Tag: James Dobson

9/11 Revealed Christian Nationalism before Stephen Wolfe’s “Case”

Published on by D. G. HartLeave a comment

Reactions to the terrorist attack then and now (25 years later) have been hard to miss or experience. One conferee this past weekend in Baltimore who gathered to honor H. L. Mencken’s cynical wit (and more), could hardly bottle up tears after stopping at the Flight 93 National Memorial on the way to Charm City.

Tallying Christian responses has also put the recent discussions of Christian nationalism in perspective. As it turns out, Protestants who have a high view of politics and nations (who are also invariabley pietist) rushed to find Christian meaning in 9/11. Confessionalists, in contrast, were reluctant to use Christian doctrine to make sense of the United States’ loss and suffering.

(Sure, this could come across as a case of confessionalists taking a victory lap at the expense of pietists. It might also be instructive about the way a high view of the church deescalates the importance of nations.)

John Fea surveyed evangelical responses to 9/11 from twenty-five years ago in a piece for Christianity Today. The opposition of Religious Right leaders like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson to immorality and secularism was clearly a forerunner to recent calls from ChristNats for laws against blashpemy and Sabbath breaking.

It took only two days for Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority and Liberty University’s chancellor, to publicize his interpretation of the attacks. On Thursday morning, he appeared on televangelist Pat Robertson’s 700 Club and blamed the attacks on all his culture war enemies.

“I really believe,” he said, “that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America—I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.’”

. . . A few days later, as the nation watched George Bush’s National Day of Prayer and Remembrance at the National Cathedral, Falwell spoke to cable news trying to walk back his comments. He told CNN, in the outlet’s paraphrase, that “only the hijackers and terrorists were responsible for the deadly attacks”—but even then he could not stop talking about his enemies.

Falwell again accused the ACLU of having “secularize[d] America” and “removed our nation from its relationship with Christ on which it was founded,” thereby causing God to “lift the veil of protection which has allowed no one to attack America on our soil since 1812.” (The editors of Christianity Today later quipped that Falwell spoke “as if America enjoyed a spotless record of righteousness until the 1960s.”)

. . . Many evangelicals, whatever they thought of Falwell’s specific targets, seemed to share his underlying assumption: God was sending the United States a message through September 11. This was the old rhetoric of the Puritan jeremiad, sermons that called Massachusetts Bay to repentance in the wake of a society-wide tragedy. Puritans believed God used Indian raids, earthquakes, and losses of charters to punish the colonies’ inhabitants. Now, in these attacks, some evangelicals were sure God was again punishing his new chosen people.

Radio psychologist James Dobson pointed to America’s “pride and arrogance,” the “killing [of] 40 million unborn babies,” and the “mainstreaming of pornography.” He told his readers to “accept the truth that this nation will suffer in many ways for departing from the principles of righteousness.”

At the Nicotine Theological Journal, the editors adopted a different stance. One article, “God Damn Mr. Laden,” questioned the ubiquity of the phrase, “God bless America”:

The phrase, “God damn,” is one that devout Christians are not supposed to utter. Depending on how it’s said, it violates the Third Commandment which, as the Heidelberg Catechism puts it, forbids blaspheming and misusing the name of God “by cursing, perjury, or unnecessary oaths.” “God damn” would appear to fall into the category of cursing. That may explain why the only time I’ve heard a minister of the gospel say these words, and with noted effect, was when describing Jesus Christ on the cross, who bearing the sins of his people, was at that moment a “God-damned sinner.” The rest of those in the congregation that Sunday morning shifted nervously.

The recent terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, combined with the response of many Americans with a show of flags and the singing of “God Bless America,” have raised questions about Third Commandment and taking the Lord’s name in vain. Why is it wrong to say “God damn” but okay to say “God bless”? Surely the latter phrase isn’t a form of cursing by the lights of Heidelberg’s authors. But does “God bless” qualify, as Q&A 99 goes on to say, as the use of God’s holy name “with reverence and awe.” When it is as common as hand-painted messages on the rear windows of cars mixed with America’s civil religion of national messianism, the phrase “God bless” could legitimately be counted as a kind of cuss word. And yet few Christians seem to be aware that the Third Commandment requires the careful invoking of God’s name. In fact, because the idea that God has a special affection for the United States runs so deep in the American Protestant soul, responding to the terrorist attack with the phrase, “God bless,” is as natural as the Irish Catholic uttering “glory be” in reaction to a marvelous or unusual occurrence.

Another piece, “Faulty Towers,” noticed that invocations of Augustinianism were less coherent than what biblical theology gleans from the story of the Tower of Babel:

In reading some Internet “pastoral letters,” one common irony emerges. Pastors are frequently invoking the name of Augustine, and yet Augustine is being cited on behalf of some very un-Augustinian sentiments about American destiny and its role in the unfolding of the kingdom. Consider two messages from PCA pastors. “America is not the new Israel,” writes Larry Ball (on PCAnews.com), but “America has been special to God.” Now God is judging us, because “we have ejected the Christian God from our schools by denying prayer and refusing to teach his law.” Chief among American culprits was the immoral and heretical former administration (which seems to cast some doubt on God’s timing). America is a “cesspool of immorality and lawlessness . . . America has lost her peace because America has lost her righteousness.” It should not surprise us that God has used ungodly people to judge us, because that is the way he chose to judge Israel. America is not Israel, but she’s pretty darn close.

Slightyly more nuanced are the pastoral reflections from Tim Keller, a PCA pastor who ministers in Manhattan. He commends the mayor and governor for their public vision of the “resurrection” of New York City. “I personally believe that this is the right way for NYC to deal with its grief. It must reflect the gospel dynamic of death-into-resurrection at a civic level. Through this New York could become less a place of individualistic achievement and more of a community. Through this Americans could become on the one hand humbler and more sensitive to the injustice and pain in the world and yet more committed to and (rightly) proud of our nation than ever before. In summary, we could become stronger through this weakness, not just in spite of it. That is the basic gospel dynamic.”

This is as profoundly anti-Augustinian as you can get. To whatever extent New York City recovers, it is not in any sense being resurrected or redeemed. It remains the city of man, and therefore, at best, an instrument of God’s restraining grace. It does not reflect any reestablished role of America’s special purpose, nor is its recovery marking the breakthrough either of the gospel or the kingdom.

Is it too much to suggest that the better biblical metaphor to recall is the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11? In a consistently Augustinian understanding, the fall of the Tower of Babel was both judgment and blessing upon the city of man. In Meredith Kline’s words, it was a blessing in the sense that God was frustrating the “apostate ideology infecting the city of man,” frustrating their dialogue and “so ungluing the bonds of their ecumenical union.”

To close by saying that 9/11 stands above theological posturing may seem like a kind way to avoid using the tragedy to score religious points. In fact, the point of drawing on theology to interpret events in the life of a nation is to indicate that no success or failure of a political body is independent of theological interpretation. In which case, the choice of theological material for assessing dramatic events in the life of a nation is telling.

Jesus for President

Published on by D. G. Hart16 Comments

He’s about the only one left when it comes to a presidential candidate with character. Alan Noble laments:

In just five years, white evangelicals went from overwhelmingly denying a division between private and public character to overwhelmingly embracing the division. It is very difficult for me to imagine an explanation of this shift other than the candidacy of Donald Trump.

I do not want to speculate here on what exactly in Trump’s candidacy caused this shift in white evangelicals. Most of the possibilities are grim and warrant their own thorough exploration. But right now evangelicals can turn back to our traditional teaching that character matters and correct the mistake of supporting Donald Trump.

He concedes that Hillary has issues (which is why Jesus is left standing in that great day):

Some evangelical leaders have claimed that we just have two morally flawed candidates. They point to Hillary Clinton’s flawed character and her sins and conclude that since they are both sinners, we have to simply judge them on their policies. But that does not reflect a Christian conception of character and behavior.

Like many evangelicals, I cannot vote for Clinton because I do not believe she would be a good president for my neighbor. Since I believe that life begins at conception, Clinton’s intention to repeal the Hyde Amendment so that federal funds can be spent on abortions reveals a profound flaw in her character.

But her flaw does not magically make Trump’s flaws any less grievous.

What I enjoy about Trump’s candidacy as someone with a seat in the theater of American electoral politics, is how fundamentalists are now in fashion for both evangelicals and Democrats:

Having grown up as a conservative evangelical during Bill Clinton’s administration, I believe that character matters. This is what leaders on the religious right taught me when Clinton was caught in his affair with Monica Lewinsky. At the time, some people tried to shrug off Clinton’s infidelity as a private matter: Of course he shouldn’t have done it, but this didn’t affect his ability to be president. But conservative evangelicals rejected this logic, and they were right.

In response to President Clinton’s infidelity, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a “Resolution on the Moral Character of Public Officials”:

Therefore, be it RESOLVED, That we, the messengers to the Southern Baptist Convention, meeting June 9-11, 1998, in Salt Lake City, Utah, affirm that moral character matters to God and should matter to all citizens, especially God’s people, when choosing public leaders; and

Be it further RESOLVED, That we implore our government leaders to live by the highest standards of morality both in their private actions and in their public duties, and thereby serve as models of moral excellence and character; and

…

Be it finally RESOLVED, That we urge all Americans to embrace and act on the conviction that character does count in public office, and to elect those officials and candidates who, although imperfect, demonstrate consistent honesty, moral purity and the highest character.

So is Noble ready for the isolation that always comes to evangelicals who scold modern America for its sins? I thought evangelicals wanted a seat at the table, and fashioned a kinder, gentler Protestantism (than fundamentalism) to get there.

Now Falwell and Co. were right? Who knew?

We're Closer to Turkey than You Think?

Published on by D. G. Hart16 Comments

This may be the most important context for considering the controversy over Islam at Wheaton College, namely, that Americans themselves are not all that comfortable with secularity and Islam reveals where the lumps in the mattress are. Rod Dreher quoted a poignant part of Ross Douthat’s column on how the West views Islam, as either as conservatives believe “radically incompatible with Western liberal democracy, and can never be reconciled to it; or, as many liberals believe, it is capable of assimilating to become as tame and non-threatening as most forms of Christianity and Judaism in the West.” In the Protestant world, either Larycia Hawkins or Tim Bayly. According to Douthat:

The good news is that there is space between these two ideas. The bad news is that we in the West can’t seem to agree on what that space should be, or how Christianity and Judaism, let alone Islam, should fit into it.

Devout Muslims watching current Western debates, for instance, might notice that some of the same cosmopolitan liberals who think of themselves as Benevolent Foes of Islamophobia are also convinced that many conservative Christians are dangerous crypto-theocrats whose institutions and liberties must give way whenever they conflict with liberalism’s vision of enlightenment.

They also might notice that many of the same conservative Christians who fear that Islam is incompatible with democracy are wrestling with whether their own faith is compatible with the direction of modern liberalism, or whether Christianity needs to enter a kind of internal exile in the West.

It almost sounds like Turkey’s war between Islamic friendly politicians and secularists, from a piece quoted sometime back from Mustafa Akyol:

As you probably well know, Turkey has long been stressed by political tension between religious conservatives and secular nationalists, the latter also known as the Kemalists. However, that main fault line is somewhat passé these days given the emergence of a new kind of tension between the religious conservatives who had triumphed together in (OR: previous) tension from years gone by. This time, it is the AKP (Justice and Development Party) government and the powerful Fethullah Gülen Movement that are at odds with each other. . . .

The term I translated here as “referee” (“hakem”) is a powerful word in Islam, referring to a neutral and fair judge who can settle disputes. And it is interesting that Ms. Eraslan, a pious, headscarf-wearing Muslim, thinks that this “referee” may be none other than secularism. Of course, this would not be the type of secularism that Turkey’s Kemalists have imposed for decades. That peculiar ideology, called “laiklik” (from the French laïcité), was based on the assumption that there was something wrong with religion and therefore it needed to be suppressed by the state.

What Ms. Eraslan probably implied, and what Turkey indeed needs, is a more American-like secularism. In other words, it should be based on the recognition that there is a problem not with religion, but with the concentration of political power.

Unlike Turkey, though, and the conflict between religion and laicite, could the struggle in the U.S. be the one that animated fundamentalists and modernists during the 1920s? The political left in the United States, like modernists, does not advocate the removal of religion from public life. They like religion (think Martin Luther King, Jr.). Jim Wallis is not a threat to them.

So too, the right also likes religion of the right sort (see what I did there?). It used to be Jerry Falwell and James Dobson. Now it’s Rick Santorum and Kim Davis.

The problem is that both left and right embrace a form of American exceptionalism that needs religion to endow the United States with a righteous or holy purpose.

In that case, if we are still living with the dynamics of the fundamentalist controversy, has the United States learned lessons it can pass on to the Muslim world?