So. That thing happened with the American election.
I’m disappointed. And disturbed as the results come out of who voted for whom.
It's strange. I identify reasonably strongly with the group that's billed as being one of the key swings to support Trump: Evangelicals. I'm a self-described Australian Evangelical. For me, my faith is a very central tenet of who I am - before I'm an Australian, a woman, of Asian extract, I’m a Christian. It’s not that those other aspects of my identity don’t count – they colour my view and my perspective of the world, and I'm actually rather grateful for them - but they're pretty much subsumed in my faith.
American Evangelicals are a slightly different breed to Australian ones, and yet, on paper, we share the name and, to some extent, share the core belief: that Christ died, once for all, the righteous (Him) for the unrighteous (us) to bring us (everyone) to God.
There are clauses and conditions around that, yes: to serve God, to obey Him, to trust in Him, to do His work. That last is a high-level instruction with very little detail, and we’re knee-deep in the detail here, frequently arguing degrees. Decency, rights, sharing the world, sharing ourselves with the world...
I’m following a few American Evangelicals on social media platforms. Some of them are in the 'as bad as each other' camp, others are heavily pro-HRC. I know at least one pro-Trump Evangelical, possibly two, although the second one is keeping very mum.
This morning, the pro-HRC Evangelicals are questioning their identification with the Evangelical label – not with their faith, although that’s being tested, too – but with the organisations that have brought them to where they are. Organisations that feel they’re doing the right thing by voting for Trump. They’re asking themselves what they can do for the people who they were voting to help as much as they were voting to help themselves: for the lost and the lonely and the unlovely, for their fellow sinners (‘unrighteous’ is everyone, not just non-Christians), for their fellow strugglers in the mire of a sinful, broken world.
This morning, from what I've seen, the pro-Trump Evangelicals are defending their choices.
I wonder if I’d have been a pro-Trump Evangelical if not for the eight years I spent out of the church. I was still a Christian, still prayed to God and read the bible to gain His direction, but I couldn’t find a church fellowship that felt comfortable for me to be part of the corporate body of Christ. And in that time, I met...other people. Atheists. Agnostics. LGBT people. People whose lives were defined by daily pain. Black Americans. People outside my income bracket. People who were different to me, a middle-upperclass girl from a conservative suburb in a western country that mostly accepted her race so long as they could ask, ‘But where do really come from?’ and compliment me on how good my English was.
I met people whom I wouldn’t have met in the churches I went to, in the social circles I moved in, in the educational brackets which are my instinctive strata. And I came to understand that the world – yes, sinful and fallen and broken – is bigger than the space in which I’d been brought up. And, yes, all those people need Jesus, but many of them aren’t willing to accept him, or accept all the baggage that tends to come with the concept of the church as an organisation.
I learned that while Jesus remains the same, the manner in which he approaches people changes - gentle to the masses, healer to the wounded, challenger to the authorities of the day. Paul's approach changes too, according to who he's speaking with - a Greek to the Greeks, a Jew to the Jews – met them at their level, where they were at. His ministry is slightly different to mine – he was a preacher and a teacher. If people wouldn’t accept his message, he didn’t waste that time on them, because he still had a message to speak. But I wonder, sometimes, about the churches left behind. Not the ones who had the letters written to them so much as the ones which didn’t. The ones who quietly, faithfully toiled on in their lives, in their cities, after Paul moved on through his preaching circuit. We hear a little about them – sometimes they’re the same church that Paul is later chastising for getting it wrong – but by and large, we don’t hear from them. And Paul’s evangelism, while also being his living, breathing example in the communities where he lived, worked, and preached is focused on the verbal in his letters – because his letters are all that we have.
It’s a little ironic, perhaps, that we mostly get a preaching view of Paul from his letters, while his day to day personal interactive ministry goes unobserved, while the actions of Jesus as described by the gospel writers are as focused on the people and interaction with them as they are focused on the message He brings: that God loves them so much, He’s come down to live among them.
What is all this, apart from a trip down my psyche? I guess it’s a basis for the questions I ask myself now.
Who am I? What kind of society am I in? What kind of society do I want to live in? What kind of living am I going to do in this society I’m in? How would Jesus be reacting this morning, as a God who saw His people’s need for someone to save them from their own cruelty and stupidity and unkindness, and sent Himself down in human form to live in the fallen world, to suffer injustice and unkindness, and ultimately to die a humiliating death on their behalf?
It’s the same question that I think the HRC-Evangelicals are asking themselves this morning, as they focus not on their rights and what they stand to gain out of Trump’s presidency, but on the losses faced by other people – many of them non-Christian, many of them unsaved and unrepentant.
Who I am today has been influenced by the people I’ve met and befriended and cared for along the way. We are all sinners, but I have accepted Christ’s redemption, and that calls me to love not just my fellow Christians but those who don’t believe and may not even want to.
Love, as Jesus defined it, means putting my rights and needs behind theirs.
Yes, I could skate along with Australian (and American) Evangelicals on the easy things to be outraged about: no gay marriage, we’re a Christian country, letting <1% of the population define gender boundaries, and those refugees are probably just trying to jump the queue to get into a country where they get fed and housed on the government penny.
I could keep my head down and be fine. I’m a ‘safe minority’ with the ‘right upbringing’ who swings heteronormative and doesn’t ping anyone’s buttons. That won’t protect me from men who think they have a right to my body – both in who I choose to allow access to it and in what I choose to do with it – and it won’t protect me from the people who see white as the default and the norm and that I should go back to where I came from (at least, perhaps, until I open my mouth and speak).
Only...God didn’t save me so I could be ‘safe’. He didn’t call me to Him so I could have a peaceful and prosperous life. I can do that, sure. But that’s not the endgame God has for me.
I believe in the New Jerusalem – a place where all come to worship God - but it’s not on this Earth, and it cannot be brought in by human politics and laws. I think the reliance on human politics and laws to ‘make us a Christian nation’ is idolatry of the worst kind: the first tenet of the Christian message is that God is personal and loving and just; the second is that the flaw in our world is not in our system but in our hearts. There is no system that can fix what we are: sinners.
Our job on Earth as Christians – followers of Jesus Christ, people of God – is to tell them that God loves them no matter who they are or what they’ve done, that, yes, he is a God of change and of self-control and of new things, but those new things are worth letting go of the old. Not everyone will hear the message, or want to believe it, but we’re not responsible for that – just for making the opportunities to speak the message. And those opportunities spring out of love and friendship, not out of preaching on street corners or the sentiments of the Westboro Baptists.
How now do I tell my gay friends that God loves them when they feel His people are so unloving towards them? How now do I tell Muslims that God isn’t a distant judge but a friend and comforter in times of despair when they see the people who claim His name tar them all with the brush of hatred? How now do I say to my atheist and agnostic friends that Christians believe that all people are created equal in the eyes of God – that Christ died once for *all* - when what they see is that so many ‘Christians’ wouldn’t stand for the rights of so many to be treated with dignity as though it were a human right?
I guess I don’t. Not after this. Not in words. I can't preach the gospel until I can live it in love. That's what I have – love for my friends, love for my neighbours, love for justice, love for my enemies. That's got to come first, or I'll never get to the last.
‘Love the LORD your God with all your heart, and love your neighbour as yourself. This sums up all the laws of Moses and the Prophets.’
I can do that, with Christ who gives me strength.
Christ give me strength to do that. Now more than ever.
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