Lost an hour or so today trying to figure out what church Rep. Andy Ogles attends, either at home in Tennessee or when he’s in Washington. I still don’t know.
While he’s in Washington, Ogles lives in the same D.C. townhouse as Speaker Mike Johnson and Pastor Steve Berger, who 0wns the home. Berger is “pastor emeritus” of a non-denominational Tennessee congregation called One Church Home, a former satellite of the nondenominational mega-church “Grace Chapel” that Berger founded in 1994. This wasn’t a new church planting, but an ugly, acrimonious split that started due to Berger’s participation in the Jan. 6 riots. Johnson is a Southern Baptist. Berger is a nondenominational serial church starter. I’m guessing Ogles is either nondenominational or Southern Baptist too, but I don’t know.
Why does that matter? Because Andy Ogles says he wants to get rid of every religion and denomination and sect in America. Except one. And thus, on the one hand, it seems kind of important to know which one that might be.
On the other hand, of course, it doesn’t matter at all which sect it is that Andy Ogles prefers for his sectarian government. His folly and his sin is not a matter of which sect he chooses to establish, or of whether or not he backs the correct one. His folly and his sin is that he insists there can be — and must be and ought to be — only one.
Here is what Rep. Andy Ogles said:
“Pluralism is a lie,” Ogles says, in a country that boasts more than 200 distinct Christian denominations and thousands of idiosyncratic nondenominational congregations all doing their own thing in their own way.
Ogles is not denying the existence of America’s religious pluralism, he’s denying its legitimacy. He isn’t saying pluralism doesn’t exist here, but that it ought not to exist here. He wants to get rid of it. He wants to stamp out the “lie” of pluralism, starting out by expelling all the Muslims.
This is not at all a new idea. It’s an idea that lies at the heart of the founding of America.
By which I mean the vehement rejection of this idea lies at the heart of the founding of America.
Ogles’s rejection of pluralism is very much the same approach that Peter Stuyvesant took when he was governor of New Amsterdam. Stuyvesant was a government official and, therefore, also a church official who understood his role as enforcing membership in the one, true church and adherence to all of its sectarian rules.
So Stuyvesant forbade Jews and Quakers from settling in New Amsterdam.
And he forbade Catholics. And Lutherans.
The man arrested Lutherans because he understood what it means to reject pluralism as a “lie.” That mean that it could never be sufficient to decree that New Amsterdam was a “Christian” colony or even that it was a “Protestant” colony. The rejection of pluralism requires its opposite, and the opposite of pluralism is sectarianism. With one sect, and only one, acceptable. The only worship that was permitted in New Amsterdam was worship in the official churches of the Dutch Reformed Church. Nothing else could be permitted, or even tolerated — not even any of the many slightly different variants of Dutch Reformed faith. Hence Stuyvesant’s proclamation of a day of prayer and fasting to repent of “the sin of religious tolerance.”
This was a terrible idea and everyone hated it.
The Jews and Quakers and Catholics and Lutherans hated it for obvious reasons, but so did most of the Dutch Reformed faithful of New Amsterdam. These were people who had freely embraced that sect, but who understood that Stuyvesant’s sectarian policy meant they were no longer free to freely embrace it. And who understood that the inevitable next step in this process was a policing of their sincerity and daily practice.
They recognized this as exactly the same intolerable unfreedom that most of them had left Europe to escape. They knew it meant violence and death and turmoil and hatred because they and their families had experienced that — for centuries — and they were sick of it.
And so the people of New Amsterdam thumbed their noses at Stuyvesant’s proclamations and they welcomed the Quakers and the Jews and the Lutherans and transformed New Amsterdam into New York, the greatest city the world has ever seen.
But Stuyvesant’s horrible plan is precisely what Andy Ogles demands. “Muslims don’t belong in America,” he says, but that’s only the first step if he truly believes that “pluralism is a lie.”
Ogles starts with Muslims, but he cannot and will not stop there. Who’s next?
Well, atheists, of course, and every adherent of any non-Abrahamic religion. Jews, because the Jews are always at or near the top of every such list from every such sectarian government (almost). Quakers and Catholics and Lutherans cannot be welcome in Ogles’s Single-Sect America any more than they were in Stuyvesant’s Single-Sect New Amsterdam. Then it’ll be time to whittle away the Methodists and Presbyterians and Episcopalians, etc.
And it won’t do to just say “Only evangelicals will be allowed.” That’s not nearly specific enough. Sectarianism is like The Highlander: In the end, there can be only one. Which evangelicals? Very specifically, which one, single group and kind of evangelicals? One can stay, all the rest — like the Muslims — don’t belong here or else you’ve surrendered to the “lie” of pluralism.
Either Mike Johnson has to leave the townhouse because Southern Baptists don’t belong in America, or else Steve Berger has to leave because it is now officially a Southern Baptist townhouse and tolerating anyone else there would be the lie of pluralism.
That’s how this works. We either embrace pluralism or we reject it. And if we reject it, then we have to pick a sect — just one — and everything and everyone else has to go.
I do not know if Andy Ogles is smart enough to understand that this is what he is demanding. I suspect not. But that’s irrelevant because that is what he is demanding, whether he understands it or not.
(And here is your obligatory Emo Philips recitation.)
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