Faith is Not So Simple

Plus, an invitation to the Artisans of Peace Christian Leaders Fall Cohort

I sat in church the day after the assassination attempt on former president Trump and I fidgeted. I fidgeted a lot. Almost as much as my three year old son, sitting next to me and grinning through worship songs as I examined the pit in my stomach.

I’ve heard many a sermon redrafted around current events at the last minute, but that Saturday night it seemed like every ministry-obligated friend in my Discord network was scrapping their notes and starting over. Some were liturgically constrained to Scripture passages about God’s glory and providence, and Christ’s messianic mission; they worried that, without explicit framing, congregants might walk away with new or reinforced messianic delusions about Trump. Others felt called (rightly and justly, I believe) to condemn political violence. But some also wanted to drive home to their congregations that Trump had really brought this horror on himself.

I watched the messages roll in, probably longer than I should have, but I read them all with deep sympathy. I knew pastors were going to have their work cut out for them the next day. As Melissa Florer-Bixler recently wondered here on Notes, it’s an easy temptation for pastors to confuse the “movements of the Holy Spirit” with the anxieties of knowing their audiences. Whether we risk our words preaching, teaching, or just trying to survive Sunday dinner together, the interpretations of those we serve can, at times, feel wildly un-shepherd-able.

American evangelicals, especially, already have hermeneutical tools in their belts that run more on national history and pop culture than on the Gospel or the historic Christian witness. It didn’t take long after the ill-fated rally for people to start praising God for “watching over” Trump, rescuing His divinely anointed from an attempt on his life. Never mind, of course, that this sort of talk further pushes blasphemous associations between Trump and Christ, or the fact that it implies a pretty monstrous divine economy in which God has apportioned special protection for a politician and not for the poor. Never mind, for example, that firefighter Corey Comperatore died protecting his family, apparently so Trump could live.¹

Never mind that, deep in the evangelical zeitgeist, a charismatic leader surviving assassination is a momentous event mostly associated with the rise of the Antichrist.²

So there was no shortage of justifications for bringing the assassination attempt up in church, and I anxiously expected it to come up in mine as well. I attend a pretty conservative, non-denominational congregation in edge-of-suburban Ohio (my senator is now Donald Trump’s running mate), and while I know my pastor to be staunchly anti-MAGA in his politics, I’ve been attending for less than a year and am still open to surprises, good and bad.

As my pastor stepped into the pulpit, body heavy with emotion in a way that’s so rare for men as broad as he is, I got a good surprise.

“Well, that happened,” he said. He didn’t say what had happened; he knew we all knew. He let the words hang for a moment, and then continued:

I gotta tell you, it leaves me confused. Really, really confused. About the state of our nation, and the state of our church. As I watched the chaos unfold, though, one image stuck out in my mind: a man [shaking his fist at] the camera while other people were hurt and still others scrambled scared. And it worries me how many people, especially young people, are going to look at that image and think, That is Christianity. That’s all I have to say about that.

From Aljazeera

He then advised us that the church had purchased multiple copies of a book on deconstruction, and encouraged us to take one home. “Some people deconstruct all the way to atheism and don’t come back,” he said, “while others undergo a reconstruction. But their reconstructed faith looks nothing like the faith of their fathers… and that’s a good thing. A beautiful thing. I encourage you to read those stories.”

A week later, I am still overcome with gratitude for this gentle, tactful servant who said so much with so little. Who saw the entire, momentous movement of American politics as secondary to the health of his congregation and their need to immerse themselves in a form of belonging surer than anything the world could offer them at that moment.

What really stood out to me, though, was how my pastor revealed the complexity of the moment by keeping things so simple. By holding the whole event at arm’s length, he respected it for the difficult, dangerous, terrifying thing it was. He communicated to us that one hour was not nearly enough to wade into a storm like this, and so he wasn’t even going to try. He did not hand us the whole, messy world from the pulpit; but he didn’t lie to us, either. Like I remember my father doing for me as a teen, he invited us to recognize and enter into the complexity for ourselves.

Bonfires

And this matters, because complexity is in low demand these days. In her recent post reflecting on the release of her book, Red State Christians,

Rev. Angela Denker

writes of the conversations she hoped it would generate and that were instead drowned out by personal attacks: “I learned that simple narratives tend to sell better.”

People tend to consume stories that leave them feeling the world is uncomplicated; that their choices of what to believe and not believe are easy, commonsensical. Those who write on difficult topics are sometimes asked to “dumb down,” but often enough the fault lies not so much with the writer and their style but with the world, which is too complex for our skittish hearts to bear. Too many attempts at simplifying it result in lies. We can only keep things so simple and still tell the truth.

Denker’s stories are simply told, but they are not simple, and not about simple people. They deny us the easy work of “othering” one another based on our politics, and the assumptions that flow therefrom. But these are not the stories people want right now.

Instead of Hillbilly Elegy ...

In a recent conversation, my friend Patty Prasado-Rao told me, “In America, when you are an agent for peace, you immediately get labeled. Reality has nuance the external world can’t handle, [and] it’s like everything is against us making those nuanced connections.” Everything, of course, includes partisan news cycles and digital platforms that make money off disinformation. But everything also includes us—our judgments and oversights. There is a personal failure at work, too, when we choose false simplicity over real complexity. When we choose the familiar and the comfortable over the true, daunting depths of reality where our images of our own innocence break down. Part of my pastor’s brilliance, I think, was in inviting us to bear that responsibility by exposing ourselves to complicated, disconcerting stories of our own faith, and implicitly putting the onus back on us if we chose not to.

What Does the Christian Do With "Stupid"?

We need that exhortation to responsibility. It’s a painful thing we’re being called to, and strenuous, and so easy to distract ourselves from it. But even a little bit of honesty with ourselves will tell every one of us that we can’t afford simple stories right now—not politically and certainly not theologically. “It no longer feels like ‘the answers’ are answering anything,” Prasado-Rao told me. She then revealed how those sentiments extend to Christian leaders who feel they can’t open up: “[These leaders] know that those under them will be shaken to learn that they don’t feel strong or confident… [But] if there is even such a thing as a theological basis for peace work, where is it? Where is the theology, where is the base? Where are the places for [them] to share their own questions, their own fears, their own difficulties?”

Where, as

Aimee Byrd

writes, are the places pastors can go to “be human?”

Where Pastors Can Be Human

“It confuses me,” my pastor said. What else could he say, about what happened last week? About a society so intolerant of complexity that it chooses the simplicity of violence again and again? About the bloodied defiance haunting him through a shaky camera feed, and the people who will point to it and say, That is Christianity?

Under all my learning, my pretentious confidence in the explanations of political and social theory, that’s what I’ve been feeling since 2016: confusion. A kind of fugue state of perpetual bewilderment. I watch what’s happening, but I don’t get it. I read accounts of how we got here, and I ask, “Yes, but what about…?” There are so many gaps that feel unfilled, so many leaps that defy any kind of explanation. Perhaps there are, finally, no explanations; only the prayer Christ offers from the Cross: “Father, forgive them; they don’t know what they’re doing.”

In her recent post, Angela Denker bluntly and admirably eases up on her own need to understand, to resolve the tensions of complexity:

“I am resigned that many have become irredeemably lost, left only to the work of the Holy Spirit. My hope is for the rest of you. The ones who aren’t yet convinced that Christianity is a fairy tale devised only for the wealthy and powerful, who worship white Jesus on Sunday and steal from the poor on Monday. My hope is for those of you who have abandoned hope that your salvation lies in the American church, but who still believe that somehow, somewhere, love, hope, faith, and — ultimately — truth really do exist. God, we’ll save for later.”³

Even in her resignation, I love Denker’s quiet, pastoral confidence that love, hope, and faith, authentically pursued, inevitably lead back to God: hold on to goodness, truth, and beauty; God we’ll save for later.⁴ I can’t imagine my own pastor saying, “We’ll save God for later,” but I think he was making a similar gambit when he encouraged us to expose ourselves to the stories of those who’ve lost faith—or found it anew, better, and more beautiful after rejecting too-simple answers. I could hear him, in a way, praying Meister Eckhart’s prayer over us: “I pray God to rid you of God!”

I've an abiding affection for the “simple faith” of many who raised me in the church. But in times like these, better to place “simple” faith at risk if that simplicity leads us to live by lies. Of course it is scary to go “further up and further in,” where God challenges our most precious images of who He is. Where he shows us how deeply these images are connected not finally to Him, but to our own desires for purity, innocence, and righteousness from within. Truth is not always a light, clear and white and radiant; sometimes we are saved in the “thick darkness” of humbling love. (Ps. 97)

Interlude 2: On Humility

With all that in mind,

Joel D. Aguilar Ramírez

and I are starting a program this Fall that’s designed to refresh the hearts of US-based Christian leaders buffeted by polarization but motivated by nonviolent theology and discipleship. Our goal is to help pastors, artists, academics, and other Christian leaders become “more human.” To open up space where they can wade into complexity. This will be a co-created space of safety and support where they can cultivate the rhythms of a spirituality that will sustain them through feelings of isolation, stuckness, and burnout. A community that will slowly move from impossibility to responsibility together.

If any of this sounds like you, or like someone you know, please get in touch. We’re eager to hear from you.

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I’m grateful to do this work under the banner of unRival Network, a non-profit organization that accompanies peacebuilders to nurture hope, inspire collaboration, and overcome destructive rivalries in a nonviolent struggle for justpeace. This newsletter is part of unRival’s mission to expand its community of regular people seeking ever-better ways of being together:

1. This is, regrettably, not a contradiction for some influential denominations of Christianity; the Ligonier Ministries website explicitly states that God loves some people more than he loves others.

2. The Christian Right’s willingness to take symbols already flush with meaning and repurpose them for their own convenience shouldn’t surprise us by now, but it’s still notable and worth talking about. JD Vance already gave us a further example when he implied that President Biden’s partisan rhetoric led directly to the assassination attempt on Trump, making the exact same argument that Republicans vehemently denied when Democrats used it to suggest Trump was culpable for January 6th, and that he knew his inflammatory speeches would be taken as calls to action by his followers.

3. If what Angela says is true, that “many have become irredeemably lost, left only to the work of the Holy Spirit,” then it’s right for us to think of the US as a sort of “mission field” now—as a place where the God under the name of God is not known, where Jesus has been erased under the name of Jesus. I am hesitant to use the language of “missions,” though it’s also entirely appropriate: the West has a historically imperial relationship to missionary work, demanding the conversion of political identities rather than hearts, caring far more about making “good citizens” rather than disciples. There is justice in our tactics coming back to haunt us, to demand that we do differently if we would heal our own land. But that will have to be a topic for another time…

Mapping the City

4. This sentiment is in productive tension with a conversation I’ve been having with my friend Duncan Morrow, a professor and peace activist in Northern Ireland. For Duncan, it’s more important than ever to lead with Jesus, because understanding Jesus “changes the [traditional] hermeneutic of the whole bible, and above all the Gospel.” A lightly edited version of what he’s said in our correspondence: “All of a sudden, when you learn to read anew, Jesus’ concern about salvation makes additional sense as ‘salvation from the catastrophe of human violence and rivalry.’ Being born again makes sense because it is about a new, formative relationship outside desire, and the role of the cross is in how it reveals the violent nature of human affairs while simultaneously reconciling us with God. Crucially (and a little ironically given its abuse by evangelicalism), Jesus makes clear that this revelation is ‘not to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved’… Jesus is a divine claim about what to do about human violence, and a model of being in the world which makes change possible for every person. He is, at his core, the claim that life is stronger than death.”