The Church and Civic Society

Lingering questions from Thursday's Colorado Springs Event

Last Friday I shared my notes from the event in Colorado Springs sponsored by the Center for the Study of Evangelicalism at UC Colorado Springs. The panel raised excellent points that seemed well received by the largely mainline audience.

But I found myself thinking back over the questions asked by audience members. They were deep and profound. Questions dealt not so much with why the vote turned out the way it did, but what we as churches do about it. The event was captured on video and I have a copy. I have shared it here (warning, it’s a big file).

Four questions have haunted me. Here they are as I transcribed them from the video.

There is a hesitancy among mainline churches to take on studies of Christian Nationalism because it is viewed as being too political….I’m wondering if there are other mainline churches that are trying to do any work around exposing what Christian Nationalism is, particularly White Christian Nationalism and its role not only in civic life but also in the life of the church and in the life of our relationships. Because I think that in order for change to happen there has to be base change and that means for us in the congregations. Are there examples of mainstream Christian groups are trying to combat Christian Nationalism at the congregational or synodical level?

How can churches become a more powerful voice in pushing back against hate in our community? Many of our congregations are really concerned that groups of people are being marginalized and threatened because of who they are or what they believe and I think churches are relatively quiet on this.

If there are forces at work looking to burn down the institutions, where do you see the reformers who are reasonable and are going to provide a better model of governance that what the others want to burn down? What holds us together as a nation if there isn’t some powerful reformation movement of some kind?

How do people know what is true?…Why is faith valuable, but truth not? How does the average citizen, in the midst of doing their lives, how are they able to sort all this stuff out?

I don’t know why this happened (and maybe I’m reading too much into things) but it seems like there is a progression to these questions. The first one is focused on addressing Christian Nationalism specifically, then we move to pushing back against hate, then protecting institutions, and finally capital-T truth.

The audience captured something important. It is not sufficient to call out Christian Nationalists or the New Apostolic Reformation (but I repeat myself). Religious values cannot be expressed as negation. That’s not to take anything away from the excellent work done by Andrew Whitehead or Tim Alberta.¹ Both of these books provide a critique of Christian Nationalism and its distance from traditional Christian faith. Alberta’s book documents how difficult it is for pastors to push back on Christian Nationalist ideas within their congregations. At the epilogue of the book, he describes a useful strategy by one particular pastor. Rather than a confrontational style, he did something else:

The strategy he settled on—which he described to me as “pull, don’t push”—was something of an elaborate Jedi mind trick. Winans wanted to bring his congregants along, to compel them to second-guess their extrabiblical desires, but make them think it was their own conviction. He would preach on godly character, then play dumb when someone approached him afterward to admit they were rethinking their allegiance to certain politicians or pop-culture personalities; he would preach on the spiritual principle of discernment, then offer a bemused shrug when someone confessed to him that they were beginning to doubt conspiracy theories or question the information they’d been imbibing on social media. (430)

This is helpful but is still within the context of what happens inside a local congregation² and how members respond. It would do us well if our churches thought even broader — what is the role of the church in nurturing our shared civic culture?

This morning, my friend and long time subscriber Jim Eisenbaum sent me his SubStack. He had written about a full-day event that happened Saturday at the University of Notre Dame. I think of it as the Big Kids Version of our panel from Thursday. All the big names were there.

But some of the same sentiments showed up. Here are a few comments I picked out of Jim’s excellent summary.

My notes on Lilliana Mason’s comments are more sparse than I’d like; apologies. In general, her research shows that, especially since 2017, there’s been an increasing moral disengagement on the part of Americans: we don’t care as much (as a society) as we once did. Beliefs about social equality, including the value of women, has grown increasingly divergent in this period as well: Ds and Rs are quite far apart on this matter. Moral disengagement leads to mass violence. My thought: the reality is that the sheer magnitude of the threats we face leads to moral weariness; vigilance requires much energy. What we may have considered deeply wrong in 1990 is banally present in politics generally today.

DuMez: There has been a long-time goal of Christians on the right (and perhaps politicians, too) to destroy the social gospel. This has been at least partially coordinated with the continued proclamation of the prosperity and power of the U.S. and of individuals in the U.S. as a direct result of the blessing of God.

DuMez: We must work locally, at that level, and get deeply involved in the local community. (Aside: this seems both important and really difficult and very time-consuming; well, yeah.) The targeted community needs connection. So, for instance, the anti-Trump Republicans feel alone. They’re actually about 1/3 of the party but afraid to speak out. People leave cults mainly because of an unexpected experience of love and empathy and truth.

Stories matter; and, said Amanda Tyler, Christian nationalism relies on funding a narrative, so we must work on counter-narratives. For instance, “belonging” is touted by the right as a scarce commodity; we need to speak and show that “belonging” is part of the category of abundance. The work is local, because (1) working locally provides us space to talk, to work with neighbors/community; (2) “local” is a practical form of direct democracy (think “school board” and so on); (3) a vibrant civil society is crucial to democracy; (4) local involvement can be a different kind of Christian witness. She thinks that mass deportation will be the main first thing worked on under the DJT administration. This can be opposed at the local level, since it’s difficult to imagine that it can be carried out without local cooperation.

Joel Day³ (moderator): “Can we be the vanguard of an alternative culture?” If so, we need to start with micro-level actions (again a return to the local action scenario). What will we do if local police are deputized by DHS to assist DHS in deporting immigrants? What do we do in this sort of situation? Do we have the courage to face this sort of problem?

I like Kristin DuMez’s comment about the attack on the social gospel. In its heyday, this was not simply about doing good in the community. It spoke to congregations as a moral center in the community.

Last week, I tried to rapidly read The End of Empathy by John Compton after a recommendation on David Gushee’s SubStack.⁴ Compton traces the role of mainline churches within their local communities from the late 1890s through the 1980s. At the height of their influence, congregational membership spoke to how individual character could be evaluated within the community. Denominational leaders provided something of a moral conscience, identifying wrongs and the way those contradicted both religious and civic values.

Many factors contributed to the loss of that moral force in the community. Suburbanization, westward migration, the rise of the middle class and expanding entertainment options all were influential. So were membership declines and economic struggles within mainline denominations, not to mention the never-ending evangelicals attacks on “wishy-washy” mainlines.

But something significant was lost along the way. In Durkheim’s terms, we lost collective consciousness, substituting a form of egoism that held that our group was more important than the collective.

Or consider what Robert Bellah and colleagues had to say forty years ago in Habits of the Heart. It sounds like today but it is much worse than what they identified.

Much of what has been happening in our society has been undermining our sense of community at every level. We are facing trends that threaten our basic sense of solidarity with other: solidarity with those near to us (loyalty to neighbors, colleagues at work, fellow townsfolk), but also solidarity with those who live far from us, those who are in situations very different from our own, those of other nations. Yet this soldiarity — this sense of connection, shared fate, mutual responsibility, community — is more critical now than ever. It is solidarity, trust, mutual responsibility that allows human communities to deal with threats and take advantage of opportunities. (xxxvi)

This is the answer I wish I had given Thursday night. Standing against Christian Nationalism and interpersonal hate is important, but the real task of the church in contemporary society is the restoration of the moral fabric. Not in fighting culture war or identity battles but in restoring our shared sense of community. That will require congregations to move out of their silos to engage those different from them and to develop skills and orientations among the membership to model that in daily life. It is hard work that we have not prepared either pastors or congregations to address, but it is essential.

I’m sure I’ll have more to say about all this as we move into 2025.

1. Both of these excellent books were selected among the top 10 books of the year by The Anxious Bench yesterday.

2. Which is very different than Barack Obama’s comments about belongingness at megachurches.

3. Joel has been a friend since my early Point Loma days nearly 20 years ago.

4. Now that the presentation is over, I can do a more careful read rather than jumping around.