Crying in The Chapel

On Sunday, February 17, I attended the 9 a.m. worship service at The Chapel at Cross Point, way up where I-990 meets Millersport Road. I would not call the place “fringe-friendly,” but I had an extraordinary experience. A description of its features, and particularly its sermon, may, by its contrast to our hopes, add clarity to the need for new forms of spiritual community.

A worshiper needed no bulletin. The “worship folder” was filled with information, but none of it pertained to the service taking place, which opened with two songs, led by a 10 piece band, accompanied by an 8 piece orchestra. Four cameras constantly played over the musicians; somewhere, a video technician selected which camera to project on the two immense video screens. One of the cameras appeared to be managed by a man on a wheeled vehicle of some kind. Once every minute or two, he swiftly passed the camera across the full 100 foot length of the stage floor boards. The resultant moving image on the big screens felt like Superbowl halftime coverage. The whole service was being signed for the deaf or hearing impaired

Announcements of pastoral concern followed, leading into prayer, which was followed by an anthem sung by a choir of 60 or so. Then two more songs were sung; the congregation, if that is the right word, stood for all the songs. Many, perhaps most, of the 1500 people in attendance were singing along, reading words displayed on the screens; however, I could not hear their voices above the band even though I was sitting toward the back of the immense auditorium and the band was about 200 feet away.

Now came the sermon. Jerry Gillis, the “lead pastor,” was dressed very casually, in the mega-church tradition. He is in his late 30s, I would guess. The sermon’s title was “Jesus and Politics.” He opened up by warning the congregation that they might not like what he was going to say, thus seeming to lay hold of the prophet’s mantle. His first claim was that there is “an alarming politization (sic) of faith in America.” His further argument was that left and right wings of American politics are equally guilty here; both claim that Jesus is on their side. He offered no data to support the idea that the left wing is eager to claim God on its side, and, given the audience, he hardly needed to give details to show that the right-wing has done this. Thus did he arrive at his central teaching, that a “Christian’s first allegiance is to God and his kingdom, which trumps allegiance to the United States.”

It took a long time to get to this simple point, but it is sound, and I was intrigued that he was offering it to his audience. They appeared to be working class and lower middle class, not generally college-educated, but not poor. I saw one person of color in the room. Of course, the cars in the parking lot were new and expensive and, probably, not paid for.

After the big point was made, I waited to hear the behavioral consequences or character of having “God and his kingdom” take priority over all other allegiances. This did not come readily from any of his Scripture readings or interpretations. Using Daniel primarily, he asserted that God is totally in control of the destiny of nations, causing them to do his will. He did not peel back any difficulties in believing this assertion.

The next major point was that the Scriptures reveal a clear limit for the scope and powers of civil government. The texts were drawn from 1 Tim 2, Rom 13, and 1 Peter 2, which, as you know, more or less argue that everyone ought to do exactly what the government tells them to do, for it is God who has given ruling power to rulers. Paul goes so far as to say that only evil-doers have anything to fear from the civil government. (Pity poor George W, who seems to have found a warm home for his little mind in that idea.) Once more, this preacher did not explore the ambiguities and conflicts of the idea. That withholding of genuine thought permitted the following tragic conclusions to be washed over the ears of a frequently applauding congregation.

The roles of government are twofold, he asserted: 1) to protect from and to punish evil; and 2) to preserve an ethic of life and freedom. Regarding the first, he suddenly and for the first time inserted a behavioral consequence for right relationship of heavenly and civil governments. “It is right,” he said, “for the government to prevent illegal immigrants from coming into the country.” He then stated that illegal immigrants commit more than 4000 murders every year, “more than all the people killed in Iraq since the beginning of the war.”

(I have researched his claim on the Internet. A US government Bureau of Statistics page states that neither federal nor state governments keep records of the ethnicity of non-black murderers. That data lacking, a right wing individual invented his own murder-measure methodology. He assumed that illegal immigrants commit murders in the US at the same rate as do their countrymen in the countries of origin. Extrapolating from an assumed 10 or 12 million illegal immigrants in the US, the partisan arrived at his notion that illegal immigrants are responsible for approximately one third of all murders in America. A right-wing congressman from Iowa took this baseless extrapolation as fact, blurted it out to his district, got into the papers, and thus it turned into “truth” for fear-mongering pastors, among others.)

The lead pastor then argued that war is sometimes justifiable, and showed his intellectual chops by referring to Augustine’s just war theory, though he offered no detail on its elements. He then asserted that the war against Afghanistan was indeed a just war, and that the war in Iraq was “debatable,” on Augustine’s terms. He swept the problem of Jesus’ radical commands against killing into the dustpan by instructing his congregation that these commands pertain to individual duty only and have nothing to do with societal or national responsibilities.

With respect to the role of government in preserving an ethic of life and freedom, he went out on a limb to argue that the founding fathers’ insistence on the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness was directed specifically at religious happiness through salvation in Jesus Christ. He is apparently ignorant of the fact that the founding fathers were mostly Deists and some of them, like Jefferson and Paine, detested the ordinary worship of Jesus. “We used to be a Christian nation,” the pastor claimed, “for all the founders believed that Jesus was the only way and that is the hope they intended the founding documents to support. But now ”—here he would offer a third specific behavioral consequence for kingdom allegiance—“our nation doesn’t mind when a woman is just getting an abortion for the fun of it." A rejection of euthanasia had to be thrown in here as well.

The final consequence in his kingdom-allegiance teaching about the limits of government was that economic policy must see to equal chances for all, not equal outcomes. “Redistribution of wealth is simply stealing,” he intoned slowly, forcefully. The place erupted in applause.

This was a 45 minute sermon. No other behavioral consequences were addressed. In sum, 1500 suburbanites plus another 1500-2000 at the 11 o’clock hour were confirmed in believing that a) illegal immigrants are extremely dangerous criminals; b) the war on Iraq might not be wrong — it is debatable; c) the founding fathers were Bible believing Jesus followers; d) abortion is evil; e) euthanasia is evil; and f) progressive taxation is evil.

What a travesty of his integrity! He began by claiming that he was leaving the rutted, muddy ways of ordinary partisan (and Republican) politics for a fresh, clean run across the fields of the kingdom—and then he drenched his listeners in the ordinary slime of right wing Republican religion, including two egregious errors of fact, and God only knows how many errors of omission, since only these few behaviors were singled out for attention as worthy of kingdom care.

To borrow from an old song, you could have “found me crying in The Chapel.”

Now, fringe-friendly worlds will not directly touch the mega-church world. It might be a waste of time to have written at such length about the experience—a kind of slumming. But I want to be open to a different possibility.

In his book “The Left Hand of God,” Michael Lerner argues that fundamentalist religion correlates positively with social oppression which, in America, primarily takes the form of relatively low wages and the commodification of labor, meaning that people feel thoroughly used by their employers as means toward other people’s ends. They are in too much pain, he argues, to have a more-open view of the world. Tightly closed religious boundaries are a kind of anodyne to the deep, unexpressed pain. I find that argument persuasive.

The beginning of the end of the old left/right politics and all the other adversarial paradigms of the culture wars will not come from the next victory of the 51% righteous over the 49% unrighteous (as to which is which, choose your weapon). We have seen that battle for the bare majority ruining the Presbyterians for a few decades, just as it has the nation at large.

The end of the old fight and the opening of the next society, and its new religious reality, can come through the work of leaders who accept that, since nothing can be known of the ultimate destiny of any person, the main work is here, namely, being good in priority to being right. Of course we know the cut of the blade of neo-orthodox theology which asserts that no one can know what is good apart from the right teaching—which only “we” have! Gotcha!

The fringe-friendly are learning how to accept the partial validity of this pole of truth, as well as the dire necessity of invoking its opposite. They understand the polar opposition necessary to all truth-saying. (From time to time, I used to tell my congregation, that since truth required that we unsay each week some of what had been said the week before, it was incumbent on them to come to church every week in order to avoid half-truths.) And the fringe-friendly get it, that they need to stay connected with folks who do not see these things, even while those folks are skewering them in private and in public. Which means, somehow I should connect with the pastor of The Chapel at Cross Point! I guess going to the cross is the point!