Peace Hacks

White Evangelicalism in America is experiencing a fairly massive rift, mostly along political lines, especially with regards to what’s commonly referred to as “social justice.” The election of Donald trump added to the schism, with many of us beffuddled at the overwhelming support of our current president that came directly from our camp.

Now, as America seems to be navigating it’s next racial justice moment, the most vocial, in-your-face representation of Evangelicalism is the side that has come to believe, for example, that BLM is a terrorist organization, that Colin Kaepernick disrespected our flag for no good reason, that Donald Trump is making America great again, etc.

It’s easy in this moment to characterize all of Evangelicalism as utterly resistant to the good changes that are coming about. That’s some of us to be sure, but there’s more.

For your consideration, I’d like to offer two perspectives from highly influential Evangelical leaders, speaking and reflecting about what it means to be an American, Bible believing follower of Jesus.

First is a sermon from Evangelical pastor Rich Nathan, who preached in June about the death of George Floyd and what he believes to be the proper response from American Christianity. He is the senior pastor of Vineyard Columbus, a position that he has been serving in since 1987. Prior to becoming the church’s first Senior Pastor, Rich taught business law at The Ohio State University for five years.

He has also been a major force for immigration reform, highlighting the issue in both sermons and op-eds. He advocates for a different plan than those traditionally offered for America’s illegal immigrants, “a pathway to citizenship governed by a system of checks and balances.” He has led Vineyard Columbus to embrace racial and ethnic diversity, now pastoring one of America’s most diverse churches, having attendees from over 125 nations.

Next are some thoughts on contemporary Evangelicalism from pastor and author John Pavlovitz:

Dear White Evangelicals,

I need to tell you something: People have had it with you.

They’re done.

They want nothing to do with you any longer, and here’s why:

They see your hypocrisy, your inconsistency, your incredibly selective mercy, and your thinly veiled supremacy.

For eight years they watched you relentlessly demonize a black President; a man faithfully married for 26 years; a doting father and husband without a hint of moral scandal or the slightest whiff of infidelity.

They watched you deny his personal faith convictions, argue his birthplace, and assail his character—all without cause or evidence. They saw you brandish Scriptures to malign him and use the laziest of racial stereotypes in criticizing him.

And through it all, White Evangelicals—you never once suggested that God placed him where he was,
you never publicly offered prayers for him and his family,
you never welcomed him to your Christian Universities,
you never gave him the benefit of the doubt in any instance,
you never spoke of offering him forgiveness or mercy,
your evangelists never publicly thanked God for his leadership,
your pastors never took to the pulpit to offer solidarity with him,
you never made any effort to affirm his humanity or show the love of Jesus to him in any quantifiable measure.

You violently opposed him at every single turn—without offering a single ounce of the grace you claim as the heart of your faith tradition. You jettisoned Jesus as you dispensed damnation on him.

And yet you give carte blanche to a white Republican man so riddled with depravity, so littered with extramarital affairs, so unapologetically vile, with such a vast resume of moral filth—that the mind boggles.

And the change in you is unmistakable. It has been an astonishing conversion to behold: a being born again.

With him, you suddenly find religion.
With him, you’re now willing to offer full absolution.
With him, all is forgiven without repentance or admission.
With him you’re suddenly able to see some invisible, deeply buried heart.
With him, sin has become unimportant, compassion no longer a requirement.
With him, you see only Providence.

And White Evangelicals, all those people who have had it with you—they see it all clearly.

They recognize the toxic source of your inconsistency.

They see that pigmentation and party are your sole deities.
They see that you aren’t interested in perpetuating the love of God or emulating the heart of Jesus.
They see that you aren’t burdened to love the least, or to be agents of compassion, or to care for your Muslim, gay, African, female, or poor neighbors as yourself.
They see that all you’re really interested in doing, is making a God in your own ivory image and demanding that the world bow down to it.
They recognize this all about white, Republican Jesus—not dark-skinned Jesus of Nazareth.

And I know you don’t realize it, but you’re digging your own grave in these days; the grave of your very faith tradition.

Your willingness to align yourself with cruelty is a costly marriage. Yes, you’ve gained a Supreme Court seat, a few months with the Presidency as a mouthpiece, and the cheap high of temporary power—but you’ve lost a whole lot more.

You’ve lost an audience with millions of wise, decent, good-hearted, faithful people with eyes to see this ugliness.
You’ve lost any moral high ground or spiritual authority with a generation.
You’ve lost any semblance of Christlikeness.
You’ve lost the plot.
And most of all you’ve lost your soul.

I know it’s likely you’ll dismiss these words. The fact that you’ve even made your bed with such malevolence, shows how far gone you are and how insulated you are from the reality in front of you.

But I had to at least try to reach you. It’s what Jesus would do.

Maybe you need to read what he said again—if he still matters to you.

Again, there’s more; more voices reflecting sentiments akin to what’s above, more people mobilizing in response to the brokenness of our world, more asking “what does it truly mean to be a follower of Jesus?” I’m saddened by the rift in my camp, and by the fact that it’s growing exponentially as of late.

I’m saddened that the word “Evangelical” has come to represent bigotry, insensitivity, hypocrisy, and all of the bad politics that follow.

Can our rift be mended? The views espoused on either side are nearly polar opposites. I don’t have much faith for it. Church history in America – the world for that matter – is full of stories where God moved his church in a particular direction and a percentage of His people simply couldn’t get on board. The Bible itself, that book that talks ad-nauseum about Christian unity, has it’s own stories of people resisting the almighty’s trajectories, and things moving forward regardless of the division that followed.

But I’m compelled to move forward as someone who’s made God the boss of my life, someone who sees the face of God in everyone, no matter what their political view. I don’t always succeed, but it’s important to act, think, and write as someone who believes that unity between us, miraculous as it would be, is a possibility.

Facebook/Twitter/etc. recently removed a video by a Houston doctor who’s claiming that hydroxychoroquine + etc. (HCQ+) is a proven remedy in the fight against Coronavirus. She claims to have seen hundreds of situations where HCQ+ has eradicated the disease, or kept people from it.

My social media feed lit up with claims of censorship, and “here we go with the takedown of America” sorts of things. I tried to find the video, but it had been taken down by this time, so I had to go to a few other places on the interweb to watch it. It’s very emotional, very personal to her, and, in a few different ways promotes the idea that there’s something fishy going on; the video doesn’t just promote HYDX, it also claims that there’s a conspiracy afoot, that the people who want to do testing on the drug are “nazis,” and that the government’s hesitancy to endorse the drug’s use for Coronavirus is unethical.

To top it off, she’s yelling the entire time.

Some of my friends are very angry, using this video and its “censorship” as further evidence that a large group of people have no interest whatsoever in the health/progress of our country.

The CDC’s Coronavirus numbers have generated a few other theories, i.e., the case/death counts are being manipulated to make things look worse than they are.

There are others: QAnon, climate change, vaccinations and autism, BLM promotes violence against police, etc. I’ve never seen so many conspiracy theories floating around in a similar moment like they are today. It seems like we’ve gotten to a point where, if someone presents data that we don’t like, we call foul. St. Paul warned us about this; if we’re not careful to be grounded in the right things, we’ll be like a ship tossed around on giant waves.

That’s us. We love a good conspiracy.

But 99% of the time, there’s not one.

Obamacare is a great example. The only reason that liberals keep pushing nationalized healthcare, we say, is because they live somewhere between not caring about America and wanting to obliterate it.

A friend of mine who’s a staunch conservative, and a former three star general, once told me that Obamacare was a great idea, but poorly executed. My wife, a healthcare professional who’s beyond weary of seeing patients who don’t have the resources for preemptive medical attention, is in favor of “socialized” medicine. Beyond that, guess who pays the bill when someone goes to the emergency room and can’t pay for it. You and me. Guess who goes to the emergency room more often than anyone else. Yep. Folks who can’t afford regular visits to the doctor. I won’t go into the social justice aspect of healthcare, that sends people through the roof these days.

Guess what happens to our economy if we double Coronavirus’ life span because we refuse to be “sheep” and follow a few simple guidelines?

As with all of our current conspiracy theories, there are two compelling sides to each story. I’m in favor of Obamacare because I think too many of my fellow Americans need better access to the things I have nearly unlimited access to. There’s an unfairness to our system, often referred to as “inequity,” that needs to be remedied ASAP. But I don’t have any conspiracy-minded friends who are interested in my side of the story. Why would they be? In many ways, I present as a liberal, nigh unto a traitor in their eyes.

American Chrisitanity is especially susceptible to conspiracy theories. We’ve been on the defensive for awhile now, losing almost every political/cultural battle we’ve engaged. We’ve lost our voice, our seat at the table. The government has recently made attempts to place limitations on corporate, indoor worship. What’s next? In the absence of a fuller picture, we see nothing but people who don’t care about our country, soon to be at our very doorstep with shackles and chains.

Not on our watch.

Our fear has made us suckers of the highest order, because fear has one job, to take over our minds, put us in survival mode, and keep our higher brain function out of the loop while we escape disaster and ruin. It’s a great thing to have when a Grizzly is chasing you through the woods, not so great when it comes to politics, especially when it comes to faith.

There are a million reasons why Jesus warned us so clearly to avoid it.

Sadly, because so many of us feel like we’re being chased through the woods by a horde of nasty, snarling, nation-damning liberals, we’re convinced that the guy who’s either defended or birthed our most popular conspiracy theories has our back. All he has to do is hold up a bible, or say something like “God,” and we swoon. When he labels his political foes “traitor,” or talks about liberals like Hitler talked about the Jewish people of his day, we’re all ears.

“In a country beset by extreme and distressing inequality, America’s premier hustler sold the electorate a wagonload of beguiling and deceptive tales about what’s gone wrong, who’s to blame, and how he’ll make things better. He persuaded not through rational argument, analysis, and truth-telling, but rather by manipulating our imperfect reasoning and our unreasoning emotions. Although this playbook has been around for a long time, Americans have never witnessed this level of mastery before. Trump’s unanticipated success dramatically illustrates the importance of understanding the “mind games” that allowed him to win, despite breaking almost every rule of evidence, logic, and propriety.” – Psychology Today Dec. 2016

Our problem is not that we’re faced with a deadly swarm of conspiracies. We’ve segregated ourselves, politically speaking, and now live at arm’s length from a fuller representation of the truth. But we’re also segregated from the non-religious world, which adds to our political segregation, as most conservatives are also religious. Think again if you don’t believe that faith and politics are about to get married and have kids.

In our desire to craft the world and her inhabitants in our image, we’ve ultimately segregated ourselves from the truth. Add that to our overall sense of threat and everything becomes a conspiracy.

Our only way forward is to desegregate.

But, as we’ve seen countless times throughout history, once a human segregates, it takes a mountain to reunite, reconcile, and come together as God so desperately seems to want. It hurts. It feels painful. Wrong. The demons we talk ourselves into aren’t easily swept away.

That’s why Jesus told the parable of the Good Samaritan. His Jewish audience had segregated from the “bad” Jews of Samaria, against better advice from their scriptures. In this story, a “good” guy gets beaten and robbed, left for dead by the political/spiritual leanings of his kinfolk, then rescued by a “bad” guy, the only one willing to help.

Replace “Jewish” with “conservative” and “Samaritan” with “liberal,” or vice versa depending on what island you’re on, and you’ll have some idea of what Jesus was getting at.

It’s actually unfair to call us “suckers” for a conspiracy theory. What we’re truly suckers for is segregation – all of it; spiritual, political, ethnic, etc. Electing a president who’s found a way to prosper by pouring gas on it wasn’t a good idea, but he’s not the problem. We are. Until we can find a way to reconcile and reunite, not only will be distancing ourselves from the deeper truths of scripture, we’ll have to watch as our country rends itself into a few different pieces.

But at least it won’t be our fault. We’re the “good” guys.

I have some confidence that the pandemic will end at some point. The great 1918 flu outbreak seemed to wear itself out after about 2 years, earlier in the places that locked things down, took the pandemic seriously, etc. If we could all get on the same page with masks and distancing, we could get out of this much more quickly. For now, I’m geared up for another 1.5 years of weirdness.

I can’t say that I don’t worry about my family’s safety, or our country’s ability to keep its collective crap together, or the suffering that’s transpired/about to transpire. What I’m having the most trouble with is the fighting; our two youngest kids fight like crazy, exacerbated by lockdown, boredom, too much time in front of the TV, etc. This is where I suck the most at coping, melting down into an emotional three year old as soon as I hear the beginnnings of an altercation.

As I try to find different ways to embrace some positive coping skills, I’m learning that it’s not the fighting that bothers me. While I do worry about the impact that so many mean words are having on their soul, what really puts a burr in my saddle is that, in general, the failings of my children are, to me, a testimony to my own. When they fight, I feel like a failure, and I’m no fun to be around when I’m feeling shame. I lose my temper, use mean words, and perpetrate absolutely nothing that might help my kids get better at coping with the tension in their relationship.

One of the most positive coping skills I’ve discovered is to understand what it is that I’m trying to cope with.

Fear.

In all of these difficult arenas, it’s important to confess to myself, and maybe to a trusted confidant, that I’m afraid. I can’t tell you how freeing it is to come to grips with the fact that my kids’ fighting scares me. What does it say about me that things aren’t going well? What does it say about my world? If I can’t control this, what other future monster is going to come along and do something worse?

We’re not trying to cope with stress, anxiety, relationships, finances, etc. We’re trying to cope with fear. As tough-guy Americans, we’re abysmal at the fine art of saying “I’m afraid.” Fear is weakness, we don’t do that, so we focus on external things and avoid one of the most postive steps we can take towards getting better at coping. Sadly, the people who’s lives are most controlled by fear are the people who are most afraid of coming to grips with what truly frightens them.

When we’re afraid, the only path to peace is honesty.

There’s no coping without it.

I’ve also learned to admit that coping hurts. It causes pain – another thing us ‘Mericans don’t do well with. We live with a closet expectation that things only go right when we’re doing things right, vice versa when we’re screwing things up. Life is a gumball machine of sorts, blessing the winners, cursing the losers.

Pain and suffering always seem to be a sign that we’re doing something wrong.

But the ability to cope doesn’t come naturally. It’s not the result of a good attitude, or an innate ability only possessed by a lucky few. Positive coping skills are just that – skills. They must be learned, honed, practiced, etc. Read about them till your eyes bleed if you want to, but the only way to acquire them is to enter arenas that frighten us, ring the bell, and get to work. That’s the only classroom, the only place where coping skills can be built.

But that hurts, so you’ll understand why I don’t always practice what I preach. I do know people who are much more tar-heely here. They’re amazing.

In our belief that pain is bad, and in the bounty of wealthy, high-tech American culture, there are many tantalizing escapes at our fingertips (speaking from experience): booze, TV, ripping people to shreds on social media, blame, finger-pointing, Amazon, etc. Not all of these are inherently evil, and it’s important to know when to engage them and when to face reality, but it’s important to know when we’re relaxing and when we’re escaping.

Booze, for example, in the appropriate quantities, is good clean fun. Unfortunately, in excess, it turns us into children, blowing our stack when the world and her citizens don’t act like they’re supposed to. It’s a good example of how easy it is to fall into the trap of relaxing so much that coping becomes more difficult.

There’s one more skill that needs mentioning, one that has an enormous positive impact on anyone’s ability to cope.

People.

Do poorly here and watch your anxiety, and your ability to cope with it walk smartly out the door. I’m not sure how this works, but close relationships are fundamental to maturity, peace, and overall emotional wellbeing. Psychologists have been talking about this since the industrial revolution conspired with modern individualism to convince us that we don’t need each other.

Thankfully, medical experts have assured us that it’s OK to meet oustide, at a negligible distance (~6 feet), even without masks. A friend and I can take a walk, catch up, sit in a park, drink some beer, etc., and be safe. Pod quarantining, i.e., hanging out with others who are being careful, is capiche as well. Indoors is a different story as climate controlled, enclosed spaces exponentially increase the risk of infection, even with masks, so let’s avoid that, but we’ve been cleared for outside hang time and should go for it.

In all of these, I don’t mean to suggest that this is easy, and I certainly don’t offer my reflections as an exhaustive list of positive coping skills, mischief managed. This is simply what comes up for me as I work through these difficult times and think through the work required for change, and ultimately, peace.

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts, stories, and personal reflections on what’s working for you, and what’s not.