(Be forewarned. The subject of this blog required that it be longer than usual. My goal in writing it is to initiate discussion and debate about the issues I raise. To that end I hope you will be willing to share it with others.)
These are no ordinary times, and Donald Trump is no ordinary president.
That is one of the reasons a recent NPR interview with the Rev. Adam Hamilton caused me significant angst.
Hamilton is the senior minister of the largest United Methodist Church in the world, with some 20,000 members, a church he founded 27 years ago.
The interview focused on his being pastor to a politically divided congregation: “We have some folks who are Trump supporters,” he said. “We have folks who were not Trump supporters.”
In that context, he said he believes his great challenge is, “How do I continue to be pastor for all of these people? And how do I help them hear each other?”
That desire to be a pastor to everyone is rooted in his belief that “the defining mark of the Christian life is not being right politically. It is expressing love.”
That is a point of view few Christians would disagree with, but its application to the political divide in our country and in Hamilton’s congregation is far from simple.
More than that, expressing love can lead ministers like Hamilton to believe, as he says he tells other ministers, that influencing people takes priority over irritating them. As I will show, I think that is a false dichotomy.
Khizr Khan, father of Muslim-American war hero Army Capt. Humayun S.M. Khan, who was killed in action in Iraq, made the statement during the presidential campaign: “There comes a time in the history of a nation where an ethical, moral stand has to be taken regardless of the political costs.”
This is such a time in America, and no group faces the moral demand to speak truth to power, to borrow an old Quaker phrase, more than clergy.
That is because this moment in our history is about the struggle over the values we are embracing or rejecting as a people and the vision we hold for the future of our country.
Of all people, Christians must understand the stakes involved in that struggle and the demand on us to stand for what is right against any and all odds because we are Christian.
But let’s put this in the proper theological context that is defining this moment for Christians.
In a recent article published in the Washington Post, eminent theologian Stanley Hauerwas says that while Donald Trump “thinks of himself as a Christian…America is his church.”
For this reason, Hauerwas argues, the worship Trump advocates is idolatrous: “Trump’s inauguration address counts as a stunning example of idolatry. His statement — ‘At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America and through our loyalty to our country we will recover loyalty to each other’ — is clearly a theological claim that offers a kind of salvation.”
That, Hauerwas argues, is a serious problem for Christians who believe that only God demands “total allegiance.” As he puts it: “Christians do not believe in ourselves or our country. We believe in God, but we do more than believe in God. We worship God. Nothing else is to be worshiped.”
The article concludes with both a challenge and an indictment: “Christians must call [Trump’s] profound and mistaken faith what it is: idolatry. Christianity in America is declining, if not dying, which makes it difficult to call Trump to task. Trump has taken advantage of Christian Americans who have long lived as if God and country are joined at the hip.”
What Hauerwas is saying actually explains why Hamilton and ministers like him face a divided church at this moment in our history. People join churches without understanding the demands being Christian places on them. Once they do, there is no evidence to support the belief that many of them transition into genuine Christian commitment thereafter.
This is how half of a Christian congregation can support Donald Trump and his policies without realizing that what they are doing is undercutting any desire their have to follow the way of Jesus.
But it is not as if the Christian community has not faced similar challenges.
In 1933 a small group of German Christian leaders came together to affirm what became known as the Barmen Declaration. It was a theological statement intended to challenge the errors of “the German Christian movement” among evangelicals that supported the “Nazification” of the gospel, a support that tragically led many German Christians to become collaborators in the Holocaust.
The Declaration begins with these words: “In view of the errors of the ‘German Christians’ and of the present Reich Church Administration, which are ravaging the Church and at the same time also shattering the unity of the German Evangelical Church, we confess the following evangelical truths.”
It ends by calling “all who can stand in solidarity with [this] Declaration to be mindful of these theological findings in all their decisions concerning Church and State.”
Most German Christians did not stand in solidarity with the likes of Karl Barth and Dietrich Bohoeffer, a moment in history whose lesson cannot be lost on us today.
Because these are no ordinary times, and Donald Trump is no ordinary president, the question before Adam Hamilton and his church, and all of us who are Christian, is whether or not we recognize that the threat we are facing is a direct challenge to choosing God over all other allegiances, to choosing politics over the way of Jesus.
That challenge is exacerbated by the fact that we face the dilemma of how to live with those who have chosen to compromise their faith. Our impulse may be to try to get along with them, be tolerant of them, and try to understand where they are coming from. And ministers may want to do everything they can to be a pastor to these people.
But those desires must be set in the theological context that our moment in history has arrived when we must make hard ethical, moral choices that will express either faithfulness to the gospel or lead to compromise.
What is dulling people’s understanding of that reality, even among clergy, is the flawed perception that the political division in congregations like Hamilton’s is nothing more than a disagreement between liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats.
If you take seriously the argument Stanley Hauerwas makes that Trump is promoting an idolatrous Christianity, you cannot dismiss political divisions in our country and in churches as business as usual, as something we have seen before about which we should not become overly distraught.
Much more is going on than that, and much more is at stake than helping church members treat each other with love and respect.
The very soul of Christianity and the church is hanging in the balance at this moment, but I wonder if Adam Hamilton and ministers like him understand or believe that this is the nature of the crisis we are facing.
Pastoral care is a sacred responsibility all pastors have. But so is speaking truth to power.
I have never known any minister who wanted to irritate his or her church members, nor have I ever known one who dared to speak prophetically who didn’t.
The responsibility, then, that falls to all ministers, as I see it, is less about trying to keep people from leaving the church, and more about helping them to understand what it means to be Christian, if they choose to stay.
And then letting them make the choice for themselves.
linnposts.com 