The Church Is Bigger Than You Want It To Be

by James Davisson

Once when I was in college, a friend of mine made some disparaging remarks about Christians. I don't remember what he was objecting to—people who bomb abortion clinics or whatever, some extreme thing—and I helpfully pointed out that people who did that sort of thing aren't really Christians. "That's just the 'no true Scotsman' defense," he retorted.

I had nothing to say to that, mostly because I'd never heard the phrase "no true Scotsman." I think it's a phrase Christians would do well to remember.

First, an explanation: "no true Scotsman" is a logical fallacy that gets used sometimes when people argue. Person A states a generalization ("No Scotsman hates haggis!"), Person B finds a counterexample ("I'm a Scotsman and I hate haggis!") and Person A excludes that example with hand waving ("Well, no true Scotsman hates haggis!") without referring to any external, objective rule.

I definitely used this flawed defense in my argument with my friend. No one had ever told me I couldn't.

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Christians are quite fond of dismissing each other as "not really Christian" when they disagree with each other's actions or beliefs. Three examples, running across a spectrum of beliefs and circumstances:

Rebels in northern CAR. Source.

1. As you may know, there is currently an ongoing crisis of horrific violence in the Central African Republic. In a recent article, local Catholic priests were described providing shelter for Muslims fleeing the people who would murder them, Christian militias known as "anti-balaka." In the article, one priest is quoted as saying, understandably, "the anti-Balaka are not Christians." 



2. Christian charity World Vision recently announced that, in view of the fact that many church denominations have become open and affirming towards LGBTQ persons, it would begin hiring people in same-sex marriages on its staff. When thousands of people decided to stop donating on the grounds that they could no longer consider World Vision a truly Christian organization, World Vision reversed its decision. Other Christians subsequently pointed out that refusing to hire gay people is, to their minds, not really Christian. 





Not Phelps, but one of his cronies. Source.

3. Notorious bigot Fred Phelps recently died. While Christians have had much to say about that fact, few are standing up and claiming that he was a Christian just like them. Phelps was, in fact, a pastor, who preached weekly from the same Bible as all Christians, from his church in Westboro, Kansas.

As far as the world is concerned, these people are Christians. They call themselves Christians, they go to church, they talk about Jesus, they read the Bible—these are the things Christians do. They are Christians. Our internal disputes about what a Christian really is—like, "someone who is for/against gay marriage," "someone who is pro-life/pro-choice," "someone who is patriotic/anti-war," "someone who is not a complete asshat"—are immaterial to outsiders, and what's more, they typically have little or nothing to do with the central tenets of the church that formally define the core of the Christian faith.*

Refusing the label "Christian" to people we disagree with—even when that disagreement is passionate and seems vital—is a crutch. It is an excuse to dismiss someone. And it is not convincing; to an outsider, it sounds like the old joke that the worst player on your team is actually the best player for the other team—it's funny, but few people are likely to take you at your word.

Dismissing others as "not really Christian" allows Christians to free themselves from blame for their actions and to make no effort to engage, correct, or counteract fellow Christians who do wrong. If people call themselves Christians, it is up to their fellow Christians to point out when they are not imitating Christ, and to actively oppose them when they do so. We neglect this duty when we simply reject them as Christians.

Conversely, we also risk missing possibly valid points of view, ideas that bear considering, when we dismiss others as "not really Christian." It's a lot easier to ignore fellow Christians if we simply refuse to consider them Christians at all.

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Let me be clear: I am not saying anything about whether anyone in the list above is following the example of Christ. Several of them very plainly are not, to my mind. I am also making no claims about the nature, or reality, of the personal faith of those involved, or whether any of them are saved.

What I am saying instead is that, as Christians, anyone who confesses the central tenets of the faith, and claims the label "Christian," is our responsibility. To borrow an ecclesiastical term, all such persons are part of the "church visible"—the institution of the church and the body of believers on earth. Whether they are recognized by God as part of the "church invisible"—the "true" church of God (the true Scotsmen?) is simply unknown to any living person, and we therefore have no way to judge and should not try.**

In other words, it is not up to us sort the wheat from the tares ourselves. Let us instead focus on planting as many good seeds as possible.

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*Human sexuality, the dignity of human life, and issues surrounding force and violence are all important matters, but you will not find any of them in the creeds set out by the early church councils, which formally define the boundaries of orthodox Christianity. The ideas inside these creeds are the dogmas of the faith; stepping outside of them is heresy. Important topics not addressed in the creeds are matters of doctrine; different denominations disagree on doctrines; all are still Christian so long as they do not stray from the central dogmas. Things outside of the central dogmas but permitted by the church are sometimes called adiaphora, "things not essential" or "matters of indifference." I like this word and don't get to use it very often.
**I note here that the church invisible is almost certainly not a smaller circle within the church visible; rather, the church visible is a circle in a Venn diagram that overlaps with the church invisible. In other words, there are undoubtedly people who do not profess Christianity yet nevertheless are members of the church, doing God's work in the world.

Peter, Paul, and Mary Walk into a Conversion Experience

 
I grew up a Presbyterian (USA) in the Deep South—you’ve heard this from me before. It means a lot of things: that I grew up a mainline Calvinist surrounded by conservative Baptists; that I was always very close to, but just outside of, various permutations of Evangelical Christian culture. My church upbringing was clearly different from many of my friends’, though generally innocuously enough. No projectors in my sanctuary. We had an organ. We said “debts” in the Lord’s Prayer.

Also, I had no idea when I had been saved.

The problem, of course, with not knowing when I had been saved was that, as far as many were concerned, I hadn’t been. I did not quibble with this conclusion, which did not assuage anyone’s anxiety about the fate of my immortal soul, especially because I obviously did not share that anxiety.

An illustration: as an older child, I was on a swim team, with practice several times a week. A local preacher’s daughter was on the team as well. Once, we were swimming laps, when she said to me as we paused for breath at the end of the lane (I was perhaps ten, she was perhaps nine): “If you died right now, would you go to heaven?” Perhaps you recognize this opening line. I did not, so I said, very honestly, “I don’t know.” We swam another twenty-five meters. “Okay,” said my teammate. “So repeat after me—” Between laps, she had me repeat The Prayer. You know the one—where you tell Jesus that you’re a sinner and explicitly invite him into your heart to rule your life. (There’s a vampire joke to be made here, but I’ll leave that to you.) Eventually we finished, and she repeated, triumphantly, “So if you died right now, would you go to heaven?” “I don’t know,” I said again, just as honestly.

I hadn’t been taught about God’s promises, or assurance, yet, and was answering only from what I had gleaned from Sunday School stories and whatever I picked up from sermons. I didn’t know much, but I did know that getting to heaven wasn’t on me. I didn’t understand why my teammate seemed so worked up about getting me to know where I was going. What happened to me when I died, I thought, was up to God, and I trusted God to make the right decision. I didn’t know anything, but I wasn’t worried about it.

There is, of course, a raw theological difference here. Presbyterians are a Calvinist branch, and the denominations with the most presence and clout in the Bible Belt (Baptists especially, as well as Methodists) have Arminian roots. Predestination versus free will. It had never once been suggested to me that my salvation was in any way up to me—indeed, a major Calvinist thesis is that it is not —whereas my swim teammate and most of my friends at school were taught that it was the most important decision they would ever make. Without that salvation moment, the story of how you believed and Got Saved (your “testimony”), your salvation itself was in doubt.

But also at issue here is the emotional story we create about how we become, or are, members of the family of God, the body of Christ. Mainline denominations don’t talk much about getting saved. There’s a lot we avoid: emotional displays in church, for instance. Talk about the activity of the Holy Spirit. Vocal responses to good points in the sermon. Guitars. But the absence of language about a single epochal salvation experience is, in a general evangelical context, the most glaring. How do you know you’re saved means, among other things, How do you know where you belong? How do you know you believe?

Paul’s conversion experience on the road to Damascus, literally knocked off his horse by a blinding light and the heavenly voice of Jesus, was the premier model for becoming Christian in the common understanding of culture where I grew up. But that doesn’t mean that it’s the only model for coming to Christ. The pastor of my church when I was a teenager suggested another Biblical precedent: Peter.

Where Paul’s conversion was sudden, dramatic, intense, permanent, and eminently recountable—Paul’s repetition of his story to others is paradigmatic for “sharing your testimony”—Peter’s path was different. He was called and he followed, but he doesn’t always understand what is happening in front of him. It takes him a while. It would be hard to say exactly when he really believed. Called to walk on water, he takes two steps and panics. Shown a transfigured Christ with the representatives of the Law and the Prophets, he babbles so that God Almighty personally hushes him. Offered a foot-washing, he at first rejects it and then asks for a full bath. The same Peter who confesses Jesus as Christ and Son of God and is declared the rock on which the church will be built, the holder of the keys of heaven, the hotheaded would-be defender of Jesus’ person, publicly denies Jesus three times. And then, later, it is this Peter, this hot-and-cold, deeply fallible, sometimes ridiculous Peter, who preaches to the crowd at Pentecost, and to whom the vision of unclean food is given and who immediately acts to bring Gentiles into the promise of salvation.

There a good deal of comfort to be found in this alternative story, with its backsliding, its ambiguity, its insistence on the hope for and usefulness of the very imperfect. It takes Peter years of walking (literally walking) with Jesus for anything to stick. And yet he is chosen, and it does, finally, stick. So also we walk, so also our mountaintop experiences of clarity do not save us from falling into valleys that show us that we are apparently no surer or smarter about God than we ever were. A “Peter” conversion model gives us time. With Peter, and often, we feel, with us, faith is a long game.

Still and all, though. Even Peter could point to dramatic experiences of Jesus. Multiple. Even Peter made the choice to follow, and could point to a time before it.

A common experience among “cradle” Christians in mainline denominations is, to put it bluntly, no experience. Many of us—myself included—were raised in a church, and have remained in it. We grow; our theology may stretch wider or condense inward, shift left or right; but we cannot see ourselves in outright denial of Christ and then preaching before a city square covered in the Holy Spirit. This faith is harder to defend and explain than Paul’s, and in some crowds, even harder than Peter’s. On the one side, we cannot point to the defining moment in which we walked through the doorway of the room prepared for us; on the other, we cannot point to any fire we’ve walked through. Where is our story?

I suggest: Mary. Not Madgalene. Mary, Jesus’ mother.

“BUT BAILEY,” you say, “AN ANGEL CAME TO HER, HOW IS THAT NOT A BIG MOMENT?”

Read the story again. The angel tells Mary that she is favored, that God is with her. Mary is, one assumes, a good Jewish girl, raised to know God and to follow the rules by which God’s people lived. She is surprised by the announcement that she is mysteriously pregnant, but her song, called the Magnificat, echoes the prophets she would have heard read in the synagogue, with business about the mighty being brought down and the poor lifted up. Mary is a churched girl, and the new information she is given—that she is to give birth to the Son of God—is still processed within the frame in which she was raised. Her understanding of God and God’s power grows, but there is no indication that she did not know God earlier, or that the Annunciation represents a dramatic break with her past. Each time something happens, she ponders it in her heart: she is equal and oriented to the task of understanding. Mary, you might say, is a cradle believer, but the strength and integrity of her faith is not doubted on account of that. There is a precedent for those of us who seem to live in a religion like a fish in water.

The punchline, of course, is that the Bible is full of conversions and reorientations of all sorts. Think of Nicodemus and his confusing conversation with Jesus under cover of night. Think of the Ethiopian, who had studied the Hebrew scriptures and was won over by a good sermon. Think of Paul and Silas’s jailers, trembling at a miracle that was not performed for them. There is no need, here, to come down on the side of free will or of predestination; there may never be a need, and (I content) the scriptural evidence is mixed. But the need for a story about ourselves, the need to see how we fit into Christ’s body and how we come to live in God’s house is more pressing. It is, I think, a mercy that scripture teems with stories.

Sex, Christ, and the End of Time

He's coming, he's coming, HE'S COMING

by James Davisson


One of the most fascinating things about Christianity is that—alone among the major religions of the modern world—it began as a doomsday cult. This has had interesting consequences.

(Quick definition: "doomsday cult" refers to a religion that expects the end of the world as we know it, and soon. When I say Christianity began as a doomsday cult, I mean that most early Christians expected the return of Christ, the resurrection of the dead, and the beginning of a new world, within their lifetimes. I use the term in a descriptive sense, not a disparaging one: the earliest Christians expected, eagerly, the end of time, and acted accordingly.)

One obvious consequence of this is the shape of the New Testament itself. Its earliest documents are not treatises laying out a systematic theology of a new religion, but ad hoc letters from early church leaders, especially the apostle Paul, providing solutions to the particular problems of individual churches (these are books like 1 and 2 Corinthians, 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, and Romans). Paul and his compatriots saw their mission as incredibly urgent—gotta tell as many as we can about Jesus before he comes back!—and they had no time for such detailed projects as systematic theology. After Paul's death, letters were composed in Paul's name (and that of other church leaders, like Peter) by his followers, that started to fill in the gaps in his teachings and wrestle with the delay in Christ's coming (these are books like 1 and 2 Timothy and Ephesians). Finally, recognizing that the end might be a little further off than they'd initially thought, Christians collected stories about Jesus himself and shaped them into narratives that could be used to instruct future generations (the gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John).

Sometimes, the consequences of early Christian apocalypticism are more subtle than this, at least to modern Christians like me, with little knowledge of early Christian history. One fascinating example: early Christian thought about sex, especially abstinence.

When modern Christians talk about sexual abstinence, it is usually to demand it from either (1) people who ain't married yet or (2) priests and members of certain religious orders. It is not, typically, a practice of ordinary lay people. In this, early Christianity and modern Christianity are distinct.

In general, it's best not to mess with nuns.

Many early Christians chose to become or remain completely chaste for the duration of their lives. While some Christians today choose lifelong chastity as part of their calling to service in a religious order, these early believers predated such Christian institutions as monks, nuns, and even, perhaps, priests. The reasons they chose chastity are complex, but here are a few:

1. As an expression of radical Christian equality: Christian communities were incredibly diverse: people of distinct social class, gender, and social freedom were all admitted, and faced challenges in creating unity among themselves. Christians believed they were supposed to be "one body," that they were a community of "neither Jew nor Greek, slave or free, male or female." Some sought to create this unity by deconstructing social structures like marriage and slavery, and instead tried to live together as one, equal body, renouncing sex. "Only by dissolving the household was it possible to achieve the priceless transparency associated with a new creation," as Peter Brown puts it in The Body and Society, (pg 53). (It is likely that this was what some of the Corinthians were doing when Paul wrote 1 Corinthians; more on that in a moment.)
2. As a way of achieving high spiritual status: In an opposite impulse from the previous one, some sought spiritual excellence and even fame through abstinence. Most early Christians thought of complete sexual abstinence as better than sex within marriage, because they associated sex with the weakness of the human body and its associated temptations.* So living completely sex-free was, in a way, spiritually glamorous.
3. As an announcement of (or preparation for) the return of Christ: Today, society is dealing with the consequences of advances in medicine and food technology that have led to rapid population growth, to the extent that humanity is straining the earth's capacity to hold us. It wasn't always like this, though: the Roman Empire's death rate was such that, just to keep society from collapsing, every woman needed to give birth an average of five times.** So complete sexual renunciation was actually a direct threat to society, a refusal a key social obligation, which pointed to the immanent total re-arrangement and renewal of society at Christ's return.

Complete abstinence from sex was seemingly a part of Christianity from the start, so much so that Paul had to address it in one of the earliest known pieces of Christian writing, his first letter to the Corinthians. What's interesting about the early church in Corinth is that part of it was interested in complete abstinence, and part of it wanted the opposite. Some insisted that "all things are lawful for me," on the grounds that God's grace could be counted upon to cover their sins. In his letter, Paul had to mediate: "Between those who said, 'All things are lawful for me' and others who insisted 'It is well for a man not to touch a woman,' Paul sought a defensible middle ground" (From Shame to Sin, Kyle Harper, pg 88). Paul's solution was to have surprising consequences, not least because it was a temporary solution, created with the understanding that the problems it addressed would soon be swept away by Christ's return.

The "libertines" (the Corinthian faction who said "all things are lawful for me") were probably not interested in crazed orgies or depraved sex acts, but in participating in the normative sexual ethics of the Roman empire—men were expected to have some measure sexual self-control, but were allowed to have sex with prostitutes (or, if they were wealthy, with their slaves). On the opposite side were a group of Corinthians who believed that strict abstinence "was the measure of holiness" (Harper, pg 92). Paul's middle ground between the two is this: (1) don't have sex with prostitutes, (2) it's okay to be married, so that you aren't tempted as much to have sex outside of marriage, but (3) he wishes that everyone could abstain completely from sex—but recognizes that celibacy is a gift.

What Paul wants is to unite the divided Corinthians so that they can get back to the work of bringing people to Christ. He is interested neither in a radically egalitarian, celibate commune (because this would be unlikely to draw new members) nor in adherence to Roman sexual codes (which he and most other early Christians saw as sinful.) His goal is certainly not to set a sexual standard for the rest of Christian history: not only is he explicit that his advice on sex is a temporary measure made in view of "the coming crisis," but he even makes it clear that his advice is just that: advice, not a divine commandment.

This does not stop the early church from developing Paul's words in 1 Corinthians into a full-blown sexual ethic, however. In the centuries that follow, many Christians will conclude on the grounds of 1 Corinthians that sexual abstinence is morally superior to marital sex; some will retreat to the desert for a life of asceticism, others will live by example in the cities, and a few will even insist that marriage or sex of any kind is completely wrong. While these views of sex and abstinence will start to shift dramatically with the advent of Protestantism, there will still be resurgences of the more radical older views.

All of this is a direct consequence of the early Christian belief that Jesus was returning soon. Many Christians still believe this, and while I think that's a belief that's worth examining, what I think is more worth examining is what parts of our faith are the direct result of inhabiting this apocalyptic worldview from the start.

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*This attitude vis-à-vis marriage and chastity—that is, that chastity was morally superior to marital sex—held sway in the Catholic church for a long time; it was one of the things the Puritans objected to about Catholicism, because they were all about sex (within marriage, naturally). Have I mentioned that I love the Puritans, like, mostly unironically?
**This is about the birth rate of modern Kenya. By comparison, the US birth rate is about 2 births per woman (source). Keep in mind that in both of these places, it is easier to give birth without dying than it was in ancient Rome.

Photo sources:
1. A modification of this, which I've been unable to find an original source for.
2. lucyfrench123
3. Luz Adriana Villa

Talking Past Each Other

by Major Philip Davisson

As anyone who has learned a second language can likely tell you, words are larger than their definitions. Words and their meanings also reflect the culture and experiences that gave birth to those words. You don’t get anywhere near fluency in a second language until you can begin to think in that language.

And when you begin to think in another language, you make another discovery: that the people born into this language-cultural milieu actually think differently than you do.* These differences are a big part of what is being reflected in the difference in vocabulary and grammar.

I reflect on this reality when I come to another observation: that even people using the same language and using the same words can sometimes mean very different things when they speak. These differences, too, reflect differences in experiences, and they can reveal a reality beyond surface similarities within a common culture. It is this hiddenness of meaning that I want to apply the subject about Christians opening doors to conversations with people who identify as part of the LGBTQ spectrum.

In particular, I am finding that our use of the phrase, “love the sinner but hate the sin,” is fraught with all sorts of misunderstanding due to experientially-derived differences in vocabulary.

“Love” seems to be a universally including word, while “hate” seems to be a universally excluding kind of word. We welcome those whom we love, and we try to love those whom we welcome. What we hate, we seek to eliminate or exclude, reject or otherwise usher out the door.

There is much more to say about that, but for now let me continue with what may be the real problem area: sinner and sin. Not the definitions of those words, which actually have rather universal agreement. When many of us in the Church use the word "sinner," we refer to a person. And with "sin," we refer to a behavior, action, and attitudes. We identify certain behaviors as sinful, and those who embrace such sins as sinners. Fair enough.

But I sense that the way we are using these words isn’t shared by the people we're trying to start conversations and build bridges with. When we say to the gay or lesbian person, for example, that we love you but hate what you’re doing, we are missing an incredibly important element.

That element is the interrelatedness between identity and sexuality. We are speaking words that draw a distinction between identity and activity, but the experiences of the other side in our dialogue draw the lines differently. The lines are drawn differently because of how each side in this stillborn dialogue has heard from the Church what is good and right about one significant aspect of identity, human sexuality.

While there is growing acknowledgement that human sexuality is an integral part of our existence as human beings, there remains an obstacle to a common vocabulary, a barrier that is related to whose existential experiences may be classified as good and right.

If we are to overcome this obstacle, the simple but difficult next step is to listen and really try to hear, to listen to the other person and to hear  how their experiences have shaped the meanings of the words that we use. It’s a bit like trying to learn another language, where we need to begin to think in another language, which requires a level of attempting to experience reality from another perspective that is perhaps altogether alien from our own.

I suspect that if we were to make a regular practice of this task, then we who would seek to truly love LGBTQ persons would discover that our attempts at sending out love are not being received as love, words of welcome, and invitations to be included—but instead as messages of hate, words that exclude and prevent entrance into the place where we say God may be found.

We might find that what we describe as an optional or conditioned behavior that we label as sinful (and therefore to be eliminated) is really an integral part of our potential dialogue partner’s existential reality: there simply is no separation between who the person is and how their sexuality is realized; both are part of human existence, of fundamental identity.

When we say we will accept the homosexual person but not the same-sex sex, the experience of the other person in this instance is that the two elements are—as in every human being—so intertwined that they hear us saying we will simply not accept them. To reject their sexuality is to reject their personhood, their status as acceptable human beings.

If we succeed in opening this conversation beyond this kind of language, the benefit to our dialogue partners might be for them to come to appreciate some fears and anxieties some of us have about redrawing the lines sin and acceptability. Where or how does this redrawing project end? Are there any standards of morality we can agree upon? Is there no danger in letting go of what the Church has understood and taught for centuries?

We can't and shouldn’t minimize these real concerns; they need to be heard and understood. But we can and should come to the point where we are prepared to learn a new language and a new way of listening: with respect and the determination to find a shared reality and a way forward together.

Entire groups of people in Jesus’ time were excluded because of existential identity reasons. Most all of these revolved around issues of the body, and the prevailing religious authorities pronounced these people unclean. It was not that their activity or behavior was wrong—although inevitably by virtue of the outgrowth of their body “issues” their activities also were denounced—but that they, as people, were declared unclean and out-of-bounds and so excluded from the realm of good and right.

When we see how Jesus interacted with these excluded people, we observe something rather remarkable. He touched them. He ate with them. He included them. And without reservation; it wasn’t as if he healed them all and then declared them acceptable. It was as if he was redrawing the lines of acceptability, and drawing all people in with him.

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Major Philip Davisson is James Davisson's dad. He's an officer (clergy) in the Salvation Army, and he is in charge of distance learning at Booth University in Winnipeg, Canada.

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*Note from James: what my dad is talking about is part of a linguistic idea called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which basically states that what language you speak can have an effect on how you think. The strongest version of the hypothesis states that your language can actually limit your ability to think about certain things. An example of this hypothesis in action: Spanish and German speakers are asked in a survey to come up with adjectives to describe the word "bridge." The word "bridge" in Spanish (el puente) is grammatically masculine (it uses the same grammatical categories as male animals and people), and in German (die Brücke), it's grammatically feminine. In the survey results, Spanish speakers tended to use stereotypically masculine language to describe the bridge, while German speakers used stereotypically feminine language. Thus, it seems that the grammar of the language has a subtle impact on speakers' perceptions.

Photo source: 
https://secure.flickr.com/photos/kasia_jot/50839702/

Religious Freedom Bills & the Myth of Persecution

In his provocatively titled essay Does Faith = Hate?, written in October, 2013, Rod Dreher offers his fellow conservatives the following advice:

Though same-sex marriage is almost certainly the wave of the future, the country isn’t there yet. In states where marriage equality is still under contention, traditionalists could take advantage of this divide to negotiate a settlement that both sides can live with—one that protects both religious institutions and religious individuals. Time is on the gay-rights side, but its more pragmatic leaders may be persuaded that achieving basic marriage equality now is worth granting substantial protections to religious dissenters.

At first reading, I was persuaded by Dreher's concern for conservatives' religious liberties. What I had in mind, generally, was the need to protect people from being forced to perform or participate in religious ceremonies that they object to, and in particular to keep marriage traditionalists from being forced to officiate or participate in same-sex marriages. I thought the general principle was valid—I wouldn't want to be sued over my refusal to perform or participate in a rite that I thought was an invalid expression of my religion—and I also thought that the specific practice of forcing marriage traditionalists to participate in same-sex marriages seemed unnecessary and unkind, and at all events was unlikely to win my fellow progressives any new supporters.*

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer alongside a protest sign regarding Arizona's recent religious freedom bill

It was a bit of a shock to me, then, when over the course of the last few weeks, a spate of religious freedom bills appeared in conservative legislatures with far, far greater scope than what I had envisioned when I read Dreher's proposal. Instead of staking out a middle ground "that both sides can live with," conservatives took advantage of their legislative majorities in Arizona, Idaho, Kansas, and Mississippi to push through laws that allow for open discrimination on religious grounds—not just to protect religious individuals from participation in religious ceremonies, but to "protect" anyone from having to serve someone if they thought their religion could be an excuse not to.

This overreach is part of a larger phenomenon: American Christians have a tendency see themselves as embattled and persecuted for their faith, and they sometimes seek to defend themselves in ways which seem harmful to outsiders (and which sometimes backfire amusingly). It's not uncommon to hear people express confusion and dismay that American Christians, who represent a very solid majority of Americans, can perceive themselves as persecuted for their faith. What these people don't seem to know is that the idea of persecution is woven tightly into the Christian faith itself.

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One of the key passages in scripture for all Christians is the Sermon on the Mount, found in the Gospel of Matthew. In the sermon, Jesus enunciates his central moral teachings, exhorting his followers with such familiar phrases as "turn the other cheek," "blessed are the meek," and "judge not." Importantly for our purposes, he also says this:

Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you. (Matthew 5:11-12, NRSV)

The idea that being persecuted for your faith is inherently virtuous is, it seems, encoded into Christianity from the start. And it's widely known that, from the start, Christians did indeed face widespread persecution—including imprisonment, torture, and death—for their faith.

Trouble is, that's not really true.

In her book, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom, Notre Dame professor Candida Moss explains how we got the notion that the early church was viciously opposed and suppressed.**

She starts by carefully explaining the actual conditions that early Christians faced in the Roman Empire: Christians were poorly understood by most members of Roman society, were generally unpopular, and occasionally came into direct conflict with Roman jurisprudence and were killed for it. She notes that, far from being evidence for active persecution of the Christian faith, such state-sanctioned killings were part of a system of jurisprudence that also provided capital punishment for "accepting bribes as a judge or for defrauding a client...[for] burning crops planted by a farmer or making disturbances at night" (pg. 165).

From a Roman point of view, Christians seemed to subvert traditional family values and called down the wrath of the gods on society, and they were rumored to have practiced cannibalism and incest! What's more, when called into court, Christians had an irritating tendency to deny the authority of the court altogether, and to refuse to cooperate with the court in any way (Moss cites an example of a Christian who, when called into court on a charge, answered all questions—even "What is your name?" and "Where do you live?"—by simply stating "I am a Christian"). Moss points out:

It is like modern defendants who say that they will not recognize the authority of the court or of the government, but recognize only the authority of God. For modern Americans, as for ancient Romans, this sounds either sinister or vaguely insane...When militia groups defend their illegal actions on the basis that they don't recognize some aspect of American law, they are still thrown in jail. This is essentially the state of affairs for the Romans. (pg. 179)

While anti-Christian violence occasionally did flare up in the Roman empire, it was typically sporadic, local violence. Even Roman governors who killed Christians in significant numbers did so less out of hatred than annoyance; of one such governor, Pliny, she says, "[I]t seems that Pliny just wants the Christians to go away. Once they are in his courtroom, Pliny has no option but to deal with the Christians, but he has no desire to seek them out" (pg. 143). In all, Moss estimates that Christians faced perhaps a dozen years of concentrated violence in the first three centuries of the faith. This is hardly the mass persecution of Christians that is current in the popular imagination.

After Christianity was legalized in the Empire, Christians began to look back with a certain, slightly perverse fondness on the time when their religion occasionally seemed enough to warrant death at the hands of the state, and they began to write stories about the people who were killed for being Christians. In the minds of Christians, these victims were martyrs, heroes, worthy of both veneration and imitation. They wrote stories about the martyrs, and as the demand for such stories grew, authors began to embellish, add to, and eventually simply fabricate stories of early Christian martyrs out of whole cloth. We have hundreds of stories of early Christian martyrs' deaths; of these, scholars estimate that perhaps six accounts are genuine, and Moss points out that even these six have all been embellished and none are eyewitness accounts.

The most sinister element of the myth of the persecution of the early church is the ends for which it has been used. Moss shows that, from early on, church leaders drew explicit connections, linking themselves—and their orthodox faith—with the martyrs, and linking people they disagreed with theologically—heretics, schismatics—with Roman "persecutors" and, what's more, with Satan. In doing so, these early church leaders set up a pattern that persists to this day, wherein church leaders call upon the language of persecution and martyrdom to set up an "us versus them" mentality that cannot be effectively bridged, as doing so would be tantamount to dealing with the devil:

Persecution is not about disagreement and is not about dialogue. The response to being "under attack" and "persecuted" is to fight and resist. You cannot collaborate with someone who is persecuting you. You have to defend yourself. (pg. 254)

 +  +  +

(from a rally for religious freedom in Missouri)

The notion that American Christians' religious liberty is at risk is quite widespread: some recent poll results show that 70% of protestant ministers think that "religious liberty is on the decline in America," and that 54% of Americans agree with them. While it is true that the nature of the religious landscape in the country is changing, and that there have been conflicts of interest between some government policies and religious groups, characterizing these changes and conflicts as a decline in religious liberty is at best a mistake and at worst an active ploy to try to retain political power and a moral high ground. Moss writes:

The cultural power that drives these claims, the oil in the machine so to speak, is the idea that Christians have always been persecuted. In Christian terms, if you're being persecuted, you must be doing something right. It's a rather easy trick: if anyone can claim to stand in continuity with the martyrs and be victims of persecution, and if being persecuted authenticates one's religious message, then anyone can claim to be right. (pg. 250)

The perception that facing persecution is a foundational element of the Christian faith fuels Christians' perception that they are being attacked. As a result, they tend to overreact instead of creating dialog and working toward common goals. Christians should re-examine the history of their faith and try to better distinguish between religious persecution—a real phenomenon in Christian history, if more sporadic and less foundational than Christians are led to believe—and conflicts of interest that can be resolved or ameliorated if we work to understand those we disagree with.

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*My dad disagreed with me when I talked to him about the article in these terms, and I found his depiction of the issue from a civil rights/discrimination standpoint to be fairly persuasive. I still think it's probably not a great idea to sue someone for being unwilling to sell you a wedding cake, but I also think it's way sillier to think that selling someone a cake is an endorsement of the event the cake is for.
**What's interesting about this book is that it is not advancing a radical new thesis, but is in fact simply presenting the widely held scholarly consensus on this issue in laypeople's terms so that it can enter the public consciousness. It's long overdue: I mention later in the post that there's been extensive work done assessing the historical validity of martyrdom accounts, and said work has been in progress for over three centuries.

Photo sources:
1. Gage Skidmore
2. Mike Licht, Notionscapital.com
3. https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1366277434l/15818294.jpg
4. KOMUnews