Church Ladies In Charge

Questioning the Ascendance of Domesticated Christianity

Aslan is a lion- the Lion, the great Lion." "Ooh" said Susan. "I'd thought he was a man. Is he quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion"..."Safe?" said Mr Beaver ..."Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the King, I tell you.” - C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

Safety Above All?

Do you ever have those moments when someone says or does something, and you have sort of an intuition that there’s something just a little “off” about what he said or did? The instinct that something is not quite right but you can’t really put it into words? That happens to me sometimes - okay a lot - and I often have to mull it over for longer than I would like before a light bulb begins to flicker in my feeble old noggin. Recently, the light began flickering faintly for me regarding one of those moments. The proximate source of illumination was this scene from the old James Garner comedy, Support Your Local Sheriff.

Garner plays the sheriff of a western town. He is performing the job purely on a temporary basis. By enforcing the law, something the locals were unaccustomed to, he provoked the inevitable confrontation with the neighborhood bullies, who are headed into town for the big Western showdown. In the scene I’m referring to, he is discussing his plans with his romantic interest. When she asks him what he intends to do, he tells her that he plans on saddling up and getting out of town. It’s one of those moments where someone says something that sounds “off”, in this case the character played by Garner.

Since the onset of Covid, there have been things about the way the Christian community responded to those events that have just seemed off to me. I’m not suggesting there was some kind of lock-step uniformity of Christian thought, or that everyone held the same views in all particulars. But there were some shared, general tendencies in the Western church that I think anyone who was paying attention could perceive. There was something about the widespread initial reaction - an almost unquestioning obedience to secular authorities - that carried a whiff of maybe being a bit too willing - a smidgen too eager - to comply.

But, I told myself: “Self, who can argue with the need for safety?”

So I soldiered on, while the back of my mind kept churning away, trying to figure out what it was, exactly, that was bothering me.

And I think perhaps this was what seemed off: the early widespread knee-jerk reaction within the Christian community seemed to mostly prioritize physical safety above all other goods.

To be honest, it sounds kind of cowardly when you put it out there so baldly. It was inevitable, of course, that Covid would ultimately entail a worldwide exercise in value judgments. We were forced, quite explicitly, to rank-order the priorities of our lives. But just as James Garner discovered, some Covid priorities sound more than a little cowardly when stated blatantly out loud.

• Groceries were essential, but communion was not.

• Bars were essential, but baptisms were not.

• Singing was verboten

• Human contact was verboten

• Funerals were verboten

• An embodied Christian community was…verboten.

How, I ask myself, did maximizing our physical and material safety come to be seen by so many Christians as the zenith of Christian love? Don’t get me wrong, safety is fine up to a point. Human beings are valuable to be sure.

But are there not some things more valuable even than our own lives?

Here’s a question that has been rattling around my brain a lot lately: What embodied manifestations of our Christian faith should take precedence over our physical safety? Maybe that’s the main question I’m really asking when you come right down to it. And, to be honest, the reality with Covid was that most people were facing a very small incremental mortality risk. To avoid such incremental risks, did we meekly surrender irreplaceable things we shouldn’t have? What can we learn from Christian behavior during Covid that will help us avoid making similar mistakes during the next crisis?

I wonder.

We Christians are part of an ancient faith that teaches immortality and the resurrection of the body, yet we gave up much of our embodied witness for a very long time just to gain an incremental improvement in mortality risk of about half of one percent.

Let me state the obvious: there’s a non-zero probability that my own characterization of these events is off. Lord knows I’m not the least bit inclined to boss anyone else around. I’m certainly not advocating that anyone should be taking gratuitous risks. We shouldn’t risk our lives for nothing.

But what about risking our lives for something? I admit that I am sometimes haunted by the words of affirmation found in the Bible’s book of Revelation: “they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death.”

I’m not implying that if we had been more tenacious about clinging to our visible witness that God would have ipso facto spared us from physical injury. I think my thoughts are running more along the lines of the three young guys who were thrown into the furnace in Babylon. In the back of their minds, they kind of knew it was a possibility that God might not protect them from the oven. But they refused to obey the king anyway.

There is something about the current moment that makes me suspect we would all benefit from having a very open and explicit family discussion about the limits of using physical safety as a governing principle for Christian resistance. However poorly I think we performed during Covid, current social trends suggest that there is a growing likelihood that overt persecution is coming our way. Having a more explicit framework for reasoning about what is worth risking our lives over might be something we should be trying to develop.

Materialist Presuppositions

I sometimes wonder if our modern vision is obstructed by a mostly materialistic understanding of sickness and disease. There were exceptions of course, but most of the discussions among Christians that I myself witnessed tended to grapple with the pandemic as a highly problematic biological event. I didn’t hear too many people reasoning about the virus as being undergirded by something actively sinister. Some might have viewed the Chinese communists as vaguely sinister, but that’s as close as many people came to framing the pandemic itself in moral or spiritual terms.

The problem with this mode of thinking, I’m afraid, is that it would have been foreign to most, maybe all, of the writers of scripture. The worldview of the authors of the biblical text was infused with a sense that events taking place in the material world often reflect, and are affected by, events taking place in the unseen world. If we don’t learn anything else from the book of Job, we should at least take to heart the implication that there may have always been more afoot with Covid than merely the biological threat.

John the apostle said that Jesus came “to destroy the works of the devil”. The synoptic gospels all start with the conflict between Satan and Jesus, followed by Jesus wandering through the Galilean countryside healing the sick and evicting demons. No one in the ancient near east thought of illness as exclusively biological or material. Biology may have been the means, but the ancients quite often perceived that the enemies of God were behind it. They had read Job too often, I guess, to ignore the part about Job’s hardships originating from the spirit world.

It’s pretty clear, from their reactions to Jesus, that the demons viewed him as a mortal threat. The apostle John said that Satan is even now at war “with those who keep God’s commandments, and hold to the testimony about Jesus.” It turns out that the biblical perspective on spiritual conflict presupposes more is at stake than merely how it affects our own psycho-therapeutic needs.

If it had not been a virus that threatened us, but the emperor of Rome instead, would we have folded up shop? Or would we instead have been meeting together with all the attendant material risks? Our spiritual forbears faced the possibility of having their heads lopped off, or of being served alive as cat food, merely for showing up at the Sunday gathering. Nero would allegedly dip Christians in tar, impale them on poles, and use them as human torches at his outdoor dinner parties.

And yet...the early Christians met.  They showed up. They did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death.

None of this should be taken as a diatribe against reasonable precautions. I know Christians in Canada who courageously defied government orders to gather together during the pandemic. But they wisely met in secret and hid their cars behind a barn so they wouldn’t be seen from the road. So I’m not suggesting provocation for provocation’s sake. The question I’m really raising is whether reasonable precautions should have included what actually happened in many places, which was total abandonment of any embodied presence of the church.

I’m really haunted by the possibility that perceiving Covid as primarily a biological event ultimately confined us to reasoning about it in exclusively materialistic terms. Covid just too conveniently interfered with embodied expressions of faith, and that fact alone should have set off all of our warning sensors.

It’s an interesting question, had they been able to access the technology we have available, whether the early Christians, sneaking around in the catacombs, would have opted for live streaming instead. We’ll never know the answer to that. But, to believe they would have embraced Zoom as a replacement for their embodied presence, one must presuppose that online meetings are able to serve as an adequate substitute for embodiment. Do we really think, so long as we can Zoom, that we can do without the wine and the bread? That we have no need to read faces, or hear voices singing around us, confessing aloud their faith in Jesus our king? Is the ancient faith entirely informational? Isn’t it, rather, inescapably communal?

Church Ladies In Charge

We should be asking ourselves if half of one percent improved mortality risk was worth all that the Western church abandoned for so many months. Has the modern conceptual model of Christianity, as primarily a therapeutic enterprise, equipped us with the tools and frame of reference we need to mount an effective Christian response to the growing usurpations by the state? The apostle Paul informs us that truth and love are intertwined. And yet numerous celebrity Christians spent much of the pandemic parroting the lies of government bureaucrats, (e.g. Russell Moore, Curtis Chang, David French, Rick Warren, etc.) Did spreading government lies, contra Paul, improve the church’s capacity for love? I am harassed by doubts.

The church’s response to Covid was an awkward window into its now overarching preference for spiritual domestication. Generations of Western Christians have inhabited a culture which has not generally been adversarial toward Christians, though that is changing rapidly. But the history of equanimity between the church and the culture seems to have led to what might be described as the triumph of the church ladies. The characteristically feminine orientation toward domesticity seems to have produced a Western church where polite spiritual manners are more highly prized than bold spiritual resistance.

This is not a recent phenomenon. As a college student, Theodore Roosevelt taught Sunday school at an Episcopal church near his college. One Sunday, a young boy showed up for class, disheveled and sporting a black eye. He had been in a fight. Roosevelt asked the boy what had precipitated the fight. The young man said that an older boy had been pinching his sister, so he stood up for her and had ended up fighting the older boy over his treatment of the younger boy’s sister. Roosevelt commended the young Sunday school student for mounting a manly defense of his sister, and summarily handed the him a dollar as a reward. This was just too much for the Sunday school administrator, however, who took exception to rewarding any such martial chivalry, and he dismissed the future president from his position as a Sunday school teacher as a result¹.

The church ladies of both sexes have been in charge for a very long time. Let the reader understand.

We are desperately in need of an unflinching (one might even say “manly”) post-pandemic critique of the Christian response to Covid in the West. My own expectation is that any rigorous analysis will need to be followed by sincere repentance for all that we surrendered. Interestingly, many of those celebrity Evangelicals who are so eager to traffic in words and self-promotion have recently become uncharacteristically quiet where Covid is concerned. Perhaps they are preoccupied offering up prayers of thanksgiving and congratulating themselves for their moral superiority to Donald Trump. And anyway, they might be very happy to have their actions during Covid perform a swirly down the memory hole, before too many people start to examine too closely what these media Evangelicals have done.

Some kind of reckoning is sorely needed though. Lacking an honest reconsideration of our spiritual domestication, outspoken media Evangelicals will continue to exert a malign influence, and many of their followers will blunder on, blissfully unaware that nagging other Christians about their spiritual manners may not actually be the sine qua non of Christian virtue.

To be more pointed, and I’m sorry to burst any bubbles, but across all of Christian history, the church’s response to evil has generally been far more robust and less mannerly than the church ladies of modern Christianity would ever be willing to approve.

1. Boller, Paul F. "Theodore Roosevelt." Presidential Anecdotes. New York: Oxford UP, 1981. 201