Happy Thanksgiving! I hope you’re able to enjoy at least part of the day with family and/or friends, and maybe even catch a little football along the way.
Continuing my now ongoing series of things I really want to do but most likely never will, here is another video for viewing pleasure:
1. This post seems fitting for the day. Everything you wanted to know about the history of margarine vs. butter in this country.
2. Felix Salmon talks about how to kill a city’s mojo with parking lots, while Andrew Sullivan discusses how highways can do the same.
3. Bruce Reyes-Chow delves into the radical Jesus bubble in contemporary Christianity.
So I really hadn’t planned on spending anymore time discussing gender roles and Christianity after I linked to this Rachel Held Evans post. Then I read through this conversation over at Two Friars and a Fool, and realized that I still had a lot rattling around in my head that needed to come out.
I couldn’t help but think that those of us who have grown up in the church, or have spent a long time there, decided the issue of female ordination decades ago, and haven’t really spent much time thinking about it since. Issues of gender roles have come up more lately. We have also spent a lot of time discussing who can and can’t be ordained. We’ve just spent most of the time discussing these in regards to issues of sexuality, not gender. I’ve been thinking a lot over the past couple of years about how while the subject of female ordination has basically been settled in churches, we still don’t agree, and neither side feels the need to talk about it anymore.
(For the video above, start at the 30 minute mark for the sermon.)
The first time this became apparent to me was about three years ago when I was talking to a friend who had begun interning in a Baptist church. He had grown up attending church sporadically, and always conservative evangelical churches when he did. In contrast, I grew up attending a United Methodist church where a female pastor was always on staff. In fact, every church I had attended until that point had at least one female pastor on staff. So we were talking and got on the topic of church leadership. I asked him what he would do if he showed up for worship one Sunday and there was a woman standing in the pulpit. He paused for a moment, and then said he had never thought about it, that it would be weird, but he probably wouldn’t mind.
After this conversation, and conversations with several other people, I realized that I had never heard a defense of woman being ordained growing up. It was just taken for granted by that point. This was the same experience many of my friends and fellow seminarians seemed to have had as well, regardless of whether their church ordained women or not. The issue had been settled, and their was no need to discuss it any further.
I bring this anecdote up because as denominations become less influential, and more churches focus on reaching out to the “non-churched” the issue will need to be dealt with explicitly. There are an increasing number of people attending churches, like my friend, who don’t think about this topic because they aren’t made to. For those of us who cannot picture church without the contributions of woman pastors this is even more important for us to remember. A person who attends a church led by a woman will probably have thought about the subject. A person who attends a large church that doesn’t allow women to lead may not think about it. Most people will only think about it when a church leader brings it up, or when they see a woman preaching.
A church that only allows men to be in leadership won’t have to deal with this issue very often. Especially if they have a woman directing the nursery or elementary programs, or as the lead singer in the worship band, or if they have a woman give the children’s sermon. Women can be visible, but still not leading in anything approaching the same capacity as men. The result can seem similar to the people in the congregation, but the difference is that women’s voices, and the ways God is working through them, are silenced.
For those of us who have no desire to return to a time when women weren’t ordained we need to remember this dynamic. We need to make sure the issue is still discussed, which means we need to be able to intelligently articulate our position. This doesn’t mean prooftexting from the BIble, but being able to explain how Paul used woman as his ministry partners, as did Jesus. It means being able to explain how our position is biblical, just as we acknowledge that the arguments against women in ministry are biblical too. It means highlighting the contributions of women to show that God is calling woman to preach and teach to everyone. It means getting people to ask the questions and put faces to the answers. Is Barbara Brown Taylor any less of a preacher because she is a woman? Were the Methodists and Presbyterians wrong in affirming God’s call in the woman I have learned from and worked with? Is Kate’s and my wedding any less blessed by God because a woman pronounced us?
In the end, this is what the issue is about. We must remember it, and continue to talk about it. If this is a debate that plays out silently, it is a debate we are at a great disadvantage in. If we don’t speak up, then we will be losing an untold wealth of wisdom in the future, as well as ignoring God’s work in our communities.
I’m sure that many of you have heard about Rick Perry’s response during the Wednesday GOP debate, saying he doesn’t have any second thoughts about any of the 234 people executed during his time governing Texas. I’m sure you also heard about the crowd’s reaction of wholehearted approval. If you’re like me you weren’t watching, heard about it on a blog, or Facebook, or Twitter and had to watch it for yourself. I’ve embedded the clip if you haven’t watched it yet.
“Apparently people were shocked by the applause here. The only thing that shocked me was that they didn’t form a rumba line. It’s a Republican debate. And it’s America. Perry’s right–most people support the death penalty. It’s the job of those of us who oppose the death penalty to change that.
It’s worth remembering that no Democratic nominee for the presidency in some twenty years, has been against the death penalty.
This is still the country where we took kids to see men lynched, and then posed for photos. We are a lot of things. This is one of them.”
Maybe I’m too cynical but this didn’t surprise me at all. If this had happened a year from now at a debate against Obama, and the vast majority of the crowd applauded wildly, then I would have been. The clip did start to bother me after awhile though. It wasn’t the applause necessarily, but the way that Perry nonchalantly shrugged off the weight of executing someone every 3 weeks during his almost 11 years as governor of Texas. He really is that sure that every one of those 234 people is absolutely guilty and deserving of the “ultimate justice” he gives? I get that this is a political debate and you don’t want to show weakness or indecision, but I want to see someone that understands the meaning of a decision. What makes this even worse is, among others, the Cameron Todd Willingham case. You can read a good recap of here at TNC’s NYT column, and one here at The New Yorker. Both are absolutely worth your time, but I’ll give a short synopsis of the case as well.
Basically, Cameron Todd Willingham’s wife and kids were killed when their house burned down. Authorities interpreted Willingham’s behavior to be inconsistent with real grief, and he became the lead suspect. Arson investigators decided that the evidence showed the fire absolutely had to be arson, then a jailhouse snitch came forward claiming Willingham had confessed to him. Willingham was convicted and sentenced to death. The snitch later recanted and in the years before Willingham’s execution fire investigation went from being a pseudoscientific art to an actual science. Investigators agreed that the evidence from the fire showed it was almost definitely not arson. All of Willingham’s appeals and petitions were denied, and Governor Perry denied to stay the execution despite the new evidence. In 2005 Texas created a commission to investigate the use of forensic science in trials, and looked at the Willingham case. By 2009 when the commission was nearing a statement on the case, and Perry was facing a primary challenge for reelection, Perry replaced the head of the commission with a friend who then cancelled the commissions meetings until after Perry was reelected.
Perry’s actions in this case bother me on many levels. How will a man who is unwilling to even consider that he made a mistake, who brags about his low views and distrust of science, and who is willing to manipulate the legal system to protect himself govern as president? Andrew Cohen gives us a good idea.
“To understand why this is a worthwhile endeavor, notwithstanding what the pundits and spinmeisters are saying about the public’s interest in capital punishment as a stump issue, it’s useful to go back 15 years or so ago in Texas history. There was an awful lot we all might have learned early on about the governing styles and intellectual rigor of then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush and his Legal Counsel Alberto Gonzales had folks around the country paid more attention in the 1990s to the grossly negligent way in which the pair evaluated clemency petitions from death row inmates.
With the benefit of hindsight, for example, one could reasonably argue that the pair’s sloppy legal reasoning, disregard for fundamental legal principles, and contempt for honest evaluation of evidence about the Texas prisoners foreshadowed the subsequent torture memos and other low moments of the Bush presidency. If you don’t believe me, if you think I am exaggerating the links and patterns here, please take a few minutes to read Alan Berlow’s landmark piece, The Texas Clemency Memos, which appeared in the July/August 2003 issue of The Atlantic Magazine.”
As you might have guessed, I am not a death penalty supporter. I do think that the facts of the case should give pause to even the staunchest supporters of the death penalty. Do we really want to have a system in place that executes innocent people? Do we really want a leader who isn’t bothered, or even willing to consider, that he had an innocent man executed? Is this a man who we can trust to consider the lives of our men and women in uniform before he sends them into battle, let alone the consequences of military action in general? I am not even close to being convinced we do or can, and I hope these are the types of questions we consider as we move farther into election season. There are many things that presidents, and legislators, don’t have specific control over, or have no history working with. What they do have for us to judge is their reasoning, thought process, and character. We will differ, thankfully, on our judgements, but I hope we are at least asking the questions.
To round out the conversation on labels and religion I want to pass on two links.
The first is from Donald Miller and talks about how we use labels to gain power over others. I think it brings together the labels and tribal symbols themes quite nicely.
The second is an article from Science & Religion (h/t The Dish), and delves into some of why people do and don’t claim religious affiliation today. I think it raises at least as many questions as it answers, but I like that.
Continuing the theme of labeling ourselves, and the inherent Us vs Them nature of it, I want to highlight this post from Fred Clark. He makes several good points about the role that guilt plays in directing how we interact with and view the world and the people in it. I specifically want to highlight his point about tribal symbols and how they serve to shut down conversations instead of start them.
Tribal symbols, or “witnessing tools,” generally fail because they are necessarily sound bites,snippets of an implied argument being made to people who may or may not participate. They generally have an implied (or explicit) scolding or shaming tone to them. At their best they’re smug, and maybe a little clever, but they do little, in my experience, to attract conversation from people who don’t already agree with you. I remember wearing good Christian t-shirts in high school, especially on retreats and mission trips, and getting plenty of comments from people who were at least as adamant in their faith as I was—but nothing from random people on the street.
The shirts did play a role in helping me claim my identity as a Christian. They helped me to take some first steps at integrating that identity into my everyday life. Again though, this had nothing to do with witnessing, except maybe indirectly. As a youth director, the shirts we designed and wore on mission trips were great at identifying who we were to the community and saying why we were there. The main purpose of the shirts though was to create community through shared identity. Or maybe it was to make it easy to keep track of 30+ high school kids in a Walmart. (Trust me, even outside of Knoxville Volunteer orange makes it really easy to identify your group.)
I’m not sure that anybody really disagrees that living out the Gospel is more effective than wearing Christian paraphernalia when it comes to getting people interested in God. This is how we get back to the discussion about labels. A label won’t make people accept your message. It may turn people off, it may intrigue them, but it won’t do the work. A good label is descriptive of the people it refers to. Christian works because we as followers strive to be followers of Christ. Evangelical is similarly descriptive. So it shouldn’t be surprising that evangelical culture is the leading driver of witnessing tools and tribal symbols. A good evangelical has to evangelize. The culture encourages its members to do so, and they have worked really hard to succeed at the calling.
If we want to pick a label to replace progressive it needs to do the same. More importantly, we need to be as dedicated to living out the message our label conveys. This is where I think that trinitarian and incarnational are the most effective. They both explicitly call us as followers to imitate the God that we worship. At the heart of each is the love of God overflowing into creation, the love that we are called to have for our fellow creatures. This is where I think these two labels are more effective than evangelical. They both point to God, not the act of spreading a message.
My hope with a new label is that it would be both as successful as “evangelical” has been, and much more so. I hope it would be as successful in seeing it’s followers embody the meaning of the label. I hope it would much more successful moving people away from preaching just to save souls, and toward sharing God’s love with God’s people—wherever that leads us.
I agree with Tony’s point that we need a label. As he says, “Words shape us; words do things; words have power.” His point that the power of the label evangelical is that it’s a theological term is spot on. It sounds religious, unlike progressive or emergent. I think this works similarly for Protestant as well, even though it’s not a theological term. Progressive and liberal are political terms first. Their theological significance is as modifiers of theological terms. This is key, and why evangelical is an effective label, even as it has gained strong political connotations in American culture. Evangelical is a theological term first, and a political term second. It’s also a positive term, describing what it is, not what it isn’t. This is part of why “progressive evangelical” doesn’t work. It is defining itself as a specific type of evangelical, and therefore not like the “other” evangelicals.
So what about the options for a new label? I really like “trinitarian Christian.” The trinity is foundational to my theology, so I like having that as a label. If I had my way I would use “perichoretic Christian,” but this falls into Tony’s too-obscure category. Trinitarian is attractive to me because it draws on the full breadth of who God is, and not just on a specific event, theme, or task. It’s also a well-known term with a clear meaning, so people know your basic belief without needing to know the meaning of the term in-depth.
I like the “incarnational Christian” option, and agree with Tony’s points, but I’m just not sure I’m completely sold on it. It strikes me as a little too specific, focusing on one theological theme, and maybe a little too obscure. The incarnation is fundamental to my theology, with it being an outpouring of God’s love for creation, but it’s not the only important theological term. I know some people will be worried about it not being explicitly about the resurrection, but I think the resurrection gets plenty of focus in Christian circles, and isn’t in danger of being ignored. “Evangelical” has no explicit reference to the resurrection, yet I think it’s safe to say that evangelicals haven’t forgotten about Easter. So “Incarnational” doesn’t mean “not resurrectional.”
My concern isn’t about the meaning of “incarnational.” It is that any label necessarily says, “I am ____, and you’re not.” This is just as true for my choice of “trinitarian Christian” as it is for any other. Labels are fundamentally divisive and I think that Christianity has plenty of divisions. That being said, Tony is still right that we need a label because people will give us one if we don’t claim one for ourselves. Maybe the answer is to find a broad enough term to allow a big tent, while being inviting and inclusive in our actions and demeanor. Maybe people we don’t agree with or like will claim the label too, but I think Jesus has some things to say about bringing people together who don’t always agree. What do you think?
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Over at his blog Tony Jones has been working with his readers to pick a new title to replace the “progressive” in “progressive Christian.” To catch up on the discussion read this, this, and these. Ready?
I hate giving myself a title, I’m too self-conscious. There is part of me that wants to get a Ph.D and then become a bishop so I could be called “The Right Reverend Dr.”—but there is no way I could ever actually use that title.
Titles draw attention to ourselves. Titles define, and therefore limit us. They effectively say, “I am like this, and I’m not like that.” Titles are never fully descriptive of who we are, and the ones that stick usually aren’t the ones we choose for ourselves. Christians didn’t start calling themselves Christians, that was a label given by others. It stuck and has been the most inclusive and enduring label we have. We keep adding new ones though, and these labels keep getting new meanings added to them by us and others. The more labels we have flying about, the more important it becomes to claim labels for ourselves.
Having more than one label gets cumbersome though, so we end up having to limit ourselves to one main one. Which one do we generally choose? We choose the one that is best known by others. So terms like “Evangelical,” “Progressive,” “Mainline Protestant” and now “Emergent” become the defining labels. Some of us identify with all of them, and there is overlap in the terms, but how progressive can you be and still be an evangelical? How emergent can a mainline Protestant be? Is a progressive evangelical as progressive as a progressive? What happens when someone else says you’re not actually what you say you are? Who gets to decide who can claim a label? Can you reject meanings tied to a specific label, while still claiming the meanings you do like?
Can you see why I hate labels? If I could, I would never use one. Unfortunately that’s not an option, so that brings us back to Tony’s posts…
