how many different ways do we have to say it

or, how long can we be a sad song

Here, read footnote one¹, and then enjoy a silly TikTok before we get started.

A friend asked me last month why I haven’t been talking about political issues on social media or in my writing lately. Was I hampered by my new role as priest, he asked?

I’ve been thinking about his question again this week as I’ve read about Trump’s continued use of pre-genocidal language, his convictions for fraud and sexual abuse, and his promise of a “bloodbath” if he isn’t reelected (given that this is basically what the January 6 lawsuits are about, doesn’t this threat mean he should not be allowed out on bail? Or what do I know.) I’ve been wondering what alternate reality I must be living in from so many Christians who are eager to support him.

There’s not just one reason I’ve been quiet about this. But one of the reasons, maybe the first reason, is that I said what I had to say four years ago, when Where Goodness Still Grows came out. And we have been banging the drum pretty consistently. I mean, here’s just an annotated sampling of the books, in the order they were published, that have come out about Christianity and Trumpism/Nationalism/politics in the last four years (the ones with an asterisk are the ones I have read):

January 7 2020
*The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism by Jemar Tisby: the one by a Black historian that started a thousand firestorms

January 21 2020
*Where Goodness Still Grows: Reclaiming Virtue in an Age of Hypocrisy by me: the one that is a fierce cry of lament, that wonders if it is a limited (white, straight, male) viewpoint that has hamstrung our understanding of virtue, that tries to reimagine embodied goodness more expansively

May 5 2020
*The Myth of the American Dream: Reflections on Affluence, Autonomy, Safety, and Power by DL Mayfield: the one that is literary essays by a wounded activist

March 22 2021
*White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America by Anthea Butler: the academic Religious Studies one, by a Black woman

June 8 2021 (which incidentally is my birthday, and Rachel Held Evans’s)
*Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes du Mez: the one by a historian that looked at cultural history and found that support for Trump was not an exception to a rule

July 13 2021
White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity by Robert P. Jones: the one by the president and founder of Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), using public survey data

April 1 2022
The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy by Philip S. Gorski , Samuel L. Perry , et al. : the one where academic sociologists look at the development of the ideology of Christian Nationalism over the last three centuries

August 16 2022
Red State Christians: A Journey into White Christian Nationalism and the Wreckage It Leaves Behind by Angela Denker : the one where a veteran journalist interviews evangelicals across America

January 24 2023
Orphaned Believers: How a Generation of Christian Exiles Can Find the Way Home by Sara Billups: the Gen X memoir

April 18 2023
Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Failed a Generation by Jon Ward: the first journalist memoir

July 25 2023
Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America by Russell Moore: the one by the former president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention

August 15 2023
American Idolatry: How Christian Nationalism Betrays the Gospel and Threatens the Church by Andrew L. Whitehead: the one where a sociologist shows how Christians harm their neighbors when they embrace the idols of power, fear, and violence

August 22 2023
Ballot and the Bible: How Scripture Has Been Used and Abused in American Politics and Where We Go from Here by Kaitlyn Schiess: the one where a woman who did graduate work at Dallas Theological Seminary and Duke Divinity School looks at the history of Biblical interpretation and politics in America

October 3 2023
Defending Democracy from Its Christian Enemies by David P. Gushee: the one where an Ethics professor talks about January 6

December 5 2023
The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism by Tim Alberta: the one where a staff writer for The Atlantic who also happens to be the son of an evangelical pastor tries to explain evangelicals

March 19 2024
The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church by Sarah McCammon: the second journalist memoir

Coming May 21 2024
The Understory: An Invitation to Rootedness and Resilience from the Forest Floor by Lore Ferguson Wilbert: the one where a memoirist writes of alienation and disorientation after years of religious and political unrest in the evangelical church, and looks to the forest to learn how to live and even thrive when everything seems to be falling apart.

Coming October 2024
Your Jesus Is Too American: Calling the Church to Reclaim Kingdom Values Over the American Dream by Steve Benzer: the one where a Baptist pastor from Texas has to say the same things that are evident in the Sermon on the Mount because maybe people will listen to a white straight baptist man from Texas say them. (I really like Steve on twitter, please don’t take this as a dig at him.)

a few of them

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Let me make a few observations about this (obviously incomplete) list (please add what I’m missing in the comments).² The first five chronologically are written by women and/or people of color. Why do you think that is?

The language of the titles contains these words: complicity, hypocrisy, myth, fractured, threat, wreckage, orphans, exiles, failed, betrayed, threatens, abused, extremism. These are not easy words.

And they come at the topic from multiple academic fields, and people of varied backgrounds and generations, from publishers from IVP to Oxford University Press.

I read only five of them myself, and then I stopped, because I just had to move on. I stopped reading about it, and I stopped writing about it, too. Maybe it’s privilege that allowed me to do so. Maybe it’s a way of putting my own oxygen mask on first.

My quiet was partly burnout and partly despair and cynicism. I had said what I had to say, we have all been saying it ad nauseam, and the polling numbers (at least) don’t change. (Not to mention the fact that our options in general are not great, and that gerrymandering —especially here in NC! — means changing minds hardly even matters in terms of outcome??)

I don’t mean to imply that my despair or cynicism is right: I believe every one of those books matters, and so, probably, do many of the tweets and instagram posts and Facebook interactions and tiktoks on this subject. I know they do because MY mind has been changed by blog posts, and because I still get emails from people who have read WGSG and felt comforted and companioned and challenged, who have used it as a conversation starter with family.

My quiet is also partly the knowledge that I am not the most qualified person to speak on most partisan political matters or current events. (But if you want to talk about how the gospel invites you to get free of the powers that try to enslave, I’m your guy.)

And a third reason I’ve been quiet is that, like Lore above, I’ve been looking to the non-human created world for lessons in change and resilience; and I’ve also been clowning a little. Thinking that maybe clowning is the way forward. I’ll say more about that later this week, I hope.

1. I would like to read You’re Losing Me as a song written by an evangelical to the church

You say, "I don't understand," and I say, "I know you don't"
We thought a cure would come through in time, now, I fear it won't
Remember lookin' at this room? We loved it 'cause of the light
Now, I just sit in the dark and wonder if it's time

Do I throw out everything we built or keep it?…

Stop: you’re losing me…

How long could we be a sad song
'Til we were too far gone to bring back to life?
I gave you all my best me's, my endless empathy
And all I did was bleed as I tried to be the bravest soldier

I would like to read Harmony Hall as a song by an evangelical to the church:

Anger wants a voice, voices wanna sing
Singers harmonize 'til they can't hear anything
I thought that I was free from all that questionin'
But every time a problem ends, another one begins

And the stone walls of Harmony Hall bear witness
Anybody with a worried mind could never forgive the sight
Of wicked snakes inside a place you thought was dignified
I don't wanna live like this, but I don't wanna die

What other songs would be on your list?

2. Further recommendations I’ve received since this posted that look potentially interesting include The Violent Take It By Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy by Matthew D. Taylor (which comes out in September, and particularly looks at the New Apostolic /Reformation and independent charismatic churches with regard to January 6) and Preparing for War by Bradley Onishi (January 2023).