Every Young Christian Needs to Read This | A Repost from Timothy Dalrymple
If You’re Selling Scorn for Conservative Christians, the Market is Hot
June 11, 2012 By Timothy Dalrymple 4 Comments
I recently wrote a piece entitled “What if the Culture War Never Happened,” where I encouraged progressive evangelicals — who publicly blame the conservative Christians (largely of the prior generation) of the “culture wars” for giving Christianity a bad name and driving people away from the church — not to accept uncritically what their liberal confreres tell them about the culture wars. Too many young evangelicals, in my view, question the culture wars but never question the “culture wars,” or the very concept and the way it’s developed in liberal circles.
Some of my progressive friends challenged me to point to examples. I did not really want to call anyone out on the carpet, but it’s a reasonable request. Sometimes it’s important to speak clearly and openly. So here’s what I want to say: To be fair, this happens on both sides. But recently I’ve seen a lot of young, progressive evangelicals denouncing and caricaturing their conservative brethren for their “culture war” concerns. But by accepting the caricatures coming mostly from secular critics, legitimating and perpetuating them, they themselves — acting out of concern for the damage done to the church and its witness — are doing great harm to the church and its witness. If we truly care for the public witness of the church, then we (liberal and conservative) need to stop slandering and caricaturing the other half of the church. Don’t throw your Christian brothers and sisters under the bus. Even if you disagree with them, you can provide a coherent, charitable explanation for what “those other evangelicals” believe.
Let me start with a generic example. MissionGathering Christian Church in San Diego, responding to Amendment 1 in North Carolina, purchased a billboard strategically located alongside Billy Graham Parkway in Charlotte that says, “MissionGathering Christian Church IS SORRY for the narrow-minded, judgmental, deceptive, manipulative actions of THOSE WHO DENIED RIGHTS AND EQUALITY TO SO MANY IN THE NAME OF GOD.” Click on the image to the right for the article explaining the billboard. MissionGathering describes itself as an “Emerging” church, and their Pastor of Spiritual Formation, Alex Roller, says that the purpose of the billboard is to tell the LGBT community that “there are progressive Christians who believe in the Bible and Jesus but still support marriage equality and rights for the LGBT population.” The church (300 members), he says, was showered with praise for the billboards they rented in response to the Prop 8 fight in California. ”We just want them to know,” says Roller, that “our hearts are with you.”
If that was all they wanted to say, however, they could have rented a billboard with the boards, “Our hearts are with you.” Given their beliefs on homosexuality and marriage, that would have been a fine thing to do. Yet that’s not what they did. Instead they called their fellow believers, who feel differently from them on this issue, ”narrow-minded, judgmental, deceptive, [and] manipulative.” So let’s be clear what they’re doing here. (1) They’re perpetuating the worst images of conservative Christians who support traditional marriage. (2) They’re holding themselves our as a better alternative. They are the good Christians, the more Christ-like Christians, who are not judgmental — even as they’re judging sixty percent of North Carolinians, a majority of Californians, over half of Christians in the United States and the great majority of Christians around the world. In other words, (3) they’re saying “our hearts are with you” in that “we feel the same anger and scorn in our hearts as you do.”
Their intentions are honorable, but undermined by an incoherent strategy and by their deep-seated scorn for conservative Christians. They’re trying to encourage love — by being hateful (and no, I don’t think that’s too strong a word). They’re trying to encourage tolerance — but judging everyone who disagrees with them. They’re trying to improve the witness of the church — by legitimating the stereotype that the conservative half of the church is bigoted and deceitful. They hold themselves out as a better alternative — by throwing more conservative Christians under the bus.
Of course, it’s easy to argue with a billboard. So, as requested, let me give another example. Rachel Held Evans’ recent post, “How to Win a Culture War and Lose a Generation” went viral. Rachel is a fine person, and I regret that I tend to engage with her posts only when I disagree with them. I’m sure she’s deeply and thoroughly convinced she’s in the right here. But she let her anger get the better of her. Let’s look at the post, which begins thus:
When asked by The Barna Group what words or phrases best describe Christianity, the top response among Americans ages 16-29 was “antihomosexual.” For a staggering 91 percent of non-Christians, this was the first word that came to their mind when asked about the Christian faith. The same was true for 80 percent of young churchgoers. (The next most common negative images? : “judgmental,” “hypocritical,” and “too involved in politics.”)
(To pause: the study says nothing of “the first word that came to their mind.” And “antihomosexual” is a catch-all term that people might check if they believe Christianity is bigoted, or merely that some Christians are bigoted, or people who simply think that Christianity opposes homosexuality. But when your anger gets the better of you, there’s no time for nuance or discernment.)
Evans goes on to say that the belief Christians are bigoted against homosexuals (in the words of David Kinnaman) is “the negative image most likely to be intertwined with Christianity’s reputation,” and (in Evans’ words) “one of the top reasons 59 percent of young adults with a Christian background have left the church.” Then Evans points to Amendment 1 in NC and the advertisement that featured a quotation from Billy Graham:
Despite the fact that the North Carolina law already holds that marriage in the eyes of state is only between a man and a woman, an amendment was put on the ballot to permanently ban same-sex marriage in the state constitution. The initiative doesn’t appear to change anything on a practical level, (though some are saying it may have unintended negative consequences on heterosexual relationships), but seems to serve primarily as an ideological statement
….an expensive, destructive, and impractical ideological statement.
Conservatives in the state […] supported the amendment, and last night it passed.Religious leaders led the charge in support of the amendment, with 93-year-old Billy Graham taking out multiple ads in publications across the state supporting the measure.
The convalescent Billy Graham likely had very little to do with the ad, but my point here is not to debate the rightness or wrongness of Amendment 1. My point is to examine the ways in which progressive Christians talk about conservative Christians. Conservative Christians have voted for these amendments consistently. Yet the reason many Christians feel differently from Evans is completely unexplained. And since (she asserts) there’s no practical reason (no reason why it might matter to give something a constitutional and not merely legal imprimatur), it must be just to spite gays. The reader is left to conclude that conservative Christians simply are, to use the terms from the beginning of the post, anti-homosexual, judgmental and hypocritical. Then Evans brings out the big guns of bold type and larger font-size:
I’ve said it a million times, and I’ll say it again…(though I’m starting to think that no one is listening):
My generation is tired of the culture wars.
We are tired of fighting, tired of vain efforts to advance the Kingdom through politics and power, tired of drawing lines in the sand, tired of being known for what we are against, not what we are for.
Evans wonders whether anyone is listening — and the post received 56,000 Facebook shares, and the comments cheer her on. If you’re selling anger and scorn against conservative Christians, the market is hot. Of course, Evans does not speak for our generation as a whole. And these are bumper-sticker arguments. I am for a family founded on the marriage of man and woman; I am for the defense of innocent human life even prior to birth. And I am not trying to advance the kingdom so much as I am trying to defend the innocent and defend social structures I consider sacred and valuable. The dead are not raised by politics, but the living can be protected and served by it. But we go on (reformatted for space):
…Amendments like these needlessly offend gays and lesbians, damage the reputation of Christians, and further alienate young adults […] from the Church.
So my question for those evangelicals leading the charge in the culture wars is this: Is it worth it? Is a political “victory” really worth losing millions more young people to cynicism regarding the Church? Is a political “victory” worth further alienating people who identify as LGBT? Is a political “victory” worth perpetuating the idea that evangelical Christians are at war with gays and lesbians? And is a political “victory” worth drowning out that quiet but persistent internal voice that asks—what if we get this wrong?
Too many Christian leaders seem to think the answer to that question is “yes,” and it’s costing them.
Because young Christians are ready for peace. We are ready to lay down our arms. We are ready to stop waging war and start washing feet.
For conservative Christians, of course, there are not merely political victories. These are matters of fundamental moral and theological import, critical to the health of individuals and societies. I believe these things matter to God because human flourishing comes when we are leading the lives we were designed and redeemed for. Sometimes the best way to wash a person’s feet is to tell him those feed are striding down a self-destructive path.
But again, the argument is beside the point. This is not really an argument but a bit of angry rhetoric. Evans never engages with how conservative Christians articulate the reasons for their actions. She never gives an explanation at all — much less acharitable one — for the things her brothers and sisters in Christ believe and do.
I understand why Rachel and her fellow progressive Christians are angry. I have many close relationships with gays and lesbians who do, indeed, find actions like Prop 8 and Amendment 1 hurtful. I do feel for them, and I genuinely wish for the sake of our relationships that I could agree with them on these issues. Evans and the MissionGathering church believe that Christians who oppose marriage equality for gays in the name of God are doing a disservice to the God they claim to serve and harming the witness of the church. I get it. But this is not the right way to respond.
This is selling anger, not offering enlightenment. Anger is not always wrong, but it’s always a dangerous substance to deal with. In its anger, posts and billboards like these lose the capacity to understand believers who disagree. They rush to judge our elders and dispense with humility or nuance. Instead of saying, “No, most conservative Christians are not hateful or deceptive. Here is where they’re coming from, but I stand with you” — they say “I am with you” because “I scorn them too.”
Does it happen on both sides? Absolutely. I cannot stand the glib, bigoted “ain’t no homos gonna make it to heaven” video that’s circulating. But one would never know, from a post like Evans’, that there are loving and thoughtful and self-sacrificial people on the conservative side of the argument who are genuinely trying to do the right thing for all people.
There is a growing genre — call it Progressive Christian Scorn Literature — about the scorn progressive Christians have for conservative evangelicals. It seems to be celebrated on the Left as a kind of righteous comeuppance for the Christian Right, and it wins the applause of the Left for the Christian Left. But it’s wrong and it needs to be called out. It’s neither winsome, nor loving, nor constructive, nor right. It will not improve our witness because it’s soaked through with bitterness and rancor. I hope that people of good heart and mind, like Evans, leave it behind.
We cannot get beyond the culture wars by simply joining one side and lobbing bombs against the other. We cannot improve the reputation of the church by throwing half of it under the bus.
Canadian Crackdown: A Repost from Michael Coren
| http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/301641/canadian-crackdown-michael-coren
A considered and empathetic opposition to same-sex marriage has nothing to do with phobia or hatred, but that doesn’t stop Christians, conservatives, and anybody else who doesn’t take the fashionable line from being condemned as Neanderthals and bigots. This is a lesson that Canadians have learned from painful experience. Same-sex marriage became law in Canada in the summer of 2005, making the country the fourth nation to pass such legislation, and the first in the English-speaking world. In the few debates leading up to the decision, it became almost impossible to argue in defense of marriage as a child-centered institution, in defense of the procreative norm of marriage, in defense of the superiority of two-gender parenthood, without being thrown into the waste bin as a hater. What we’ve also discovered in Canada is that it can get even worse than mere abuse, and that once gay marriage becomes law, critics are often silenced by the force of the law. Although precise figures about gay marriages in Canada are elusive, there are thought to be fewer than 30,000, after an initial surge of around 10,000 as soon as the law was passed. But if large numbers of gay people failed to take advantage of the law, the law certainly took advantage of its critics. Again, definitive figures are almost impossible to state, but it’s estimated that, in less than five years, there have been between 200 and 300 proceedings — in courts, human-rights commissions, and employment boards — against critics and opponents of same-sex marriage. And this estimate doesn’t take into account the casual dismissals that surely have occurred. In 2011, for example, a well-known television anchor on a major sports show was fired just hours after he tweeted his support for “the traditional and TRUE meaning of marriage.” He had merely been defending a hockey player’s agent who was receiving numerous death threats and other abuse for refusing to support a pro-gay-marriagecampaign. The case is still under appeal, in human-rights commissions and, potentially, the courts. The Roman Catholic bishop of Calgary, Alberta, Fred Henry, was threatened with litigation and charged with a human-rights violation after he wrote a letter to local churches outlining standard Catholic teaching on marriage. He is hardly a reactionary — he used to be known as “Red Fred” because of his support for the labor movement — but the archdiocese eventually had to settle with the complainants to avoid an embarrassing and expensive trial. In the neighboring province of Saskatchewan, another case illustrates the intolerance that has become so regular since 2005. A number of marriage commissioners (state bureaucrats who administer civil ceremonies) were contacted by a gay man eager to marry his partner under the new legislation. Some officials he telephoned were away from town or already engaged, and the first one to take his call happened to be an evangelical Christian, who explained that he had religious objections to carrying out the ceremony but would find someone who would. He did so, gave the name to the man wanting to get married, and assumed that this would be the end of the story. But no. Even though the gay couple had had their marriage, they decided to make an official complaint and demand that the commissioner be reprimanded and punished. The provincial government argued that, as a servant of the state, he had a duty to conduct state policy, but that any civilized public entity could accept that such a fundamentally radical change in marriage policy was likely to cause division, and that as long as alternative and reasonable arrangements could be made and nobody was inconvenienced, they would not discipline their employee for declining to marry same-sex couples. Anybody hired after 2004 would have to agree to conduct such marriages, they continued, but to insist on universal approval so soon after the change would lead to a large number of dismissals, often of people who had given decades of public service. This seemed an intelligent and balanced compromise. Yet the provincial courts disagreed, and commissioners with theological objections are now facing the loss of their jobs, with the situation replicated in other provinces and also at the federal level. So far, churches have been allowed to refuse to consecrate same-sex marriages, but a campaign has begun to remove tax-free status from religious institutions that make this choice. When asked about how this would undermine charitable efforts in behalf of the poor and homeless undertaken by numerous Christian churches, one of the leaders of Equality for Gays and Lesbians Everywhere, a Canadian gay-rights advocacy group, replied: “We’ll only take away charitable status from the buildings where the priests live and where the people pray.” As colossally ignorant and threatening as this sounds, it is also downright disingenuous. Four years ago, a Christian organization in Ontario that works with some of the most marginalized disabled people in the country was taken to court because of its disapproval of an employee who wanted to be part of a same-sex marriage. The government paid the group to do the work because, frankly, nobody else was willing to. As with so many such bodies, it had a set of policies for its employees. While homosexuality was not mentioned, the employment policies did require that employees remain chaste outside of marriage, and marriage was interpreted as the union of a man and a woman. The group was told it had to change its hiring and employment policy or be closed down; as for the disabled people being helped, they were hardly even mentioned. In small-town British Columbia, a Knights of Columbus chapter rented out its building for a wedding party. They were not aware that the marriage was to be of a lesbiancouple, even though the lesbians were well aware that the hall was a Roman Catholic center — it’s increasingly obvious that Christian people, leaders, and organizations are being targeted, almost certainly to create legal precedents. The managers of the hall apologized to the couple but explained that they could not proceed with the arrangement, and agreed to find an alternative venue and pay for new invitations to be printed. The couple said that this was not good enough, and the hall management was prosecuted. The human-rights commission ruled that the Knights of Columbus should not have turned the couple down, and imposed a small fine on them. The couple have been vague in their subsequent demands, but feel that the fine and reprimand are inadequate. As I write, two Canadian provinces are considering legislation that would likely prevent educators even in private denominational schools from teaching that they disapprove of same-sex marriage, and a senior government minister in Ontario recently announced that if the Roman Catholic Church did not approve of homosexuality or gay marriage, it “would have to change its teaching.” What has become painfully evident is that many of those who brought same-sex marriage to Canada have no respect for freedom of conscience and no intention of tolerating contrary opinion, whether that opinion is shaped by religious or by secular belief. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which has just turned 30 years old, fundamentally changed the direction of the legal system, emphasizing communities more than individuals. This has empowered minority groups with the most appeal to quash individual freedom by exercising their political and judicial influence. The system in the United States is different, more concerned with freedom of speech, and generally more respectful of the individual. But the groups and activists trying to silence their opponents are arguably even more radical and vociferous south of the border and, anyway, legal and political assumptions are capable of change; they certainly changed in Canada. The Canadian litany of pain, firings, and social and political polarization and extremism is extraordinary and lamentable, and we haven’t even begun to experience the mid- and long-term results of this mammoth social experiment. I seldom say it, but for goodness’ sake learn something from Canada. — Michael Coren is a Canadian TV host and columnist, and the author, most recently, of Heresy: Ten Lies They Spread about Christianity. This article originally appeared in the June 11, 2012, issue of National Review. |