Motions of Grace

Intersections of scripture and life

Category: social issues

On being conservative

June 16, 2020 / / 0 Comments

It’s more useful to think of political conservatism as an impulse rather than as an ideology. Specifically, it’s the impulse to preserve what is good about our present social, political and cultural arrangements, or at least to limit harm when those arrangements inevitably change.

In my sense, then, there are no conservative beliefs as such. “Abortion is wrong,” for example, is a belief that a person might try to use to influence society in either a conservative or non-conservative manner.
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Ideologies, “those people” and grace

March 18, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Christchurch, New Zealand | Getty Images

There is no one explanation, and perhaps no real explanation, for why someone would walk into a public space and gun down dozens of people he’s never seen before.  In some cases, like the terrorist attack in Christchurch, we can appeal to “ideology” in an attempt to make sense of what has happened. Put very simply, an ideology is a set of beliefs about the way the world should be (i.e., a set of ideals) coupled, almost always, by an account of why the world is not that way. And such an account usually involves “those people.”

“Those people” ensure that the world remains a middling-to-bad place because of their own ideologies, behavior, or even their very existence. “Those people” oppress the proletariat; they undermine family values; they maintain the heteronormative patriarchy; they’ve come here to take our jobs.

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February 11, 2019 / / 0 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, the Christian Post published a piece I wrote on the “deaths of despair” epidemic afflicting the white working class in the US. You can find it here.

 

“Till we have built Jerusalem”

January 5, 2019 / / 0 Comments

The New Jerusalem from a 14th century tapestry | photo by Kimon Berlin, used by permission

I will not cease from Mental Fight,

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:

Till we have built Jerusalem,

In Englands green & pleasant Land.

William Blake speaks here of Jerusalem, but he clearly means the New Jerusalem spoken of in the book of Revelation. We can and will, he says, create a maximally just and peaceful society in human history, within space and time – in England, to be precise. By the late 19th century, the Inevitability of Progress had become a popular idea in the West in both secular and Christian circles (the latter expressed this idea as “postmillennialism,” i.e., the doctrine that Jesus will come back after we’ve fixed the world).

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La Sagrada Familia and loving our neighbors

December 21, 2018 / / 1 Comment

La Sagrada Familia, by Kelly Latimore

This icon appeared on my Facebook feed a few days ago. It’s viscerally powerful and I’ve been thinking about it quite a bit since I first saw it. Ms. Latimore’s implicit message is that how we regard Central American refugees is how we regard Christ, who himself fled to a foreign country to escape violence (Matthew 2:13-15).

I later found this icon illustrating a post written by a Christian blogger who insisted that God wants our country to adopt essentially an open-border policy. But surely it’s not that simple, even if we accept the icon’s underlying message.

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Why working class whites don’t go to church

October 2, 2018 / / 0 Comments

I’m honored to have the website Mockingbird publish a piece I recently wrote on the film Manchester by the Sea and what it has to teach the American church about one of its most pressing problems. You should check out more of their offerings while you’re on the site.

By way of disclaimer: Manchester is a superlatively beautiful film; it’s also a really hard one to watch. Being essentially an extended meditation on grief, it takes an unflinching look at people dealing with horrible things. Please exercise caution before watching. Also, for what it’s worth, the characters, uh, speak in the vernacular. 

Entrenched poverty, Deuteronomy, and working on unsolvable problems

August 15, 2018 / / 0 Comments

 

Over the last two or three months, the churches in the town where I minister have seen a major uptick in calls for financial assistance. Some callers tell us that they’ve recently lost their jobs, but the majority are on disability insurance which, for whatever reason, isn’t enough to keep the lights on. On most days it feels like we’re pretty good at treating the symptoms of financial hardship (past-due rent and empty gas tanks) but powerless to get at the root cause (in this case, physical disablement).

To switch metaphors from the hospital to the battlefields of WWI, our churches are up against “entrenched” poverty, the kind that can’t be dislodged by a quick barrage of money. And in many places across the US and for all kinds of reasons, poverty has been digging in for generations. Some towns have never recovered after the local factory closed decades ago; some neighborhoods suffer the ongoing effects of the racist policies of the past. In St. Louis, where I live, sections of the northern part of the city look like they’ve been through a literal war. Whole blocks are abandoned, and once-venerable buildings collapse in on themselves, victims not of bombs but of long-term economic malaise.

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Evangelicals and poverty

February 6, 2018 / / 0 Comments

Last year the Washington Post conducted a poll asking the question, “Does poverty result more often from lack of effort on an individual’s part, or from circumstances beyond that individual’s control?” The Post found that Christians are twice as likely as non-Christians to blame poverty on lack of effort. For every non-religious person who believes that the poor are primarily responsible for their condition, you can find three white evangelicals who agree.

This is not shocking. White evangelicals tend to emphasize the role of individual responsibility. And there is solid Scriptural support for this attitude: “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat,” wrote the Apostle Paul, words John Smith quoted* at Jamestown as he set his group of loitering noblemen to plow the fields. Proverbs exhorts the sluggard to observe the ant, and warns him of the poverty that will result from his apathy. Later Christian tradition numbered “sloth” among the seven deadly sins.

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Political action and loving your neighbor

September 22, 2017 / / 0 Comments

Granite City, IL (photo from builtstlouis.net)

As far as internet memes go, one of my favorites is: “In democracy, it’s your vote that counts. In feudalism, it’s your count that votes.” It’s easy to forget that the vast majority of the human race throughout history lived under some form of the latter. The average individual did not have a say in how his (and definitely not her) society was run, short of participating in a torch-and-pitchfork peasant revolt.

It’s a relatively rare thing, historically speaking, to have some degree of influence over the organization and direction of your society. It’s also not a phenomenon the New Testament directly addresses, the NT documents being written at a time when Christians were a tiny, politically voiceless minority living in the distinctly non-democratic Roman Empire.

Nevertheless, as we acknowledge that Christ is Lord of all aspects of our lives, it’s incumbent upon us as American Christians to think carefully about engaging in political action (voting, campaigning, lobbying, etc.) in a way that’s honoring to Him. How to do this in practice, however, is often enough a pretty complicated question.

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