When God Won’t Let Me Go Off On The Evangelicals

I was planning to go off on the evangelicals in this blog post. After First Baptist Church of Dallas went all-in on their nationalist idolatry, releasing an official CCLI Christian praise song called “Make America Great Again.” After I heard about an angry white man shooting a black girl with his concealed handgun out of road rage. After Donald Trump released his wrestlemania tweet.

I was debating about whether to call them “God and country evangelicals” or “white evangelicals.” If I called them “God and country,” I could specify that it’s not all evangelicals, just the ones who literally worship the American flag more than they do Jesus. But I like using the phrase “white evangelicals” because it’s a reminder that race is the real issue behind everything and I can prove it.

At first, I was going to talk about the way that the original Christians never would have been thrown to the lions if they were God and country evangelicals, because when the early Christians refused to offer a sacrifice to Caesar, that was the equivalent of refusing to stand up for the Star Spangled Banner, and God and country evangelicals would never do that. But then, I got this idea that I would go through Romans 1:18-32, the anti-gay crowd’s favorite passage in the Bible. I would rewrite it in terms of the favorite idols of white evangelicals, showing how their idols filled them with every kind of wickedness, evil, covetousness, and malice, which proves that they were actually the ones Paul was talking about, not the gay people.

I’ve been on a roll the last few days on Facebook and Twitter. People are starting to share and retweet my stuff (which always makes me feel strangely uneasy). My creative juices are flowing. I’ve got zeal boiling over like a ripe volcano in my brain. So I was fired up to say something really poignant and devastating. Because Donald Trump is an indictment of at least 81% of evangelical theology (since 81% of them voted for him in case you needed a reminder) and I just wanted my words to pound their faces into the ground like Trump was pounding Vince McMahon’s face into the ground in the video that he tweeted.

But then I found myself last night in a conversation with a military guy who had a conservative seeming haircut and biceps and mannerisms. And his wife has cancer that’s come back for a second time and it’s metastasized all over. And he kept on saying, “The Lord has blessed us so much.” And they’ve got two beautiful kids who were playing with my kids and having a great time in the pool. We didn’t talk about anything earth-shattering. It was mostly just dad small-talk. But he was friendly and humble. He was patient and compassionate with his kids. And talking with him made me feel warm and fuzzy inside.

So it got me confused.

What does resisting evil look like? Is it going off on the apostate idolaters who think that everyone else is an apostate idolater by clobbering them ironically with their favorite clobber passage from Romans and putting their boy Donald’s wrestlemania tweet at the end with a huge caption that says EIGHTY-ONE PERCENT in all caps?

Or is it relishing and holding up human interaction where ideological categories don’t exist and two dads are just watching their kids swim together?

So if I like the warm and fuzzy feeling I have when I’m just a dad talking to another dad, is that me retreating into my white male privilege and pretending the world around me isn’t a giant dumpster fire? Or on the flip side, am I being a toxic, self-righteous asshole who is hardened against God’s love when I tell off the white “God and country” evangelicals?

Last night I also got a message from a queer post-evangelical Christian woman who said reading my blog was liberating for her in her journey. It’s for people like her that I seek to blow up the self-assuredness of toxic evangelical theology. To smash the chains of the people being crushed by it who need to hear someone else repudiate it so they can walk out into freedom.

Jesus told off the Pharisees. That’s how he showed solidarity to the marginalized. He wasn’t a reasonable, enlightened third wayer who rose above the pettiness of “both extremes.” He was an asshole to people who needed to get chewed out.

But I’m still confused.

If I were the pastor at this military guy’s church on the Sunday before the 4^th of July and I shook his hand on the way out, I might slip and say, “Thank you for your service” instead of “The Lord be with you.”

I think creating a Christian praise song out of a partisan political campaign slogan is frightening and awful. But I did belt out “America the Beautiful” yesterday morning at the Catholic mass I attended.

I would never advocate putting an American flag in a Christian house of worship, but I’m not sure I could commit to demanding its removal if it were hanging up when I arrived.

So how do we prevent fascism from being normalized in America? Is that actually what’s happening around us? Was Donald Trump’s wrestlemania Tweet an actual threat of violence against the press or just an awkward old-man joke? It’s genuinely hard to tell what’s real and what’s hysteria. I’m not sure what it looks like for things to “cross the line” unequivocally or what I’m actually supposed to do when that happens. Am I supposed to stop talking to dads at swimming pools who might be on the other side?

What do God and country evangelicals really look like anyway? Are they angry white men who listen to Rush Limbaugh all day and shoot black girls in a fit of rage any time there’s a traffic misunderstanding? Or are they dads whose wives have cancer and who talk with genuine, incomprehensible faith and gratitude about their lives?

What am I supposed to be learning here and what am I supposed to be teaching? Am I supposed to be prove the evangelicals wrong in order to break through to the people in their clutches who are inwardly tormented and need enough spiritual leverage to rip themselves out of a tight-knit community they love that has toxic theology they don’t love? Or is proving a point what I’m supposed to be learning not to do? Does bad theology matter if the people who have it are awfully nice, complex human beings?

I’m still confused. But it seemed like what I was supposed to do this time was dump out all the questions that are swirling around in my brain for you to see. I don’t know what I’m doing. But I really want to.

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