-Robert Frost, from his poem “Mending Wall”

The following is a reflection from my time thus far in Jerusalem, where I am now taking a summer course at Hebrew University on the History and Archaeology of Jerusalem.

At 8:00 last Sunday morning I sat down for the first of four kitschy, quasi-propagandist movies I would view that week. Funded by the Ir David Foundation, a right wing Israeli association “committed to continuing King David’s legacy as well as revealing and connecting people to Ancient Jerusalem’s glorious past”[1], this movie required 3D glasses as I “traveled back in time” to view David’s heroic and improbable conquest of Jerusalem from the Canaanites. Yet was I transported back into history or myth?

The story of David’s conquest of Jerusalem is presented in 1 Chronicles 11:4-9:

David and all Israel marched to Jerusalem, that is, Jebus where the Jebusites were, the inhabitants of the land. The inhabitants of Jebus said to David, ‘You will not come in here.’ Nevertheless, David took the stronghold of Zion, now the city of David. David had said, ‘Whoever attacks the Jebusites first shall be chief and commander.’ And Joab son of Zeruiah went up first, so he became chief. David resided in the stronghold; therefore it was called the city of David. He built the city all round, from the Millo in a complete circuit; and Joab repaired the rest of the city. And David became greater and greater, for the Lord of hosts was with him (NRSV).

Most scholars agree that the audience for which 1 Chronicles was written was post-exilic, an audience somewhat akin to Israelis today. The community who composed 1 Chronicles had been a people without a land; their historical reality included defeat and humiliation at the hands of Nebuchadnezzar and exile to Babylon. Those who returned to the land needed a story to strengthen their collective religious and national identity. Who better than the fierce figure of King David, who according to the Deuteronomistic historians took on the Brobdingnagian Goliath (1 Sam 17) and unified the kingdom of Judah on a scale Saul could not achieve? The chroniclers present David as a man without fault or weakness, leaving out his more salacious moments recorded in 2 Samuel – such as his relationship with Bathsheba – and the threat to his kingdom by his own son, Absalom. David, in other words, is the picture of the modern Israeli Sabra: a strong and fervently nationalistic Jew.

This picture of David is ubiquitous in Israel today. Museums and archaeological sites open to the public abound, using media and an un-nuanced perspective on “Biblical history and archaeology” to present an Israel that rightly belongs to the Jews. Springing from this worldview, right-wing Israelis – who, by the way, currently hold much of the political and sociocultural power, and therefore craft the dominant narrative – behave much like their Chronicler counterparts did toward the Am Ha’aretz, “the people of the land.”  Whether impoverished Judeans and Samaritans left behind subsequent to the Babylonian exile or modern Palestinians who have inhabited the land for centuries, the “myth of the empty land” seems to prevail.  Indeed, biblical scholar Sara Japhet asserts that despite evidence to the contrary, “for the book of Ezra-Nehemiah the Neo-Babylonian period in the land of Israel is non-existent. It is a historical vacuum […] there is a direct transition from the destruction of the Temple to its restoration.”[2] Likewise, nearly every right wing Israeli movie I have viewed has included a direct paraphrase of Zechariah 8:4-5: “Thus says the Lord of hosts: Old men and old women shall again sit in the streets of Jerusalem, each with staff in hand because of their great age. And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in its streets.” (NRSV)

Were there no children playing in the streets of Jerusalem prior to 1948?  The Zionist rallying cry, “a land without a people for a people without a land” certainly reflects this view. Yet this exclusive solidarity with the Chroniclers among modern Israelis excludes those dissenting inclusive voices in the Hebrew Bible, also written during the post-exilic period: that of the authors of Ruth, who claims David to be a descendant from a Moabitess, and Jonah, who asserts that God honored the repentance of the Ninevites and did not destroy them.

Clearly, the Chroniclers present only one exclusivist point of view in the Hebrew Bible, yet powerful and wealthy modern rightwing Israeli institutions, who understand themselves to be a post-exilic community, emulate the dominant perspective of the Biblical post-exilic community. Today chosen-ness, as with the Chroniclers’ “remnant theology”, has become a way to marginalize, persecute, and exclude – to the point that the Israelis, who themselves weep over the Western Wall of the destroyed Temple, have constructed a second wailing wall for Palestinians.

The tragedy is, I do not believe that this situation is black and white. Plenty of Jews have been victim to Arab attacks, a former grand mufti of Jerusalem sought to conspire with Hitler, and Jews should have access to their religious sites in Jerusalem. But pro-Israeli propaganda to which I have been subject – in the name of an academic course no less! – as well as the dominant Israeli racist attitude toward Arabs all drive me to feel even more zeal to protect Palestinian rights. In other words, the Jewish tactics are self-defeating, at least in my case. I can respect, and even sympathize with, a person who is authentically trying to understand the other.  But the boorish exclusivity I have perceived in the case of Israel leads me to believe that what Israel needs more than ever is not King David, but Ruth and Jonah, and perhaps the Prophet Micah: “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you 
but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8, NRSV).

All photos were taken by the author of this post and are used here with permission of the author.

[2] Sara Japhet, “Periodization: Between History and Ideology,” in Judah and the Judeans in the Neo-Babylonian Period, eds. Oded Lipschits and Joseph Blenkinsopp (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2003), 81.

The first thing I noticed: in front of all but two students was a glowing apple, that ubiquitous symbol of cutting edge and downright cool western technology.  There were original Macbooks, Macbook Pros, Macbook Airs, and iPads propped up on stands.  And I could not help but let the irony wash over me: here we are in a course on Christianity’s frequent complicity with exploitative power structures and in a majority Christian-identified room we have played directly into the hand of the dominant culture.  Oh yes, and I too had a glowing apple at my place.

I like to think of myself as a generally socially responsible person.  I purchase only fair trade coffee to brew at home and I study at local coffee shops that tend to brew fair trade blends.  I drive a car that was rated #5 for fuel efficiency in the year it was made.  I research the nonprofits to which I donate to ensure their program strategy makes sense and that my funds will be employed strategically.  But sometimes, I must admit, when I am rushed and Starbucks is the only convenient option and they are not brewing fair trade (which they typically are not), I do not forgo my cup of coffee.  And I shop at H&M because, on a student budget, who can afford American Apparel?  And despite this recent This American Life exposé, I love my Macbook.  So what gives?

I think I manifest what we typically refer to as “liberal guilt:” that pervasive feeling of shame that I was born into privilege, and that every dollar I spend on luxuries such as Starbucks coffee and an iPod is a double injustice: it is both money that could have gone to those who cannot even afford to eat, let alone buy an iPod, and it is also playing into an unjust structure that is stacked against the oppressed and marginalized. Further, I feel guilty about feeling guilty.  After all, it is sort of imperialistic and narcissistic to think that I, a white westerner, can save the day for an exploited worker in China.

And the truth is, this guilt only gets me so far.  My internal narrative goes something like this: “Every morning I brew fair trade at home and bring it with me in a reusable travel mug, so it is okay if I buy one cup of Starbucks every once in a while.”  Or, “I have to have a laptop for my work and these companies are all exploitative, so I might as well buy my Macbook.”

In other words, I maintain my ethical convictions up to the point at which I am only slightly inconvenienced: I have to carry my travel mug around with me all day, I may have to ride home in the rain when I bike to class, I have to drive out of my way to Trader Joe’s to buy fair trade.  But when the stakes become higher – not owning a laptop or buying more expensive clothes that are guaranteed to be made under fair working conditions at a fair wage – I cave.  And, from my observation in my class, it appears most of us do.

The fact is, I am privileged just by virtue of the fact that I have the means to study the relationship between Christianity and social power – at an Ivy League institution nonetheless.  But what bearing does that have on me if my ethic is inconsistent with the conclusions I take from the course?  Can I – or can any of us who are privileged – ever fully live into an ostensibly impossible ethic, or are we doomed to a life of hypocrisy?

"Now, up until today, most Americans have never heard of the combat Lord's Resistance Army.  And here we are at war with them.  Have you ever heard of Lord's Resistance Army, Dawn?  How about you, Brian? […]  You never heard of Lord's Resistance Army?  Well, proves my contention, most Americans have never heard of it, and here we are at war with them.  Lord's Resistance Army are Christians.  It means God. […]  Lord's Resistance Army are Christians.  They are fighting the Muslims in Sudan.  And Obama has sent troops, United States troops to remove them from the battlefield, which means kill them.  […] Lord's Resistance Army objectives.  I have them here.  […]

'To remove dictatorship and stop the oppression of our people; to fight for the immediate restoration of the competitive multiparty democracy in Uganda; to see an end to gross violation of human rights and dignity of Ugandans; to ensure the restoration of peace and security in Uganda, to ensure unity, sovereignty, and economic prosperity beneficial to all Ugandans, and to bring to an end the repressive policy of deliberate marginalization of groups of people who may not agree with the LRA ideology.'

Those are the objectives of the group that we are fighting, or who are being fought and we are joining in the effort to remove them from the battlefield."

This recent Huffington Post article details Mr. Limbaugh’s factual errors in his description of the LRA and its activities.  I will not rehash here his blatant inaccuracies.  Rather, I would like to give voice to the utter disregard for human life Mr. Limbaugh displays through his celebrated ignorance and his political polemics.

First of all, Mr. Limbaugh seems to celebrate the ignorance of himself, his colleagues and the “American people” (though he may be thinking of somewhat of a skewed sample within this third category).  On the basis of this ignorance, Mr. Limbaugh implies that the predominantly Congolese and Sudanese people the U.S. would be protecting are unworthy of this protection.  After all, if I, a privileged American, have never heard of these people and their problems, then they might as well not exist.

Further, it strikes me as somewhat sadistic and irreverent that someone could be so attached to his political view as to celebrate a known terrorist group.  Certainly Mr. Limbaugh claimed ignorance and, if one is so insular that he or she has no use for international politics, then perhaps it is possible for a person to know nothing of the LRA.

Yet in addition to the ethical problems posed by this myopic worldview, I would expect more from Mr. Limbaugh.  Either his own research is so inept that he, a regular political commentator, has not once run across the civil war in Uganda in any of his previous work, or the emphasized ignorance of himself and his colleagues was mere political rhetoric, a ploy to make Obama look the fool for sending U.S. troops to fight an unknown band of Christian political freedom fighters (if you know anything about the LRA, this description is far from the truth and the “stated objectives” cited by Mr. Limbaugh are simply laughable).

He is certainly either way discredited, though to me the second is the more plausible conclusion.  Mr. Limbaugh is no idiot, though he is, in my opinion, a generally icky person.  If I am indeed correct, then Mr. Limbaugh just knowingly prioritized his polemics against President Obama over the inhuman violence the LRA has committed against Ugandans, and particularly against children.  Can U.S. political rhetoric become any more soulless?

Let’s now ground ourselves a bit.  CNN.com recently ran an article about Evelyn, a 22-year-old girl who as a child was abducted and tortured by the LRA.  She was forced to march through the woods for long hours without food and water; one day during an air raid a piece of shrapnel ripped through her body and tore a hole in her face.

The LRA decided not to kill her in spite of her gross injuries, though she was still required to make grueling marches, her wounds infected and unable to eat solid food.  Evelyn managed to escape via a dangerous sprint to safety through the forest and was enrolled in a rehabilitation center.  She was fortunate enough to receive financial support through a fellowship program, which is providing her with reconstructive surgery in the United States.  Imagine the thousands of abducted children who have not been so fortunate.

After the October 14^th show aired, Evelyn sent a very simple message to Mr. Limbaugh: “My name is Evelyn. I am a former abducted child. My heart breaks when I hear your message about the LRA."

I join in solidarity with Evelyn:

Dear Mr. Limbaugh,

Please stop celebrating the ignorance of gross human rights abuses.  Please stop caring more about Second Amendment rights and taxes on wealthy Americans than victims of unspeakable injustice.  And please, oh please, do not silence the stories of those victims by skewing the truth for political gain.

Sincerely,

Sara

This summer I had the privilege of traveling to Germany and Poland with a fellowship program run by the Museum of Jewish Heritage.  Along with eleven fellow seminarians, I studied the role of the church and the clergy, for both good and ill, during the Nazi Regime.  What profoundly and consistently struck me throughout the trip were the ways in which a significant portion of the church played an active role in the justification of National Socialist ideology.  Called the German Christian Movement, this segment of the church was six hundred thousand members strong at its weakest point.  How could Nazi ideology, which is so blatantly contrary to the love ethic found in the Gospel narrative, have permeated Christian theology and praxis so pervasively?

It seems the German Christian Movement used pieces of Christian language, history, tradition and symbolism to legitimate a new religious narrative that aligned more with the psychological needs of the people and the ideology of the state than with traditionally orthodox Christianity.  The anti-Jewish, anti-feminine and anti-doctrinal nature of the German Christian church emerged from a German collective memory that was informed by hardship related to Germany’s defeat in WWI, resentment over the perceived unfairness of the Versailles Treaty, the longstanding presence of anti-Semitic theology in the German Church and the political agenda of the increasingly powerful National Socialist Party.  Though this paradigm was replete with Christian language and ritual, these were merely hand-plucked from the Christian narrative and used in radically unchristian ways.

Stanley Hauerwas warns against this use of religious symbol outside of its indigenous narrative framework, as without its context the symbol inevitably loses its meaning.[1] Religious language, symbol and ritual must remain within its own narrative lest it be misconstrued, all too often for nefarious purposes.  The German Christians had created a perverse civil religion that hollowed and reassigned quite a few elements of Christianity.  In the case of the German Christians, it is obvious that the church was unable to live both the orthodox Christian narrative and the German Christian narrative side-by-side: because of their incommensurability, one necessarily overtook the other.

Yet what about us?  As with the German Christians, American Civil Religion (ACR) has borrowed heavily and selectively from the Christian narrative.  Robert Bellah points out that this has allowed ACR to coexist with Christianity in the U.S. without the average American Christian perceiving any conflict between the two.[2] Yet if the German Christian civil religion could not practically coexist with orthodox Christianity, is American Civil Religion able to do so?

As with German Christianity, ACR arose out of a present social psychological need that defined the collective memory of the past.  Though America’s founding fathers did not intend civil religion to be a substitute for Christianity, their creation of a distinct civil religious narrative used familiar Judeo-Christian language to unify the fledgling country with a common story: “Europe is Egypt; America, the promised land. God has led his people to establish a new sort of social order that shall be a light unto all the nations.”[3] Over 200 years later, Americans still seem to need a story to unify and promote a sense of national pride. Yet what of the dark underbelly of American history?  It would seem somewhat sacrilegious, or at least gauche, to publicly recall the Trail of Tears on Independence Day, the hegemonic atrocities of the Vietnam and Iraq wars on Memorial Day or the barbarisms of slavery and Jim Crow on Thanksgiving.

Further, as Bellah contends, the image of the United States as the new Israel can lead to a troubling fusion of “God, country, and flag.”[4] This phenomenon is indeed evident in contemporary American political discourse.  Last month Presidential hopeful Rick Perry organized an enormous rally in Texas to pray and fast for “God to save a nation in crisis” and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich “has vowed to defend his grandchildren from the imminent threat of ‘a secular atheist country’ or, somewhat inconsistently, political domination by radical Islamists.”[5]

ACR is certainly at least capable of, if not prone to, creating an “other” and, as with the German Christian narrative, ACR is able to justify the exclusion of the other and the wrongs we have committed against her.  Yet according to the orthodox Christian narrative, the U.S. is not the new Israel.  It seems that we too have selectively plucked religious symbols from their original context and reassigned their meaning.  Consequently, the ACR narrative competes with the orthodox narrative of the church.  One cannot simultaneously believe both that his nation is the “city on a hill” and the church is the “city on a hill,” as the first excludes from the church those who are not deemed to be a legitimate part of American society.  As with the Aryan Clause (though certainly not as extreme), ACR’s misuse of Christian language and symbol creates a disenfranchised other: the Illegal Alien, the Welfare Queen and the Muslim terrorist.

The tragedy of the German Christian Movement appears evident to our 21^st century hindsight.  Yet when will we begin to see ourselves with such clarity?

[2] Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 96(1) (1967): 10.

[3] Ibid., 6.

[4]Ibid., 11-12.

[5] Michael Wolraich, “Republicans Race to Prove Christian Cred,” CNN.com, August 10, 2011, http://edition.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/08/10/wolraich.perry.christian/index.html?hpt=po_bn1.

Largely based on this two-and-a-half minute promotional video for Bell’s forthcoming book, Love Wins: Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, Piper has determined that the book will come a bit too close to universalism for his sensibilities.  And so, with a few clicks of the keyboard, a tap of the mouse and one trite tweet, it seems Bell has been expelled from what Piper deems to be the One True Church.

In the dramatic aftermath of this catastrophic event (please note the sarcasm dripping from my keyboard), evangelical blogs have lit up with the commentaries of those who would rush to Bell’s defense, of those who feel that determining the clear and public boundary between heaven and hell is the job of every committed Christian, and of the occasional cynic with a snide remark about marketing ploys.  The debate has even reached my Facebook newsfeed, where today I spotted this:

Friend A’s status: There's nothing loving about preaching a false gospel. This breaks my heart. Praying for Rob Bell.

Friend B’s Reply: Thanks for posting this. His church is about 10 min from my house. Some scary stuff!!

Now I do realize that by posting on this topic I am contributing to the drama that is unfolding on social media sites across the evangelical spectrum.  I also realize that I am in the minority at State of Formation in my evangelical affiliations.  And I further realize that this episode has become so heavily swarmed with bloggers that the carcass may just need to be buried.  Yet before it is, I would like to make a few comments about the nature of the swarm.

First of all, there is obviously a “theological ridiculousness” going on here.  Revolutionaries are giving their lives in Libya to oust a madman who has maintained an oppressive autocracy over them for 42 years.  Civil unrest continues across the Middle East in nations such as Bahrain, Yemen and Oman.  In Wisconsin, the collective bargaining rights of teachers have been under threat.  Meanwhile, the cyber sphere cannot seem to get enough of Rob Bell and John Piper.

Given this apparent absurdity, what comes naturally to me is to point the finger.  I audibly laughed when I saw the above conversation on my newsfeed at the utter seriousness with which my friends spoke.  Yet when I am not laughing, I am just plain angry: angry at my fellow evangelicals for allowing such trivial disputes to dominate our theological discourse and angry that such disputes are even disputes.  I am raging, hopping mad at the strong proclivity of the evangelical establishment – and many ordinary evangelical congregants as well – to eternally damn whoever strays out of a most narrowly determined “orthodoxy” that in many ways represents worship not of the God of the Christian scriptures but of a hyper-Calvinist heritage.  In other words, Farewell John Piper.

But hold on.  Did I just say Farewell John Piper?  My finger, it seems, has turned back on me.

Conflict is not in itself a bad thing.  In the 1950 film, Harvey, Jimmy Stewart plays an eternal optimist who responds to a dispute with his sister with this remark: “I plan to leave. You want me to stay. Well, an element of conflict in any discussion's a very good thing. It means everybody is taking part and nobody is left out.”  Conflict, in other words, will inevitably arise if everyone is allowed to voice his or her opinion.  Indeed, the absence of conflict would likely signal that someone’s voice is not being heard, that we are deluding ourselves if we believe that we are inclusive of the other in our exchange of ideas.

Yet as State of Formation contributor Jenn Lindsay pointed out in her excellent post on the challenge of intra-faith relations, kindness and conflict must constantly be held in tension, and kindness is often the most difficult when it comes to those within our own faith families.  At least this is what I have found to be the case in regard to John Piper: his exclusivism makes me want to exclude him right back.  And I suspect I am not alone in this inclination.  All religious families have their skeletons in the closet, their “crazy Uncle Als” and even their not-so-benign sisters and brothers who do and say things in the name of religion that not only embarrass us but deeply hurt and offend us.  It is tempting for me to want to disown Sarah Palin and Pat Robertson precisely because of the conflict their opinions bring to the table.  Yet to exclude them would be to make the “heresy” accusation that I would be denying them the right to use.

This leads me to conclude that, as ridiculous as his remarks may sound, and as deeply as I disagree with his theological conclusions, I must accept John Piper as my brother in the strange and diverse body of Christ.  He has become my object lesson for the day in loving not just my religious neighbor, but my Christian brother as well.

When I first learned of Kato’s murder, my initial reaction was a terrible sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach – the kind one feels when something horrifying has happened in a familiar, beloved place.  The same one I felt last July when I read that a bomb had exploded ¼ mile from my Kampala apartment.  You see, for the whole of 2009, the very year Uganda’s infamous anti-homosexuality bill was first proposed in parliament, I was working with a human rights organization in Mukono.  I regularly rode the matatu buses around town, walked the dusty roads in my ridiculously impractical yet requisite business attire, endured shouts of “muzungu!” (“white person!”) everywhere I went and dined on meals of matoke, chicken and rice in the small, simple restaurants that lined the main drag of Mukono Town.

Not unlike the rest of Uganda, the rule of law in Mukono is shaky at best.  Indeed, as one might imagine, homosexuals are not the only ones whose rights are being violated in Mukono.  For instance, my organization worked with victims of land grabbing – a group mostly made up of widows and orphans who had been illegally forced from their homes and land upon the deaths of their husbands or fathers.  And in September 2009 riots in Mukono and Kampala led to mob rule in areas charged by an ongoing feud between the Baganda tribe and the Ugandan government.  For days we heard gunshots in the distance as we hunkered down with friends and tracked real-time developments around the city using Twitter.  The Pearl of Africa, in all of its beauty and apparent stability, can change on a dime – and it does quite often.

The organization I was with in Uganda is a Christian organization.  While loosely evangelical in orientation, it maintains a commitment to ecumenism, placing itself “in the tradition of abolitionist William Wilberforce and transformational leaders like Mother Theresa and Martin Luther King, Jr.”  It provides assistance to victims without discrimination in regard to religion, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation.  I point this out because almost every article I have read regarding the anti-homosexuality bill in Uganda links the bill to American evangelicals.  While it is indeed true that fundamentalist American pastors have had a nefarious influence in Uganda, to blame a nebulous and monolithic group called "evangelicals" is both unfair and inaccurate.  As an evangelical, I mourn for David Kato.  I mourn for all those whose opportunity for a peaceable life is precluded by those who would take advantage of a weak and often corrupt public justice system to bully the vulnerable.  We dealt with these bullies every day in Mukono.  They are indeed plentiful.

So what is the truth when it comes to US influence on this anti-homosexuality bill?  It appears that the influencers with whom we are dealing are not your run-of-the-mill evangelical pastors.  Indeed these individuals merit the special and distinct designation of fundamentalist.  For instance, many of the articles I have read on the bill traces US influence back to a conference in March 2009, in which three Americans traveled to Uganda to speak against homosexuality.  One of these individuals is Scott Lively of Abiding Truth Ministries, a malignantly homophobic group committed to “converting” homosexuals and “exposing the hidden false assumptions and deceptive rhetoric of ‘gay’ arguments.”  Lively’s written materials include such titles as The Pink Swastika, which blames much of the Holocaust on the presence of homosexuality in the Nazi party and denies Nazi persecution of homosexuals, Why and How to Defeat the Gay Movement and Seven Steps to Recruit-Proof your Child: A Parent’s Guide to Protecting Children from Homosexuality and the “Gay” Movement. These works beg for comparison with William Turner Pierce’s The Turner Diaries and Hunter – the former found in Timothy McVeigh’s car at the time of the Oklahoma City Bombing.  If Lively is representative of the other two speakers, these are certainly not evangelicals – these are members of hate groups.  And, in fact, The Southern Poverty Law Center has declared Abiding Truth Ministries to be just that.

Yet even these extremists have not endorsed the more severe elements of the Ugandan anti-homosexuality bill.  Abiding Truth Ministries has publicly denounced the use of the death penalty for the ill-defined charge of “aggravated homosexuality,” though Lively remains supportive of other portions of the bill, including life imprisonment for “touching someone of the same gender in a sexual way.”  In a country where homophobia is the norm and where mob rule often trumps rule of law, such measures would surely bolster a full-fledged witch-hunt.  Acknowledging this, other conservative groups have condemned the bill in its entirety.  Exodus International, a group that actively supports conversion of homosexuals to heterosexuality and which the media has also linked to the proposed Ugandan legislation, has publicly come out against the bill as a “deprivation of life and liberty [that] is not an appropriate or helpful response to this issue.”

The difficulty even with conservative groups like Exodus that oppose bullying, hate crimes and anti-homosexuality legislation, however, is that they actually reinforce such measures in places like Uganda by perpetuating the notion that there is a linkage between homosexuality and pedophilia, as well as the idea that homosexual adults actively “recruit” youth to convert them to a gay lifestyle.  Most of the Ugandans I knew used the terms “homosexual” and “pedophile” interchangeably.  Whether one’s religious convictions support a gay lifestyle or not, this kind of misinformation is unacceptable.

We have established that American influence on anti-homosexuality measures in Uganda has largely come from a fundamentalist impulse.  Yet the question still remains: how should an evangelical Christian respond to homosexuality?  I take my cues from progressive evangelical Tony Campolo here.  In his book, Letters to a Young Evangelical, Campolo argues that whether one’s interpretation of Romans 1:23-27 results in a conviction that Paul was speaking against homosexuality in general or that he was speaking against specific idolatrous practices in Corinth, the Christian love ethic remains intact.  This means acknowledging when a group becomes an oppressed minority and working to ensure that group receives access to justice.  Campolo advocates for equal rights for homosexuals to marry, teach in public schools, adopt children and serve in the military (his book was written before the repeal of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy).  In fact, Campolo and his wife – both evangelicals – hold differing interpretations of Romans 1.  Yet even with diverging theological opinions on this issue, they both recognize that to be called blessed in the Kingdom of God is to “hunger and thirst for righteousness” (Matt 5:6).  And so I mourn for Kato and I celebrate his life.  And I hold out hope that the church might one day love better and thirst harder after the justice that should have been afforded to Kato and all he represented.

Yet this conversation reflected on a popular level the debate that has been raging between evangelical academics for years, a debate that has come to define evangelical dialogical efforts. American evangelicals have long been in the shadow of the Modernist/Fundamentalist Controversy. Old Princeton-style theologians such as Carl Henry planted the evangelical flag in Biblical inerrancy and refused the status of “Christian” to anyone who did not fully adhere to this doctrine. Thus when evangelical theologian Clark Pinnock went out on a limb and adopted, with some adaptation, Karl Rahner’s inclusivism, and when evangelical scholars such as Miroslav Volf, Alister McGrath and Rodney Clapp have dared reconsider the faith in light of postmodernity and the foundationalist assumption, more traditional evangelicals have cried heresy. One needs to look no farther than D.A. Carson’s 569-page tome, The Gagging of God, to find an example of this phenomenon.

What does all of this mean for ordinary church-going evangelical folk? It seems the non-endorsement of more progressive theologies of religions by the recognized “gatekeepers of orthodoxy” – those conservative evangelical heroes like Carson and John Piper – has precluded the fruit of this debate from informing any real, on-the-ground evangelical dialogical efforts. As Gary Dorrien notes, conservative Calvinist theologians still control most of the evangelical seminaries and publishing houses (Dorrien, Gary. The Remaking of Evangelical Theology [Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998], 182). That means that the books promoted in evangelical churches and many of the pastors of those churches are on the whole going to side with Piper and Carson, not with Pinnock and Volf. As a result, almost every evangelical has heard of John Piper but for the most part only those who run in academic or progressive circles (circles that, one might imagine, overlap quite a bit) have heard of theologians on the “evangelical left.”

Yet all is not lost. Indeed, what is not trickling down from the echelons of the academy is emerging from the grassroots. There is a growing critical mass of evangelical pastors and lay leaders who are pioneering into the murky waters of interfaith dialogue. Take Bob Roberts, a megachurch pastor in Texas who spearheaded the Global Faith Forum, a conference for Muslims, Jews and Christians attended by figures such as Eboo Patel of the Interfaith Youth Core, Islamic scholar John Esposito and prominent Jewish peace activist Mark Braverman. Efforts such as these, however, remain a bit bumbling and awkward. A Christianity Today online article about Roberts’ dialogue, for instance, notes that the traditional evangelical sacred cow of evangelism through proclamation remained an elephant in the room throughout the event: “attenders kept wondering if merely participating in such an event—where mutual understanding was the key note—was to compromise.” The author of the article goes on to muse, “when you set up a conversation in which conversion is never a real possibility, and yet in which genuine and respectful love is clearly evident—well, is it an event worthy of an evangelical's time?” (Galli, Mark. “Putting Evangelism on Hold” in Christianity Today, November [web only] 2010). My Bible study debate came flooding back.

Evangelical grassroots praxis in interfaith dialogue is an encouraging trend. As Eboo Patel has commented, “Evangelicals are a hugely important community in advancing a global interfaith movement because of their size, their strong faith commitment, and their keen perception of culture.” (Patel, Eboo. “The Faith Divide: What Brings us Together and Drives Us Apart” in The Washington Post [online], January 4, 2011) But the truth is, as long as evangelicals are left groping in the dark for more progressive, yet indigenously evangelical, answers to theological questions about soteriology and evangelism, attempts at dialogue will remain awkward at best. Yet I will not conclude this, my first post, on such a gloomy note.  There are, in fact, a few shining lights answering the need for more progressive evangelical public theologians and pastors. For instance, Fuller Theological Seminary has established the Journal of Evangelical Interfaith Dialogue, a publication with a mission “to create space for evangelical scholars and practitioners to dialogue about the dynamics, challenges, practices and theology surrounding interfaith work, while remaining faithful to the gospel of Jesus and His mission for His church."  May such efforts be multiplied.