Donald Trump and U.S. Christians, Three Perspectives: "There Is a Sickness in American Christianity, and Trump Is Feeding on It"

4 in 5 white evangelicals, 3 in 5 white Catholics and Mormons — "pro-life" voters — brought us the Trump nightmare.

I will not forget.

— Bill Lindsey (@wdlindsy) December 15, 2016

Commentator William Saletan, a self-styled "liberal Republican," writes, "There is a sickness in American Christianity, and Trump is feeding on it."

As Talk of Mercy Continues in Rome, U.S. Archbishop Restricts Communion to Righteous, Another Gay Employee of a Catholic Ministry Is Fired, Etc.: There's the Church World, and Then There's the Real World

I wrote yesterday that while the men in Rome are nattering on about mercy and fashioning a church that's a field hospital for the wounded, something else, something quite different, continues to unfold for many of us in the real world at a distance from the Vatican. For LGBT people and for women, that something else is a decided signal from the men talking about mercy and healing that some people count more than others in their church. And that the bread heaped on the Catholic table is for some people and not for others.

The Command to Open Our Hands and American Exceptionalism: Marilynne Robinson on the Real Roots of American Christianity

On this American holiday centered on giving thanks, Marilynne Robinson's words in her essay entitled "Open Thy Hand Wide: Moses and the Origin of American Liberalism" spring back to mind:

Quote for the Day: Marilynne Robinson, "Shorthand Justice Is Not the Thing at All"

Marilynne Robinson speaking to Bill Moyers about her magnificent new novel Lila, which I've just finished reading:

A Reader Writes: "Are These Conservative Churches Really . . . a Weird Kind of New World Hebraic Cult?" — Reflections on the Neo-Calvinist Movement in U.S. Evangelicalism

Several days ago, in response to my posting about how Steve's two aunts who are nuns received the news of our marriage in May, tinywriting posted some very good questions (and here) about how we can discern when Christian movements have departed in essential ways from the foundations of the Christian message and no longer adequately represent Christianity. Tiny notes that "when these conservative Christian churches take conservative life-style positions it's always the Old Testament that they quote."

In the News: On Not Saying Gay, Idaho Strikes Down Ban on Gay Marriage, Marilynne Robinson on Leviticus and Gays, and Cincinnati Catholic School Contract

Brief takes from recent news or commentary on the news:

Marilynne Robinson on "The Great Narrative" of Wondrous Love in the Gospels: An Advent Meditation

I posted this excerpt from Marilynne Robinson's essay "Wondrous Love" during Holy Week 2012. I'm of a mind to publish it again now as an Advent meditation. I love its insistence that what Christians think and say in the name of Christ--what they profess as the teaching of churches called into being to remember Jesus and transmit his memory--has always to be normed by the "great narrative" of the Christian gospels.

Marilynne Robinson on the Emancipation Movement: Chick-fil-A Supporters in Historical Context

Last week, as Steve and I drove north from Missouri into Iowa on Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day and as we spotted long lines of cars at Chick-fil-A in Independence, I happened to be reading Marilynne Robinson’s essay “Who Was Oberlin?” (in When I Was a Child I Read Books [NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012]).  Marilynne Robinson, who teaches at an Iowa university and who set her Pulitzer-winning novel Gilead, with its rich historical resonances remembering the bitter struggle to eradicate American slavery and, ultimately, establish equality for people of color, in Iowa . . . .

Marrying Well: Stable Families, Economic Success, and Morality Tales

At the Commonweal blog right now, Eric Bugyis offers a valuable discussion of Jason DeParle's recent New York Times article which appears to show a correlation between higher income levels, higher marriage rates, and marital stability.  Research appears to indicate, that is, that couples whose income is higher, whose educational levels are higher, and whose social status is, as a result, also higher than the norm, tend to marry and stay married at higher rates than is the case at the bottom of the economic and educational ladder.  There, in fact, among what used to be called the "working classes," marriage is becoming more infrequent, as couples have children out of wedlock at higher and higher rates.

Fred Clark (and Marilynne Robinson) on Evangelical Tribalism: Implications for Catholics

Moving Beyond Tribalism

I very much appreciate Fred Clark's valuable work in defining and critiquing evangelical tribalism.  Clark's critique of evangelical tribalism parallels my own of Catholic tribalism, and accents points I accent as I critique the tribalism of my own faith community.  I began writing explicitly about Catholic tribalism when the U.S. Catholic bishops announced their current overtly partisan "religious freedom" war against the Obama administration several months ago.

More Marilynne Robinson: Synchronicity, Synergy, and Nature as Shining Garment of Divinity

Marilynne Robinson finds science's inability to imagine the world analogically, or to speak of what it observes in analogical terms, a significant shortcoming.  The "scientific worldview" is altogether too narrow, she thinks, because it cannot fulfill its promise to explain everything that it observes, when it lacks the language of analogy to extend its definitions and observations beyond what is apparently only on the surface of "reality."

Marilynne Robinson on Community and Imagination: Applications for Contemporary Catholicism

In her new book When I Was a Child I Read Books (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012),  Marilynne Robinson sees the basis of community as "imaginative love for people we do not know or whom we know very slightly." And so she thinks that when the definition of community hardens, contracts, and becomes violently exclusive and defensive, tragedy results both for those against whom the edge of such definitions are turned, and for those developing such exclusive and weaponlike definitions of community.

Reflections During the Sacred Triduum: Marilynne Robinson and the Central Narrative of Scripture as Wondrous Love

I'm also reading Marilynne Robinson's new book When I Was a Child I Read Books (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012) these days, and am struck by a number of things that, to my way of thinking, have important significance for anyone trying to retrieve and celebrate the essential meaning of core Christian symbols at this point in American history.  First, Robinson is clear-eyed about the extreme damage many groups of Christians in the U.S. are now doing to the core symbols of Christian faith.  She minces no words about how the distortion of key affirmations of traditional Christian faith by ill-educated zealots who have little connection to what's central in Christian history and belief is tragically betraying the meaning of Christianity for large numbers of Americans today.  

Reflections on Marilynne Robinson's "Home": Yet More Light and Truth

I finished Marilynne Robinson’s novel Home last week, and want to recommend this book to anyone who appreciates first-rate literature, or is interested in the manifold connections between religion and culture in the United States from the foundation of the American experiment. Home won the prestigious Orange Prize this past summer, following in the footsteps of its predecessor Gilead, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005.

Home and Gilead (about which I blogged glancingly back in April) are interlocking novels. Both are set in the small fictional town of Gilead, Iowa, in the latter half of the 1950s. Both center on the families of two of the town’s elderly ministers—the Ameses of the Congregationalist church and the Boughtons, who are Presbyterians. And the plots interlock, so that events told from the perspective of the Ames family in Gilead unfold in Home as we hear the Boughton side of the story.

A proviso before I go any further and forget an important admonition: don’t bring Home onto an airplane if you fear disturbing fellow passengers and embarrassing yourself by sobbing aloud as you read. Not, that is, if you’re a certain kind of reader. The book is not bathetic in the way that caused Oscar Wilde to mock The Old Curiosity Shop and Daniel O’Connell to toss it out a train window.

Home is insidiously moving, for anyone who grew up in, around, or in even the most remote connection to families and humans (and other animals: there’s Snowflake and a little hen who gets cooked) who comprise those odd social units. Its tormenting of the heart sneaks up on you slowly—as love does, the kind of love that entangles our hearts with the hearts of others and will not release us, as it makes the fates of those with whom love has interwoven our hearts matter perilously to us.

Just saying . . . .

And so that’s one major focal point of Home: as the title suggests, it’s a book about family. About home. About an aging, retired Presbyterian minister Rev. Boughton and his youngest daughter Glory, whose life is something of a mess for reasons obscure even to her—a mess because she believed and tried and cared and was overlooked and taken for granted in the process. And the book is about her lost and wandering alcoholic brother Jack, who arrives home after many years of exile to find his father dying.

And who cannot mend the breach between himself and his family, cannot justify himself and his existence in any effective way at all. Jack is helpless before his father’s refusal to stop loving him despite anything he has done or left undone.

And then, as the novel ends, the tables turn and it’s Jack who, in his ruined abjection and with his wounded hands, brings redemption to his father and his helpless sister, as Rev. Boughton lies dying.

As this brief plot summary suggests, Home is, at one level, a retelling of the parable of the prodigal son. It’s far more than that, though. For anyone steeped in the biblical text—as Americans of almost all classes and backgrounds once were, unavoidably so, because it was taught in schools and its stories were fundamental to the nation’s cultural currency—Home is a primer of biblical allusions ranging from David and Bathsheba to the Suffering Servant.

It’s a book you won’t understand—just as the United States is a nation you won’t understand through much of its history—if you don’t know and pay attention to subtle, omnipresent allusions to the Judaeo-Christian scriptures. And to the hymns that shaped the cultural outlook of generations of Americans, particularly in Protestant churches of the heartland and the Southeast throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th. Hymns that envision saints and grieving family members (who sometimes overlap) gathering at rivers, walking in gardens, listening for the whisper of hope to lift their hearts.

It’s easy to be sentimental about the story Home tells, particularly for someone who, as I did, grew up with overt connection to the mainline and evangelical Protestant churches that have long mediated salvation to and reinforced the morals of middle America. There’s a way in which both Home and Gilead celebrate something many of us take for granted, and which now seems to be passing quickly from our culture: the centrality of church life, of biblical allusions, of the kind of community churches uniquely comprise in small American towns and in rural America—something rather difficult to explain to anyone who grew up outside a cultural milieu dominated by the Protestant experience of the heartland and the Southeast.

It’s clear that Marilynne Robinson appreciates—and yes, wishes to celebrate—that experience and that influence, and it’s equally clear that she is nostalgic about the demise of this experience and cultural influence in postmodern America. At the same time, she is cool-eyed about what the churches of middle America can and cannot do, what they have and have not done. She is cool-eyed about our cultural sins of omission and commission, even as she celebrates our soul of a church.

As the posting about Gilead to which I link above notes, Robinson wants to remember what some churches, at least, were able to accomplish in the Midwest during the period of abolition. She does not wish her readers to forget that, even when many of our churches caved in to culture and did what was easy and expedient (and rewarding in terms of money and power), some believers pulled hard against the tug to concede and fought to set captives free.

Home continues that story through an ongoing dialogue between Rev. Boughton and his feckless son, who can no longer find himself at home in his family’s church until that church comes to terms with the struggle for civil rights that is contesting barriers to justice throughout the nation in the period in which the novel is set. And for all his fundamental goodness—his holy, biblically shaped, theologically astute goodness—Rev. Boughton cannot appreciate this struggle.

His alcoholic son, who did not attend his mother’s funeral, who has been in prison, who fathered a child out of wedlock and then abandoned that child and its mother: his son Jack the prodigal is the one who understands. It is Jack who is able to retrieve the strands of liberation that powerfully informed the 19th-century piety of his forebears and their neighbors in Gilead during the struggle against slavery, and to point those strands to their contemporary significance in the civil rights movement.

This is a novel about church and family, then. It’s a novel about the way in which biblical and theological preoccupations formed the crucible of family life for generations of churched Americans in the areas of the nation in which Protestant churches dominated cultural life up to the latter part of the 20th century.

Marilynne Robinson is masterful—a word I don’t use lightly, one that is simply accurate here—in her depiction of the painstaking and exceedingly painful way in which members of traditional churched families work out their salvation through the pedestrian but sublime medium of everyday conversation. Not a word that is spoken goes unmeasured, unanalyzed. Every nuance of speech passing between family members is weighed in the scale of right and wrong, of forgiveness and compassion, of possible hurt and probable misstatement, in a way impossible to explain to anyone who has not spent years being schooled in the intricacies of biblical exegesis—of the kind of exegesis peculiar to the Protestant tradition in its classic expressions, in which life or death depends on the meaning of this text and the interpretation of that text.

Robinson is powerfully nostalgic about—she hungers for the retrieval of—a culture in which language matters. In which it matters intently. In which everything hangs on the choice of the right word or the wrong word. In which the cultural imagination of ordinary people is enriched beyond measure by meticulously crafted sermons that subtly, with inexpressible care, parse the significance of a text until its hidden sense springs forth suddenly to demonstrates that, yes, God hath yet more light and truth to break forth from the Word, even now.

Home is a book about the power of the word/Word, about its forgotten power in American culture, about its ability to illuminate and to open doors that appear decisively closed (and to wound, whip, and subjugate). It is, in that sense, an old-fashioned book, one whose faith in the power of language to shape culture and sensibility appears almost impossibly quaint at a time when few of us can expect to hear a halfway literate sermon in any of our churches of a Sunday—let alone a well-crafted, thoughtful, heart-rending one.

But when we can find novels that contain passages like the following, we need not lament the loss of the word/Word too loudly:

In college all of them had studied the putative effects of deracination, which were angst and anomie, those dull horrors of the modern world. They had been examined on the subject, had rehearsed bleak and portentous philosophies in term papers, and they had done it with the earnest suspension of doubt that afflicts the highly educable. And then their return to the pays natal, where the same old willows swept the same ragged lawns, where the same old prairie arose and bloomed as negligence permitted. Home. What kinder place could there be on earth, and why did it seem to them all like exile? Oh, to be passing anonymously through an impersonal landscape! Oh, not to know every stump and stone, not to remember how the fields of Queen Anne’s lace figured in the childish happiness they had offered to their father’s hopes, God bless him.

As long as we can read literature like this, we are not totally bereft of sermons that continue to break open the Word as they break open hearts to let it in. Even if our churches continue to starve heart and mind with inane, jingoistic homilies that merely skim the surface of thought. Or of redemption. And of humanity, for that matter.

Thought for Day: No More Theological Sense Than a Jackrabbit

You can spend forty years teaching people to be awake to the fact of mystery and then some fellow with no more theological sense than a jackrabbit gets himself a radio ministry and all your work is forgotten. I do wonder where it will end.

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), p. 208.

Iowa, the Churches, and Human Rights: A Meditation on the Anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Death

I am impressed by Iowa. Yesterday, when the Iowa Supreme Court unanimously declared that Iowa’s statute forbidding same-sex marriage discriminates against an historically disfavored class of human beings without a constitutionally sufficient justification for this discrimination, Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal and House Speaker Pat Murphy issued a press release noting Iowa’s history of defending civil rights (here).

The statement notes,

Iowa has always been a leader in the area of civil rights.

In 1839, the Iowa Supreme Court rejected slavery in a decision that found that a slave named Ralph became free when he stepped on Iowa soil, 26 years before the end of the Civil War decided the issue.

In 1868, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that racially segregated "separate but equal" schools had no place in Iowa, 85 years before the U.S. Supreme Court reached the same decision.

In 1873, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled against racial discrimination in public accommodations, 91 years before the U.S. Supreme Court reached the same decision.

In 1869, Iowa became the first state in the union to admit women to the practice of law.

In the case of recognizing loving relationships between two adults, the Iowa Supreme Court is once again taking a leadership position on civil rights.

Iowa and its history of defending civil rights have been on my mind lately for other reasons. As I’ve noted previously on this blog (here and here), I’ve been working on a writing project that tracks the history of an Arkansas family that crossed the color line in the 19th century. A white slaveholder-planter formed a marital relationship with a free woman of color in the 1830s and raised a family by her, living with her and his children by this spouse to the end of his life. This marriage could not be solemnized or legally sanctioned, due to laws that prohibited miscegenation.

In the 1850s, as the war neared and as racial tensions began to peak in the South, this husband and wife sent their three children north to Ohio for schooling and to set them up on land of their own, where they could live free of the dangers confronting them in the plantation South. All three children married white spouses, all from New England abolitionist families with strong ties to churches promoting abolition and aiding escaped slaves. One of the three children, in fact, married a Lyman, a relative of Harriett Beecher Stowe and of several ministers active in the abolitionist cause at Lane Seminary and Oberlin College in Ohio.

And here’s where Iowa comes into the picture: after marrying a white wife in Ohio, the oldest of these three children of mixed blood moved to Iowa. It’s clear that he did so in part because he could live free of racial stigmas there. From the time of his marriage and move to Iowa, he and his children “passed”: they lived as white people, even while his brother and sister in Ohio sometimes continue to appear in records as mulattoes.

Iowa was a place that beckoned this family with mixed racial roots. It was a place in which they could live free (or relatively free) of impediments due to their African blood. It was a place that respected their humanity in a way in which their home state of Arkansas decidedly did not.

In 1859, several years after the parents of these siblings had sent them north to safety, Arkansas passed a law mandating that all free people of color leave the state or be returned to slavery. Things grew even more hideous following Reconstruction. For that reason, the son in Iowa did not come home from the early 1850s until the 1880s, though numerous letters from his parents to him and from him to his parents and siblings indicate that the family members longed to be with each other.

He did not return home because, as a man of mixed racial ancestry living as a white man in the north, he and his family would have been in danger, had he come back to see his parents. He did send a son to stay for a while with his parents in Arkansas. That boy appears as mulatto on the census in his grandparents' household in 1880—a clear indicator that, had his father returned to see his parents in their old age, his mixed ancestry would also have been known, and would have mattered.

When this son finally did return, he did so only because his mother was dying. He was able to spend some weeks with her in the summer of 1882. She died the following March. Letters of the father written after his wife’s death indicate that he could not sustain life, once the wife who was his reason for living (the letters state this plainly) had died. He survived his wife less than a year. When his son got word of his father’s feebleness, he set out from Iowa to Arkansas. News of his father’s death reached him as he and a companion rode horseback through Arkansas, still some miles from his father's home.

The fears that kept this son so long from parents he longed to see, and who hungered to see him, were real fears. Less than a decade after this, an African-American minister, Rev. E. Malcolm Argyle, who was visiting the state, reported to the Philadelphia Inquirer that, in March 1892, eight black citizens of the state had been murdered, “strung up to telegraph poles, . . . burnt at the stake and . . . shot like dogs.” Argyle says that 500 African-American citizens of the state were waiting on wharves beside the Arkansas River in Pine Bluff, southeast of Little Rock, to take passage on steamboats to Oklahoma to escape the oppression. He notes that the statewide paper was stating that another 1200 black citizens had just passed through north Arkansas headed for Oklahoma for the same reason.

Seven years after this, the youngest son of the white planter and free woman of color, who had inherited his father's land in Arkansas, was shot in the back and killed while riding horseback on his land. A black man was apprehended and accused of murder. In the same week in which this man of mixed blood whose white father had dared to acknowledge him and leave him valuable land was murdered, black men were lynched all through that area of the state.

As I say, Iowa has been on my mind lately. When one reads these mind-boggling accounts of cruelty practiced by one group of Americans (by my own ancestors) against another group little over a hundred years ago, and when one thinks that some places in the nation afforded those being oppressed relative freedom—the birthright of all American citizens—one cannot help thinking that it matters supremely where we live. And what those who live in that particular place think and believe.

And whether we live among people committed to human rights and to respect for the humanity of fellow citizens. And whether we live among citizens who share our respect for the foundational principles of our democracy.

And whether we live in places in which—in contrast to the South throughout much of its history—the churches are not servants of the ruling class, parroting the ideas of those with money and power, bolstering their hegemony and blessing that dominance with selective snippets of scripture.

There have certainly been prophetic exceptions in Southern history. How could I deny that on this day in which we commemorate the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr.?* The black churches have often kept the prophetic legacy of Christianity and Judaism alive while it sank from sight in the white churches of the South, buried under a ponderous heap of white power and white privilege.

Even with that legacy of the black churches, and with some notable exceptions in the white churches themselves, however, when one surveys the course of the history of the American South, one learns to count on the churches here to take the wrong side: my people, the churches to which they belonged and continue to belong, fighting tooth and nail against all that is right and just and merely decent, again and again.

They invested everything in the defense of slavery. When the world and the rest of the nation judged slavery to be immoral, they turned themselves to the defense of Jim Crow laws and segregation, to the defense of their baffling, fanatical need to classify human worth by pigmentation. When they lost that battle and history proved them wrong yet again, they began to preach against women’s rights, against woman suffrage, against women working outside the home (and bobbing their hair and wearing makeup and pants). Against women period, insofar as women were not under the hobnailed boots of some man somewhere—or, as an Arkansas leader once famously put the point, unless they were barefoot and pregnant.

And on and on it goes. The same people, my people, descendants of those who fought tooth and nail for slavery and then for segregation and then for male domination of women, wailing at each instance that the world would end if the line were crossed: those same people are now fighting tooth and nail against their gay brothers and sisters and against any fundamental decency shown to those brothers and sisters.

And still wailing, prophesying the decline of everything if the line is crossed and a scintilla of the rights they take for granted with such astonishing entitlement are given to these brothers and sisters whose humanity they continue to batter.

It appears some folks in Iowa don’t think this way, the way many of my churched relatives in the South think and have thought for lo these many years. As they apparently didn’t in the 19th century, either, when escaped slaves fled the South and headed to Iowa, or when free people of color seeking a better life somewhere outside the South moved to Iowa, or when women asked for equal rights under the constitution, or when African-American parents asked that their children receive an education in state-funded schools equal to that afforded white children.

As I say, I’ve been thinking about Iowa lately, and I think I may have discovered some reasons for Iowa’s defense of human rights. I’m reading Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead these days, and much of that novel takes place in Iowa.

Gilead is a novel of ideas, a multi-generational meditation on how various religious ideas have played out in the American experiment, against the backdrop of the foundational documents of the nation, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. The novel explores the varying responses of several generations of ministers in Iowa and Kansas (evidently Congregationalist ones) to slavery and its aftermath.

As it does so, it illustrates the role that churches can play in a democratic society, when they take ideas seriously—in contrast to many churches of the American South, for which all but narrow “official” ideas have long been anathema. In the 19th century, as we Southerners battened down the hatch and actively ran thinkers, newspaper editors, anyone critical of our peculiar institution away, and as we mandated lockstep conformity to our official ideas, the churches of the Midwest were moving in the opposite direction.

They were encouraging debate—about slavery, and then about racism. And later about women’s rights. They were encouraging believers to think what was strongly discouraged in most Southern evangelical churches: that is, that a religious commitment must necessarily issue in ethical commitments centered on social justice. While we in the South turned inward and fretted about liquor and uppity sashaying sisters in the Lord, our brothers and sisters in Iowa were debating the rights and wrongs of slavery and racial injustice, and were frequently concluding that not merely the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, but the bible as well, condemned such practices and such institutions.

Churches, and what churches think and do, play a role in what a society becomes. As a white Southerner raised in the American South and still living there, as someone descended from generations of staunch evangelical believers, that is crystal clear to me. The difference between Iowa and Arkansas certainly has to do with the different ethnic groups that settled the two states, with differences in climates and economies, with differences in education and social institutions.

But it also has to do with differences in churches. In Arkansas, throughout much of the history of the state, it has been well-nigh impossible to get evangelical churches to admit that the scriptures say anything at all about social justice or the morality of economic institutions. We take our bibles neat, as we do our toddies: focused narrowly on matters of personal rather than public morality, on fornication and whoring and drunken carousing. And in this day and age, homosexuality.

When we do get an idea for social reform in our heads, you can bet it will spring from those personal moralizing concerns writ large: because we believe drinking liquor is wrong for us, we'll want to outlaw it for you, too. Or because we think that all human beings ought to abstain from sex outside a heterosexual marriage—one man, one woman, for life—you'd better believe we'll do all in our power to force you to adhere to our standards, whether you share our beliefs or not. We're concerned about your salvation, don't you know.

In Iowa, things seem different. And if Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead is any indicator of the reason for that difference, it has much to do with what has gone on in many churches in Iowa, throughout the history of the state. Try as we in the South will to force our evangelical cousins in the Midwest to believe this—and there’s going to be a lot of pushing in this direction in coming weeks—many good Christian people in Iowa are just not convinced that repudiating and discriminating against their gay brothers and sisters is really a noble Christian cause.

They’re not any more convinced of that than they were when we made a similar argument about the nobility and moral salubriousness of our wish to hold some human beings as property over a century ago.

*Hence the graphic accompanying this posting.