The Siren’s Call
The history of Christianity is full of incidents in which the church heeds the Siren’s call and shipwrecks itself on the shores of the dominant cultural narrative. While this may not be surprising, it is tragic because each of these instances represents a blatant failure on the part of the church to fully proclaim the call of Jesus to, “repent (Gk. metanoia), for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” Today white evangelicals in America have heard the siren’s call and shipwrecked themselves on the shores of American exceptionalism and a false vision of the kingdom of God, putting their hope in Donald Trump to win a cultural war that has nothing to do with God’s kingdom while they fight to protect the myth of “Christian America.”
Why people voted for Trump is a complex question and there is no single answer. The two books I have found most helpful on this are John Fea’s Believe Me and Gerardo Marti’s American Blindspot. I have friends who say they voted for Trump because he said he would place judges in the court system that would be favorable to their position. Other friends said the only issue they cared about was abortion, they supported Trump because he said he would support legislation to make abortion illegal again. Others simply stated they couldn’t vote for Hillary or any Democrat. In voting for Trump they were all willing to surrender the previous cry of evangelicals for strong moral leadership in favor of what they considered a policy win. The same voices that decried Bill Clinton’s moral failure condoned Donald Trump.
For too many white evangelicals the song of American culture and civil religion plays so loudly that the song of authentic faith can no longer be heard. Even as evangelicals around the world decry their support of Donald Trump there is a refusal to listen to the voice of the braoder church, they close their ears to their own brothers and sisters in Christ. It was very disappointing to many when Al Mohler recently turned from his “never Trump” position to support him. Thankfully prominent evangelical leaders like Mark Labberton, Richard Mouw, and Rich Stearns, as well as evangelical publications like Christianity Today have continued to faithfully call the present administration to account. Anecdotally, my own experience supports the research on who supports Trump, as the only friends I know of who support Trump are white, American, evangelicals. My international evangelical friends stand in opposition to him as do my friends of different ethnicity and religious backgrounds.
How did we get here?
The early years of the Christian church were often difficult for the new Christians. There were several reasons Christians found themselves being persecuted. One of the primary reasons was disloyalty to the dominant cultural narrative. I like how Brooks Harrington describes the dominant narrative, “as a song that plays everywhere and all the time to everyone. It is so loud, relentless, and pervasive that every other song sounds discordant and grating, and finally is not heard at all” (Brooks Harrington: No Mercy, No Justice, 19). Christians claimed that Christ had an exclusive and sole claim on their lives and this clashed with the claim of the Roman Emperor to be sovereign.
The Roman empire, like the United States, was known for its openness to religion. It never demanded loyalty to a single god as long as the people were willing to demonstrate their loyalty to the state. There were several ways this was practiced, through feasts and national celebrations in which the religious symbols of the state were prominent, images of Caesar, flags and standards flying high. The Christians, out of loyalty to Christ, refused to participate in these events of civil religion, they could not declare their allegiance to anyone other than Christ and were viewed as being disloyal to the empire.
Polycarp was a bishop during the second century. He was arrested in his mid-80s and was offered an opportunity to save his life by declaring his allegiance to Caesar, he refused. Later, due to his age, the governor asked him to swear an oath by the “luck of Caesar” and he would live. Again he refused because his only concern was that his life be shaped by the Christian story, “If you still think I am going to swear by Caesar’s Luck, and still pretend not to know what I am, let me tell you plainly now that I am a Christian” (Penguin Classics, Early Christian Writings, 128).
The Christian story was not considered compatible with that of the state, they had competing allegiances. Polycarp was killed for refusing to declare his allegiance to Caesar.
With the conversion of Constantine (312 AD) the church began to occupy a privileged position, as the new religion of the state. Christendom was born. It was a welcome relief from the times of persecution. However, the church embraced the state in a way that it never had before. A new compromise began that has been present in the life of the western church for the past 1,700 years. By 438 laws were being passed that “for the first time in Roman history made heresy, in the sense of incorrect belief as opposed to outward practice, illegal. … In 528 Emperor Justinian made it illegal not to be a Christian, and pagans were given three months to convert” (Craig Carter, Rethinking Christ and Culture, 83). Over the centuries this compromise with the state saw the church sideline its call to repentance as it provided support and legitimization for crusades, inquisitions, wars, and slavery, and more. With the integration of state and church nations could now claim, and often did, with the support of the church that we had God on our side.
With Christianity becoming the official religion of the empire it bowed to Caesar to gain prestige, position, and power. Ever since then the dominant, cultural elite, of the church have been reluctant to relinquish their position. It is a different story for black Christianity in the west, and other groups, but white evangelicals are the inheritors of the mix of Christianity and civil religion and heirs to the position privilege that comes with it. They struggle to hear any other song.
The result was a light version of Christianity that failed to proclaim the full breadth of repentance.
Repentance (metanoia)
The call to repentance over time has become a call to personal salvation. To acknowledge our sinfulness and accept Jesus as both Lord and Saviour. This is important, but it is also only part of what it means to repent. The word metanoia has a much broader range of meaning. At its core is the idea of changing our mind, our ways, our resolve, and our purpose in life. As Hirsch and Nelson note, “Engaging with true repentance has always been a challenge for the stubborn human mind, but even more so in our twenty-first-century ‘echo chambers,’ in which our beliefs are amplified and reinforced within our closed networks” (Reframation, 125).Many on the conservative side of the church have reduced to the Christian “worldview” to a set of questions about beliefs. Focus on the family lists these questions, provided by Barna Research, as their criteria for a Christian worldview:
Do absolute moral truths exist?
Is absolute truth defined by the Bible?
Did Jesus Christ live a sinless life?
Is God the all-powerful and all-knowing Creator of the universe, and does He still rule it today?
Is salvation a gift from God that cannot be earned?
Is Satan real?
Does a Christian have a responsibility to share his or her faith in Christ with other people?
Is the Bible accurate in all of its teachings?
However, we never see Jesus or any of the apostles suggesting this is the criteria for a Christian worldview. Indeed they are a far cry from the action oriented worldview espoused in Micah 6:8, “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” Or with the radical teaching of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount or his proclamation that he fulfilled the words of the prophet Isaiah to bring justice to victory (Matt. 12:20). The apostle doesn’t use this list in his teaching, rather he calls us Or the the life Paul calls us to live in his epistles. The questions posed by Barna are safe, because they in no way challenge the Christian to question the dominant cultural narrative, there is no conflict of kingdoms.
As I explain in my book, Christians have a new identity, we are declared to be citizens of God’s kingdom. Through repentance we have changed our mind about where our allegiance lies. I’ve often wondered if we could change how people view metanoia if the first question asked of people seeking to join the church was, “Do you absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which you have heretofore been a subject or citizen?” What better way to ask what we are willing to give up in order to fully and completely step into the new life that is ours in Christ? Of course these words have already been taken by the United States Government. They are part of the required oath that is to be sworn by anyone wishing to become a naturalized citizen. If you have any doubt about what the state expects then this should resolve it.
The Christian call to repent was and is a call to embrace a new story. It is a story of hope for the world, not any one nation. It is a story that calls us to, “not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2).
It is a story that was too broad, inclusive, and an affront to the traditional structures of society for the Roman empire to accept as the early Christians practiced a faith that saw, “no difference between Jew and Gentile” (Romans 10:12).Or one that acknowledged that “Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all” (Colossians 3:11). Yet many within the white evangelical community continue to call for walls to be built. Xenophobia is pervasive as it poses a threat to the position of privilege.
When I look back over history I hear the voices of St. Francis, William Wilberforce, Martin Luther King Jr., Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and others calling the church to embrace the full sense of metanoia. It is hard to put aside 1,700 years of privilege, but we must see it for what it is, a compromise with the world. Trump is promising white evangelicals the world, satan offered the same thing to Jesus and Jesus said no.
