Homosexuality and Catholicity, Part 2: Evangelical Hypocrisy

Whoops...I never posted the second half.

Finally, let me explain part of why I am so concerned about the typical evangelical response to this issue (though this criticism is not aimed at you).
You alluded to 2 Timothy 3, from which I shall now quote,
“For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people.” You quoted some commentator who glossed “avoid such people” as “have no fellowship with them, depart from their communion, withdraw from them, and come out from among them: this passage sufficiently justifies the reformed churches in their separation from the church of Rome.” If this is so, then surely we are of all men most to be pitied! For who is not a lover of self, or a lover of money? Who is not proud, or ungrateful? Who does not love pleasure rather than God? Obviously, we cannot avoid every sinner, so presumably this applies to those who obstinately cling to their sin and spurn calls to repentance. What we see with homosexuality is a serious ethical confusion--an acceptance of activities which, though our culture tolerates them, are clearly immoral. But is homosexuality the only phenomenon where we see this in the church today? No, and abortion is not the only other one. At least since World War II, a great number of conservative Christians have embraced the world’s approach to war, an unrestricted, utilitarian, “you gotta do what you gotta do” approach. Christians have even endorsed nuclear weapons, carpet bombing, and more. If this isn’t a great ethical confusion, what is? Conservative Christians have also happily endorsed economic practices and uses of money that earlier generations would have considered terrible examples of greed, luxury, and exploitation. American Christianity is rife with this kind of mammonolatry, as Doug Jones has pointed out over the past couple years; and indeed, as he has also pointed out, economic sins are more harshly condemned in Scripture than are sexual sins (e.g., notice that the chief criticism of Sodom in the Bible--Ezek. 16:48-50--is not for her sodomy, but for luxury and neglect of the poor).
If we are going to take a hard line on homosexuality--refuse to associate with them, excommunicate them, call down judgment upon them--what are we going to say about these ethical confusions of ours? “For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you.” (Mt. 7:2) If we’re really serious about righteousness in the Church, we need to be just as hard on our own sins as others, and that means that we need to be careful about using serious sin as a reason to divide a church, because there’s enough serious sin around to keep the Church dividing until judgment day.
Conservative Christians rarely seem to notice that after Paul’s harsh condemnation of homosexuality and idolatry in Romans 1, he turns to us and says, “Therefore you have no excuse, O man, every one of you who judges. For in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, practice the very same things. We know that the judgment of God rightly falls on those who do such things. Do you suppose, O man--you who judge those who do such things and yet do them yourself--that you will escape the judgment of God?” (2:1-4)
Yikes. Clearly Paul does not mean that the Jews he is addressing practiced exactly the same sorts of things, but theat they were guilty of sins just as serious. Are we evangelicals guilty of sins as serious as confusion about homosexuality? Maybe, maybe not. After seeing American conservative Christianity through the eyes that our brothers in Britain can see us, I really do wonder whether we’re not worse sometimes. And yet conservative condemnation of homosexuality and abortion has given us a convenient way to hide our guilt. We focus so obsessively on the sins of liberal Christianity, filling ourselves to the gills with righteous indignation, that we manage to avoid ever turning the sword of the Word on ourselves, to divide our own flesh and spirit, discerning the thoughts and intentions of our hearts. Until we can learn to be just as honest about the seriousness of our failures to understand and apply Jesus’s standard of godliness as we are about those of brothers in more liberal churches, we had better tone down the rhetoric of judgment and division, of shunning and schism, lest God judge us with the measure by which we judge, and come and strike the land with a curse. Here is the beginning of my post.

Livingstone's Ambiguous Legacy

I posted earlier about the ambiguous history of evangelicalism's relationship with imperialism, as sketched in Niall Ferguson's Empire. I'm afraid that the story hasn't gotten much better, and that an old hero of mine, David Livingstone, has been a casualty of the new revelations. Not of course that Livingstone turned out to be wicked or anything like that...just ambiguous. Turns out that he wasn't really a very successful missionary; in fact, it was the stubborn failure of Africans to convert that led him to turn explorer. This decision signaled a a crucial shift in philosophy that was to have great influence on British colonial policy--no converts without commerce. Livingstone decided that the spiritual and moral improvement of Africa could not be accomplished without a prior economic improvement that was to take the form of British colonization and commerce into the heart of Africa. Thus did evangelicalism hitch its wagon to the horse of capitalism long before such atrocities as Jon Schneider reared their ugly heads. Now, how much of this was a bad thing is hard to say. Undoubtedly, the influx of British commerce did much to raise African peoples out of their darkness; but we all know about its terrible exploitation as well.

While Livingstone failed at this mission in his life, his follower, Henry Morton Stanley, did not. But, though also an evangelical Christian, Stanley's methods were not Livingstone's. Stanley preferred guns and gunboats to Bibles and medicine. Among other evils, he was infamous for helping the king of Belgium establish the brutal slave-colony of Belgian Congo. Defending himself against charges of violence and brutality, he said, "the savage only respects force, power, boldness, and decision."

Learning all this dispelled the halo of idealized sanctity that earlier influences in my life had bestowed on Livingstone and Stanley, and it also offered more evidence in refutation of James Jordan's careless charge against the Anglo-Catholic movement--that it helped fuel the imperial exploitation of the Victorian age. (Jordan argues that this was a natural consequence of Anglo-Catholicism's use of images in worship!) Not only does this charge fail because the imperial exploitation had been going on for long before the Oxford Movement, and was, in fact, ameliorated in many ways during the latter half of the century, but it fails more decisively because, if anyone was complicit in the evils of imperialism, it was the evangelicals, far more than the Anglo-Catholics.

Of course, it's best not to indulge in historical finger-pointing among Christian groups. We are all guilty in our own ways. But, I did think it worth offering yet another rebuttal against Jordan's odd accusations.

Evangelical Imperialism

In listening to Niall Ferguson’s Empire (on audiobook) lately, I’ve encountered some rather depressing anecdotes about evangelicalism, which show that its recent complicity with injustice is nothing new.

Consider this: We all know about John Newton, right? Author of “Amazing Grace” and other hymns, great evangelical preacher, former slave trader who converted and became a leader of the anti-slavery movement. Great story, right? Well, except for one little detail. Newton’s evangelical conversion took place before he became the captain of a slave ship. It was only after several years as a slave trader that it occurred to him that his Christian duties might conflict with his occupation. Modern evangelical blindness on the Third World Debt problem seems to have plenty of historical precedent.

In another depressing episode, Ferguson tells the story of the great Sepoy Mutiny in India in 1857, which was largely a response to the missionary movement; the Indians felt that their religion was threatened, and so they rose in rebellion against the British. Now, I have no problem with the missionaries making the Indians feel threatened about their religion, but it is the response to the rebellion that is deeply troubling. The missionary societies and the evangelicals were the loudest voices calling for vengeance without mercy against the rebels. “In churches all over the country, the theme of the Sunday sermon shifted from redemption to revenge,” Ferguson says. He offers an extended quote from a sermon at the time by none other than Charles Spurgon, which he characterizes as a “call to holy war: “The Hindus’ worship necessitates all that is evil, and morality must put it down. The sword must be taken out of its sheath, to cut off our fellow subjects by their thousands.”

It was all chillingly reminiscent of the evangelical response to 9/11, in which the part of the US population that most fervently claimed to be washed by the blood of Jesus became the most bloodthirsty part.