Kissing Christianity goodbye

Recently the evangelical world was roiled with the news that Joshua Harris, author of the book "I Kissed Dating Goodbye," which he has since disavowed and apologized for, was separating from his wife and abandoning the Christian faith.

What happened? I have a theory.

For decades the faith has had a reputation, deserved or not, of being heavy on maintaining cultural values, including sexual purity especially among girls, the subject of Harris' book, and light on the primary tenet of the Christian faith, which is the grace of God through Jesus Christ. And when those cultural values come under attack, which many cultural conservatives believe has been happening for decades, their vacuousness is exposed.

And that's not the only thing being exposed, either. Numerous women today are sharing about their struggle with sexuality when they were girls then, specifically the shame they felt for even thinking about sex or even engaging in it (in some cases unwillingly).

Part of the problem is that, as I have said before, God demands not a moral life but a transformed one. There's a reason for that: Unless you recognize your need of His grace you simply cannot appreciate it. Not for nothing did Jesus say to the religious leaders of His day that tax collectors and prostitutes would enter the kingdom of heaven ahead of them.

One thing that I find problematic in so-called Christian movements like "Quiverfull" that simply sought to "outbreed" the rest of the world and cloister children in the process is that they in fact sabotage their own goals by making the faith more traditional than evangelical. In this context outreach to others not in the faith is much less important than raising children not to question anything. While there's nothing wrong in itself with imparting faith to children, doing so in that way paradoxically leads to a weak faith and a lack of trust in God Himself to preserve His own.

This could be the reason why much of the millennial generation disdains evangelicalism, which has become more of a subculture than a living reality pointing to a living God. Their parents either never knew or have forgotten that the necessary transformation to keep children living for Him must come before any demands for "moral" behavior.

Perhaps Harris, who later became a megachurch pastor, will return; if he does he'll have the fire of God in his bones and not tolerate half-steps. It's for this reason I've been saying for a while that this generation needs its own touch of God, and should He move in that way it will put its elders to shame.

Losing your life for the sake of fear

Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.  For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it. What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul?

— Jesus, recorded in Matthew 16:24-26

There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.

— 1 John 4:18

Last week author Peter Wehner, an evangelical Christian and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank, noted that many of his fellow evangelicals voted for President Donald Trump largely out of fear primarily of loss of cultural power. He isn't the first to say this and certainly won't be the last, but I hope his words will get through to some folks.

Of course Trump's transgressions against God's moral law are legion — serial adultery, foul language, long-standing racist statements and behavior, outright lying — and wouldn't be accepted were the perpetrator a registered Democrat or leaned politically liberal.

And that's the problem. A lot of folks see Trump as their last hope of maintaining America as they see it — comfortable for people like them to operate without any constraints, so they excuse his behavior. But in supporting him they actually sabotage the propagation of the the very Christian faith they believe is at the heart of their life.

Bottom line, such folks don't really trust in God to preserve His people. Nor do they really believe the Gospel of Jesus Christ, which at its heart is about reconciliation — first, between God and mankind through His cross and, that accomplished, men and women to each other. In such an atmosphere, folks who think differently are seen as implacable enemies and Christianity is reduced to a turf war.

And that fear has already manifested itself in the rejection of evangelicalism by much of the millennial generation, with many of those remaining taking positions that, at least on the surface, oppose Biblical principles, most notably same-gender matrimony. But this is what happens when you demonize gays, people of color, Democrats, the "left" ... you name the target. When you spend your time identifying and trying to defeat enemies you can't maintain any sense of outreach to them and even encourage people to sympathize with them.

That's why the Christian influence they say they long for is shrinking despite all the campaigns and money being spent. They have actually abandoned, or in some cases never truly understood in the first place, the core of the faith. Nothing but full-scale repentance, which will lead to the abandonment of the "culture war," will stem the tide.

I suspect that Wehner gets this. I hope more voices like his will be heard.

Feeling abandoned

Recently I was reminded that insensitivity toward singles in the church starts early.

On a Christian singles page on Facebook one woman who just got into a relationship recently complained that another single female friend simply dropped her as a result, almost without explanation. I explained to her, however, that she was in one sense being normal because she was feeling abandoned. When the woman in the relationship mentioned that her friend had that happen to her before, I said, in effect, “Yep.”

Because when friends get into a relationship, especially one that might lead toward marriage, the still-unattached friends they had often feel hung out to dry. There really is a loss there, one that simply won’t be replaced with activities or spiritual “discipline.”

I saw this up close as part of a youth fellowship in high school. I was friendly with three other guys in it but rarely got to spend time with them on a consistent basis. Reason? One worked most weekend nights, another dated quite a bit and another was seeing a girl on the sly. I had my eye on one particular girl in the group who never reciprocated, so one day the leader, who was married, clearly annoyed, asked me, “Why do you need a girl?”

Hel-LO? Didn’t he notice that most of the other guys I knew then had one as well?

Indeed, the only time I didn’t feel I “needed” a relationship was when I was around other unattached Christian singles; until my early 20s I had never met a spiritually mature man who wasn’t dating. (Later on I did get into a couple of relationships that, looking back, were placeholders for the real thing.) But, having experienced the loss of good friends to matrimony and parenthood, I told my girlfriend that I still needed to be around the singles, in part so that they wouldn’t feel abandoned the same way I was.

It’s no longer an issue at my age, in part because of music rehearsals and dance parties I attend regularly often with empty-nesters, usually “single again.” But I’ll never forget those days of feeling very much alone, and I can say that I didn’t grow very much as a result because growth does take relationships. And when you can’t get those …

'A racist bone in my body'

I for one found it ludicrous that, right after President Trump made a statement critical of the quartet of freshman House members who are all women “of color,” he insisted, “I don’t have a racist [bone] in my body!” Even a cursory peek at Trump’s record should put the lie to that statement.

That being said, let’s not fool ourselves, however, into thinking that we’ve been delivered from racist thinking or that somehow it just doesn’t affect us. Because, whether we want to admit it or not, it does.

We saw this at my church, which today is intentionally racially and culturally diverse, during our annual missions emphasis month three years ago, coincidentally during the presidential campaign. Several hundred people left due to the slogan “Welcome the Stranger,” taken as a shot at Trump’s stance on illegal immigration. And I’m told that many of those members actually made racist statements on the way out.

Which tells me that, as much as we may take pride in being “reconciled,” we really don’t know each other well — or at least as well as we think we do. The reality is that, over a certain age, none of us is colorblind; I lost that in the first grade (and others feel that probably before then).

As a fifth-grader in a Christian academy I absorbed, and to my shame dished out, a lot of anti-white rhetoric courtesy of my father. What changed me, however, was a number of younger girls, all white and mostly blonde, who became emotionally attached to me for reasons I still don’t understand. Gradually it dawned on me that, if I were to have relationships with such girls, I needed not only to tone that down but eliminate it altogether by changing my thought process. Martin Luther King Jr. helped in that respect, never downplaying the racism that he fought (and eventually killed him) but trying to get beyond it.

It would help if we all expressed similar regret and repentance over what’s been happening in our society, especially over the last few years — and not wait for our opponents to “go first.” Let’s act in humility and admit that we all have partaken of the poison of racism. Were we to do that it would be so much easier to purge from the church and thus hold the world accountable for how it chooses to operate.