Demonizing the Left

As I mentioned in my last post, the books Velvet Elvis and The Prodigal God both comment on how we as evangelical Christians can set-up our children for a shock when they enter the real world. In the first case, Rob Bell talks about how those who are raised in evangelical churches and especially in Christian schools can come away from that with the impression that the only truth that exists is located in their church or school. In the other case, Timothy Keller talks about those same kinds of home and school environments in terms of the people who have liberal, leftist views about sex, politics, and culture and that anyone outside the circle of their faith is not to be trusted. The one is about truth, the other about people, but they are similar. When those children go off to college they find that there is some truth to be found in the liberal universities and some loveable people to be found, causing them to doubt what they had been taught, including their religious teaching. In trying to protect our children, we often go too far and demonize those we disagree with and it later comes back to haunt us when our children abandon the faith because it mislead them about truth and about people with too extreme a position.



In The Prodigal God Keller points out that the father of the prodigal son would have been the object of derision by his peers for giving the prodigal his inheritance early. He would have been told that he let that child walk all over him; he would have been called weak; he would have been told to stand up to those boys! Instead, he was more than patient and forgiving, taking the loss himself by allowing the prodigal to blow his inheritance and later accepting him back. He would have been told by his peers to refuse to take him back, that the son needed to live with the consequences of his actions. Indeed, that is exactly what the elder brother wanted. In other words, he would have been demonized by his peers for failing to uphold the honor of the role of father. Similarly today in the Arab world fathers are 'shamed' into killing their daughters who balk at their parents arrangements for marriage or who become Christians, among other things.


When we demonize the left, we do something similar to what peers of the father would have been doing; trying to cut them off, teach them a lesson. It is similar to what the Arab world does to those who embrace Christianity. We don't recognize the similarity to these things many times, but it is there just the same. To demonize those we disagree with we simply cut off or at least reduce the possibility of redemption.


I must admit that I do get tired of hearing how awful Obama and company are every day on talk radio. I disagree with most everything Obama does and, as with his predecessor Carter, most of what he does will have to be undone later. But demonizing does not help. As with the examples in these books about how demonizing the left sets up our children for a shock when they enter the world, this constant demonizing of the left sets us up for losing all support from moderates as they must get more tired of this than I do as conservative. And he may accidentally do something good along the way.


Disagree? Yes. Make the issues clear? Yes. Demonize? No.

Two Kinds of People in the World

Someone has noted that there are 2 kinds of people in this world: those who think there are 2 kinds of people in the world, and those who don't. At times this does seem to be a very time-worn set-up for a comparing and contrasting of two alternatives. There are spenders versus savers; conservatives and liberals; Chevy guys and Ford guys. I didn't grow up on a farm, but I laughed out loud at a restaurant in the Midwest when I saw a green John Deere hat that said 'Friends don't let friends drive red tractors', so there apparently are also Deere guys and Farmall guys. The Chevy/Ford/Deere/Farmall thing has suffered of late, though, due to Toyota, Nissan, Kubota, and others so the next generation may not relate to that as well. Being of a certain age, though, I do still laugh at the line in Christmas Story about 'my dad was an Oldsmobile man!'

Yet the '2 kinds of people' comparison does have some validity, which is no doubt why it gets used so often. I just finished reading The Prodigal God by Timothy Keller and, lest there be any confusion from my last blog, I liked it very much. It is a fresh look at a very familiar passage of Scripture, the parable of the Prodigal Son. Most sermons on this passage that I have heard in the past focused on the licentiousness of the younger son; recently, I have heard more about either the hard-heartedness of the elder son or the sacrificial love of the father, but I think this book gives all 3 the most even treatment that I have come across for even a very oft-cited passage. He does, of course, use the 2 kinds of people paradigm; the younger brothers of the world, whom Kierkegaard calls the 'aesthetic', and the elder brothers, the 'ethical' in Kierkegaard's terms. I have heard them also called the 'party-ers' and the 'do good-ers'. I never related quite as well to this dumbed-down version of the comparison, I think in part because in college the 'party-ers' were clearly the Greeks, but the non-Greeks did not fit any neat category as far as I could tell. Keller comes up with slightly different terms: moral conformity versus self-discovery. I like this because I think it captures the spirit of the age rather well.

The younger brother, of course, was the self-discovery agent, out there to 'grab all the gusto he could get' and experience life! Meanwhile, the elder brother is demonstrating his moral superiority and self-mastery through his diligence. The book spends some time pointing out the cultural context, though, and how the actions of both sons would have been unthinkable in that culture: the younger because demanding his part of the inheritance while his father remained in good health was basically saying that he considered his father more valuable dead than alive, and the elder by his confrontation of the father's acceptance of the returning prodigal in telling the father what he should/should not do with his wealth. The elder brother knew that the younger one had squandered his fair share, and if he were accepted back he would start consuming the inheritance that would have come to him, so he challenges the father's right to control his own resources. Both sons were fundamentally self-centered, but they demonstrated it in very different ways. Both were seeking to be in control and escape the control of the father. Yet both were loved and pleaded with by the father, though the elder brother, as with the Pharisees in Jesus' day, had a much harder time being reconciled to the father. They, like the elder brother, were convinced that they needed no reconciliation. They had done all the right things. Only those profligate party-ers needed that. How hard it is for those who do all the right things to see their sinfulness!

I commented about Velvet Elvis a couple of weeks ago regarding why so many church-going kids abandon the faith when they go to college, and that topic comes up in this book as well. He mentions how he moved to New York city from the Midwest to start a church and how he met 'many young adults who had come from more conservative parts of the U.S. to take their undergraduate degrees at a New York school. Here they met the kind of person thay had been warned about for years, those with liberal views on sex, politics, and culture. Despite what they had been led to believe, those people were kind, reasonable, and open-hearted. When the students began to change their views, they found many people back home, especially in the churches, responded in a hostile and bigoted way. Soon they had rejected their former views along with their faith.' I would not limit this to just those that go to New York, and I think this does often happen. Keller points out the 'elder brother-ish' reaction of those back home, but there is more to consider here.

It also raises another, more fundamental question on those who lose their faith: were they simply 'elder brothers' as well, doing what is right because of what was viewed as right at home? When they went to a place where a different approach is considered 'right', they struggle briefly, but then fall into line. The hostile reaction from home pushes them along, of course, but it seems to me that if we lose our faith when it is challenged, then it must have been insecure all along. To say it another way, were they simply 'Church-ians' back home instead of Christians? Had their lives actually been changed by the invasion of Christ into their lives, or were they just following the rules like the elder brother? I tend to think the latter.

This all goes to say that I fundamentally believe that there really are just 2 kinds of people in this world: those whose lives have been invaded by the living Christ, and those that haven't.

The Purpose of Church

I have started reading Timothy Keller's book The Prodigal God which I was recently given. The book is a re-examination of the parable of the prodigal son and he makes a good case for spending more time understanding the elder brother, who never went wild, along with the prodigal son. He provides a different look at the father as well, whose extreme love was 'prodigal' in its excess, as is God's love. Along the way he makes some comments about how Jesus attracted sinners and rebels while repelling and alienating the religious community. He comments that while Jesus attracted the irreligious and offended the religious, our churches today do not have this effect. 'The licentious and liberated or the broken and marginal avoid church' he points out. 'That can only mean one thing. If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did' he goes on to say. This raises the issue of what is the purpose of church services.



His implication is that organized church services should be aimed at attracting the irreligious, the marginal, the rebels, the alienated. Much of the 'seeker sensitive' movement has agreed with this approach, as does the 'emerging church' effort. I disagree.



Church services are not aimed at attracting unbelievers; they are aimed at worship by believers. Jesus did not reach out to the irreligious and sinners in His time of worship. As best I can tell, though, His worship was mostly either alone or at the temple, so I don't know that our conept of worship is all that great either. However, worship is not outreach. The sinners and irreligious were attracted to Jesus during his public conversations with his opponents or during his 'hands on' ministry times (healing, feeding, having one on one conversations, at dinner, etc), not during temple worship. To try to aim worship services at the irreligious is to deny believers a time of group worship and encouragement. Seeking to have teaching times that reach the unbelievers is a valid thing to do, but it should not replace group worship for believers.



Our church states that 'worship is our number one ministry priority' in its statement of core values. I personally think that discipleship should be our number one overall ministry priority, but worship is indeed the number one priority for public worship services. Our attraction to the irreligious should be in our 'hands on' ministry time (feeding the poor, helping the helpless, etc) and in events that raise issues in the public square, as Jesus did. Confusing the attraction of the irreligious to the active work of Christ with attracting them to worship services does worship a serious disservice.

Velvet Elvis, Discipleship and Truth

I just finished reading Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell, who is a pastor in Michigan. I generally liked the book, though the style of it interfered with the message for me at times. The writing is a hybrid between a Powerpoint(r) presentation and prose, with lots of 'bullet points' (sentence fragments standing alone without a paragraph) mixed with paragraphs. It is something like reading half of a dialogue. While this was distracting, much of the content was good as I seek to understand the disconnect between my generation and my children's generation. I read in the paper last week that there is a bigger 'generation gap' now than at any time since the 60's. It certainly seems that way in church, so I hope to gain some insight into that over time.



I liked Velvet Elvis much better than Blue Like Jazz. The latter seemed to me much more existential, making comments about how Christianity can be experienced but not understood, that 'truth means much more than accuracy', that the 'mystery' of the Orthodox church was 'cool' just because it was different. The overall tone of Blue Like Jazz struck me as very existential, as if he had given up on the concept of truth as anything other than personal experience.



Velvet Elvis, while the style was neither fish nor fowl, was more truth-oriented. The book was worth the price (or more, since I got it at a discount book warehouse in Pigeon Forge for about three bucks) for the chapter on discipleship. I suppose you could call it a chapter; maybe it was a Powerpoint section. In any case, it was about discipleship. That chapter gives a terrific overview of how rabbis of Jesus' day had followers, how they were the best-of-the-best from the Torah schools, how the rabbi did not accept just anyone to be a disciple, and so on. This gave both a great context for what it meant in that culture to be a disciple, and how Jesus also made discipleship into a new thing, gave it new life, by calling as his disciples a group of men that would not have made the cut into the discipleship groups of the other rabbis of the time. Frequently in the book, Bell puts this kind of context around his point, illuminating how understanding the culture of the time changes how we understand many of the teachings of Jesus. He includes information about a place known as 'the Gates of Hell' in Casesarea Phillipi, and that the god Pan was worshiped there in obscene ways, and that His declaration that His church would be build on a different rock and the Gates of Hell would not stand against it was a reference to that place and that kind of worship. We usually miss that connection, even though we may have seen pictures of that place, as I have. The great grace of discipleship is that the Christ, the ultimate rabbi, thinks we can be like Him, and that we can carry on His teaching and ministry, even if we could not make the cut for the other rabbis.



He also directly addressed a question that has been on my mind: why so many kids who grow up in a Christian home and a sound church leave the faith when they leave for college. He suggests that one possibility is that they may have been taught that Christianity encompasses all that is really true, that all the truth in the secular world is suspect. Especially if they also went to a Christian school they may have gotten this idea. Then they find out that there is some truth out there in the world but are not prepared for the reality that all truth is God's truth. This can appear like a refutation of the faith they grew up with. It is an interesting thought, though probably not the only reason for this falling away of many at college. This emphasis on truth was much more palatable to me than the existentialism of Blue Like Jazz.



There is quite a lot in the book that still left me feeling the generation gap. His reference to being in a punk rock band while also a pastor is one example of that. The wedding at the lake for his friends who wanted it to be 'spiritual' but not 'Christian' was another example. At times he was a bit New Age-y, but he still managed to hold on to the concept of truth. 'If it is true, then it isn't new' he says at one point. Exactly!

Senior Week, Leadership, and Love

We have been going through a downsizing at work and the folks who took the voluntary severance package just finished their last week on the job. Many of them were near retirement and the package gave them enough incentive to go ahead and move into retirement now. With so many senior folks leaving, this past week has reminded me of high school days when the seniors were getting ready to graduate. Deja’ vu all over again, as Yogi would say. In addition, my daughter turned 20 and so for the first time in 16 years we have no teenagers in the house. That passage out of the teen years also made me think of the milestones and passages in life. It was a strange sort of week in that way.

Of course, some younger folks who were considering a new direction in their life also left. One of those was a man who had worked in my team as a project leader and is moving to Canada to join his new bride. They were married shortly before this severance package was announced. He is from India, though he spent much of his teen years in Canada, and he met his wife on the internet via a match-making/dating service for Asian Indians. She lives in Canada. Since marriages in India are traditionally arranged marriages, that approach seems to fit. He is an avid reader, so I am giving him a copy of The Four Loves by C. S. Lewis as he leaves and begins his new life with his new bride. I suspect that those from cultures of arranged marriages have fewer unrealistic expectations about romantic love than those from cultures like America, so the message that ‘Eros makes promises that she cannot keep’ may not be as desperately needed in his case as it is in America, but I suspect he has lived here and in Canada long enough to have been corrupted by our culture.

That our culture desperately needs this message was made clear yet again this past week by the news of the Argentina affair carried on by Governor Sanford of South Carolina. While the press rarely gets anything right, the comments that have been in print about how he felt that this woman was his soul mate, that this is about love, and so on indicates that he certainly does not yet understand about Eros and her promises. There has been such an ongoing stream of these types of revelations among governors, presidential candidates, preachers, and others in power that I am beginning to wonder if there are other lessons here as well. So many of these ‘leaders’ have such enormous egos that it seems to me that we have a cultural problem in not being able to tell the difference between egotism and leadership. So many of our ‘leaders’ appear to be leading when they are mostly just serving their own ego. They seem to do the same in their relationships with women, serving their own ego and thinking they can talk their way out of anything. And so many women, for their part, seem to prefer this fast talking, outgoing, self-serving type, often choosing them over men who are more introverted but also more reliable and less self-centered. While the ability to communicate is important, it is not enough. For my part, I will take depth and integrity over skillful rhetoric any day. It seems to me that many women, like the electorate, do not recognize the difference between leadership and egotism either. It should not be a surprise that so many have swooned over the words of Obama regardless of his lack of having ever done anything of consequence and regardless of his arrogance. That seems to be the concept our culture has of leadership.

Meanwhile Gov. Sanford clearly still has lessons to learn. Perhaps I should have sent him a copy of The Four Loves too.