Rule Following and Partisan Identity

It Doesn't Have to Be Like This

In the summer of 1973, I started attending a Nazarene Church in Indianapolis. I had just flunked out of Purdue — not hard when you stay up late with friends, skip class, and don’t turn in your work!

I checked out this particular congregation, a very conservative church in a very conservative part of the denomination because a girl went there. She was a friend of my friend’s girlfriend and had a conversation during my year¹ at Purdue. And that’s where she went to church.

Finding a neo-fundamentalist congregation actually appealed to me at the time. I had rightly blamed my college failure on my own lack of discipline. So having someone set rigid boundaries met a felt need. Besides, they seemed to like me for who I was.

This was a subculture where “not fitting in” was a badge of honor. Send your kid to school with a note to get that our of square dancing class because “we don’t believe in that”. Same goes for the school prom or school parties. We watch our language. We dress appropriately. We avoid places where alcohol is served. We wrestle with whether it’s acceptable to see Billy Graham sponsored movies.

That neo-fundamentalist period in my life was short-lived. Theologically, I found myself drawn to a deeper understanding of God’s grace as a gift and pondered how to reconcile all the rule keeping with the idea that God loved me not for what I did or didn’t do but just because he did.

Still, the experience gave me an academic focus. In many ways, my work on evangelicalism over the decades has been an exercise in decoding the subculture. A history colleague and I did a conference presentation at SSSR in 1984 about a period where the Church of the Nazarene changed their Manual while simultaneously arguing that nothing had changed². We titled our paper "Ignorance is Strength: Doublethink and Secularization". (Come on, the conference was in 1984!).

As we were working on the presentation, my friend commented, “You know, if all the rules went away tomorrow, I don’t who I would be.” It still makes me sad forty years later.

This trip down memory lane was prompted by reading Ruth Graham’s New York Times piece a week ago and Russell Moore’s reflections on Ruth’s piece in Christianity Today on Friday. Ruth’s article was titled “Piety and Profanity: The Raunchy Christians Are Here”. She opens her article describing a pin-up calendar of female conservative influencers . She then moves to this:

Published by a “woke-free beer” company hastily launched last year as an alternative to Bud Light, the calendar was clearly meant to provoke liberals. But when photos of it began circulating online in December, progressives did not pay much attention. Instead, it sparked a heated squabble on the right over whether “conservative dads” who happen to be Christians should reject the calendar on moral grounds, or embrace it as an irreverent win for the good guys.

She writes:

Well into the 21st century, conservative evangelicals maintained their reputation for strict standards within their own churches and schools around language and public displays of sexuality.

They did not avoid just profanity, but often also mild transgressions like “wuss” and “darn.” Evangelical Christian schools enforced strict dress codes focused on modesty, especially for girls. In the 1990s, teenagers attended conferences and wore “purity rings” to pledge their commitment to wait until they married to have sex.

Something shifted before Trump came along. Church rules were seen as good guides if you wanted but not crucial. You don’t want your kids to skip the prom experience. A little champaign at a wedding toast is acceptable. A few chosen curse words and hand gestures when cut off in traffic are understandable.

In today’s hyper-partisan information environment, Goldwater’s “extremism in defense of liberty is no vice” gives way to the current “vulgarity at the expense of the other is no vice”. Because we’re sure they’d do it to us if they had the chance.

What happens when “the rules” are no longer binding?³ We substitute new in-group markers for the old ones. Today, those are political identity issues. Next time you see a public opinion poll that has subgroup data for religious groups and political party, look at the numbers for White Evangelicals and Republicans. I guarantee you that they are within two points of each other.

Russel Moore’s article in Christianity Today is titled “Why Character Doesn’t Matter Anymore”. He writes:

What happens long-term with your policies in a post-character culture is important. What happens to your country is even more important. But consider also what happens to you. “If individuals live only seventy years, then a state, or a nation, or a civilization, which may last for a thousand years, is more important than an individual,” C. S. Lewis wrote. “But if Christianity is true, then the individual is not only more important but incomparably more important, for he is everlasting and the life of a state or a civilization, compared with his, is only a moment.”

The Bible not only warns us about what character degradation—from immorality to boastfulness to heartlessness and ruthlessness—can do to the souls of those practicing such things, but also about the ruinous effect on those who “approve of those who practice them” (Rom. 1:32).

Ned Flanders is not, and never was, the Christian ideal. Personal piety and upstanding morality are not enough. But we should ask the question—if The Simpsons were written today and wished to make fun of evangelical Christians, would the caricature be someone inordinately devoted to his family, to prayer, to churchgoing, to kindness to his neighbors, to the awkward purity of his speech? Or would Ned Flanders be a screaming partisan, a violent insurrectionist, a woman-ogling misogynist, or an abusive pervert?

I realize that what Ruth Graham and Russell Moore are critiquing is just a new version of what I was critiquing coming out of my neo-fundamentalist phase. Are these things (rules or partisan identity) what keeps us in the club as Christians? Isn’t there something more?

Passion Week invites us to recognize that Resurrection Sunday absolutely changed the rules. We aren’t Christians because of what we don’t do or who we support for president or our position on a host of culture war issues. We follow Jesus in taking up our cross and following. We strive to be closer to His character in spite of our failures. We aren’t trying to win one for our team⁴ but to change the game all together.

1. My first year. I went back in 1974, met Jeralynne, stayed for my doctorate, departing in 1981 for my first teaching job at Olivet Nazarene.

2. Something repeated last year when suddenly the social positions of the church were elevated to doctrinal positions enabling church leaders to remove credentials from pastors who dared differ on things like LGBTQ+ acceptance.

3. As part of my dissertation research, I wrestled with the strangeness of a voluntary association saying “follow these rules or you’re out” which defeats the whole voluntary piece. The question became instead, “why do people feel constrained by the rules when they could leave whenever wanted?”

4. Wednesday’s newseltter.