Sermon

I start this by saying that I am not a Christian, though I used to be. I became one at the age of nineteen. I was lucky enough to learn with a very thoughtful collection of Christian friends.

I’ve since left this faith behind, seeing too much of Man’s artifice there in the church to believe that the construct could be fairly called Godly—seeing, far too often, and sometimes first-hand, how the idea of God was used to justify or hand-wave behavior ranging from the somewhat destructive to the truly despicable.

I mention this to qualify what I say next. There is a pursuit of worldly power by the church in the US that seems to be based in a misunderstanding of the nature of the Mission; this pursuit has caused the church to rot; and this rot is so advanced that I am not sure it would recognize Jesus.

A misunderstanding of Jesus’ goal

The Jewish people in the Gospels appear to be expecting a military king who would free them from the Romans. The Dead Sea Scrolls demonstrate this in its War of the Messiah segments. Herod seemed terrified that the Messiah would supplant him. Isaiah 11 also points to this expectation, as does John 6:

After the people saw the sign Jesus performed, they began to say, “Surely this is the Prophet who is to come into the world.” Jesus, knowing that they intended to come and make him king by force, withdrew again to a mountain by himself.

This isn’t what Jesus saw for himself. When he returns, he rejects his disciples worldly hopes of him, as told in Acts 1:

Then they gathered around him and asked him, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?”

He said to them: “It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

In the writings of Paul, we see an opening-up of Christianity to non-Jews, including those in the Roman Empire. This opening up of Christianity seems very much at odds with a faith focused on the overthrow of the Roman Empire, or one concerned with the pursuit of political power.

The genesis of this present rot

In 1973, the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade that a woman has the right to obtain an abortion without excessive government restriction. After this, evangelicals became more involved in politics to fight back against the scourge of legalized abortion. Or so the myth goes.

Jerry Falwell made this claim explicit:

In his 2005 book, Jerry Falwell, the firebrand fundamentalist preacher, recounts his distress upon reading about the ruling in the Jan. 23, 1973, edition of the Lynchburg News: “I sat there staring at the Roe v. Wade story,” Falwell writes, “growing more and more fearful of the consequences of the Supreme Court’s act and wondering why so few voices had been raised against it.” Evangelicals, he decided, needed to organize.

In fact, evangelical involvement in American politics had an entirely different genesis, with both Falwell and Heritage Foundation co-founder Paul Weyrich involved in a push to unite Christians against the perceived evil of—and I do wish I was making this up—forced school integration.

Jerry Falwell

Jerry Falwell had a long history of supporting segregation. In response to the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, Falwell delivered a sermon titled “Segregation or Integration: Which?”, quoted here from Agent of Intolerance by Max Blumenthal:

“If Chief Justice Warren and his associates had known God’s word and had desired to do the Lord’s will, I am quite confident that the 1954 decision would never have been made,” Falwell boomed from above his congregation in Lynchburg. “The facilities should be separate. When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line.”

Falwell’s jeremiad continued: “The true Negro does not want integration…. He realizes his potential is far better among his own race.” Falwell went on to announce that integration “will destroy our race eventually. In one northern city,” he warned, “a pastor friend of mine tells me that a couple of opposite race live next door to his church as man and wife.”

After Brown v. Board of Education ruled that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, many in the south responded by opening private “segregation academies” that remained whites-only.

One of these schools was Bob Jones University, a tax-exempt private school that admitted any blacks only in 1971, non-married blacks only in 1975, and maintained a ban on interracial dating thereafter. Its tax-exempt status was revoked on January 19, 1976, retroactively to December 1, 1970, on the grounds that it practiced racial discrimination in its admission policies.

Again from Blumenthal’s piece:

For Falwell and his allies, the true impetus for political action came when the Supreme Court ruled in Green v. Connally to revoke the tax-exempt status of racially discriminatory private schools in 1971. At about the same time, the Internal Revenue Service moved to revoke the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University, which forbade interracial dating. (Blacks were denied entry until 1971.) Falwell was furious, complaining, “In some states it’s easier to open a massage parlor than to open a Christian school.”

Falwell had other reasons to support Bob Jones. Another segregation academy, Lynchburg Christian Academy, was founded by Falwell himself.

Falwell continued to support the segregation at Bob Jones University for years afterwards. In 1983 the Supreme Court upheld the Government’s right to deny tax-exempts status to the university. Falwell called this “a blow against religious liberty”.

It is plain from history that repellent ideas can be given justification as God’s desire for the world. Although Christian abolitionists are revered, many Christians supported slavery not just in principle but as a Christian institution.

Bishop Stephen Elliott of Georgia even made a case for the redemptive purpose of slavery when he said:

Around Sierra Leone, and in the neighborhood of Cape Palmas, a few natives have been made Christians, and some nations have been partially civilized; but what a small number in comparison with the thousands, nay, I may say millions, who have learned the way to Heaven and who have been made to know their Savior through the means of African slavery!

Furthermore, it is possible for the Christianity practiced by people to be corrupted into something clearly abhorrent. Frederick Douglass recognized the same in his time:

[…] between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference — so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked.

I hope the case of Falwell demonstrates that these days are not behind us. Moreover, those who have a positive view of Falwell likely have either forgotten or never known of his segregationist past. For the powerful, the past can be rewritten to best suit one’s agenda.

But what agenda is that?

Paul Weyrich

From Thy Kingdom Come by Randall Balmer:

Weyrich, whose conservative activism dates at least as far back as the Barry Goldwater campaign in 1964, had been trying for years to energize evangelical voters over school prayer, abortion, or the proposed equal rights amendment to the Constitution. "I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed," he recalled in an interview in the early 1990s. "What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter's intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation."

I want to point out something interesting here. Both the Green v. Connally ruling that revoked tax-exempt status for private schools that practiced segregation, and the IRS actions against Bob Jones University that Weyrich and Falwell fought against, occurred during the Nixon and Ford presidencies, respectively.

Though the IRS continued these policies throughout Carter’s presidency, it’s hard to see this as a good faith argument. Weyrich tries to mislead the listener into a partisan framing of history.

Weyrich tried to involve evangelicals in politics in a push for his own, conservative, goals. He and others succeeded in this, but it should be clear that what was important to evangelicals (again, segregation) was used to draw them into a larger conservative framework of policies.

But what about abortion?

Abortion

How was abortion viewed by evangelicals before Roe v. Wade? From Agent of Intolerance:

By 1973, when the Supreme Court ruled on Roe, the antiabortion movement was almost exclusively Catholic. While various Catholic cardinals condemned the Court’s ruling, W.A. Criswell, the fundamentalist former president of America’s largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, casually endorsed it. […] A year before Roe, the SBC had resolved to press for legislation allowing for abortion in limited cases.

While abortion clinics sprung up across the United States during the early 1970s, evangelicals did little.

From NPR’s Throughline:

KING: So opposition to abortion has become so associated with evangelical Christians that it seems like that's the way it was all along.

ABDELFATAH: No. In fact, the Southern Baptist Convention, they actually passed resolutions in 1971, 1974 and 1976 - after Roe v. Wade - affirming the idea that women should have access to abortion for a variety of reasons and that the government should play a limited role in that matter, which surprised us. The experts we talked to said white evangelicals at that time saw abortion as largely a Catholic issue.

Rather than being a foundational idea, anti-abortion activism was adopted to continue the political movement that started with the defense of segregation. From Thy Kingdom Come:

What about abortion? After mobilizing to defend Bob Jones University and its racially discriminatory policies, Weyrich said, these evangelical leaders held a conference call to discuss strategy. He recalled that someone suggested that they had the makings of a broader political movement—something that Weyrich had been pushing for all along—and asked what other issues they might address. Several callers made suggestions, and then, according to Weyrich, a voice on the end of one of the lines said, "How about abortion?" And that is how abortion was cobbled into the political agenda of the Religious Right.

Abortion was therefore used as vehicle for the continuation and growth of the Religious Right, not as the primary driving force that led to its creation.

This does not mean that those that believe that abortion is wrong and should be made illegal are insincere in their beliefs. But the genesis of the Religious Right as a bulwark against school integration, and the rather obvious scheming by Weyrich and crew to choose abortion as a second point to rally around after segregation seemed unpalatable, should at the very least give one pause to consider the motivation of those that operate within this sphere.

Secondly, it is important to note that the change in how the SBC and other evangelical organizations saw abortion correlates with the work of the Religious Right to drive evangelicals towards serving conservative political ends.

You have been misled.

An idol is raised

Consider your “allies”

The Religious Right movement has worked effectively to conflate Christianity with Republicanism. This association can be strong.

I remember discussing the then-upcoming 2016 election with some evangelical Republican voters. They insisted that Trump was “God’s candidate”, and that God would use him for His purposes.

Could God use Hillary Clinton, if she won? No, they insisted. Because she wasn’t “God’s candidate”. This seems to spit in the face of God’s capability.

In an egregiously partisan example, one of Trump’s top religious advisers, Dr. Robert Jeffress, said of Democrats “apparently the god they worship is the pagan god of the Old Testament Moloch, who allowed for child sacrifice”, implicitly dismissing that one could be both Christian and a Democrat.

And although it may be clear to some why the Republican Party is “God’s party”, it is hard to see where the connection between the priorities of the party and the priorities of Christ exists.

The headline Republican action of the last few years—the tax cut—helped cut the taxes of the richest 400 people in America so much that their overall tax rate became the lowest of any income group. It is unclear how the ultra-rich paying a smaller proportion of tax than anyone else maps onto the stated beliefs of evangelicals, and yet the support of evangelicals for the Republican Party was critical in getting this and other conservative goals passed.

Temporal power

The political involvement of the Religious Right has not primarily been about helping others, but instead on creating rules in society to benefit themselves, blocking others from doing things they want to do or giving themselves additional “rights”. In effect, it is an effort in gaining temporal power.

Focus on the Family

Focus on the Family has a history of pushing against gay rights. At an anti-gay-rights rally in 2004 called “Mayday for Marriage”, their chairman endorsed George W Bush for a second term and pushed for Republican control of the Senate:

Tens of thousands of conservative Christians gathered on the Mall here Friday for a demonstration against same-sex marriage that doubled as a rally to turn out conservative Christian voters on Election Day.

"I encourage you to remember in November," James C. Dobson, chairman of the evangelical self-help organization Focus on the Family, told the crowd, many of whom held Bush-Cheney placards and wore the campaign's buttons and T-shirts. […] "We can't reach the court," Dr. Dobson told the rally, denouncing the Supreme Court for rulings in favor of abortion and gay rights. "But we can reach the Senate. We can do that on Nov. 2."

Focus on the Family also worked with others to pass Proposition 8 in California, which was a constitutional amendment banning the recognition of marriages other than between a man and a woman.

Alliance Defending Freedom

The Alliance Defending Freedom is another conservative Christian group co-founded by James Dobson. It has litigated against gay rights, and has pushed to get pastors actively involved in politics:

In perhaps its most aggressive effort, the alliance organizes an annual Pulpit Freedom Sunday, enlisting pastors, who under federal rules may not endorse politicians or bills, to link “biblical principles” to politics in their sermons. In June, more than 1,000 pastors signed up to preach “the truth about marriage.”

The ADF want to repeal the Johnson Amendment, which prevents all 501(c)(3) non-profits from endorsing or opposing political candidates.

"The tax-collecting IRS shouldn't be playing speech cop and threatening a church's tax-exempt status simply because its pastor exercises his constitutionally protected freedom of speech," ADF Senior Legal Counsel Erik Stanley, who heads the Pulpit Freedom Sunday event, said in a statement.

Of course, this is deliberately misleading. Churches and religious leaders are able to speak out on religious and social issues, and religious leaders are allowed to endorse or oppose political candidates as private citizens. It is only that they cannot use the tax-exempt (and therefore government-subsidized) resources of the church to do so.

The repeal of the Johnson Amendment would allow effectively persons or organizations to make tax-deductible political donations through churches. Already section 116 of House Resolution 3280 bars the IRS from investigating churches (and churches only) for breaching these rules unless the head of the IRS agrees.

How bad is it? Here’s the ACLU on section 116:

The goal of Section 116 is to make it very difficult for the IRS to investigate claims that churches—but only churches—have violated the law by engaging in partisan political activity by requiring consent from the IRS Commissioner for each investigation and notification to the Ways and Means Committee in the House of Representatives and the Finance Committee in the Senate before such investigations can commence. The first requirement would significantly slow down, if not functionally halt, the pursuit of 501(c)(3) violations, while the second would only serve to further politicize these investigations.

Such drives aim to increase the political power of churches, and the Religious Right along with them.

Who does this serve?

The political actions of Christians on the Religious Right appear to be entirely self-serving, aiming to enhance the power of Christians, specifically conservative Christians, over other people.

When Christians agitate to remove gay marriage from civil society, they are looking to force their religious beliefs on others. When conservatives pass laws like Section 116, they seek to boost the power of churches.

Where is the service to others? This behavior seems very much against the example of Jesus. Where is the work to feed the hungry and help the poor?

As Jesus says in Mark 10:42-45:

So Jesus called them together and said, “You know that the rulers in this world lord it over their people, and officials flaunt their authority over those under them. But among you it will be different. Whoever wants to be a leader among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first among you must be the slave of everyone else. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve others and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

Trump

There appears to be some grotesque characterization of Trump as some sort of savior figure. Jon McNaughton has him in the stead of Washington crossing the Delaware. Michael Steele said that CPAC attendees viewed him as “the Golden Calf, he is the thing that they come and bow before.”

Franklin Graham prayed for him in a disturbing fashion:

Yet the Rev. Franklin Graham’s declaration last week for a “special day of prayer for the President, Donald J. Trump” on Sunday had a very different theological flavor. Graham made clear that the real purpose of the event was not to pray for the president, but to pray in his political favor. “President Trump’s enemies continue to try everything to destroy him, his family and the presidency,” Graham said. “In the history of our country, no president has been attacked as he has.” The American Family Association described the day of prayer as a type of “spiritual warfare,” necessary because Trump’s many accomplishments “make him very unpopular with the Devil and the kingdom of darkness.”

This mirrored the American Family Association’s bizarre earlier article:

The opposition to this president is very intense and much of it doesn’t even make a lot of sense – at least not in the natural. The media, the opposing political party, the political party that he is in, - it appears that opposition is coming against him from almost every side. It seems that there are those who don’t like him no matter what he does.

This is more than a prayer for the president to lead wisely. This is a prayer in political support for the president and his agenda, and implies that his political opponents are of “the kingdom of darkness”.

Much is made among the right about the unfairness of attacks upon the president. But perhaps a man with a history of lying, cheating, swindling, blatant racism, and grift might continue one or more of these practices?

Child separation and detention condition of migrants

The child separation policy of this administration, and the detention conditions of migrants, at the southern border should fill anyone with empathy with disgust and rage.

A report from DHS’s own acting inspector general to the acting head of the organization, sent in July of this year, was titled “DHS Needs to Address Dangerous Overcrowding and Prolonged Detention of Children and Adults in the Rio Grande Valley”. Photographs from the report (pages 4 and 5) show human beings in cages so tightly packed that there isn’t enough room for everyone to lie on the cold, concrete floor. Conditions have been decried by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

That adults are held in these conditions is itself a disgrace, but the policy of separating children from their parents is some new level of horror. I won’t write here of the details—there are plenty of places to find this information, and I wish to spare the sensitive reader—but if you read eye-witness reports and do not well up in tears and fill with rage against the injustice, I am not sure what sort of person you are.

A common refrain is “if we don’t have a border, we don’t have a country”, joined often by “we need to enforce the laws”. The former is laughable (did we not exist as a country before Trump?), but the latter does not correlate with the actions of the administration, which continues to break the law in disregarding the requirements of the Flores agreement. They have also argued in court that it is “safe and sanitary” to confine immigrant children in facilities without soap or toothbrushes and to make them sleep on concrete floors under bright lights.

Refugees in general

On September 26 2019, the administration cut the cap on the number of refugees to be admitted to the United States (in the subsequent year) to 18,000. This is the lowest level since the program began, and is the fourth time the Trump administration has cut this cap, after cutting it to 30,000 in September 2018, cutting it to 45,000 the year before, and that same year slashing the previously set cap for 2017 from 110,000 to 50,000.

With this new cap, the United States is no longer the world’s top country for refugee admissions, after leading the world in this regard since 1980. With the 70.8 million people refugees and displaced people around the world, representing the biggest refugee crisis in history, this seems particularly callous.

Sadly, the US has a history of turning away those in need. In 1939, the 937 passengers of the M.S. St. Louis, mostly Jews fleeing Nazi Germany, was denied entry first to Cuba, then to the United States, then to Canada. Of those passengers, 254 were murdered by the Nazis. There are real consequences to turning away those in need—it is not some abstract act.

How does this track with the Jesus you claim to follow?

Unrecognizable

I have demonstrated:

• That Jesus rejected the characterization of the role of the Messiah as someone who would pursue political dominance;
• That an institution defended by Christians, using Christian terminology and arguments based on an understanding of the Bible, does not make those institutions worthy of support (e.g. slavery, school segregation);
• That Christians can be manipulated by outside actors to align themselves with a political movement;
• That the view of abortion by the SBC has changed, and this change correlates with the work of the Religious Right to influence evangelicals towards conservative political ends;
• That, once co-opted into a political movement, Christians can take up a wide variety of positions that don’t have any obvious connection to a theological backing, and associate that with their identity;
• That this can become further twisted into a drive to put the needs of Christians first;
• And that Christians can, and often do, support politicians that push policies that are stand in direct opposition to the explicit instruction of Christ.

What does that say of the present evangelical movement in politics? Specifically white evangelicals, 81% of whom voted for Trump? What does it matter if you attend church, pay your tithe, and study the Bible, if you have no heart?

Jesus himself says in Matthew 23:23-24:

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.

The hypocrisy has not gone unnoticed. Churches will often lament the large proportion of people leaving their congregations, but rarely have I seen those churches take a step back and consider that perhaps they are contributing to this. At the very least, evangelicals must watch out for that camel, lest they choke on it.