A Real American Church

 If the world ends any time in the next few centuries, mark my words, America will be the birthplace of "the" Antichrist. As I have talked about before, I grew up in a pastel-painted evangelical world with a rotting, bitter underbelly. I've been listening to people claim the American president was the prophesied Antichrist from Revelations since Bill Clinton. Honestly? The first person I ever thought might actually fit the bill was Donald Trump. I doubted it, but I figured if it was anyone in my lifetime, he was a good candidate.

Something about Donald Trump felt really familiar during his campaigning in 2016. Between his speeches and the policies his staff talked about implementing should he become president, it all felt so familiar. Then I remembered watching filmed and translated campaign speeches made by the one and only Adolf Hitler in history classes in high school and I realized the rhetoric each of them used was nearly identical. Trump's team talked about making Muslims register, making them wear outward patches, signifying their Muslim faith. They talked about using Japanese internment camps during WWII as legal precedent for locking up Muslims and Latino immigrants. There was talk about how the 14th Amendment was what made all Native Americans natural born citizens, and how before that, a whole nationality was excluded from being American despite being born in America, there was talk about using that as legal precedent to revoke other people groups' access to citizenship, simply based on their nationality. This was mostly intended to revoke all the citizens with families in Latin American countries, because that has long been used as a strategy to rush the legal immigration of people from those countries: their relationships to American citizens. 

If you can't understand how fascist these policies are, if you don't see how similar they are to the policies implemented by Nazis during their rise in Germany, I don't know how you got here. 

Before Trump, I feel like the Republicans were moderate enough that many well-meaning Christians could align themselves with them without feeling too guilty, because of the Republican stance on "Christian" issues. When I turned 18, I voted for Bush's second term. I disagreed with his stance on torture, but I was voting about abortion and homosexual marriage, at the time. The Church I was raised in primed me with less intense versions of things that are rampant today: homophobia, trans-phobia, Islamophobia, antisemitism, racism, misogyny, sexism, toxic masculinity, ableism. At the end of Bush's administration, the Tea Party became a thing. They weaponized a lot of what aligned the Christian majority with Republicans. They tuned up all the fascist bigotry to eleven. Instead of letting the Tea Part split the bill, the Republican party ate them, adopting a lot of the radical views that made the Tea Party so popular among the bigots in this country. 

As I have touched on before, I married a poor, disabled Puerto Rican from the Bronx, moving in with her there. I have spent almost my entire adult life in disenfranchised communities, the products of racial and class disparity. I have spent much of my adult life partnering with my then wife in advocating for disability awareness, and at the same time watching member after member of the Church move away from God because their sexuality or gender identity was not welcome in the Churches I associated with. Good people. Loving, kind, Christ-like people, giving up lives of ministry because they were told that just by living their lives, they were actively living in sin. As I have mentioned before as well, I didn't feel safe to explore my sexuality or my gender identity while living with my parents. I was not really allowed to ask the questions if there was any chance the answers I found didn't line up with the way they wanted me to be. So I didn't ask them, not until I moved out and got married. 

Questioning your sexuality, your very gender identity, even if you come down mostly in line with what you thought of yourself before the questioning began, can do a lot of damage to any baby marriage. A lot of the ongoing issues my wife and I had resulted from that period of my questioning. My growth and maturity came at a steep cost, a healthy marriage. 

After the radicalization of the Republican party, I have noticed a lot of churches have backed away from some of the more aggressive stances that are used to marginalize and oppress people in the name of Jesus. As a result, there are a lot of churches out there that don't take stances on things. Little churches, especially. They're afraid of alienating what little congregations they do have, so they have prioritized community and fellowship above nearly anything else. In my opinion, this is the very definition of lukewarm, which is spoken against in Revelation 3. Jesus was not afraid to take a stance on things. It alienated people, for sure. That's part of the reason why the religious establishment had him killed. He made them uncomfortable with how much he condemned their usage of God's authority to alienate God's own children. 

A reflection of justice in general: I think that justice is a show of love on a grand scale. How can you show you love the victims of oppression, then do nothing to change it because you don't want to offend the oppressors? You can't. Jesus maintained open communication to those religious authorities that were honestly interested in the truth. Take Nicodemus for example. He was a pharisee, but he was genuinely curious about the words of Jesus, and Jesus spoke to him in a respectful way. But there were others that he cursed out, calling vipers, or sons of Satan. Just because these don't look like the curses from today's vernacular, doesn't mean they weren't profanities of the worst kind. 

That being said, I think there are practical ways any church can step up and stand for justice in today's American society. The first is democracy. In the spirit of the sovereignty and dignity God has instilled in each of us, imprinting us with his very own image, claiming us as his children by dying on the cross, I am a big proponent of the concept of the royal priesthood. We are all princes and princesses with bits of royal blood in us. We all have an authority in Jesus, as well as a responsibility. Democracy, genuine democracy that is, is one of the only ways I know of that really recognizes that in a person. I think we can act on this with transparency and democratizing the authority of a church. One of the coolest things I experienced recently at a small church was the ratification of its mission statement and vision and purpose. The pastors took a step back and let the congregation come up with these things, let the congregation vote on which versions felt right. It helped the congregation get in a place where it took ownership of the soul of the church. 

The second piece of this is advocacy. While we aren't meant to be American before we are Christian, one of the things I have always appreciated about American law is the Bill of Rights. When the American constitution was being shared with the original 13 states that would join to become the United States, an overwhelming majority of those states declined to ratify and opt into that constitution because of one thing: the lack of a Bill of Rights. While we have always been a country of rule by majority, we have always been one to dignify and protect the minority. Unlike the Soviet Union, later, which would be ruled by the dictatorship of the majority, under strict communism. During the Arab Spring, too, did we see some of the ugliness of democracy. When many of the Arabic nations that we Americans placed dictators at the head of overthrew those dictators and instituted democracy, they voted in conservative Muslim laws, laws under which oppressed women and LGBTQ+ individuals. As Christians, for the same reason we take on the authority of Christ, we must recognize the dignity of the image of God in others. We must recognize their sovereignty.

This is where social justice comes in. And this is also where some Christian traditions have histories that shine, such as many Catholic traditions. Capitalism is not economic democracy, but rather economic dictatorship. If we dignify all humans the way they deserve, then socialism becomes how we democratize the economy. It doesn't have to be through government intervention, either, but very often capitalists use the government to oppress, so I don't see a problem with using it to protect, instead. As individual churches, though, there are ways we can address this. We can provide safe places for people to meet and unionize. We can provide places for people to try to get businesses off the ground that will help them support themselves and their families. I've already touched on some of this in previous posts, talking about how I think every church should support a school, should support a daycare, support some kind of medical clinic or something similar. 

The first step is inclusion. In leadership as well as attendance. This is a half-measure I have seen a lot of churches make lately. They don't want to come across as bigoted as the extremists, but they still harbor a core of bigotry. So, they let people attend, but not lead. This is most often seen with LGBTQ+ members of the community. "You can come, you just can't be an example to the world of behavior we approve of. There's something wrong with you, and while we won't do you violence, we don't condone your choice to be who you are, either." Somehow, churches seem to think it's just tragedy that causes Queer members of their congregation to leave after they receive messages like that. I mean, how magnanimous of them to let them stay in the first place, right? 

This stands for disabled members of the community, too. I've seen churches that didn't prove welcoming to people with autistic kids, citing how "disruptive" the kids were to other people. I've seen congregations that didn't bother to have anyone learn to sign, because they didn't think to provide a place for Deaf people to come. I've seen churches that have designated spaces for people in wheelchairs, all the way in the back, so they don't bother anyone trying to get up and down the aisles. Churches on second floors, or in buildings with multiple levels without elevators. Or churches that let their elevators stay broken for weeks on end. And this in no way even touches on the serious harm churches have done to people with disabilities when it comes to "healing". 

Let me be clear. I believe God still enacts miracles. I believe in healings, and tongues, and prophecy, and all the apostolic signs the Spirit uses to empower his Church. But I am an absolute skeptic at heart, and have never believed God has ever condoned making a person feel like their faith is somehow lacking just because they aren't perfectly healthy. When I was married, my wife had experiences of people praying over her to make her walk. After enough people did that, made her feel somehow less than because she couldn't walk, is it any wonder that she didn't feel at home in some of those churches? 

For queer people, it's easy to include them. You just.... include them. If they have a heart for worship, you let them join the worship team. If they have a heart for teaching, you let them teach a Sunday school class or a Bible study. If they just like to serve people and your church runs a soup kitchen, let them organize it. Queer people, and youth specifically, have it rough in a conservative society. They are more likely to be the victims of violence, as well as more likely to try to take their own lives. They're at higher risk for being thrown out onto the streets by conservative parents, ending up homeless. When you grow up in a society that doesn't accept you, is it any wonder so many kids feel like they can't live in it? 

For disabled people, it takes barely more effort. Stop making them feel like burdens. Recognize the need for signing interpreters. Recognize the need for family bathrooms, for working lifts or ramps. Show patience and respect. 

For churches in working class environments: advocate for strong unions, tenants' unions, and small businesses. Advocate for giving the power and the dignity back to the people who have had it taken from them. 

These are easy first steps any church can take on its way to being a power for social good in the world. They don't cost much in the way of money or resources. But they do call for a change in attitude. Churches need to let go of their bigoted traditions, stop playing nice with both sides of the fence, and finally stand next to those people on the brink of breaking under today's systems.