Natalie's Narrative

Pro-life evangelicals and prior inconsistent statements

2012-02-21T08:45:00-06:00

The Gospel Coalition blog recently rounded up some evangelical leaders' calls for civil disobedience. Requiring religious employers to provide health insurance that covers contraception (regardless of who actually pays for it), is effectively forcing pro-life Christians to violate their conscience. These evangelicals claim that some of the drugs to be covered are abortifacients.

Such violation of religious liberty will not stand. These men, along with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, are so concerned about human life that they will not tolerate even the most remote connection to birth control that results in the ending of even the most basic forms of human life. Innocent, defenseless lives are at stake here.

Chuck Colson says he loves his country, "but I love my God more . . . I've made up my mind---sober as that decision would have to be---that I will stand for the Lord regardless of what my state tells me."

Rick Warren so bravely proclaimed, "I'd go to jail rather than cave in to a govement mandate that violates what God commands us to do."

Richard Land and Barrett Duke wrote an impassioned call to Christians to oppose this measure, which is an "affront to all people who are pro-life" (emphasis added).

I'm in my last semester of law school, and have been trained to impeach witnesses up on the stand because of a little something called a "prior inconsistent statement." Our justice system is so concerned with the credibility of witnesses that we have carved out an exception to hearsay rules, which normally prohibit out-of-court statements, so that those words can be used against witnesses if they make previous inconsistent statements. Once the witness is confronted with the inconsistency, she is impeached and her word is no longer credible.

To me, Colson, Warren, and Land have lost credibility based on their prior inconsistent statements about their support of innocent, defenseless human lives and whether they would put the state before their faith in God.

In 2003, when the Bush administration was preparing to pre-emptively invade another country, many evangelical leaders offered their support, or at least helped justify, this military action, which resulted in over 100,000 documented Iraqi civilian deaths. When allegations later surfaced that the U.S. military was using an especially heinous form of torture on prisoners of war, some evangelical leaders again stepped up to help justify torture.

Chuck Colson reasoned that "if a competent authority honestly believed that [torture] was the only way to get information that might save the lives of thousands, I believe he would be justified." Yes, this is the same Chuck Colson that you just read about above, who proclaimed that while he does love his country, he wouldn't let his state get in the way of his stand for the Lord.

Rick Warren, in 2008, performed some post-hoc rationalization for the Iraq invasion, despite the Bush administration's later-disproved reasons for invading in the first place: "whether or not they found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is beside the point." Yes, this is the same Rick Warren who valiantly rails against a government who makes us violate God's commands.

Richard Land stated in 2006 that the Iraq war "was just; I think it was one of the more noble things we've done." Yes, the same Richard Land who, as we saw above, so passionately protested against government action that is an affront to people who are pro-life.

None of these men offered such an unequivocal statement in support of innocent, defenseless human lives when the U.S. decided to invade Iraq and later sanction torture. No one called for civil disobedience when reports started pouring in of civilian deaths, or of the U.S.'s best and brightest being blown up by roadside bombs, or of those same best and brightest being driven to suicide once they're home, or of the estimated 900,000 Iraqi women who are now widows.

Such duplicity disgusts me. I know no one is perfect and that stances change, and I'm certainly not claiming to be perfect. But such pompous calls for civil disobedience simply make my stomach turn. I can't help but think of the death and destruction in Iraq that was abetted by some U.S. evangelicals. The juxtaposition doesn't sit well with me, and I have a feeling it doesn't sit well with many other people in my generation.

If you want to make valiant, impassioned, public calls to put your faith in God before your obedience to the government, at least be consistent. Because if not, even an inexperienced law student would have you impeached on the stand in a heartbeat.

Wheaton problems, evangelical problems

2012-02-17T08:45:00-06:00

It wasn't until my senior year at Wheaton, in 2005, that my friends and I signed up for Facebook. "Status updates" weren't yet an option. Twitter wasn't even launched until after I graduated from Wheaton. This means that my peers and I didn't have an instant social media forum to share our opinions.

Even in our oh-so-ancient pre-Twitter era, we still found a way to communicate, converse, and share opinions on campus, but I bet the advent of smartphones and easily-accessible social media has dramatically changed how information flows in such a tight-knit community. One such change is students tweeting during chapel services, using the #chapeltweets hashtag.

Each February, usually in honor of black history month, Wheaton has a chapel dubbed "Rhythm and Praise," in which students (of all backgrounds, but the majority are black) lead a "gospel-style" worship service. Keep in mind that the college is overwhelmingly white, with very few students of color. Last Friday, some white students sent out a series of racially insensitive and derisive tweets during this particular chapel. Noah Toly, an urban studies professor and director of the Urban Studies Program, summarized the tweets here.

My heart is heavy for the students who led worship that day. I can't imagine how painful it must be to know that your fellow Christians take your worship style lightly, or wish for a return to business-as-usual.

As I'm no longer on campus, I don't want to portray the events incorrectly. However, I did want to comment on many white students' and alumni's responses I've seen online. What may seem like an isolated incident at a Christian college reveals, to me, a bigger issue within white evangelicalism as a whole. One white professor thinks we should be quiet about the incident, because "talking it out" sometimes piles on to the hurt. One presumably white alum sees nothing wrong with stating a preference toward "traditional" worship styles.

White evangelicals have a complicated, uncomfortable history with our black neighbors, and we don't come to a historically-neutral table. Christian Smith has asked believers to "stop excluding, dismissing, discounting, and ignoring other Christians" who don't belong to their own "in-group." Speaking of in-groups, many white evangelicals have created an "insider" culture, with our own unwritten grammar of conduct and nuances of cultural idiom.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with a preference for a European or white U.S. American style of worship. But when we white evangelicals convince ourselves that our worship services, music, preaching style, and other aspects of church life are simply "neutral" or "traditional," we effectively shut out Christians of color, even if excluding others is not our intent. When Christians of color point out how hurtful it can be to "joke around" about a particular worship style--even when the comment was made with no harm intended--a defensive response only makes the wound grow deeper.

Anthropology professor Brian Howell, who was extremely influential during my own time at Wheaton, explains that a seemingly neutral statement or preference can still perpetuate hurtful racism, even if the person who makes such a statement or has such a preference isn't a racist:

When someone listens to gospel music and declares it "disorganized," (true example from #chapeltweets), he may just be intending to say that he doesn't know where to look; there's a lot going on; he is confused. At the level of intention and reference, nothing racial there. But indexically there are some layers here. Mind you, the performance in question did not involve people forgetting the lyrics, bumping into each other, or not knowing who should step up to the mic. At that level it was orderly. But it was more complex than some other (European based) forms of music. To call it "disorderly" is to make a comparison. To what? To "orderly" worship. To "normal" worship. To "white" worship.

On a broader scale, I wonder what white evangelicals could learn from this teachable moment. Perhaps we could realize that worship styles and church services are not race-neutral. Worship and the theology that underlies it are rooted in a specific context, which includes race. White evangelicals may not think our views about church or worship have a racial influence. We instead consider them race-neutral. Only allowing space or only legitimizing white, suburban, middle-class preferences, then, can speak volumes.

When it comes to worship, one of the most vulnerable times in the practice of one's faith, perhaps we should unpack our preferences and question our assumptions, as Dr. Howell mentioned. What seems completely natural to one group of believers may have a different meaning for another. At the foot of the cross, why would we make value judgments or insist that one's preferences are somehow neutral?

What was there all along...

2012-02-14T08:45:00-06:00

The next section in Christian Smith's The Bible Made Impossible deals with "A Historically Growing Grasp of the Meaning of the Gospel." It provides a helpful tool for thinking about a closed canon. Smith writes: "[T]he Christian church’s historically progressive understanding and working out of the meaning and implications of the gospel as mediated to us through scripture has never in church history been complete and is not now complete."

The common evangelical belief is that the New Testament provides all we need to know theologically, and modeled how believers work out the gospel in a "particular sociohistorial context. This does not mean the New Testament authors "understood and worked out all the long-term implications of the gospel for theological knowledge, human life, and society." Later generations continued to develop the authors' theology in new ways. It took over 350 years "to work out orthodox, catholic, christological, and trinitarian doctrines, which most evangelicals still affirm as theologically nonnegotiable today." I loved his description of this process, "theological wrangling."

"What was embryonic in scripture needed to develop and grow into a more mature theological expression of what was there all along." Smith argues the New Testament authors had simply not "worked out the full implications" of the truth they so cherished, but which later generations of Christians have formulated.

Slavery is a prime example of this "unfolding." The New Testament authors did not work out the gospel's moral implications for slavery. This has caused many to reject Christianity, which is understandable. I believe the doctrine of inerrancy keeps this stumbling block in place, ossifying what is supposed to be inchoate.

Smith notes early Christians were, "like all humans, limited in time, place, and range of vision." For them, slavery was an unalterable fact of life. The Gospel merely meant slaves should submit to their masters and masters should treat their slaves well. But, the Gospel started planting seeds, "in the form of the then-radical idea that slaves and masters were equals and brothers in Christ."

For all Christians to unequivocally understand that the Gospel means the end of slavery took time and struggle--wrangling. Today, all Christians look back and clearly know the truths of the Bible unfold in such a way that slavery is wrong. The denouncement of slavery was not itself a teaching found anywhere other than in embryonic forms in the New Testament. But eventually all Christians grasped this truth by fleshing out the Gospel's ramifications. Smith explains:

[T]he total meaning of the gospel did not land on the apostles’ doorsteps the day after Pentecost, like a cognitive FedEx package containing everything the church would ever need to know, think, and believe until Jesus returns in glory. The apostles understood and preached the truth of salvation in Jesus Christ. But they did not know and teach the fullness of the many implications of that truth for doctrine, relationships, and society. That was a task given to subsequent generations of believers across church history.

He later describes this process as a "slow but ultimately revolutionary leavening of the gospel in human life," not overtly prescribed but nevertheless a valid result of New Testament teachings.

Smith's use of slavery as an example, to me, highlights the necessity of decolonizing our faith. Of course there were those who knew from the start that slavery was unequivocally wrong - slaves themselves! And I'm wary of describing the process as slow. Just as Martin Luther King Jr. warned against white moderates' desire to take the civil rights movement more slowly, I wouldn't want the gradual, historical unfolding of the Gospel to sanction a delay in ensuring the liberty for all at the foot of the cross.

But back to Smith - he cites a litany of verses to support this premise (in a...biblicist sort of way), but his point remains that evangelicals only apply the "working out" and "growing" verses individualistically. Rather than strictly personal spiritual growth, what if these verses addressed the church's collective understanding of the Gospel? What if truth itself is developing, unfolding, and dynamic, like a mustard seed, or yeast spreading through rising dough?

Pervasive interpretive pluralism frames the Bible as the complete and final teachings on all subjects. But let God-fearing, Bible-believing Southern Christians in the nineteenth-century U.S. remind us: failure to grasp a historically progressive understanding of Scripture results in support for one of the ugliest times in human and American history, undergirded by what appears to be the Bible's defense of slavery.

If a developing, dynamic truth sounds uncomfortably close to postmodernism, most of us would acknowledge that denouncing slavery didn't require a radical postmodern turn away from "objective truth." I still believe truth has roots, but perhaps we've got to keep watering seeds and wrangling, careful not to let the Gospel fossilize. Or perhaps we should be more careful not to let our understanding of the Gospel ossify, lest we fail to see what was there all along.