The God Grift
Editor’s Note: I sometimes have the impression that I can save lives if I can get particular people talking to other particular people. As an artisan of moral seriousness among us and a former assistant Attorney General for the state of Tennessee, Preston Shipp is one of those particular persons. His friendship with and advocacy for Cyntoia Brown made him mildly famous for a time. The two of us were once invited to discuss the white supremacist terror ideology which we’re both committed to trying to overcome in our own thinking and in the lives of the people around us. Here’s us with Reverend Davie Tucker, Dr. Forrest Harris (President of American Baptist College), and Reverend Margaret Ernst. It’s among my favorite two hours of footage available on the Internet. I bring this all up to introduce some words Preston posted on social media recently. If you’ve followed the news, a mob in Williamson County Tennessee threatened violence against healthcare workers who testified before a school board on the wisdom of a temporary mask mandate in public schools earlier this week. The footage is jarring. As the weekend approaches, Governor Bill Lee has demonstrated no interest in speaking for or standing with these healthcare workers against the mob, and our Senator Marsha Blackburn appears to be egging them on. President Biden, meanwhile, has made an effort to fill this leadership gap. If you’ve watched the footage, I invite you to bear fruit in keeping with your reaction. I believe conflict avoidance has made possible the disinformation campaign that continues to burn through Tennessee with the aid and the encouragement of many of our elected officials whose friends and families many of us know personally. Consider your own context and speak up where you can. If not now, when?
Editor’s Not Continued: Amid all of this, Preston has some helpful words. Like me, Preston seeks to dwell within and sustain a moral universe in which communities of baptism means something. Preston risks something by calling on church organizations to consider their own involvement in a campaign which, let us not speak falsely now, is a form of active terror in our world. I suspect most of my subscribers are outside of Tennessee, but I imagine his words might serve each of you in your worlds somehow. The God Grift, after all, has strongholds all around the world. Consider and draw courage from his witness, and, where applicable, Swing for the fences! And if you think Preston or I are missing something, I of course want to hear about that too. Disagreement is the sunshine.
After about ten minutes of looking, I have not been able to determine how many churches are in Williamson County, Tennessee. There are hundreds upon hundreds, likely into the thousands, but I can't find a solid number.
They'll all be gathering together in two days, waiting for a word from their pastor/priest/preacher. After the disgraceful scene at the Williamson County school board meeting on Tuesday night, which spilled out into the parking lot and devolved into the anti-mask crowd verbally assaulting people wearing masks and threatening the physical safety of health care professionals, even drawing a public rebuke from the President of the United States, it is time for the leaders of Williamson County congregations, which I'm sure serve as the church homes for many of these anti-mask people, to swing for the fences this Sunday morning and let the chips fall where they may.
I'd wager that many of these congregations have expensive audio/video systems and large projection screens in their sanctuaries. (Seriously. I recently learned that they'll spend literally hundreds of thousands of the dollars that get dropped into the collection plates on sound boards, lighting rigs, and even smoke machines. I digress). So they can show in high def the full 2:20 video of the parking lot debacle that I've linked below. Williamson County church people need to sit still for that. Then there needs to be silence. Then the screens could feature a few scriptures:
"Do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the law and the prophets."
"Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility regard others as more important than yourselves. Look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others."
"Love is patient, love is kind. It is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on getting its own way. It does not dishonor others. It is not easily angered or resentful and keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not celebrate wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things."
And then…
"Many will turn away from the faith and will betray and hate each other, and many false prophets will appear and deceive many people. Because of the increase of lawlessness, the love of many will grow cold."
After contemplating these foundational passages in silence, the preacher then needs to ask those gathered together in the Lord's name "Who are we?" Because the people in that video have been encouraged to think of themselves in some way that is quite disconnected from baptism, for those of them that are Christians. Maybe they are thinking of themselves first as "American" or "free" or "white" or "Republican." Whatever the case, they are thinking of themselves as real only insofar as they are separate from others, which is always inadequate and goes against the created order of the universe. Somehow, they perceive that their sense of self is being threatened, perhaps by the increasingly diverse society they live in, and they are lashing out. They are feeling vulnerable and insecure and afraid and perhaps even traumatized somehow, all of which manifest themselves publicly as toxic anger and even violence. They are mistaking the position they have taken for their deepest selves, and they are convinced that their sense of self and well-being must take precedence over and be defended against that of the "other." They are thinking not in terms of neighbor, which is the way of Jesus, but of enemy, which is the thinking Jesus seeks to free us from at the end of Matthew 5.
Baptism obliterates the us/them, me/other dichotomy. In baptism, people die to every other mechanism that they might turn to in order to achieve a sense of value and identity and to dominate each other. One's fundamental identity is in being a beloved member of a beloved community. There are no deficiencies. We are liberated to be our true selves, as Merton put it, image-bearers of God free to honor the image of God in everyone else. Thus our lives are not characterized by what we saw in that parking lot earlier this week, which was the exact opposite of Christian baptism. Instead, the baptized community is marked by love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Where were those among the anti-mask crowd? Wholly absent. Not even on their radar, even among the "Christian" musician who was apparently one of the ringleaders of the dumpster-fire circus.
I hope Williamson County pastors/priests/preachers are up to the task come Sunday. Your congregants need to hear from you. They don't need another bland sermon series that ignores the harm conservative Christians are doing to our society because they have seemingly forgotten their baptism.
Editors Note Resumed: Thank you, Brother Preston. I have an update…
Meanwhile, Bill Lee has been rewarded for his loyalty.