we inherited our fear fairly; that doesn't mean we get to use it as a club

I've been thinking about persecution complexes in Christians in the west.

Christians have always been taught that our ‘persecution’ would take the shape of the Roman persecution of the late empire - open oppression from the authorities of the world, as described in Acts and in history books. This has driven a lot of the panic from the Christian Right about culture wars and ‘losing Christian society’.

In fact, however I think the church’s greatest temptation has been, is, and will be to be offered the whole world and lose its soul - “if you take on the power of the world, you will not die spiritually as God has claimed but will be like Him, having the power to define good and evil” - pretty much the exact same way humanity was originally persuaded to rebel against God - convincing them that they knew best.

And I firmly believe that far too many western Christians have just accepted that lie about worldly power - that forcing a largely non-Christian society into a Christian mould will make us safe, will enable our mission to the world, and will bring about the kingdom of God.

Interestingly, I am starting to believe that the reason the church has grown so much across Asia in the last fifty years even as western churches have stagnated, is because ‘Christian society’ doesn’t actually engender true faith - it’s like a shell of a creature: the living being once inhabited it, but has since moved on to something else, leaving behind only the shape of what it once was.

And I can see that our (the church’s) great sin of the 2000s will be that of omission (the things we have not done that we should have done), not commission (the things that we did that we shouldn’t have done): already we have too many people staying silent and safe when injustice and cruelty take place either at a personal level or at a societal level.

God in his Word says:

‘Away with your noisy hymns of praise!
I will not listen to the music of your harps.
Instead, I want to see a mighty flood of justice,
an endless river of righteous living.’

~ Amos 5:23-24 ~

God does not desire worship in the form of music or filled pews, but in the justice and love-for-others of his people.

This theme is frequently repeated throughout the OT prophets: Don’t just look to your own house, look to your neighbour’s house. Don’t just look out for yourself or the people with All The Things, but look out for those who have nothing - no power, no money, no means. Jesus goes on about this in the Sermon on the Mount - blessed are the meek, the poor in spirit, the grieving, the lonely - and his examples through his ministry frequently elevated the acts of the poor and the weak and the helpless rather than the political leaders of the day. The two people commended for great faith were not Jewish at all, but a Roman centurion, and a Syrophoenician woman.

And yet ‘Safety and prosperity’ are the household gods of most Western Christians - the most important thing in their lives is their life and their family’s lives.

Martyrdom in other parts of the world means actually losing your job, your freedom, your life. ‘Martyrdom’ in the west happens when someone challenges your politics, or when people return your ‘Merry Christmas’ with 'Happy Holidays'.

I think we (western Christians) have become so jumpy at anything that smacks of resistance to our faith and our message, thanks to the (actual) persecution of the early church, that we’ve forgotten that our faith is validated in what we do in troubled times: and not just our own times of trouble, but in the time of others’ trouble, also.

And, yeah, the martyrs of the early church lost their lives, but they gained the whole world.

Have western Christians gained the whole world in politics and yet lost the soul of their faith: to love the world as Christ loved us?

lama sabacthani?

Right now, I feel mostly abandoned by my fellow Christians. Out on the edge, being a "social justice warrior" for the widowed, the poor, the fatherless, the alien the people of colour, the immigrant, the Muslim and Jew, the 'different'.

I know a lot of people like that, thanks to my time on the internet. No, they're not Christians, but they're still people. God still loves them and sent Jesus to die for them, and they can reject him all the way up to the point that they die, after which they face judgement. But God still loves them and wants them to know Him, and I am the messenger of that news - perhaps the only Christian in their circles, for many have been burned by the church, by religious families, by social and religious condemnation. I'm open about my faith, but not proselytising, I hope. And I hope to give them a different view of Christians to the one they were brought up with - people who said 'I can't love you because you're not as God wants you to be'. Because my view is that God says to me, "I love you, even though you're not what I want you be - yet." And he has committed to remake me to be spiritually more like him (although I resist the process a lot). But I'm not who God wants me to be - not yet. And we - He and I - are working on it, still, after forty years.

The thing is that most of my Australian Christian friends don't have the connections I do. My spiritual mentor does - her daughters are just out of school and in the arts, and are struggling with their faith and how the church has tended to approach queer peoples in the past. I'm grateful to have that; we read the bible and do a small study, and pray with each other. And I can voice my doubts to her without fearing automatic condemnation, or the standard Australian Evangelical line.

See, here's the thing: I remember a Christian friend who wouldn't donate to a group because they supported an organisation that promoted marriage equality. Would they defend gay people being targeted by bigots? I wish I could say yes, but I don't know.

I've been asked "No, where do you really come from?" many many times. And when they don't get the answer they want, people tend to keep asking until they get the admission that my family came from overseas (as compared to, say, being Australian Indigenous). The only time I remember friends stepping in were two women who'd known me for ten years at that point, and they laughed and encouraged me when I kept on obfuscating. "Sydney. Australia. Australian. Australian." One of them said, "Actually, Selina's more Australian than I am: both her parents are Australian, my dad's still British." I've never forgotten that defence and I never will. Incidentally, neither profess faith in Christ.

Would my white Christian friends intervene on my behalf if someone insulted me? Yes. Probably.

Would my white Christian friends intervene for someone else like me if someone insulted them? Maybe. I think so.

Would my white Christian friends intervene when someone generally made a blanketing comment about people like me? I don't know.

I think that's the part that's most isolating: I DON'T KNOW.

If I were in the US, I'd be an at-risk person. Low-risk, as a 'safe minority' but still at-risk of generic bigotry, rather like that New York Times editor who was told "Go back home to China" although he was born in America. That's the possibility that I'd be facing over there - insignificant compared with having a headscarf torn from me and my car stolen, or having people threaten me physically because I'm not white - but there, and while I trust that my American friends might defend me, would they do the same for someone else, someone they didn't know? Would they speak up to stop stereotyping? I don't know that, I can't trust that.

And that terrifies me.

I'm not even American. I don't have to identify with American Evangelicals, but I look at them and I wonder about Australian Evangelicals: if someone promised us No Gay Marriage, would we also flock to a banner that was held by someone who said and did terrible things, and encouraged bigots, and wouldn't defend everyone - only those who agreed with him? Is that what we've already done with the Australian Liberal Party and Nauru and the Marriage Plebiscite?

I listen to the fears my non-Christian, at-risk American friends, and I hear the silence from my Christian-identifying, voted-for-Trump American friends when they're asked to condemn the violence against individuals of colour, sexuality, and religion - or else I wade through screeds about 'unity' and 'liberals who can't accept the results' - and wonder if this is what it is to love my neighbour.

It's not wrong to love my neighbour as myself, is it? To love those who might hate me, and to be a blessing to those who might curse me, to do good to those who might do evil to me, and to pray for those who might happily see me dead? No. No, it's not. It's right to defend people regardless of their policy or politics, whether they're sinners like non-Christians or sinners like Christians.

But I'm tired, and I'm scared - for my friends-who-aren't-socially-or-evangelically-accepetable and a little for myself - and I really feel like I'm out on the edge, alone, without support from either my Australian Christian friends or my American Christian friends, both of whose silence condemns me for my 'social justice crusade'.

I'm not - I have Christ with me, giving me strength. "Inasmuch as you did for the least of those, you did for me," said Jesus.

And yet that's more intellectually known than spiritually felt at this point in time.

so, that thing happened: identity in Christ and representation

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.