would actually solve them. Doing that might cost the super-rich donors to the political parties some money. Heaven forbid! So the politicians do nothing. Economies prosper when enough people have enough money to spend, but our economy and our law are funneling money away from people who need it and would spend it to people who don’t need it and will just horde it. All empires function primarily to benefit the rich and powerful, but they are likely to do that more and more when they enter an unhealthy decline. The American empire has clearly entered an unhealthy decline.

Donald Trump is a symptom of that unhealthy decline. He represents all the worse angels of our nature. He is racist. He is sexist. He is personally immoral and expects everyone else to be immoral too. He thinks his fame and wealth give him license to attack and abuse other people, especially women. He is a jingoist, caring nothing for countries other than the US and, frankly, not really caring for the US in any meaningful way. He says “America first.” He clearly means “me first.” He admires authoritarian regimes more than democratic ones and panders to the fear of many Americans who think authoritarianism will solve their problems, which it won’t. He makes promises that he obviously can’t fulfill. Mexico will pay for the wall. I’ll bring back coal mining jobs. I’ll make America “great” again, by which he seems mostly to mean I’ll make America white again. He threatens nuclear war with impunity, apparently having no idea of the horror that any nuclear war would be. The United States has enough nuclear weapons to destroy all life on earth several times over, and he thinks we need more. He is a religious bigot, thinking that all Muslims are a threat to American security. He thinks white supremacists are decent people. He wants to reintroduce discrimination against transgender people in the military and would probably like to keep gay people out too. He is xenophobic, thinking that people not from the US are less than people from the US, or at least less than native born white people in the US. He has no empathy. He has no sympathy for anyone outside his immediate family, and he probably doesn’t have much for them. He is heartless, careless, classless, and a terrible role model for Americans and others around the world. Fear and money put him in the Oval Office, thereby presenting this country and the world with the potential for unmitigated disaster.

And in all of those ways he is a symptom not a cause. He is a symptom of the unease, the anxiety, even the fear of a people that is losing its dominant place in the world and can think of no constructive way to deal with that loss. Fear produces backlash. Fear makes people yearn to go back to how they think things used to be, never mind that they never really used to be that way. Fear and the anger it produces brings out the worst in people. Fearful, angry nations resort to the worst angels of their nature. A good example is Weimar Germany. Germany lost World War I, and the victorious allies imposed a harsh, punitive peace treaty on it. Things in Germany went from bad to worse. The Germans reacted by resorting to the worst angels of their national character—authoritarianism, militarism, and antisemitism. They made the German fascist Adolf Hitler Chancellor and proceeded to inflict untold horror on virtually all of Europe. Hitler was a symptom of everything that was wrong in Weimar Germany, and he was a reaction to it. He was a symptom of Germany’s humiliation after World War I and the economic catastrophe that followed it. From being, or at least seeing itself to be, the most civilized, developed, and powerful country in Europe Germany, lost everything that constituted its self-image. Hitler was the result.

Donald Trump is a symptom of similar dynamics going on the US today. Sure, what’s going on in the US today isn’t nearly as bad as what went on in Weimar Germany, and Donald Trump, bad as he is, is no Hitler. Still, just as Germany lost its position of dominance in Europe after World War I, the US is losing its position of dominance after the Cold War. A great many Americans are reacting to that loss in a way similar to if less extreme than the way a great many Germans reacted one hundred years ago. Donald Trump is of course important in his own right. He is an unstable and incompetent man with his hand on the nuclear trigger. More significantly Trump is a symptom of the underlying dynamics of American society. Until we face those dynamics honestly (and few if any prominent American politicians are willing to do that) we run the risk of reelecting Trump in 2020 and electing others like him, or maybe worse, in the future.

Book video

This is a little video about my book Liberating the Bible that an outfit I've signed up with for some publicity has produced.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5P25BGJlmU

Three Traps

Three Traps

For the past several years, with one year off as required by the Conference’s bylaws, I have served on the Committee on Ministry of the Pacific Northwest Conference of the United Church of Christ. One of the things we do on that Committee is examine candidates for ordination in the UCC and either approve them or not. Part of the ordination process is for the candidate to write an ordination paper that sets out her beliefs and understandings of theology, church history, the UCC, the practice of ministry, and other matters. I just finished reading one such paper. It is a very good one, far better than most. Yet as I read it I noticed that this well qualified candidate fell into or just skirted around three traps that far too many progressive Christians fall into. I’d like to explore those traps here. They are:

1.       The assertion that all are welcome in church.

2.       The assertion that the Bible is somehow divine or divinely inspired.

3.       The assertion that we progressive Christians are always to be nonjudgmental.

I’ll consider them in that order.

1. All are welcome in church. That is something that almost every church asserts. The non-UCC Congregational church from which I resigned at the end of 2017 says “All are welcome” on its sign on the street in front of the church building. In the UCC we tend to wear a universal welcome on our sleeve as some sort of badge of honor. A great many UCC churches, including the one to which I belong and now attend, say either out loud or in their weekly worship bulletin “No matter who you are or where you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here.” Those words have practically become the mantra of the UCC. On one level that mantra serves a good and necessary purpose. For far too long most Christian churches have excluded certain people. They have excluded LGBT people. Some of them have excluded divorced people. If what we mean by “all are welcome” is that we do not discriminate against people on improper grounds, fine. We shouldn’t discriminate like that, and more and more churches today are doing less and less of that kind of discrimination. The problem is, that’s not what our signs say. They say all are welcome. They say “no matter who you are” you are welcome here. I object to that notion on a variety of grounds.

First, it almost certainly isn’t true. One problem is that while many churches say they welcome LGBT people they really don’t. It makes us all feel warm and fuzzy to say all are welcome, but church people are like people everywhere. There are those of us who have not gotten over the prejudices we all grew up with, or at least those of us of a certain age grew up with. I know, for example, that while that church I recently resigned from says all are welcome there are all kinds of people who actually are not welcome there. I suppose that’s one reason I resigned. At least some of the people of that church cling to prejudices against gay people. I could never convince myself that an openly gay or lesbian person really would be welcome there.

There are other reasons why a claim that all are welcome isn’t true too. I’ll cite that church I resigned from again as an example. Before I became their pastor that church had to ask the son of one of the members not to attend because he is a person with mental illness who would not control his behavior at church. He made people uncomfortable or even made them feel threatened. Is anyone who disrupts the life of a church really welcome in it? Is anyone who makes people feel unsafe at church welcome? Probably not. People come to church for a variety of reasons, but everyone who comes to church expects it to be a safe place. If a person makes it an unsafe place, that person is not welcome.

Nor should that person be welcome. It simply isn’t true that a church should in fact welcome all people. Someone who constantly disrupts the worship service isn’t and shouldn’t be welcome. Yes, perhaps the pastor and/or others of the church could work that person to help them change their behavior so that they would be welcome. That would be a good and worthwhile thing. But sometimes it just isn’t possible. Mental illness and personality disorders are realities, and sometimes people suffering from them just can’t control themselves. In that case a church may, indeed must, exclude that person from some or all of its activities.

Here’s another example of someone who shouldn’t be welcome in a church. For years I served a church that became what we call Open and Affirming shortly after I joined them as their pastor. Open and Affirming means that that church claimed to accept and affirm LGBT people, people so often excluded from church life. The church I served actually did welcome such people. Being Open and Affirming became a big part of that church’s identity in a town in which no other church openly welcomed LGBT folks at the time. Now say someone who opposed the acceptance and full equality of LGBT people came to that church for the express purpose of making LGBT people uncomfortable and working to get the church to repeal its Open and Affirming commitment. Would that person be welcome? No. Should that person be welcome? No. Becoming part of any institution requires accepting what the institution is and what it stands for. That doesn’t mean we don’t work to transform the institutions of which we are a part. Not at all. It does mean that we work to make our institutions, including our churches, more fully and authentically who they really are. It doesn’t mean we come in expressly to turn back who they have become.

Every institution or organization must have a boundary of some kind. Boundaries define identity. An organization with no boundary is no organization at all. Oh, I suppose you could form an club for example that said we are a club of whoever shows up. Yet such a club would have no purpose other than as a place for people to show up. A church certainly has more purpose than that. Church’s have identity. There are a great many churches and a great many church identities. A church’s identity shouldn’t be static. It should be something the church is aware of and always working on improving. Yet no organization can remain what it is at it most basic level if it welcomes people who want to change it at that basic level. Should a Christian church welcome people into the life and membership of the church who want to turn it into a church that worships the devil? Of course not. Like all institutions churches have boundaries. Boundaries create identity. Boundaries are necessary, and they are good when they are appropriate for the institution that has them.

“Christian” is itself a boundary. It doesn’t mean that the people of the church condemn or even dislike people of other faiths. Today many of us Christians fully accept the validity of other faiths for the people who live their connection with ultimate reality within those faiths. It does mean that this particular institution places itself within a particular faith tradition, the Christian one. It means this organization is a Christian church and not a Jewish synagogue, not a Muslim mosque, not any other kind of place of worship and any place other than a place of Christian worship. Most churches have other kinds of boundaries too. A UCC church is not a Roman Catholic church. That doesn’t mean UCC people necessarily have anything against Roman Catholic people or the Roman Catholic church. It does mean that someone who wants to come into the UCC church for the purpose of trying to turn it into a Catholic church isn’t and shouldn’t be all that welcome. A church has to have a boundary; and as much as it may proclaim that all or welcome, that boundary means that some people aren’t.

Of course my Christian sisters and brothers who proclaim that all are welcome in their church mean well. They are on the whole good, decent people who want to overcome centuries of prejudice inside the church. I want to overcome it too, but “all are welcome” is a trap for so many of us. In that ordination paper I mentioned above our candidate says all should be welcome in the church, but then even she qualifies that statement. She says all should be free to have a voice in the church as long as they aren’t harming anyone else. Ah, there’s the rub, or there’s one rub out of several. We don’t want anyone coming into our churches and harming anyone there. That’s a boundary. That’s a limitation to all are welcome. We get so enthusiastic about being welcoming that we say things that aren’t true and that really we don’t and shouldn’t mean. That’s the trap. I wish more of my progressive Christian colleagues were more aware of it.

2. The assertion that the Bible is wholly or partially divine or divinely inspired. I have written at some length on this one, so I’ll just treat it briefly here. For a fuller discussion of the issue see Part One, Stop 11, titled “Inspired?,” in my book Liberating the Bible, A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians.[1] We all grew up, I suspect, hearing the Bible called the word of God. I’ve heard lay people in very progressive Christian churches call it God’s word when they read a passage from it in worship. We’ve all heard it called divinely inspired. For most Christians the Bible has authority because, as they believe, it somehow comes from God. The very good ordination candidate who wrote the ordination paper I keep mentioning seems to understand the Bible quite well, but she too calls it both human and divine. Calling the Bible divine or divinely inspired is a trap because of the insurmountable difficulties that classic contention raises. God’s can’t have written or inspired everything in the Bible because it contains things that just can’t be true if we understand them literally, that is, factually. We know, for example, that the plant Earth has developed over several billion years, not that it was created in seven days as Genesis 1:1 to 2:3 says it was. We know that there is no dome in the sky holding back water as Genesis 1:6-8 says there is. We know that Joshua did not make the sun stand still in the sky as Joshua 10:12-13 says he did. We know as the author of the book of Joshua did not that the apparent movement of the sun across the sky results from the rotation of the earth, not from actual movement by the sun. There are of course a great many other things in the Bible that cannot be factually true though they sound to us like assertions of facts. Some of them are assertions of facts and some of them actually aren’t, but God would not have made the factual errors we find in the Bible. God didn’t write the Bible.

The Bible also contains numerous seemingly factual contradictions that, we assume, God would have avoided had God written the Bible. Did God create the world in seven days as in Genesis 1:1 to 2:3 or in one day as at Genesis 2:4a? Did Noah take one pair of every animal into the ark as at Genesis 6:19, or did he take one pair of “unclean” animals and seven pair of “clean” animals as at Genesis 7:2? In neither of these cases can both passages be factually true. They plainly contradict each other. Did Jesus fall on the ground in agony in the Garden as at Mark 14:35, or did the armed band come to arrest him fall to their knees before his divine majesty as at John 18:6? It’s unlikely to have been both. Both of those accounts can be, and are, spiritually true; but they cannot both be factually true. Factually, they are just contradictions. So no, God didn’t write the Bible.

Saying that the human authors of the Bible were divinely inspired but that they included human error in their writings also raises insurmountable problems. If some things in the Bible are divinely inspired truth and other things are human error, how do we tell those two things apart? There simply is no objective way to do it. We may have criteria for making the distinction that work for us, but they are just our subjective criteria. We can’t impose them on anyone else. When we say the Bible is either wholly or partially divinely inspired as weave a tangled web that there is no getting out of.

That’s why it is a trap. It is so easy to say that the Bible is divine. It is so easy to say that it is divinely inspired. We’ve heard it so often. Perhaps we so want it to be true. The trap is that we say it without awareness of the insurmountable difficulties it raises. We say it uncritically, and when someone of a more critical bent raises questions about it we are surprised. The questions hadn’t occurred to us, and we are unprepared to answer them. We’re actually much better off admitting that the Bible is a wholly human document. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t true or that it doesn’t contain truth. It does, but not because it is divinely inspired. Here’s how I summarized what I think is the proper approach to the Bible and its human origins in Liberating the Bible:

Let me suggest that you think of the Bible as invitation. The Bible doesn’t dictate truth to us. Rather, its ancient authors say here are the experiences and understandings of some of your ancient forbears in the faith. Generation after generation of faithful Jewish and Christian people have found meaning, hope, comfort, and challenge in these pages. So come on in. Learn what we have to say. Do the difficult work of really understanding our ancient texts on their own terms. Then do your own discernment. We did ours, now you do yours. We hope that what you read here will light your path to God, but we cannot relieve you of your duty to discern God’s truth for you and your world. We don’t all say the same thing. We didn’t all understand God the same way. We didn’t understand the universe and human nature the way you do. But come on in. Learn from us. There is great wisdom here. Learn from us, but don’t just parrot back what we had to say. We invite you not to rote responses and easy answers. We invite you to the hard but sacred work of study and discernment. May God be with you in that work. Amen.[2]

3. The assertion that progressive Christians must be nonjudgmental. I hear it all the time. Not long before I came to be their pastor the first church I served had adopted a “mission statement” that included the phrase “Being nonjudgmental….” The ordination candidate I mentioned at the beginning of this post said that she tries to be nonjudgmental in her pastoral relationships, or words to that effect. On one level these assertions of non-judgmentalism serve an important purpose. Over the course of its long history Christianity has been far too negatively judgmental of people, positions, and practices that in fact should not be negatively judged at all. The best example in our day is the way Christians have in the past and today far too many still do condemned LGBT people simply for being who they are. Moreover, the church has been far too eager to dictate to people how they should live rather than listening to people, their cares, and their concerns and to meet them where they are. It is so easy to judge others. It is so easy to condemn others, and we humans so often do it for all the wrong reasons. The church truly must repent of its past wrongful judgments against God’s people. To the extent that people who call us to be nonjudgmental seek to right that ancient wrong, God bless them. They are doing holy work.

Yet the claim that we are simply to be nonjudgmental without more is simply false, and it is a trap. It feels so good to say we’re nonjudgmental. It is part of our efforts to welcome into the faith and the church people who have been excluded for far too long for all the wrong reasons. Yet simply saying that we are nonjudgmental is still false, it is still a trap. The truth is that there are ways in which God calls us precisely to be judgmental. After all, we can hardly say that many of the leading figures in the Bible were never judgmental. Listen, for example, to the great eighth century BCE prophet Amos[3]:

Hear this word, you cows

                of Bashan

   who are on Mount Samaria,

who oppress the poor, who crush

                the needy,

   who say to their husbands,

                ‘Bring something to

                drink!’

The Lord God has sworn by

                His holiness:

   The time is surely coming

                upon you,

when they shall take you away

                with hooks,

   even the last of you with

                fishhooks. Amos 4:1-2

Nonjudgmental indeed! Amos just let the idle wealthy who oppressed the people have it but good.

Then of course there is Jesus. Hear again this familiar story:

     Then they came to Jerusalem. And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling and those who were buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves; and he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple. He was teaching and saying, ‘Is it not written,

                ‘My house shall be called a house

                                of prayer for all the

                                nations?’

                   But you have made it a den

                                of robbers.’  Mark 11:15-17

Hardly what you’d call nonjudgmental, is it.

Consider too the story of the so-called “widow’s mite” at Mark 12:38-13:2. There we read that Jesus said:

Beware of the scribes, who like to walk abound in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets! They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.

Jesus then observes a poor widow putting into the temple treasury “everything she had, all she had to live on.” In other words, the temple of the scribes has just devoured her house. So Jesus says: “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.” Again, hardly nonjudgmental, is it.

Amos and other great Old Testament prophets judged and condemned those who oppress the poor and the vulnerable in the name of God. Jesus judged and condemned those who used the most sacred place in Judaism to exploit the people. Amos spoke up for those whom his culture condemned as sinners because they were poor. Jesus condemned religious authorities who exploited rather than served the people and who used their ministry for their own ego gratification. Judgment was very much a part of what both Jesus and prophets were about.

So if we can’t say that Jesus and the prophets were nonjudgmental, and we can’t, how are we to understand judgment as a part of the life of faith? We understand first, I think, that evil is a reality in the world. Amos saw it. Jesus saw it. Prophets of many different faith traditions have seen it all over the world. Our call is to judge, denounce, and (nonviolently) oppose evil.[4] That’s what Jesus did, and it is what he calls us Christians to do. It is what God calls all people to do. And as we judge, denounce, and (nonviolently) oppose evil we must make a distinction that Jesus made (even if prophets like Amos sometimes weren’t very good at making it). We must distinguish between the evil that people do and the people that do it. Of course that isn’t an easy distinction to make. How can we condemn the evil Hitler and Stalin did without condemning Hitler and Stalin? Maybe we can’t, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t.     

The problem with saying that we progressive Christians are nonjudgmental is that it fails to make that necessary distinction between evil and the people who do it. Failing to judge and condemn evil leaves us passive. It makes us useless in God’s struggle against the evil that we fail to judge. Of what use to the world is a church that just sits there and lets evil have sway without even saying much less doing anything against it? None, that’s what. God doesn’t need uselessly passive allies. God needs prophets. God needs disciples of Jesus, and both the prophets and Jesus has no qualms at all about judging and condemning evil. Yet we must of course be cautious. Is what we’re condemning as evil really evil? Christians judged faithful same gender relationships as evil for centuries, and far too many still do. Now we know that they are nothing of the sort. Are we condemning evil and not people? We must be cautious, but we mustn’t let the need for caution stop us from making prophetic judgments. It’s not easy, but judging evil is part of our call as Christians. Let’s not let the fact that Christians have often judged wrongly stop us from judging as are called to judge.

So our faith is filled with traps. We make easy statements about important matters without giving them sufficient thought. Let’s stop doing that. Lets recognize the traps that our faith sets before us. Then let’s avoid them, OK?

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[1] Sorenson, Thomas Calnan, Liberating the Bible, A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking Christians, Archway Publishing, Bloomington, Indiana, 2015.

[2] Id., p. 134.

[3] The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

[4] Yes, I know. At Matthew 5:39 Jesus says “But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer.” The late Walter Wink has conclusively demonstrated that the Greek word that always gets translated as “resist” in this passage is a military term that means something like “go out in ranks against.” The line would be better translated “Do not resist an evildoer violently” See Wink, Walter, The Powers That Be, Theology for a New Millennium, ” Doubleday, New York, 1998, Chapter 5, “Jesus’ Third Way,” pp. 98-111.