Very Nice People

Last updated on: March 28, 2005 at 7:25 pm by Fred Clark

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Very Nice People 2005-03-28T19:25:07-05:00 Fred Clark

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Honestly, criticizing Rick Warren is not the purpose that drives my life, but the megachurch guru made one other statement on "Larry King Live" that's worth examining.

On the subject of Terri Schiavo, Warren says something that highlights why it is that evangelical Christians in America are simultaneously Very Nice People and blindered hypocrites. Here's Warren:

I know that if it were allowed, that Terri Schiavo's feeding for the rest of her life would be taken care of by millions and millions of people, who would be happy to pay for her feeding for the rest of her life if she happened to even remain in that state. And so that's not the issue.

He's right that "that's not the issue." The question at the heart of Schiavo's numerous court cases was not whether or not anyone was willing or able to pay for her care, but whether or not such care was what Terri Schiavo would have wanted. All of those courts — again and again — have decided this is not what she would have wanted.

Warren seems to be substituting a hypothetical scenario for the actual case. In this hypothetical scenario the primary issue is not "What did Terri Schiavo want?" but rather "Who will pay for her care?" True believers in this scenario thus recast Schiavo's husband as a mercenary cad trying to shirk any obligation to pay for her medical care.

This seems to be another example of the demonizing function of evangelical anxiety. The need to see ourselves as good leads to a need to see ourselves as significantly better than others. And since, in reality, we do not appear to be substantially different from others, we are forced to reinterpret them, to view them as more wicked than they are, ascribing to them the most heinous of motives for even the most difficult situations (see also: The Politics of Abortion).

But despite all that, I have no doubt that Warren's central assertion here is true: If called upon to do so, "millions and millions of people" — many of them devout Catholics and evangelicals — would contribute to pay for Terri Schiavo's medical maintenance.

For the sake of argument set aside — as these millions do — the question of what Schiavo would have wanted. There is a noble impulse at work here. These folks would be willing to give, even to give sacrificially, for the sake of another. That's a Good Thing.

The Schiavo case, of course, is not the hypothetical scenario that Warren presents. It is not simply a matter of insufficient resources. Yet multitudes of just such cases do exist. Yet because these cases are not causes celebre their existence goes unnoticed, their need unheeded, by the same "millions and millions of people" who are so ready to contribute to care for Terri the Symbol.

This is where the blindered hypocrisy comes in. American evangelicals really are Very Nice People. They would never, like Dives in the parable, callously disregard the suffering of poor Lazarus on their very doorstep.

Yet they have no problem constructing lives and communities that prevent them from ever having to see, or notice, or acknowledge the existence of the billions of Lazaruses (Lazari?) who make up the majority of our neighbors in this world. After all, good, decent people simply can't be expected to raise their children in the kinds of neighborhoods where beggars are loitering on doorsteps.

The sympathetic impulses of these Very Nice People are real, but they are stymied by context and by a semi-voluntary refusal to look at those outside of that context. This semi-willing blindness imperils "The Soul of the New Exurb." When the blindered context of American evangelicals gets combined with poisonous reassurances about the undeserving poor, and then used in the service of self-interest-group politics that pits it against any larger, common good, then these Very Nice People can wind up having a very nasty effect on the world around them.

The link above is to Jonathan Mahler's fascinating New York Times Magazine profile of an exurban evangelical megachurch near Phoenix (a church, incidentally, modeled after the church growth philosophy of Rick Warren).

Mahler describes many of the laudable programs offered by the church, programs that are:

… what church-growth experts refer to as a side door. Before the rise of the megachurch, evangelism was done primarily through the front door — the Sunday-morning service. Today, large evangelical churches try to offer the yet-to-be-saved as many different entry points as they can.

But doors — front doors, side doors, back doors — are for going out as well as for coming in.

If someone in desperate need manages to find their way in through one of the many doors of evangelicalism's megachurch culture, the millions and millions of people inside will rally to their aid. But sadly those same millions don't seem willing to go out those doors to look around and see if there might be more unmet needs out there.

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