It was at this moment when I realized how clearly the Coronavirus has brought so many things into focus that are often (in my case) typically occluded by home renovation shows and sports journalism: things like how, in my community, education has been effectively ended for the majority of our public school students because a large number of them lack regular access to the Internet and needed technology to engage online curriculum, so they haven’t been doing anything, for over a month. Or, how individual Americans are encouraged, nay, regularly shamed by Dave Ramsey on the radio, for living outside of their means and not keeping 6 months of living expenses in a rainy day envelope. And yet it seems most of our country’s largest corporations ran out of operating capital during the first week of the pandemic and immediately asked for bailouts from the government. Or, how “work-life balance” is a phrase — much like “self-care” that doesn’t actually mean anything in a nation characterized by the universal expectation that women will use accrued vacation time to give birth and then return to work in two weeks. Or, how receiving government assistance 3 months ago was a moral failing for families who can’t pay the rent while working 60 hours a week (at what we are now all calling “essential businesses”), but that same assistance is now “logical,” “necessary,” and a “moral imperative” for the freshly furloughed middle class. 

Leaving Chole Cooney to compellingly moan about work, life and parenting in her widely shared piece for Medium:

“This current situation is almost prophetically designed to showcase the farce of our societal approach to separating work and family lives. We are expected to work from home full time. And care for our children full time. And we cannot have anyone outside our immediate household help. It can’t work and we all are suffering at the illusion that it does.”

But then again, we knew all of this already, we’ve just been able to more effectively ignore the ways that crippling income inequality and a long running governmental abandonment of people who don’t happen to be corporations sinks all boats. Because we used to have “so much going on right now.” Like a white-noise machine that has suddenly shut off in a power outage, the sudden halting of a life typically spent distractedly scrolling from one online retailer to another, or one email to another, or one semi-professional child sporting event to another, or one hot-yoga-cycling-cross-fit-class to another, awakens us to the ways our house always makes this much noise when we start paying attention.

Which is what made Easter so especially difficult to engage with online, primarily because (at least for me), Church as spectator sport only works if I keep having “so much going on right now.” If I am busy, stressed, anxious about the future and my son’s ability to compete with other preschoolers in the great octagon that is American child-rearing, then I don’t really notice that Church usually serves the role of quietly releasing the pressure that builds within me every time I refuse to allow the life and teachings of Jesus to challenge a dominant culture that leaves so many of us crippled by debt, poverty, sickness, under-employment, and the anxious pursuit of happiness at all costs parading as the good life.

READ: Amidst the Pandemic, a Chance to Experience Easter as the Apostles Did

When I am implicitly told that regular Christian faith and practice is constituted by supporting the “ministry” of the Church with regular donations, participation in an annual service project, and sporadic attendance in a small group where I spend even more time with Christians not talking about what keeps me up at night (not to mention possessing an overwrought concern about the style or order of what constitutes the raw data of a Sunday morning), I only buy it as actual religious practice if the sound machine of my existence is turned all the way up. 

However, when my (and every) local church turns itself into a panoply of religious programming, I am regularly encouraged to tune into as a spiritual practice, it has been my experience that the camera not only adds 10 pounds, but also this sinking feeling that when you stream sacred things on Facebook it seems to turn wine back into water and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ into one of those creepy inflatables manically flapping at you from in front of a used car dealership. But then again, maybe this is just what Easter celebrations characterized by spiral ham, hidden eggs, smocked dresses, baskets filled with choking hazards, and floral crosses always look like for everyone watching us at home in their pajama pants. I’m saying we Christians seem out of touch, frivolous and woefully superfluous in a world unmoored by death. 

By my count, Easter, at least in the beginning before all the human-sized Bunny costumes, appeared only because God was first willing to die, to stop speaking for once, in order to usher in a reflexive sort-of Sabbath from the practice of an anesthetizing pseudo-religion that leaves us in both good times and bad, distractedly attempting to survive the world rather than actively seeking its transformation. 

Maybe our Easter needs to die so that it too may be reborn into something we would have, before now, confused for the gardener, a ghost or a fellow traveler on the road to Jerusalem.

Which leaves me wondering what it might be like for churches—desperate for new content, answers about the future, and our regular financial support—to stop holding on so tightly to the ways they believe God and religion is supposed to function in our world? Instead of anxiously attempting to make the very same productions and performances and activities impossibly integral to the lives of their congregants by live-streaming the resurrection, what if churches instead used this time to empower people to develop rich connections to both the divine and the world he died for on their own without having them first run their Christianity and tax-deductible donations through the sanctuary? 

I think this moment we’re in, if we’ll let it, is inviting all of us — maybe most especially the Church — to ask far more interesting questions about how we’re all parenting and working and eating and sleeping and schooling and feeling and exercising and staying connected and supporting vulnerable populations in a world gone mad? But to ask those kinds of question—the ones our moment demands we must ask—the Church has to finally let go of other questions, even sacred ones, that have kept it cemented in the lives of people for centuries now. 

I’m saying if God had to die in order to birth a new world into being, I don’t think any of us are getting out of this thing alive, most especially if our buildings have steeples with crosses on them. 

I guess the institution wanted the same from me, but I foolishly studied the humanities, spent three years mastering divinity, and struggled to see the similarities between CEOs making (in some companies) 150 times the average employee, and pastors working in an industry where the company owns your house and doubt is a fireable offense. So I eventually quit because I was depressed, anxious, and confused about how being a pastor had anything at all to do with working for a church in America. I’m now a psychotherapist and the father of a 4 year old who let me know the other day — in the midst of a tantrum because I asked him to use the bathroom — that I am “unnecessary.”

I, too, found it a bit on the nose.

If you have met at least one toddler, you might already be familiar with this sackcloth-and-ash approach to following directions they don’t particularly enjoy receiving. A hurricane force meltdown occurs, all while you recall the last time a tiny version of yourself yelled at you because you refused to let him or her sit in a pile of his or her own excrement under your favorite lamp. Speaking of which, do you know what’s funnier than being mercilessly yelled at for attempting to remedy a scorching case of self-inflicted diaper rash? Watching an adult version of yourself attempt to reason with a tiny version of yourself who is rather content to live the rest of his life with a trouser-full of whatever it is in your living room that currently smells like grocery store trash…generally speaking. It’s hilarious, once you get the smell out of the carpet.

However, do you know what’s even funnier? Watching people in their 40s and 50s attempt to convince other people in their 40s and 50s that there is a preferred style of “worship music” that our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ finds most amenable to his Sunday morning experience. And by “worship music” please feel free to insert: “new sanctuary carpet” or “new building plan” or “new annual budget” or “new ply of toilet paper throughout all church bathrooms.” (This one is depressingly true.) It’s hilarious, after the fact, when your mortgage isn’t dependent upon the outcome.

What I’m saying is that people arguing with one another in church buildings about things none of us know for sure is eerily similar to people arguing with their children about screen time at the grocery store, in that, rationality, creativity, and intelligence are almost never invited to the bargaining table.

In his book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, UVA psychologist and researcher Jonathan Haidt compares the power of our dis-regulating emotionality during a particularly tense argument to that of a 6-ton elephant, and the power of our higher level rational thought to that of a 150 lb. human riding atop the 6-ton elephant.

Meaning that when our emotions are under control, we can typically direct the movements of the elephant to accomplish tasks we would never be able to on our own. But if and when the elephant encounters a mouse or a tube of toothpaste squeezed from the middle instead of the end of the tube, YOU BETTER HOLD ON CAUSE PAPA BEAR IS GOING TO LOSE HIS TEMPER AND SHAME EAT ONE DOZEN ORIGINAL GLAZED KRISPY KREME DONUTS IN HIS CAR UNTIL HE FEELS BETTER…generally speaking, all the elephants I know love carbs.

As a psychotherapist trained in a school of thought known as “family systems,” my approach to working with one person exhibiting a dysfunctional pattern of behavior is to explore the network of relationships comprising the totality of this one person’s experience — because humans never learn who they are as individuals in a vacuum, but as participants in a generational, geographic, institutional, religious, and sociological approach to being human. It isn’t just the gills and the fins that make you a fish; it’s also the water.

A primary belief of this approach to understanding the complexity of humanity is the idea that dysfunctional patterns of behavior that are true of one person within a couple or family, are typically true of an entire institutional framework, as if that institution itself was but one person exhibiting profound dysfunction in a multitude of directions and personalities. “The Family,” in this example, is the client, rather than a short-hand description for a loosely connected group of individuals with the same last name who all have their own preferred dysfunctions. Which is probably why you’ve noticed, without maybe being able to articulate exactly why, some rooms, and buildings, and schools, and houses, and churches can feel incredibly anxious, and toxic, and like all the air has been sucked out of them.

Spaces — like brick and mortar kinds of spaces — can actually be conduits of the emotionally dis-regulating fear and pain of the people who gather in them. So when people say that “church” harmed them, or shamed them, or rejected them, or lied to them, I don’t correct their experience smugly with the reminder that: “No, people hurt you. Church is just an institution or a faceless ordering entity, because institutions become the incarnation and manifestation of the lives, souls, hearts, fears, and baggage of the humans within them, humans whom the Apostle Paul once called the eyeballs and toenails of ‘the Church.’”

When I come across resources for “fixing” Church, or “healing” Church, or “saving” Church that focus on data points, and statistical analysis, and sociological info gleaned from cold calling Millennials on their preferences for Christian cover bands before noon on the weekends, I typically delete those emails. Not because they aren’t well-intentioned or full of earnest ideas fueled by reading too many blogs on Twitter, but because they ignore the fact that when bodies (both collective and individual) are emotionally dis-regulated — which I think we can all agree that Church in America is a bit emotionally dis-regulated about its place in the world — higher level thought turns off.

The elephant has seen a mouse, and now we’re all just holding on for dear life.

As the budget dwindles, and the congregation dwindles, and the influence dwindles, and the professional staff dwindles, and the spirit dwindles, and when faced with red lines in every direction, churches (in my experience) haven’t typically produced their most creative, intelligent, and insightful work. They usually just argue about “the young people” and “worship music” and how the next CEO can right the ship because he (It’s always a he isn’t it?) practices the 5 Habits of Highly Successful People.

However, when a pastor is able to non-anxiously empathize with “church,” with its pain and its confusion and the fact that it used to have more money in the bank but now seems like it’s going to outlive its savings, we’re able to start getting a better handle on what the moment before us actually requires, which, for the record, is almost never an “alternative” worship service or more synergy. That answer usually comes from a place of pain, which is why you’ve heard it brought up at least once every five years whenever your institution’s budget comes up short. If we can, together, push through the pain and the fear and the anxiety stemming from the very real problems besieging our institutions and our world, we might find that our creativity and intelligence and insight starts flickering to life like the lights on the dash of my old Civic when she finally turns over on a cold February morning.

An example of this was when a historic Baptist congregation in North Carolina, instead of institutionally buying a corvette and marrying someone half her age, decided to donate a rather chest-pain-inducing-portion of their budget for the creation of a homeless shelter for LGBTQ adolescents (even though those adolescents are probably not likely to become tithing deacons anytime soon). This move didn’t “fix” their church, but it did give everyone who gathers within her walls a different sense of why they’re there and what they can do together for their community when they stop panicking about who isn’t showing up for group singing and a lecture on Sundays.

Another example of this was when a dwindling, aged, majority Caucasian congregation on the West Coast decided to join forces with a fledgling multi-ethnic church plant, because “we had the building and they had the spirit.” They recently moved, as one church, into the hallowed out carcass of a once mighty megachurch in their city, not by being a poor facsimile of the (now defunct) megachurch, but by being its opposite.

A final example of this was when a traditional church in your town decided that they were missing out on all the young families in their community, so they desperately started a “contemporary” worship service before “Sunday School” at 9:00am, had parishioners put signs in their yards, stickers on their minivans, and links to the revamped church website on their Facebook feeds. Rather quickly, the sanctuary was filled, everyone stopped arguing about the pastor’s sermons, and the TOWN WAS SAVED!

Just kidding, that almost never works.

In my experience as a churchgoer, a pastor, and now a psychotherapist to both churchgoers and pastors, sometimes the best thing we can do for one another, whether we’re 3 or 83, is — whenever one of us is rolling around on the floor screaming through the delivery of information they never wanted to hear —for all the non-anxious someones (occasionally there’s only one of you) to bend down, sometimes on both knees, get eye-to-eye, and say that you’re sorry, that you know this is hard, and that even though it seems impossible right now, we aren’t going to make anyone go through this alone. But we will go through it, even if there are more tears.

You do this, even when they’re yelling at you about a diaper rash they caused and now refuse to let you remedy. You do this, even when they threaten to leave, and stop paying your salary, and blame you for their family’s lack of spiritual maturity, and send you punctuation-less emails in the middle of the night.

You do this, because somewhere inside of you, like maybe at the bottom, you know that being a pastor (and a parent) isn’t about the lapel mic, and the board meetings, and the weddings, and the standing ovations, and the graduation slideshows, and the Subaru commercials we all imagine our lives to look like. But it’s actually about sitting with the thing you love the most, and unflinchingly, non-anxiously willing it to love itself enough to let you wipe the excrement off of it. (Succinctly, you do this work because you signed up for it, and if you didn’t, then please use this as whatever sign you needed to finally start selling life insurance.)

Arguably, at no other point in our lives than when we’re emphatically staring down a hurricane force meltdown by something we inexplicably love on a cellular level can we know more about what it means when the scriptures remind us that God isn’t an unflappable CEO, but is our Parent and our Partner and our Priest and our Prophet and our Spirit and our Soul and our Strength and our Savior and our Friend and the one thing that refuses to give up on us, even when we’ve soiled ourselves yet again.

God leads with empathy, God follows with solidarity, and God finishes with collective action, and when we do too, we might be surprised at what comes “out of the mouths of babes,” as the Bible once famously put it.

“I know quite a few people, mostly young adults but not all, who are proud to say that they have accumulated thousands of friends on Facebook. Obviously, this statement can only be true if the idea of friendship is reduced. A real friendship ought to introduce each person to unexpected weirdness in the other. Each acquaintance is an alien, a well of unexplored difference in the experience of life that cannot be imagined or accessed in any way but through genuine interaction. The idea of friendship in database-filtered social networks is certainly reduced from that.”

As I was thinking about whether or not he was right, I saw four houses in one Zillow search of my city that had the same shiplapped accent wall. And, as I was reflecting on whether or not the ubiquity of the shiplap proves Lanier’s point, my wife sent me an article from NPR about how researchers at Brandeis University have uncovered what they’re calling “the hipster effect” (hang in there, it’s worth it):

“It’s a running joke that male hipsters all look alike with their flannel shirts, thick beards and other seemingly off-brand attributes. But a comical incident in the MIT Technology Review might just prove that they all really do look alike. The publication recently published an article on a study out of Brandeis University about the “hipster effect,” which studied how nonconformists usually act unconventionally in the same way — to end up being exactly the same.”

The best part is what followed MIT Technology Review’s publication of said findings, and I’ll let them take it from here:

Right after the article was published, MIT Technology Review promptly received an email from someone who claimed he was the man in the photo and hadn’t given his consent. He accused the publication of slandering him and threatened legal action, writing:

‘You used a heavily edited Getty image of me for your recent bit of click-bait about why hipsters all look the same. It’s a poorly written and insulting article and somewhat ironically about five years too late to be as desperately relevant as it is attempting to be. By using a tired cultural trope to try to spruce up an otherwise disturbing study. Your lack of basic journalistic ethics and both the manner in which you reported this uncredited nonsense and the slanderous unnecessary use of my picture without permission demands a response and I am of course pursuing legal action.’”

The crescendo here is (rather predictably) that this very hip man was terribly wrong about his own hella-hip likeness. He, as if on cue for the researchers, mistook a stock photo of another hipster (who was a model) for himself, and was flabbergasted to find out that yet another nonconformist acted “unconventionally in the same way.”

Life is mostly a closed loop, and I’m finding from personal experience that you have to wear slim-fit pants into your almost-mid-thirties to experience the stifling closed-ness of it all.

According to folks like Lanier, one thing the Internet has severely truncated is humanity’s ability to be weird, in singular, non-marketable, and digitally unrecognizable ways, and that this weirdness is the very fabric, or bedrock of what makes humans undeniably more important than the technology we have worked tirelessly to create.

For example: I have 1,453 Facebook friends (not to brag), and I’m worried no more than a handful realize that I am terribly, even uncomfortably strange, especially when it comes to the metrics employed by the Facebook algorithm to determine my political preferences, religious beliefs, kitchen countertop design preferences, and whether or not I’ll be enticed to make a quick getaway to a Caribbean Sandals resort (not to brag) because my phone overheard a friend of mine regaling me with stories about being face-up on the business end of a commercial Daiquiri machine the other day at work. And this time I’m not bragging, because you are too; you’re terribly weird. However, if I’m not really your friend I have no clue about this weirdness, or how you dance at weddings, or why you persist in believing the moon landing was faked — as you are only more white noise of beach vacation footage, parenting complaints, misattributed motivational sayings, and multi-level-marketing pitches on my news feed of digitally digestible sameness.

In a phrase several others have been employing long before I got a hold of it: Social media is the standardized testing of human relationships, and we can’t help but live our lives according to its scores.

Things like Facebook and Instagram have trained us to relate to one another according to the strictures of digital life. It relegates irrelevant and anomalous data to the nether-regions of the web and heightens false binaries and limited drop-down options as a way of answering existential questions about how one dates, sleeps, believes, votes, thinks, feels, and furnishes a bonus room. A friend of mine who enjoyed a similar social media detox last year kept remarking, passive aggressively I’m sure, that once he “unplugged” it was amazing to come alive to a world “where I don’t already know if I immediately hate someone because of my newsfeed.”

Which is also why, in a world where life is being stuffed inside “the cloud,” Christianity is experiencing the same draining of weirdness that is so inherent to its success. If you’re keeping score, Christianity is (mostly) the belief that God became a human person, and not just any human person, but an unmarried, homeless, poor one whose behavior famously prompted his mother and brothers and sisters to try and come “collect” him at the end of a sermon. This God in the flesh did and said and embodied so many strange things that he was killed by the binaries of his day, and even then, he transcended them all the same, leaving only an empty tomb in his wake.

As one my favorite Australian theologians, Mike Frost, is famous for saying:

“Jesus was completely off center, a square peg in a round hole. And those who were most attracted to Him were the ones who had nothing to lose — women, children, young fishermen, the poor, the disabled. With this band of misfits and outcasts, he changed the entire world.”

I’m starting to wonder if the Incarnation might not be the most important (and strangest) Christian doctrine for our technological age. The idea of God turning tired words and dead prayers into flesh and blood to be argued with, eat a meal beside, and follow into the wilderness seems incredibly foreign to a community of people who look at flesh that have become algorithms (which aren’t even real words) on private screens in restaurants, schools, cars, and beds right beside other living, breathing flesh and blood.

As we scroll toward apocalypse together, here’s a prayer I’ve been tinkering with anytime I absentmindedly reach for my phone as a way of participating in the technological diminishing of my cellular weirdness in order for it (and me) to be more effectively discovered on a Google search:

 (Closes eyes)

My life is not a commercial product.

My child is not a commercial product.  

My political views are not commercial products.

My religion is not a commercial product.

My relationships with other humans are not commercial products.

(Throws phone into traffic)

(Dangerously retrieves phone amidst said traffic. Anxiously turns it back on. Feels a guilty sense of relief that it works again. Checks Facebook to see how this post is doing. Immediately experiences hot shame.)

Jeez, amen.

Yes, some of them are in poverty.
Yes, some of them are failing Geometry.
Yes, some of them say curse words and punch things (or humans) when they’re angry.
Yes, some of them show up for class after trying (and failing) to sleep off whatever happened last night.
Yes, some of them know that they are “problems.”

When I first met one of these adolescents the other day, he greeted me with an extensive list of his previous diagnoses from other clinicians “in the system.” Once I was finally able to sneak in a question about whether or not he found these helpful for navigating life on Earth, I still quiver with joy at his response:

“S____, no, I just thought you would cause you’re a therapist.”

The longer I work with “high-achieving” or “problematic” or “depressed” or “exceptional” kids in churches, high schools, and in private practice, the more I’m struck with just how much sense the Christian doctrine of Incarnation makes. According to adolescent theorists and clinicians over the past 50 years or so, this population is the perfect incarnation of a particular family and society’s values, beliefs, hopes, and bad behaviors all squeezed together into a pair of gym shorts. Adolescents are the living, breathing “symptoms” of our family units, and they manifest these symptoms with a similar panache, creativity, and guttural wordlessness that echoes our own Lord and Savior’s ability to clear a room with obfuscation on the one hand, and cutting clarity on the other. It’s their trademark lack of filter that makes adolescents so very much like Jesus.

If we’ll let them, “the teens” can teach us a great deal about the kind of world we have built around them, its values and beliefs, hopes and bad behaviors, and what living in this kind of place does to a person before he or she learns to more appropriately swallow the pain of existence with home renovation shows and arguments about identity politics on Facebook.

One of the things I’m learning about our world from these incarnate symptoms is that we are (all of us) in desperate need of liberation from sin, which, frankly, is not a sentence I really expected to type. In another life, I was a Baptist minister performing lock-ins and ski-trips professionally (Christian Cruise Directing®, as it were). One of the expectations of caring for the souls of everyone between the ages of 12-18 is the annual summer trip to hear a man (always) in ripped jeans yell at you in a small-college auditorium about how much God hates premarital sex and Internet pornography. In one of these very auditoriums I heard the phrase:“God cares more about his own glory than he does about any of us.”

There is a clinical term psychologists and therapists use for moments like these: “Bummer”

This man went on to say it is only because of Jesus’ death that God can even bear to look upon our inherent and inescapable “sinfulness.” From that point on, I concluded that if there’s one thing that takes the edge off of growing up in the powder keg of anxiety and self-loathing we call adolescence in America, it’s knowing that God had to kill the kid he really loved in order to remember to pick us “problems” up from soccer practice.

So I quit talking about sin, about substitutionary atonement, because it seemed like piling on, and I’ve noticed many of my contemporaries have done the very same thing. But, as I see more and more adolescents whose “normal” anxiety baseline mirrors what clinicians would have hospitalized people for in the 1950s; or who constantly refresh their phones in search of updated GPAs on the school’s online grade book,; or who cook, clean, and care for siblings because both of their parents work 60 hours a week just to pay the mortgage, and who feel like failures “constantly” (as one recently put it) for not being able to survive in this kind of world, I struggle to find a more apt term for what we’re all living under than sin.

Philosopher Alain de Botton noted in his book Religion for Atheists that the concept of sin is due for a resurgence among the non-religious, precisely because it provides people across the religio-cultural spectrum an opportunity to externalize their pain and frustrations onto a scapegoat. Which, from an atheist, borders on revivalism.

What if we’ve been misunderstanding the point of sin? What if this concept, instead of inviting normal people with long commutes and weird family baggage to blame themselves on a cosmic scale for coming up short, is actually about giving people a way of externalizing their failure and pain onto something we can universally struggle against, together?

What if sin, rather than sinners, is our problem? And, what if the cure isn’t to talk less about it and take more responsibility for its reign on Earth, but to talk more about it and struggle against it with every fiber we have left?

Sin is why elementary school kids know what the phrase “active shooter drill” means.
Sin is why health care isn’t an unalienable right for humans in America.
Sin is why corporations have more power over our political process than actual communities of humans.
Sin is why our political dialogue reads like the bathroom wall at the high school where I work.
Sin is why religion always has a cut list.
Sin is what forces moms back into the workforce almost immediately after giving birth to their children.
Sin is why Taco Bell has a breakfast menu.

What if in our reticence to harken back to the bygone eras of sweaty revivals and tearful altar calls, we have lost the ability to demonize the demonic? It would seem that reclaiming a way of talking about what this kind of environment does to people created in the image of God — those with a cellular propensity for great beauty, selflessness, humor, and generosity — without turning the people themselves into the problem (into sinners) is the whole purpose of atonement.

Because in the absence of sin-talk, we haven’t done away with the demonization entirely, we’ve just transferred it to the living, breathing humans we have bound to the altar atop Mt. Moriah. In my experience, we’ve all got somebody we’re trying to sacrifice for the good of everyone else.

Yes, some of them are in poverty.
Yes, some of them failed geometry.
Yes, some of them say curse words and punch things (or humans) when they’re angry.
Yes, some of them are trying to sleep off whatever happened last night.
Yes, some of them know that they are “problems.”

Mercifully, before Abraham plunged the knife into his son Isaac, the divine screamed “Stop!”
Mercifully, before the world turned on itself, Jesus took up his cross and walked the lonely road to his death.
Mercifully, when the world needs a scapegoat, God volunteers so we don’t have to find an alternative.

You could say God is willing to die for us, because God cares more about us than God does about God’s own glory.

So, with that out of the way, your ethnically homogenous middle class church (and its budget, building, and membership) is probably shrinking not because your local megachurch just opened a third location in the old CVS across the street from you, but thanks almost entirely to the fact that the Middle Class in America is shrinking. Your church’s formational activities, its “mission” work, its schedule, its business meetings, its worship style (or lack thereof), and even the delineations in pay it makes between clergy and support staffs (or even between “senior” clergy and associate clergy), all work in concert to form your congregation into what it means to be a member of the social class that dominates the demographics of your faith community, and not in what it means to be a participant in a countercultural revolution bringing heaven to earth.

For instance, many young working class Americans don’t have Sundays off. I’m going to say it louder for those of you whose sanctuary sound systems are ailing: A LARGE NUMBER OF YOUNG AMERICANS DON’T HAVE SUNDAYS OFF BECAUSE THEY WORK RETAIL. Also, many young working class Americans don’t have evenings off, and if they do, they don’t have childcare because their partners are also working.

Most “young families” (the veritable catnip for aging congregations nervous about making it) don’t have enough disposable income (or vacation time) to take an eight-day international mission excursion for the low, low price of $4000 a head, let alone volunteer to cover the hot dog expenses for your annual post-VBS cookout.

In the midst of your church wide “revisioning,” “relauching,” “rebranding,” and “reimagining” projects you are likely undertaking due to falling budget and attendance numbers, I might suggest an alternative to the tried and true model of shaming older millennials (those in their early-to-mid-thirties) and the generations ambling along behind them for their “selfishness,” “lack of priorities,” or for “constantly staring at their phones and forcing their kids to play travel soccer.

Instead, a more helpful approach might involve looking at the larger data sets reminding us that most young Americans enter the workforce better educated and more indebted than any generation in history, and thanks to wage stagnation, a lack of occupational stability, and a constantly inflating standard of living, an indebtedness that keeps them as the first generation since the Great Depression to do worse financially than their parents and grandparents.

The reason many young people are delaying marriage and having fewer children isn’t just because they’re playing Fortnite in the basement, it’s because they still have roommates, lack trustworthy health insurance, and work two jobs in the “gig-economy.”

So, where am I going with all of this?

What if instead of competing with area churches for the few remaining members of a greatly diminished social class who can truly “appreciate” and “support” what your church has “to offer” (think how utterly ridiculous it is to conceive of Christianity as some sort of self-help subscription service), your faith community decided to create worship opportunities at nontraditional times for people who work nontraditional hours?

What if your congregation pooled its resources not to re-roof the Christian Education annex, but to get community members out of crippling student loan and credit card debt?

What if your congregation worked to foster organizational opportunities for people of differing social classes and generations to build actual relationships and understanding rather than siloing them in different worship styles, “Sunday school” classrooms, and once-a-year backpack distribution lines?

What if your congregation started encouraging its participants to upend and delegitimize the rules of our consumeristic market economy by simply paying its support staff a living wage, working to decrease widespread income inequality between senior and associate level staff members, and modeling for a weary and broken American moral compass what it looks like to believe that a budget is an unshaking moral pronouncement of one’s values rather than the determiner of what values one can afford to hold from year to year?

What if your church actually practiced the teachings of Jesus together, even if those teachings came in direct contrast to the teachings of what it means to be happy, healthy, and wealthy in a version of America that no longer exists?

At the least, what if your church stopped believing that the meaning of Christmas is best communicated by giving people (both here and abroad) boatloads of consumer products they neither need nor still appreciate by the middle of January?

What would the world, or our country, or our cities, or our neighborhoods look like if, when people of meager means saw your building they didn’t see a poverty-shaming handout delivery system, an impenetrable stained glass fortress, or a place where rich white people pass the time thanking the divine for not making them poor, or a Republican, or a Democrat, or closed minded, or progressive, or Presbyterian, or Methodist, or Baptist, or Evangelical, or a grocery store clerk with only Tuesdays off?

To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else, Jesus told this parable: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’ But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’ I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” — Jesus of Nazareth

See what I mean about being radical? Honestly, it’s like trying to convert to a different religion, which I suppose was kind of his point.

Open letters delivered over the internet are typically one of the least interesting and most easily dismissed mediums for getting your point across, especially to people who will probably disagree with you. This is because open letters are straw men (or straw women, or straw people, I’m not sure what we’re doing with gender neutrality and scarecrows) stuffed up with the worst components of our opponents’ position, and then precisely eviscerated as a way of rallying our base to their battle stations.

So you should believe me when I remind you that, as someone who could probably be considered an “expert” in writing things for free on the internet that end up having all sorts of negative professional implications, I don’t relish the penning of something like this. It’s just that I feel the need to leave some kind of public record for the authorities who will later fish our bloated and waterlogged religion out of the river, and will have nothing to go on but dental records.

Consider this letter my back molar.

_____________________________________

Dear Fellow Christian Who Will Never Read This Open Letter Because I Am Your Mortal Political Opponent, And You Stopped Following Me on Facebook Because I Shared “Something Political” and You Quietly Told Your Phone I Was A Liberal,  

First of all, how are you?

I haven’t seen you since Thanksgiving, or church, or second-period algebra, or that evangelical youth camp where we spent a summer together, I sure hope you’re well! I must say, I’ve been reading and hearing about your support of our president’s increasingly dangerous “policy” positions…

(From racism parading as “law and order,” to colluding with the bad guys from Rocky 3, to tax cuts supporting only the wealthiest citizens of our country, to edging towards apocalypse — via Jerusalem or Pyongyang, whichever fuse lights first — and now to grandstanding support of an accused child sex offender for the Senate.)

…and I have become concerned about your “theology.”

It seems your faith has become incredibly political these days, and that you’ve forgotten “the gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,” trading it for “the praise of (wo)men” in large houses in Washington, with large Twitter followings, and large platforms provided by for-profit Christian schools and nonprofit shoeboxes.

I remember one time you helpfully reminded me that in my strident support of African Americans mobilizing in large numbers to protest being gunned down in their neighborhoods by police officers in tanks that I was, as a pastor, no longer “sticking to the gospel of Jesus Christ and his saving death on the cross.” According to your reminder, my public (read: tepid internet) support of the Black Lives Matter movement was actually “harming my witness” to people “across the political spectrum.” You told me I needed to get “back to the gospel” ASAP, otherwise it might be time to find another pulpit (read: “youth event” because I’m only allowed to work with adolescents in churches) or career.

I remember you had a similar reminder when I marched alongside people of many faiths and orientations in protest to a twice-rejected law banning Muslim families from our country.

I remember you had a similar reminder when I gave a sermon about nonviolence, the dangers of unending militarism, and the impact of PTSD on soldiers reintegrating into families, communities, and the American workforce following their bloody service to our country.

I remember you had a similar reminder when I publicly questioned the motivations behind barring LGBTQ individuals from full inclusion in the life and ministry of God’s family on earth.

I even remember you had a similar reminder when I began asking questions about why no one in our community takes the teachings of Jesus and the book of Acts literally (especially the light socialism), but everyone in our community takes a few passages from Leviticus literally. (And no, not the ones about showing your boils to the priest!)

Each time, you gently, or not so gently (BREATHLESSLY IN ALL CAPS WITH NO BREAKS FOR PUNCTUATION) invited me to reflect on what these issues “had to do with the gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,” and whether I might be attempting to cram “my agenda” into the mouth of Jesus and his saving work on the cross.

Because, in your words, “my politics” had (or has) replaced or superseded or undermined “my theology.”

I totally get that.

In some ways you might have been (or are currently) right. One of my issues is that I desperately want people to think I’m smart, and bookish, and cool, and aloof in a James Dean-with-bad-skin-and-a-masters-in-divinity-sort-of-way. I do love John Oliver and John Stewart and Stephen Colbert and Sam Bee and Larry Wilmore, but not because I’m a coastal-liberal-elite subsisting solely on the tears of regular readers of the Drudge Report (I went to a state school, live in East Tennessee, and make less than you do), but because they are (for me) some sort of ubermensch cooked up in a lab by Aaron Sorkin inspiring me to believe that people rail against something for reasons other than ratings (even if they don’t).

Sheepishly, I often wish more people read my stuff, and when they don’t, I’m tempted to rattle my own saber as a way of igniting my base or offending “yours.” And you’re probably right, I often chase the “praise of men (and women and everyone in between),” and am quite often wrong about a majority of things, most of which involve my love of righteous (although action less) indignation. I’m more of a hashtagger and sermonizer (when I get the chance), than self-disinterested marcher for justice. I have my own baggage, and most of it involves using religion, politics, and, in a pinch, even “you” to satisfy the dissonance I so often feel because my actions fall far short of my words and stinging rhetoric.

You could say I’m a bit of a clanging symbol, or a whitewashed tomb, or a bad karaoke rendition of a breathtaking Jon Stewart rant from the good ole days.

I hope that you’re still reading, because this isn’t some sort of apology that I hope will inspire you to apologize for what’s *cough* REALLY THE PROBLEM HERE *cough* — but that in baring my own scars (kind of like Jesus following his crucifixion) and wounds and fears and baggage, you might feel safe enough to unlock the door to the baggage keeping you and your own tribe cut off “from the authorities.” We won’t get anywhere together if we keep letting corporations and their preferred politicians and news personalities set the ground rules for who we listen to, or how we can or can’t speak with one another.

The more we lock the doors to people who disagree with us, the more we willingly elect pedophiles to the Senate, abusers to the House, deranged Tweeters to the White House, and megalomaniacal victimizers to the Academy. 

I’m rather tired of having to cut through an atmosphere of skepticism and cynicism and tribalism (some of the fumes from which I take full responsibility) whenever I want to talk to you about how I don’t think cutting taxes to people living in the stratosphere of our economic food chain will change the lived experience of people in abject poverty, or people in middle-class poverty, or people in upper-middle-class poverty. I also don’t find it terribly helpful that I have to hear that, because I’m interested in a larger federal government (resulting in me voting for Democrats from time to time — although that’s probably going to change) that somehow makes me “not a Christian” or someone who no longer “believes in the gospel.”

I will allow your self-constructed narrative of a political Christianity almost solely concerned with limiting (and eliminating) abortions, the rights of LGBTQ persons, and the absence of federal help to people in poverty, if you’ll allow me to continue to consider myself a “follower of Jesus” when I include marginalized people at the statehouse and at my communion table (which, SPOILERS, because our democracy is no longer interested in being anything more than a feudal patronage system, is ALL OF US NOT NEEDING THAT PRIVATE PLANE TAX WRITE-OFF).

However, I should state that I will always believe that your support of Donald Trump, Roy Moore, and the other court evangelicals who — so desperate for some White House correspondence stock — willingly sold you (and our Lord and Savior) out for at least 30 pieces of silver was where your movement jumped the shark.

I appreciate your interests in protecting the rights of the unborn at all costs, I just wish the rights of the rest of us already born didn’t have to be trampled underfoot in the process.

One more thing you were probably right about is that your religion (and mine) is under attack, but not from liberal arts professors at Vassar, or the Hollywood establishment, or the work of Robert Jeffress and James Dobson. Our respective Christianities are being laid waste by special interests, namely ours, and the ways we have sought to weaponize our fidelity.

Because I’m a (sometimes) pastor, I’ll close by saying that toward the end of Genesis, Abraham believes he hears the voice of God inviting him to take his long-promised heir, Isaac, to the top of nearby Mt. Moriah in order to sacrifice the person for whom he had most longed, as bloodily concrete evidence of Abraham’s fidelity to his God. However, upon reaching the peak, binding Isaac to a nearby altar, and raising the knife heavenward, God (at the last minute) invites Abraham to consider a ram caught in a nearby thicket as a suitable sacrifice (rather than his son).

Depending upon your tradition, this story can be read as one elucidating Abraham’s great, unwavering faith. A faith willing to go to the ends of the earth (or his own family tree) in search of ways to prove itself. This story can also be read as one that results only in questions about what kind of tyrannical, aloof, backwards God asks for this kind of faith, asks for this kind of sacrifice? One of my favorite interpretations invites us to consider that God is explicitly engaging a tradition (child sacrifice) that Abraham (a religious man in the wilderness of pre-history) would have been intimately familiar with, as a way of bringing him (almost satirically) to the edge of reason, as a way of prophetically calling into question an entire religious system that would require shedding the blood of other living, breathing human beings.

Consider the ram, Abraham. 

Against better judgment, we’ve dragged our faith to the top of the mountain, we’ve bound it to an altar built in the name of nationalism, democracy, and power, and now have the knife raised heavenward once again as a way of proving how serious we are about our commitment to religion. We’ve promoted abusers, we’ve covered up treason, we’ve cheered at the rejection and damnation and condemnation of our brothers and sisters, and we’ve spilt blood in service to our country and our religion (again and again and again).

What if instead of cheering us on from the skybox, God has been pleading with us to consider the ram the whole time?

What if our acts of fidelity to the tribe our back bumper testifies to have actually been the thing God was satirically calling into question from the beginning?

What if this whole thing is about the divine putting on display how far we’re willing to let our misguided faith in a structure, or a system, or a party, or a religion, or a country take us?

Consider the ram, Abraham.  

I’ve been willing to sacrifice so many of you, living, breathing, gifts on the altar of my faith-based righteous indignation and fear of the news cycle.

I’m sorry, truly.

I hope that we can share a coffee, or a beer, or, as the earliest followers of Jesus did on the evening before his death, a shalomim (or fellowship) meal of bread and wine and reconciliation. If Jesus could break bread with the man who nailed him to a cross for 30 pieces of silver, then I dare say I could probably survive a meal with someone who thinks Sean Hannity has good ideas.

But no promises, reconciliation is a process.

Your (maybe) friend,
Eric

It’s a rather strange time to be alive.

So when a large group of Christians with very many Twitter followers, convened in Middle Tennessee this week to create and release a document they have ominously entitled “THE NASHVILLE STATEMENT” I had to know more. (Namely, because I love Connie Britton in the show Nashville and her other work on Friday Night Lights.)

However, instead of a theological justification for exactly why God allowed Hayden Panettiere, another Nashville character, to commit war crimes against Southern accents for roughly 6 seasons on network television, I got this:

“Evangelical Christians at the dawn of the twenty-first century find themselves living in a period of historic transition. As Western culture has become increasingly post-Christian, it has embarked upon a massive revision of what it means to be a human being. By and large the spirit of our age no longer discerns or delights in the beauty of God’s design for human life. Many deny that God created human beings for his glory, and that his good purposes for us include our personal and physical design as male and female. It is common to think that human identity as male and female is not part of God’s beautiful plan, but is, rather, an expression of an individual’s autonomous preferences. The pathway to full and lasting joy through God’s good design for his creatures is thus replaced by the path of shortsighted alternatives that, sooner or later, ruin human life and dishonor God.

This secular spirit of our age presents a great challenge to the Christian church. Will the church of the Lord Jesus Christ lose her biblical conviction, clarity, and courage, and blend into the spirit of the age? Or will she hold fast to the word of life, draw courage from Jesus, and unashamedly proclaim his way as the way of life? Will she maintain her clear, counter-cultural witness to a world that seems bent on ruin?”

To which, at first blush, I thought: FINALLY! a group of people willing to take a stand that could alienate them from their revenue streams in favor of delivering moral clarity on the issues currently besieging our globe like historic flooding resulting from climate change, institutional racism, violence parading as patriotism, and bald faced power grabs by “Christian leaders” so desperate for some White House correspondence stock that they have proclaimed Thermonuclear War a “God ordained right” for our president to undertake if he feels threatened.

Then I read this:

“WE DENY that adopting a homosexual or transgender self-conception is consistent with God’s holy purposes in creation and redemption.”

And this:

“WE DENY that the approval of homosexual immorality or transgenderism is a matter of moral indifference about which otherwise faithful Christians should agree to disagree.”

And (oddly enough) this:

“WE DENY that killing off Rayna James (Connie Britton) in Season 5 of Nashville made the show more dynamic. It didn’t, and is inconsistent with both God’s designs for soapy drama (see Shonda Rhimes) and/or a biblical definition of ‘Must See TV.'”

Of course THE NASHVILLE STATEMENT is a 10-page document signed by yet another cabal of “Christian leaders” during one of the most tumultuous summers in recent memory that unsurprisingly fails to mention anything constructive for people of faith and goodwill to do other than repudiate another group of people whom they have already repudiated ad nauseam.

So, in the spirit of tone-deafly dragging soapboxes into the middle of (say) a Houston convention center where thousands of now homeless families and individuals are trying to get some much needed sleep on uncomfortable cots thanks to a 500 year flood, may I suggest a few quick notes for your “NASHVILLE STATEMENT”?

1. The word “Transgenderism” sounds like something one might catch from eating undercooked shrimp on a Carnival cruise line. If it weirds you out for people so uncomfortable with their biological sex that they take steps at their own personal peril to mitigate this discomfort (like changing clothes, names, hair, and physiology), maybe don’t discuss it like it’s incurable gout. Personally, I enjoy addressing people with greetings like: “Hi Gary!” (That is, of course, only if they enjoy being called “Gary.”) I find using people’s preferred names and identities makes them more relatable and less likely to be sacrificed on the altar of my need to score political points from a pulpit or a Nashville Holiday Inn Convention Center (I’m assuming).

2. Please discontinue the use of phrases like “counter-cultural witness,” “biblical conviction,” and/or “courage” to describe taking a stand that absolutely WILL NOT result in rejection or reprimand from anyone paying your salaries, filling your nonprofit boards, watching your Christian television shows, questioning your political affiliations, buying your books, filling your conferences, or attending your seminaries and/or for-profit online schools of supernatural ministry. It isn’t courageous to energize your base.

3. For clarity’s sake: was anyone currently confused about where a group of mostly Southern Baptist men — more than one of which has blamed natural disasters on the existence of civil rights legislation protecting LGBTQIA people — stood on the issue of sexual and gender non-conformity? I must say, never in my life have I been more clear on how a person or pastor using the adjective “biblical” to describe anything from toothpaste brands to shallow justifications for electing Donald Trump to the highest office in the land feels about the LGBTQIA community. In short: we know, even without the PDF.

4. Naming this theological knee-capper of a resolution THE NASHVILLE STATEMENT as if it were going to be forever enshrined in the annals of revered Christian history feels about as historically weighty as those “Old Timey Photos” families take at Dollywood where dad’s holding a toy rifle and mom is weirdly dressed up like a sexy saloon worker. Not only is it pastiche and overpriced, it attempts to cheaply memorialize parts of American life that no one who actually lived through them would ever do voluntarily. (Exhibit A: cos-playing Confederate soldiers at your local monuments)

Whether you agree with the sentiments put forth by this statement, or you strongly oppose them, or you believe that healthy disagreement about other people’s sexuality and gender identity will serve to finally unravel the validity of a centuries old religious tradition that has been used to justify genocide and slavery on almost every continent: Let me remind you, the one (arguably) biblical definition of “courage” almost never involves nailing someone else to a cross in the name of your God.

According to the witness encountered in those testimonies to the life of Jesus so many pastors pass over on their way to Romans, the word courage or “counter-cultural witness” is typically reserved for those willing to die themselves — even when that “self” would later be termed “fully God” by some council in a city we can no longer find on a map — rather than a term for those using oppressed minority groups as a bullet shield for their own existential anxieties about losing political power in a changing world.*

(*NOTE: I even seem to remember reading somewhere that it was actually anxious religious leaders in bed with the Roman empire, and not people attempting to carve out a life on the margins of orthodox religious life, who brought Jesus to the executioner.)

So, here’s a much shorter statement:

God doesn’t kill, shame, reject, or condemn other people to save the world.

God allows God’s self to be killed, shamed, rejected, and condemned to save the world.

No matter how many people sign up for it, nailing other people to crosses designed for those of us who seek to follow this crucified God will always result in more chaos, fear, violence, and darkness.

And we need the light, now — more than ever — because the creek has already risen, and there are actual Nazis at the gate.

It’d be funny if it weren’t so devastatingly sad. 

I distinctly remember this sinkhole near my grandparent’s house that flooded anytime it rained for longer than a few hours. During one particularly wet spring, someone, in an effort to make the best of a bad situation, had decided to float upon the dirty sinkhole flood waters with a pink pool float that eventually found itself deflated and entangled for the better part of a few weeks in a 10-foot tree in the middle of a dry and open field.

It’d be funny if it weren’t so devastatingly sad. 

Recently, a rather insightful piece by Jacoba Urist appeared in the New York Times about the rise (and soon-coming-fall) of “minimalism” and its gospel of decluttered, anti-consumeristic centeredness found only at the conclusion of an individual’s journey to pare down his or her worldly possessions by interrogating each t-shirt individually to see which ones produce the most joy.

In the midst of her article, I was drawn to one observation in particular:

Still, critics chide minimalists for a kind of faux self-discipline. After all, if you can afford to toss your stuff, you can probably reacquire it should you change your mind and, say, come to find that your home carbonation system is indispensable…Tiny houses are in vogue, but not mobile homes, which have been around a while. As Dak Kopec, an environmental psychologist at the Boston Architectural College explained, it’s ‘more prestigious to say you live in a tiny home than a recreational vehicle or camper.’

The genesis of our issues as aspiring minimalists, as Urist notes, is the insatiable capitalism that forms the very ground upon which all of our propositions, personalities, and philosophies stand. Which seeks to explain why attempting to jettison an identity rooted in owning the most stuff will eventually devolve into an identity rooted in the ability to own the most stuff without having to own the most stuff. Essentially, minimalism quickly becomes a race to pay more for less.

Urist, once again:

According to the sociologist Joel Stillerman, author of “The Sociology of Consumption,” among certain educated, upper-middle-class segments of the United States and other Western societies, there is a connection between minimalist design and a quest for well-being. But minimalism is also meant to project taste, refinement and aesthetic knowledge. “These people,” he said, “are making the statement that ‘I can afford to have less. I appreciate books and travel and good meals.’”

This enlightened capitalist impulse may also explain why wealthy white people moving back into the inner city have this rather pernicious habit of buying up properties “with character” in historically zoned districts. Typically, these districts end up having surprisingly strict requirements about wood window replacement, but surprisingly lax requirements about skyrocketing home values that push minorities renting next door back to the suburbs from which the aforementioned white people initially fled for more “diverse” communities downtown comprised of people with all the same bumper stickers on their Subarus.

“I brake for ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.”
-2012 Subaru Forester

It’d be funny if it weren’t so devastatingly sad. 

As a pastor working for a denomination desperate to maintain its place in the world, I find the same impulse inherent in the ways in which us professional Christians talk about so-called “millennials” and how we can or can’t lure them into our sanctuaries for worship and Bible study, forgetting that the one requirement for being a millennial is disposable income and free time. Otherwise, you find yourself consigned to the generational dustbin known as “poverty” where one’s uniqueness and internet search histories go to die (namely, because they have no ad value).

The ecclesial hot-takes we pen and vociferously consume end up simply contradicting one another in a closed loop of conversations about the worship music preferences of 25 year olds, forgetting of course that 30 percent of the American workforce doesn’t get Sundays off anymore. (This percentage rises the younger you are.) Not many of these millennial exposés seek to cover the differences in the existential drives of, say, a working class, food insecure, and impoverished 25-year-old single mother living in Section 8 housing who took out a bad loan to cover tuition at a for-profit higher-ed institution, compared to those motivating the exhausted Baby Boomer next door who spends her days on a fixed income caring for two grandkids after losing her own 25-year-old daughter to an opioid addiction.

“Do people in poverty enjoy liturgical worship in cathedrals or guitar heavy synth-rock in converted shopping malls? I MUST KNOW!”
-Not RELEVANT magazine

According to the logic of insatiable capitalism, both of these women are poor, and therefore experience and understand life in exactly the same way, which should remain altogether mysterious for those of us in higher tax brackets with more complex issues. So when we talk despairingly about godless and rootless “millennials” wasting money on brunch and locally-sourced-artisanal-fedoras, we are standing on the shoulders of an entire system that understands the great question animating existence on this earth to be: “What’s the best way to spend all my extra resources?”

Should I go to church with my day off?

Should I volunteer more?

Should I go on incredible vacations or accrue too much modern furniture?

Should I overspend on a midtown loft near a thriving farmer’s market, or a house in a historic district surrounded by Caucasians who are surrounded by African Americans, or a suburban brick monstrosity in a good school district?

Should I send my kids to the public school with “academy” in its name, or the Woody Guthrie School for Mouth Harps and Organic Lentils, or the Wells Fargo School for Ill-Fitting Suits and Fiduciary Infidelity?

It’d be funny if it weren’t so devastatingly sad. 

At this moment of almost catatonic confusion about what to do with my “one wild and precious life,” like should I own more or less or better or greener or whole-30er, I remember that deflated pink pool float stuck in a tree 10 feet off the ground in the middle of a bone-dry field. And I’m quietly reminded that when the flood waters of my existential anxiety about what my life is supposed to be about recede, so will the usefulness of all the things I clung to in order to survive the storm of my uncertainty.

When my feet are back on solid ground — rooted in the historicity of the person of Jesus and his homeless, itinerant, and untimely execution at the hands of anxious religious elites and wealthy government-backed functionaries — I occasionally remember that a life measured by its ability to provide financial security at 65 (after spending the previous 40 years at a job I hated) is a wasted one.

Even if it never ends with a Lincoln Town Car inefficiently straddling two spots in a Publix parking lot outside Boca Raton. 

What if our struggles as aspiring minimalists, millennials, middle aged, and middle class Christians are rooted not in the fact that we didn’t take the message of the Church (whatever it may call itself for you) seriously enough, but that we took the message we received too seriously. The message teaching us subversively…

(through deacon, elder, and university boards made up of wealthy businessmen, the expected gender and education of our pastors and teachers, the size and feel of our buildings, and the sociological makeup of our sanctuaries and seminars)

…that people with the most money get to make the rules about God, government, and the good life.

Because those people, the successful ones steering boats in that Merrill Lynch commercial during Wheel of Fortune, conquer countries, erect palaces, have excellent taste, and even have the fellowship hall and the library named after them. And if God (or anyone else) tries to get in their way, historically, they have a habit of crucifying him. However, the one thing they’ve never been able to do, despite money and power and unfettered access to golf carts, is to keep God buried once they’ve laid him in the tomb.

Which could explain why the average Christian (numerically speaking) in our world today isn’t an evangelical man in the Southeast, but an impoverished, oppressed, Pentecostal-Catholic, Latin-American woman. 

No matter how much the Christian Church in America earns, or saves, or builds, or owns, or votes, or wins, if it continues to unquestioningly assume that value has anything at all to do with wealth and power, it will eventually find itself (once the waters of this life have receded) deflated, haggard, and strangely flapping in the breeze of an endlessly sunny day.

Or, as Jesus once remarked, for those of us who wish to save our lives, we must lose them, because it’s the anxious saving of our lives, that actually ends up doing us all in.

This is only growing more difficult for me in the wake of Humana’s cessation (the last remaining marketplace insurance provider in the Knoxville, TN area) of my family’s health coverage in 2018. A coverage my two-year-old (the one who casually mentioned the other day that all children are here to replace their parents) consistently depends upon every time he runs headfirst into the dining room table.

Likewise, I’ve come to learn that one of the stubborn things about growing up is that while we grow out of embarrassing, backwards, and unhelpful hobbies and habits (I’m looking at you DMB concert filled with white people in dreds), we have this way of almost immediately filling up that secretly-shameful-hobby-sized hole in our hearts with something more currently embarrassing.

Nowadays, I am regretfully enthralled by HGTV’s Fixer Upper. Without fail, after watching 45 minutes of Joanna Gaines explain why the interior of this week’s home looks almost identical to the interior of last week’s home, I find myself pulling up real estate listings on my computer, or mentally renovating my ancient hallway bathroom, or thinking about how maybe it’s time to replace the dirty vinyl siding on the outside of my 100-year-old house, or how I’m really owed a master bathroom with double sinks, or how I can find out how much you paid for your house as a way of sizing up where I stand in the great race toward dying with the most stuff.

And it’s all based on this pernicious idea that one’s ability to pay for something(s) they don’t need is the only morality needed to make the decision.

Here’s what I mean:

If you are in poverty because of generational and systemic inequality, your decision to buy the latest tennis shoes or iPhone becomes an issue of national interest. Words like should get indignantly thrown around at this point like, “You should choose to pay for health insurance instead of a new iPhone like the rest of us.”

However, if you are a person of means, spending $500,000 converting a dilapidated farm house in Waco, TX (where the average home values at about a third of this) into what amounts to a livable Urban Outfitters is considered quality, wholesome, family-friendly entertainment that all of us aspire to duplicate in our own shiplapped, open-concept homes.

Words like can get passively employed at this point, such as, “I’m glad I can finally upgrade to granite tops in this kitchen. The formica was KILLING ME.”

“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, that they didn’t stop to think if they should.” -Dr. Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park

What fills the nooks and crannies of my 32-year-old heart is the prevailing understanding that if I have enough money, I never have to explain myself, my choices, my renovations, my weekend plans, my preferences, my car(s), my beliefs, my politics, and my son’s exhausting extracurricular calendar to anyone. EVER.

And if I lack the means to “give my son everything he deserves” (read: at least three Disney trips before middle school), I have to spend the rest of my life apologizing and explaining and defending who I am, why I am, and what I am to everyone looking on from the cheap seats of my existence.

This only gets worse if you’re religious in America, because many of us grew up with the understanding that God “blesses” the faithful in really tangible, monetary expressions of divine favor that typically result in having more bedrooms than people in your family. God blesses people constantly with mundane conveniences like parking spaces, found keys, survived common colds, as well as longer lasting rewards for longer lasting faithfulness like good paying jobs with health insurance and 401(k)s, or spouses, or healthy children, or a nice house in a good school zone.

The odd thing about this kind of blessing is that, from my end at least, it appears to have a generational quality to it. Most of the people who came from parents blessed by this God and this God’s favor seemingly kept going to good schools, kept having exotic vacations, kept getting good jobs, kept having healthy kids, and kept repeating the whole blessed process again and again.

And here’s where things get tricky: It all happens independent of whether or not they persisted believing in this God.

As a straight, Caucasian, middle-class male who has professionally chosen to tether my family’s financial well being to the practice of the Christian faith, I can’t tell you how terrifying it is to come face-to-face with the fact that God’s “blessing” (however you interpret it) might not mean giving my son any of the things I always thought I would if I was faithful to this God.

I have this persistent fear that when my son replaces me (because of my lack of faithfulness and STEM education), I’ll have nothing to pass on to him. That my stubborn refusal to believe in the God I grew up hoping would reward me for believing will not only damn my own halting efforts at retirement, but my son’s as well.

I fear that my indignant belief both in a God who has a preferential option for oppressed people — as well as the unpopular idea that churches often participate in the perpetuity of this oppression when they never ask if they should spend millions on new building projects (as just one example) in a city where there isn’t enough affordable or transitional housing for people who need a place to sleep — will damn my own son’s efforts at providing safe housing for his family.

And I fear that my strident and unyielding commitment to preaching, writing, talking, and living into a faith that is as stooped, crumbly, and moss-covered as my modest home’s foundation will damn my own son’s efforts at hopefully, optimistically, and buoyantly believing that the world isn’t just a tragic loop of generational poverty and generational wealth determined by the accident of one’s birth.

I want to believe that God actually has as much to say to those of us able to constantly upgrade our lives as God does to those of us who can’t. But this belief is unpopular, heavy, and often unemployed when it’s aired publicly, leaving those of us attempting to desperately cling to this faith in the face of mounting bills and uncertainties and confused stares from the blessed and existentially stable among us — with the constant question of whether or not God has abandoned us, or we, God.

Even if it’s wrong, dumb, and shortsighted, I want to be able to at least give my son a generational advantage in believing that the resurrection was something more than just an opportunity to wear pastel sweater vests in a large and poorly air conditioned room with blessed and appropriately dressed middle-class white people.

I want him to at least receive the gift that comes from being a part of a family and a community of people who practice the ancient art of (sometimes foolishly) depending upon a divine force — rather than the invisible hand of the stock market — for worth, direction, hope, and stability.

Put simply, when my son replaces me, I want him to believe in a God that believes in him, even if the dollar amount in his savings account begs to differ. Because if he does then, that will mean that at some point in my life, I will have believed it also — which would be quite the miracle.

Much of my extended family at one time or another identified as “tee-totalers,” or folks who abstain from alcohol consumption of any kind for religious (read: Baptist) reasons. So, it was rather surprising when I happened across an almost empty handle of gin under the kitchen sink while cleaning out my tee-totaling great aunt’s rancher following her death. By comparison, this seemed like a rather tame discovery compared to the eulogy delivered a day earlier by her Baptist pastor (and friend) who spun a few yarns about driving his own mother and my great aunt to the casino one state over on the weekends when they were younger.

The shocking thing here wasn’t necessarily my great-aunt’s wild side, but that everyone handled it so well, like they had known for years. As I later came to find out, they had, and it floored me. It wasn’t that my thoroughly modern sensibilities were especially unnerved by the drinking and slot playing (I grew up watching “The Real World”), but because I had actually believed her when she talked to me about God’s judgement and the dangers of alcohol. I came to realize that the reason everyone seemed totally fine about this sort of hidden inconsistency in the life of my saintly great-aunt, was because they had all grown up Baptist in East Tennessee: where disavowed dichotomy between one’s life and faith is our religious mother tongue.

Perhaps you’re familiar with the more serious examples of this whole “don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing” sorts of logic in my Baptist upbringing:

Where our left hands are going on domestic and foreign mission trips, feeding homeless folks, ordaining women in our church, collecting money for any and every ill besieging our global and local community, praying for the souls and lives of people in crisis, and (in the case of my home church) starting an inter-denominational food and clothing distribution center for struggling families in our area.

While our right hands vociferously support legislation removing necessary infrastructure and financial support from the families we serve, refuse (politely) to actually hire any of the women we ordain, slander those seeking crisis services, pull our kids out of public schools in the wake of community transition, silence questions about race and inequality, and shake in anger at anyone identifying as a Christian who calls into question these incongruent postures towards the universe.

Growing up Caucasian, Middle-Class, and Baptist in East Tennessee was (and is) an effort in constantly splitting oneself in two over, and over, and over again in the name of the Lord.

With each passing year it becomes more and more obvious that not naming reality as it’s actually happening is a deeply-held spiritual practice in the Baptist tradition. No matter the cultural winds and waves besieging their boat, Baptists possess this stalwart, unwavering commitment to interpreting and reading the Bible with great conviction in the midst of any and every cultural and actual storm.

They should be commended for their steely-eyed-faithfulness.

However, this stalwart, unwavering commitment oftentimes means eliminating from view any of the ways the Biblical text might challenge how our right hands are voting, spending, speaking, and living. Which means, if you’re Baptist in the Southeast you probably haven’t heard your pastor speak glowingly of last month’s Women’s March, or mention that Black Lives Matter, or question the current administration’s posture toward an increasingly diverse world, or point out that Jesus of Nazareth grew up the son of Middle Eastern refugees fleeing political unrest and genocide following his birth that we celebrated just a few months ago.

Despite the fact that all of these beliefs are ardently held by people of deep Christian conviction, many of whom, are paid by your church to pray and deliver sermons.

Pastors and church leaders across the country seem continually flabbergasted by their (almost entirely Caucasian and Evangelical) congregations who, as recently as this week, gave the current administration a 75% approval rating. This is especially confusing when compared to a letter signed by 500 major Evangelical leaders (i.e. pastors) from all 50 states critical of the Trump administration’s executive order on immigration.

For those of us who grew up Baptist in the Southeast, this disavowed dichotomy between our faith and our political life isn’t a recent aberration brought starkly into view by Donald Trump. Instead, it’s the manifestation of a longstanding unwillingness to unite these two parts of our souls out of both the practice of lets-all-get-along Caucasian Southern politeness, and the misguided application of the inherently Baptist belief in the separation of Church and State. Which is why, in times like these, Baptist pastors remain warmly vague and intentionally circumspect in their sermons, while fuming indignantly about their congregations’ politics behind closed doors.

As a Baptist kid in East Tennessee, one of the passages I grew up hearing often was the 48th verse from Matthew, chapter 5:

“Be perfect, therefore, as your Heavenly Father is perfect.”

This verse encapsulates the whole of what it means to be a practicing Baptist Christian in America: that being, the pursuit of socially acceptable moral perfection at all costs (including, but not limited to the binding and gagging of all the unsavory parts of your life in the trunk of your soul).

Enter my big-hearted, faithful, slot-playing, gin drinking, Bible thumping, teal sweatsuit wearing, tee-totaling, great aunt. A woman who worked at the local health department for over 30 years tirelessly delivering medical services for indigent clients, while also bemoaning the “welfare state” that allowed her to retire at 65 with a pension and access to healthcare because “God helps those who help themselves, Eric.”

While growing up Caucasian, Middle-Class, and Baptist in East Tennessee instilled in me a love for the Biblical text, faithfully serving my community, the nuances of St. Paul’s missionary journeys, and the Welch’s Grape Juice flowing through the veins of my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ once a quarter, one thing it never taught me was how to be okay with my own and the world’s rather profound inconsistencies.

Luckily, a few years ago a friend of mine reminded me that thankfully the Bible wasn’t originally written in the King’s English. Which means, in Matthew 5:48, the word “perfect,” is actually the Greek word “teleios,” and generally translated means “the end of something” or carries with it the idea of “completion or finishing.” A better translation (put forth by both Greek philosophers and early Christians) might read: “Be complete, therefore, as your Heavenly Father is complete.” The word for “perfect” in Hebrew, Jesus’ religious mother tongue, is the word “shalom,” which loosely translated connotes this same sense of peace, completeness, rocking-chair-on-the-porch-with-a-glass-of-sweet-tea sorts of at-home-ness with the world.

Be complete, be at home, be at peace with a complicated world, therefore, as your Heavenly Father is complete, at home, and at peace with a complicated world.

Which makes sense in light of this verse’s location in a much larger passage about making space for our enemies at our own tables, welcoming and loving people who can’t actually pay us back for that love, and continuing to live in solidarity with a complex and sometimes violent world even if it kills us in the process.

As one verse from earlier in Matthew 5 reminds us:

“[God] makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.”

When I remember my great aunt, it isn’t the schizophrenic religiosity or the fact that she stubbornly called wasps “waspers” that dominates my memories, it’s that she possessed this tee-totaling faith in me, a cynical, acne-prone, and sullen adolescent boy from a divorced family trying (often unsuccessfully) to find his groove in the world. She never let me believe that my limping imperfections, near-constant self-doubt, and exhausting cynicism were anything but a gift and a welcome friend to the divine (even though she would never have said something weird like “the divine”).

Despite what she may have believed about God’s preferences for how people spend their food stamps, or how the world began, or how it will end, or to which political party God always sends tax-deductible donations, none of that mattered when she picked me up from school, and listened to me complain about how alone I often felt. She was simply there, idling in her green Buick regal, always on time, always fully present, sweatsuit and all.

In the face of inconsistency (both theological and existential), her love made her perfect, complete, congruent, and I hope one day love will do the same to me. As St. Paul and Jon Lennon sort-of put it, in the end all we have (or need) is love, not right beliefs, not moral perfection, not political power, nor even the rhetorical high-ground, nothing but love makes it out of this thing alive.

As Ash Wednesday reminds us, everything else is just dust and air.