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Thoughts on religion, politics, life and death. And other banned topics.

Segregated Sundays


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“For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility.”
—Ephesians 2:14

There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
—Galatians 3:28

Why are our churches so segregated? Not just by race, although that is bad enough, but by political affinity? The early church was made up of people from all walks of life. There were rich widows and poor layabouts. There were Greeks, Jews, and barbarians. There were slaves and slave owners. There were young and old, rich and poor, male and female, smart and stupid, tall and short, native and alien, slave and free, extroverts and introverts, dark-skinned and light-skinned all in the same church. They had arguments and offenses and jealousies and lawsuits, but they still met together and worshiped together. Could it be that we have missed some central, unifying truth in the gospel?

I met Marv Sauers in 2006 a couple of years before he died. He was 80. He had been a pipeline technician (or engineer, I’m not sure what his job would be today) in northern Minnesota. He fought in World War II. He grew his own tomatoes and shared them with friends. (He grew and shared zucchini too, but—let’s face it—everyone who grows zucchini shares it.) We attended the same church, a nondenominational evangelical church near Hastings, Minnesota. He used to say that he was their token Democrat. When he died the church lost a little of its diversity. It became even more Republican.

I understand the need for a Credo. Without a statement of belief spelling out exactly what we stand for, the church could become a social club, standing for goodness in some unspecified way. Yet somewhere along the way being Republican has become a tacit tenet of evangelical faith. Why? It comes down to just one issue: abortion. Republicans are against it, and Democrats are for it. For many evangelical Christians, abortion is non-negotiable. If you are for it, it is like being for serial murder: you don’t deserve a voice in civil discourse about anything else. How can you vote for someone who favors killing babies just because they haven’t been born yet?

Yet there are plenty of liberal Christians who are also Democrats. They are brothers and sisters too. Some favor abortion—not, of course, because they favor killing babies—because they favor women’s autonomy. They see a world that wants to make childbearing the defining characteristic of women and use that characteristic to exclude them from full participation in other areas of life. Abortion may be an imperfect solution, but it is a solution within the control of the woman, and they favor letting a woman control her own destiny rather than letting others control it who do not have to bear the consequences of their decision. For liberal Christians, abortion is not a litmus test in the same way that it is for conservative Christians. It is one issue among many, not the one issue that defines a candidate’s—or a party’s—character. (It is plain, however, that a Democrat who opposed abortion would have as tough a time getting elected as a Republican who favored it. As with so many issues that divide America at present, there seems to be no middle ground, no room for imagining that those who disagree with you might have the best of motives instead of the worst.)

Our churches are as politically segregated as they are racially segregated. The same is true of economic class and, basically, any indicator by which we commonly self-segregate. The church is just like the world. The only difference seems to be that the Christians think they are better.

The reasons for this self-segregation are partly technological. In the first century, if you wanted to go somewhere, you walked. Everyone walked to synagogue. Everyone walked to church. Everyone walked to hear the latest theories discussed in the marketplace. If you went to church at all, you went to one that was nearby. For the same reason, people were more connected to their neighbors and communities. The people you lived near were the people with whom you worked, talked, celebrated, and worshiped. You were forced to get along with people who did not share your views. Our technology has made it possible to go to a church miles from where we live where the people are as like us as possible. Unless we deliberately seek out people who differ from us, we quite naturally drift into insular relationships that never challenge our prejudices about anything. Our churches even become adept at excluding difference merely by being unwelcoming to those who are not like us. This makes it possible to go to a church where you never encounter a dissenting political view to say nothing of different theological or philosophical views. We can go to a church where there are no feminists and talk about feminism as if it were hell’s agenda. Meanwhile across town a church of feminists is meeting and discussing how patriarchy is pure evil.

Somehow—and it can only be by conscious, deliberate effort—we have got to get out of our cocoons. We have got to accept that everyone who loves Jesus, no matter their theology or political party, is part of the family of God. I’m not suggesting we should not fight. Let’s fight among ourselves. Let’s bring to bear our best arguments and our strongest defenses. But let’s fight like brothers and sisters who love one another, not like warring camps who hate one another. Let’s open our minds and hearts to one another and learn that we might just possibly be wrong about some things.

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