Jesus and John Wayne critique

I'm reading Jesus and John Wayne, by Kristin Kobes Du Mez.  The subtitle, How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, is an indication where it's headed.  What it says is less surprising than everything it assumes:

• American patriotism is little more than chauvinism and racism.   
• The Cold War was irrational fear mongering by American politicians.
• Soviet Communists were not attempting to destroy our capitalist economy and system of government.
• The Vietnam war was American power mongering and not an obligation of membership in Southeast Asia Treaty Organization.
• The sexual revolution has been all progress and liberation.   
• Male assertiveness is evil.
• Jesus is, in reality, the painting by Warner Sallman and not a sun-burned Jewish carpenter who confronted and challenged the authorities of his culture.  
• Evangelical publishing and media power significantly counterbalance the left-wing bias of main-stream media.

If all this is true, then patriotism and advocacy for American democracy by Evangelicals might be dismissed as religious fear mongering.  Any awareness of how socialist ideology has fared over the past hundred years, makes it difficult to take seriously the redundant slander of anticommunism and defense of American polity.  

After about ninety pages, the book does seem worth reading.  I'm finding answers to questions I've had about Bill Gothard, Marabelle Morgan, James Dobson, Phyllis Schlafly, Tim and Beverly LeHaye, Oliver North, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson et al.  I've met people over the years who have read these icons of the Religious Right or attended their seminars.  Kristin Kobes Du Mez has caught them in quotes she assumes are beyond the pale.  The impressions I had of Bill Gothard and James Dobson, notorious for their ideas about authority and hierarchy, were from conversations with people who tried to put their ideologies into practice.  What I knew about Marabelle Morgan was mostly from a Saturday-Night-Live parody. 

Gothard and Dobson argue or imply that God has ordained hierarchical organization in the family, in business management, government, and the church.  Gothard contends that resistance to authority is the root of most of our problems and that submission to the chain of command is the remedy.  It's difficult to accept the idea that submission to the authority vested in fathers, bosses, government officials, or pastors should be the general rule when bosses, officials, and church leaders are so frequently grotesque in their character flaws, and fathers are, often as not, completely missing from the families for which they are one way or another responsible.  Patriarchy is now an epithet.  Business managers who rule by intimidation are considered obsolete.  

Submission isn’t fashionable, especially for women.  “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the dirt." Says Mordred, the bastard son of King Arthur in Camelot.  Our current culture has abandoned traditional ideals.  As a general rule, there are no rules.  This, of course, has more than a century of philosophical precedent, or more explicitly, anti-philosophy by existentialists who argue that even if there is metaphysical formal order, we don't have access to it.  We're at the stage where people aren't willing to submit even to the biology of their bodies.

But in this context, it might be reasonable to also question the authority of revolutionaries whose nihilism has gone onto the fringe of credibility.  When might submission be reasonable or even beneficial?  Start with the cynical perspective: most of us have worked under the hierarchy of business organizations.  We notice that getting a good review depends on being useful to people with power.  Some people call that kissing ass; others call it ambition.  If you find out what the power players want and help them achieve their goals, you'll keep your job and maybe get promoted.  If this isn't submission, it is the equivalent.  By putting your own ideas and opinions on hold, you work according to somebody else's agenda.  I know a guy who changed his political perspective entirely to accommodate management when he took a job at Google.  He's doing very well in his career and compensation.

There are always limits to one's options at work or earlier in life.  Kids who learn to obey their parents generally do better in school.  A generation before James Dobson, Dr. Spock's Freudian ideas made parents fear giving their child a complex of some sort if they disciplined or inhibited him or her in any way.  The Boomer generation reared on the Freud/Spock ideology encountered reality when they came of age in the Vietnam era.  It can be argued that their revolt was morally justified.  Not so much their excesses of sex, drugs, and rock and roll.  Dobson's ideas about setting limits and punishment for strong-willed defiance were not unreasonable in the 1960s and 70s.

But this thing about chains of command, starting with the father in the family and continuing at various stages of life, clangs against every modern shibboleth.  It is unreasonable to submit to all hierarchical authority.  I've had managers who told me to do irrational things just to assert their authority.  A lot of business processes and procedures are counterproductive.  Even when it wasn't good for my career, I have, often enough, worked outside the parameters defined by management.  Sometimes this has been productive, more productive than following the protocol.  Sometimes it has led to my termination, usually on good terms.  Managers could sometimes understand what I intended, even if somebody else was more useful to them.

Back in the 1970s, I dated a woman who had read Gothard and Dobson.  She was a veteran of the sexual revolution who had married then divorced another rebel.  They had a child, a boy, who was about six years old by the time I got interested.  She had found Jesus a refreshing alternative to the life she had been living.  She had a good job at the phone company, then a career in which women could advance.  She was also concerned, to say the least, about her son, partly because his father, it came to light, was bisexual.  After he left her, he was, as she indelicately put it, hustling dudes on the street.  Going to church was for her a different kind of liberation.  

She could sing and play the guitar.  She was a hit in many ways at the megachurch she attended.  We did some singing together even though my classical training alienated some of her friends, who suggested she might be compromising her native gift.  Her church was enforcing the chain-of-command ideology.  One of my friends called her minister The Great White Chief.  Everybody was compelled to participate in a home group where a delegate of the Chief or his minions supervised their lives.  All were expected to share their most intimate thoughts and submit to life coaching, actually to obey their spiritual director.  This didn't sit well with me, but I apparently passed review by her spiritual director, and she was pretty sexy.  I also liked her son, whom she had given a biblical name, Reuben. We got him a child's size violin and enrolled him in the Suzuki School.  Interestingly enough, I never had the feeling that she would be a submissive wife if things had gone that way.  After she met my parents, I remember my father's quip, "If you marry her, you'll likely have a tiger by the tail".

After a few starts and stops, our relationship fizzled.  She married another guy in her church.  Last time I saw her, she was pregnant and very happy.  Given her background of riotous living, she and her son didn't seem to have suffered any harm from the control freaks at her church. That kind of discipline and submission may have been an antidote to the ideology of the 1960s from which she was in retreat. 

Though mainline denominations of the church don't ascribe to any of Gothard's or Dobson's ideology, hierarchical management is the way things run.  A priest in the Episcopal Church told me his boss-Bishop required all priests and deacons in the diocese to answer email or text messages within thirty minutes.  Anybody who wanted to continue to work in this domain had to endorse the party line.  They knew what they must do and what they must leave undone.  At diocesan conventions this included adding their preferred pronouns to their name tags.  I used to write prayers of the people at the invitation of a woman who had ambitions beyond her status as a deacon.  She carefully edited my submissions and revised anything that wasn't politically correct.

Through a couple more chapters Kobes Du Mez rattles on about Phyllis Schlafly, Tim and Beverly LeHaye, Oliver North, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Richard Nixon, Barry Goldwater, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan.  Southern Baptists participated in politics.  Isn't this a violation of the separation of church and state!  They used militaristic metaphors and patriarchal language about women in combat.  Phyllis Schlafly opposed feminism and the Equal Rights Amendment.  Despite her accomplishments as an attorney and her prominence on the speakers' circuit, she said her husband allowed her to fly to many events around the country.  They said Jimmy Carter, a brother Southern Baptist, caved to the Communists and flubbed the Iran hostage crisis.  When Southerners abandoned the Democrats in large numbers, they helped elect Reagan.  They hyped the Strategic Defense Initiative, which despite being missile defensive technology confirms their fascination with Reagan's cowboy-gunfighter mystique.  Add patriarchy to jingoism and racism, and you have Kobes Du Mez's profile of the Religious Right.  Despite the title of the book and a lot about patriarchy, we haven't yet read anything about John Wayne. We do get a litany of sexual escapades by televangelists.

Family values as advocated by the Religious Right are often maligned as a cover for patriarchy and homophobia.  Kobes Du Mez details collaborations by James Dobson, Presidents, and military brass, about family values, with a presumption that it will be questionable among right thinking people.  Currently more than 20 million children live in homes without the physical presence of a father.  It's easily verified that children from fatherless homes are more likely to be poor, become involved in drug and alcohol abuse, drop out of school, and suffer from health and emotional problems. Boys are more likely to become involved in crime, and girls are more likely to become pregnant as teens.  

For the past fifty years, Johnson era programs--the War on Poverty, the Great Society, Aid to Families with Dependent Children--have allocated trillions of dollars, in effect subsidizing dysfunctional behavior.  36 million people were living in poverty in 1964, and about 46.5 million live in poverty today. The poverty rate was 19 percent in 1964 and is about 15 percent now.  The War on Poverty has been as big a failure as the War on Drugs, and the later debacle is not unrelated to the former.  During this interval of history, the Religious Right has been advocating for family values.  Draw your own conclusions.

I quit reading this rant before any appearance of John Wayne.  Readers who persist evidently accept it’s contention that religion and politics are separate or independent cultural species.  I got interested in a book that documents the absurdity of this claim: Dominion; How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, by Tom Holland.

Against Church Hierarchy

...you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all brethren. And call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven. Neither be called masters, for you have one master, the Christ. He who is greatest among you shall be your servant; whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.

Matthew 23: 9-11

Jesus lived in controversy with the rulers of the synagogue and temple. He’d likely be just as opposed to church hierarchy as it has developed and persisted through history. The book Pagan Christianity, by Frank Viola and George Barna describes how the informal religion of Jesus became a bureaucracy.

In 380 CE, the emperor Theodosius issued the Edict of Thessalonica, which made Christianity, specifically Nicene Christianity, the official religion of the Roman Empire. A religion growing rapidly in small groups was thereafter under the control of the Roman Empire. Funding that had previously gone to various pagan religions began to be dispersed to the Christian church. Opportunities arose for ambitious people to use the church to gain power and use the church for political ends.

The distinction between clergy and laity is unknown in the New Testament. As is evident in the quoted passage above, Jesus explicitly rejects it. In the churches Paul discusses, all church members participated in worship and in decision making. After a hierarchy was established, which resembled the imperial Roman hierarchy, a lot of things changed. Possibly the most significant and pervasive change was the transformation of worship from a participatory format to that of a theatrical performance by the clergy. Of course, with this came the establishment of hierarchical prerogatives.

There is much more for discussion in Pagan Christianity and its follow-up Reimagining Church. I've often noticed that controversies in the church turn as much on how decisions are made, about music, liturgy, or polity, as on the results. These books put our disputes and discussions in a new light.

It comes as something of a shock that the church may have gotten administration wrong since the Edict of Thessalonica in 380 CE. When Paul wrote to the Corinthian church about problem of disorder in worship, he addressed his letter to the whole church, not to the elders. All of Paul’s epistles are address to church members not administrators.

The order that Paul recommended to solve disorder was not that of bureaucracy, that is to say a hierarchy. He didn’t specify that worship should be mainly teaching and ministry by the elders. He did say that things should be done decently and in order, because the situation he wanted to remedy was outrageous by any standard. People were all talking at the same time, over one another, and some people were getting drunk.

The order he called for maintained participation by all members of the church, one at a time, each with a contribution. Anybody who wanted to speak, or prophesy, was allowed to voice their perspective. This would also allow people to raise questions. How would that go over during a sermon in a church of any denomination now?

The order that Paul discusses is the analogy of the body, all members of which have equal value and purpose. When Paul discusses elders and deacons, the qualifications are not ordination or election. Rather deacons are appointed to serve humble needs. Elders must have demonstrated ability to manage their own families. They should not be polygamous. Their children should not be disobedient or disrespectful.

I can remember one situation in all the churches where I’ve been a member, when an elder resigned because his son had repeatedly misbehaved in the way teens often misbehave. He’d been drunk and disorderly several times and his father disqualified himself as an elder. I can also remember “preachers’ kids” who were hell raisers who repeatedly embarrassed their ministerial parents, but this had little effect on the parents’ roles in the church.

Unfortunately, power tends to corrupt. Even more unfortunately, the leadership in our churches often resembles the misused authority of the Pharisees and Sadducees. I’ve been mainly involved in Lutheran, Catholic, and Episcopal churches for now more than seventy years. I can joke about it, because I’ve been baptized twice and confirmed three times. For some years in high school and college I attended Churches of Christ in the Campbell tradition.

The Episcopal church has been torn by lawsuits and controversies. Officially the discussion is supposed to resolve based on scripture, tradition, and reason. In practice it comes down to ideology currently in vogue among the hierarchy. Thirty years ago, when the Episcopal and Lutheran churches attempted to merge, the effort foundered on disputes among their hierarchies. The people accepted open communion between the churches, but the hierarchies never resolved the question of which of them was closer to apostolic succession.

The only passage in the Gospels I can find that supports authoritative ministry, even by the apostles, is when Jesus says to Peter, “I give you the keys of the kingdom, power to bind and to loose, to forgive or not forgive”. This, of course, is the passage that the Catholic Church cites to support the Pope at the head of an elaborate hierarchy. But, when the dispute arose about Gentile observance of Jewish laws, Paul says he had to oppose Peter because he was simply wrong. It resolved in favor of Paul’s rational argument, not authority.

Viola and Barna discuss the historical development of church hierarchy church and services' devolution to spectator events. They cite many examples of how church polity has come to resemble that of Imperial Rome. The Reformation was an attempt to wrest control from the hierarchy, but Luther and Calvin changed only doctrinal points while maintaining control in their own hierarchies. Christians were expected to continue to sit and listen to them preach. The distinction between clergy and laity persisted.

In the churches Viola and Barna cite as good examples, scripture, tradition, and reason, have prominence, but the defining factor is that everybody can contribute to worship services and participate in making decisions. When people converse together about their lived experiences following Jesus, Jesus himself is revealed by his presence in the community. I think many of us have known him in this way from time to time in our conversations with others of the faith.