This is one of those worlds-collide stories, from eight or nine years ago.
Instead of doing the table reading at the theater, the whole cast was invited to the playwright’s house for the read-through and a friendly dinner featuring the playwright’s husband’s famous chili. This news was met with great enthusiasm by the veteran members of the company. Skip lunch, they told me. Save room for the chili.
It was kind of wild and strange for me to find myself a part of this odd little artsy world. I’d done community theater and some dinner theater (“interactive murder mysteries,” oy). And now here I was, surrounded by real actors with real training — people whose professional headshots had appeared in honest-to-G0d copies of Playbill. And somehow I wound up part of this workshop, bringing this madly ambitious, experimental playwright’s remarkable visions to the stage.
So I think part of the reason I wound up talking to the playwright’s husband was because he was the one other person in the room who wasn’t quite a part of this avant garde theater world. Sure, he was married to an edgy playwright, but he wasn’t an artist himself.
“What do you do?” I asked. “Besides making amazing chili?”
He was, it turns out, something of a number-cruncher — an efficiency expert with a commitment to measuring and maximizing productivity. Maybe that sounds a bit dull and wonkish, but his job was actually pretty exciting. He traveled all over the world measuring and enhancing the tangible results of relief and development projects for a large evangelical Christian agency.
He was, like me, an evangelical Christian. And he was, like me, an evangelical Christian whose faith in Jesus compelled him to work for justice for the poor. That’s an even smaller subcultural niche than the world of avant garde theater.
No surprise, then, that it turned out we knew a lot of the same people. I started naming a bunch of folks who worked for his agency — people whose writing I had published when I was the editor of an evangelical Christian magazine, or whose work we had written about. He knew many of them — including my former boss, who had been an executive in that organization. And, just like my old boss and many of my other friends who work for relief NGOs, the playwright’s husband could also sometimes sound like Carmen Sandiego — “Oh you know Amy? She’s terrific! Last I saw her she was working on a water project in Eritrea.”
It was a bit odd, though, having that little evangelical family reunion there in that setting. Not only were we surrounded by actors and theater people, we were drinking beer.
The playwright’s husband was a Brit, and evangelical Christians in the UK don’t carry the same 19th-century cultural baggage as evangelical Christians in America do. But still, he knew that many American evangelicals regarded beer-drinking as sinful and theologically fraught. He understood that it wouldn’t be prudent for him, as a representative of sorts of a large evangelical organization, to be seen in public drinking a beer. That would be a source of “controversy.” It would become a Thing, leading to various tribal gatekeepers denouncing the relief agency for failing to maintain a proper “biblical stance” with regard to the “sin” of beer-drinking.
Those gatekeepers would begin demanding that other Christians withhold their support for the relief agency. Sure, nearly all of those gatekeepers weren’t donating any support to begin with, because poverty and hunger have never been among their priorities. The gatekeepers’ threats of withholding support would thus be mostly a hypocritical lie. But even so, their inevitable attacks and their efforts to condemn the agency as “controversial” could mean an overall reduction in donor support. The playwright’s husband knew better than almost anyone just exactly what the real-world effects of any such reduction would be: Wells not dug, children not fed, women denied health care, schools not built.
It might sound noble and courageous to talk about taking a bold and principled stand against the biblical illiteracy and hypocrisy of the teetotaling gatekeepers, but the price for that stand might be paid by poor children. So we drank our beer in private.
Sometimes, in some circumstances, paying the ransom seems like the right thing to do.
But overall, over time, you can’t make a policy out of paying the ransom. That might be best for specific hostages in the short-term, but in the long run it creates an incentive for more hostage-taking, more extortion. It empowers the gatekeeping bullies, encouraging them to think that their arrogant presumption to speak for God and the Bible will never be challenged, questioned or even examined.
Evangelical institutions — churches, colleges, seminaries, magazines, relief agencies — will all, at some point, have to take a stand against the extortion, the lies, and the vile power-games of the gatekeepers.
And let’s be very, very clear: the gatekeepers are liars. They insist that “the Bible is clear” in prohibiting drinking beer. That is not true. Even worse, they insist that no one who drinks beer can really be a real Christian. That is not true. That is a lie — a deliberately malicious, nasty, ugly lie.
That is how the gatekeepers maintain their power and control over the tribe: by telling lies about other Christians. By endlessly repeating the lie that most other Christians are not “really” Christian at all because they drink beer or because they believe in science or because they are gay or because they are not anti-feminist or because they voted for the moderate Republican in the primary instead of for the tea party Republican.
Part of the reason the gatekeepers’ lies about their fellow Christians have gotten louder and nastier is because they realize they’re losing their grip over the tribe and the subculture. They realize that most American evangelicals no longer regard beer-drinking as a sin and no longer accept the way a handful of clobber-texts were twisted to suggest otherwise. As more and more American evangelicals have come out of the beer-drinking closet, the gatekeepers’ lies about them have become harder and harder to defend.
“There’s no such thing as a beer-drinking Christian,” they still say, but now everyone knows they’re lying.
And it’s not just the gatekeepers’ gospel of teetotalism that’s on the wane. That’s just one of many areas in which, during my own lifetime, the gatekeepers’ pronouncements about “clear biblical teaching” have been proven false and been rejected by a growing majority of American evangelicals.
Consider, for example, interracial marriage. A majority of American evangelicals used to consider that a sin and a violation of clear biblical teaching.
Heck, a majority of all Americans across the board disapproved of interracial marriage as recently as 1995.
Study that graph for a moment, soak it in.
If you are an adult, 18 or older, then majority acceptance of interracial marriage is something that only came about after you were born. In 1995, a majority of Americans were perfectly willing to admit to a pollster that they did not “approve” of “marriages between whites and nonwhites.”
But the culture has changed, dramatically, in the past 20 years. Despite the gatekeepers’ former insistence on “clear biblical teaching,” more than two-thirds of white evangelicals in America no longer disapprove of interracial marriage.
Nowadays, even most of the gatekeepers have given up on the clobber texts they used to use to condemn interracial marriage. Most no longer fervently claim that the Bible clearly teaches that interracial marriage is wrong. Many of their old argument have been repurposed and reaffirmed, however, as part of a new gatekeeper extortion plot involving marriages that they now say are a violation of “clear biblical teaching.”
And that, by the way, is the other element of my worlds-collide story above. The playwright’s husband is a white man. The playwright himself is black. The gatekeeping bullies and their toadies would be even more upset by that than by the beer-drinking. They would aggressively act to punish the agency this good Christian man works for, declaring that it is impossible that he is really a Christian at all.
There’s no such thing, the gatekeepers say, as a gay Christian. There’s no such thing, the gatekeepers say, as a Christian in an interracial marriage. There’s no such thing, the gatekeepers say, as a Christian who drinks beer. They can cite clobber texts that they say support all of those lies, but none of those texts has the power to make those lies true.
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