Jul 18 | Done with the debate, Part 2 (Letters from the Coast)

This is the second in a two part entry about the inherent objectification and racism of modern evangelism.

 

PART II: ALREADY JUSTIFIED

Of course my own denomination has its own problematic racial history to contend with. Glass houses, and whatnot. But the racism of the mainline Canadian Anglican church looks very different from the racism of the North American evangelical church. While we cling to the paternalistic, colonialist racism inherent in historically British institutions, what I’m interested in is the inherently objectifying framework of evangelism as present in those who risk it all to save souls.

Going abroad to spread the message goes all the way back to the beginning of Christianity, but it’s disingenuous to compare Paul’s jaunts across the Mediterranean with Jesuits bringing the Bible to Canada. Paul, while a Roman citizen, was still a member of an occupied community under Roman rule who ended up in prison for what he was doing. And while he was pretty spicy in some of his criticisms of his flock, he tirelessly fought for integration of Gentiles in the infant church. Of course this brought us to a complicated place once the church became the establishment, but in its early days this was more cult than colonialism, and even pretty radical.

Fast forward to today, where we have whatever the heck Jilly’s doing, and people like the somber looking folks my boss and I noticed fanning out across the street from our church two by two, with books in their hands and resolute faces. Fast forward to today, where arguments are not made in good faith but are merely a chance to show off one’s supposed rhetorical skill – really just a chance to, in my opinion, commit the sin of pride by supposedly running circles around heathens with your encyclopedic knowledge of random Scripture quotes, as though doing glorified sword drills were really that impressive a display of faith or knowledge.

There are so many ways to do this kind of work, and almost all of them drive me up the wall.

We’ll start with a beatific smile, and move into the main course, which is telling me, through all of those teeth, that I’m going to burn in hell if I don’t align myself with a set of beliefs that dates back a hundred years at most.

If I do anything other than slam the door, it quickly becomes a chance to mansplain Scripture to me, as if I, raised in the church, a student of the faith in earnest on my return to Christ in 2005, and an ordained priest with an MDiv and awards for my work in New Testament hermeneutics, knows nothing about how the Bible should really be read; even though, again, their particular interpretation of Scripture grew out of a barely one hundred year old panic that higher biblical criticism was going to topple the universe – indeed, as though after two thousand years of biblical scholarship all across the world a handful of white men in the United States only just got it right in 1910.

But if you refuse to engage, of course, you’re a coward. “Debate me!”

No.

I don’t have to.

As a dear friend once told me, “You don’t have to justify yourself. You are already justified.”

I didn’t invent the radical reading of Scripture. I’m only one in a long of radical interpreters. Indeed, I’m only one in a long line of folks, lay and ordained, who have woven their own culture, their own worldview, their own zeitgeist into the braid of Scripture.

That is what Jesus did. That is what Paul did. That is what everyone has always done.

The opposite of faith, someone once told me, is not doubt, but certainty.

If you are so so sure about something, that’s not faith at all. Faith is first and foremost about relationship before intellectual assent. This is how it was in the church for thousands of years. In these latter days of the Enlightenment, though, faith is also about holding fast to what you’re really not sure about, allowing something to shape your life because you know in your heart it’s true but can’t really prove it with the tools of logic. For me, that’s about saying that love, as it exists outside of romance or family ties, as it exists, driving people to give everything up for the other, is more than just a neuron. It’s something that has no biological source, but exists in and indeed holds up the universe. I can’t show it to you on a microscope. I can only show it to you with my actions and my words…AND I would never tell you to only experience it through my actions and words.

What fundamentalists do for their god has nothing to do with faith. It’s just bullheadedness.

In these days where we challenge the colonial legacy of the church, where we scramble to piece together a faith that has probably done as much damage as good (and it has done quite a bit of good, despite what a lot of folks would have you believe), I think we need a radical reinterpretation of what it means to bring Jesus to those who do not know him.

I think maybe it looks like actually practicing what we preach.

I think maybe it looks like friendship more than threats.

And I think maybe it looks like having a bit of damn humility for once.