Evangelicals Vs. Christians

By JIM VAN DER POL

Evangelicalism is not the Christianity I learned at my mother’s knee. It seeks and grasps after power while the Christianity of the gospels is about powerlessness. The very language has been confounded and confused, as the tongues of mankind were scrambled at the Tower of Babel.

Is it the end times business? Perhaps the insistence upon belief in the unbelievable, the return of a vengeful Jesus, suffocates the instinct toward logic. Perhaps the prooftexting of a holy book is always perverse and twisted. Even so humane a man as Pope Francis genuflects before a sexual dogma more suited to the empty world in the ancient eastern desert than to our crowded modern times.

Evangelicalism will have to be fought as it tries to reinstall Trump in the White House. Progressives cannot do it. Their language is wrong. Evangelicalism is at its roots Protestant, though conservative Catholics sign on. The Protestant tradition has the Bible central, not the church. The argument will have to be carried by those as steeped in the Bible as the evangelicals, but who are repelled by the simplification and destruction of the good that is prooftexting, the narrowing of religion and the lust after power.

We have treated evangelicals with a kind of amused tolerance. We will have to quit that. Evangelicals can be, and often are, decent people. But their beliefs are seriously deranged and they are having an awful effect on our lives together in the world. We do have a dog in this fight, and best we get to it. We need to quit letting things pass. We should pick fights if necessary. And we do it on the basis of understanding the Bible better than they do. Yes, there is a use for all that catechism and church attendance after all!

We should start by trying to understand evangelicals. How about the gap between the God of Genesis, the powerful wrathful Yahweh (Jehovah) and the Gospel God represented by the loving Jesus? Is this growth in our understanding of God, or growth of God? And is there a difference? Here we get into fear of change. Many evangelicals and certainly all fundamentalists are going to have trouble with either interpretation. For them, the Bible is the unchanging word of God and God himself does not change. Change threatens. This is true for all of us, but most of us can see as well that change is sometimes good. Political Evangelicals cannot. It would not be amiss to note that it is just this, this insistence upon holy words from the past that has driven so many away from the Church.

Evangelical views are not held lightly. Trump is now threatening certain states, whose governors he does not like and in at least one case, whose people he does not expect to vote for him with death by coronavirus by withholding equipment. This is beyond death by incompetence, that is, death because he does not get the things done that he could, a bitter outcome of the failure of our degenerate Senate to get some control of him when they had the chance. This is deliberate and he at least thinks his people are fine with it.

His people are largely evangelicals. This is a death cult. And one of the bases for such a cult is a driving fear of change.

Political evangelicals tend to be authoritarian. Yahweh jealously commanded the tribe to carry out genocide against the people of Canaan, who worshiped various mostly female fertility deities. The attacks reflected back upon the attackers as wars often do and the tribe was itself reinforced in its social structure. Children and women were owned. Social standards were enforced or changed through violence. Homosexuals were outcast because they didn’t produce children. Women were feared because they did and so seemed closer linked to nature, which was also hated and fought against. These aspects of our society today are somewhat muted, but not hard to see if we look.

When Jesus begins to look more like Jehovah, with his fits of rage enforcing authority and his willingness to kill indiscriminately (such as in the “rapture”), we can be sure we are in conversation with political evangelicalism. When we have children in cages at our border, when women raise the children with little or none of the wealth, which is more and more in the possession of the wealthy, mostly white males, when black men fill our prisons, when women and children are abused and beaten, and when we are constantly at war, then Jehovah is in charge and Jesus is a mere poster on a wall.

Today we have a president who ignores and sneers at our elected representatives, who has the military trying to disperse peaceful protesters, hiding his own incompetence in an overwhelming need to be re-elected.

We have traveled already a considerable distance back into our own past. We must be reminding the political evangelicals in our families and neighborhoods that Jesus cannot be made to stand for what they want in society and government, and that twisting their own religion into the grotesque thing it has become damages them too.

Jesus stands among us today. He wears a mask and nurses the sick, at considerable risk to his own health. He is most likely neither white nor male.

The burden of the Gospels is love, radical love of God for the Earth and people, God’s creation and of people for God and thus for each other. It is there in the parable of the Good Samaritan, in many instances of sharing of the food, in the protection of the woman caught in adultery, in the admonition to love your enemies, for even the Pharisees manage to love their friends, in criticism of great wealth, in the harsh criticism of the religious elite of the day.

We have Jesus renewing the wine supply at the wedding in Cana so the party could continue. We hear Him telling his followers not to worry, that God cares for the sparrow and will certainly care for them. He cautions against useless jealousy in the Prodigal Son story and in favor of community harmony among the early and late laborers in the vineyard.

Prooftexting is the tool of the literalist, the heretical impulse among religious people toward “the letter that kills” in the memorable phrase of Alvin Boyd Kuhn. Literalists give us the inferior status of women, hatred and fear of homosexuality, elevation of violence. All of these appear in the Bible and the tradition, but along with so very much that is contrary to them.

Consider the idea of the rapture. Nothing has destroyed so many Palestinian lives as the notion of the rapture, put to political use by the right wing in Israeli politics. And part of the basis for the rapture is the passage about the separation of sheep and goats in the teachings of Jesus, paired with some of the probably drug-induced dreaming in the Revelation of John. But deducted from this teaching of Jesus is the point that we make our lives and the quality of our souls by how we act and react to our situation on Earth. Instead we get a kind of absolute prediction of religious retribution in earthly time.

Literalists, or fundamentalist Christians or political Evangelicals can be known by this tendency to understand allegory as fact or prediction. If we hear someone taking the flood story as a real event in real time we need to watch out. This thinking is dangerous. And the only antidote is to continue to tell the core message of the Bible, the teachings of Christ and the burden of the story of the Hebrews in the Old Testament, a message of love and faithfulness. And to tell it, we must know it. The telling can be Easter in our dark world.

Jim Van Der Pol farms near Kerkhoven, Minn. A collection of his columns, “Conversations with the Land,” was published by No Bull Press (nobullpressonline.com).

From The Progressive Populist, September 15, 2020

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