Being Evangelical

Consider this a late entry to Prismatic Warren’s (look, we need to distinguish the blog and the guy) cleric blogwagon. Or don’t. I meant to write something for it because I loved the movie Conclave, but ended up having a crazy month where I thought less about this blog than I had for the other months of this year. This has nothing to do with Conclave or D&D though. Bon appetit.

I was talking to a friend and her boyfriend who were recounting their recent adventure while church hopping, the result of the boyfriend getting kicked out of his church band because his girlfriend (my friend) moved in to live with him. A fourth person in all this had invited them to their church, a Lutheran one, and the couple was totally surprised by what they had encountered. Never mind the support dog the congregation just had around as a conversation starter (“Did you meet this dog that’s gone out of its fucking mind?”). They were surprised that the church, despite being ‘Christian’, was very ‘Catholic’. The liturgy came across to them as a cult-like ritual. Where was the soft rock music and all that shit? They just wanted community, they told me—not whatever the fuck that was.

Our conversation revealed a lot in both of us. My friend, distinguishing between Christian and Catholic churches, revealed either that she internalized the rhetoric of Evangelical churches either very quickly (since she started dating her Christian boyfriend a while ago) or very early on (despite self-identifying to me before as spiritual-but-not-religious). I also realized that although I was raised Evangelical, I was much deeper in the shit than 90% of most churchgoers. Like, I didn’t know that there were people who distinguished between Christians and Catholics but also didn’t know what the deal with Lutherans was, whether historically or ritually. There are a couple surveys by Evangelical organizations revealing that most Evangelicals hold beliefs that are straight-up heretical; The Gospel Coalition says about this, “the label ‘evangelical’ can often tell us more about a person’s sociological and political convictions than what he believes about the Christian faith.”

In contrast, from a young age, my father instilled in me an incredibly (excessively) in-depth understanding of Christian theology and history. You can’t have good practice without good theory, I guess, and he saw himself as a member of the Christian vanguard to spread the Gospel and save people from Hell. He preached in the park, organized Bible studies in converts’ homes, left Chick tracts in the laundromat by our house—and we, as his family, were involved in every step of the way (my mother serving as an awkward interlocutor, being a native Spanish speaker who didn’t fully buy into the whole project). The last text I read from my father was him expressing both disappointment and a future hope, because he had prayed over me as an infant that I would grow up to be a soldier for Christ with my maternal great-grandmother (a Puerto Rican Pentecostal later in life, contra the rest of my mom’s family who were variously into Catholicism, Santería, or nothing at all).

Biblical Literalism

Again, I was deeply in it, and a massive component of my (our?) belief system was biblical literalism. Wikipedia describes it as a hermeneutic technique with which to interpret the Bible, specifically in contrast to the historical-critical method which my father had always decried as liberal. (Confusingly, my family had always been left-leaning, except my father on the issue of abortion specifically; liberalism in this case refers to non-orthodox beliefs or practices relative to Evangelicalism.) The problem is the term “hermeneutic technique” implies a consistent method applied equally and evenly across the Bible as a corpus, but biblical literalism was more like a parallel belief system based on interpretations of select passages and rearrangements thereof, QAnon-style. In other words, despite the premise of biblical literalism being to read the Bible as clearly and straightforwardly as possible, its interpretations require specific context and conceits from the community.

A great example is the book of Revelation. The critical-historical method is ironically more literal and straightforward than the reading proposed by biblical literalism if you have just a smidgen of context such as “When and where was this written?” or “What languages did the author and audience speak?” It’s a rallying cry to early Christian communities, that the events foretold by the Jewish prophets were happening and the struggle against Rome (as Babylon) is simultaneously a cosmic war against Satan which will culminate in an ultimate victory of G-d over sin and the reign of Jesus on Earth. It’s barely symbolic except that the text borrows certain imagery from Jewish prophecy, more or less literal, and that coded language is used to refer to Rome as a seven-headed Dragon (13:11-17) which, as per the angel delivering the prophecy (7:9-11), represents seven hills and seven kings of which only six have come to rule (Nero being the sixth of the Julio-Claudian dynasty). Moreover, the Beast to whom the Dragon gave authority has a number χξϛ which when translated to Hebrew is נרוןקסר; you may notice that Greek and Hebrew use the same set of characters as letters and numbers, and that the Hebrew spells out Nrn Qsr (Neron Qaisar). Since the original audience was a bunch of Jewish Christians, that would have been very obvious to them, and even besides that the text is extremely straightforward about its own meaning. This is not an allegorical interpretation in the same way, for example, Philo of Alexandria had constructed for the Torah: this is the text giving and explaining an obvious metaphor. You have to intentionally disregard the text’s own guidance and inject foreign symbology in order to interpret it differently.¹

And that’s what Evangelicals did. There’s two interlinked theological frameworks at play, both of them modern: premillennialism, the belief that the Millennial Kingdom described in Revelation is a future state ruled by the returned Jesus rather than being a description of the Church in the present time (fine, that’s literal enough); and dispensationalism, the belief that G-d’s covenants with Israel and the Church are distinct rather than the latter fulfilling and superseding the former. These beliefs constitute a futurist project where the Church must intervene in world history in order to execute G-d’s agenda: establish the modern state of Israel in order to rebuild G-d’s temple, rapture believers from the Earth, and usher in the Great Tribulation when G-d punishes humanity and wages outright war against Satan. Three of those four things are modern injections: the first two because the state of Israel and G-d’s temple no longer existed when the theology was first articulated in the nineteenth century, and the third because the Rapture is also a nineteenth century doctrine to systematically (i.e., through extrabiblical mental gymnastics) reconcile eschatological passages which were once understood distinctly even by seminal Protestant theologians like Luther. Nothing about Evangelical eschatology is orthodox, much less original to the text of the Bible itself. Biblical literalism may be the conceit of Evangelical theology, but it is not really its guiding principle. What is, though?

Making Disciples

Every Evangelical has a testimony. I’ll tell you mine. I was five years old and, one Sunday evening, I was giddy after a particularly exciting sermon that morning. I asked my father to help me pray to receive Jesus in my heart. He was proud of me and of that moment. He didn’t put a gun to my head. Or, more like, though we went to church every Sunday, and though I was raised in a religious context, he didn’t prompt me to ‘actually’ convert. That’s the difference between us and Catholics: you have to wait for the kid to actually want it before you dunk them in the baptismal font (or, for Catholics, sprinkle some water on the infant’s head—so nonconsequential). When I received the Holy Spirit, I was totally ecstatic and was running around the house. My father keeps a digital journal and has an entry describing it, but I remember. I was very happy and excited.

My father didn’t grow up in the Church. He was the youngest of many kids, born last to a pair of fairly old parents (like, in their forties). I have an “aunt” on that side who, my father would remind me as a genealogy freak, was actually my cousin because she was really the daughter of my father’s sister despite being way closer in age. I never fully understood the dynamic of my father’s family. I got the impression they were somewhat dysfunctional. The eldest sister (I think half-sister?) wasn’t fully in the picture because she was married with kids and lived elsewhere. Another sister eventually fell for a yoga health cult in NYC. Another sister got into wicca and moved to Ireland or some shit. Apparently, when I was very little, we went to his brother’s wedding, but he got divorced and started sending my dad hate mail because he was jealous of his relatively functional life (as I understand it?). My dad at fourteen years old saw the trajectory of his life—going to school, getting a job, marrying someone, having kids, retiring, and dying—and felt existential anxiety about it. What was the point of doing all that and then just dying in the end? He found an answer when a friend invited him to AWANA, sort of a Scouts-esque after-church kids program where you played and (for the most part) memorized a bunch of Bible verses à la carte like Mao quotations. Conspicuously militant-themed. I went there growing up, too. But, yeah. That’s his origin story.

I was told growing up—as advice for evangelizing—that everyone is either leaving a crisis, going through a crisis, or about to enter a crisis. Crises are what get people to think about their lives, and get them to open up to bigger questions about the significance of life itself or what happens when you die. In other words, when someone is going through it, that is the very best time to minister to them and offer something greater than their tribulations. That can’t be said for children who grew up in the Church, but definitely for believers like my father and others who (more consciously) accepted Jesus—which, I hate to do this, but it bugs me how Evangelicals always talk about Jesus being the one to enter your heart, as opposed to the Holy Spirit. Anyway, I think crises do more than open the door to Jesus: they keep that door wide open. Lack compels desire, and anxiety ensures a constant flow of lack whether as fear or as want. That anxiety is generative of fervent faith, which is fed into beliefs and practices which generate even more anxiety. That’s how you distinguish true believers from those who tripped and fell into a church pew.

This atomic dynamic hints at the structural affinity between Evangelical Christianity and contemporary fascist movements in the United States, like White Nationalism. Of course, the modern Evangelical movement comes out of the racist reaction against civil rights and the end of Jim Crow (generally and, I’m thinking of in particular, the Bob Jones University segregation scandal), the Southern Baptist Convention comes out of support for slavery in southern states during the Civil War, and much of American Protestantism comes out of Anglo-Saxon settler colonialism. But I say “affinity” rather than “causality” because the basic techniques of conversion and retention predate specifically Evangelical movements, being fundamental to Christianity and more general group identity formation. Evangelical Christianity as a movement is defined by phobia, stricto sensu, as a reaction against other social forces which members regard with obsessive fear or hatred. This is why Evangelical identity more strongly predicts political convictions than religious beliefs: it has very little to do with interpreting the Bible literally (or consistently…) than wielding its authority as a cultural shibboleth to rally losers around fascism.

And G-d Said

Let me tell you my real testimony. I was thirteen years old and, one Sunday evening, I was crying in bed. My father had gotten really into Young Earth Creationism, a pseudo-science ‘field’ premised on the belief that G-d had created the Earth about six thousand years ago based on a literal reading of Genesis—which may well have been believed by its audience, although I think it is also (at least partly) an intentional subversion and even secularization of Babylonian cosmology. Anyway, this ‘worldview’ was peddled by Ken Ham, the founder of YEC organization Answers In Genesis through which he sells homeschooling textbooks and operates a creationist museum / theme park. In his book Already Gone, he argues that the increasing acceptance of evolutionism has resulted in a mass exodus from the Church, and that the only solution is to equip Christian children with a literal reading of Genesis as supported by AIG’s pseudo-scientific research. I was a believer, and a zealous one at that. My father bought me lots of books at my request about the scientific truth of creationism which was being repressed by anti-theist scientists, and I ate it all up.

But, contrary to Ham’s thesis, it wasn’t evolution that broke me. Evangelical politics in the early 2010s centered on three controversies: abortion, climate change, and gay marriage. I was to the ‘left’ of Evangelicals on these topics at the time, speaking relatively: first, that abortion was primarily an issue of society punishing women (especially poor women) and that the answer could be found in welfare and sexual education; second, that G-d called humans in Genesis to be stewards of the Earth, meaning that our responsibility is to care for animals and nature more generally (and that the degeneration of nature was a sign of humanity’s aggregated neglect in that respect); and, third, that whomever the state treats as married has no bearings on whom the Church considers married. (Despite being ‘woke’ for a Christian at the time, I like to think that I’ve gotten better since—having become my own person and all that shit.) I accepted that I was in the minority on these issues, within Evangelical circles at least, but that didn’t bother me nearly as much as what Evangelicals did not advocate for. What about wealth redistribution or social justice? When I asked on these questions, the answer was always that it wasn’t the secular State’s responsibility to impose biblical morals at the cost of individual liberty—except, seemingly, when it was to punish women and homosexuals.

It wasn’t evolutionism that prevailed over my faith, but the cruel immorality of those who called themselves Christians. By my own estimation, I considered myself a socialist before I stopped believing in creationism, and it took me first realizing that biblical literalism was itself a lie vested with social interest (capitalist, patriarchal, racist). I cried in bed that night because a certain slogan had permeated Evangelical spaces from the new Newsboys song “I Am Second”, which goes like this in the chorus:

I’m second to One
Redeemer, The Way, The Light
I’m second to One
The Savior
No compromise
I’m laying everything
At the foot of the cross
My pride, my life, my all
I’m second to One
He second to none.

You’re second? You think you’re second to G-d? Jesus, the Word Incarnate, G-d-in-flesh, said to be everyone’s servant—and here you are, saying that you’d think you were on top had you not known G-d and realized that you were in fact second to one? Fuck you, man. The thought simmered in my brain for a couple years, during which I underwent my first foray at puberty and realized that I was one of those sexual degenerates who were going straight to hell if they ever acted on it. Cool, cool. Everyone fights their own battles, and it didn’t cross my mind when I suggested coyly that Kim Davis—the Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples in 2015 after Obergefell v. Hodges—was perhaps motivated by the media attention and material support she garnered from Evangelicals in addition to what morals she claimed to have (plus, did you know that she denied the Trinity?). My father didn’t appreciate the sentiment, and it was a whole thing. That, and an argument we had about whether a song by classic Christian singer Carman referred to Earth as the center of the universe literally or metaphorically, made me realize that criticism was out of the window. Evangelicalism has no function generative of truth, grounded in sola scriptura or otherwise.

The Punchline

There’s a passage in the Bible for which Protestants constantly give Catholics shit, which we can probably represent best in full (Matthew 23:1-12, emphasis mine):

Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’s seat; therefore, do whatever they teach you and follow it, but do not do as they do, for they do not practice what they teach. They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others, but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them. They do all their deeds to be seen by others, for they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long. They love to have the place of honor at banquets and the best seats in the synagogues and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces and to have people call them rabbi. But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all brothers and sisters. And call no one your father on earth, for you have one Father, the one in heaven. Nor are you to be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Messiah. The greatest among you will be your servant. All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.

Catholics and other traditional Christians refer to their clergy as priests and address them as “Father”. I was curious what Catholics had to say about this, since even today I feel like it’s a rather presumptuous title. Thankfully, Catholic Answers had answers:

To understand why the charge does not work, one must first understand the use of the word “father” in reference to our earthly fathers. No one would deny a little girl the opportunity to tell someone that she loves her father. Common sense tells us that Jesus wasn’t forbidding this type of use of the word “father.”

In fact, to forbid it would rob the address “Father” of its meaning when applied to God, for there would no longer be any earthly counterpart for the analogy of divine Fatherhood. The concept of God’s role as Father would be meaningless if we obliterated the concept of earthly fatherhood.

But in the Bible the concept of fatherhood is not restricted to just our earthly fathers and God. It is used to refer to people other than biological or legal fathers, and is used as a sign of respect to those with whom we have a special relationship.

Common sense. Common sense! Great news, everyone: the only people you shouldn’t call “father” are people who you already would not have been calling “father”. I much prefer a reading by the (very deservedly disgraced) Slavoj Žižek, that Jesus suggests subverting the ideological premises of earthly authority by universalizing such authority in the G-dhead, in order to move towards a more egalitarian social order (universal equivalency moment?). Still, I realized that no matter how much older I’ve gotten, no matter how hard I’ve tried to internalize an enlightened atheist view, I hold deeply Protestant or even Evangelical views about the world—not in accepting its fascist premises, but in having taken for granted its conceit as a child and preteen. Do I believe in G-d? I don’t know if that matters. All I hope is that if G-d is real that G-d is just. One part of me prays sometimes for mercy, but really it’s fine if I am punished for eternity—provided that those sexist, racist, pedophilic fascists also get what they deserve.

And, fuck, what does that sound like?

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1. My most annoying Protestant-coded belief is that the Catholic Church, in some sense, is (or was) the successor of the Roman Empire as a network of power in a feudal context. Still, reading references to the Roman Empire as referring to the Catholic Church is obviously anachronistic and requires that the text’s meaning would not have been intelligible for over a thousand years after its composition. That’s not a literal interpretation, much less a straightforward one! ↩︎