of liars and leaders

The year I was sixteen, my church had an Easter church camp. The theme of the camp was that We Would Face Oppression And Resistance As Christians. It's a reliable Evangelical theme, both then and now.

That camp, we got confronted by it quite directly.

At the Saturday night event, usually only filled with teenagers from 12 to 18, their over-18 leaders (up to about age 27, maybe), and maybe four adults/parents who were there to keep an eye on everything, a stranger walked into the event and started demanding to know why we believed. What was this Jesus thing all about anyway? How could we follow this thing so blindly? He was escorted out, and the evening started to go on but ground to a halt as the leaders realised that the teenagers were mostly too traumatised to continue. The evening was disrupted, and we were sent back to the main hall while the leaders conferred about what to do next.

About half an hour later, we were called back in and a handful of the leaders confessed: the stranger was a plant. Someone that they knew from their university Christian groups who'd agreed to be the 'challenger' to a bunch of sheltered, conservative teenagers of Asian background and Australian birth about the realities of the Christian life.

Most of us accepted this, I think. I don't remember much about my thoughts and feelings, except that it seemed like a reasonable idea that had gone way out of control. Also, some of the younger girls in my cabins - 12 and 13 years old - were rather traumatised by the sudden prospect of confrontation. One was really close to the guy when he stopped in the centre aisle to castigate the leaders, and she was trembling. These are kids from Sydney's North Shore, young and protected, upper-class, private school kids brought up in a Christian environment among family and friends. They've never known hardship or struggle or oppression - and money and status and power insulate us from those things, too.

She was struggling a lot, so we had one of the female leaders sitting on the bed and talking with her, with many of the other younger girls who were still struggling to process. This leader hadn't been part of the plan. In fact, her boyfriend - a grown man of thirty - had twigged that the challenger was someone from a university Christian group back in his day, and gone after the group of leaders who'd escorted him out to reason with him, only to find out that it was all a show. A performance with the intention of 'showing us how it really was'.

He was furious at the deception.

When I ventured that the leaders had our best interests at heart - preparing us for the world - though, John shook his head. "Selina," he said, "God never uses fear and lies as His tools to further His kingdom."

God never uses fear and lies as His tools to further His kingdom.

I don't know if John remembers saying that, but it has stuck with me for nearly thirty years.

What does this thirty-year old memory have to do with the now?

Simple.

Scott Morrison is a liar.

He may be a Christian, but he is also an inveterate liar. He takes no true responsibility. He bears no true burden of leadership. What he can deflect to someone else, he will. What he can obfuscate and deny, he does. He may very well be saved by the blood of Jesus, but he is a terrible ambassador for Christ in the political arena because he is not a man of honour and decency. He is the Aaron Burr of our times: "talk less, smirk more, don't tell them straight what you're against or what you're for..."

And Australian Christians are voting for Morrison and his party out of fear.

All the ranking church people I know in my denomination are behind the Liberal Party of Australia. For gender certainty. For religious discrimination. For 'decency' and 'uprightness' and 'a godly society'. To keep our society from 'falling to godlessness', to maintain our privileged standing in educational institutions and charitable institutions, because God's way is the correct way and this gives us the right to demand that other people listen to us and put up with us and don't question us and our methods...

The lies and falsehoods and squirrel statements that the leaders of the Liberal Party make? All in the service of God. All in the flourishing of the Christian faith.

All in the undercutting of Christian witness.

God never uses fear and lies as His tools to further His kingdom.

captive audiences and the gospel

the right to force other people to listen

In my mid-twenties, I was working in the city, commuting up the north shore line.

It was usually a quiet, unprepossessing trip, full of people who carefully didn't make eye contact and who tried not to say anything more than the barest minimum to each other. Mobile phones had not yet achieved internet status at the time, and so people read their papers or a book or stared blankly into space as they girded themselves for the day ahead.

Except this one morning.

A young man - maybe my own age, maybe a bit younger - got on my carriage at Chatswood. Taking a position near the stairs, holding firmly to the provided handles, he raised his voice for our attention and began...a stand-up comedy routine. He had a nice voice. The jokes were dad-level - that wincingly funny angle of 'oh no dad, please'. His voice carried through the quiet carriage, intruding on a peaceful morning commute. And there was no escape for anyone who didn't have headphones on. (And headphones or earphones were a far less common proposition in those days.)

We were on a train headed to work. We had no choice about being there - not if we wanted to earn money. Sure, some people smothered laughs at his routine, but my own thoughts at that moment were, I didn't sign up for this and I have nowhere to go.

The thing about that train carriage was that there were another six stops to the city, and I didn't know how long he was going to make jokes, but I wasn't in a mood to take them.

I can't remember what I said. I remember that it was short and polite and very much annoyed. I sympathised with his enthusiasm and his vigour, but at that moment if I'd had a neon sign to put up over my head, it would have read something like: DO NOT WANT.

He apologised and piped down. The guy standing next to him said quietly that he enjoyed the humour. The train ride continued, and he got off a few stops later.

Maybe under other circumstances, I might have been more forgiving. After all, the guy was passionate about what he was doing, he was enthusiastic, he was pretty funny in that dad-joke kind of way. But I didn't have the capacity for it then, and if I didn't, doubtless many other people didn't either, although none of them would have been so bold as to say so. Don't rock the boat, don't interrupt him, put aside your own discomfort to make him feel at home...

No. Sorry. A stand-up routine on a street or a platform, where people can move away? Yes. Sure. All good.

A stand-up routine with a bunch of people who are pretty much the definition of a captive audience? No. That's inflicting something on people that they haven't paid for, haven't asked for.

I think of that morning sometimes when my friends complain that they can't "tell the gospel" at their workplaces anymore.

I think of people who just want to get through their day, who are tired and grumpy, who haven't signed up for this, who didn't ask for it. I think of people who have no choice but to listen to a co-worker whose enthusiasm might be enjoyable outside of work but whose insistence on preaching the gospel inside an office space leaves no choice but for the recipient to stand up and say "No. Enough. I don't want to listen to this now. I signed up to work, not to be preached at."

What we offer to people as individuals, on their own time, in spaces where they have the choice to listen or the choice to shut it down gently. And I think of being preached at by someone who might have my best interests at heart but who has all the sensitivity of a brick when it comes to my comfort levels, or who tells themselves "it's the gospel, of course it's going to make them uncomfortable".

And I think that we are doing a great news no favours at all when we force people to listen.

In the same way, I think we are doing a great news and a great freedom no favours at all when we require people to follow Christian standards for our own comfort levels, but that's another conversation entirely.

TW: domestic violence

Tell me again that she was burned alive because she didn't smile properly. Tell me again that he flung his daughter off a bridge because she was singing a song he didn't like. Tell me again that he drowned himself and his daughter because his ex-wife made him angry...

Tell me again that he's a good man, a good father, a provider, an upstanding member of the community, a god-fearing man, that it's not his fault, that nobody saw this coming...

Tell me again how it's what she did, how she didn't appease him, how she wouldn't respect him, what she was wearing, who she was smiling at, her slutty behaviour, her bad morals....

We have a song when this kind of thing happens. We sing it really well. In six billion five hundred million part harmony. It's partly self-defence. So long as we do the right things, as long as we meet the right standards, so long as we jump at the right time through the golden hoops... We'll be okay, right?

Violence and abuse happens because the perpetrator chooses to be violent and/or abusive in a situation where others choose not to be.

Nothing more.

They're not "good men". They're not "just sinners". They're not "driven to it". They choose.

Moreover they learned that they could choose this way because you and I and the papers and the authorities excuse it. Because we think "oh, he's just a little weird" and "he does so much good in the community" and "well, maybe he didn't mean it like that" and "it's just the way God made men with all that extra testosterone that's gotta go somewhere hur hur".

And after the bodies are recovered and lying in the morgue, after the mourners have screamed their throats raw in the first flush of agony and finally fallen asleep in a funk of exhausted grief, we whisper gently, "he's a good man, even though he burned his wife to death, shot his son at a cricket match, abused multiple women, threw his partner out of the moving car..."

Do you think the God that wipes every tear from the eye of the broken doesn't see the way you slide respectability over brutality?

do we hate sin more than we love other people?

A person who took the lives of women in some part because he had learned to hate sexual sin to such a degree that he believed killing other women vs working on his understanding of those issues within himself was a good plan…

His faith community told him to hate sin more than he loved other people.

I am reminded of a story - a medieval murder mystery - where the local priest of a village is found dead in the river. The man had been chosen by the abbot of the nearby monastery as a man upright in all things, knowledgeable and educated, and more than fit to teach the parishoners all they needed to know of the things of God.

More than suitable, right?

Well, a newborn was birthed and considered sickly, and they ran for the priest to baptise it, but he was at his devotions and wouldn't rouse from them, even for this. He came afterwards, but the baby was already dead. And because it wasn't baptised, in the tradition of his faith, he wouldn't allow it to be buried in consecrated ground.

A mentally deficient young woman would sleep with any man who cozened her, and ended up giving birth to a child out of wedlock. But when she tried to return to the church, the priest told her she was an unrepentant sinner and excommunicated her. In grief, she went and drowned herself.

Yardage between the priest's allotment and a local man's plot was considered 'flexible', and the local man had used it to drive his cattle acrosss with the blessing of the previous priest. But now the new priest demanded that it be tilled for his usage all the way to the edge, cutting off the local man.

A freeman born operated a piece of ground that was traditional serf-held, and the priest required that the freeman prove his status or else he would be held bound to the land. The town elders held the freeman's freedom and the priest backed down, but claimed he had done nothing wrong.

The priest was theologically sound, legally within his rights, morally correct... But he had no heart for people. For 'sheep without a shepherd' as we are taught Jesus looked upon the crowds.

I did a little questionnaire about men's mental health this morning - teenaged son of the pastor of our church - and while I know the stereotypes of masculinity that tend to be bruited about, I also know that I follow a faith that grounds itself in a God - divinity, authority, power - who clothed himself in fragile mortal flesh, endured the little twinges of human existence, wept, grieved, submitted to brutality, and is still considered the lynchpin of our faith. Like, the Jesus of the gospels - whose harshest words were for those who led others astray with religiosity, whose most brutal action is against the bleed-em-til-they're-dry monetary systems of the day, who refused to take up arms against armed soldiers who came looking for him - is everything humanity should be, and he embodies so few of the 'masculine' traits that a group of kids would probably pick if you asked them to choose.

But back to having a heart for people - not just 'the lost', as churches like to phrase it, but people. Even those who have cast Christianity away. Do we still love them? How capable are we really of hating the sin and loving the sinner?

Because I think that, in our Sydney Evangelical context we hate the sin far more than we love the sinners. And this is a big problem going forward.

Sin is something to be wary of - absolutely. But one of the tensions of human existence is where it is better to restrain sin or sinfulness and where it is wiser to show love. And Jesus walked it perfectly - mostly by showing love to the 'sheep without a shepherd'. We can't hope to match it perfectly, but I think we should try to follow in love more than in hatred of sin.

on rape, truth, and why the church is silent

My guess is that the reluctance of Christian organisations to address rape culture or the denigration of women is multi-layered.

Even once you get past the 'sexual assault is a woman's problem, not caused by men and male entitlement' line, Christianity has to deal with the "we've been pushing the 'ladies, be modest in your dress so you don't inflame men's desire' for centuries and we can't admit it was wrong because church outsiders might challenge us on other matters of authority" blockage. That's a pretty huge blockage, and the church self-defends against it in every way, shape, or form - and has historically, from the theory of evolution being in opposition to biblical literality, to women's equality being valid and necessary, to it being a sin to be same-sex attracted no matter what you did or didn't do with that attraction.

Once it swallows that, it needs to address "well, obviously a woman being sexually assaulted must be sinning (because of course marital sex isn't rape, and 'good women' don't put themselves in a situation where rape could happen - see 'be modest in your dress...') and we shouldn't be helping to make her sin consequence-free". This is a pretty common 'sin-conflation' among Christian organisations. The premise is that "the problem is that the little sins are the same as big sins in God's eyes" which means there's no essential difference to the church's mind between a woman being sexually active outside of marriage, and a man taking a woman against her will.

And even once they've managed to choke down that idea, there's an attitude of "this is a worldly problem, not a spiritual problem, and church organisations, leaders, or preaching do not in any way contribute to it". Y Helo Thar "Porn Is The Problem", crowd.

Male entitlement, buoyed by the theology of male headship (with corresponding female inferiority), underpinned by a Madonna/whore complex regarding female sexuality? Not even acknowledged, although it underpins many a talk about sexuality and gender in the church and is reinforced by worldly masculinity and advertising.

Oh and then there's the deep-seated perennial mentality of "ew, feminism makes a woman unclean; she can be cleansed of it by the blood of Jesus, but she can't keep the feminism" which dislikes supporting anything with even the whiff of 'feminism' about it. Frankly, feminism is outright sin to the hard end of complementarianism and a 'slippery slope' to the more flexible ones: why, let women think they don't have to submit to the authority of men - let them suppose they're equal and they'll be abandoning their families and thinking they know more about anything than their husbands!

The authority question, incidentally, is also a root of the trans-panic in conservative and complementarian churches; "if we can't define male and female with definitive biology, then how can we be sure that men are given the due authority that their gender entitles them to?"

I don't hate the church or Christians. But I sincerely and truly understand why others do.

March 4 Respect: unsilent women, authority, and feminism.

Some people use the word 'respect' to mean "assign authority". And some people use the word 'respect' to mean "assign human dignity". Which leads to the point where someone says, "You must respect me, or I won't respect you." And what they mean - and will frequently act out - is, in fact, "You need to recognise me as an authority, or I won't treat you with human dignity."

As such 'feminism' is anathema to men who use the term 'respect' to mean 'recognise as an authority' because it no longer takes male authority as the last word. 

It also occurs to me that when men or male authorities talk about "being respected" they're largely talking about being assigned authority and recognised and acknowledged as such. So a man feeling disrespected is most likely because he isn't considered the last word, the leader, the ultimate authority. However, when women talk about "being respected" they're largely talking about being assigned humanity.  A woman feeling disrespected is likely because she's not being considered as a person  - rather, she's an object, a usefulness, or an adjunct.

As such 'feminism' is anathema to men who use the term 'respect' to mean 'recognise as an authority' because it no longer takes male authority as the last word. This explains a lot of pushback against feminism in Christian and peri-Christian (Christendom?) circles. When 'respectfulness' is seen as "you will recognise, acknowledge, and submit to my authority for no other reason than that I am male" then, yes, feminism is dangerous to the rigid end of complementarianism and a slippery slope to the more flexible side.

In contrast, 'feminism' to most feminists means  the recognition that a woman is a person: fully whole, legally independent, individual and worthy of decent treatment without regard to whether or not a male finds them personable, socially acceptable, or fuckable. Women are worthy of existence and human rights simply because they are (...made in the image of God, the Christian mentally adds).

I have never ever had a conflict between my feminism and my faith. Jesus' closest followers included women who not only fed him and washed his feet, but also learned from him and were witnesses to his resurrection. And his behaviour and teachings are what we would these days call 'feminine'. So, yeah, of course God sees me as any man's equal in human dignity, therefore any human dignity accorded a man is my right, too. And yeah, it gets messy when we bring it into society where men hold the power, the authority, and even the truly godly ones are not above tweaking the system to give them the advantage. Human nature is human nature, after all. That doesn't mean it's wrong, just unpopular. (And shouldn't we as Christians know about not-wrong-just-unpopular? I mean, that's a biggie in our cultural victimhood...)

I want to say something cynical about the rather notable silence about the March4Respect from most of the churchgoing people that I know. I won't. Some of them are trying; some of them aren't. Most are focusing on the Great Trans Fight that will kick into gear over the next 12 months, because from that will come the dollar signs of religious education and our right to teach and preach our views like they're dominant and nobody is going to question them.

But I still think we're spending our coin on the drug of 'moral self-righteousness' that will leave the broader church with no witness in the world. But I'm nobody on that point - who'd listen to me?

they want to believe

Sometimes I think Christians don't give non-Christians quite as much benefit of the doubt as they should.

For the most part, non-Christians want to think well of Christians. Yes, they want to think well of Christians in a namby-pamby kind of ineffectually good but otherwise unharmful way, but overall, they want to think well of do-gooders and moral people - they want to admire people for their principles. Not just on "marriage, sexuality, and reproduction" but on "the poor, the widow, the displaced, the fatherless".

What they don't want is to see people who claim the moral high ground be complete jackasses when it comes to dealing with matters that require grace and graciousness, charity and compassion, justice and fairness. They especially don't want to see comfortable middle-class Christians lord it over them morally while refusing to lift a collective finger for the unfortunate and dispossessed.

They want to see our collective actions conform with our beliefs. And too often, the actions of our leaders don't conform with our beliefs except in marriage, sexuality, and reproduction. Our graciousness is lacking as we clutch desperately at the remaining shreds of social power that we have, brandishing them while shrilly proclaiming "the truth in love" - truth it may be, but loving? Not in any form that they'd recognise.

(Sometimes I wonder if the "but I'm telling the truth in love" crowd realise that if you correct a child when they're doing wrong but fail to cheer them on when they're doing right because that's just what they should do, then you might be acting in love but the child doesn't recognise it; 'love' doesn't mean forcing truths that are presently unpalateable to them down their throats. It's amazing how many Christians will not understand this.)

In his post about the RZIM revelations, Dr. Russell Moore observed that the world beyond Christianity doesn't reject Christians because of Jesus; they reject Christians because so often it seems that Jesus is no more than a tool in the hands of Christians.

That's a damning observation.

For two thousand years, the Christians who changed the world were tools in the hands of their Saviour.

Today, most people would think of 'the church' and condemn it for using Jesus as one more weapon to be used in the culture wars. They might respect and admire individual Christians, but 'the church'? No. Not for them, thanks.