The Faith and the Place

Editor’s Note: On a personal level, I am sustained by hundreds of people who are, by my estimation, kinder and smarter than me. They often address me directly, but it's also the case that I carry, in my mind, the looks I imagine might appear on their faces were I to say aloud in their presence the thoughts I’m thinking. I then imagine what they might say were I to voice those thoughts. This is how these people function as imagined editors in my mind through no fault of their own. 

Editor’s Note Continued: Reva Russell English is one of these people. She’s prolly in my TOP FIVE FAVORITE CONVERSATIONALISTS. She’s also one of my best friends that I haven’t seen in years. She was kind enough to offer a private response to my recent Religion News Service piece calling on predominantly white church organizations to mind their insurrectionists. I’m enriched by it. I’m publishing it with her permission. I think I’m in complete agreement with her even as I would like to note a slight difference of word choice from where I’m sitting. I would say that our F.B.I. and our Department of Justice, like all institutions, house bad faith actors. I’d put it that way instead of saying they’re corrupt. But I receive (or mean to receive) Reva’s words and respect her decision to put it the way she does. I admire her way of naming cultures of corruption. 

Editor’s Note Continued: I take the title of this post from a phrase Reva shared with me. When I asked her about making it the title, she had this to say: “I think that’s a great title…I feel like part of the appeal of Christian Nationalism is equating the place with the faith (and obscuring that we stole it and harm it and those living on it)...I also feel like any faith that isn’t rooted in loving relationship with place and all who live there is no faith I want to be a part of.” 

Hey, David. 

I hope you and the fam are well. We are good, just trying to figure out how to live through the end times in a loving and practical way. I wanted to write, because I’ve been mulling over your recent piece in Religion News Service. I have some thoughts about it that I wanted to toss over your way, and out-in-the-open-Twitter seems too shallow a place.

I think there are a few things I’m bumping into that I find problematic about the piece. The sentiment expressed, I think, is solid, of course. Shouldn’t churches hold their members accountable for publicly inciting violence? I completely agree with you that the answer is yes. The problems I see arise from another place: I don’t see how reps like Marjorie Taylor Green can be seen to be at odds with their churches or their churches at odds with them. If anything, the fact that they call a particular church body home says more about that church body than it does them. (And maybe this isn’t a good example. She was baptized there, but maybe doesn’t still consider it her home.) Reps and others like MTG have chosen the church they’ve chosen because it suits their worldview and heart’s matters, their political ambitions, vision of community or power, etc. 

If Andy Stanley were actually preaching/representing/living out a gospel in alignment with what you believe to be the gospel, then she would never call that place her church. The pastor and North Point church, then, cannot be called upon to call her out (nor can other churches with similarly violent members be called upon to call their members out). She’s there, because she knows she’s welcome. Her gospel aligns with theirs.

It seems at face value that this can’t possibly be the case. After all, Stanley isn’t calling anyone to violence explicitly, but he is justifying violence implicitly, and he is asking those in his flock (and those in his video audience) to tolerate and submit to violence. I watched his three-part series on Nothing Divides Like Politics, and a lot of it is a bunch of privileged white man god talk that’s akin to folks claiming to be non-violent whose entire existence/livelihood/safety/finances/etc. are propped up via state violence. (Can you really proudly say you don’t own a gun if you call the cops so they’ll use theirs?) Stanley claims—repeatedly—that Jesus wants unity, that Jesus seeks those who call themselves Christians to be “one”. This is a call to action from a powerful man (who probably thinks he is a unity guy because his life/wealth/education/reputation/children/goals have never been in danger, so unity with those who disagree with him literally doesn’t affect his life, just his comfort level) to the disempowered to shut up and lump it. 

He even tries to equate the early church’s differences with our current differences—See! They overlooked race and difference!—but when someone became a Christian in the early church, they became part of a persecuted class no matter who they were before. Here, being a Christian—so long as you’re white and straight and wealthy enough with bonus points for being a dude—is being a part of the power structure that participates in oppressing the *other* or at the very least benefits from it. The false equivalency is pretty gross.

There are whole swaths of folks on the political right calling for the extermination of whole people groups, individuals, entire cultures, and it isn’t a thought experiment—some of them are armed and training/ready for war. When someone in Stanley’s position of lifelong privilege and power tells a group of people that includes members of targeted groups and those doing the targeting that they need to seek “oneness”, it’s an implicit invitation to seek homogeneity, not unity, and homogeneity is a fascist, and therefore violent, goal, and I can’t imagine Jesus ever saying we should seek unity with fascists.  

Now it’s possible that I’m missing Stanley’s point (I say this because I think he would say this), but for a large part of the series, he is a master of generalities and never gets into the particulars. He also acts like there has been no willfulness/policy on the part of the state and Christians in the US to steal, lie, murder and defraud people of color, Indigenous people, poor people, queer people, etc. He pretends we just have different lived experiences with no analysis about why those differences exist and yield the results we see on a daily basis.

How is a trans person to achieve unity with someone who thinks they should just pretend the gender they were assigned at birth is who they are or die/be imprisoned? How is the person with an ectopic pregnancy or the child pregnant from rape supposed to seek unity with those who would rather see them dead than given life-saving abortions? How is someone who is disabled supposed to seek unity with an elected official with taxpayer-funded healthcare who doesn’t think their life or its quality matters? How are Indigenous folks to seek unity with folks who live on and make money with and destroy stolen land? Honestly, Stanley feels like a wolf in sheep’s clothing. His calls for unity are calls for death or for at least not minding that others die. It’s why MTG would feel fine saying that’s her church. It’s why he won’t call her out publicly (or others like her) even though he probably is uncomfortable with her behavior.

Also, he’s a pretty staunch Western Civilization apologist and white washer (loosely claims Christians got rid of slavery in the 4th century, does no followup on how the US was then “founded on Christian prinicples” with slavery, land theft, and native people extermination enshrined. Does no followup/wrestling/mention of Philemon or Jesus’ use of slave/master language, etc. In other words, he just skips over the hard parts.) He even claims that writing is what allowed people to be able to pass info on from generation to generation, and stuff like that, which ignores Indigenous oral history and storytelling around the world; storytelling, knowledge and history-keeping in US Black culture; Aboriginal songlines, even generational Appalachian knowledge here in the US; etc. is super-dangerous: It can make a lot of privileged white folks from the U.S. feel superior to others because we know how to read and write. It’s American exceptionalism which is reliant on ignorance, and I do see it as a pastor’s job to dispel shit like that. But maybe Stanley doesn’t know about it, or maybe he just can’t wrest himself away from his Western worldview to value those ways of knowledge keeping/passing properly. 

I mean, he actually says, “Every generation is smarter than the generation before, and with extra knowledge comes extra wisdom and insight.” Like being smarter is the goal, like that doesn’t imply that when the Nazis took over Germany and tried to kill everyone who wasn’t *perfect* and white, they were the smartest and most wise and insightful that folks had ever been. It’s just such shitty, pat ‘em on the back preaching IMO, and don’t get me started on how he claims the New Testament’s view on women was radicalizing when we have more scandal than anything else in whole segments of Protestantism specific to men in power abusing women and not being held accountable for it and that’s not even bothering to mention the wound of complementarianism that keeps so many women in bad situations.

I could say a lot more about this sermon series but I won’t. (I also never saw/heard in it a disavowal of Christian Nationalism either. Is that somewhere else?) Anyway, what I am saying is that Andy Stanley and churches like that one are perfect for people like MTG. They don’t challenge her; they affirm what she already believes: That White American Christianity and the US are best, and their status quo (militaristic, white, cis, patriarchal, straight, money-loving, etc.) is best, too. Anything else needs to change or be eliminated. At the same time, they say vague feel-gooderies like Listen to people who are different from you! Try and understand! Be loving! 

It’s notable that when he appeals to this, his long list of “differences” like Republican/Democrat, Poor/Rich, Black/White, etc. doesn’t include LGBTQ/Straight or Folks Who’ve Had Abortions/Folks who WOULD NEVER, which makes me think 1) that he thinks there are no queer folks or folks who’ve had abortions in his congregation or 2) he doesn’t think queer folks or folks who’ve had abortions should be listened to or 3) he knows it won’t fly and he’ll get fired if he says queer folks or folks who’ve had abortions should be listened to. Regardless, that all says a lot about him and the church, too.

He does attempt some exhortation around some of the heavy ethical weight of early Christianity, but he speaks in generalities—not defrauding, not stealing, keeping one’s word, no adultery, etc. But if he isn’t asking his congregation how they’re/we’re participating in/working toward reparations to Black folks and Land Back and the like, how as business owners/landlords they’re/we’re not stealing from the pockets of our employees and lessees, how my/our retirement investments affect our neighbors’ lives, etc. then everyone in the congregation (unless they’re cheating on their spouse) is nodding and feeling good about themselves and their choices. 

He also closes out with a quote from Jordan Peterson who is a charlatan, a danger and a fool, and either he doesn’t know that or he doesn’t think that and both are highly problematic. I guess what I’m saying is: Andy Stanley and his church aren’t who you think they are or want them to be. They are instead, a cover for both Christian Nationalism and a false, self-righteous unity-seeking that only serves those who want things to be nicer and less icky and don’t care if anything is loving or just, because they are just fine.

Also, and this is a much smaller point: I think it’s problematic to call out as a negative Republican reps saying that Merrick Garland and the FBI are corrupt. Is it hypocritical of them? Yeah, but that sort of consistency is not the key to their way of viewing/influencing reality. The truth is that Merrick Garland and the FBI are corrupt. They are armed agents of the empire, and the empire/state exists to protect and further itself and to squash anything that might get in the way of that, and they lie and steal and murder and do other shitty things to achieve their ends. It’s why COINTELPRO was (and probably still is) a thing, and it’s proof to us that the state sees DT as a real threat to its continuation and world domination and ongoing protection of the elite at the expense of the planet itself.

Anyway, that’s a lot, I know. If you’ve made it this far, please feel free to respond or not. I’m always grateful for the work you do. It helps me (and so many others) reflect and learn and engage with both the faith and the place. Thanks. 

Love, 

Reva