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.

The imminent revival, part 13 — the 'awakening'

Back in the early 1980s Pat Robertson, host of The 700 Club, was prophesying a “spiritual awakening” in this country. I quickly dismissed it as so much hooey.
 

This month, I’ve learned just why I was correct back then.
 

See, when such folks make noise about an “awakening” they have this idea that God will come down and simply turn others’ hearts toward Him, which in practice means that people will adopt their political and cultural values and “clean out” their enemies by destroying or at least ridiculing them.
 

But after reading the article “Real Awakenings are Not Elegant — [They] are Messy, Ugly, Shattered & Raw” by Elizabeth Gordon in ElephantJournal.com, I was reminded that I’ve been going through my own “awakening” since August 2017, though I’m not at liberty to discuss the details. They refer to inner, not societal, transformation.

One thing that Gordon mentions, and which has been my experience, is that “With real-world awakenings, there is a lot of crying. There is a ton of confusion and doubt and questions and shock. There is deep-seated socialization and conditioning that gets unearthed, leaving us wondering what … we believe/want/know/feel now.” I can imagine that such happened to many of the Biblical characters — Jacob, Paul, the Apostle John and even Jesus, when He was tempted in the desert for 40 days.

Reason: “They expose all the yucky stuff, the shameful stuff, the secrets, the dreams that were never given a voice, the relationships that imprison us, the words left unsaid. Awakenings are a mirror we can’t turn away from, even in our ugliest, most tattered gown. They force us to get real, to get honest, to get transparent. They ask us to [uplevel].”

That is what began to happen to me nearly two years ago, when I realized that much of my life at the time turned out to be a lie or, at best, a sham. Without realizing it, I had been selling myself short, perhaps because I felt I didn’t deserve better.

But there is a reward for going through the process — “And when we do arrive, we realize we have been cleansed, blessed, and prepared. We understand that those dark nights of the soul were an opening for our raw truth to claw its way out. We are humbled that our greatest pain has now become our biggest teacher.”

I had an inkling of that reward last year.

This is why such talk of “awakening” is just that — talk, with no substance. There’s no reference to personal repentance or engaging the inner, deeper life, causing folks to “arrive at our deepest place of love and compassion ... [and] to arrive at the tender crossroads of accepting ourselves and loving others.”

That’s what real revival will produce — tenderness, which I have come to crave.

Of late I’ve been listening to “Awakening,” a beautiful Spyro Gyra tune from 1980 which is in the key of F-sharp but, interestingly, doesn’t resolve until the very end. And today I know why — it also represents an arrival.

Anyway, true revival will lead to kindness, gentleness, goodness and self-control, among other things, with the focus on what God wants to do. May that happen to and through me and us.

Bringing joy

Three years ago, inspired by a dance partner whom I'd met four months previously, I composed a tune that I wanted to arrange for the 16-piece swing band that plays for that dance. I also wanted her permission to put her name to it.

After I showed her the lead sheet to ask for it, her eyes began to water. "Can I keep it?" she asked shyly, to which I said, "Sure." (I'd written it on the computer, so it was stored.)

Only recently, however, did it hit me: I wasn't simply making her happy. I was bringing her joy, which, as David Brooks wrote two weeks ago in The New York Times, "comes when your heart is in another [and] is the present that life gives you as you give away your gifts."

You see, she and I have become part of an informal dance group that makes the rounds of partner dances several times a week. Over the past couple of years we have become a family of sorts, holding an informal birthday party each month honoring those celebrating; consoling people who had lost loved ones; recognizing the birth of grandchildren (most of us are empty-nesters); and, more recently, rejoicing in the recent wedding of two of our members. Indeed, for a time, I was giving flowers to women in it.

As Brooks writes, "Lovers stand face to face staring into each other’s eyes. But friends stand side by side, staring at the things they both care about. Friendship is about doing things together. So people build their friendships by organizing activities that are repeated weekly, monthly or annually: picnics, fantasy leagues, book clubs, etc."

That has shown me just what our relationships should be about, especially in the church. We can talk about "the joy of the LORD" all we want, but that can happen only with a certain amount of bonding. As Hebrews 10:25 reads, "Let us not neglect meeting together, as some have made a habit, but let us encourage one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching."

Anyway, the tune ended up being finished at the end of that year, and I was privileged to dance with her at its premiere early the next; it ended up being a hit with not only our fellow dancers but also the band, which today plays it in regular rotation and thus has taken on a life of its own. In addition, it's also being played by two other bands, one of them my own.

One other point: When you try to spread joy, it often comes back to you.

My partner turned 60 in November, so I requested that the band play the tune in her honor, which it did. Feeling humbled, I confessed to her later, "I didn't appreciate just how much it meant to you"; to that, she responded, "I can't begin to tell you."

You could say that, in exercising my creative gifts, I've done my job.

Overturning Roe: Some unintended consequences

Let me first say that I have always opposed abortion on demand at any time for virtually any reason and disagreed with Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that removed most state restrictions on abortion in 1973, when it happened. Some of you thus might believe that if it were overturned by a subsequent decision legal abortion would end and, suddenly, all these positive consequences would result.

I’m not convinced of that; to me, it comes down to the old line “Be careful what you wish for — you just might get it.” I see much anti-abortion activism as just so much bullying and not really focusing upon the babies whose lives the activists say they're trying to save.

Some fallacies about the potential overturning of Roe:

If abortion weren't so readily available, women wouldn't be having sex and getting pregnant in the first place.

Naïve as all get out.

According to the book "Blinded by Might: Can the Religious Right Save America?", at the turn of the last century, a time before abortion was banned, a lot of men did the "use 'em and lose 'em" thing, leaving women destitute and vulnerable to abortion. And now that we know today that, especially with the #metoo movement, many girls often undergoing sexual abuse, including rape, much sexual contact that results in pregnancy isn't even welcomed, blowing to smithereens the implication that little vixens are out to seduce men and escape consequence in the process.

Adoptions would increase.

Not today, they wouldn't.

Having a child out of wedlock is far, far less a stigma, if any at all, than two generations ago; as a result, the vast majority of women actually keep their babies with little if any tut-tutting. And part of that is the deep hole that exists in the hearts of many mothers who actually did give up their children, not to mention that in the children themselves once they learn that they were adopted.

Revival would result.

I don't see how.

When abortion was banned during the turn of the last century religion had little, if anything, to do with that. Indeed, you never had any consistent anti-abortion theology until the late 1970s, and such theology is in fact inconsistent in its own right because it focuses on only the unborn.

And when it's shown to be unproductive — then what? We're seeing religious faith expanded to support a viewpoint beyond its actual scope.

Anyway, supporting cultural change primarily through legal means virtually never works. Proper relating needs to be modeled, not simply forced through.