So since I started taking questions from Nerdfighters more than a year ago (wow) I have had numerous folks send me a request for help with a loved one who became one of "those Christians." We all know the type... the uber-fundamentalist who feels the need to moralize on everything, only does stuff if they have "proper Christian value," can't speak five sentences without commenting on the salvific status of everyone in the room, etc.
You know the type. I know the type.
Often, the Nerdfighters asking these questions does not attend the same church their loved one does, or does not attend any church at all. They often have a lot of anger for that church, especially the minister, and can't imagine how to reach out to their loved one who is gobbling up everything that guy is saying every Sunday Morning.
This is usually when I get a compliment along the lines of, "I wish they had a pastor more like YOU..." and I thank them for the compliment and then help them start processing on how to talk to their loved one. But here is a secret... I've had church members in my church like that, too. I've been frustrated with those members. So having me as a pastor was not proof against a church having some of "those Christians."
But that made me think. It is natural, when a loved one makes such a drastic turn, to assume that the local church, or at least its pastor, are the ones responsible for the turn. But this is far from always the case. We live in an age where information about literally anything can always be attained from some source or another. Christian Radio is a good example. (I've actually had it out with people running nearby Christian radio stations on a couple of occasions.)
So when you are worried about your loved one, if you're not sure of the place where they attend church... give it a shot. And if you think your loved one needs help, it might be worth dropping the pastor a line to see if they would be a useful ally on this. Now sometimes, they won't be. Sometimes they ARE the source of the insanity.
But sometimes they won't be. And on those occasions, it is possible that they will actually stand up and help you see to it that your loved one maybe hears enough voices encouraging them to get the help they need.
I know that we pastors have screwed up often enough that a bunch of people don't think we're worth the effort, and as it will be your effort, that is entirely up to you. But if you're at your wits end, it may be worth at least reaching out to them. Give them the opportunity to be awesome. If it works, you'll have a good ally to reach out to your loved one.
Tuesday, February 23, 2016
Thursday, February 11, 2016
When Progressives Aren't
So I have had something bugging me for the past week or so that I wanted to bring up here. Given the current political climate, it will be possible to read this as a condemnation of a certain political campaign, that being Bernie Sanders, and I want to say up front that such is not my intention. This is not meant to be an indictment of Sanders or his supporters, merely pointing out what I see as a problem, not among them, but among "progressives" in general.
As progressives, we pride ourselves (we darn near define ourselves) on being forward thinkers, pushing towards a better status quo for everyone. We look at the backwards thinking of conservatives with barely constrained rage tinged with disgust... they are the old thinkers, the backwards dinosaurs holding us back in a world we would like to see relegated to an embarrassing page of history.
We have set particular earmarks of this on various -isms that we see held up by those rich folk and their poor yokel adherents (you may already see where I am going with this...) such as sexism, racism, classism, ableism, etc. We also add some -phobias, like transphobia and homophobia, just to keep things interesting, and we wave our hands and point every time we see evidence of those tendencies.
At least, we do so every time we see it among conservatives.
But we progressives have a dirty secret. We also, we personally, continue to have issues when it comes to gender, class, race, and sexuality.
This isn't to say that we ONLY pick a Bernie Sanders because he has a penis, or that we look at a Hillary Clinton and think, "Nope, Vagina, she can't lead." But as progressives we ALSO know that prejudice is rarely so simple and straightforward as that.
So run this drill. Imagine that a female candidate is running for office and supporters of her CONSERVATIVE opponent were putting out memes that wrote her off as weak, or shrill, or too emotional, or not palatable enough. We'd raise cain, right? If we then found out that those same supporters had done the same thing in a previous election it would be confirmation. We would point at the support base and say, loudly, "YOU HAVE A PROBLEM THAT MUST BE DEALT WITH."
But when the opponent is another progressive, as with Sanders now and Obama before him, we write it off. It can't REALLY a problem. Because they, and their supporters, are progressives. And WE are progressives. And progressives would NEVER be sexist, or racist, right?
The reason this bothers me so much is because it follows a pattern I have seen before in the church. When a scandalous thing happens in a lot of churches, the wagons quickly circle and the members go on the defensive. Not wanting to believe that such a thing could happen in a forum so sacred to them. Do you want to know HOW the abusive priests in the Catholic Church were protected so long? It wasn't just popes and bishops. It was large groups of the membership refusing to see the problem for what it was, not necessarily because they liked the perpetrators, but because they couldn't even begin to imagine that such a thing could happen in THEIR church. So they would assume that the problem was with the victims, not the institution, and a horrible abuse of power became internalized and even institutionalized to a major religious organization.
I am seeing all those same patterns emerge now. Not from the leadership, mind you. In what might have been the strongest move of his campaign YET, Bernie Sanders outright rejected anyone who approached his opponent in a sexist means and said he wanted no part of it. It was brave, brilliant, and a move worthy of a presidential candidate who claims to want to take us to a better place.
And a lot of his base proceeded to ignore him. In the days that followed I saw articles saying that Clinton made a similar claim last time, and so it was just a despicable political ploy. They claimed that the Berniebros were just a false narrative. They raised articles where certain supporters of Clinton were seen to be racist, to show that if ANYONE had -ism problems, it was Clinton.
You know, I don't doubt, not even for a second, that some Clinton supporters had strong racist undertones in their objection to Barack Obama, because there were a lot of white people who supported her and, yeah, we still have BIG issues with race, as well.
And amid all the rejections, returned accusations, and diversions I saw in the progressive moment precisely what I have seen a million times before, all the way down to the point where one female Sanders supporter, in a moment of frustration, posted the thought, "But not ALL Sanders supporters are like that?"
And so we've added #notallmen to the pile, as well, rejecting what should be an obvious truth to a progressive; there is a difference in privilege when it comes to an older man running against a woman, regardless of the identities of the man or the woman.
We've got a problem, Progressives. And the problem is that we have become so attuned to see these problems in others that we have begun to refuse to see it in ourselves, and repeatedly fall into near identical behaviors that we have called out in others, all because we refuse to confront the reality that people who fall under the progressive umbrella still struggle with many of our hot-button issues.
And in the end, if we are unable to name and address those issues in ourselves, while being so eager to point them out in others, then we are precisely the hypocrites the conservatives make us out to be. We have a problem. It doesn't mean you should vote one way or another. But if there is to be any integrity to the direction we push our world in, it absolutely must affect the way we campaign, the way we debate, and the way we live.
As progressives, we pride ourselves (we darn near define ourselves) on being forward thinkers, pushing towards a better status quo for everyone. We look at the backwards thinking of conservatives with barely constrained rage tinged with disgust... they are the old thinkers, the backwards dinosaurs holding us back in a world we would like to see relegated to an embarrassing page of history.
We have set particular earmarks of this on various -isms that we see held up by those rich folk and their poor yokel adherents (you may already see where I am going with this...) such as sexism, racism, classism, ableism, etc. We also add some -phobias, like transphobia and homophobia, just to keep things interesting, and we wave our hands and point every time we see evidence of those tendencies.
At least, we do so every time we see it among conservatives.
But we progressives have a dirty secret. We also, we personally, continue to have issues when it comes to gender, class, race, and sexuality.
This isn't to say that we ONLY pick a Bernie Sanders because he has a penis, or that we look at a Hillary Clinton and think, "Nope, Vagina, she can't lead." But as progressives we ALSO know that prejudice is rarely so simple and straightforward as that.
So run this drill. Imagine that a female candidate is running for office and supporters of her CONSERVATIVE opponent were putting out memes that wrote her off as weak, or shrill, or too emotional, or not palatable enough. We'd raise cain, right? If we then found out that those same supporters had done the same thing in a previous election it would be confirmation. We would point at the support base and say, loudly, "YOU HAVE A PROBLEM THAT MUST BE DEALT WITH."
But when the opponent is another progressive, as with Sanders now and Obama before him, we write it off. It can't REALLY a problem. Because they, and their supporters, are progressives. And WE are progressives. And progressives would NEVER be sexist, or racist, right?
The reason this bothers me so much is because it follows a pattern I have seen before in the church. When a scandalous thing happens in a lot of churches, the wagons quickly circle and the members go on the defensive. Not wanting to believe that such a thing could happen in a forum so sacred to them. Do you want to know HOW the abusive priests in the Catholic Church were protected so long? It wasn't just popes and bishops. It was large groups of the membership refusing to see the problem for what it was, not necessarily because they liked the perpetrators, but because they couldn't even begin to imagine that such a thing could happen in THEIR church. So they would assume that the problem was with the victims, not the institution, and a horrible abuse of power became internalized and even institutionalized to a major religious organization.
I am seeing all those same patterns emerge now. Not from the leadership, mind you. In what might have been the strongest move of his campaign YET, Bernie Sanders outright rejected anyone who approached his opponent in a sexist means and said he wanted no part of it. It was brave, brilliant, and a move worthy of a presidential candidate who claims to want to take us to a better place.
And a lot of his base proceeded to ignore him. In the days that followed I saw articles saying that Clinton made a similar claim last time, and so it was just a despicable political ploy. They claimed that the Berniebros were just a false narrative. They raised articles where certain supporters of Clinton were seen to be racist, to show that if ANYONE had -ism problems, it was Clinton.
You know, I don't doubt, not even for a second, that some Clinton supporters had strong racist undertones in their objection to Barack Obama, because there were a lot of white people who supported her and, yeah, we still have BIG issues with race, as well.
And amid all the rejections, returned accusations, and diversions I saw in the progressive moment precisely what I have seen a million times before, all the way down to the point where one female Sanders supporter, in a moment of frustration, posted the thought, "But not ALL Sanders supporters are like that?"
And so we've added #notallmen to the pile, as well, rejecting what should be an obvious truth to a progressive; there is a difference in privilege when it comes to an older man running against a woman, regardless of the identities of the man or the woman.
We've got a problem, Progressives. And the problem is that we have become so attuned to see these problems in others that we have begun to refuse to see it in ourselves, and repeatedly fall into near identical behaviors that we have called out in others, all because we refuse to confront the reality that people who fall under the progressive umbrella still struggle with many of our hot-button issues.
And in the end, if we are unable to name and address those issues in ourselves, while being so eager to point them out in others, then we are precisely the hypocrites the conservatives make us out to be. We have a problem. It doesn't mean you should vote one way or another. But if there is to be any integrity to the direction we push our world in, it absolutely must affect the way we campaign, the way we debate, and the way we live.
Wednesday, February 10, 2016
The Rant I Couldn't Have
A couple of days ago I presided over a funeral for a non-member of my church. This isn't particularly uncommon... there are plenty of people who are not regular church attenders who still see themselves as Christian and want a church funeral. What was different about this was that this man, until recently, had been a member of another church here in town.
My initial conversations with the funeral home director and family made me realize that there was more going on than was sitting on the surface, and so I dug a bit deeper and found out that this man had walked away from the church because they had refused to do a funeral for his sister, whom they had refused because she had not "adequately disciplined" her daughter when she got a divorce. (I really wish I was making this up.)
Fast forward to now. The man had no children, but his nieces and nephews all wanted him to have a funeral in their church. They were all members in good standing. But again, the church said no. He had made his decision to not attend and not donate, and they would not perform the funeral for him. The family explained the situation to their funeral home director, who recommended they call me, and so we set everything up.
The Funeral went well, and I had tons of people falling all over me telling me how great it was that I did the funeral when he wasn't a member of my church. how lovely and welcoming we must be. They were frustrated with their church, but just kind of shrugged and said that they kept going there because of "the values that it teaches."
And with a dollar for my swear jar I'll ask now what I wanted to ask then; "WHAT FUCKING VALUES?"
One of the final straws for me was when the Niece who I planned the funeral with asked if I could focus on the scripture of the Good Samaritan as a theme for the funeral, because this man had been kind, generous, and always willing to go out of his way to help others. That was backed up by story after story that people told when recounting how much they would miss him.
If you don't know the story, the cliffs notes version is that a man was attacked along the road by bandits and left for dead.A priest came by, saw him, and then passed on the other side of the road. Later a Levite (a member of the priestly caste) also came by, also passed by. Finally a Samaritan, an outcast, looked down on by pretty much everyone, came by, helped the man to an inn and treated his wounds, finally leaving, instructing the inn keeper to continue to care for the man and promising to return and pay whatever was owed beyond what he'd already paid.
And there it was, sitting in front of me. The perfect way for me to vent my frustrations. A story about people in need (the grieving family) and religious authority just passing them by, uncaring, until the outcast comes and cares for them in their need. I wanted to pin that church to the wall with it, to show them all how callous, and frankly unchristian, that institution was being.
I didn't for two reasons. For one, I have been trained to be highly suspicious of analogies where it turns out that I am the hero, second and far more importantly, funerals are for grieving and remembering the departed, NOT for the pastor who didn't even know the departed to get on a soap box. I've yelled at far too many other pastors for doing that to be anything but a massive hypocrite if I did it myself.
So I swallowed my rant and did my job, and smiled at all the people who told me just how wonderful it was that my church did what Jesus Christ said all Christians were supposed to do.
I don't know what to do about it. I want to scream it from the mountaintops, nail theses to doors, storm into worship services and say that a church that cannot even get its own head out of its ass to take care of its own members during their times of grief is not teaching any values worth knowing. I want to tell them that the Divine Banquet to come will not have bouncers, will not require a cover, a merely an invitation, and that as the church our job is not to screen those invitations, merely to deliver them.
Tonight is our Ash Wednesday Service. I get to preach about sin. Should be a good one.
My initial conversations with the funeral home director and family made me realize that there was more going on than was sitting on the surface, and so I dug a bit deeper and found out that this man had walked away from the church because they had refused to do a funeral for his sister, whom they had refused because she had not "adequately disciplined" her daughter when she got a divorce. (I really wish I was making this up.)
Fast forward to now. The man had no children, but his nieces and nephews all wanted him to have a funeral in their church. They were all members in good standing. But again, the church said no. He had made his decision to not attend and not donate, and they would not perform the funeral for him. The family explained the situation to their funeral home director, who recommended they call me, and so we set everything up.
The Funeral went well, and I had tons of people falling all over me telling me how great it was that I did the funeral when he wasn't a member of my church. how lovely and welcoming we must be. They were frustrated with their church, but just kind of shrugged and said that they kept going there because of "the values that it teaches."
And with a dollar for my swear jar I'll ask now what I wanted to ask then; "WHAT FUCKING VALUES?"
One of the final straws for me was when the Niece who I planned the funeral with asked if I could focus on the scripture of the Good Samaritan as a theme for the funeral, because this man had been kind, generous, and always willing to go out of his way to help others. That was backed up by story after story that people told when recounting how much they would miss him.
If you don't know the story, the cliffs notes version is that a man was attacked along the road by bandits and left for dead.A priest came by, saw him, and then passed on the other side of the road. Later a Levite (a member of the priestly caste) also came by, also passed by. Finally a Samaritan, an outcast, looked down on by pretty much everyone, came by, helped the man to an inn and treated his wounds, finally leaving, instructing the inn keeper to continue to care for the man and promising to return and pay whatever was owed beyond what he'd already paid.
And there it was, sitting in front of me. The perfect way for me to vent my frustrations. A story about people in need (the grieving family) and religious authority just passing them by, uncaring, until the outcast comes and cares for them in their need. I wanted to pin that church to the wall with it, to show them all how callous, and frankly unchristian, that institution was being.
I didn't for two reasons. For one, I have been trained to be highly suspicious of analogies where it turns out that I am the hero, second and far more importantly, funerals are for grieving and remembering the departed, NOT for the pastor who didn't even know the departed to get on a soap box. I've yelled at far too many other pastors for doing that to be anything but a massive hypocrite if I did it myself.
So I swallowed my rant and did my job, and smiled at all the people who told me just how wonderful it was that my church did what Jesus Christ said all Christians were supposed to do.
I don't know what to do about it. I want to scream it from the mountaintops, nail theses to doors, storm into worship services and say that a church that cannot even get its own head out of its ass to take care of its own members during their times of grief is not teaching any values worth knowing. I want to tell them that the Divine Banquet to come will not have bouncers, will not require a cover, a merely an invitation, and that as the church our job is not to screen those invitations, merely to deliver them.
Tonight is our Ash Wednesday Service. I get to preach about sin. Should be a good one.
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