With God On Our Side, Part III

A friend of mine emailed me the NYTimes piece about the Reverend Gregory Boyd, the Maplewood minister who rankled his congregation by removing overtly-"Republican" references from his services and church.

I wasn't quite sure how to react. On the one hand, I am, myself, uncomfortable with excessive politics in church (even though my faith drives my politics); while my faith leads me to what I think is a fairly obvious conclusion when it comes to politics, I am uncomfortable seeing the pulpit used for temporal politics.

It's the kind of story that will elicit tittering from the left, and outrage from some on the right - and the Strib certainly got a lot of mileage out of the story.

The author, NYTimes Religion beat reporter Laurie Goodstein, is also not known as a friend to traditional religion or, for that matter, Republicans - a point that virtually every commentary I've seen on this issue has skipped wholesale. Not that I necessarily believe that a writer's biases are the dispositive factor about a piece like this - but I notice that the NYTimes (and most of the mainstream media) coverage of evangelical politics is either sketchy or marinaded in stereotypes.

So what about the article?

Let's look:

Like most pastors who lead thriving evangelical megachurches, the Rev. Gregory A. Boyd was asked frequently to give his blessing — and the church’s — to conservative political candidates and causes.

The requests came from church members and visitors alike: Would he please announce a rally against gay marriage during services? Would he introduce a politician from the pulpit? Could members set up a table in the lobby promoting their anti-abortion work? Would the church distribute “voters’ guides” that all but endorsed Republican candidates? And with the country at war, please couldn’t the church hang an American flag in the sanctuary?

On the one hand, I applaud; I go to church to focus on things far beyond this world; while I can live with being hectored about temporal issues, I don't like it much.

But make no mistake - I take what I learn in church out into the world with me. My faith is right there behind my politics.

And so while I don't mind the gay marriage rally announcements and politicians being banished from the pulpit, there are some motivations worth questioning here. Boyd's or Goodstein's.

After refusing each time, Mr. Boyd finally became fed up, he said. Before the last presidential election, he preached six sermons called “The Cross and the Sword” in which he said the church should steer clear of politics, give up moralizing on sexual issues, stop claiming the United States as a “Christian nation” and stop glorifying American military campaigns.

“When the church wins the culture wars, it inevitably loses,” Mr. Boyd preached. “When it conquers the world, it becomes the world. When you put your trust in the sword, you lose the cross.”

"Give up moralizing on sexual issues?"

Let's leave larger matters of theology aside; ignore for a moment the bits about the conundrum of Christians and war; defer talking about believers and nationalism (which brings up issues over which I'm genuinely ambivalent. For what reason does a church exist if not to "moralize" - to draw a line in the world's moral sand? And how is drawing that moral line - for those who choose or are drawn to belief - "losing the cross"?

I have to wonder if Ms. Goodstein isn't editorializing between the lines here: would Rev. Boyd's story have seen the light of day (as far as the NYTimes is concerned) had he merely softpedaled overt politics - or, given this next part, if she isn't exaggerating parts of his stance:

Mr. Boyd says he is no liberal. He is opposed to abortion and thinks homosexuality is not God’s ideal.

Whatever. The consequences of Rev. Boyd's stance are obvious:

The response from his congregation at Woodland Hills Church here in suburban St. Paul — packed mostly with politically and theologically conservative, middle-class evangelicals — was passionate. Some members walked out of a sermon and never returned. By the time the dust had settled, Woodland Hills, which Mr. Boyd founded in 1992, had lost about 1,000 of its 5,000 members.

But there were also congregants who thanked Mr. Boyd, telling him they were moved to tears to hear him voice concerns they had been too afraid to share.

“Most of my friends are believers,” said Shannon Staiger, a psychotherapist and church member, “and they think if you’re a believer, you’ll vote for Bush. And it’s scary to go against that.”

(Side note: "Scary". It's a term that I'm looking forward to seeing cashiered from the English language. I'm growing sick to death of people (of all political stripes, although it's most prevalent on the left) who think other peoples' expression of belief, political or religious, is "scary". Belief in anything requires you to put a piece of yourself out there, which is itself "scary"; nothing can be "scary"ier on its face than faith in God itself. Belief itself - in whatever - requires a thicker skin. Quit being scared, people).

Sermons like Mr. Boyd’s are hardly typical in today’s evangelical churches. But the upheaval at Woodland Hills is an example of the internal debates now going on in some evangelical colleges, magazines and churches. A common concern is that the Christian message is being compromised by the tendency to tie evangelical Christianity to the Republican Party and American nationalism, especially through the war in Iraq.

At least six books on this theme have been published recently, some by Christian publishing houses. Randall Balmer, a religion professor at Barnard College and an evangelical, has written “Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America — an Evangelical’s Lament.”

And Mr. Boyd has a new book out, “The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power Is Destroying the Church,” which is based on his sermons.

“There is a lot of discontent brewing,” said Brian D. McLaren, the founding pastor at Cedar Ridge Community Church in Gaithersburg, Md., and a leader in the evangelical movement known as the “emerging church,” which is at the forefront of challenging the more politicized evangelical establishment.

My discomfort with overt politics in church is a matter of repeated record.

And yet for many people, the values that ones' faith calls for are similar to the ones that they express politically because - you know where this is going, don't you? - their faith drives their politics. Despite "books" on the subject, the fact is that evangelicals are overwhelmingly right-of-center (whatever their churches' approaches to politics from the pulpit - and, by the way, evangelical churches are not only not monolithically Republican, but far from unanimous showcasing Republican messages from the pulpit.

Does Ms. Goodstein note this? Ever?

Or the fact that while the "emerging church" is generating heat from the top - from theologians and ministers who do things like write books on the subject, or can declaim from the pulpit and be heard, that the Christian Church in America in a broad sense (not just evangelicals) is reacting the same way Reverand Boyd's congregation aqt Wooddale has? Goodstein n otes that Wooddale Church has lost 1,000 members for not being "conservative enough" for some of its members; the larger story is that the liberal wings of the Episcopal, Lutheran, Catholic and other churches have been hemorraging members for a generation or two, losing them to the evangelical, "conservative-friendly" churches like Boyd's.

Perhaps it's not so much that people want their politics in church, as that they want their church not to repudiate the politics that so many of these people got from their faith. If they don't want their church to proclaim the US a Christian nation, at least they'd like to have the good wrought upon the nation by Christianity - and Christians like them - acknowledged rather than treated as a stealth perversion.

“More and more people are saying this has gone too far — the dominance of the evangelical identity by the religious right,” Mr. McLaren said. “You cannot say the word ‘Jesus’ in 2006 without having an awful lot of baggage going along with it. You can’t say the word ‘Christian,’ and you certainly can’t say the word ‘evangelical’ without it now raising connotations and a certain cringe factor in people.

Submitted for your approval: The evangelical identity is not dominated by the religious right; the religious right is dominated by an evangelical identity.

And despite the best wishes of the "emerging church", or those whose "best case" vision of mainstream Christianity looks a lot more like Unitarianism than what most of the Christian Street would see, the bulk of the average worshippers in the pews are, at least to one extent or another, conservative on at least some of the major wedge issues, if not in their party politics; the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the USA, regarded as a liberal church (with a General Assembly that on a bad day could pass for the Minneapolis City Council) was forced to abandon its plan to divest from Israel by an unexpected (!) groundswell of support for the Jewish state.

And this was from a "liberal" denomination.

Let's go back to Rev. Boyd:

Mr. Boyd said he had cleared his sermons with the church’s board, but his words left some in his congregation stunned. Some said that he was disrespecting President Bush and the military, that he was soft on abortion or telling them not to vote.

“When we joined years ago, Greg was a conservative speaker,” said William Berggren, a lawyer who joined the church with his wife six years ago. “But we totally disagreed with him on this. You can’t be a Christian and ignore actions that you feel are wrong. A case in point is the abortion issue. If the church were awake when abortion was passed in the 70’s, it wouldn’t have happened. But the church was asleep.”

One question unanswered in Ms. Goodstein's column; how did this congregation full of staunch Republicans even end up in Rev. Boyd's church in the first place?

Mr. Boyd, 49, who preaches in blue jeans and rumpled plaid shirts, leads a church that occupies a squat block-long building that was once a home improvement chain store.

The church grew from 40 members in 12 years, based in no small part on Mr. Boyd’s draw as an electrifying preacher who stuck closely to Scripture. He has degrees from Yale Divinity School and Princeton Theological Seminary, and he taught theology at Bethel College in St. Paul, where he created a controversy a few years ago by questioning whether God fully knew the future. Some pastors in his own denomination, the Baptist General Conference, mounted an effort to evict Mr. Boyd from the denomination and his teaching post, but he won that battle.

He is known among evangelicals for a bestselling book, “Letters From a Skeptic,” based on correspondence with his father, a leftist union organizer and a lifelong agnostic — an exchange that eventually persuaded his father to embrace Christianity.

Mr. Boyd said he never intended his sermons to be taken as merely a critique of the Republican Party or the religious right. He refuses to share his party affiliation, or whether he has one, for that reason. He said there were Christians on both the left and the right who had turned politics and patriotism into “idolatry.”Another side note: It's here that the mainstream media pays the wages of the sin of its longstanding ideological slant. The same newspaper that says Reverend Boyd is non-partisan is the same one that notes conservatism as "extreme" and "partisan", while considering the left "moderate"; we don't know if this portrayal of Boyd is accurate. It might be, but I dont' trust Goodstein to tell us.

Let's take it at grudging face value for now. Boyd - no, Goodstein - notes this extreme, borderline-noxious example of the hijacking of the pulpit...:

He said he first became alarmed while visiting another megachurch’s worship service on a Fourth of July years ago. The service finished with the chorus singing “God Bless America” and a video of fighter jets flying over a hill silhouetted with crosses.

“I thought to myself, ‘What just happened? Fighter jets mixed up with the cross?’ ” he said in an interview.

Patriotic displays are still a mainstay in some evangelical churches. Across town from Mr. Boyd’s church, the sanctuary of North Heights Lutheran Church was draped in bunting on the Sunday before the Fourth of July this year for a “freedom celebration.” Military veterans and flag twirlers paraded into the sanctuary, an enormous American flag rose slowly behind the stage, and a Marine major who had served in Afghanistan preached that the military was spending “your hard-earned money” [Why the scare quotes? -- Ed] on good causes.

The juxtaposition of the fighter planes and the cross is dramatic, and noxious even to me.

And I think Ms. Goodstein knows that, and wrote it fully aware of its impact.

Now, picture a similar scene; a megachurch projecting the image of a couple of gay guys exchanging wedding rings, and a woman prepping for an abortion, over the cross. That would generate a response, no?

Of course.

In the world of Laurie Goodstein - and her target demo, in an area where faith has shallower roots, statistically, than in most of the US - the faithful should be repulsed by the juxtaposition of patriotic imagery and faith more than that of the gay wedding and the abortion - even though nationalism isn't really much of a topic in the Bible (let's assume we accept the Bible as the basis for Christian belief, for argument's sake), while marriage and murder are.

Personal taste might bid some Christians to eschew overt patriotism in church. I"m one of them. But the other images directly attack key institutions of the faith.

Without making value judgements of my own, tell me - why does Laurie Goodstein suppose Rev. Boyd lost 20% of his congregation?

In his six sermons, Mr. Boyd laid out a broad argument that the role of Christians was not to seek “power over” others — by controlling governments, passing legislation or fighting wars. Christians should instead seek to have “power under” others — “winning people’s hearts” by sacrificing for those in need, as Jesus did, Mr. Boyd said.

“America wasn’t founded as a theocracy,” he said. “America was founded by people trying to escape theocracies. Never in history have we had a Christian theocracy where it wasn’t bloody and barbaric. That’s why our Constitution wisely put in a separation of church and state.

Question for Rev. Boyd: what is a committed Christian to do? Leave their party at the door? Or leave their faith outside the polling place, excise it from their civic life, pretend to be an atheist whenever any civic issue that might involve non-Christians comes up?

The former, I can do - have done, many times.

The latter is just plain silly. Nobody asks gays, Afro-Americans, or the handicapped to leave their identities out of their politics.

And while I started out the story as somewhat sympathetic to Rev. Boyd's stance, his assumption that I - we - seek "theocracy" is nothing short of insulting - on a par with "JFK can't be a good American and a good Catholic at the same time", to pick an example that American learned to chuckle in embarassment over nearly 50 years ago.

Mr. Boyd lambasted the “hypocrisy and pettiness” of Christians who focus on “sexual issues” like homosexuality, abortion or Janet Jackson’s breast-revealing performance at the Super Bowl halftime show. He said Christians these days were constantly outraged about sex and perceived violations of their rights to display their faith in public.

“Those are the two buttons to push if you want to get Christians to act,” he said. “And those are the two buttons Jesus never pushed.”

"Perceived" violations?

I'm starting to see why Rev. Boyd had some problems.

Mr. Boyd gave his sermons while his church was in the midst of a $7 million fund-raising campaign. But only $4 million came in, and 7 of the more than 50 staff members were laid off, he said.

Mary Van Sickle, the family pastor at Woodland Hills, said she lost 20 volunteers who had been the backbone of the church’s Sunday school.

“They said, ‘You’re not doing what the church is supposed to be doing, which is supporting the Republican way,’ ” she said. “It was some of my best volunteers...In the end, those who left tended to be white, middle-class suburbanites, church staff members said. In their place, the church has added more members who live in the surrounding community — African-Americans, Hispanics and Hmong immigrants from Laos.

Which is fine - leaving out the value-judgement inherent in Ms. Goodstein's inclusion of this factoid. But Goodstein comes to the crux next:

His congregation of about 4,000 is still digesting his message. Mr. Boyd arranged a forum on a recent Wednesday night to allow members to sound off on his new book. The reception was warm, but many of the 56 questions submitted in writing were pointed: Isn’t abortion an evil that Christians should prevent? Are you saying Christians should not join the military? How can Christians possibly have “power under” Osama bin Laden? Didn’t the church play an enormously positive role in the civil rights movement?

One woman asked: “So why NOT us? If we contain the wisdom and grace and love and creativity of Jesus, why shouldn’t we be the ones involved in politics and setting laws?”

Mr. Boyd responded: “I don’t think there’s a particular angle we have on society that others lack. All good, decent people want good and order and justice. Just don’t slap the label ‘Christian’ on it.”

I'd be willing to meet Rev. Boyd halfway on this; a good person doesn't have to be a Christian.

But Rev. Boyd - and/or perhaps Ms. Goodstein - are doing the most overt label-slapping in this piece;

• Christians who dare to express their faith through politics are inherently a danger
• They are inevitably (so it seems, since no other alternative is presented), er, hell-bent on theocracy and domination.

It's a prejudice - a conceit - that the left that Laurie Goodstein represents, about a belief that exists only on a radical fringe, a part of American Christianity that nevertheless obsesses the likes of Laurie Goldstein. And like most such prejudices, it's wrong and ignorant.

Wrong and ignorant. They're two words that brush up against the idea of beating evangelicals over the head with conservatism...

...and smack Laurie Goodstein's article full in the jaw.

I remain ambivalent about mixing nationalism and faith. Laurie Goodstein's article gives me no reason to think about that issue at all - but should further stoke the thesis that the mainstream press at the very least doesn't understand faith, and at the most detests it.

Or at least detests it if it gets all uppity and votes.

Posted by Mitch at August 9, 2006 06:50 PM | TrackBack