Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Progressive Christian
How evangelical gatekeepers mistake extortion for leadership: A story

How evangelical gatekeepers mistake extortion for leadership: A story

Last updated on: March 25, 2014 at 5:20 pm by Fred Clark

How evangelical gatekeepers mistake extortion for leadership: A story 2014-03-25T17:20:07-04:00 Fred Clark

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.

This is one of those worlds-collide stories, from eight or nine years ago.

Instead of doing the table reading at the theater, the whole cast was invited to the playwright’s house for the read-through and a friendly dinner featuring the playwright’s husband’s famous chili. This news was met with great enthusiasm by the veteran members of the company. Skip lunch, they told me. Save room for the chili.

It was kind of wild and strange for me to find myself a part of this odd little artsy world. I’d done community theater and some dinner theater (“interactive murder mysteries,” oy). And now here I was, surrounded by real actors with real training — people whose professional headshots had appeared in honest-to-G0d copies of Playbill. And somehow I wound up part of this workshop, bringing this madly ambitious, experimental playwright’s remarkable visions to the stage.

So I think part of the reason I wound up talking to the playwright’s husband was because he was the one other person in the room who wasn’t quite a part of this avant garde theater world. Sure, he was married to an edgy playwright, but he wasn’t an artist himself.

“What do you do?” I asked. “Besides making amazing chili?”

He was, it turns out, something of a number-cruncher — an efficiency expert with a commitment to measuring and maximizing productivity. Maybe that sounds a bit dull and wonkish, but his job was actually pretty exciting. He traveled all over the world measuring and enhancing the tangible results of relief and development projects for a large evangelical Christian agency.

He was, like me, an evangelical Christian. And he was, like me, an evangelical Christian whose faith in Jesus compelled him to work for justice for the poor. That’s an even smaller subcultural niche than the world of avant garde theater.

No surprise, then, that it turned out we knew a lot of the same people. I started naming a bunch of folks who worked for his agency — people whose writing I had published when I was the editor of an evangelical Christian magazine, or whose work we had written about. He knew many of them — including my former boss, who had been an executive in that organization. And, just like my old boss and many of my other friends who work for relief NGOs, the playwright’s husband could also sometimes sound like Carmen Sandiego — “Oh you know Amy? She’s terrific! Last I saw her she was working on a water project in Eritrea.”

It was a bit odd, though, having that little evangelical family reunion there in that setting. Not only were we surrounded by actors and theater people, we were drinking beer.

The playwright’s husband was a Brit, and evangelical Christians in the UK don’t carry the same 19th-century cultural baggage as evangelical Christians in America do. But still, he knew that many American evangelicals regarded beer-drinking as sinful and theologically fraught. He understood that it wouldn’t be prudent for him, as a representative of sorts of a large evangelical organization, to be seen in public drinking a beer. That would be a source of “controversy.” It would become a Thing, leading to various tribal gatekeepers denouncing the relief agency for failing to maintain a proper “biblical stance” with regard to the “sin” of beer-drinking.

Those gatekeepers would begin demanding that other Christians withhold their support for the relief agency. Sure, nearly all of those gatekeepers weren’t donating any support to begin with, because poverty and hunger have never been among their priorities. The gatekeepers’ threats of withholding support would thus be mostly a hypocritical lie. But even so, their inevitable attacks and their efforts to condemn the agency as “controversial” could mean an overall reduction in donor support. The playwright’s husband knew better than almost anyone just exactly what the real-world effects of any such reduction would be: Wells not dug, children not fed, women denied health care, schools not built.

It might sound noble and courageous to talk about taking a bold and principled stand against the biblical illiteracy and hypocrisy of the teetotaling gatekeepers, but the price for that stand might be paid by poor children. So we drank our beer in private.

Sometimes, in some circumstances, paying the ransom seems like the right thing to do.

But overall, over time, you can’t make a policy out of paying the ransom. That might be best for specific hostages in the short-term, but in the long run it creates an incentive for more hostage-taking, more extortion. It empowers the gatekeeping bullies, encouraging them to think that their arrogant presumption to speak for God and the Bible will never be challenged, questioned or even examined.

Evangelical institutions — churches, colleges, seminaries, magazines, relief agencies — will all, at some point, have to take a stand against the extortion, the lies, and the vile power-games of the gatekeepers.

And let’s be very, very clear: the gatekeepers are liars. They insist that “the Bible is clear” in prohibiting drinking beer. That is not true. Even worse, they insist that no one who drinks beer can really be a real Christian. That is not true. That is a lie — a deliberately malicious, nasty, ugly lie.

That is how the gatekeepers maintain their power and control over the tribe: by telling lies about other Christians. By endlessly repeating the lie that most other Christians are not “really” Christian at all because they drink beer or because they believe in science or because they are gay or because they are not anti-feminist or because they voted for the moderate Republican in the primary instead of for the tea party Republican.

Part of the reason the gatekeepers’ lies about their fellow Christians have gotten louder and nastier is because they realize they’re losing their grip over the tribe and the subculture. They realize that most American evangelicals no longer regard beer-drinking as a sin and no longer accept the way a handful of clobber-texts were twisted to suggest otherwise. As more and more American evangelicals have come out of the beer-drinking closet, the gatekeepers’ lies about them have become harder and harder to defend.

“There’s no such thing as a beer-drinking Christian,” they still say, but now everyone knows they’re lying.

And it’s not just the gatekeepers’ gospel of teetotalism that’s on the wane. That’s just one of many areas in which, during my own lifetime, the gatekeepers’ pronouncements about “clear biblical teaching” have been proven false and been rejected by a growing majority of American evangelicals.

Consider, for example, interracial marriage. A majority of American evangelicals used to consider that a sin and a violation of clear biblical teaching.

Heck, a majority of all Americans across the board disapproved of interracial marriage as recently as 1995.

Study that graph for a moment, soak it in.

If you are an adult, 18 or older, then majority acceptance of interracial marriage is something that only came about after you were born. In 1995, a majority of Americans were perfectly willing to admit to a pollster that they did not “approve” of “marriages between whites and nonwhites.”

But the culture has changed, dramatically, in the past 20 years. Despite the gatekeepers’ former insistence on “clear biblical teaching,” more than two-thirds of white evangelicals in America no longer disapprove of interracial marriage.

Nowadays, even most of the gatekeepers have given up on the clobber texts they used to use to condemn interracial marriage. Most no longer fervently claim that the Bible clearly teaches that interracial marriage is wrong. Many of their old argument have been repurposed and reaffirmed, however, as part of a new gatekeeper extortion plot involving marriages that they now say are a violation of “clear biblical teaching.”

And that, by the way, is the other element of my worlds-collide story above. The playwright’s husband is a white man. The playwright himself is black. The gatekeeping bullies and their toadies would be even more upset by that than by the beer-drinking. They would aggressively act to punish the agency this good Christian man works for, declaring that it is impossible that he is really a Christian at all.

There’s no such thing, the gatekeepers say, as a gay Christian. There’s no such thing, the gatekeepers say, as a Christian in an interracial marriage. There’s no such thing, the gatekeepers say, as a Christian who drinks beer. They can cite clobber texts that they say support all of those lies, but none of those texts has the power to make those lies true.

Previous Post

March 24, 2014

Moving into the age of leisure

Next Post

March 25, 2014 If the comment section of Christianity Today reflects the state of Christianity today, then we need to burn the whole thing to the ground and start over

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category class warfare evangelicals Iraq Left Behind Mammon music Uncategorized

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 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 July 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 March 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 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 August 2004 July 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 February 2004 January 2004 December 2003 November 2003 October 2003 September 2003

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

Who was the mother of Samuel?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Mary Hannah Sarah Rebekah