Growing Up Evangelical, I Was Taught How to Be Good in Private, but not in Public
Growing Up Evangelical, I Was Taught How to Be Good in Private, but not in Public
On Public Character, and the need for gentleness
Hello friends,
I’d like to begin with a plea for gentleness.
My book is on the precipice of release, in just four days. It is personal. I am sharing my life in a very personal way, for better or worse. It impacts me, sure. But it impacts those I know and love as well.
I have seen indications this week that there are some people who hope the book is an angry take down of the people they hold responsible for things going wrong. I have sensed a desire for vengeance and humiliation.
I hope those people are disappointed.
I do make criticisms in the book. But I try very hard not to put myself in the place of God. I hope I don’t make that error. I do not consider myself judge, jury and executioner. I doubt my own judgment, even as I try to come to some conclusions about what has gone wrong and how we can all try to make things better.
Self-assured self-righteousness — if you want to get me going, that’ll do it.
Seek justice. But love mercy too. And walk humbly. That’s one of my mantras. I got it from the Bible.
I wrote a few words on Instagram about deconstruction:
Now here’s an essay I wrote that comes out of the book, about one of the main reasons I think evangelical political involvement and action has gone astray.
On Public Character
Most mornings of my childhood, my father read us the Bible over breakfast.
He’d open his dog-eared and heavily underlined copy of the Scriptures to the second chapter of Proverbs, and utter these words: “My son, if you accept my words and store up my commands within you, turning your ear to wisdom and applying your heart to understanding—indeed, if you call out for insight and cry aloud for understanding, and if you look for it as for silver and search for it as for hidden treasure, then you will understand the fear of the LORD and find the knowledge of God.”
“Get wisdom,” the author of Proverbs wrote in chapter four. “Though it cost all you have, get understanding.”
He planted the seed and it grew. The desire for understanding and wisdom blossomed in me through the many complex strands that bond a father to a son.
The profession of journalism has been my passport on this quest. It has expanded my range of view, introduced me to new people and different ways of thinking, and trained me to think more carefully and precisely. It has made me a better Christian, as I’ve written about elsewhere.
Over the last several years of this lifelong journey, I’ve concluded that the evangelical church in which I was raised has done harm to the country, to our neighbors whom our faith commands us to love as ourselves.
Why did this happen? This question has puzzled many. But in writing my book, Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement that Failed a Generation, I found some answers. I think it has something to do with the ways in which I — like so many others — was taught to think about what it means to be a good person and a good Christian.
In short, I was taught a lot about private character: what it means to be good in private, in your home, with your friends, in church, in your workplace.
I was not taught about public character: what it means to be a valuable member of society, contributing to the greater good, and investing yourself in the health of the whole.
***
Hannah Arendt argued that “the principal goal of the American founders was neither individual liberty nor property rights … but public freedom,” writes Philip Gorski in his book American Covenant.
Arendt focused on “positive liberty” or “public happiness.”
“By 'the pursuit of happiness,' in other words, the American founders had meant something public and collective, rather than something private and individual,” Gorski writes.
The American conservative evangelical church, in contrast to the African-American church, has failed to impart this understanding of public character to its millions of attendees and members. I see little meaningful Christian formation toward these virtues in evangelical culture.
This deficit has allowed parts of evangelicalism to drift toward a quasi-ethnic tribal identity useful for seizing political power and cultural privilege, rather than a set of religious beliefs and moral commitments.
The failure to inculcate public character has at least two root causes: an overly private faith and an apocalyptic mind. One significant result of this failure is the resulting capture by one political party.
***
Growing up, I was taught that to be a Christian meant, primarily, that one had an individual relationship with God. God cares about me, and loves me, and I love him. I speak to him, and vice versa. Our love for God was to take the form of obedience to his commands. We really only talked about personal virtue and personal holiness.
There was little teaching about our status as individuals in the community outside our church congregation. We didn’t even really think other churches were as Christian as we were. I encountered this attitude just months ago, when a relative sniffed at the small local congregation I attend and told me that I should be going to church where the spirit of God was really at work. How could they assume to know this with such certainty? Yet there are many churches that train their members to think this way.
We were also taught that sin was against God, and sometimes another person. But were not trained to think in terms of transgression against our community. Other traditions have not neglected this. There is a long tradition in the Black American church of emphasizing social justice and a vision of what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the beloved community.” The Catholic church teaches the doctrine of solidarity. There are examples in other faith traditions as well.
But the conservative church — made up of mostly white congregations — has ignored or looked down on the spiritual resources available to them in the historical witness of the Black church. My church was no different.
I was raised in a Christian bubble. We withdrew from proximity to those not like us, and lost touch with the reality of life outside the four walls of our church. To the extent that we engaged with politics, we were converted by right-wing political figures and institutions into fearful antagonists. We were not stakeholders interested in contributing and taking responsibility.
***
The second component, an apocalyptic mind, is important to sketch out carefully.
I was not raised, as some were, by parents who talked about the end of the world all the time. But our church was formed during the 1970’s, when books such as Hal Lindsey’s “The Late Great Planet Earth” were influential. Lindsey’s book was released in 1970 and reportedly sold millions of copies inside a decade. The ideas in that book shaped evangelical culture right as our church was formed.
The apocalyptic mind believes, in short, that the world is always getting worse and that Christians should keep to themselves, wait for Jesus to return to usher them into heaven, and try to convert outsiders whenever possible.
The roots of this mindset grow out of a set of beliefs about how the world will end, rooted in a theological view called dispensationalism. Followers believe “that God at the beginning of time determined a specific, detailed plan for history’s last days — a plan revealed in the Bible with minute particularity, though in symbolic language and veiled images,” wrote historian Paul Boyer in his book When Time Shall Be No More.
Dispensationalism is rooted in a hyper-literal reading of biblical books like Revelation, in the New Testament, and Ezekiel in the Old Testament, or Talmud. Many Bible scholars reject this interpretation. “Revelation does not predict a sequence of events, as though it were history written in advance. Such a misunderstanding of the book cannot survive a serious and sensitive study of its imagery,” wrote Richard Bauckham, an English Anglican scholar of theology, in his book The Theology of the Book of Revelation.
The symbolic imagery of Revelation, Bauckham and others have written, is not meant to predict the way that the world will end. Rather it is a “critique of the system of Roman power” that was built around a worship of “power and prosperity,” and an imperial cult of idolatry of the political leader. “Revelation [is] the most powerful piece of political resistance literature from the period of the early Empire,” Bauckham writes.
The apocalyptic perspective poisoned us. It made us nihilists who believed that the world we lived in was little more than kindling. The rivers and mountains of endless beauty were sadly just doomed for fire and destruction. It drove us further into isolation from others, and from any kind of meaningful civic engagement. If the world might end tomorrow, what was the point of anything other than going to church?
So while my church didn’t obsess about the disappearance of Christians into heaven before the Great Tribulation (known as the Rapture), like some Christians who read or watched the Left Behind books or movies, our assumptions about public life in particular were deformed by the so-called premillennial dispensationalism that was popular when our church was founded.
***
Finally, because we were after a blissful peace of mind that came from a personal relationship with Jesus our best friend, we saw politics as an ugly and sinful business: below us, earthly, carnal, dirty, even disgusting. We deigned to involve ourselves in political matters on only one issue, one in which we could enter the arena as spotless messengers of light and righteousness.
Abortion was murder. We would organize and march and protest and vote against that. Anyone who disagreed? Evil. Possibly demon-possessed. So, most Democrats were anti-God, hopelessly lost secularists who were destined for hell.
This is about as black and white as one can get. It allowed the Republican party to count on the votes of millions of Americans as long as its candidates said the right things, demonized Democrats, and made evangelicals think that because the morality of abortion was clear cut to them, so were the political solutions.
It was a lack of public character in the first place that made evangelicals one-issue voters: a lack of care about understanding the world we live in, the way power works, and how we can responsibly steward it, shape it, guide it, for the common and greater good.
Becoming one-issue voters made evangelicals into enablers that sent a man who was manifestly unqualified for the presidency into the Oval Office, and kept justifying his dangerous and unchristian behavior with a mantra about judges and abortion. America came uncomfortably close to seeing its democracy and all the freedoms contained therein toppled over, as Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election. Many conservatives remain satisfied with having had to pay that price to get the Supreme Court they wanted.
***
There is a lot of talk in the first few chapters of Proverbs about how wisdom will protect us from “the adulterous woman.” This was a particular focus in my regular reading of these passages. My dad emphasized it. My youth group did as well.
But in Proverbs 2, just before the warning about the “wayward woman . . . who has left the partner of her youth,” whose “house leads down to death” (vv. 16–18), there is another cautionary passage about a different sort of figure: “Wisdom will save you from the ways of wicked men, from men whose words are perverse, who have left the straight paths to walk in dark ways, who delight in doing wrong and rejoice in the perverseness of evil, whose paths are crooked and who are devious in their ways” (vv. 12–15).
As a child, I was limited in my imagination of how this verse applied to real life. Crooked paths evoked thought of teenagers smoking and drinking and cursing. Ultimately, it led to premarital sex.
My ten-year old self could not have conceived that these warnings would have increasing relevance as I grew into adulthood and middle age. Further, I could not have comprehended what I now perceive: that the Christian culture I was being raised in was actually making me and others around me more vulnerable to manipulation by men “whose paths are crooked and who are devious in their ways.”
Meaningful reform inside the church would aim to instill, praise, value and elevate at least four traits in professing Christians.
Public character includes discernment: the ability to know what is true, what is knowable, and what is not knowable. Then there is also integrity: the ability to act on that knowledge. Third is wisdom: meaningful experience in applying discernment with integrity over time.
The fourth trait relates to epistemology: the study of how we know things. Epistemic modesty recognizes the limits of knowledge, leading to an avoidance of certainty or dogmatism. And epistemic modesty respects expertise. They are unafraid to make claims based on expertise, but they shy away from pronouncements on subjects outside their expertise.
The goal is to “seek knowledge and to seek it rightly,” writes Bonnie Kristian, in her book Untrustworthy. "Developing these virtues can make you a characteristically trustworthy person."
Interesting Reads
“The smearing of Garrett Foster” by Radley Balko at his Substack, The Watch.
This is a highly detailed rundown of what happened, as much as we know from witness testimony at trial, in the shooting of Garrett Foster by a man named Daniel Perry, in 2020. If you have watched cable TV news coverage of this story, or have heard someone talking about it, send them this piece. It goes into great detail about what happened, and how the law applies.
Damon Linker on Texas Gov. Greg Abbot’s statement that he will pardon Perry for shooting Foster.
“The result is a party that increasingly elevates that polemical description of conservatism into a self-evident foundational principle of absolutized bad faith: There must be ingroups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside outgroups whom the law binds but does not protect.
“I defy readers to gaze into the legal and moral abyss opened up by Greg Abbott’s promised pardon and try to explain it in a way that doesn’t amount to a restatement of this singularly appalling principle.”
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education weighs in on “the accosting of Riley Gaines” at San Francisco State University last week.
“To be clear, students who protested without disrupting the event engaged in First Amendment-protected activity. But those who stomped and yelled to drown Gaines out during her appearance, or accosted her in the halls to intimidate her, did not. SFSU needs to take a hard look at its response to the Gaines event and ensure that sufficient safeguards and procedures are in place to protect free speech for everyone. And they need to drop the investigation into Professor Behrooz immediately."
Read Marianne Szegedy-Maszak’s review of Neil King’s book in The Washington Post.
King opens our eyes to what has been hiding in plain sight. Escaping the seemingly inescapable strip malls and chain stores, he takes us into the encapsulated, pre-modern splendor of “the heart of Amish and Mennonite farm country on a spring morning impervious to improvement” punctuated by “the array of colors” of clothes hung out to dry on laundry day. He enjoyed a softball game fiercely played by high school boys and girls and was welcomed by their coach and teacher, who then asked if he had “time for a couple of hymns?” Indeed he did, and, King writes, “it may have been the fullest offering of thanks I have ever received. Those voices, how they mixed and soared and played off one another. . . . it was all miraculous and beautiful. The simple purity of it, mixed with the lyrics of death and longing for a better place, twisted a part of me. I won’t lie. I cried when they sang those songs.”
Substack’s alternative to Twitter: Notes
I’ve not joined any Twitter alternatives. But I am trying out Notes. You can see what it’s like here.
That’s it for this week. Have a great weekend!
The crux of what you're writing about here reminds me of Lutheran theologian, Paul Tillich, when he argued that vertical transcendence—the individual religious experience—that must be accompanied with horizontal transcendence—the societal, public life. Have you read any of Tillich's work?