Note: I have appreciated the growing interest among paid subscribers in my lectionary reflections. My goal is to offer a thread or two that busy homilists can pull on to offer a competent treatment of relevant themes raised by the lectionary readings, mainly taken as a whole. I also hope that watching me wrestle with the texts can be instructive for post-evangelicals and others who are trying to figure out how to relate to scripture.

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Note: I am so grateful that you, my Substack inner circle community of paid subscribers, has grown so rapidly during this first month. I have especially enjoyed thinking of you as I write this Sunday meditations. It’s been kind of a different voice for me — more raw, less filtered, as honest as I know how to be. Today I am going to talk in that voice about my relationship with the Bible as it now stands. As always, I don’t just welcome but covet dialogue.

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INTRODUCTION: PROBLEMATIZING THE QUESTION

The theme of this conference, as you know, is “Preaching to Heal the Divide.”

I want to act like an academic by immediately challenging this framework. Academics call this “problematizing the question.” That is what I must do as I begin today.

I cannot simply agree with the implicit diagnostic premise of this event that division is our primary problem and that preaching to heal the divide is the primary medicine we should offer.

Of course, I join with every other attention-paying person in recognizing that our politics does reflect bitter divisions that we tend to think of along something like left-right lines. I have experienced and often discussed with others how those divisions are filtering down into churches, friendship groups, workplaces, and families in deeply painful ways.

There are at least two ways to interpret this experience of division. One is to make the empirical move: polling and voting reveal deep and substantive divisions over issues of ideology, policy, partisan identification, and support for specific government officials or candidates. Elections reveal how closely divided we are as well. We don’t just disagree, we 50/50 (or 48/48/4) disagree. Voila, we are a divided society.

Then our next move is to acknowledge that those divisions often feel like wounds, indeed suppurating ulcers. What we need is preaching and other forms of Christian ministry that, like medicine, treats these wounds. Thus, preaching to heal the divide.

But here is another way to interpret the experience we are having. Instead of saying our main problem is division, we might say that our main problem is that part of the nation, and part of the Christian community, has been seduced by a destructive political ideology that has nothing to do with the Gospel. Does that ring any bells for you?

Most of my progressive, attention-paying friends would call the ideology that we consider alien and destructive something like White Christian Nationalism – that’s the main term of art. I usually call it Authoritarian Reactionary Christianity. Here’s my book on the subject. Insert everything you have ever heard about the patriarchal, xenophobic, racist, nativist ideology that goes by those names. That is what we are critiquing.

If the issue is that millions of our fellow Christians have been seduced by extremist right-wing ideology that they quite wrongly think is Christian, then our main problem is not division. This would mean that our main solution is not preaching to heal the divide. Our main solution would be something more like confronting this alien ideology that has established a beach-head in the heart of the American church.

Which is it, then? What is the real problem? Division, or seduction of the church by an alien ideology?

Here is a historical example quite relevant to the city and the region in which we meet. By the 1840s, the American church was deeply divided over the issue of slavery. That is a fact.

But was the main problem that division, and the main solution some kind of appeal to Christian unity? Or was the main problem the firm commitment to slavery on the part of perhaps half of American Christians? If that was the main problem, then the solution was not preaching unity. The solution was challenging slavery and slaveholder Christianity.

Let me complicate the matter even more by attempting an empathetic reading of the perspective of many of our politically conservative Christian kinfolk. I happen to know that for many of them, their diagnosis of our primary problem is not that we are divided. Instead, in a move that mirrors that of many on the progressive side, many Christian conservatives would say that our main problem is that too many progressive Christians have bought into an essentially secular liberalism that sacrifices biblical values. Therefore, their main prescription for Christian preachers is not to preach unity but to defeat cultural liberalism. And that is the project that they are undertaking at this very moment, with the considerable help of the current American government.

So, the fact of the matter is that the American church is so divided that we can’t even agree on whether division is the real problem and preaching to heal the divide is the right solution. And if we instead believe that some part of the church has been seduced by an alien ideology away from true Christianity, but we can’t agree on what part of the church has been seduced, and what the really alien ideology is, and so we can’t agree on what we are trying to defeat, then we see that we cannot agree either on a diagnosis that division is the problem or that alien ideology is the problem. Our division goes all the way down. Not even the doctors can agree on what is wrong with the patient.

Who will save us from this body of death?

I don’t have any magic solution to offer you today. But I can tell you both what I tried to practice when I was serving as interim pastor of a large purple church in this area during the first Trump term, and what I have systematized in my most recent book, The Moral Teachings of Jesus.

My solution? A relentless focus on an honest exegetical rendering of the moral teachings of Jesus. Let me now tell you about that book and what I discovered while working on it. It’s all I’ve got. Maybe it will help.

THE RADICAL MORAL MESSAGE OF JESUS

What is prized by humans is an abomination in the sight of God. –Lk 16:15

What I do in this book is dig into forty moral teachings of Jesus as presented in the Gospels.

The goal of the book is to bring the content of the teachings of Jesus to the center of our attention for honest engagement. The words of Jesus set the agenda. Instead of bringing my issues to the text and asking for answers, I just reflect on what he chose to talk about and what it might mean.

I do not speak about Jesus’ teachings as if I am an expert in practicing them – they are radical, and demanding, and they are challenging and even disorienting for anyone who takes them seriously. Indeed, the more I dive into these teachings, the more challenged I feel.

The need that drives the book is my sense that these actual teachings of Jesus are strangely neglected across much of the community that bears his name and proclaims its loyalty to him. It’s not that we Christians are trying and failing to obey him, it’s more like many of us have stopped even paying attention. This problem has very deep roots – I don’t hesitate to pin much of the blame on decisions made by major church traditions – Luther and Calvin, I am looking at you. But the problem seems to be very widespread in the US Christian community.

In my 2020 book After Evangelicalism, I talk about various versions of Jesus that seem to predominate in that sector of Christianity, including 1) Jesus who is only the crucified savior who died on the cross for our sins, 2) Hallmark Christmas movie Jesus, my cuddly best friend, 3) Prosperity Gospel Jesus who wants you to succeed, and 4) Vacant Jesus fillable with any content we want -- which can yield Enslaver Jesus and Nazi Jesus and Proud to be an American Jesus or whatever Jesus one might want. I don’t think this problem only exists in evangelicalism.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but it seems to me that Jesus himself has become a vague cipher -- or a definite inconvenience to Christians with other agendas they seek to pursue.

I want to do something kind of basic – let Jesus’ teachings as recorded in the Gospels tell us what he believed and what he cared about. Amidst an obvious religious, moral, and political crisis in this God-haunted land, I am turning back toward Jesus.

I believe that Jesus' most important moral sayings are addressed in the book. I am going to take you on a brisk tour, so here goes.

Jesus’ most important moral teachings include:

-- the Beatitudes – where he said blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are those who mourn, blessed are the meek, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice, blessed are the merciful, blessed are the pure in heart, blessed are the peacemakers…he talked about a way of being that God blesses even if the world scorns.

--the Greatest Commandment – love God with all and love your neighbor as yourself.

--the Golden Rule – do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

--Love Your Enemies and pray for those who persecute you.

-- The Great Judgment – a judgment scene teaching in which how we treated the least of these is understood to be how we treated Jesus, and is the grounds for eternal judgment.

I examine key parables of moral significance, such as

--the Good Samaritan – which one proved neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers? The one who showed him mercy. Go and do likewise.

--the Prodigal Son—We had to celebrate, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life, was lost and is found.

--the Rich Fool – tonight your soul shall be required of you – and the things you have prepared, whose shall they be?

--Lazarus and the Indifferent Rich Man – poor Lazarus desired to eat the scraps from the rich man’s table -- but no one gave him anything. And then they both died…

--the Pharisee and the Tax Collector—all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.

--the Widow and the Unjust Judge – and will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry out to him day and night?

I look at Jesus' teachings about:

--the kingdom of God – that state of affairs in which God reigns and shalom and justice happen at last, which Jesus said was starting right then and there.

--Sabbath and moral law – “The Sabbath was made for humans, not humans for the Sabbath.” Which means religion and its moral rules are God’s provision for our good, and when they are not, they must be reconsidered.

--family – Whoever does the will of God is my brother, sister, mother. Jesus redefines family!

--religious tradition – You abandon the command of God and hold to human tradition. Stop doing that.

--self-denial – deny yourself, take up your Cross, and follow me.

--true greatness – Whoever wants to be first must be last of all.

--marriage –there is no need or obligation to marry, but “what God has joined together let no one separate.”

--children – let the little children come to me, for to such as these belongs the kingdom of God. If any of you cause one of these little ones to stumble, woe to you.

--wealth – “how hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom.” “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth but instead treasures in heaven.” “You cannot serve both God and Mammon.”

-- peacemaking – “If you remember that your brother/sister has something against you, leave your gift at the altar, go be reconciled, then come and offer your gift.”

--honesty – “let your yes be yes and your no be no.”

--piety – “Go into your room and shut the door and pray to your father who is in secret, and your father who sees in secret will reward you.” No religion for show!

--forgiving – “if you forgive others their offenses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. Be merciful, as God is merciful.”

--judging – “do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For the judgment you give will be the judgment you get.”

--the test of true faith – “you will know them by their fruit…Only those who do the will of my father in heaven will enter the kingdom.”

--fear – “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.”

--always, love – “love one another as I have loved you.”

I also address the moral implications to be drawn from several of Jesus' most famous encounters, including:

--with the unwanted woman who anoints him at a dinner party – Your faith has saved you, go in peace.

--with the Rich Young Ruler, who went away sad because he had great wealth and was unwilling to part with it in order to follow Jesus.

--with the Samaritan woman at the well, whom Jesus treated with respect and who in turn told her whole community about who he really was.

--with the woman facing execution, whose life Jesus saved while he offered his unforgettable teaching, “let the one who is without sin cast the first stone at her.”

--and events that occur during Jesus' occupation of the Temple in the last days of his earthly life, including his cleansing the temple system that he believed extorted the poor in the name of God and leveraged religion in the interest of the Herodian dynasty. “You have turned my father’s house into a den of thieves!”

LESSONS LEARNED

I am pretty excited about the distillation offered in the conclusion, in which I felt compelled to take this less well-known saying of Jesus as paradigmatic of his moral radicalism: "What is prized by humans is an abomination in the sight of God" (Lk 16:15).

Jesus appears to look at God and the world almost entirely upside-down from the way most of us do -- including most of us who say we believe in God and even in him.

From Jesus’ perspective, even though we come from God our Creator, humanity is well and truly messed up. We look at the world and live our lives basically upside down, in a complete reversal of how we ought to think and live. We half-know this, but mainly deny it. This is where Jesus’ moral message begins.

Jesus suggests that if we would watch and listen to children, they could show us aspects of a better way. But we don’t watch and listen to them. We instead ignore or even mistreat them, as we train them in our own messed-up values -- so that when they grow up, they can fit in and succeed in the upside-down cultures that we have created.

Jesus understands with sympathy that humans are very needy creatures. We are not at fault in this; it is how we are made. We have daily physical needs that demand our attention. We can learn to discipline these somewhat, but they do make their demands felt. They also can create a gnawing sense of insecurity -- especially if we must wonder where we will turn to find food to eat or a place to sleep, but that sense of anxiety can afflict absolutely anyone.

Jesus further understands that we are also needy emotional, relational, and spiritual creatures. These are the more interesting needs, because they are more uniquely human, and because the way we act to meet them can take such a great variety of forms.

Trying to satisfy these needs drives many of us much of the time into patterns of behavior destructive to others and ourselves. One characteristic human pattern is an unwillingness to discipline our basic physical neediness adequately. Another characteristic pattern is a tendency to look in the wrong places to get our hyped-up needs met. Human life is in this sense a tragicomedy, in which we have a great many opportunities to watch ourselves and others flail around trying to get these needs met.

Jesus clearly sees that one of the most interesting, subtle, and destructive “needs” that humans have is for recognition. Whether we call it honor (and contrast it with shame), status (and contrast it with marginality), or visibility (and contrast it with being invisible), human beings want to be recognized, want to be important, want to be valued. We also tend to treat honor, status, and visibility as zero-sum games, with more for us being less for others and vice versa. This is part of our moral sickness, that we are so competitive about such things. What a disastrous bondage this is for humanity.

Jesus knows that humans lie – a lot. We lie to God, to self, and to others. We lie because we can’t stand the truth, can’t face the truth, and are too embarrassed and proud to move beyond our posture of self-protection. We lie to ourselves about what really matters and what secures a good life. Building our houses on sand, we find our building projects unfinished or in ruins when we die, or when our world falls apart.

Jesus saw the significance of social practices. He saw that cultures reinforce these foolish human tendencies pretty much everywhere. Unfortunate basic tendencies (weaknesses) in our messed-up human nature get reinforced again and again by broadly accepted cultural patterns.

What cultures do is teach us to build status around sinful human tendencies -- which are reinforced rather than understood as sin. We honor the wealthy as better than the poor, the powerful as better than the powerless, those who live in luxury as better than those who are dirty or without homes, the adults as better than the children, the healthy as better than the sick, the physically strong as better than the weak, the kinfolk as better than the stranger, and so on.

It is when upside-down thinking like this, in family, neighborhood, music, art, economics, education, entertainment, religion, politics, and law, all reinforce each other, that most human beings are taught and caught in patterns of valuing things that are deeply offensive to God. We have been trained away from true knowledge about ourselves, about what is real, about what matters.

Yes, that is exactly why Jesus said “what is prized by humans is an abomination to God.” Our values are completely upside down. Human culture as we have set it up is a set of interconnected and idolatrous offenses to God, against God, that are celebrated by people -- the best people – over endless generations!

Our religion was and is supposed to help –from Jesus’ very Jewish perspective, God spoke plenty clearly through the Law and the Prophets and the Wisdom writings. But we humans often make a hash out of religion too.

Speaking in the tradition of the Jewish prophets, Jesus argued that many common religious patterns are adventures in missing the point. Celebrating wealth as reward from God, exploiting the poor and blaming them for their plight, treating illness as punishment from God, cooperating with or even deifying unjust state officials and practices, honoring the high-born, focusing on minutiae rather than real human well-being, encouraging religiously prideful comparison with others, letting legalistic maneuvers reinforce sin, blessing nationalist violence and retaliation, undertaking showy acts of piety for human praise, participating in honor/shame-based reciprocity games, abandoning God’s justice and love in the name of God himself…Jesus named it all.

Again, it seems that everything we value is upside down. What we think is awesome God thinks an abomination. What we think is great, God doesn’t care about. The person we think is a nobody, God values. What we fear, God says shouldn’t bother us.

Jesus teaches that we need to be stripped down, and to return to the basics. To the root (radix). We need radical spiritual and moral surgery. This is about more than morality. It begins with a theological vision and a spiritual practice that incorporate these things that Jesus taught us:

God is all and in all. God is the source of creation and life, the ground of existence, the destiny of the creation and of each of us.

God is king. God is the only true king. God deserves our loyal service, far more than the earthly rulers whose showy pomp is a faint, idolatrous echo of the majesty of the one true king, and whose demands for loyalty God scorns. God requires and rightly deserves everything from us, his creatures.

God is love, offers love, requires love.

God wants justice, offers justice, requires justice.

God is fiercely sensitive to marginalized persons. They matter just as much to God as do the powerful ones. More, maybe. God seems radical that way but that’s only because our moral vision is so messed up. Indeed, the last, least, and lost, is where we best meet God in the world.

God wants people to give their whole - full – complete – true - pure – hearts, selves, souls, and lives to him. This is way beyond rules and obedience. It’s devotion. It’s submission. It’s love.

God wants people who are humble in heart, mournful over their sins and this screwed up world, hungry for justice, merciful and reconciling.

God wants people who will secure themselves by trusting in him rather than in foolish human strategies and schemes that are so constantly self-defeating.

Jesus’ Way of living may feel like self-denial to us, perhaps especially at the beginning, when we first hear that call. But once we have learned to see Reality rightly, have reoriented our vision, it begins to feel more natural. As the world’s illusions drop away, as the world’s upside-downness becomes clearer, we become ready to turn ourselves right-side-up. Then we are not just willing but eager to learn how to do so.

God wants a radically reoriented humanity. But that begins with a vanguard group that will radically reorient in this Godward direction and which will fearlessly choose to play by God’s rules, not by messed up human patterns. One day the will of God will be done in all the world. The “kingdom of God” is the name for a world turned right-side-up. The church is to be its first expression. But sometimes it is people not in church who see and practice Jesus’ way better than so-called Christians do.

This kingdom of God has moral dimensions that can be practiced right now. Jesus is not just teaching high ideals or impossible ethical perfectionism intended to humble us by reminding us of how sinful and imperfect we are. We are that, for sure.

But this Way is about retraining. It is a retraining into practices Jesus taught, like peacemaking, forgiveness, economic simplicity, mercy, and generosity, turning the other cheek, enemy-love, covenant fidelity, truth telling, non-judgmentalism, Good Samaritanism, standing with the vulnerable. valuing all people the same, leading by serving while not seeking human honor – it’s a lovely way of life once you are in it, but it takes training – like anything else worth doing. If it takes 10,000 repetitions to perfect a skill like hitting a baseball, why should it take less practice to follow the Way of Jesus?

Jesus teaches that God truly honors heartfelt repentance, and we sure need to repent, not just once but often. Learning to see and act in the world in a way that completely reverses prevailing cultural patterns is very difficult. Backsliding is probably inevitable. We will need to repent, a lot.

The efforts that we make to turn the world’s values upside down are likely to be met with opposition, from all centers of power – family, state, economy, religion, tradition, and culture. We feel that opposition within ourselves too. We might die in the effort to follow God this radically. But Jesus says this death, if it comes, is better than living falsely before God and hurting others as we get swept into corrupt ways of being. And so we are willing to bear that risk, because it is worth it and because Jesus tells us it goes with the territory.

TYING IT ALL TOGETHER

Let me end this way.

Whether our diagnosis is that our main problem is political/social/cultural/moral division, or instead our diagnosis is that some part of the church (not our part!) has been seduced by an alien ideology and needs to be confronted for that, in both cases our frame of reference is essentially set by the left/right binary as it has existed in the United States since about 1963. This particular way of clustering ideological, political, and moral commitments and this stubbornly intransigent division along left/right lines, is really only traceable to that period of dramatic cultural upheaval we call “the 60s.” I oversimply a bit – one could tell the story with a longer angle of vision -- but it is a defensible claim to be sure.

Focusing relentlessly on the moral teachings of Jesus has the singular benefit of not fitting within the parochialism either of a recent time horizon, or a single national environment, or a two-party/two ideology binary that could be called liberal/conservative or left/right. Jesus shatters all these categories. Indeed, his moral radicalism challenges everyone on every part of our current unfortunate spectrum. I tend to think of his moral challenge not with horizontal metaphor of left vs. right but with a vertical metaphor -- either of Jesus making us queasy by turning everything we value upside down (kind of like a really scary thrill ride) or by Jesus drilling all the way down to our sick moral core as individuals and cultures. Either way, Jesus takes charge. Either way, Jesus overcomes our binaries and just maybe our self-righteous pride.

That is why I think at least one major solution to the crisis of our times is to let the moral teachings of Jesus find renewed proclamation in our churches today. May it be so.

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Note: I continue to enjoy puzzling over the lectionary readings with my growing community of paid subscribers. I am hoping that busy working clergy who are currently benefiting from these musings will recommend this Substack feed to others.

This week's lectionary offers one of those challenging combinations of texts that do not immediately seem to fit together. Yet as I sat with them, I found myself drawn to a common theme: God's response to human helplessness.

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Note: Over the coming months I want to occasionally give paid subscribers a glimpse of my new book on Job with Orbis, coming out September 2. This chapter reflects on one of the most fascinating and consequential translation questions in the entire book of Job: Job 6:14 and the meaning of friendship in a season of spiritual crisis.

The passage below explores a provocative translation possibility that raises a difficult question: Is friendship contingent upon right belief?

ON THE PROBLEM OF FRIENDSHIP BEING CONTINGENT ON ‘RIGHT’ BELIEF

It is worth zeroing in on fascinating translation differences related to Job 6:14.

Translators mainly agree that Job is accusing his friends of failing him. More specifically, their failure is in practicing ḥesed, a central moral obligation in biblical ethics, translated variously into English as kindness, loyalty, and steadfast/covenant love.

Everything else about the verse, though, is disputed. The three translations cited at the start of this chapter help us see where the disputes lie. Job may be saying:

a) You friends have forsaken the fear of the Almighty (El Shaddai) in withholding ḥesed toward me during my distress (NRSVue);

b) I am despairing and need you to do better in practicing ḥesed toward me so that I do not forsake my fear of the Almighty (NASB);

c) You should practice ḥesed toward me despite me being in such great distress that I am (at risk of) forsaking the fear of the Almighty (NJPS).

The NRSVue and NASB readings are (again) more conventional; the NJPS is (again) more provocative. Within the multiple translations on my desk, judgments are split, though most take the more conventional view.

All three translations (and more besides) are possible from the elliptical Hebrew. On the more conventional readings of v. 14, Job accuses his friends of withholding ḥesed toward him and thus either abandoning “fear of God” or failing Job so that he does so. One might say that in the name of defending God’s reputation they have abandoned God’s moral command and thus what true reverence requires.

On the more provocative reading, Job suggests that his friends owe ḥesed to him even now, even in a moment when Job’s great distress has caused him to forsake his traditional submissive reverence to God. But his friends have not offered the ḥesed that Job deserves.

In other words, NJPS Job is saying that true friendship should not be contingent on whether I am satisfied with the current state of your theology or spirituality. A faithful friend, even within a religious community, offers kindness, loyalty, and love (ḥesed) “even” to the friend who is struggling deeply with God, faith, and theology – perhaps especially to such a person, because their need is so acute. True friendship is not contingent on “right” belief! Here we circle back to this crucial issue.

This reading of Job 6:14 has enormous implications for spiritual exiles and deconstructing readers of Job. Job’s complaint about his friends failing him is something pastors and ministers of those spiritual exiles from more traditional communities hear a lot. The exiled realize that these church people who they thought loved them in their church were only willing to love them for the sake for the sake of what the individual could give to the church or how far in agreement to traditionalist views they were willing to stay.

What happened when the struggling or questioning individual came forward? Too often, either their faith community “friends” disappeared or they created an us/them schism between the true piety of the faith community and the faltering of the one they then exiled.

The experience of being rejected for asking hard questions or coming to unwelcome conclusions is common in traditionalist religious circles, as friendship turns out to be contingent on somebody’s idea of theological or moral orthodoxy. This is what Job experiences, and he calls his friends on it.

Who can find those friends who will not abandon us if we do not end up believing all the same things? So many friends, and all of Job’s, leave each other “high and dry” when crisis comes. They are of no help, because they are too busy judging others for having the “wrong” theology.

For those of us who are the spiritual exiles, as we build new communities of faith and friendship, will be able to avoid replicating the pattern that once so wounded us? Fiercely loyal, fiercely loving, not breaking off friendships within community when we cannot accept their theology or ethics anymore? How do we work proactively to create communities of faith that are not based on religiously contingent friendship, that are not re-versionings of purity tests, of the same old cancel culture?

Note: Last Sunday, one week late on the lectionary schedule but just on time for this local church, I preached a sermon on the Holy Spirit. It evoked a profound response. Those who have been following my lectionary reflections will see the fruit of that research in the sermon. After I give you the sermon, I will tell you about the response and what I make of it. As always, I invite conversation with you who have joined my Substack community.

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I want to call your attention to a book that is unlike anything I have ever read. It is a novel called The Death of the Adversary. It was first published in German in 1959, in English in 1962. But it was written during WWII by a German Jewish refugee who wrote it while hiding from the Nazis in the Netherlands. That young man grew up to become a psychoanalyst who, according to the back cover copy, pioneered the treatment of war trauma in children.

The book is written in first-person voice. We hear everything from the tunneled perspective of a child, then the clearer understanding of an adolescent, then the fully coherent rationality of a young adult.

It is uncanny how the narrator captures the perspective of a young child trying to understand the conversations his parents are having, trying to make sense of the anxiety in their voices even as their words are veiled, but he knows they are anxious, and he knows the veil must cover something terrible.

I frequently heard Father and Mother talk about this subject, mostly in the secretive, whispering voice of grown-ups who do not want the children to hear. A new kind of intimacy informed their words. They were talking in order to hide something. But children quickly learn to divine the secrets and fears of their elders, and to grow up towards them (p. 11).

We are (we think) in the real life experience of the author. Born in 1909, Keilson was a Jew coming of age in Germany just during and after WWI. But we don’t know this from him. From Keilson. He doesn’t tell us this in the book. We never get his name. We never get his parents’ names. We never see the word “Jew” or “Jewish.” We never get any dates.

You have to know the history. If a boy in Germany whose age tracks with Keilson’s hears his parents sounding anxious about a politician saying hateful things about their group, if you know the history you can put two and two together. When Father says…

If B. should ever come to power, may God have mercy on us. Then things will really start to happen (p. 11).

Then you know that Father must be talking about some very early rabble-rousing by a young Army corporal named Adolf Hitler, and you know that Father and family are Jewish, and you know that even though it is at least ten years before he comes to power, we know that — oh my God — he does come to power, and we know about what happened after that overall, and we wonder about what this is going to mean for our Narrator and his parents.

And soon after this scene with has parents we get more and more vignettes from Narrator Boy’s childhood, and schoolboy days, and early work experiences, and time with a kind of girlfriend, most of them centering around how politician B. was in the very process of actually rising to power and poisoning the minds and culture and young people and eventually the law of Germany in a way that increasingly affected the actual life of Narrator and his family.

But the heart of the narrative is not so much those details but the way that young Narrator’s character is being (mal)formed — and he knows it, and he watches it, and he talks about it — through his fascination with and growing hatred of this man B., his “adversary.” And how over time, more and more, the imagined death of this adversary becomes the center of the emotional life of the Narrator.

I can make the dreamscape/horrorscape of this novel even clearer by working backwards in the plot development.

Because even before we get the first childhood story — recounted above — it seems an older Narrator is speaking in the present tense about something that has just happened or is about to happen:

For days and weeks now I have thought of nothing but death…I welcome the day which brings me once again the thought of death. With every breath I take, the thought penetrates further into my body, down into its most hidden recesses, and fills it entirely. It is death, death that guides my pen! (p. 7)

These are the very first words from the Narrator. But he goes on to say:

It was the thought of my enemy’s death which penetrated me and made me shudder as one does on an icy night. The death of my enemy—I think of it with all the joy a thought can have for those to whom a thought is something vital and alive (p. 9).

And this:

I wish that he who throughout his life knew that he was my enemy, as I was his, should carry into his hour of death the knowledge that my thought of his death will be worthy of our enmity. I will not relinquish one inch of this enmity. It remains our imperishable possession, even in his last hour on earth (pp. 9-10).

From my knowledge of the history, if it is at all relevant to what Narrator is doing here, the actual author Keilson may have been writing about the time in Spring 1945 when he knew that the genocidal dictator Hitler was very near his death, a death which Narrator, and presumably Hans Keilson, devoutly had sought from and in the very marrow of his soul for the better part of two decades. So, in hiding in the Netherlands, writing through the thin veil of anonymity and pseudonymity, the author writes honestly of his anticipation of the death of his adversary at last, the adversary who had delivered so much suffering and death to others.

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Note: This lecture was delivered in Hamburg, Germany, in September 2025, at a conference marking the 500th anniversary of the Believers Church tradition. It represents my attempt to assess both the enduring strengths of that tradition and the challenges facing it in the United States today.

I. THE BELIEVERS CHURCH TRADITION

Earlier this year the Anabaptist “Leader” magazine asked me to participate in the celebration of the 500^th anniversary of the movement by offering an analysis of Anabaptist distinctives. I believe that statement is a good place to start. It is my understanding that it is this tradition whose birth we are celebrating. I see in the program that it is given several different names and undoubtedly these carry delineated differences more meaningful to specialists than to me: Believers Churches, Volkskirchen, Freikirchen, Kirchenbewegung und Entscheidungskirchen. I hope that the hallmarks of the tradition that I will name here are recognizable as more or less accurate for the entire tradition.

Believers Churches focus on the historical Jesus as the center of Christianity. We pay close attention to the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ life, teachings, and behaviors, and believers seek to model their behavior after his. This contrasts sharply with versions of Christianity which attend only to the salvific significance of Jesus’ death or on doctrinal statements that offer little attention to Jesus’ life and teachings.

Believers Churches focus on obedience to Jesus Christ as Lord. We have taught that to be a Christian is, fundamentally, not just to believe Jesus to be the Son of God and Savior of souls, or other points of doctrine, but also the Lord of the believer, the church, and the world. We have understood baptism not as a ritual or as a ticket to religious community or heavenly eternity but instead as a vow of wholehearted commitment and a pledge of obedient service.

Believers Churches believe that the Church is called to be a disciplined community of Christ-followers. If baptism marks entry into a community of people distinctively committed to obeying Christ as Lord, then this sets the Church apart as a sub-community within the human family. We are not like everyone else, because we have made distinctive commitments to Jesus Christ, whom we believe to be Lord and have committed to obey.

If this theological conviction is real, and this baptismal commitment is genuine, then the Church must be a community with expectations, a community that looks different from other communities. It must be a community that trains itself in the Way of Jesus and finds constructive ways both to establish boundaries of community practice and to help committed members live within those boundaries.

Believers Churches share a wide range of moral commitments with all other orthodox Christians. But distinctive Believers Church moral commitments such as peacemaking, economic simplicity, and service to the vulnerable are grounded in the life and teachings of Jesus, in the Lordship of Jesus Christ, and in the identity of the Church. It is true, in my view, that Believers Churches focus on such practices as seeking justice, making peace, living simply, and serving humans in need in a manner distinctively more intense than many other Christian communions, broadly speaking.

These commitments don’t come from nowhere. They come from our historic focus on the “Way of Jesus,” our understanding of what it means to be a Christian, and the ethos and commitment of our churches. As these distinctives are grounded in Jesus and his Way; as they are not mere preferences or idiosyncrasies; they will not likely be sustained if our focus on Jesus, and the rest of our distinctive way of believing and belonging, is not sustained.

Believers Churches believe in the Reign (kingdom) of God not just as a future eschatological hope but as an inbreaking reality visible in the life of the Church itself. This belief helps to fire Believers Churches with moral passion, as life is viewed not just as a vale of tears (or theatre of pleasure) but instead as a context for living into and living out the Reign of God each day.

This belief raises our expectations of the Church – and lowers our expectations of the world. We are able not to fall prey to excessive worldly-political hopes or loyalties because we know that no earthly ruler or kingdom is the kingdom of God. We do not look for salvation from the government or its leaders. We do not identify any earthly nation as a Christian nation.

While some strands of the Believers Church tradition have been separatist and disengaged from worldly politics, all have understood that faithful church communities bearing witness to Christ’s way exude a public witness that, unless it is hidden under a basket, speaks constructively to the world. Also, to the extent that Believers Churches have been congregationally governed and embraced various democratic practices, they have become a kind of school of democracy, quite distinct from more hierarchical church traditions. And, especially in recent Believers Church thinking, most of us have understood that loyalty to Christ and love of neighbor requires various forms of public witness and social-political action.

This is my list: this tradition we celebrate this weekend has for 500 years focused on the whole Gospel witness to Jesus, to whom we have committed our lives as Lord; gathered in voluntary, disciplined congregations to pursue this Way together; lived morally serious lives with some distinctive commitments such as peacemaking, simplicity, and service; sought to live into the inbreaking Reign of God and indeed to be a sign of it, and have loved their neighbors not just inside but outside the church, which has often taken the form of public witness and social-political action.

This is a grand tradition, or family of traditions, a crucial part of the Christian family offering a distinctive and invaluable witness.

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II. THE BELIEVERS CHURCH TRADITION IN THE USA

The United States proved to be a uniquely hospitable context for the Believers Churches. The settlement of colonial North America was certainly undertaken by powers, such as England and France, which had establishmentarian, non-Believers Church visions. But even if one considers only the English settlers, there were completing Anglican and Calvinist visions. Add to that the French and their predominantly Catholic but also Huguenot settlers, and the Germans, some of whom were Catholic and others Lutheran. Now mix in the many dissenter and reformist traditions that came our way, including the Baptists, Congregationalists, Quakers, Mennonites, Methodists, and so many others.

By the time of our revolution and constitution writing in the late 18^th century, the combination of competing non-Believers Church/establishmentarian visions, together with the potpourri of Believers Church adherents, created the conditions for a religious settlement uniquely well-suited for the thriving of Believers Churches. The United States of America would not establish any religion, but neither would it hinder the free exercise of religion. These two principles were enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution. The United States would not fund religion, but neither would it prevent religious communities of all types from funding themselves. The United States was not born either with an interest in protecting an established national religion nor in dismantling it – consider France’s counterexample. A secular state, serving a religiously diverse people, taking a posture of benevolent neutrality towards specific religious expressions – this was our vision.

To the extent that churches managed to be effective in attracting adherents, building congregations, and spreading their influence, they were free to do so in the free religious marketplace. This had the perhaps unsurprising but certainly salutary result that Believers Churches – and many others – did quite well. This was visible to the brilliant French observer, Alexis de Tocqueville, when he wrote in 1835: “Religious institutions have remained wholly distinct from political institutions, so that former laws have been easily changed whilst former belief has remained unshaken. Christianity has therefore retained a strong hold on the public mind in America.” This arrangement has not been seriously challenged in American history for nearly 250 years – until, perhaps, now. But that gets ahead of the story.

For centuries, Baptists were among those in the Believers Church tradition who celebrated what used to be described as a free church in a free state. We believed in political democracy, in the US constitutional order, and, most fiercely perhaps, in freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, and religious disestablishment. We advocated similar arrangements wherever constitutions were being written.

III. POLITICAL/CIVIL IMPLICATIONS IN THE USA

As we all know, some branches of the Believers Church tradition have emphasized disengagement from civil government for various reasons. Beginning there, we can still acknowledge that even that particular Anabaptist vision was always aware that Christians are always bearing Christian witness in how we live and how we treat our neighbors when we encounter them. We could always and rightly claim that in living quiet, godly, law-abiding lives, raising our families in a loving and disciplined fashion, being honest in business, and in all other ways contributing to the common good, we could be described as meeting or even exceeding our civic obligations.

Other versions of the Believers Church tradition, including the version of Baptist church life into which I was initiated in the late 1970s, did believe in the legitimacy and sometimes even the obligation of a more direct involvement in civil and political life. We were taught active citizenship, including paying close attention to civic affairs, community life and public policy. We were taught to make our voices heard on matters of moral significance, voting, protesting, running for office, and otherwise serving actively in civic affairs, doing so within the parameters and as an expression of the lordship of Jesus Christ. This vision ran across the entire political spectrum from left to right in Baptist life. Left-leaning Baptists might press for racial integration and economic justice while right-leaning ones might emphasize limiting divorce and abortion rights, but all did so with confidence that this was a legitimate expression of faithfulness to Jesus.

I argued in my book Defending Democracy from its Christian Enemies that Baptists and other Believers Churches made a number of specific contributions to the development and the health of US democracy. This included our advocacy of democracy, the rule of law, and limited government, our fierce arguments on behalf of religious liberty and other civil and political rights for all, our allergenic reaction to hierarchicalism and authoritarianism, our religiously rooted egalitarianism in which everyone is made in God’s image and potential kin in Christ, and our voluntary formation of covenanted communities in which peers in Christ -- and under his lordship -- learned the humble practice of local congregational democracy.

On that latter point, political philosopher Michael Walzer has written, “Congregational life was surely a training for self-government and democratic participation.” Believers Church congregations have been laboratories for democracy. Once people have tasted the empowerment and dignity that comes from having a say in decisions that affect them, they do not take well to dictators and authoritarians.

I certainly must say here that any constructive and happy thing one can say about Believers Churches in the US and their contribution to equality, justice, and democracy must be held in tension with the tortured history of white supremacism and the constant violation of these principles by self-identified Christians through slavery and the racial terrorism and segregation that followed the Civil War. But I must then hasten to add that resistance to these moral contradictions was felt, articulated, and acted upon, primarily by Black Americans usually deeply shaped by their own Christian faith and grounded in their own congregations, and by their white allies, grounded in a dissident, somewhat less compromised version of Christianity.

If you would permit me a bit of nostalgia for a moment, I want to close this section by simply taking you back to the version of “the story we are living in” that I was taught by my teachers at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in the mid-1980s. I think especially of my primary mentor and dear friend and co-author, the late Glen Stassen, known to some of you.

That story was this: the USA was a stable democracy that was in the process of overcoming the terrible flaws of our founding and of the segregationist/racist heritage that the Civil Rights movement had worked so hard, and made so much progress, in redressing. The Baptist tradition could claim the Baptist pastor Martin Luther King Jr with pride, as well as the many other Baptists and Believers Church Christians who during the heat of the civil rights battle had donated to this work, voted for it, marched and waved placards and agitated, and sometimes paid a serious price in doing so. Baptists and other Christians were expressing the lordship of Christ and the love of neighbor in working not only for civil rights and racial desegregation but also in relation to other causes, notably peacemaking on nuclear weapons and Vietnam, environmental issues, women’s rights, and economic justice.

Baptists and other believers enjoyed the liberty to express our faith and our advocacy in public without hindrance – though we needed to make our arguments in a way that respected the religious and moral diversity of the US public -- and we enjoyed enough influence with our own people and in the country that we could sometimes even win specific arguments and policy fights. This work was often led by Christian ethicists and pastors, like what I felt called to be, and it was some of the most rewarding work imaginable in this good yet broken world, created and loved by God.

IV. DETERIORATIONS IN (BELIEVERS) CHURCH LIFE SINCE THE 1960s

Well, that was the good news. Now I will offer an account of deteriorations in the Believers Church situation in the US over the last few generations. Most of what I will say applies far more broadly than to the Believers Churches.

We can begin with the overall weakening of church attendance, church membership, and church loyalty since the 1960s. While the decline of overall US Christian participation has advanced unevenly, with the ‘mainline Protestant’ churches declining first, and the ‘evangelical’ churches declining more recently, the overall picture is one of decline. In 1963, 90% of the US population identified as Christian; today it is 62%. Roughly half of the US population identified as mainline Protestant in 1963; today it is 11%.

We all know that churches that are declining in membership develop predictable challenges. It becomes harder to meet the annual budget, increasing anxiety among everyone and making paid church leaders more cautious. The loyalty of the members to the church cannot be trusted, and the sense that every similar church is a competitor in a declining market reduces collaboration among churches and, again, increases the anxiety level in each congregation.

Church members, aware that churchgoing is optional and that there is more supply than demand, can shift toward a consumer mindset and develop a weaker loyalty especially to churches that demand things of them that they might find uncomfortable.

When church survival is at stake, church leaders are often busy all the time working on survival strategies rather than being able to cast a moral vision.

When churches close, as they now often do, the overall church sector weakens, one church at a time. Churches as a vibrant voice in society, a significant part of civil society, able to shape the ethos of the society or at least of their own people, decline both in reality and perception.

If we take as normative the idea that Believers Churches were/are based on a lordship of Christ/discipleship vision, which does not ask what message will please people or build consumer loyalty, but instead what message is faithful to the way of Jesus, then the decline of such churches means the decline of a rigorous discipleship vision as a factor in American culture and politics. To the extent that ‘religion’ or ‘Christianity’ is visible and functioning in American culture and politics, it is a different version of such than what the Believers Churches once promoted.

This is my way into the next deteriorating factor I want to describe. It can be named in two ways: one way is to call it left/right polarization. The other is to call it the decline of way-of-Jesus Christianity and the rise, first, of right-wing US evangelicalism, and now Trumpist post-evangelical authoritarian reactionary “Christianity.”

Probably most of you know the story of polarization in US Protestantism. It goes back for at least a hundred years, beginning with the fundamentalist-modernist controversy which set the parameters of US Protestantism for decades. The fundamentalists wanted to protect premodern doctrinal commitments from biblical criticism and Darwinian science. The modernists were seeking some kind of integration or accommodation. It was a fierce fight.

Also, and this is often overlooked, the modernist side adopted the Social Gospel and wove it into the ethos of what became the mainline Protestant denominations. This vision helped motivate political reform efforts from the Progressive movement to the Depression-era New Deal all the way to the 1960s Civil Rights movement. In his very fine 2020 book The End of Empathy: Why White Protestants Stopped Loving Their Neighbors, sociologist John Compton shows that what mattered about the mainline was not just ideas but institutions and infrastructure. The highwater mark of progressive liberal politics in the US was also the highwater mark of mainline Protestantism – from the 1910s through the early 1960s. That mainline Protestant world once had the capacity to generate massive organizing and infrastructure local and national to muscle change through our government, from child labor laws to old-age pensions to the Civil Rights Act.

When the new evangelicals organized in the 1940s and 1950s, though they all emerged from the fundamentalist side, they wanted to shoot the gap between fundamentalism and liberalism with a robust middle way that eventually became known as evangelicalism. (I tell this story in my book After Evangelicalism.) These pioneers, like Carl Henry and Billy Graham and many less well-known, had great success in building a brand, an infrastructure, and a power base. They attracted dissenters from the conservative side of the mainline and over decades enticed many fundamentalists and their institutions to rebrand as evangelical.

The fundamentalist/modernist binary had already superseded the older denominational distinctives within Protestantism, and the evangelical movement intentionally did the same. Methodists vs. Anglicans vs. Lutherans vs. Baptists vs. Pentecostals vs. Congregationalists mattered a whole lot less within the grand modern binary. With the rise of the new evangelical movement, most everyone was sorted along evangelical/mainline lines. The distinctions were purportedly theological, but I am among those who have argued that they were at least as much if not mainly political/cultural.

Compton argues that the rise of white US evangelicalism into a major force in US culture that took off mainly in the 1960s and thereafter was substantially fueled by the demand for an alternative place for white US Christians to go if they no longer wanted to be challenged by their mainline pastors on issues like economic justice or racial desegregation or the Vietnam War. Essentially, his argument is that evangelicals poached frustrated white mainliners who wanted more conservative politics or the veneer of an apolitical stance from their churches.

When fundamentalist and evangelical leaders, mainly big-church pastors but also TV personalities and activists, came together to develop an explicitly political strategy in the late 1970s, building an alliance with Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party, the politics that had been the majority view all along in both fundamentalist and evangelical circles came right out into the open. Increasingly, to be Republican was to be Christian was to be evangelical. This partnership changed both the Republican Party and the religious leaders and communities who moved into what became not a marriage of convenience but eventually an identity fusion.

The title of my [conference paper] talk asks whether the Believers Church is an auslaufmodell – the closest English equivalent phrase appears to be “obsolete or outdated model.” I didn’t come up with the phrase but at this point in my talk it does make sense. Because, sadly, the left/right polarization in American politics and religion and Christianity – developing from the early 20^th century, accelerating since the 1960s, dominating our landscape today -- has all but swept away every older distinction. Believers Churches were once contrasted with state churches or national churches, free churches with unfree churches, decision churches with infant Baptism churches, discipleship churches with cultural churches. Now we have culture-wars left-leaning (blue) churches and culture-wars right-leaning (red) churches and churches that are paralyzed because they are “purple” – that is, neither ‘red’ nor ‘blue’. In this maelstrom of polarization, whether churches baptize babies or report to bishops often seems simply immaterial.

Take the Baptist churches of the US as an example. Before the fundamentalist/modernist fight they were already divided into dozens of denominations based on old controversies. The most fateful of these was the Southern Baptist Convention vs. the northern Baptists in their split over slavery in 1845. That original Confederate white supremacist Baptist Christian vision – thought long dead – has now arguably resurfaced since the right-wing takeover of the denomination in the 1980s.

Anyone working in the US setting knows that the SBC is a major headquarters of the evangelical and now Trumpist right wing in the US right now, while the black Baptist denominations tend to lean left politically (not always, and not on every issue), the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and American Baptist Churches are divided but lean center-left, the Alliance of Baptists is pure left, and on it goes.

It certainly seems clear that when churchgoing Family A moves into Town X in the US right now, the fact that they have been Baptists matters far, far less in their church search than what political brand of Baptist they are. Today, very few Democratic-leaning Baptists would even consider joining an SBC church, and the opposite also applies. It certainly makes one wonder what Believers Churches now believe, or if the category has any meaning.

And now let me close the loop on this section by describing the even more alarming development of the last ten years. That is Trumpist Christianity. It is sometimes called white Christian nationalism. If you have read my book on democracy, you will know that I find this phrase imprecise. I instead used the phrase authoritarian reactionary Christianity to describe the what his happening on the political right not just in the US but several other countries. I fear that my description has been confirmed by events. The US government is under personalist authoritarian rule in pursuit primarily of a culturally reactionary agenda, with barely any area of society exempt from the president’s pursuit of power. The main nationalist dimension has been visible in Trump’s tariff policies.

Political authoritarianism and a visceral posture of negative reaction to modernity (including moral liberalization, gender egalitarianism, and racial pluralism) do not need to be tethered to religion, and especially to actual religious communities with actual practicing believers. But they are often lathered in Christian rhetoric to become a faux-Christian cause.

It is clear that a lot of the “Christianity” that has fallen for authoritarian reactionary politics of the Trumpist type is very, very thinly connected, if at all, to anything resembling orthodox Christian practice or affiliation. This dovetails very nicely with Compton’s finding that people who still actually participate in organized religious communities are less rather than more likely to fall prey to anti-democratic and pro-violence ideologies. The MAGA “Christian” movement needs scare quotes. It is in many ways post-Christian.

This means that the concern about secularization must now apply not just to fading mainline churches but also to what is happening on the right. Secularization can mean erosion of belief in God. It can mean the decline of religious participation in real churches. But sometimes it also means the ideological conquest of the husks of Christians and their churches by an alien ideology that has nothing to do with Jesus. Compton has a new book coming out where he addresses the rise of “untethered believers” -- a powerful and evocative phrase. If untethered to historic forms of Christianity, people might just find themselves finding their greatest meaning at a torchlight parade or a political rally.

I believe it is crucial to understand that Trumpist Christianity, or MAGA Christianity, or Trumpvangelicalism, or Authoritarian Reactionary Christianity -- whatever we call this thing that has emerged over the last decade -- has some continuities but many discontinuities with the kind of conservative evangelical political engagement that we saw from the 1970s until Trump.

Those activists and pastors – I knew some of them – were recognizable as Christian believers operating within a certain traditionalist Protestant version of Christianity. While some of that is still visible today, I also think that something fundamental has indeed changed. Trump is a devoutly secular figure in his lifestyle and history and language and everyone knows it. His invocations and evocations of Christianity are wafer-thin, more racist and nationalist than Christian. As the central figure of US life for a decade, he has played more of a role in discipling right-leaning Americans than any religious leader. He has helped to create the conditions for a proto-fascist, and certainly authoritarian and anti-democratic ideological movement and now government, many million miles away from the way of Jesus. This is anti-immigrant xenophobia, aggressively negative cultural reaction, and anti-democratic authoritarianism dressed up thinly in Christian clothes.

V. CONSEQUENCES VISIBLE IN OUR MOMENT

Imagine a situation in which an aggressively authoritarian, xenophobic, racist, lawless, amoral political movement led by numerous figures flaunting a certain malformed version of Christianity competes for power and then comes to power in a historically-culturally ‘Christian’ culture. Yes, my allusion to the early 1930s in Germany is intentional.

What one would want from the Believers Churches in such a situation would be something like the picture I described in the first movement of this talk. One would hope for a Jesus-centered, well-discipled, reign-of-God focused, obedient church full of people who know the difference between the way of Jesus and seductive fake “christianisms.” One would want pastors who know what time it is, what is going on, how to read the signs of the times, who preach boldly, whose people trust and listen to them, who set standards, who make demands based on obvious teachings of Jesus, and who help keep their people unseduced – indeed, who prepare their people for resistance where resistance is called for.

There is some of this in the US Believers Church (and other church) settings, for sure. But there is not enough.

On the right, primed by decades of conservative evangelical politics, by a decade of Trumpism, and especially in the South by centuries of malformed white supremacist Christianity, the vast majority of white Christians have bought in to Trumpism or don’t see problems big enough to resist. It isn’t just that they tolerate Trump, but that a significant number of them think he is right on most important things, as embodying their values. Again, there are dissenters, and some creeping out the backdoor into unchurched or post-SBC/evangelical spaces. But definitely not a majority.

Here we see some of the built-in risks of the Believers Church tradition.

The focus on the authority of scripture can be subverted as seducers override scripture while claiming to be biblical.

There is no trans-congregational authority – no bishop -- who can blow the whistle on neo-fascist Christianism.

There is no body of teaching developed and refined over centuries, in calmer times, that might constitute a social teaching tradition. To the extent that generations of scholars and pastors have produced valuable texts, these texts are known mainly to academics and do not carry any ecclesial authority.

Congregational autonomy and congregational rule mean that the local church pastors who preach fascist Christianism or Authoritarian Reactionary Christianity cannot be checked by any higher authority. Alternatively, the goodhearted pastors who sees their flock being seduced by, say, xenophobia or racism, have no hierarchy that can protect them if they feel the need to challenge unhappy trends from the pulpit. Many pastors have lost their jobs in recent years in the US over precisely this.

On the left, the problems are different. There is not likely to be seduction or lack of clarity about what is wrong with a right-wing authoritarian government. Indeed, on the Believers Church left, there is plenty of agita, misery, fear, anger, and protest. A goodly number of churches ring with cries of dissent and calls for resistance on a weekly basis. But their audiences are relatively small, their influence limited, and the script old – and often biblically thin. In other words, bleatings of progressive protest have been standard fare in left-leaning US churches for over fifty years.

Overall, today’s protests are taking place mainly in the politically oriented Black churches, and in the most blue or liberal Believers Churches and mainline churches. This is a very small part of the overall churchgoing population, which is itself a much smaller part of the US population than it used to be. And this in a nation in which 72% of white Christians voted for Trump.

I cannot tell you how many times I have been invited into these spaces where my message is eagerly awaited. This is blue Christian America. It’s not nothing. You can give a lot of speeches and sermons and podcasts there. But these churches are not strong enough, united enough, or organized enough to constitute a major source of resistance.

VI. CONTRAST EXAMPLE: CATHOLIC CHURCH ON IMMIGRATION

I want to offer a contrast example in relation to the US Catholic Church. As of 2020, there were between 60 and 70 million US Catholics, making up over 20% of the US population, gathered in 20,000 congregations, with 40% of Catholics being Latino/as. Six of the nine US SCOTUS judges are Catholic, five on them on the conservative side, one on the liberal side. The Vice-President is an aggressively conservative Catholic convert who might very well become president next, or soon. For the first time, a US born person has become Pope.

The Catholic Church in the US is at least 2.5 times as big as the (ideologically divided) Believers Church population, twice as big as the mainline Protestants overall, and much more influential.

In contrast to what I said about the Believers Churches, the Catholic Church does have a hierarchical, episcopal authority structure which can keep local parish priests in line and also protect those who might need protecting. It has a body of teaching that carries official authority – it can be found in the Creed, the catechism, papal statements, and the social teaching documents. It has a national organizational structure that spreads across the country and has real national influence, mainly centered in the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, and of course, that structure is tied to a larger global church structure representing two billion Catholics.

The issue of immigration makes for a good case study for a brief review. Probably no issue has been more visible for this administration. You have seen the headlines and you know the various initiatives underway or that have already been attempted. Raids by masked agents, families broken up, flights of detainees without due process to third countries, the celebration of cruelty and intimidation. Trump’s consistently dehumanizing rhetoric for over a decade has softened us up and made us susceptible to these cruelties. And today there are more sophisticated efforts by ideologues to (re)define America in etho-nationalist terms, that what makes an American is how long your people have been here.

Again, big chunks of conservative Protestant America are all in with this, and woe betide the lonely pastor who challenges it with a sermon on Gen 1:27-28. But the local Catholic cleric in places like Texas, Arizona, or Georgia offers any statements or policies related to immigration from within the framework of a very well-established teaching tradition that emphasizes human dignity, the image of God, the sacred worth of all, the only-relative status of national borders, the need for humane treatment of detained immigrants, the rights of refugees, and the need to protect the vulnerable and families.

A great place for US immigration officials to find thousands of undocumented immigrants would be in Catholic churches on Sunday morning. Early in its new term, the Trump administration officially rolled back previous protections from raids for “sensitive locations” such as churches and schools. But the bishops individually and collectively have denounced the possibility of raids at churches and schools. The USCCB has collectively flagged threats to religious liberty and risks to staff and clients, and the head of the USCCB’s committee on migration has publicly urged a shift toward more just and merciful immigration policies and argued for protection of congregational spaces.

And churches have not so far been raided. There have been a tiny handful of arrests in church parking lots, a few of them Catholic. Fear of arrest has led to reduced church attendance in some places; in Southern California, where immigrant enforcement has been the most intense, some dioceses have suspended mandatory church attendance due to fear of arrests. (That’s quite an exception to Catholic norms.) In short, the Catholic church’s public voice on immigration has been quite clear on the Christian ethical issues involved, and the church has retained a disciplined and consistent stance.

It certainly seems likely that the collective voice and power of the massive US Catholic Church has, so far at least, had the effect of checking the immigration enforcement policies of this government, so relentlessly applied in other sectors. Clearly, the government has not wanted to pick a fight with 60 million Catholics, the bishops, and the pope. Any power able to check the actions of this government is to be celebrated. When that power is a Christian communion, all of us must pay attention.

VII. FINAL THOUGHTS

Let me conclude with a few final comments.

At one level, what is at stake today – what is always at stake – is the faithfulness of Christian people to the way of Jesus. Faithful witness is preached but mainly lived. It has to do with the total way of life of Christian people and the actions of churches. A strength of the Believers Church tradition has been rigorous emphasis on discipleship fidelity and obedience to Jesus, and a heritage of preparedness to pay a price, the cost of discipleship.

Protecting faithful discipleship is the daily and weekly project of the believer and all real churches. It is a hard enough challenge in the best of times, because we are all beset by temptation and sin is a reality. It is an even harder challenge when alien ideologies proclaiming their ‘christianism’ attempt to seduce us. On this battle, the Believers Church paradigm is certainly NOT an auslaufmodell. It is of essential significance.

In the US, the seduction process is well apace. And so is the effort to leverage the actual and potential power of the US government to intimidate or coerce churches, parachurch organizations and believers into subordination to that alien ideology.

One priceless inheritance of our constitutional order – deeply influenced by the Believers Church tradition --is that our pastors are not state employees and are therefore not susceptible to employment pressure. However, over the decades the US has become entangled with congregations through offering grants to churches for various projects of public value, such as housing, addiction recovery, and emergency relief services. The government is also the organization that provides tax-exempt status for religious bodies such as denominations and congregations. These powers could be leveraged to pressure churches if a government so chose.

In a recent letter from the General Counsel of the United Church of Christ to denominational leaders, quoted by Diana Butler Bass on 7 August, the GC reported that the federal government had notified her that churches that receive grants under the Nonprofit Security Grant Program are now required to cooperate with immigration officials, to not engage in or promote Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs, and to not participate in boycotts related to Israel.

Essentially, this means that Trump’s retrograde policy agenda must now be complied with by any church that receives government funds under at least this one grant program. There are other USG grants and certainly there will be similar conditions demanded. Don’t miss it: The power of the federal purse is being leveraged to attempt to seduce/intimidate churches into potentially compromising their values to keep getting government money.

Butler Bass points out that the three issues flagged in this government communique to the United Church of Christ leadership connect to “concerns long at the center of mainline Protestant and social justice Catholic agendas – care for and protection of immigrants, racial and gender equality, and justice for the Palestinian people.” The policy appears targeted at separating the left side of the Christian community in the US either from its values or government money. If congregations have become dependent on government grants for their survival, this could be a very difficult choice indeed. It is a wicked clever move, fully reflecting not just the authoritarianism of this government but its cunning.

Is there anyone within the sound of my voice who hears any historical echoes when it comes to the use of centralized government authority pursuing what might be called a Gleischaltung agenda, exploiting its financial leverage in relation to the teaching and action of a nation’s churches?

Of course, the only answer is for churches to say you can keep your money, we will keep doing what we believe faithfulness to Jesus requires. That is the answer that must come from all the churches, of whatever tradition, Believers Church or not, who have not already been seduced by this ideology stalking the land and embodied in our current government.

And that is my final point. We used to hope for something like global Christian unity on doctrinal matters. It will never happen. In the US today, we cannot hope for Christian unity on doctrinal matters or anything else.

But we can hope for something better than a predictable left/right binary. We can perhaps hope that the best resources of each unique church tradition can be drawn upon to build a working majority of churches and Christians who know what is at stake in the current political crisis in the US. This would be a communion of saints, a fellowship of Christ’s people from dozens of ecclesial communities, who choose fidelity to Jesus Christ against authoritarian reactionary Christianity and resist the depredations of the current United States government.

GENESIS 12:1-9

Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. ² I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. ³ I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”^[a]

⁴ So Abram went, as the Lord had told him, and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. ⁵ Abram took his wife Sarai and his brother’s son Lot and all the possessions that they had gathered and the persons whom they had acquired in Haran, and they set forth to go to the land of Canaan. When they had come to the land of Canaan, ⁶ Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the oak^[b] of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. ⁷ Then the Lord appeared to Abram and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” So he built there an altar to the Lord, who had appeared to him. ⁸ From there he moved on to the hill country on the east of Bethel and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east, and there he built an altar to the Lord and invoked the name of the Lord. ⁹ And Abram journeyed on by stages toward the Negeb.

PSALM 33:1-12

¹ Rejoice in the Lord, O you righteous.
Praise befits the upright.
² Praise the Lord with the lyre;
make melody to him with the harp of ten strings.
³ Sing to him a new song;
play skillfully on the strings, with loud shouts.

⁴ For the word of the Lord is upright,
and all his work is done in faithfulness.
⁵ He loves righteousness and justice;
the earth is full of the steadfast love of the Lord.

⁶ By the word of the Lord the heavens were made
and all their host by the breath of his mouth.
⁷ He gathered the waters of the sea as in a bottle;
he put the deeps in storehouses.

⁸ Let all the earth fear the Lord;
let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him,
⁹ for he spoke, and it came to be;
he commanded, and it stood firm.

¹⁰ The Lord brings the counsel of the nations to nothing;
he frustrates the plans of the peoples.
¹¹ The counsel of the Lord stands forever,
the thoughts of his heart to all generations.
¹² Happy is the nation whose God is the Lord,
the people whom he has chosen as his heritage.

ROMANS 4:13-25

¹³ For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith. ¹⁴ For if it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void. ¹⁵ For the law brings wrath, but where there is no law, neither is there transgression.

¹⁶ For this reason the promise depends on faith, in order that it may rest on grace, so that it may be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham (who is the father of all of us, ¹⁷ as it is written, “I have made you the father of many nations”), in the presence of the God in whom he believed,^[a] who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. ¹⁸ Hoping against hope, he believed that he would become “the father of many nations,” according to what was said, “So shall your descendants be.” ¹⁹ He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already^[b] as good as dead (for he was about a hundred years old), and the barrenness of Sarah’s womb. ²⁰ No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, ²¹ being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. ²² Therefore “it was reckoned to him as righteousness.” ²³ Now the words, “it was reckoned to him,” were written not for his sake alone ²⁴ but for ours also. It will be reckoned to us who believe^[c] in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, ²⁵ who was handed over for our trespasses and was raised for our justification.

MATTHEW 9:9-13, 18-26

⁹ As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax-collection station, and he said to him, “Follow me.” And he got up and followed him.

¹⁰ And as he sat at dinner^[a] in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting^[b] with Jesus and his disciples. ¹¹ When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” ¹² But when he heard this, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. ¹³ Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous but sinners.”

¹⁸ While he was saying these things to them, suddenly a leader came in and knelt before him, saying, “My daughter has just died, but come and lay your hand on her, and she will live.” ¹⁹ And Jesus got up and followed him, with his disciples. ²⁰ Then suddenly a woman who had been suffering from a flow of blood for twelve years came up behind him and touched the fringe of his cloak, ²¹ for she was saying to herself, “If I only touch his cloak, I will be made well.” ²² Jesus turned, and seeing her he said, “Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well.” And the woman was made well from that moment. ²³ When Jesus came to the leader’s house and saw the flute players and the crowd making a commotion, ²⁴ he said, “Go away, for the girl is not dead but sleeping.” And they laughed at him. ²⁵ But when the crowd had been put outside, he went in and took her by the hand, and the girl got up. ²⁶ And the report of this spread through all of that district.

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On September 2, my next book comes out, with Orbis press. Job in Exile: A Guide for Spiritual Refugees (Orbis Books) is a treatment of the majestic, complicated, wonderful Book of Job.

I have been fascinated with Job since my high school days. It struck me then as wildly, dangerously out of step with the rest of the Bible, so much so that I was shocked …

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One of the most liberating things about being a post-evangelical is that I no longer feel the need to believe or to pretend to believe impossible, improbable, or destructive things.

Hard-core religion — at least Christianity — involves a great amount of such believing and pretending to believe impossible, improbable, and destructive things.

Let me tell you how that fell apart for me, and what I have put back together on the other side.

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Note: On Friday, May 22, I enjoyed the distinct honor of being awarded an honorary Doctor of Divinity at Franklin College in Indiana. I also gave this baccalaureate address. It foreshadows themes that will appear in my future book with Bloomsbury on Christian humanism.

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Note: I am crafting these lectionary reflections each week and aiming to offer thoughtful theological, spiritual, and moral resources, with a special purpose of serving busy homilists. I am hopeful that this is becoming a resource of real value to pastors/clerics/preachers/homilists (you know who you are). It could also become a context for sharing ideas in the comments section. I hope you might want to join that community.

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Note: Nearly three years ago I interviewed Kelsey Morrison, who had made national headlines as she was forced out of her soccer coaching job at her evangelical college for open communication related to her sexual orientation. This week we followed up. Our conversation was illuminating and inspiring. But also maddening, because of the suffering we, mainl…

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I am grateful that in the three weeks since I have upgraded my efforts on Substack and made a paid subscriber option available, a substantial number of you have signed on for this more intense community. One thing I promised you was some more personal reflections, a look behind the screen, as it were. It looks like Sunday mornings at dawn will be one of those occasions.

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In England, I discovered an original edition 7-volume compilation of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s most important speeches during WWII.* Most of the speeches were to Parliament, though certain other important speeches were included in these volumes. For me, this collection is a treasure trove, both as historical documentation, and as exempl…

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ACTS 2:1-21

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. ² And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. ³ Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. ⁴ All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

⁵ Now there were devout Jews from every people under heaven living in Jerusalem. ⁶ And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. ⁷ Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? ⁸ And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? ⁹ Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, ¹⁰ Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, ¹¹ Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” ¹² All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” ¹³ But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.”

¹⁴ But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, “Fellow Jews^[a] and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. ¹⁵ Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning. ¹⁶ No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel:

¹⁷ ‘In the last days it will be, God declares,
that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,
and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
and your young men shall see visions,
and your old men shall dream dreams.
¹⁸ Even upon my slaves, both men and women,
in those days I will pour out my Spirit,
and they shall prophesy.
¹⁹ And I will show portents in the heaven above
and signs on the earth below,
blood, and fire, and smoky mist.
²⁰ The sun shall be turned to darkness
and the moon to blood,
before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day.
²¹ Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’

PSALM 104:24-35

O Lord, how manifold are your works!
In wisdom you have made them all;
the earth is full of your creatures.
²⁵ There is the sea, great and wide;
creeping things innumerable are there,
living things both small and great.
²⁶ There go the ships
and Leviathan that you formed to sport in it.

²⁷ These all look to you
to give them their food in due season;
²⁸ when you give to them, they gather it up;
when you open your hand, they are filled with good things.
²⁹ When you hide your face, they are dismayed;
when you take away their breath, they die
and return to their dust.
³⁰ When you send forth your spirit,^[a] they are created,
and you renew the face of the ground.

³¹ May the glory of the Lord endure forever;
may the Lord rejoice in his works—
³² who looks on the earth and it trembles,
who touches the mountains and they smoke.
³³ I will sing to the Lord as long as I live;
I will sing praise to my God while I have being.
³⁴ May my meditation be pleasing to him,
for I rejoice in the Lord.
³⁵ Let sinners be consumed from the earth,
and let the wicked be no more.
Bless the Lord, O my soul.
Praise the Lord!

1 CORINTHIANS 12:3-13

³ Therefore I want you to understand that no one speaking by the Spirit of God ever says “Let Jesus be cursed!” and no one can say “Jesus is Lord” except by the Holy Spirit.

⁴ Now there are varieties of gifts but the same Spirit, ⁵ and there are varieties of services but the same Lord, ⁶ and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. ⁷ To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. ⁸ To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, ⁹ to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, ¹⁰ to another the working of powerful deeds, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. ¹¹ All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.

¹² For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. ¹³ For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.

JOHN 20:19-23

¹⁹ When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors were locked where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” ²⁰ After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. ²¹ Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” ²² When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. ²³ If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

PREACHING IDEAS

It should be noted at the outset that at least in the Church of England lectionary there are an unusual number of options.

The Acts 2 passage can be (must be) the first or second reading.

Numbers 11:24-30 is an option for the OT reading — this is the story of Moses gathering 70 elders and God sharing some of the “spirit” that had been on Moses with the 70. That ends with the story of Eldad and Medad who have the spirit but in the camp rather than at the tent. Joshua tries to get Moses to stop them, and Moses says, “Are you jealous for my sake? Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would put the spirit on them!”

That is an interesting text to consider weaving in here!

And John 7:37-39 is an option for the Gospel reading — this is an early statement about the Spirit in John, where Jesus speaks of living water flowing out of the believer’s heart, and the narrator says, “Now he said this about the Spirit, which believers in him were to receive; for as yet there was no Spirit, because Jesus was not yet glorified.”

That might be a jumping off point for an exploratory Pentecost sermon that emphasizes some of the mysteries and even some potential discontinuities in the biblical witness about the Spirit. In non- or post-evangelical contexts, it ought to be possible to name these and make meaning out of them.

One could begin with John 7:39’s “as yet there was no Spirit.” What?! How is that really a possible statement in view of the rest of the canon, including texts that are listed as readings for today?

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Berlin (1909–1997) was a Latvian-born British intellectual who spent most of his career at Oxford, where he became a revered fi…

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Democratic resilience is appearing from three directions at once: institutional resistance, civic mobilization, and international democratic solidarity.

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