Have we become the very thing we hate?
Responding to some pushback I received on a podcast
You know what they say: anything can happen at a Bible conference social mixer. Okay that might not be a saying, but I was at one such mixer last year and didn’t know a person in the room. So I scanned the area for any other lost souls, people who had the same despairing deer-in-the-headlights look I did.
Finding none, I settled for approaching whoever I could find who seemed on their own without a group. And so it came to pass that I made two friends that night: a German theologian and an American prospective Ph.D. student. A day or two later, that student introduced me to her husband, who happens to host a podcast called Spiritually Incorrect. I hit it off with the couple and left that conference with an invitation to appear as a guest on the show.
So I did, and the episode just dropped this week.
This is sort of like a Choose Your Own Adventure book. You can stop here and listen to the episode, or you can wait on that until you need background noise for an hour and plow ahead. Go ahead and choose your adventure now.
Okay, for those of you who haven’t listened to the show yet, I’ll give you a minor spoiler: after my conversation with the two hosts, the episode continues for another 10-15 minutes. During that time, the two hosts argue with each other (probably for sport and entertainment value), one of them trying to “refute” or pick apart what I shared in the interview, and the other one more or less defending me.
I haven’t had time to really process that back-and-forth, but I thought, “Hey, you write a blog. You could respond to the criticism leveled at you in the epilogue.” You know, since I wasn’t there to respond (cough cough).
Really I just want to focus on a specific charge Seth made about me/post-evangelicals in the ending: that while we say evangelicals are guilty of chauvinism, aren’t we guilty of the very same thing? Just as evangelicals think they have a better worldview than (all) other people, don’t we think we have a better worldview than, say, evangelicals?
(Note: the wikipedia page for chauvinism is actually quite helpful.)
I don’t want to write off this accusation out of hand. While it’s coming from a conservative evangelical, I have actually heard an almost identical critique from progressive critics of the ex-vangelical movement: aren’t you just swapping in one set of gatekeeping rules for another? Aren’t you just LGBTQ-affirming but still every bit as White supremacist as the evangelicals?
I think both of these opposite-but-the-same claims boil down to this: White post-evangelical Christians have the very same flaws and injustices as White evangelical Christians. To those on the left the flaw is White supremacy, and to those on the right it is moral smugness.
I don’t think I can do justice to either (and certainly not both) versions of this critique in the closing paragraphs of this blog post. But here are my somewhat off-the-cuff responses:
We (individually and collectively) are on a journey. We still may have some of the very same flaws that we did as individuals several years ago, or as the churches we were part of then. But like any journey, there is movement. We are trying to resist white supremacy, homophobia, patriarchy, ableism, ageism, and more (including moral smugness!)… but these things are not flushed out of our institutions, brains, bodies, or practices overnight. We are gentle with ourselves and each other about the transformation we are experiencing—without surrendering the urgency of learning this work of resistance.
As for Seth’s specific accusation, I would say that the chauvinism in White evangelicalism is almost unique among all the popular religious traditions in our society. Certainly different from whatever looking-down-on-conservatives “chauvinism vibe” we might have in post-evangelical spaces. Why is it different?
The scope of chauvinism is different (as JD pointed out to Seth on the show). We might think we have better politics than conservatives, but evangelicals think their entire worldview is superior to that of any non-evangelical.
The consequences of disagreement within the chauvinism are different. If an evangelical disagrees with me on politics or theology, oh well, I might think they have suboptimal politics or theology. But if I disagree with an evangelical on pretty much anything (in my experience), it is a sign of sure hellfire to come, and the person is compelled to communicate that to me to try to prevent that hellfire.
The impact of the chauvinism is different. How does my sense of better politics manifest itself in the world? Maybe an angry tweet or two, and these tweets could offend a conservative evangelical. How does the evangelical sense of correctness show up in the world? Imperialism. People traveling to other cultures and trying to morph communities’ entire social life into one of Western evangelical Christianity. Or on just a local level, people telling their children or neighbors that they are one missed repentance away from eternal conscious torment.
So yes, I think we “have escaped”—or perhaps are escaping—”from the very critique we have of evangelicals.”
