Culture war blindness: “I can see people but they look like trees walking”

Yesterday morning at our church staff meeting, we read the story of Jesus’ double-healing of the blind man at Bethsaida in Mark 8:22-26. Jesus has to rub his spit on the man’s eyes twice, because the first time that he does it, the man says, “I can see people but they look like trees walking.” In the context of another week of evangelical Christian blogosphere drama, God confronted me with this realization. Like the blind man at Bethsaida, my vision is blurred when I look at the people on the other side of all the arguments. They look like trees to me in the sense that I can basically see where they’re going but I don’t see their faces. Just like many others in my generation of white evangelicals, I have been afflicted by culture war blindness.

One of the things I’ve wrestled with over the past few years is the legitimacy of deconstruction, the basic critical move of postmodernity, in which you don’t judge a book by its cover since book covers always lie and there is always a deeper agenda that the book is trying to hide about itself. As an English major, I was indoctrinated in deconstruction. You never simply take a text at face value. Every character in a novel is an unreliable narrator defined by a set of privileges and presumptions that reflect a certain worldview. I have transferred the text-reading skills of my English major training into my people-reading as a social commentator on the trends of white evangelical culture. The question is whether this causes me to see trees instead of people.

I think deconstruction is a natural response to the cynicism with which people package themselves in our age of social media. Maybe I’m misreading others, but I know that I am constantly performing and posturing as I consider all the subtleties through which I can engender other peoples’ sympathy with my self-presentation. It’s not something that I choose to do, but more of a tyranny that haunts me and constantly wages war against the assurance that my worth comes from God’s unconditional acceptance. It’s probably the case that other people are not nearly as obsessively self-conscious and stage-managed as I am, but they sure do look that way to me. The more I sense that somebody is opaquely wrapping themselves in pious posturing and pretending that they have no personal investment in what they are doing because they’re strictly concerned with “God’s glory” or the “Bible’s authority,” etc, the more I want to peal away the outer layers of BS like an onion and find the real agenda underneath.

In any case, I have a lot of theories about the “forest” of trees that I see walking around. I see a family values movement that has been a backlash against the perceived excesses of the civil rights movement and continues to justify itself with coded digs against “welfare mamas” and the “culture of dependency.” I see a suburbia originally built by racism whose sensibilities about safety  continue to be reinforced by a basic belief in the total depravity of everyone else. I see a suburban megachurch Christianity that never stops congratulating itself for making the default state of affairs in a stable middle-class family into the moral perfection of the kingdom of God. These sensibilities about the forest textures of at least Southern white evangelicalism seem reasonably legitimate, but they obviously can’t do justice to individual people. Because people aren’t “trees” that obey sociological trends.

So I had a recent experience in which the trees I was watching became people and it was very disarming. Some of you read the recent post I wrote trying to grapple with my ambivalence about the ugliness of the Sovereign Grace abuse scandal and the fury with which my post-evangelical tribe has attacked the Gospel Coalition in response. I really wasn’t trying to be sympathetic to the Gospel Coalition. I’ve always thought that they were Sith and I’m a Jedi. But then a TGC guy whom I thought was being a jerk in social media wrote a comment on my blog in which he confessed to being a jerk. And it made me feel bad for him, because I thought about whether I could reasonably expect to keep my composure in front of a furious twitter firing squad. So I went back and edited my piece to soften what I had to say about him.

Then a pastor who’s affiliated with the Gospel Coalition wrote me a long email that showed me his heart and made it impossible for me to dismiss him as one of the Sith lords responsible for the demise of American Christianity. I actually think we’re on the same team. I shared with him my sense that God has called me to share the gospel with people who share my progressive sensibilities and probably wouldn’t give a hearing to the more conservative message that he preaches. And he was very pastoral and encouraging in response to this.

God used all this to disarm my rage, and it actually felt really liberating. It’s also part of a growing crisis that I’m having about the book I’ve felt called to write. It seemed like a much less daunting task when people were trees and I was more confident in my righteous zeal, when I was perfectly clear on all the problems with evangelical Christianity and all the solutions that I was going to offer to save it. I’m not sure what to do now. I’m worried that what I have to do to make my book proposal juicy enough for publishers is to get back to the “clarity” I had when people were trees and I knew who the Jedis were (me) and who the Sith were (Calvinists).

I remain convinced that there are obstacles to the gospel within evangelical culture that I’ve been called to name and dismantle. I just want to do so in such a way that I’m not treating people like trees. The irony of course is that this has been my complaint all along. That the people whom I treat like trees are not seeing other people, but only the categories of “tree” dictated by their ideology, whether it’s “homosexual” or “illegal alien” or “Palestinian terrorist” or another type of condemned outsider. Jesus didn’t do ideology. He interacted with people on a case by case basis. He never said, “I’d really like to help you, but the Torah says ______ so my hands are tied.” He saw the humanity of every individual he encountered and responded pastorally whether the situation called for a gentle healing hand or a stern rebuke.

What this whole experience has confirmed for me is the power of humbling yourself before other people. When two Calvinists humbled themselves before me, they ceased to be Sith in my eyes. They won far more ground with me through vulnerability than if they had pinned me down in some kind of bitter argument where I was forced to concede that the Bible confirms all five points of the TULIP. If you want to win others for Christian friendship rather than just winning arguments, then try showing your humanity to them. That’s the way to stop being a tree.