Culture war blindness: “I can see people but they look like trees walking”

Last updated on: July 17, 2014 at 10:17 am by Morgan Guyton

Culture war blindness: “I can see people but they look like trees walking” 2014-07-17T10:17:31-05:00 Morgan Guyton

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Yesterday morning at our church staff meeting, we read the story of Jesus’ double-healing of the blind man at Bethsaida in Mark 8:22-26. Jesus has to rub his spit on the man’s eyes twice, because the first time that he does it, the man says, “I can see people but they look like trees walking.” In the context of another week of evangelical Christian blogosphere drama, God confronted me with this realization. Like the blind man at Bethsaida, my vision is blurred when I look at the people on the other side of all the arguments. They look like trees to me in the sense that I can basically see where they’re going but I don’t see their faces. Just like many others in my generation of white evangelicals, I have been afflicted by culture war blindness.

One of the things I’ve wrestled with over the past few years is the legitimacy of deconstruction, the basic critical move of postmodernity, in which you don’t judge a book by its cover since book covers always lie and there is always a deeper agenda that the book is trying to hide about itself. As an English major, I was indoctrinated in deconstruction. You never simply take a text at face value. Every character in a novel is an unreliable narrator defined by a set of privileges and presumptions that reflect a certain worldview. I have transferred the text-reading skills of my English major training into my people-reading as a social commentator on the trends of white evangelical culture. The question is whether this causes me to see trees instead of people.

I think deconstruction is a natural response to the cynicism with which people package themselves in our age of social media. Maybe I’m misreading others, but I know that I am constantly performing and posturing as I consider all the subtleties through which I can engender other peoples’ sympathy with my self-presentation. It’s not something that I choose to do, but more of a tyranny that haunts me and constantly wages war against the assurance that my worth comes from God’s unconditional acceptance. It’s probably the case that other people are not nearly as obsessively self-conscious and stage-managed as I am, but they sure do look that way to me. The more I sense that somebody is opaquely wrapping themselves in pious posturing and pretending that they have no personal investment in what they are doing because they’re strictly concerned with “God’s glory” or the “Bible’s authority,” etc, the more I want to peal away the outer layers of BS like an onion and find the real agenda underneath.

In any case, I have a lot of theories about the “forest” of trees that I see walking around. I see a family values movement that has been a backlash against the perceived excesses of the civil rights movement and continues to justify itself with coded digs against “welfare mamas” and the “culture of dependency.” I see a suburbia originally built by racism whose sensibilities about safety continue to be reinforced by a basic belief in the total depravity of everyone else. I see a suburban megachurch Christianity that never stops congratulating itself for making the default state of affairs in a stable middle-class family into the moral perfection of the kingdom of God. These sensibilities about the forest textures of at least Southern white evangelicalism seem reasonably legitimate, but they obviously can’t do justice to individual people. Because people aren’t “trees” that obey sociological trends.

So I had a recent experience in which the trees I was watching became people and it was very disarming. Some of you read the recent post I wrote trying to grapple with my ambivalence about the ugliness of the Sovereign Grace abuse scandal and the fury with which my post-evangelical tribe has attacked the Gospel Coalition in response. I really wasn’t trying to be sympathetic to the Gospel Coalition. I’ve always thought that they were Sith and I’m a Jedi. But then a TGC guy whom I thought was being a jerk in social media wrote a comment on my blog in which he confessed to being a jerk. And it made me feel bad for him, because I thought about whether I could reasonably expect to keep my composure in front of a furious twitter firing squad. So I went back and edited my piece to soften what I had to say about him.

Then a pastor who’s affiliated with the Gospel Coalition wrote me a long email that showed me his heart and made it impossible for me to dismiss him as one of the Sith lords responsible for the demise of American Christianity. I actually think we’re on the same team. I shared with him my sense that God has called me to share the gospel with people who share my progressive sensibilities and probably wouldn’t give a hearing to the more conservative message that he preaches. And he was very pastoral and encouraging in response to this.

God used all this to disarm my rage, and it actually felt really liberating. It’s also part of a growing crisis that I’m having about the book I’ve felt called to write. It seemed like a much less daunting task when people were trees and I was more confident in my righteous zeal, when I was perfectly clear on all the problems with evangelical Christianity and all the solutions that I was going to offer to save it. I’m not sure what to do now. I’m worried that what I have to do to make my book proposal juicy enough for publishers is to get back to the “clarity” I had when people were trees and I knew who the Jedis were (me) and who the Sith were (Calvinists).

I remain convinced that there are obstacles to the gospel within evangelical culture that I’ve been called to name and dismantle. I just want to do so in such a way that I’m not treating people like trees. The irony of course is that this has been my complaint all along. That the people whom I treat like trees are not seeing other people, but only the categories of “tree” dictated by their ideology, whether it’s “homosexual” or “illegal alien” or “Palestinian terrorist” or another type of condemned outsider. Jesus didn’t do ideology. He interacted with people on a case by case basis. He never said, “I’d really like to help you, but the Torah says ______ so my hands are tied.” He saw the humanity of every individual he encountered and responded pastorally whether the situation called for a gentle healing hand or a stern rebuke.

What this whole experience has confirmed for me is the power of humbling yourself before other people. When two Calvinists humbled themselves before me, they ceased to be Sith in my eyes. They won far more ground with me through vulnerability than if they had pinned me down in some kind of bitter argument where I was forced to concede that the Bible confirms all five points of the TULIP. If you want to win others for Christian friendship rather than just winning arguments, then try showing your humanity to them. That’s the way to stop being a tree.

Previous Post

May 20, 2014

Can we stop using "I'll pray for you" as a retort in social media?

Next Post

May 23, 2014 Let them go in peace and start over from scratch like Wesley did

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Advent Beauty Will Save the World Bible Big Picture: Ephesians Bloggers Book Christian salvation and the Beautitudes Culture Daily Office Danceable Homiletics Deadly Sins Deep Roots: Genesis Devotions Dominican Republic May 2011 El Principio Misericordia (The Mercy Principle) Five verses God tattooed on my heart Fundraising FutureGospel Good Biblical Words Henri Nouwen Interview Jennings' Christian Imagination Jesus inside the beltway Jesus Is My Candidate Jesus vs the Pharisees Jesus vs. Plato Journey to Eternity Looking Back on 2012 Love Actually Monday Merton Monday Merton Music Occupy the manger On Earth As It Is In Heaven Original Sin Podcast Poetry Politics Prayer Psalm 119 Radical Jesus 101 Reviews Sermon on the Mount Sermons Spanish Bible study Special Series Spiritual but not religious Synchroblog Theology Things that made me think Thomas a Kempis Ugliness Into Beauty Uncategorized Viaje Dominicano 2013 Walking in the Valley (Lent) Welcome: It's More than a Mat Wild Goose 2013 Wrestling

Select a Month March 2022 January 2022 December 2021 September 2021 April 2021 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

True or False: All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.

Select your answer to see how you score.

TRUE FALSE