Ignorance is something we often do not recognize in ourselves. This is especially true if we have been taught or indoctrinated into ignorance. Honestly, many Christians in the United States are terribly ignorant of the actual religion of Christianity. This is terribly obvious in the responses to the recent mid-term elections. Ignorance in the hands of people who have no concept of being wrong in their convictions leads to literal hells for others. But that ignorance also leads to some highly ironic humor if you understand religion.
I’ll start with the humor. White evangelicals are solidly in the camp that God is in full control and sovereign when Republican candidates win elections. But those same human beings suddenly sound like Open Theists or Process theologians when Democrats win. That, or they becomes dualists who believe that their idea of Satan has enough power to thwart God. I chuckle when it happens because it is rather predictable.
Humor aside, much of the language I am seeing by Christians - including Holiness folk is downright fantasy. From the idea that Christians somehow have cornered the market on freedom, to claiming that other faiths seek to remove freedom is such a strange move. These are people who claim to love the Constitution of the United States, yet when people of many or no faiths get elected, it becomes the end of the Republic. That is thinking that is both ignorant and dangerous. It is thinking that leads to anger and violence.
Now that we are several days into the realization that their political ideology was not in the majority this year we have come to the inevitable conspiracies. I saw a funny meme reflecting on this. You start to see graphics of county results where a state’s map looks mostly red with large splotches of blue. The poster asks the “good question” of how the Democrat won. The best response I have seen is one of Ohio. The commenter responded. You see, most of the red is corn fields and corn has yet to be granted the right to vote. Land doesn’t vote, human beings do and cities hold more human beings in a smaller area. But ignorance fuels conspiracy.
Ignorance also leads to heterodox positions so that one can claim they oppose a fellow Christian. There is a meme that claims James Talarico is a heretic because he said God is non-binary. The counter contains language of God as father. There’s a slight problem here though. Orthodox Christianity holds that God transcends gender, because God is Spirit. Scripture also refers to God using male and female metaphor for that very reason. But many evangelicals are taking the heterodox view that God is exclusively male. They are claiming beliefs outside of orthodoxy. I also believe this happens because there is ignorance about the definition of non-binary. I think the ignorant equate non-binary with trans. The two are not the same and God is truly non-binary in orthodox thought.
All of this deeply harms the witness and prophetic voice of the Church. We look like a bunch of people unable to reason ourselves into logical positions. We say stupid things and use angry and hateful words. I have seen several members and some clergy in the Church of the Nazarene (COTN) posting things that are definitely in opposition to ideas within our Covenant of Christian Conduct (this covenant has been ruled as essential doctrine). But I doubt anyone will be disciplined for these actions. It’s too dangerous to hold people to the sections that call us to reject religious bigotry or to love our enemy. So many posts seek to root out imagined sin by using sinful tactics. The ends do not justify the means.
I get it. The results feel like the end of the world for some. But then they (like myself) have tremendous privilege in our culture. The mostly white membership of the COTN in the USA and Canada is in no danger of being grabbed off the streets by government forces. Or, in the case of our Haitian sisters and brothers in danger of being deported to a country quite hostile to them. Here’s a secret, I bet some Nazarenes voted for Democrats to try and help their Haitian friends and loved ones. Our denominations, aside from a few District Superintendents and clergy have been silent as thousands of members of the COTN were stripped of their protection after fleeing Haiti. That silence could be because of a fear of the ignorant who don’t even recognize that we have Haitian churches in the United States.
Ignorance is dangerous when those who have been indoctrinated into the idea that science is at odds with their faith listen to people as ignorant as they. It is the ignorant being led around by the foolish. I recently saw a post in which a person with influence in their corner of the COTN was making claims that an epidemiologist knew nothing about vaccines. The sheer ignorance within the words shared was astounding. You see, she thinks that vaccines are only for the protection of the vaccinated. That’s a complete misunderstanding of the way vaccines work. The science is that we need a threshold of people to be vaccinated or immune so that those who cannot be vaccinated are protected. It is also science that once you reach that threshold, the disease targeted by the vaccine is unable to spread. For people like my wife and I who have compromised immune systems, these facts are important. We only need to look at the tragedy of measles to see what harm comes from going below immunity thresholds.
What is ironic to me is that the person who shared the ignorance appears to believe that society must be inoculated against sin. They are so worried about how others behave, but have no care for the bodies of those same people. But then, American evangelicals are rather gnostic in their view of the body. They treat bodies as dirty things rather than the good creation of God. Their indoctrination into a theo-political faith leads them to accuse fellow Christians of being demonic simply for not following their sinful path into syncretism. Another example of this is equating Democrats who have Christian faith with Christian Nationalists. There is a huge difference. One lets faith inform their actions and attitudes, the other forces their brand of faith upon all. They are not the same or even close to the same.
Also, try to wrap your head around the idea that a United Methodist pastor who openly speaks of beginning every day on his knees praying that he might be an example and follow what God would want in the world is demonic while being perfectly fine with Haitian Christians - Haitian members of the COTN - being stripped of the protections they were offered by the Unites States government because of the threat present in their home country. The dissonance is so utterly mind boggling. The COTN in North America is not dying because we fail to multiply or are not fundamentalist enough, we are dying because we are not being disciples of Jesus.
How do we turn this thing around?
Discipleship is one way, but it takes a lot of effort and pain to show the error of syncretic discipleship. You might even find yourself accused of all sort of evil for simply illuminating the problem. It is discouraging because even statistics and studies showing that this is a reason that those outside the church are not apt to visit a church do not help. Those studies usually only cause more retraction, accusation, and blame.
We can also pray that the kindom come on earth as it is on heaven. Politics is ever present in our culture. It is a team sport in the U.S. But we don’t have to pick either of the primary teams as our team. Instead we can be the church prophetic and speak truth across the political spectrum and vote however we each feel led. The government of the U.S. is built upon the ideal of individual liberty. Christianity is a communal religion lived out in the metaphor of body. The two are not really compatible as frameworks for living truth. Let the U.S. be what it claims and let the Church be what God has called us. Yes, those will be in conflict at times, but that is the nature of discipleship.
Most of all, we need to take the words of Jesus to heart and remember that every single human being we encounter is made in the image of God. Every single human being is worthy of our love. Jesus is clear - the reason we pray for our enemies is because we are not to see others as our enemies. We are to see them how God sees them. Then we need to shut out the voices of the Christian influencers who are now busy telling you that God hates some people and that means you can hate them as well. Ignorance is hell.