Before you read this, here is my main point:
Exclusivity is killing Evangelicalism. And people who are part of evangelicalism are losing some of their humanity as they participate in Exclusivism.
Part 1 in this series is on Prophecy and the NAR
Part 2 is on Spiritual Warfare and the NAR
Part 3 focuses on why this movement is Toxic for non-evangelicals
Between my second and third year of pre-med, I took a year off the biology studies and enrolled in a Bible College. This is what evangelicals used to call segregated training centers. It was a break year for me. I knew I desperately needed it.
After years of both surviving and ignoring my early childhood abandonment/neglect events, and later sexual assault by a babysitter, I lost my father to cancer just before my 17th birthday. During my last year of high school and first years of college, I barely existed emotionally.
Finally, I couldn’t cope with the paper chase of med school prep without a break.
I was depressed all the time. Though I kept my grades up, I hated life. I hated school. I loathed and feared so many things.
One bright spot was a group of college students who went to my church. We spent late nights together helping one another cope with life. They encouraged me to take a year off and find myself and get over my depression by attending a Bible College. That’s how I ended up on the prairies of Saskatchewan.
It was the best of places and the worst of places for someone with complex PTSD.
First, the worst part.
Everything there was foreign to me. I wasn’t a church guy. I didn’t know the Bible. They all spoke a coded language. When someone got bad news from home, no one said “That’s fucked up!”. They said “I’ll pray for you” or “God will find a way” or “Keep trusting in Jesus.”
I was code-switching all the time. It was exhausting.
Very few other students knew rock music. Conversely, I didn’t know their christian music. I didn’t know their authors. I didn’t know how to find Philippians in the Bible. I didn’t know how to pray.
I was the only one at the lunch table not bowing my head and giving thanks before the meal.
No one else knew Led Zeppelin was the world’s greatest band. No one else enjoyed the writings of Kurt Vonnegut or John Updike.
Though mired in this miasma where I felt diseased and out of touch with god, the academic work was thrilling. I dived into the texts of the christian scriptures and explored how Christian Theology worked. It was nice to be good at something in this place.
What skewered me back onto the end of the christian sword were the practicum courses. For me, the hardest one was called “Acts and Evangelism”.
Built on the foundation of the scriptural book “Acts of the Apostles”, we were required to do some kind of evangelistic outreach. At first, I had no idea what this was.
Maybe some people reading this have no idea either. Let me explain as simply as I can.
In the four stories about Jesus—called the Gospels—he is reported to be something very special among humans.
In John 14:6 it says “Jesus answered, ‘I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Notice the phrase “no one…” Evangelicals believe that Jesus is the only way to know god. According to evangelicalism, there are no other religions who have truth.
In Matthew 28:19-20 it says “Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.”
Since these scriptures state Jesus is the only way to god, christians are then commanded to make disciples of Jesus (i.e. committed followers) of ALL nations.
Evangelism is not just telling people what christians believe. It is a sales pitch. It encompasses all the methods to bring people to a place where they decide to buy into Jesus and commit their whole life to him. This is called “Being Born Again.”
They made me do this.
To pass the course, I had to become a Jesus salesman!
I wasn’t even sure what I believed, and now I was being forced to pigeon-hole people and convince them to give up whatever path their life was on and follow a god who was angry at them because they had been born as horrible, sinful babies, and were going to be tortured forever.
Their only hope was Jesus, who leveraged an escape route by dying for them as a compromise deal he made with god for their souls.
I hate working in sales. I am also satisfied with everyone believing whatever they want to believe.
But if I didn’t do this evangelism activity, I would fail the course.
You might laugh, but at that point in my life, academic achievement was the only thing I felt good at. I wanted to pass the course.
I sweated every week, knowing that before the end of the semester I had to talk to someone about faith in Jesus.
One Saturday morning, I sucked it up and visited the local University and talked to some people. And I told them the same thing each time:
“Hi, I’m Mike. I go to that Bible College in the Northwest corner of the city. I’m supposed to tell you about Christianity so I can pass a course. I really don’t like doing that. So I’d rather listen to you tell me what you believe.”
And several of them did talk to me. It was refreshing. I heard some weird stuff, yes, but I also heard some marvelous perspectives.
It’s 50 years later and I remember some of those conversations.
Evangelism was the hardest part of being a christian. It remained uncomfortable for me until the day I left it for good a decade ago.
So why did I end up staying at the Bible college and finishing a degree in Theology? There was something there I had never found before.
I fit in. I was accepted, loved, and wanted.
Say whatever you will about how bad christians can get with judgmental attitudes, hatred, and hierarchal abuse, when they accept you, it is an emotional warm blanket. It is the snuggling puppy experience of the soul. I made friends that stayed with me until I left the Faith. I met my life partner there. I decided to quit medical school and become a missionary bible translator. (Note: I was headed that direction, but I never ended up there).
I stayed all those years in a religion I never quite believed in because I had found a family that cared for me. I suspect this is why a significant percentage of christians stay. Ironically, it is also one reason why they leave. When this loving family hurts you more than anyone else ever has, the result is life-altering.
Back to the concept of evangelism and its role within the current flavor of Christian Nationalism known as the NAR. Since most believers stay with the church despite their doubts, they are expected to be involved in the practices of Evangelism. Since Christian Nationalism/NAR believe in the primacy of the Great Commission, you can’t understand the current political climate without grasping the intents of evangelism.
As a pastor, I noticed most evangelicals hated talking about their faith. The few who excelled at it seemed to be the most fanatical among us. That reinforced to many that this evangelism thing was just too hard.
To christians, this Great Commission means to go into every culture, nation, language group, neighborhood, political structure, media outlet, educational institution, sports franchise, local restaurant, street corner, and entertainment venue…and sell Jesus to them.
Many of my old christian acquaintances would be insulted or confused by the transactional way I portray the evangelistic endeavor. But that is how I was always taught it. This is how I saw others approach it. Though we are told the enterprise of “winning people to Jesus” was because god loved the world, I never saw much of that.
What I witnessed in so many lives was a sense of duty. For every passionate evangelist in the faith, I witnessed scores of people who were happy someone else was doing evangelism. But we were all told this was our duty to tell the world that God loved them and didn’t want them to go to hell. Even though god is the one who determined they had done something wrong. And god was the one who designed Hell. And god was the one who struggled to solve the Hell problem he created.
The christian scriptures told all of us “You do not belong to yourselves. You have been “bought with a price”. It doesn’t get more transactional than that.
Even the death of Jesus on the Cross was a transactional arrangement.
Christians want to take over the world by any means. And that includes using politics and force to achieve world domination.
The New Apostolic Reformation believes strongly that the world must become Christian by any means possible. In this, they believe they are fulfilling the Great Commission. In order to achieve this, they cannot conceive of any type of inclusiveness or pluralism.
To an evangelical, there is no value to other religions. There is no value to working together with any country who is not completely sold out to Christianity. They do not believe in working with political forces that refuse to align themselves with christian goals for domination and control.
In short, they do not believe in making America great. They believe in making America the only nation in the world. They believe their job is to use American power to force the rest of the world to follow Jesus.
At its core, Evangelical Christianity believes in Exclusivity. This does not allow for any inclusive behavior. And, as the politics of the Republican Party have been merged with these goals, they believe only the American version of conservative politics is legitimate. All other approaches to living are wrong.
This marriage of exclusive religion with extremist right-wing ideology causes evangelicals to embrace several contradictory positions:
-Save fetuses, but shame the babies and unwed mothers after birth.
-love other ethnicities—unless they live in America.
-follow Jesus who taught love, but hate LGBTQ+ people
-vote for the GOP, but do not believe in democracy
-believe in freedom of religion, but only as it applies to christians.
-believe that people must be saved and go to heaven, but buy handguns and create weapons of mass destruction to kill those same people if they impinge on your religion, family or nation.
I could go on.
Evangelism flowing out of the “Jesus is the only way” foundation breeds Exclusivism. The purpose of this is to create a group that can be defined and controlled. But the end result is that Evangelicalism, like a cancerous tumor, is being slowly destroyed because it cannot connect to other groups and peoples.
How is this destroying evangelicals?
- Exclusivism creates “echo chambers”. These are places and groups where only one line of thinking is allowed. Of course, any group can be an echo chamber. But evangelicals meet at least several times a week with each other. And they reinforce their beliefs from infancy. Therefore, the echo chamber both indoctrinates the followers AND isolates the group from outside ideas. Just like inbreeding kills animals because of genetic malformations, echo chambers kill a group by causing it to be blind to its deficiencies.
- Exclusivism Rejects Empathy and Social Justice: Evangelicals have always valued the primacy of the soul over the preservation of human bodies. “What does it matter if a person is provided food and shelter if they ultimately go to hell” goes the evangelical argument.
Psychologist Paul Bloom, writing in Atlantic Magazine in 2005 says this about religion:
“Religion forces us to perceive the world of objects as essentially separate from the world of minds, making it possible for us to envision soulless bodies and bodiless souls.”
Because evangelicals practice exclusivism, they believe wholly in this separation of body and soul. The body and soul have different paths. This views our physical existence on this planet as of lesser importance than our soul’s disembodied existence in the Afterlife.
Pastor Doug Wilson, an evangelical, was one of the first to call empathy a sin. But he was not the last.
After Bishop Mariann Budde, in her Inauguration Day sermon, called on the President to show compassion to immigrants, the evangelical world erupted in outrage. Many commentators wrote articles about the sin of empathy.
Several books are being published on the dangers of empathy. Allie Beth Stuckey’s book “Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion,” and Joe Rigney’s “The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits” are just two examples of this trend.
Why are evangelicals so down on empathy all of a sudden? It is because their Exclusivism is being challenged. They are being criticized for supporting policies that are hate-filled and ignoring the needs of the poor and suffering. Evangelicals supported the end of US AID programs recently because they were told it is part of the sin of empathy.
In order to counter this criticism, evangelicals point out that the god of the Bible was not empathetic. God could withdraw help and punish people if they didn’t do things god’s way.
I contend it is these scriptures of ancient near east and their understanding of humanity which is being foisted upon the entire world as a model.
To be fair, their scriptures indeed do have some examples of a heartless deity ignoring babies and mothers, invoking violence on those who didn’t believe. But the same scriptures also show god commanding mercy without judgement. All we can conclude from this that the Bible may not be a great book to emulate in our present age.- Exclusivism creates animosity and hatred. This is also called “otherism” or “xenophobia”. Xenophobia fosters divisions, making cooperation and social harmony more difficult. It can also escalate into physical aggression, hate speech, and institutionalized discrimination. Christians often decry when these things are done to them.
As we saw in Rwanda with the Hutu and Tutsi tribes, the longer this xenophobia perpetuates, everyone ultimately becomes an enemy.
Earlier in my pastoral career, we lived in a county of 70,000 in Montana. In that small county, there were over 300 churches. We used to speculate that if every evangelical had their way, there would be 3000 churches with 3 people in each one. The prolonged exclusivity results in internal bickering and judgmentalism among various christian entities. The continuing crusade for “purity of mind and doctrine” causes more and more divisions and confrontations.
Christianity is known partly for its constant infighting throughout history. Evangelicalism is the inheritor of that practice. Exclusivism is the reason.
During my final year as a pastor, I got to know a lovely young person who attended the church. This was a church known for their acceptance of many drug addicts and alcoholics.
But this teen was neither of those. They identified as queer—specifically, non-binary. And they experienced being “othered” by the group as a whole. I tried showing them compassion and acceptance, but the rejection by the group was devastating to this non-binary person.
They left the church and never returned. The group was poorer for that loss.
Dr. Isaac Sharp published a book two years ago called “The Other Evangelicals: A Story of Liberal, Black, Progressive, Feminist and Gay Christians—and the Movement that Pushed them Out”. In an interview about the book, he says,
“The fundamentalists and their heirs staked a decisive claim on the evangelical name, fought hard for their right to do so, and kept defending the territory on precisely those terms. Over time, the liberals and modernists arguably lost interest in the label and stopped challenging fundamentalism’s descendants for the right to claim it.”
As they won the name “evangelical” they also won the right to ensconce Exclusivity as one of its main features.
This is what will finally kill off the heart of evangelicalism. They can no longer show love in a tangible way to anyone outside of their tribe unless the purpose is to win them to Christ.
The Chinese people used to sneer at the missionaries who came into their country, creating feeding programs for the Chinese poor. They only did this to gather an audience for the preaching of the Gospel.
They called those who attended the churches for just the food “Rice Christians.
Evangelist Charles Finney, the so-called Father of the Second Great Awakening in America, also advocated the use of any means necessary to preach the Gospel to mankind. He called these “New Measures”. They were essentially devised marketing plans to sell Jesus.
Evangelicals have been doing this ever since.
They would rather focus on creating Rice Christians than providing universal health care or feeding the poor and care for the dying.
It’s not a bug in their system. It’s how their system works.
And it’s killing them from the inside.
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