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
The way we were (are)

The way we were (are)

Last updated on: August 1, 2022 at 6:40 pm by Fred Clark

The way we were (are) 2022-08-01T18:40:29-04:00 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.

• The Adirondack Explorer profiles Word of Life’s Schroon Lake Bible camp on its 75th anniversary. It’s mostly a puff-piece, but also a glimpse of what late 20th-century white evangelicalism was often like before it was reshaped by Gingrich and W. and the tea party and Trump. That’s not to say it wasn’t “political” or “politicized,” just that it was political in a different, subtler, more implicit way. (Local reporter Chloe Bennett does a nice job capturing that aspect of the place.)

I never went to Word of Life, but dozens of my friends from church and my private fundamentalist Christian school went every year. It was a popular pilgrimage for youth groups and whole families from our Central Jersey white fundie world. My friends came back from Schroon Lake every summer with tales of all the fun they had there (and of how they had, of course, re-rededicated their lives to Christ at campfire one night). And I was happy for them, but never really jealous except for the one year that two classmates of mine went to basketball camp there and got to play in a game with Dr. J and Bobby Jones. (Heisman Trophy winner and former Rumble Pony Tim Tebow is up there this summer.)

“It’s an amazing feeling to be standing with a group of people, looking over a lake, all singing together, and feel like you’re part of something,” one former camper says, fondly recalling her summers as a camper and a volunteer at the Bible camp. She had been all-in — determined to attend Word of Life’s “Bible Institute” instead of college where she hoped to train to become a missionary in “full-time Christian service.”

But her story took a different turn because — well, because Word of Life is also the kind of place that invited Anita Bryant as a guest speaker during the height of her 1970s anti-gay campaigning.

There’s so much going on here.

We should note that Word of Life reached that 75-year milestone without any hint of Kanakuk Kamp-style horrors. But there’s a deeply creepy Jordan Peele vibe to an island filled with kindly smiling white faces saying “This is the day that the Lord hath made, let us rejoice and be glad in it!” before adding, “Now, let’s get you signed up for reparation therapy.”

But this same crisis of faith awaits every happy camper. Even if you can easily check “No” on that volunteer application asking about “gay thoughts,” you may find yourself confessing to the sin of being awed by those pictures from the JWST or of having watched Prehistoric Planet and entertaining sinful thoughts about the age of the universe. There are so many ways one can wind up rubbing up against the boundaries of white fundamentalist identity, prompting a response that makes it’s subtle, implicit politics suddenly unsubtle and explicit.

• Alex Morris’ Rolling Stone interview with Bonhoeffer biographer Charles Marsh gets at the appeal of what’s going on at those bonfires and lakeside ritual revivals:

The world of the evangelical is really overcharged with meaning. I mean, there is nothing more associative than the evangelical mind at first blossom. It’s a psychedelic kind of world that you inhabit. In those times when you are in worship and celebration and repentance and in the deep community of evangelical fellowship, you feel that you are right in the center of the metaphysical whirlwind, and you have been invested with a divine, almost superhuman destiny. That excess of emotion and feeling and energy leaves its mark.

But Marsh is also very insightful on the downsides of this me-o-centric encounter with ultimate meaning. Hence the title of that Rolling Stone piece: “‘An Evangelical Childhood is a Total Mindfuck’ New Memoir Recounts the Anxiety and Thrills of Growing Up a Conservative Christian.”

• Dave Gushee writes about how the current Fox- and Trump-ified strain of white evangelicalism is a departure from the mid- and late-20th century forms of white evangelicalism my classmates experienced up there at Schroon Lake, “When Christianity becomes toxic ‘Christianism’.” I want to unpack that a bit, to suggest that, when push comes to shove, the current form of this religion is just what it always was before push came to shove. Here again is Charles Marsh:

It’s an identity that is totalitarian in its understanding of the world and its understanding of truth. It doesn’t admit difference. If it sees difference—whether sexual, political, or racial—it wants to obliterate that or consume that or overwhelm that by its own powers. The awakening into a new identity, a born-again identity, is also an awakening in too many cases to a sense of having an answer for every question and a prescription for every kind of sexual behavior, human behavior, of having such supreme confidence that you’ve been brought into this one truthful, eternally enduring identity. And so when it observes difference, it simply can’t abide difference. It can’t ignore difference; it has to remove it.

Push came to shove when the white evangelical subcultural bubble was no longer sustainable — when the campers had to leave the island — and it became impossible not to observe difference. Ethnic and cultural difference. Religious pluralism. (Even internal pluralism, which is especially intolerable for those adamantly insisting that their every doctrine is based on a common-sense, literal reading of the plain and perspicuous, nice and accurate holy scripture.)

Marsh describes white evangelicalism, in other words, like the people of Krikkit in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide:

They flew out of the cloud.

They saw the staggering jewels of the night in their infinite dust and their minds sang with fear.

For a while they flew on, motionless against the starry sweep of the Galaxy, itself motionless against the infinite sweep of the Universe. And then they turned round.

“It’ll have to go.”

In any case, that’s not the most important part of Dave Gushee’s piece. The most important part is this bit:

Even the handful of proto-Christian Right types I met at my own church still were playing by the same faith rules as everyone else there. I remember when a woman from church asked me to be a bit actor in a film called “Can Soviet Imperialism Be Stopped?” (Will someone please find this film, in which young David Gushee, dressed as a Soviet soldier, menacingly pours red paint over a globe? Thank you.) This woman was a serious Cold War Republican who worked hard to get Ronald Reagan elected. But she — and her organization — bore no resemblance to the debased freak show we are now seeing wrapped in the banner of Jesus.

Again, I’d argue that this form of white Cold Warrior evangelicalism was mainly a proxy for opposition to segregation and an attempt to assert moral superiority by folks who were increasingly aware of their moral bankruptcy being made increasingly evident by their fierce opposition to the Civil Rights Movement. The National Indignation party demonizing JFK before his visit to Dallas in 1963 was not, as they claimed, actually upset about Kennedy’s training of Yugoslavian pilots. They were upset about the prospect that Brown v. Board of Ed might someday be enforced. McCarthyism and zealous Cold Warrior posturing provided a pretext for the self-flattering illusion of “We’re Still the Moral Authorities” until Gorby ruined the fun and all of those same Cold Warriors flipped a switch and suddenly began pretending to be everyone else’s Moral Superiors by pretending that everyone else was a Satanic baby-killer.

But, again, that’s not the most important bit. The most important bit is that somewhere out there is this low-budget movie with a young Dave Gushee in a Soviet uniform. And that anyone who has access to this film needs to stop whatever else they’re doing and upload “Can Soviet Imperialism Be Stopped?” to YouTube. Please. Thank you.

• The linking between Marsh and Gushee here is partly due to the serendipity of my RSS feed, but it’s also due to the grim warning they’ve both provided to 20th- and 21st-century white Christians in deeply unsettling (in the best way) books.

I’ve previously mentioned Marsh’s biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Strange Glory, as a much-needed antidote to the toxic, self-flattering Bonhoeffer book that drove Eric Metaxas off the deep end. I describe Metaxas’ wretched Marty Stu hagiography as the Benjamin Button version of Martin Niemöller, a weirdly pro-fascist argument that wound up rallying its author and many of its readers to demand that “They come for the Communists …” and the trade unionists, and the LGBT people, and the Jews.

Marsh’s book, by contrast, provokes the kind of sober reflection that Niemöller arrived at only when it was far, far too late. It probes how it was that Bonhoeffer’s faith forced him to take responsibility and to take sides when most white Christians failed to do so. In other words, it forces the reader to confront the same haunting questions raised by Dave Gushee’s excellent book on The Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust. Gushee examines hundreds of case studies of resisters and rescuers to see what they had in common but winds up frustrated and chastened and dismayed to realize there is no magic secret, no pattern of education or politics or religion that explains this small minority’s exceptional courage and clarity in a fearful, confused world.

I wish there were some such magic secret — This One Trick Will Keep You From One Day Too Late Realizing You’re Complicit In The Slide To Genocidal Fascism. The closest Gushee comes is suggesting that all those rescuers and resisters shared an aversion to what he calls “boundaries of moral obligation.” That phrase — “boundaries of moral obligation” — is also an apt description of what Niemöller confesses in his famous My-God-What-Have-I-Done? prayer/poem.

And so, again, I suspect that the only sure way to become more like Bonhoeffer is to accept that we’re probably more like Niemöller. And vice versa — if we flatter ourselves by thinking we’re just like Bonhoeffer, then we’re bound to become like a pre-repentance Niemöller (or like Eric Metaxas).

Let me leave you with this: Reggie Williams delivering the 2018 Nordenhaug Lectures at the International Baptist Theological Study Centre in Amsterdam. Williams, author of Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus, is speaking on “Bonhoeffer, leadership and responses in the context of European nationalisms.” In four years, that video has only been viewed 147 times. I think it would get more attention if the IBTSC changed the title to “This One Trick Will Keep You From One Day Too Late Realizing You’re Complicit In The Slide To Genocidal Fascism.”

And I think that title might, in this case, be accurate.

Uncategorized

Previous Post

August 1, 2022

8/1 Flashback: Have fun

Next Post

August 2, 2022 8/2 Flashback: Fundamental

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

Which Old Testament prophet confronted King Ahab about worshiping Baal?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Elijah Jeremiah Isaiah Ezekiel