(Re)Finding the Faith

This is going to be something of a departure for me, but I was inspired to write this after listening to the Sunday message at church last week. That was an excellent talk by our pastor about how we all write our master stories and inevitably whether in matters of life or faith, there’s a crash and how we go about navigating that ‘crash’ is just as important as what we find on the other side of it.

It was a good message, but what really got me thinking was her mention of a theory out there that every five hundred years or so, Christianity faces a great moment of crisis or reorganization and given the fact that the last one was about five hundred years ago with the Reformation, we’re either in the middle of one of those moments now or we’re overdue.

I don’t think it would be uncharitable to say that the American Church (and when I say church, I’m doing a hand-wavey thing that more or less includes every Christian denomination) is in something of a crisis. There have been barrels of ink and terabytes of data written about the Great American Unchurching, but I’m going to put my marker down right up front: when you conflate your faith with your ideology, you’re going to have a bad time. When you make choices in the service not to do what’s morally right, but to protect your own power structure, you’re putting ideology over faith, and when people realize that the Church as an institution, doesn’t mean what it says and has never has and more importantly, has no intention of doing so, you’re going to see people vote with their feet and straight-up leave.

This tweet, from one of our charming state representatives in Des Moines, is a perfect encapsulation of that. I don’t have a trans kid (as far as I know) and if I did and wanted to let them live as their authentic selves whatever that might look like- it wouldn’t be because I thought God has somehow ‘made a mistake’ that I needed to fix. Your children aren’t mistakes. No one is trying to correct what’s made by God, they’re trying to love the child that God has sent them. The maddening thing for so many people, I think, is that they don’t get to choose the children they get. So they conflate what should be a simple question of faith (love your neighbor as you love yourself, or just in general: LOVE) with their ideologies to push an agenda that serves that politics but causes profound harm to the Church as an institution.

For someone who was raised Catholic, this isn’t a particularly new notion, in fact, it’s the proverbial tale as old as time. Conservatives and Liberals have been arguing in the Catholic Church for decades, so the latest tussle between the Pope and US Conservatives isn’t new. There are people who think getting rid of the Latin Mass was a bad idea. They freaked out about girls being allowed to be altar servers which led to the angriest homily (in favor of the notion, not against) I’ve ever heard from our Priest and the only one I can think of that drew a standing ovation in the eighteen years I went to church on a regular full-time basis. You can go back further than that to debates over liberation theology in the '70s and '80s– the arc of the Catholic Church in the 20th Century saw it go from being some of the staunchest defenders of the status quo and authoritarian rule to being some of it’s fiercest critics, especially in Latin America. (This is probably why some Conservatives in the Church have a problem with Pope Francis… they don’t trust him theologically.)

But all of those debates were centered on theology and not ideology. They were fierce, vicious debates- some of them anyway and while the theological idea of a ‘preferential option for the poor’ may be hard to dispute, I might be oversimplifying things when I say that the Church started to get really uncomfortable with it all when it drifted over the line into politics.

In America, this isn’t new. Articles (like this one, dating from 2017- so it’s a bit old) trot out the same tired old saw about the consequences of the secularization of society without actually offering any concrete solutions as to what to actually do about it. But ideology has been invading the sanctuary for decades now- you just have to do a Google search on things like the Moral Majority and go down the rabbit hole from there. But that generation is getting older now and I think a change is coming– the exvangelical movement is getting harder and harder to ignore. The noxious growth of prosperity theology was supercharged by the rise of mass media with mediums like radio and television and I think that taught a generation of evangelical leaders that they could wield temporal power as well as spiritual power if they wanted to. I think the line between them has been blurring for a while. While I freely admit that I don’t know all the ins and outs of evangelical culture or theology, there seems to be an underlying message that the Church is no longer living up to its promise or holding true to its words.

The scandals that have riven the American Church have not helped. My own personal departure from Catholicism- I remain temperamentally Catholic if not a practicing one- was largely driven by the disgusting lack of accountability for those who had covered up and hidden the sexual abuse of children in the Church. The message I got was clear: the Princes of the Church matter more than the children of the Church do and I couldn’t stomach that- and neither could a lot of other people. The Baptists have had their own sexual abuse scandal in recent years. It’s come to light that the Mormon Church is sitting on truly obscene amounts of money- for what purpose, it’s not entirely clear. 

If your pastor preaches in an Armani suit and you sit in a church that holds hundreds if not thousands, while there are those that know hunger or need or want in your community, you’re doing Christianity wrong. If you tell people that the message of Jesus is love, but not for those people over there, just these people right here, you’re doing Christianity wrong. If you think that your faith and your religion are somehow under attack in the safest, most Christian country on the face of God’s creation, you’re doing Christianity wrong. (The American Christian persecution complex is one of the most enraging things on the internet today. Ask an Iraqi Christian how it’s going. Ask a Chinese Christian. Or a North Korean Christian. You better check your persecution complex, friends, because we are doing just fine here in America. No one is feeding us to the lions and if people are telling you that they are, they’re lying.) If you think that political and temporal power is a necessity to protect a religion that has been around for two millennia now- guess what? You’re definitely doing Christianity wrong.

What it all adds up to is this: when Churches let ideology infect their theology, people are going to start voting with their feet. When they let ideology infect their theology it’s time to re-examine the master story of your Church. If you can commit to that and follow through with it, you might just see people start to (re)find (or even refine) their faith again.