Waiting With Their Light

Light is paradoxically both a particle and a wave. Come to think of it, most of life is paradox. Our time on earth is both wonderful and disagreeable.  As this holiday season unfolds, I am feeling peace and anger, determination and resignation, hope and acedia. Let me explain.

According to an article in the New York Times, Donald Trump won the white evangelical vote by 65 points (85 percent for Trump and 15 percent for Harris) and lost the rest of the American vote by 18 points (59 percent for Harris and 41 percent for Trump.) To put it simply, white evangelical Christians elected Donald Trump.

They elected a man found liable for sexual abuse into the highest office in the land. I suppose I should not be surprised. This is the same group that fired me after 35 years of good work with nary a single negative evaluation, the group that took away my pension, all because I came out as transgender, something never mentioned in the Bible.

I regret working so hard to establish new evangelical churches all over the nation, most of which would not allow me through their doors today, let alone into their pulpits. There are a handful of churches and people who are exceptions, and I do want to acknowledge them. Those churches and leaders have also paid a price, most of them booted from the denomination that birthed them.

Interestingly, the one time I have been publicly cancelled by the left, it was a church that cancelled me for daring to question the appropriateness of giving adolescents irreversible medical treatment for their gender dysphoria. That particular church disavowed me without even informing me there was a problem. But let me be clear, only one mainline congregation has treated me unfairly. The entire evangelical world has rejected me.

What conclusions are my grandchildren to draw about the church and Christianity? I know the conclusions my non-spiritually-affiliated friends have drawn. They are not theologians, but they know enough to see that the church has abandoned the teachings of Jesus, because it has.

Jesus taught in metaphor. Evangelicalism wants literal meaning. Jesus taught awe. Evangelicalism wants scientific explanation. Jesus taught mystery. Evangelicalism wants certainty. Evangelicalism has abandoned Jesus in favor of bibliolatry, governed by the interpretation of its supremely confident but poorly educated leaders. They have abandoned the teachings of Jesus in favor of a return to a federated understanding of the old and new covenants, placing us back under the teachings of the law, or at least the specific ones they have decided serve their purposes, like the Ten Commandments. Evangelicals prefer the didactic teaching of Paul over the narrative teaching of Jesus.

All of this is an abandonment of the primary half of the brain, the right hemisphere, in favor of its emissary, the supremely confident but non-contextualized left hemisphere. It is a church more connected to Rene Descartes than it is to Jesus of Nazareth.

I sound angry, you say? I am. But I also understand that sin in the Bible is a not locked up inside the skin of an individual. It is a cosmic collective malevolent force. It is what we do when we come under the influence of a group that behaves in ways the individuals within that group would never behave on their own. My problem is not with individual evangelicals. It is with what they have done as a group. They have behaved in ways the sociobiologist EO Wilson said we’d better get ahold of before we lose the species and the planet as we know it. They have created enemies that do not exist.

The church will pay a price for its arrogant grasp for power. It has abandoned its root cause – to love God, neighbor, and self. What is left is nothing but the collective ego’s need for safety and power. Their narcissism has been made known and it will be justly rewarded.

I know most of my readers are not Christians, so I shall answer your anticipated question. Why am I still a Christian? It is because I do believe in the Jesus who taught in metaphor, not literal meaning, the Jesus who encouraged awe instead of offering scientific explanation, the Jesus who gave us blessed mystery instead of sophomoric certainty. I still believe the teaching of Jesus to love God, neighbor, and self.

I still love many people who have left me behind. I would welcome a visit from them. I would not allow myself to be badgered or belittled by them, but I would welcome the chance to rest in the beauty of our shared, flawed and vulnerable humanity. We would walk down to the river and watch its ageless flow as it twists and turns on its way to the sea. The words of Wendell Berry come to mind, from The Peace of Wild Things:

When despair for the world grows in me

And I wake in the night at the least sound

In fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be  

I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water

And the great heron feeds  

I come into the peace of wild things

Who do not tax their life with forethought

Of grief, I come into the presence of still water

And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light

For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.