I will admit it: I've changed. Part of me wants to fall back on the expression, "I didn't leave my party, they left me." And while that may be partially true (the GOP of today is a dried-out shell of what it was 30 years ago), I've also distanced myself from much of the ideology and politics of my youth. Occasionally people I knew long ago will be surprised that I don't support Trumpism, that I believe the current movement of mainstream conservatism to be wholly unChristian and pagan. After they accuse me of supporting abortionists and radical leftists (I don't) because in their dualistic mindset you're either a True Believer or in league with devil democrats, a few may still have enough of a curious mind as to ask why I've changed. So, having thought about this over a long period of time, let me explain.
I grew up Republican. My parents didn't talk about politics much directly, but I knew that they were big supporters of Ronald Reagan and occasional donors to the GOP. I inherited from them and the conservative community in which I grew up a sense that conservatism was morally pure. On the one hand I was told that Democrats wanted to support gay rights, abortion on demand, women in the military, and tax increases for hard-working Americans. Republicans, however, were morally superior. They supported 'traditional family values', an honest work ethic, and a sense that America was God's great blessing to the world, and even the endless wars we seemed to export were part of a greater moral crusade. And so if Democrats were not quite the America-hating enemy they would someday become, they were yet Wrong. I absorbed this mindset as being the proper patriotic Christian worldview with little teenaged rebellion.
At age 17 I entered into a Christian university of my religious heritage that had a decidedly conservative ethos. Its leaders in the past had been anti-communist activisits and its leaders in the present were God-fearing American patriots. The economics courses in which I minored had a decidedly free-market bent (Free To Choose by Milton Friedman was the sacred text). The American Studies program of which I was an invited member invited speakers like Ed Meese, Alan Keyes, and William F Buckley. And so while one of my main polysci professors (who has long left there) was a closet liberal and covertly challenged some of the America-first proclaimations that seemed so comonplace on the rest of the campus, it was not suprising that I was strengthened in my resolve to be a good Republican and conservative. That, after all, was what being a Christian was all about, right?
After a few years of trying to figure out what to do with my life, I started graduate school in Christian ministry. While it was of the same university umbrella as my undergraduate work, this school, instead of being in a small rural town, was located in very urban Memphis. While there I was exposed to a much more critical understanding of my faith, moving me beyond childhood Sunday school religion to a more disciplined and cohesive kind of discipleship that demanded that I read all of Scripture, not just those parts that affirmed my faith. While I was still very much a conservative Christian at this point, simply being exposed to other ways of thinking became a very important part of my Christian journey.
And this journey continued on as I began my first ministry positions, first working in campus ministry in the midwest and then as a pulpit preacher for a small rural church on the west coast. That both of these places were outside of the Bible belt (or at least on the edge of it) might have been important: the only churches that were willing to hire an untested and unmarried minister were ones that had few other options. Most of my classmates who had more charisma and more family and more connections were able to settle into a classic southern religion heritage, but I was not. And quickly it became apparent that no longer was I 'comfortable' in my setting; while I still preached with churches in conservative parts of America (and yes, rural Oregon may be the single most politically conservative place I've ever lived), it wasn't so much of a religious conservatism of doing right and pious living that surrounded me. Rather, it was a kind of ideology that had shed much of its religious heritage and was more firmly rooted in an individualistic ethos of "It's all about me. Government is evil. I do what I want to do, and nobody can tell me otherwise." As I get older in hindsight I can see that in fact this is what mainstream American conservatism was becoming, but at the time it seemed simply a product of the place in which I lived.
This turned out to be a great challenge of faith to me, because as I began my fledgling ministry career, I was still a solid conservative. Being unmarried and having far too much time on my hands, I began listening a lot more to the growing conservative media that began springing up at that time in response to the perception that mainstream news outlets were too liberal. Rush Limbaugh became a daily listen. Fox News became a fascination for me, and not just because of the cute blondes in the short skirts that seemed to be on every program. And reading other crusading conservatives and connecting with other like-minded individuals on this new thing known as the 'World Wide Web' helped reaffirm much of what I believed. Bill and Hillary Clinton were evil. Liberals hated America. Only conservatism could save America from the socialists who would destroy it.
Yet being in an area in which my social life was greatly restricted while being too socially awkward to do much about it, I had a lot more time to continue digging into the Scriptures and understand more of what it was that I preaching. It's not that I tore off my old understandings, but I did start challenging them in a way that I had not before. Reading the prophets of the Old Testament, for example, started to undermine my belief in prosperity as a proof of godliness. In fact, it started to become clear to me that God wanted much more from me than to simply be a Good Religious Person...he wanted me to walk in his own Goodness. Passages like Hosea 6, Amos 5, and Zechariah 7 helped me to see that my faith was not this individualistic American piety that I had long believed it to be...rather, it was also to be about seeking out justice for the fallen, showing mercy to those in trouble, and defending the cause of those who were oppressed. I began to wrestle with the many denunciations of hoarding wealth while others suffered and how many of my conservative Christian brethren sought to separate out religion from everyday life. We couldn't let our religion get in the way with the American pursuit of prosperity, could we? Paired with a re-reading of the social laws of the Torah in which the need to do right by one's neighbor was central to being righteous before God, and I began to see that while my earlier understandings were not fully wrong, neither were they complete. Were we to simply explain away the radical social re-ordering of the Jubilee year, in which society was to economically reset in order to bring about equality and fairness? Were we to ignore the warnings about the economic injustice so prevalent in that era which were to bring about God's wrath, and rather continue to believe in a 'health and wealth' gospel in practice, if not in name?
Of course, it was likely the writings of the New Testament that caused me to think most differently. Having read the Bible through many times, it was (and still is) impossible to fully seek to do as Alexander Campbell advised in trying to read the Bible as if we've never read it before. Even today sometimes in my reading I find myself simply nodding and affirming myself. Yet it was in reading about the mission of Jesus in Luke 4:18-19 that I started to see that if the church is really the body of Christ, shouldn't it be doing what Jesus did? It became much more difficult to explain away the commands of Jesus to sell everything and give to the poor and then come and follow him (Mark 10:21). It became obvious that we were to honor Zacchaeus (Luke 19) not just as a 'wee little man' but as an example of somebody who gave up a life of radical self-interest in order to radically follow Jesus. And in reading the reality of the early church in Jerusalem as it concerned the social order conforming to the needs of many, it became more challenging to think about how they shared all they had and 'gave to anyone as he had need' (Acts 2:44). For most of my life I was taught that we were to be New Testament Christians, who were called to do Bible things in Bible ways. And for the first time in my life, it became apparent that this was true not just in the few hours we met together as a church, but daily as we sought to be disciples in all that we did.
And so my inner struggle grew, not just with what I was (and was not) seeing in the American church both local and in the culture, but also within myself. How was I to reconcile the conservatism of my youth with the discipleship I yearned for as a true disciple of Jesus? I began to listen much more critically to the right-wing media that I had allowed to be my political guidestar...and I began to realize how far away it was from Christianity that I was reading about in my Bible. Was I to despise liberals, be suspicious of immigrants and people of other races, and be only concerned about my financial well-being and individual freedom? Or was my Christianity that sought out the needs of others more important?
I suppose there have been many stops along the way in this journey.
-Sometimes it symbolic, like the time after 9/11 when on a church down the street from where I lived a huge American flag was planted on top of the cross that graced the top of their building. Did the flag really trump the cross? Sure seemed that way for many within the church!
-Other times it was witnessing the loud and angry nationalist fervor of many of my fellow Christians: were they citizens of the kingdom of God first, or were they American citizens first? This was long before I really started to dig into the depths of Jesus' teaching about the Kingdom and what that was all about, but even through those days I knew something was not quite right.
-It increasingly struck me as odd that the 'culture wars' that many Christians were fighting had little to do with authentic Bibilcal Christianty and was more about maintaining social order. And the generals they continued to follow in such wars themselves time and again turned out to be more morally corrupt than those they preached against!
-And through it all, I continued to see how many of my fellow Christians continued to nod politely at the preaching of the gospel of grace and love and righteousness, yet only really get excited about kicking ass in the Middle East, whatever football team they rooted for, ensuring that they could buy the most powerful weapons they can get their hands on, and conservative promises to 'take back our country' from the liberals (or libtards, or democraps, or any other derisive names they had for anybody who aren't as patriotic as the flag-waving Americans think themselves to be).
Even after all this, it's not that I think myself a liberal as I pass a half-century of life. Far from it...I'm probably still a bit right-of-center on the political spectrum. I don't think much of some social programs that seem more about good intentions than verifiable results. I wish there were no more abortions and no more broken families. I think we are better off with judges who read the law for what it says, not what they want it to mean. I struggle with why tax dollars ought to prop up the degrading lifestyle of the willfully obese or the careless or the addicted or the many others who refuse to change their ways. And while I'm more likely than I used to to think that in a pluralistic country we ought to tolerate the lifestyles of those which our faith considers sin, this does not mean that I believe we should be so tolerant as to be restricted to silence when it comes to challenging those who live and promote self-destructive lives, nor seek to enable sin in the name of 'diversity'. The gospel which we proclaim should not be altered to fit the moral relativity of today.
It's not easy to find the right balance, especially in this age in which we are so polarized between Right and Left. I'm not alone in feeling that I have no real ideological home these days. The GOP has lost all moral and intellectual credibilty, the Democrats have ideas but few of them fresh, and any other position seems likely to make us into a party of one. I'm a registered Libertarian, but I don't take it seriously because they don't seem to, either (c'mon, win something, anything, anywhere!); nor do what I think libertarianism means (freedom from oppression so that we can serve others) is the same as what most others think libertarianism means (freedom for me so nobody ever tells me what to do).
Yet do I really need that ideological home? As a citizen of the Kingdom of God, I feel as if I truly do have a home already. I'm a disciple of Jesus Christ, not perfect in myself or my understanding of the world around me, but transformed by the renewing power of the Holy Spirit. I am liberated from sin not to serve myself, but to be a blessing to people around me. It struck me awhile back that when Paul talked about the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5, his line concerning those fruits 'Against such things there is no law' is not a throwaway line but a recognition that if we truly live as people producing spiritual fruit, there's nothing anybody can do against us, there's no law or government edict that can truly deprive us of the freedom that is most important. Yes, sometimes because we proclaim that Jesus Christ is King we will face opposition, even persecution. But the things that far too often define what American Christianity is about today are far removed from the core gospel. Such things (e.g. gun rights, obsessing about personal freedom, rallying against government involvement in health care or social services, American Exceptionalism, fervorously supporting the military and the police, border controls, etc.) are far more American than they are Christian. Without a doubt, we are living in an age in which the substance of American Christianity has been diluted to the point that, as Jesus would have said, its salt has lost its saltiness and deserve to be thrown out.
I don't know the way back for our country, beyond the Biblical pattern of repentance, crying out to God, obedience, and seeking reconciliation with our neighbors. Unfortunately, as the history of Israel makes clear, such things only seem to happen when God sends a plague upon his people; they have to hit bottom to wake up and see what is righteousness again. Even then, people often refuse to change...and in the meantime we are so comfortable in our American Christianity that I don't see any hint that there will be revival anytime soon. Maybe COVID should have been that wake-up call...much like economic recessions, 9/11, or other national crises should have been seen as the bullhorn of the Lord. But the people most refusing change, it appears, are those many Christians who have accepted Donald J Trump (or, less commonly, amoralistic liberalism) as their Lord and Savior. Apostasy often appears to be the final portion of any once-great nation's spiral into sin, and as a whole we are going down that road with eyes wide opened, parading ourselves into oblivion.
As for me and my household, though, I'd like to proclaim as those Hebrews entering Canaan all those years ago, 'we will serve the Lord.' It's not that we will get it all right. And over the next years of my life I will continue to change and grow. Some of the stuff I mention here might be childish ramblings to my older self. But I do think I'm closer to the truth now than I was as a young conservative. I'm a middle-aged disciple, and I can live with that.
