Tag: generous pluralism

On venues and hospitality

I feel like I’ve written about this before somewhere… but…

This week the West Australian Government banned, and then unbanned, the Australian Christian Lobby’s Martyn Iles’ roaming soapbox “The Truth of It” from two public venues it oversees; the Albany Entertainment Centre and Perth Concert Hall.

They should not have done this — and not just for commercial reasons (though that was the lever pulled, if I’ve understood correctly, by the venue partner to get the event back on — which, if true, just reveals that, as in almost all cases (see: woke capitalism), money is the actual idol at the heart of our culture, not sexual identity… sex sells, as it always has). They shouldn’t have done this because it is a power-hungry expression of something at odds with democracy and true secularism (plurality). They shouldn’t have done this because doing this reveals their own ‘state religion’ — the one they’ve replaced Christianity with.

Now. My take on the ACL is well-rehearsed in these parts — I’m not a fan.

So much so that Martyn has blocked me (or refused to host my views he finds troubling) on his Facebook page. That’s arguably a private space, and, sure, he’s quite welcome to block me if he doesn’t want to hear criticism of his brand of Christianity. That’s his right. I’ve also started limiting who can see and respond to my posts on Facebook too.

As much as I find the personality cult surrounding Martyn and his roadshow personally problematic, a government stepping in to cancel it is more personally problematic to me. This isn’t something to celebrate — especially if you are part of a minority group. This sort of government intervention around the use of public space — the demarcation of who acceptably belongs with a voice in ‘the public’ as recognised by the state — is dangerous.

In our first few years as a church plant, my church family met in a State-government owned theatre, many churches around the country meet in rented public school buildings. Public buildings that are available for hire to multiple faith groups and ideologies are an expression of pluralism and part of the bedrock of civility. We never had any pressure placed on us by our venue (we did, when we moved out due to renovations, get kicked out of a replacement venue because we aren’t an arts group and so were in breach of their leasing provisions). The hardening ‘secular frame’ in Australia which might mean these sorts of spaces become unavailable overnight, and my experience not having our own church property, means I’ve been telling anyone who’ll listen that church buildings are incredibly important (and we should probably stop selling them). They’re important for practical reasons — but as I’ll unpack below, I think they’re important for political, cultural, and theological reasons (and if we were good at architecture, on the whole, and didn’t just build multipurpose facilities that function as “non places“). Look. There’re going to be lots of generalisations in this post and they are just that… general observations.

My take on cancel culture is also well documented. I don’t like it (and it’s always religious). I don’t like this decision from the Labor Government in Western Australia. Governments, with strong majorities, banning voices who oppose “their views” isn’t just a slippery slope to totalitarianism, it’s an iron clad un-democratic use of power to disadvantage anybody who might challenge your grip on power.

I’m also, I think, on the treatment of public space as a religious contest for victory (toppling statues), rather than for a place where civility and a generous pluralism might play out — I’m not a fan.

I’m especially not a fan when Christians play, or enjoy, all these games ourselves. Toppling statues. Holding up Bibles outside churches after protestors have been tear-gassed. Only advocating for our own Christian freedoms (to the extent that, when we’re advocating for someone who denies the Trinity we’ll call them a Christian just to serve our broader project). Cancelling people whose views we don’t like… that stuff.

Now. Arguably the ACL both wants ‘religious freedom’ for Christians to participate in public spaces (and say whatever they want without consequences from their private employees), and to limit the ‘religious freedom’ of others participating in public spaces (like drag queen story times in public libraries, and gay couples calling their relationships marriage). They have been, I would argue, inconsistent on this principle of freedom in public spaces. Now, as an aside, I’m not saying I think drag queen story times are a public good, but I do think they are an expression of an essentially religious frame, and that anyone who says they’re ‘indoctrinating kids’ while running a Sunday School needs to be able to carefully explain what the difference is without imposing the Christian moral frame that doesn’t want kids grappling with adult content. They’re certainly an ideological use of public space that the ACL has opposed (and, surprise surprise, LGBTIQA+ political groups in Western Australia have supported an equal but opposite reaction against the ACL, celebrating the cancellation).

The secular governments in Australia at the same time have been increasingly treating public spaces as spaces to be free from religion, through an awkward definition of secularism that sees it as being ‘not religious’ rather than ‘not sectarian’, and through a weird secular-sacred divide that we religious people have also often enforced by pretending that religion does not affect every part of our life and being.

In ‘secular Australia,’ Religion is what happens in private places, like our hearts, our religious spaces like our Cathedrals, our Temples, or our Mosques. Or. You know. The prayer room in Parliament House. This decision from the West Australian Government is utterly consistent with other state governments, and the Federal Government, who want to restrict ‘religious freedoms’ to ‘religious spaces’ — because our governments, like most Christians in Australia, operate with this secular/sacred divide. So, we’ll protect (legally) a minister (like me) from conducting weddings outside our theology and “sacred” rites, or churches from employing non-religious people (or employing according to statements of belief and codes of conduct), and some people will even extend those protections to church run institutions (like schools), but we won’t protect a photographer or baker who, through religious convictions, won’t supply a service to a same sex couple (now, again, I think there are principles of hospitality and neighbour-love that mean Christians should feel free to offer those services without feeling like to do so means they suddenly adopt another person’s moral frame). The photographer and baker aren’t offered the protections afforded by ‘religious space’ because they are operating in public (even as private enterprises… it’s confusing). I do wonder what might happen if more churches had on-site bakeries…

The prevailing cultural narrative is that religion happens in private religious spaces, and that it doesn’t belong in public spaces. And we religious people have been part of creating that narrative in a bunch of ways. I’ll pick two. Firstly, “secularism” — including this divide — is a product of Christianity, and secondly, in the way we’ve used our own spaces as private rather than public.

Secularism is a product of the western world, which is for good and ill, a product of Christianity. They aren’t having these debates in Muslim countries. Secularism, depending on which ‘subtraction story’ you believe (those are stories that explain how we got from Christendom (where the vast majority of people and the architecture of society were built on shared religious beliefs) to where we are now (a pluralistic, fragmented nation with contested public space) is a product of explicitly religious movements before it becomes a product of the rejection of religion itself (that’s a bad modern ‘subtraction story’). Tensions between Protestants and Catholics about public space like who gets to build a Cathedral in a public square, or run a school, or influence the King and so win victory over the other are pretty similar to tensions around who gets to read stories in the local public library. It’s just our religious options have massively expanded (in what Charles Taylor calls “the Nova”). This expansion in religious options is also a product of The Reformation, which opened up the possibility of questioning traditional dogma.

Now. None of those historical changes are necessarily bad; as a Protestant, I’m glad we’re not all Catholic. I’m also glad that, for the most part, Protestants and Catholics have stopped killing each other (or even cancelling each other) because of religious differences and that now there’s even civility and dialogue.

What is bad, I think, is that with the disenchantment of space brought about by the Reformation, and the emergence of ‘the public square’ in the west, brought about (at least according to Jurgen Habermas) by the end of Feudalism (a divinely endorsed ‘order’ where space was given to people by divine birthright and there was no public or private, only land ruled by a sovereign monarch and ruled according to their will) and the birth of democracy (where you need space for ideas to be thrashed out and debated). There had, of course, been public squares in Greece, but its version of democracy was less universal than the democracies brought about in the west by the universalisation of the concept of the “image of God”.

Anyway. I digress.

See. The thing is.

Churches have always run their physical spaces as private spaces, as sacred spaces even — only opening the doors (in many cases) one day a week. Reinforcing, perhaps, the secular/sacred divide. Church space is here for you on the sacred day, but the rest of the time, all the other hours of your life, and on all other issues of communal life — wherever other discussions occur, the performing arts take place, or cultural artefacts are presented — that can all happen in secular space, and probably public space at that.

We haven’t been fantastic at bringing our own vision of beauty and culture and truth to the public square in part because we haven’t anticipated and reacted to change around us, in part because we’ve been busy reinforcing the secular-sacred divide in our practices, not only because we haven’t done ‘public Christianity’ well, but also because we just haven’t been using our own spaces well. There are, of course, groups committed to public Christianity — the ACL is one (and if Martyn’s the best we’ve got… then…), but also City Bible Forum, the Centre for Public Christianity, and a bunch of other organisations out there are doing this… but my point is that we haven’t seen the church (our local community, but also the visible church in Australia) as a public institution meeting in public sacred spaces, but private institutions (and often we ‘desecrate’ the places we meet by emphatically saying ‘they aren’t sacred’, rather than saying ‘these teach us how to view all space’).

We haven’t been great guests in the public spaces post-nova, in the secular age, where multiple religious views are brought to market for performance, recognition, and even debate. But, nor have we been great hosts.

We haven’t treated church buildings as public spaces — either as hosts who hold events for the public (outside of Sundays — and here I’m not talking about the way that churches use buildings to funnel people in to a Sunday service, that’s a ‘private use’) but events that use church buildings as a “public square” where other voices can be heard, or by inviting other people to use our facilities (where we might disagree with them). This isn’t universal, there are plenty of church buildings being used as community hubs out there… and plenty of church buildings that lose the Gospel and the call to be different from the world as they seek to play host, and so end up just as secular community spaces.

Churches are (typically) rightly careful about who gets to preach and teach in order to continue passing on the good news of the Gospel of Jesus (and maintain our distinctives), but we also have to figure out how to steward our spaces — whether our buildings will be public or private, or used in a way that reinforces the narrow view of the sacred, or in ways that break the secular-sacred divide.

But I reckon it’s worth asking the question — perhaps especially those in the West at the moment — would your church host a branch meeting of the Labor Party mid week (I’m not even asking about the pulpit)? And if the answer is no, and it’s about values, then we can’t jump straight to “but public space is different” — because we haven’t got a reputation for treating it differently (especially the ACL). Why should we ask the government to act as arbiters of a public square, when we don’t treat it as a truly public square ourselves (in excluding others), and when we aren’t using our own spaces as we’d want the government to use theirs? Why are we assuming that government is ‘secular’ and so ‘neutral’ (again buying in to the secular/sacred divide) rather than religious (and not Christian)?

We have a reputation for trying to exclude visions of human flourishing we disagree with from public life (again, think drag queen story time, or the same sex marriage debate). Public space isn’t different, public space has always been religious. Sometimes overtly, sometimes just because we have a theological frame, as Christians, that means we can recognise that every social political ideology is fundamentally religious, and every public act is liturgical. Because we are worshipping beings (and that’s the heart of being made to image God).

We also have plenty of religious spaces that we can start using to challenge the insidious secular/sacred divide that is so often at the heart of modern political problems; spaces that we can use (even architecturally) to proclaim that Jesus is Lord over every inch and every moment of life, but also spaces where we can make the truth public, and show that this means fearlessly inviting voices we disagree with to the table with us. Rather than silencing the voices of those who disagree.

Revisiting Generous Pluralism (unpacking a little of my political theology) — part 2

This picks straight up from where yesterday’s post left off — as part of an explanation of how I understand generous pluralism, within a broader political theology, because a paper will be released by our denomination’s politics, culture and theology committee (GIST) in coming months.

Fourth Point: The ‘Politics’ of the Kingdom

Because to be ‘made in the image of God’ is to be made to spread the presence of God over the face of the earth as his ruling-representatives who are like him — so that Israel’s task as a “kingdom of priests” is a continuation of the created purpose for humans, to be re-created in the image of Jesus and brought into the Kingdom of Heaven by God’s anointed king (the Christ), the Gospel is inherently political.

Even the word Gospel — ‘good news’ — was a word used in the Roman empire to announce the victory of Caesar, or a new Caesar taking the throne. Mark’s Gospel, which announces as Jesus ‘the Son of God’ goes toe to toe with imperial propaganda that said the same thing about Caesar Augustus (claimed to be the Son of God in various gospels circulated around the Empire).

The nature of the Kingdom of God, in the Old Testament, was to be different — Holy — set apart — generative — rather than destructive. Israel was to be a subversive presence in the Ancient Near East because of its vision of the dignity and created purpose of every human; and because instead of having ‘image of God kings’ who were the images of violent domineering gods who rule through chaos and destruction (like the gods of the Enuma Elish — Babylon’s creation story), Israel would not have a ‘king like the nations’, but Yahweh as king, and, failing that, Yahweh’s anointed. So, Israel’s little exercise with Saul, when they ask for a ‘king like the nations’ is a picture (in Samuel) of ‘life by the sword’ — life under a domineering, proud, military king like the nations — but Hannah’s song at the start of Samuel sets the scene for the nature of God’s king and kingdom (much like Mary’s song does in Luke).

Both depict an upside down kingdom where the proud are humbled, and the humble exalted.

Hannah’s Song (1 Samuel 2) Mary’s Song
“There is no one holy like the Lord;

there is no one besides you;

there is no Rock like our God.

 

3 “Do not keep talking so proudly

or let your mouth speak such arrogance,

for the Lord is a God who knows,

and by him deeds are weighed.

 

4 “The bows of the warriors are broken,

but those who stumbled are armed with strength.

5 Those who were full hire themselves out for food,

but those who were hungry are hungry no more.

She who was barren has borne seven children,

but she who has had many sons pines away.

 

6 “The Lord brings death and makes alive;

he brings down to the grave and raises up.

7 The Lord sends poverty and wealth;

he humbles and he exalts.

8 He raises the poor from the dust

and lifts the needy from the ash heap;

he seats them with princes

and has them inherit a throne of honor.

“My soul glorifies the Lord

47     and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,

48 for he has been mindful

of the humble state of his servant.

From now on all generations will call me blessed,

49     for the Mighty One has done great things for me—

holy is his name.

50 His mercy extends to those who fear him,

from generation to generation.

51 He has performed mighty deeds with his arm;

he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts.

52 He has brought down rulers from their thrones

but has lifted up the humble.

53 He has filled the hungry with good things

but has sent the rich away empty.

54 He has helped his servant Israel,

remembering to be merciful

55 to Abraham and his descendants forever,

just as he promised our ancestors.”

These songs outline the character of the politics of God, and his king. Jesus is the king the Old Testament has been waiting for. God-as-king.

Saul is not the idealised version of the ‘image of God’ who will lead God’s people. Neither, for what it’s worth, is David — though he is a “king after God’s heart” — his rape of Bathsheba is a picture of Adam-like kingship where he, like Eve in Eden (the verbs are the same) sees, desires, and takes something (in this case someone) God forbade taking. Solomon, his son, builds the temple — then builds a house for himself bigger than the Temple, and breaks all the Deuteronomic rules for kingship — including going back to Egypt to get military machines, and marrying many wives to solidify his political power, and amassing wealth. Kingship in the Old Testament ends up (like priesthood) being viewed as negative and not fulfilling the image bearing purpose humanity was made for. The Old Testament ends with the hope (or expectation) that Yahweh might bring a ‘day of the Lord’ where he will establish a Davidic king forever, who would truly end the political-theological exile from God, restoring his dwelling place (the Temple) and presence with his people, and in the world — and restoring a people who might take up our created purpose once again.

Jesus is crowned as the king of heaven and earth in his crucifixion, and ultimately in his ascension as he enters the throne room of heaven as the victorious son of man (pictured by Daniel); the fully divine-human son of man and son of God is now reigning in heaven (Acts 2, Ephesians 2-3), and his kingdom — a new polis — begins on the earth in the church — the new ‘temple’ — God’s presence in the world. We are ambassadors of the kingdom, priests, and ministers of the reconciliation God will work in and for all things as the first fruits of the new creation and Temples of the living God (Acts 2, Colossians 1, 1 Corinthians 6, 15, 2 Corinthians 5, 1 Peter 2, Revelation 21-22).

The still incarnate (human) Jesus is reigning in the throne room of heaven and we are already united in and to him by the Spirit, and raised and seated with him, so that we are ‘positioned’ there too; and he continues to serve as the true image bearer of God, the priest and king who intercedes with the Father on our behalf as we pray. His victory unites Jews and Gentiles in this new, re-created humanity with this political task of being his image bearing regents who spread his kingdom across the face of the earth (Matthew 28:18-20). The Great Commission is not just a call to ‘make converts’ — but to make disciples; citizens; new-creations who bear the image of Jesus in the world, and, by the in-dwelling presence of the Spirit function as God’s faithful presence — the body of Christ — in the world.

The church, then, is an alternative political kingdom to the kingdoms of this world; a new polis, participating in the ‘upside down kingdom of the cross’ — those who ‘take up our cross and follow him’ — so our political strategy is not to be Egyptian, Babylonian, Roman or like the beastly self-centered and proud kingdoms caught up in service of Satan, and the gods (Elohim) opposed to Yahweh in the heavenly real. This kingdom is cross-shaped. When we offer ourselves as a living sacrifice “in view of God’s mercy to us” in Jesus, as our true worship we are able to avoid the deforming patterns of this world, and display a challenging (perhaps subversive) alternative, trusting God to vindicate us even as we are confronted with evil (even an evil state, and even as we submit to such power (Romans 13), like Jesus did). Our unity as believers (across kingdom lines that formerly divided us) is a testimony to the victory of Jesus over the powers and principalities, and the “ruler of the prince of the air” (Ephesians 2-3). The victory of Jesus is a victory over the forces arrayed against God in the heavenly realm, establishing (as if it was in doubt) that Yahweh is the most high; but also reversing the distribution of the nations under alternative spiritual authorities in Deuteronomy 32 and at Babel. Where in the past “God overlooked the ignorance” caught up with idolatry, because Israel was his inheritance among the nations, now he commands all people everywhere to repent — recognising the reality that “in him we live and breathe and have our being” (Acts 17).

A faithful presence — as re-made image bearers — is distinguished and distinguishable from fallen humanity and the political kingdoms built on the cursed patterns of human relationships described in Genesis 3; a fracturing of our role to be co-rulers — representative regents — with God, and one another, in Genesis 1. The distinction is cruciformity; embodying the nature and character of the God revealed to us in the crucified Jesus; and the values expressed in Hannah and Mary’s songs.

It’s also important to remember that though we are God’s presence in the world, and called to imitate Jesus, we are not God (we are not judge, jury, and executioner, nor are we saviour or king — we are ambassadorial/priestly presence, this is nicely captured in the person of Paul, who seems to adopt the motif of the ‘suffering servant’ in his conception of his role as apostle to the Gentiles, though who is able to say “was Paul crucified for you” while also calling us to “imitate him as he imitates Jesus” (1 Cor 11:1), carrying around the ‘death of Jesus in his body so that the life of Jesus may be made known (2 Cor 4), and becoming a suffering “fool” for Christ rather than adopting the power-based rhetoric of the world while ‘demolishing worldly arguments’ that set themselves up in opposition to God (2 Cor 10-11)). And, indeed, the church is not tasked with ‘wielding the sword,’ though governing authorities may well be Christians. Our job is not to change hearts — that happens by God’s Spirit as an act of grace and recreation (Romans 8, Ephesians 2); our job is to proclaim and live the Gospel, the power of God (Romans 1:16, 1 Corinthians 1-2) — to hear the words of Jesus and put them into practice as we live wise and good lives amongst the pagans (Matthew 7:24-27, 1 Peter 2, Romans 12 etc). Our role is not to condemn people to judgment, or to stand by and celebrate that judgment (like Israel may have been tempted to as God opposed the nations who opposed them), our task is to embody the virtues of the Kingdom; loving our enemies, turning the other cheek, praying for those who persecute us and to invite people who see the King at work in us to join us in repenting as we proclaim his victory and invitation to be re-created. This might involve calling sin sin (like John the Baptist did with Herod), but it will necessarily involve the proclamation of the victory and reign of Jesus as ambassadors in Rome would carry around the ‘Gospel’ of Caesar.

So. My “political theology” and my account of the posture we are to take is first captured in this idea that we, the church, are a polis called to live as God’s faithful (cruciform) presence in the world; challenging and subverting worldly empires that are beastly and cursed, so that we might invite people to rediscover the life they were created for — reflecting the nature of God as we worship and serve him.

Fifth Point: Mapping the Terrain

While it is possible to articulate a ‘political theology’ against the backdrop of the west — whether reflecting back to the halcyon days of Christendom, or a nobler ‘pre-Christendom’ age, or this new ‘post-Christian’ era we find ourselves in, I believe a Christian political theology and/or posture worth its salt is one that coherently guides the public activities of Christians in any time or place; a Godly political theology is not simply a theology that operates in exile in Babylon, or in first century Israel, or for the church in Rome in the second or tenth centuries, or in 21st century China. A proper political theology should not be something we simply form against our own context, but one that forms the way we engage in our context.

This is not to say we can’t (or shouldn’t) observe, or learn from, the history of the west and its intimate relationship with Christianity (see, for eg Tom Holland’s Dominion for a narrative account of Christianity’s profound shaping of the west). We should observe the transition of epochs or ages in the west from pagan pre-Christian, to Christian, to post-Christian — noting that post-Christianity is not simply a return to the pagan preconditions of the first few centuries of the church, but that post-Christian governments are defining themselves against Christianity as though it is intimately involved in the wielding of the sword, and that often (to quote Mark Sayers) citizens of the west ‘want the kingdom but not the king’ — or, as Holland would express it ‘secularism is a Christian development’ (Charles Taylor would agree on that front, seeing ‘secularity’ as a product not just of Christianity but reformation). In his inaugural lecture at Cambridge, De Descriptione Temporum, C.S Lewis made this point about these three different western epochs.

“The christening of Europe seemed to all our ancestors, whether they welcomed it themselves as Christians, or, like Gibbon, deplored it as humanistic unbelievers, a unique, irreversible event. But we have seen the opposite process. Of course the un-christening of Europe in our time is not quite complete; neither was her christening in the Dark Ages. But roughly speaking we may say that whereas all history was for our ancestors divided into two periods, the pre-Christian and the Christian, and two only, for us it falls into three-the pre-Christian, the Christian, and what may reasonably be called the post-Christian. This surely must make a momentous difference. I am not here considering either the christening or the un-christening from a theological point of view. I am considering them simply as cultural changes. When I do that, it appears to me that the second change is even more radical than the first. Christians and Pagans had much more in common with each other than either has with a post-Christian. The gap between those who worship different gods is not so wide as that between those who worship and those who do not. The Pagan and Christian ages alike are ages of what Pausanias would call the δρωμενον the externalised and enacted idea; the sacrifice, the games, the triumph, the ritual drama, the Mass, the tournament, the masque, the pageant, the epithalamium, and with them ritual and symbolic costumes, trabea and laticlave, crown of wild olive, royal crown, coronet, judge’s robes, knight’s spurs, herald’s tabard, coat-armour, priestly vestment, religious habit for every rank, trade, or occasion its visible sign.”

Taylor sees the ‘secularisation’ of the world emerging from its disenchantment (Lewis’ diagnosis is essentially the same, though his sense of what caused that change, technology, is only an aspect of Taylor’s account), and from the post-Reformation emergence of many options for belief (pluralism) within any particular society or nation, where previously nations in the west (and non-Christian nations) had enjoyed a sort of political, cultural and religious order that functioned as a hegemony. That divinely order and authoritative ‘architecture of belief’ shifted, and we were left defining our own sense of the good as “buffered selves” — individualism is, in some ways, both a product and a cause of secularisation.

Pluralist (or polytheistic) contexts make it harder to identify the idols or powers and principalities (the cosmic forces) at work in any particular society, community or individiaul — but this does not mean such spiritual forces are absent or irrelevant in the modern west (or even in the operation of Christendom; Luther, for example, was pretty quick to see the Devil in the details of Roman Catholicism in the 16th century).

One of our questions, as Christians, is how should we engage not only with the civil magistrate — but in a world where the forces once held together in a common social architecture of belief — religion, culture, and politics, have now fragmented (from each other, and to the extent that common myths, stories, religious beliefs and practices (and spaces), and political philosophies are no longer almost universally held. How should we operate in a secular liberal democracy within a capitalist framework, particularly a post-Christian one drawing on the fruit of the Gospel, as opposed to a not-ever-Christianised China? Do these different contexts produce thoroughly different outcomes or has Lewis overstated the difference between pagan and post-Christian contexts in that people remain idolatrous worshippers, it’s just our modern gods are less overtly and explicitly ‘religious’ in nature. Paul’s diagnosis that idolatry is ‘exchanging the truth about God for a lie, worshipping and serving created things rather than the creator’ gives us a consistent anthropological and political starting point for our political engagement with non-Christian neighbours. Secular prophets like David Foster Wallace (“everybody worships”) and Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, that recognises the idolatrous impulse at the heart of various forms of consumption and the pursuit of transcendence from the material world, are useful companions on this journey. The intersection between religious orders and politics are more visible in eastern or majority world contexts, and even in communist/atheistic China.

How a Christian takes on the task of ‘faithful presence’ in second century Rome (a minority culture), when closer to the centre of power (in Christendom), in minority ‘post-Christian’ Australia, or in 21st century China might simply be seeking to express and embrace the cruciform values of the kingdom of Jesus and adopting a posture of loving, faithful, difference to their religious neighbours who hold deeply different beliefs. Just as a Protestant, or Catholic, in Ireland must navigate deep difference across Christian traditions, or a Reformed Christian must work out how to accommodate anabaptists in 16th century Switzerland, or the Australian government has to figure out how to approach education when schools were previously sectarian enterprises, or whether an Islamic community should be free to build a mosque, or how a faithful Christian community should operate in a Chinese context where the government explicitly opposes Christianity and persecutes the church. In whatever the context, our political call, as Christians, is to faithfully embody the message and ethos of the king we represent, trusting that God’s power is made perfect in our weakness, and that we will be vindicated — this will, I believe, look like proclaiming truth about God as creator, redeemer, and judge — but recognising that political and religious transformation is not ours to secure through the mechanics of power, but God’s to secure by the inbreaking of his kingdom through the Spirit.

This means we will not seek to coerce co-operation or conversion to Christian life for those whose idolatry means God has ‘given them over’ to a darkened mind and heart, leaving them unable to please God or obey his law (natural or revealed). This means that, at a fundamental level some degree of pluralism is God’s design for life this side of the eschaton; Christendom, and the wielding of the sword (or the mechanics of power) against other religions (like Israel is called to in Deuteronomy) is not the way of Jesus; and post-Christian paganism (or idolatry) is going to involve religions that look a whole lot like capitalism (greed which is idolatry), liberalism (self-worship autonomous from the creator), and the worship of sex and sexual pleasure.

Some form of pluralism in the world outside the kingdom of God is the norm, the sword — in Romans — was given not to Christian governments, but to the beastly and idolatrous Roman empire and our call to submission to that sword — even for disobedience to unjust laws — was an opportunity to embrace the cruciform nature of the kingdom, trusting that God would vindicate his people when they did not repay evil for evil (Romans 12). This is consistent with how the early church understood the task of witnessing — or martyrdom.

Should Christians find themselves wielding the sword — or as a presence within the institutions of power (like Joseph, Daniel, Esther, or Erastus) they are still called to be a ‘faithful presence’ with their first loyalty being to God and his kingdom.

Pluralism coupled with faithful presence is not polytheism; it is not a call to affirm the truth of the positions reached by idolatrous systems, though it may involve recognising a common quest for truth and goodness (like Paul in Athens, or Paul’s recognition that rulers and authorities bring order and goodness even as idolaters). Pluralism might involve a posture of humility and listening in a shared quest for wisdom and truth (like Solomon listened to international proverbs such that they are included in the book of Proverbs attributed to his name), recognising, with Augustine, that “all truth is God’s truth” and we might find some to plunder in Egypt.

Pluralism is not a posture within the church; where Israel’s aggressive monotheism does find continuity; we are to “keep ourselves from idols” and to flee sexual immorality, and to expel the immoral brother — but this does not mean we are to expect non-Christians to embrace Christian sexual morality and to not be in relationship with them when they do not (1 Corinthians 5). We can eat at the table with idolaters so long as that is not understood as our embracing idolatry (to the detriment of the weaker brother), and as part of our witness as God’s faithful presence, so long as it is not us ‘sharing the cup of demons’ — but we are to guard our own table more with more care (1 Corinthians 9-11).

The challenge for us, in adopting a posture in our secular, liberal, democracy (or in any context) is to consider how to be a faithful presence amongst those with different religious convictions to our own; whether we are in power or they are. Our task is not to be proud oppressors, but humble ambassadors of the crucified king — a task that may well lead to martyrdom, and our bodies being left to be mocked in the ‘public square’ of that great city — Egypt, Babylon, Rome, or Jerusalem — where Jesus was, himself, crucified (Revelation 11). Beastly empires will reject us because our faithful presence will challenge, or confront, the powerful with the message that Jesus, not Caesar, is the son of God.

Sixth Point: Integrating these blocks to pursue a ‘generous pluralism’

In our context, where many views are invited to be accommodated at the political table — a table that is not ours to run as hosts, but where we enter as fellow citizens of our nation — the question is how we should welcome contributions of others, and their own pursuit of the good. So, if all the above is true, these are, I believe the necessary implications.

We must recognise that our neighbours are fundamentally religious and shaped by a certain sort of worship.

We must recognise that this darkening happens individually and culturally; and that our political systems are products of human hearts corrupted by idolatry and given over to that corruption by God as an immediate and ongoing judgment for sin. We must recognise that this religiousity is expressed in a variety of ways and that we are more comfortable with some gods (like marriage, family, dominion, and money) than with others (like sexual liberation) — and we should examine why that is, and seek to be consistent — not just in how we treat the capitalist and the muslim, as those whose hearts belong to another god, but in how we treat those who worship ‘individual sexual liberty’ in the pursuit of an ‘identity’ apart from God. Some pluralism is a necessary function of our own existence as ‘citizens of the kingdom of this world’ who are also, like Paul, be citizens of human empires. We are no longer exiles from God, so now live as sojourners in these nations — and for us to be accommodated, rather than simply martyred, requires the state make such an accommodation. This (via the golden rule and the call to love our enemies) should shape how we wield political power or influence should we receive it. If we want ‘religious freedom’ because we recognise that to be human is a fundamentally religious enterprise; then we should consider how we extend or support that same freedom to others while also faithfully proclaiming God’s call to repent because of the victory of Jesus, and his role as saviour and king of all nations, and the one appointed by God as judge.

We must recognise that the freedom to worship other Gods is actually a freedom given by God, as an expression of his sovereignty — as he chose Israel, and then the church, as his worshipping communities — his inheritance — but that he calls all people everywhere to turn to Jesus and receive forgiveness of sin, and re-creation as his heirs through his Spirit, and that he has appointed us to that task.

We must recognise that the tendency for beastliness has not been eradicated by Christendom (and indeed, that beastliness was, paradoxically, operating in tension with the goodness of a Christian presence and influence on the west). Sometimes the emperor, or ruler, listens when the Gospel is proclaimed — we see that in Jonah, but also in Constantine.

We must recognise that our primary task is not to change the world or to change hearts, but to live as changed people who glorify the Triune God who changes hearts through the events of the Gospel — God’s “good news” about his victory and rule over the heavens and earth. Our posture, then, is to be a faithful presence — bearing the ‘image’ of Jesus as we worship God by his Spirit. Change in the world, historically, has happened when Christians have done this. And part of that recognition of our task is what should limit our tendency to reach for the sword; to keep us clear of culture wars or the beastly, worldly, mechanics of power — the ‘medium’ of worldly politics is part of the ‘message’ — its forms and tactics are forms of idolatry, and liturgies that form us as we engage in them.

We must recognise that our task, when engaging with the world, is not to engage on the terms supplied by the beastly power games of human politics — that liberalism, secularism, and various forms of idolatry (for example, greed, or racism) — are self-perpetuating. Part of being a faithful presence will involve challenging and exposing the status quo (like John’s Revelation), calling it what it is, and trusting that God will vindicate his faithful church, as he did Jesus. We should also not, for example, avoid explicitly religious language when explaining how we understand what fruitful life in God’s world as his faithful people should look like, in order that we might best be understood and accommodated (so playing games that reinforce secularism, or idolatry, or individualism/liberalism) is a failure to be fully faithful, and reinforces blindness.

It cannot be our job to create a Christian state through the creation of laws that our neighbours cannot obey (Romans 8), or to coerce or co-opt faith through the law. There will be good things that flow to our neighbours should they live lives aligned with God’s design (and have been in the west), and part of being a faithful presence is to advocate for such goods, and to embody them in our own community, the church, we might even participate in democratic process on the basis of securing that good, but I believe we should do this in balance; recognising that the government, in a pluralist context, has a responsibility to govern for different visions of the good and that we would want to be accommodated as much as possible were we at the mercy of the political or religious other (so, for instance, the early Christians advocated for law changes around their own persecution — they asked for pluralism, accommodation, and reciprocity, as might a Christian in modern day China) because these things are, in themselves, religious, political and social goods aligned with God’s design, as the one who providentially continues supplying life, breath, and everything else to idolaters who have rejected him, so they might seek and perhaps find him — it is not simply the means by which the goodness of Christianity might be established.

Generous pluralism, then, is a recognition of deep — almost infinite — difference between positions; not just because deep disagreement exists as a human product of creatureliness and personhood, or our situatedness in nations and cultures and families who are different because of different experiences, stories, and values — but because there is a profound and real gap between those who have the Spirit of God and are his re-created images in the world, and those living in exile, cut off from his presence. That gap can’t be bridged by anything but the Spirit as a gracious gift from God; and political difference is an expression of that ontological and epistemological difference. I wasn’t seeking to make a significantly different posture to John Inazu’s Confident Pluralism, except that I wanted to ground it as a posture more deeply in the spiritual realities causing difference and frame our approach around obedience to the commands of Jesus to love our enemies, pray for those who persecute us, and treat others as we would have them treat us, and his example of generous hospitality and invitation to his enemies (us) — both in life, and death.

If I were coining the phrase to describe how I believe we are to navigate this necessary balance between faithfulness and pluralism now, rather than four years ago, I would perhaps not focus on generosity as an attempt to articulate the reciprocity at the heart of the commands of Jesus; I am happy enough with the word — but I wonder if a better expression of the spirit of generosity, embodied in the nature and character of God and his invitation for all people to be restored to his presence, in the light of his ongoing providence and provision (all generous), and in the ministry and mission of Jesus, that was so centered on the table, I would probably talk about how our role is to envisage public life as a table; and to practice hospitality, whether as hosts, or guests.

Revisiting “Generous Pluralism” (unpacking a little of my ‘political theology’) — Part 1

The good folk at GIST, my denomination’s think tank (committee) on politics, society and culture contacted me recently to let me know that they’re working on a paper canvassing (and critiquing) various ‘postures’ towards the world and that my “generous pluralism” was one of the positions they were hoping to engage with. After a lengthy email exchange and a long conversation with a friend on the committee, on GIST’s behalf, seeking to clarify my position, I still have concerns that this paper will not adequately represent my views, in ways that might cause some issues – issues I’d like to cut off at the pass.

I appreciate their reaching out, and the opportunity to (for myself) re-examine “generous pluralism” as an articulation of my own political theology (or posture towards the world), both in the light of their critique and as an expression of my thinking from four years ago. One of the nice things about blogging is that one can observe how one’s own thought iterates, or evolves, or expands over time — another good thing about blogging is that every post has a context, a wider body of work (and an author) that give a particular post meaning — a downside is that sometimes people may only see one particular post, or idea and use that to extrapolate or totalise my position. Nobody is going to read everything I write, and I don’t expect people to, and the piecemeal approach to engaging with various articles in my archives, even those I still totally agree with (like this one), runs the risk of interpreting a word, idea, or phenomenon outside the context (and particularly my authorial intent). I do not think ‘generous pluralism’ is a coherent political posture on its own, nor do I think anybody else is articulating or advocating for it (if it is a ‘thing’ at all rather than an aspect of a bigger thing), and so I’d like to unpack that context explicitly over the next two posts.

I do try to work towards being coherent, and integrative in my thinking and writing — and to chart how things expressed in my archives have developed, or remain, so this has given me an occasion in which to do that. I’m also very open to critique or criticism — and I’d genuinely love to know if these views put me outside the Presbyterian camp — but I would like my actual views (in full) to be being critiqued, not one aspect detached from its foundations.

The more immediate context, for me, than the occasions that led to the production of the posts on ‘generous pluralism’ is also the context of the pulled Eternity News piece about polarisation and the hard right, the ongoing attempt to articulate a political strategy of hospitality and seeking to understand and accommodate the ‘other’ (even the theological other within the church), and various opportunities to talk in a more ‘long form way’ on a couple of podcasts — both CPX’s podcast Life and Faith and Freedom For Faith’s podcast Talking Freely — in such a way that I’ve been able to map out some of the integration of various aspects of my thinking. Because it is likely that the new GIST paper will lead to some people engaging with work of mine from 2017, I thought it might be helpful to unpack some of that framework explicitly (with some reference to other things I’ve written).

This might be a long post, but it’s really, I guess, for those seeking to actually understand, engage with, or critique my position within the context outlined above.

Starting Point: My Theological Frame

Political theology — as a theology — is grounded in some understanding of who God is. My political theology is shaped from convictions about God as Triune — that the God we meet in the Bible, and in Jesus, is a generative life-creating God of infinite and eternal love within the Trinity who poured out light and life and love as an expression of His character; that God is the ‘grounds of being’ (the one in whom we live and breathe and have our being), who created all things with a telos (or ‘end’) — for the persons of the godhead to mutually glorify and love each other, and for that glorious love to overflow into creation, and for glory and love to be given back by creation — both ‘what has been made’ (in a material sense — so, Psalm 19, Romans 1, etc), and specifically the people made in God’s image as rulers and representatives of his divine nature and character — ‘sub-creators’ in the world who join in God’s generative purposes for God’s glory as we worship God.

I believe that the persons of the Trinity operate in perichoretic union and perfect co-operation in creation, the sustaining of all things, and the redemption of the world through the incarnation, death, resurrection, and glorification of Jesus.

I believe that God is Triune, and that the Son, Jesus is both fully divine, and fully human — that he is the perfect revelation of God (the exact representation of his being) to us, and also the image of the perfect image bearing human; that Jesus and the Father join in pouring out the Spirit as an act of re-creation, anticipating the renewal of all things and the joining of heaven and earth (separated by a ‘vault’ or firmament in the Beginning, but not anymore in the end — but we’ll get to that in the ‘cosmic geography’ below).

I believe that the creator God is a loving and hospitable God who desires relationship and provides a good world as a good gift to people in order to reveal his character; that he is Holy and righteous and perfect and defines what is good — but also that while we are made in the image of God, and have our being in him, our ability to grasp the infinite nature of God is limited by our creatureliness before it is limited by our sin — that God has to accommodate himself to us in order to reveal himself to us. I believe that God — the almighty — is the most high God who rules over the heavens and the earth as the rightful ruler, and who is sovereign (sovereign in such a way that places me in the Reformed stream of theology around questions of soteriology). I believe the things said about God in the Westminster Confession — including “To him is due from angels and men, and every other creature, whatsoever worship, service, or obedience he is pleased to require of them,” and so I believe that God is both creator, sustainer, redeemer, and judge of all — and that our task as ‘image bearers’ is not to stand in each of those roles, but in the role he has appointed for us.

I believe the Bible is the word of God — inspired or ‘breathed’ by him (like we humans are), through human authors at various times in history, but that it is a coherent whole where the ‘law, Psalms, and prophets’ are Israel’s Scriptures (the Old Testament), teaching God’s priestly people how to represent him as a kingdom in a political-theological context but that these are primarily fulfilled in Jesus; Jesus was God’s plan a. The lamb was slain before the creation of the world, and the author of life orchestrated history and events to culminate on that wooden cross in Jerusalem as the climactic moment, and fulcrum, of all of history. I believe that most of us approach the Scriptures as gentiles, not under the law, and that our job as Christian interpreters is to understand the Old Testament as Christian Scriptures, recognising how they were also Jewish Scriptures — so that we can’t flatly turn to a law in Deuteronomy or Leviticus and apply it to the life of the church now. I believe Jesus, as fulfilment of the law, is a more perfect law — and a more perfect picture of what the image of God looks like, and what ‘being Holy as God is Holy’ looks like, and that we are called to imitate him and be transformed into his image. I think some categories or distinctions that we Reformed Christians have used to understand and apply the law are arbitrary and artificial, and that a Christ-centered, or Christo-telic, Biblical Theology is an attempt to read Scripture on the terms supplied for us by the Word made flesh.

Second Point: Theological Anthropology

I believe that humans were created by God with a glorious task of bringing his presence into the world — ruling over it and participating in his generative, fruitful, flourishing, life-creating purposes — tasked with spreading his Temple-like presence (Eden) over the face of the earth as his priestly agents.

I believe that the image of God (imago dei in the Latin, tselem Elohim in Hebrew) is not simply a divine imprint in us that gives us dignity and makes human life (and bodies) sacred — but that to be made as ‘tselem Elohim’ is to be given a particular function in the world; to, as his worshipping beings reflecting his glory as our lives are shaped by his presence with us — and that this function is political in that it is about how we believe the world should be ordered (the spreading of God’s presence/kingdom).

I believe that all humanity was made with this function — but that all humanity joins in the rebellious rejection of that function — following the temptation of Satan, the Serpent — and so, we were cast from his presence (exiled) from the Garden. I believe the story of Genesis is the Bible’s cosmic origin story that tells us the purpose not only of Yahweh’s people Israel, but all people — such that Israel were to view their international neighbours as exiled from God’s presence, cursed, and in need of restoration and blessing that they would participate in bringing as God’s priestly people in the land (a new Eden). But to be exiled is to also be under God’s judgment and given over to the consequences of idolatry as we ‘become what we behold’ — so sin has an affect on our individual humanity and our ability to know God and know his world rightly; but it also has a cultural affect on nations with ‘common idols’ — and these nations and cultures have a reinforcing impact, that, under the judgment of God, further darken our hearts and minds. This is sometimes called the ‘noetic effect of sin’ — which has to be held in tension with the idea of ‘common grace’ and the divine imprint on all people as people created ‘to bear God’s image’ (in God’s image) who are not actively ‘bearing God’s image,’ but are becoming ‘the images and likeness of their gods’ (Psalm 115).

I believe the Genesis story interacts with other Ancient Near Eastern stories about the origins of the world, the nature of the gods, the function of humanity, and what a human ‘tselem Elohim’ looks like — particularly with the stories of the beastly (Satanic) dominion machines ruling the surrounding nation; Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, Persia, Greece and Rome might have looked like much more successful and dominant ‘blessed’ nations — but the story told by the Bible critiques their views about gods, chaos, disorder, war, dominance, and the idea that only the king ‘represented’ the gods as a tselem Elohim. To be made in the image of God is a political task, with an inbuilt political critique of distorted, beastly, sinful forms of humanity.

Sin has not eradicated the image of God in us, but it has stopped us performing our God given function of glorifying him as his representatives; we are like idol statues (that’s literally what a tselem Elohim is) in exile waiting to be re-vivified so that we might represent God again (this is what happens when idol statues are captured in the ancient world and Genesis 2 actually has significant parallels with a ‘vivification’ or ‘revivification’ ceremony where the life of the gods was manifested in a sculpted statue, in an orchard, so that it might represent those gods.

Sin starts with our hearts — and our decision to ‘worship and serve’ creation instead of the creator; to exchange our task as being ‘made in God’s image’ for ‘worshipping images we made’ — we are worshipping beings and we become what we behold; created to reflect and glorify God we de-create ourselves so that we represent other gods, and, eventually, like captured idol statues that are not reclaimed, sin leads to the fiery furnace; the destruction of false cultic images by the victorious God-king.

Every action comes from our hearts — shaped by false worship — this means that every action we make is shaped by our loves; total depravity is not ‘absolute depravity’ and the latent ‘image of God’ in all of us, and our place in God’s world that testifies to his nature means that even ‘captured images’ still look and act a bit like God; we still live, breathe, create life — we still ‘sub-create,’ bringing order and beauty into the world — and yet that order and beauty is, in varying degrees, corrupted by sin. I believe Paul is talking about this experience — humanity ‘in Adam’ in Romans 7, where he talks about ‘knowing what he ought to do’ but his flesh (image of God), being at war with sin. We are in need of rescue — re-creation — the provision of new hearts and God’s Spirit (the new covenant) — which Paul describes in Romans 8, with the coming of the Spirit to re-create us as God’s children, freeing our minds and bodies from bondage to sin (and idolatry) so that we might be transformed into the image of Jesus and glorified — so that we might be God’s presence in the world again as we serve the king who liberated us, and are transformed into his image through the ‘true and proper worship’ of offering ourselves (plural) as a living sacrifice (singular), not being conformed to the idolatrous patterns of this world (Romans 12).

People without the Spirit do not have “the mind of Christ” — they have the breathe of life (psyche) from God, but not the Spirit (pneuma). Paul makes a big deal about this in 1 Corinthians to explain why the cross is understood as the power and wisdom of God by those with the Spirit who call Jesus Lord, but is foolishness to those who are perishing. There is an infinite chasm — both an ontological difference and an epistemological difference between those who are being re-created for eternal life by the Spirit, and a functional and telic difference — in that a re-vivified image of Jesus has a heavenly body and is destined to glorify Jesus forever, while an ‘exiled’ in-Adam image is destined for death and dust and judgment (1 Corinthians 15). We are either united to Jesus, and raised and seated with him in the heavenly realm — liberated from all other ‘elohim’ and their imagery, forgiven and re-created by grace, through faith in Jesus Christ, and so freed from judgment (and not complicit in his rejection and crucifixion, so judged for rejecting God’s king in the ultimate act of rebellious sacrilege), or united to the ‘ruler of this world’ — Satan — and so facing his future for our actions, and our share in his treasonous campaign.

The Great Commission is a new ‘cultural mandate’ — a call to go out and fill the earth with God’s image bearing presence because, through the resurrection, all authority of heaven and earth has been given to Jesus and captured (exiled) humans, previously ‘bound up’ by the rulers of this world, are now able to be liberated and re-created, restored from exile to their image bearing function by the Spirit; called to be part of the kingdom of the crucified king in the face of beastly (Satanic) empires; equipped to be God’s faithful presence in the world. A presence that is subversive, differentiated, and challenging to the powers and principalities because we’re the new creation breaking in to ‘this world’ as a picture of God’s triumph in the heavenly realm through Jesus (Ephesians 2-3).

Third Point: Cosmic Geography

The earthly political order reflects a ‘cosmic’ geography. While I’m still inclined to see ‘Trinitarian’ significance in the plural in Genesis 1 where God says “let us make man in our image,” and to see that flowing into the creation of male and female, when read beside Psalm 8 there’s a sense that we were, perhaps, to be on earth what the angels are in heaven — God’s representatives. There is a ‘heavenly host’ that includes other beings called either ‘sons of God’ (the Nephilim) or ‘elohim’ (see Psalm 82).

When the nations are scattered across the earth in Babel, Deuteronomy 32 (in a textual variant that makes more sense in the context and is better attested than ‘sons of Israel’ — ‘sons of God’) the nations are given to these other divine beings to be ruled by (because of their idolatry). The origin story for this move — the Babel story — shows the nations scattered by Yahweh after humanity had failed to heed his command to spread across the face of the earth, and instead, committed to building a sort of temple-bridge to the heavens for their own glory — the tower — in a story that also seems to engage with and invert Babylon’s creation myth, which pictures the city of Babylon as a place built by the gods so they could party on earth and enslave people (the Bible’s Babylon — Babel —is built by people who want to party on earth and enslave people while also trying to take over heaven).

These heavenly ‘powers and principalities’ appear at various times in the Biblical narrative, but different nation states in the Old Testament are essentially ‘monotheistic’ or ‘polytheistic’ nations where their political order reflects their cosmic mythology, and when Daniel talks about wars he suggests conflicts on earth reflect conflicts between heavenly princes. Political structures in the world are also, in the Old and New Testaments (right up to the divinisation of Caesar), inherently religious and idolatrous — so when gentile converts come into God’s people, because through the victory of Jesus, God has commanded all people from all nations to repent (Acts 17), the re-creation of a foreign person in the new people of God — the kingdom of Jesus — represents a re-ordering in the heavens because all authority really has been given to Jesus; the age of Babel is over and the scattered, exiled, people are now being invited to repent and come home from their idolatry. There’s a tension to wrestle with between the idea that ‘idols are nothing’ — that statues are bits of creation such that to worship them leaves you breathless, dumb, and lifeless — and that there is a cosmic order being reflected in the beastly (Satanic) empires that are at war with God — a political/theological message hammered home by Revelation’s apocalyptic critique not just of Rome as the Beastly power par excellence, who corrupted and co-opted Israel in Satan’s war with God; but in the way Rome is connected thematically to Babylon, and so we have a critique of all religious systems that set themselves up on power, destructive and idolatrous dominion, and rebellion against God’s order. We can take that critique and hold it up against various political structures (or economic structures) operating in the modern world and see ‘Babylon’ still operating as an empire to be resisted, enslaving people to be re-created and liberated through Yahweh’s victory secured by the son, Jesus Christ, and sealed by the Holy Spirit, so that ‘heaven and earth’ are brought together as we become God’s temples — a sort of ‘bridge’ between the heavens and the earth (and this is how Pentecost is a new Babel). Our job as “Citizens of Heaven” is to bring God’s presence into the world as testimonies to his re-creation plan — the “New Eden” Revelation 21 and 22 depict — where heaven and earth are brought together under the absolute reign of God because all enemies have been eternally vanquished through the victory of the cross.

Interim conclusion (stay tuned for part 2).

Any description of my political posture as ‘generous pluralism’ has to be understood against this backdrop (and, as we’ll see in the next installment, has to be significantly modified by my understanding that the primary political call on God’s people is to be citizens and ambassadors of God’s kingdom; his temple and “Faithful Presence” in the world, and by the first step from these conclusions which is to say that faithfulness looks differentiated from Babylonian ways of ‘imaging God’, and specifically looks cruciform. It looks like being the image of Jesus and the ‘body of Christ’ in the world as we take up his pattern for our humanity equipped and empowered by the Spirit.

Don’t be a Macarthur-in-the-closet on religious freedom… come out like Macarthur did

John MacArthur has been in the news quite a bit in the last 12 months. But he’s been a phenomenon on the Christian web for many years. MacArthur’s influence has spawned many of the darkest parts of the Christian internet; watchbloggers, discernment trolls, and theobros out to destroy anybody who disagrees with their spiritual framework (mostly provided by Pastor John) like Jordan Peterson destroys everyone on YouTube. You find a fundamentalist internet outpost and do a word search (or try this one), or click the tag, for John MacArthur, and you’d be forgiven for thinking “Pastor John” is something like the Pope in these (typically) Baptist circles (which is ironic). His infallible reaction to Trump, to Covid (and church closures) and his hardlined, unwavering fundamentalism is admired from pillar to post. Even Pulpit and Pen, who hate everybody, love John MacArthur.

The pile of things I agree with John MacArthur on is outweighed by the mountain that I don’t.

But he’s a conviction pastor, and I can respect that. He names his convictions and he holds them. And that has integrity — and, in a time where prominent church leaders are being exposed for lacking integrity, I’d rather leaders were consistent and not hiding their beliefs behind a veneer of respectability (actual respectability would be next level). I respect MacArthur’s lack of respectability, and his consistency.

The same man who proudly proclaimed that President Donald Trump had called him to thank him for fighting in the courts to keep his megachurch open during a pandemic that has now claimed 500,000 lives in his country, has recently come out to proclaim that he doesn’t believe in religious freedom. He said:

“The new administration will uphold religious freedom? I don’t even support religious freedom. Religious freedom is what sends people to hell. To say I support religious freedom is to say I support idolatry, it’s to say I support lies, I support hell, I support the kingdom of darkness. You can’t say that. No Christian with half a brain would say, ‘We support religious freedom.’ We support the truth!”

Religious freedom is the hill to die on for lots of conservative Christians; and it is something that I think is pretty important to uphold in a secular democracy; because genuine religious freedom is what prevents sectarian politics that shoots for a theocracy at the expense of those who disagree. It’s what stops us living in a Catholic, or Muslim, or Presbyterian state (even while, on a technical level, it’s not clear why we in Australia are not an Anglican state, except for systematised pluralism…).

The TL;DR summary of all this is if you’re a MacArthur in the closet, you should come out. Stop pretending religious freedom is your goal, or a good thing, if you don’t believe it, especially if you’re closeted because it is expedient or allows you to push for more worldly power. And if you’re not a MacArthur in the closet, then you’re actually a pluralist (in some form) and you might need to expand your definition of ‘religion’ in order to fully embrace religious freedom as a civic good (while holding your own theological convictions about what is true and good), or be able to describe why you want to limit the freedom of others (and not be limited yourself).

The thing is, in my observation lots of the people who lobby for religious freedom in a country like Australia actually mean ‘Christian Freedom,’ this is true with the exception, I think, of the lobby group Freedom For Faith, who have, in the main, profoundly understood the landscape here, although perhaps have too narrow a definition of what constitutes ‘religious’.

Tara Isabella Burton’s Strange Rites unpacks a little of the problem with some of our thinking about religious freedom, and what ‘religious’ means, when we limit it to institutional religions rather than spiritual commitments and the pursuit of some vision of the good through acts of worship. She suggests that for the emerging generations in the secular, liberal, west, religion functions much more broadly and in a ‘remixed’ way where people harness ‘religiosity’ in their pursuit of an authentic self and self-understanding. She says, for example, that the essence of a religion for these ‘Remixed flocks’ is that it provides “four elements: meaning, purpose, community, and ritual.” And that they are “intuitional” rather than “institutional”

“By this, I mean that their sense of meaning is based in narratives that simultaneously reject clear-cut creedal metaphysical doctrines and institutional hierarchies and place the locus of authority on people’s experiential emotions, what you might call gut instinct.”

This feels true (see what I did there) — and — if our democracy is genuinely secular (that is ‘without an official religion’) and democratic — then our understanding of “religious freedom” and what is being navigated and protected has to navigate the landscape where both institutional and intuitional religious freedoms are protected and balanced. Presbyterians have religious convictions, and so too do those people for whom the pursuit of LGBTIQA+ rights and recognition have taken on those religious characteristics (connected to meaning, purpose, community, and ritual).

Christians, more than anybody, should be seeing these modern communities of meaning and purpose as ‘religious’ because our understanding is that to be human is to worship something; and that the issues with human behaviour is that we’re prone to wander towards idols — worshipping created things, rather than being moved to wonder at God’s glory from the things he has made. That’s Romans 1. Right there. Idolatry, as Pastor John recognises, is religious. And to support religious freedom is to allow idolatry. MacArthur is right. But we might be allowing idolatrous worship in order to allow people to pursue true worship, as we hope to be those who worship in Spirit and in truth.

Religious freedom is a necessary outworking of a commitment to reciprocity — the sort of ‘love your neighbour as you love yourself’ reciprocity; and an outworking of epistemic humility. If we are all worshippers — and we are all, as Paul says in Athens, created and located so we might ‘reach out for God’ and perhaps find him, and if we are all prone to error in that search, and to idolatry, it is unlikely that any religious expression — including any particular denominational expression — has fully grasped the truth about God.

This isn’t to say that objective truth doesn’t exist, doesn’t matter, or shouldn’t be pursued — but it is to acknowledge our limitations as finite creatures, even in traditions that stack up the accumulated wisdom of many finite creatures, who are trying to know God through his revelation to us that, in Calvin’s conception, necessarily involves him ‘accommodating’ to our limits. We can’t, and won’t, ever wrap our brains and hearts around the entirety of who God is, or his love, or character — because we have puny human brains that are prone to self-seeking error, and even in the New Creation, with God’s unmediated presence, God will be gloriously, infinitely, overwhelming and we’ll have an eternity to keep knowing more of him.

Pluralism is required to even allow the ongoing presence of denominations other than your own and to recognise that in those theological distinctives, that can be quite substantial, there is simultaneously error and a quest for truth.

To not be a pluralist means to plant your flag in the ground and say “I am totally right, and everyone must agree with me.” To not be a pluralist, with integrity, is to be John MacArthur.

Now, it might be that there are boundaries where, at least for Christians, true belief is demarcated — they might be confessional, traditional, or catholic (in the broadest sense). For me, for example, the Trinity and the Divinity of Jesus, plus his life death and resurrection as described in the Gospels — those would be deal breakers where I would say to not hold those is to not be holding on to the essence of Christian belief. I’m also part of an institutional religious tradition where I have sworn to ‘assert, maintain, and defend’ the teachings of an institutional church (albeit one that sees liberty and conscience as important things for pursuing truth from God’s revelation in his word, rather than just human, institutional, traditions as binding). But, for those not holding my belief, I’m not sure the answer is to legislate away their ability to believe something other than what I believe (in fact, I am reasonably convinced that is not the answer). In fact, I’m reasonably convinced the answer is to legislate for the freedom for others to engage in the intutional and institutional quest for meaning, purpose, community and ritual; that is, I think religious freedom is really important and good and broad and essential for pluralism and secularism and democracy.

There is, also, the paradox of tolerance here — some religious convictions are beyond the pale, some are damaging and have no place in a democracy because they dehumanise parts of the ‘demos.’ The Old Testament is full of God’s anger at, for example, Molech worship and the violence, sacrifice of children, dehumanising debauchery and oppression carried out in the name of that god (and especially anger at Israel for jumping into bed with all these diabolical gods).

And our modern secular democracy makes all sorts of decisions about limiting freedoms in pursuit of the common good that we celebrate — the catch is, because we’ve become ‘beyond the pale’ and damaged children in our care, been complicit in violence and oppression — that sort of thing so that ‘limiting’ for the common good is now being applied to us (sometimes justly, like with the imposition, by the government, of new practices and regulations around child safety). It takes a certain sort of consistency to speak against that regulation as an interference of our religious freedom; and that’s not something I’ve seen much of. We also face limits around, say, our practices in a pandemic — and I am starting to see religious freedom type objections to singing restrictions, particularly in New South Wales. Whether those restrictions are ‘common sense’ or not, we’ve generally not been unhappy (unlike MacArthur) to have some of our freedoms restricted for the sake of our neighbour. Our freedoms aren’t totally unrestricted because we give up some rights in order to live responsibly as neighbours, and to care for vulnerable people in our communities — we Aussies also have a very low authority view of church community and membership, and so we aren’t imposing ‘restrictions’ on the religious freedoms of people in our churches (typically) — either through church discipline, or not letting people leave church communities (or change denominations, or convictions) as expressions of ‘religious freedom’…

I think we’d get a lot further in conversations about religious freedom if we were more committed to pluralism, and to extending those freedoms way beyond where we currently do — to gender dysphoric people who don’t share our theological convictions, to same sex couples who’d like to get married, and to various other communities we rail against. It’s a brave Christian in conservative churches who supports the building of mosques, or the rights of a community of Satanists to gather built on the principle of pluralism or religious freedom; but it takes real courage (it seems) to say ‘that gay couple should be allowed to get married as an expression of their convictions that are ultimately religious’ — that’s where our own ‘intuitional’ religion kicks in; where for so many Christians it seems that the thing that gives us meaning, purpose, community and ritual is not our ‘Christian’ practice, but our conservative politics (which isn’t to say that being a Christian is not a political calling; “Jesus is Lord” is a political statement that provides a certain amount of meaning, purpose, community and ritual). We conservative Christians fought the plebiscite like a political culture war — not as people committed to religious freedom as a broad and inclusive good, but as a political fight (where we refused to acknowledge, in the main, the religious convictions driving our own understanding of marriage; there was a deliberate strategy to argue in the secular world as though our definition of marriage was purely ‘natural’ and secular, while those arguing for redefinition were arguing more religiously — along the lines of meaning, purpose, community, ritual and also, I’d say, offering a ‘religious’ vision of the good). And now we fight for religious freedom as though it is purely defined by being able to tell people they can’t do things. Why don’t we try telling people why it is good to follow Jesus; why Jesus brings meaning, purpose, community and ritual as the heart of ‘true religion’ and a guide to the worship we were made for?

But I digress. It’s an important digression because while I don’t respect those who play the ‘religious freedom’ game while paying lip service to a pluralism they don’t practice; I do respect someone who says ‘pluralism is bunkum and religious freedom is promoting idolatry;’ to be a pluralist isn’t to celebrate that those around you who aren’t pursuing true worship — the worship of the triune God made possible by the Holy Spirit being poured out to unite us with Jesus as the Gospel is unleashed; to be a pluralist is to acknowledge that other people are free to choose their gods, and the consequences of that choice. Just like God allows idolatry (see, again, Romans 1). It’s not my job to change someone’s object of worship; it’s my job to worship in Spirit and in truth, and to trust that God will change hearts as the Spirit turns the hearts of people towards God. Once I recognise that this is not my responsibility, I am freed to live beside people, to love them, to serve them, to pray for them, and to enjoy them as good gifts from God in my life who are given life, and breath, and everything by the God who wants them to reach out for him, and perhaps find him (even in a city as full of idols as Athens). Idolatry isn’t cause for celebration; it can be cause for despair — like for Paul in Athens — but Paul doesn’t set about changing the legislation in Athens to forbid idol worship, he introduces Jesus as the way to know the “unknown God” (and, by the by, his speech to the Areopagus, the gatekeepers of the Pantheon, meets the conventions required to officially introduce a god to the plurality of options available in Athens).

Here’s the thing. I think most people who like John MacArthur actually agree with John MacArthur on religious freedom but don’t have the courage to name it.

I think most conservative Christians who are politically active don’t actually want pluralism or even a secular democracy. I think most progressive Christians who are politically active don’t actually want pluralism or a secular democracy either — and that they’d like to eradicate conservatives not just from the public table, but from the denominational tables they belong to (and this is true, too, within conservative denominations). But very few people will name it; because they’re busy ‘coalition building’ in order to support their own (institutional) interests; not in order to practice loving reciprocity that allows others to pursue their own religious intuitions.

This isn’t to say that confessional standards or institutional doctrines and traditions aren’t important — in fact, I suspect that in our intuitional age what should be fairly fixed has become contested and that lots of fights around the ownership of different denominational tables are actually power/property grabs, where it would be better for everybody just to generously schism into a plurality of traditions, or to set up ‘communions’ or denominations that are deliberately broad (ironically, I think the Presbyterians with our declaratory statement, and emphasis on liberty of opinion, are meant to be a much broader evangelical ‘Reforming’ tradition than the Big R Reformed types fighting to run our table would like us to be).

Their animating end game is the ‘city of man’ looking a whole lot like ‘the city of God’ (to use Augustine’s terms); this side of the eschaton. They aren’t particularly interested in the heart change required to see the overlap grow (the sort that would come through exercising our religious freedom in constructive ways that are small, and local, and person by person work from the bottom up, while allowing others to exist whose existence and religion they find offensive), they’re interested in the mechanics of power — the levers that can be pulled to get the results. And taking John MacArthur’s stance is not going to get laws changed in any properly secular democracy. It’s not politically expedient; it has no utility. It has a certain sort of respectable virtue — conviction and integrity — even if it is not necessarily built on wisdom or truth.

MacArthur even explicitly states that he is under no allusion that his stance will be effective; it is simply consistent with his pre-millennial eschatology.

“We don’t win down here, we lose. You ready for that? Oh, you were a post-millennialist, you thought we were just going to go waltzing into the kingdom if you took over the world? No, we lose here — get it. It killed Jesus. It killed all the apostles. We’re all going to be persecuted. … We don’t win. We lose on this battlefield, but we win on the big one, the eternal one… We will proclaim the exclusivity of the gospel, the unique revelation authority of Scripture. We’re not going to lobby for freedom of religion. What kind of nonsense is that? We are in the world to expose all those lies as lies. So this is just part of what’s been on my mind.”

He named it. With admirable clarity, theological consistency, and conviction. And I can respect that; most political Christian voices nail two of those three in any given moment. I once tried to tabulate how theological anthropology, one’s understanding of the Gospel, and one’s eschatology intersect in different political theologies (it’s not the most beautifully structured table ever). MacArthur has consistency all the way down. He’s out of the closet as a government-hating pre-millennialist fundamentalist who believes anybody who doesn’t share his views is an idolater. The only point where he isn’t yet out of the closet and consistent is identifying the point at which he is in fellowship with, or not in fellowship with, other traditions within the church; his theobros and discernment blogging friends put a fair bit of energy into trying to draw those lines for everyone though, based on his teaching being authoritatively ‘the southern baptist tradition’… which again, is ironic.

See, what’s interesting here, again, is that so much of the ‘Christian Right’ operates with a sort of dominionist/post-millennial belief that we are tasked with building the City of God here on earth; not with faithfully being God’s presence in our cities as we wait for ‘the Holy City, the new Jerusalem’ to come down from heaven on Jesus’ return ala Revelation 21. So much ‘Christian lobbying’ is towards that end. But try getting people to unpack their theological vision — their eschatology — and how that lines up with their politics and actions, and you get mud. Partly because there are a plurality of theologies, and eschatological models, out there that all produce different political visions but often the same political action (so we can have a coalition for marriage, religious freedom, or against conversion therapy laws, that includes Catholics and Muslims, or we’ll call a Trinity-denier a Christian because he agrees with our sexual ethic, but we can’t have Christian institutions that make space for progressive Christians (theologically or politically) to work together on common causes like the Environment or anti-bullying programs in schools, or even ‘coalitions’ with the LGBTIQA+ community to work on shared visions of the good, or our Indigenous community to work against systemic racism because that is ‘woke’). As it stands, ‘pluralism’ only works in one direction in the conservative ‘institutional’ religion – it’s to prop up institutional interests; and so often ‘religious freedom’ campaigning is the same (with, admittedly, a desire to see the religious commitments of adherents to these institutions protected in other institutions or workplaces)…

To name those differences though, within the church, especially within the conservative “Christian Right”  would commit us to a certain sort of religious freedom or pluralism that we don’t like to practice outside the church, and, this is also true on the other pole; ‘progressive Christianity,’ but I write as a member of a conservative (theologically and politically) institution, one that, for example, joined the ‘Coalition for Marriage’ and publicly lobbied against conversion therapy laws in Victoria).

We’d have to admit either that those with different positions are welcome at the table of a ‘broad church’, or, that we don’t believe them to be Christians at all, such that we should oppose their speech (and again, MacArthur and his online cronies are more consistent on this front too). And where we share ecumenical fellowship — whether around progressive causes, or through shared coalescing around ‘the Gospel’ across institutional lines, we’d have to acknowledge that we are already practicing pluralism. And we have to acknowledge the tension that creates — that in that practice we maintain a clear sense of what we believe to be the ‘capital T’ truth we’re prepared to die for, but that we’ve managed to engage in pluralism without compromising that sense, although perhaps engaging in pluralism is actually a path to broadening one’s understanding of truth — because it involves listening to others. Then we need to stare down the questions around why if we are happy for Baptists or Catholics, to continue to exist and practice their institutional religiosity (and where we would oppose legislation that sought to limit their existence), we aren’t prepared to advocate for space to be made for more ‘intuitional’ religions — especially as those lines start to get quite murky with emerging intutional/institutional Christianity (ala the emerging church movement, or Pentecostalism).

The beauty of MacArthur coming out like this is that in a secular democracy, the polis now knows where he is coming from and has to decide whether to tolerate or accommodate his views. His intolerance of pluralism is exactly the test that pluralism needs; you’ll see voices from the Christian left trying to denounce and cancel him — not just in the civic space, but the church; you’ll see voices from the intolerant ‘hard secular’ world trying to restrict his freedoms beyond just asking his church not to gather during the pandemic, or to wear masks. Some of his crazier views will be exposed and people will be able to exercise their freedoms to find less crazy popes (or, hey, no pope at all).

Christians: Don’t be wedged by abortion; be different

Many Christians are single issue voters on the issue of abortion. And I understand that. For Christians who have convictions about human life and personhood beginning in utero (convictions I share) abortion at any point is the taking of a human life; the death of a person. These convictions about human life aren’t just Christian convictions, there are good scientific reasons to see a foetus as materially human, so now the debate about the morality of abortion in philosophical circles (rather than scientific ones) tends to focus on when a human is a person. Non-religious definitions of personhood tend to come from a mishmash of convictions or ideas about what life is and what makes life have some sort of dignity or worth — these positions are occasionally non-integrated or non-coherent positions. Sometimes these positions draw on certain ideas from our Christian heritage in the west, where persons have a sort of ‘sacred’ God given dignity (historically because of Christian belief about humans being made in God’s image, but in the secular west this dignity just ‘is’. The abortion debate is primarily framed around the rights, dignity, and self-determination of the woman as an individual who is sovereign over her body, and so even if a foetus is a person, there’s a philosophical question about that person’s sovereignty.

Christians are perhaps more inclined to push back against individual autonomy and-or sovereignty because we understand that ‘the earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it’ is a claim that God is sovereign over human bodies, as creator, and as Christians in particular we believe ‘we are not our own’ and that our ‘bodies have been bought at a price’… plus a reasonably orthodox view of sin is that it’s essentially a declaration of independence, or self-sovereignty, rejecting God’s rightful sovereignty over our lives and bodies. This is all to say the Christian worldview is fundamentally at odds with the worldview that makes abortion both a woman’s right and a human right. This also means when the Christian worldview (or its Jewish counterpart) does not inform or shape the view of a culture our position isn’t simply a contested position, where there are other views, but a minority position. Navigating this minority position while believing that abortion is the taking of a human life is a particularly fraught thing for Christians, especially those of us committed to a certain sort of pluralism in a modern, secular, democracy where perhaps the most we can ask for is to be heard and accommodated, because we’ve destroyed our social capital or any sense that we might be a coherent moral voice because our institutions have been found to be corrupt (ala the Royal Commission into Institutional Abuse, and the recent Pell conviction), we’ve developed a reputation for being against affording human rights to minorities we disagree with (ala the same sex marriage debate), and we’ve done this while agitating for our own rights and freedoms (the religious freedom debate).

Politically, abortion is actually regulated by the states, so the Federal Labor party raising it as a policy issue in a federal election is an interesting move, and one that seems more about heat than light — more about turning up the heat on their ‘regressive’ opponents by painting themselves as ‘progressive’ than about a policy platform of substance. In short, it’s a classic ‘wedge politics’ move, and the temptation for us as Christians — not simply the challenge for politically conservative people who may oppose abortion on more than just religious convictions — is to not be wedged. Wedge politics needs a villain. A bad guy to point to to say ‘don’t be like these dinosaurs’ — and the classic Christian response to discussion around abortion plays straight into this divisive political strategy. The Labor Party’s number crunchers have obviously decided that the social capital of single-issue voting Christians (typically conservative theologically and politically) is currently so low that not only is there no political loss for wedging us and painting us as the villains, there is a political gain in the wider electorate for doing so. Our conservative Christian Prime Minister was savvy enough to refuse to be wedged on this issue, the question is, can the rest of us respond with similar wisdom.

I can totally understand single issue voting on abortion. I can understand wanting to belt out a hasty statement or letter to paint the proponents of the law change as evil… but I’m not sure it serves the political cause any more than it serves the mission of the church in proclaiming and living as an alternative kingdom following the true king. I’m not sure it even brings our neighbours closer to truth and morality in a way that restrains evil (which is a more classically reformed, Christendom, position than the political theology I’m advocating). It’s possible that jumping into what is clearly a wedge politics style trap is the right and noble thing to do anyway, but I’m not sure it’s being ‘as wise as serpents and innocent as doves’ in the face of a wolf like culture.

I’m also equally prepared to listen to those who argue that ‘pro-life’ has to extend beyond ‘pro-birth’ and so should include a coherent platform that supports vulnerable parents, tackles poverty and mental health (some of the social and economic factors that contribute to abortion), a coherent environmental policy that tries to make our environment compatible with human life, and a humane approach to foreign aid, war, refugees, and asylum seekers. No party has a perfect platform on these fronts, so voting is always a matter of wisdom and freedom, and politics is always about much more than where you cast your vote, and, especially for Christians, it’s about how we live our lives and how we organise our community within the community — or our alternative kingdom with an alternative politics that comes from an alternative, and radically subversive, crucified and raised king. Voting is a matter of wisdom and conscience, so if your conscience dictates that you can’t vote for the Labor party, then don’t. But politics is not as simple as ‘single issue voting’ — it’s equally important that we don’t fall into the trap of thinking that our vote is our singular contribution on an issue. The nature of democratic parties is that their members shape the policy platforms and ideologies of particular parties, and single issue voting leads to a Christian evacuation from, rather than faithful presence in, these particular political institutions. We want doctors to maintain faithful presence in the public health system, with integrity — and our rhetoric sometimes makes it impossible for faithful Christians to remain, and work for change in, parties that currently have a pro-abortion platform.

Abortion isn’t an issue that wins the hearts and minds of non-Christians, and its often spoken about with passion and a commensurate lack of compassion for ‘the other side’ or charity. It’s a fraught space to speak into as a bloke, especially a bloke employed by a conservative religious institution. But it’s not an issue I’ve been silent about, or not been clear about you can read pieces both on this website — where, for example, you’ll find a piece from as far back as 2011, and as recently as 2018, and from our church, where we’ve preached and written about this topic being sure to consult, elevate, and include the voices of women. What we’ve tried to do is build empathy, imagination, understanding, and compassion into our response and to suggest ways of being political that aren’t simply tied to what our politicians do.

Christians have, since the beginning of the church, had to mark themselves out as different to the world on the issue of abortion. Abortion is not a modern invention; in any society where a foetus or a child was less than a person with less dignity than the adults in the society, abortion, even infanticide, was a common response to unwanted children who interfered with the plans of a family (typically of the father in more patriarchal cultures). There’s one example of a Roman soldier serving abroad writing home to his pregnant wife telling her that if they had a son he looked forward to meeting him, but if it was a daughter, she should ‘expose her’ (leave her to die, or be collected by strangers — usually either brothels or Christians). In one of our earliest Christian documents, a summary of the moral teaching of the Bible — a ‘how to live’ guide for Christians, there’s a paragraph that says:

“Thou shalt do no murder; thou shalt not commit adultery”; thou shalt not commit sodomy; thou shalt not commit fornication; thou shalt not steal; thou shalt not use magic; thou shalt not use philtres; thou shalt not procure abortion, nor commit infanticide; “thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods”

This wasn’t simply a list of restated common moral behaviours, it was a guideline for Christian difference. A way of life for a different ‘polis’ — a new politics.

A little later there’s one of my favourite early church documents, the Letter to Diognetus (aka the Epistle to Diognetus) which says:

“For the Christians are distinguished from other men neither by country, nor language, nor the customs which they observe. For they neither inhabit cities of their own, nor employ a peculiar form of speech, nor lead a life which is marked out by any singularity. The course of conduct which they follow has not been devised by any speculation or deliberation of inquisitive men; nor do they, like some, proclaim themselves the advocates of any merely human doctrines. But, inhabiting Greek as well as barbarian cities, according as the lot of each of them has determined, and following the customs of the natives in respect to clothing, food, and the rest of their ordinary conduct, they display to us their wonderful and confessedly striking method of life. They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners. As citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers. They marry, as do all [others]; they beget children; but they do not destroy their offspring. They have a common table, but not a common bed. They are in the flesh, but they do not live after the flesh. 2 Corinthians 10:3 They pass their days on earth, but they are citizens of heaven.”

They don’t destroy their offspring. This was something that marked out the Christians as ‘citizens of heaven’ living in a strange land.

This way of life was contagious. The empire eventually became Christian, and the Christian story of human dignity profoundly shaped the west — even giving rise to the full rights and dignity of the mother, not just the father, so that abortion is now a ‘women’s issue’. And it’s legit to ask questions of our culture and its leaders when it comes to how we understand personhood and whether the new western story of individual sovereignty where other lives are stacked up against our own in a battle of rights is better than the story we’re leaving behind, but one of the best ways to ask that question is to avoid being ‘wedged’ — to not be a political football lined up as ‘regressive’ people to be kicked around, but to be different. Genuinely different.

One of my favourite theologians/ethicists, Stanley Hauerwas, suggests this is a new/old frontier for Christians living in the post-Christian west. In this stunning interview where he critiques the Benedict Option and talks about the (positive) dangers of community to the world we live in and its rampant individualism, Hauerwas notes that it’s not in political victory over others via the power game that our alternative king will be visible, but in our different way of life.

“I say that in a hundred years, if Christians are identified as people who do not kill their children or the elderly, we will have done well. Because that’s clearly coming.”

Let’s not get trapped just offering a negative view to the ‘progressive’ politics of our day — to be painted as the ‘regressives’ who say no. Let’s not be wedged. Let’s live an alternate vision of the kingdom and build institutions that seek to make parenting plausible, and pregnancy and what comes after it something less than terrifying. Let’s make ‘pro life’ something more than jumping into exclusion zones with billboards. Political pluralism isn’t about silence, or ceding the case, but about clearly making the case that we live the better story; that our vision of what gives a person personhood and dignity — caught up with the God who made people and lovingly redeems them through the death and resurrection of Jesus — produces better outcomes for people and communities, starting with the most vulnerable, than the alternatives being served up by our world. That’s the challenge we face responding to Labor’s wedge.

It’ll be all white in the end: on hope and love in these ‘last days’

The fires of our Christian persecution complex are being stoked this week by those who warned as all (and boy, did they tell us) that the same sex marriage vote was about more than marriage.

These fires are burning brighter with the news that the magazine, White, will be shuttering after an activist campaign saw advertisers desert their platform because the owners, a Christian couple, adopted an editorial policy consistent with their personal views.

It was a year this week since the postal survey results were announced; and the doomsday prophets have formed a line behind Lyle Shelton to announce that they ‘told us so’, because this was never just about marriage, and now we have a bona fide story of martyrdom. Here. On our shores. It’s not just bakers in the UK. There’s nothing I like more than reading think pieces beating that same ‘told you so’ drum as a ‘hot take’ on current events. So here’s mine.

I’m sure the couple in question are lovely, faithful, people – I’m sure they’ve been caught up in the modern ethical minefield, a minefield produced by the rapid shifting of the ground beneath our feet. I’m sure that you can draw a straight line between the existence of same sex marriage and the position they find themselves in. I’m sure they agonised about their editorial policy, and whether to go public in the face of pressure. I’m sure their position has caused them real pain. I’m sad for them, it seems tragic to watch the business they spent years building disintegrate. I’m not sure how I’d feel about the amount of free publicity they’ll now receive, because they’re a political football, coming after this commercial decision.

I’m not sure it’s the editorial policy I’d take, even though I share their views on the definition of marriage. I’m not sure it represents a hospitable or generous pluralism; but it is absolutely their call to make — what they do with their platform, and what they promote. I’m equally sure, that at this point, they aren’t facing legal consequences for the position they took.

Their experience is not an experience that religious freedom laws would protect while we also operate in a free market (and to be honest, the free market is a bigger idol than sexuality in our culture, and it’s one where most Christians are happy to participate in the temples and cultic practices of our economy, where we aren’t when it comes to the cult of sexuality, sexual identity, and expressive individualism). Exactly the same principles that give this couple the right to hold on to, and act according to their convictions — the same religious freedom, or freedom of speech, give rise to the rights of those who put pressure on their advertisers to line up with their own convictions. It seems certain that some of the ‘free speech’ directed at this couple was hateful, and crossed a line, into threats and bullying — and yet, what they’re experiencing is the cost of doing business in a fractured, pluralist, world — where each side plays a zero sum game. They were, perhaps, naive to think they could play the game in any other way — that they could continue operating according to a now obsolete status quo — that they could ignore the hashtag campaign and that it would go away. It seems to me they had three zero sum options — ‘capitulate,’ close down, or pitch for financial support from institutions and businesses who share their values (and so become a pawn in the ideologically driven culture war). If 40% of Aussies share the definition of marriage of these editors, including the religious establishment, we churches could put our money where our mouths are and take out advertising space. We could make this magazine part of our strategy for burnishing and promoting traditional ‘white’ weddings between a man and a woman so that they shine brightly among the alternatives. But we won’t. Because we have no imagination — and we prefer the alternative of sitting on the sidelines, proclaiming ourselves prophets, and distancing ourselves more and more from the hearts and minds of the average Aussie punter while participating in the culture wars. I suspect there’s a fourth — the option of hospitality, where they made their views known, consistently and editorially, but adopted an inclusive editorial policy as an act of generous pluralism that refused the ‘zero sum’ options on the table.

We’re quick to say ‘told you so’ and slow to say ‘tell you what’ — we offer no alternative vision, just an apocalypse — and we have learned nothing from the apocalyptic moments of the last few years — like the Coopers’ Brewery fiasco — when it comes to shaping our public posture. As I’ve often pointed out in these posts, the word ‘apocalypse’ really just means ‘revelation.’ And so we, again, are having not just the state of the world revealed — but the ‘hope-less’ state of the church and our engagement with the world around us.

While some see the legalisation of same sex marriage as a ‘precipice’ that we jumped from, and we’re now plummeting off wondering if we packed a parachute, I’m more inclined to challenge that narrative on two fronts — firstly, the political debate was about the political reality, so it was really about marriage — and the result of the postal survey and subsequent legalisation of same sex marriage only impacts this magazine decision because it introduced same sex weddings (and thus, a new market in the wedding industry), which is explicitly the same thing the political campaign was about. And secondly, politics is downstream from culture — and the cultural horse bolted on this issue long before the postal survey. This moment was coming with the cultural winds that saw most commercial interests in Australia line up behind the ‘yes’ vote, because before it was a political reality the hearts and minds of the average Aussie were won by the narrative of progress and equality. There’s no precipice, the marriage vote was the last domino to fall in a long line of other legal issues (that, in honesty, did need to fall — like the criminalisation of homosexuality, and the ‘gay panic’ defence for killing somebody if you thought they were gay and trying to have their way with you).

This, incidentally, is why the official ‘no’ campaign did us a terrible disservice in making it about consequences and not at all about anything positive about traditional marriage and why we’d want to keep it as a social and cultural good, and keep it exclusively for heterosexual couples. Perhaps they knew that would be an impossible sell…

So here’s a hope-full suggestion.

It’s time we Christians poured our effort into showing why our vision of marriage — God’s vision — is compelling, and not just for straight people. It’s compelling because marriage is a ‘created thing’ that reveals something about God and his love, and ultimately about his plans and love for us.

It’s time we realised that in the era of the Royal Commission, and in the wake of not just the postal survey but years of the gay community in Australia campaigning against unjust laws that were justified as ‘Judeo-Christian’ — we have no social capital.

If we’re going to burn actual capital it’s time to stop spending it trying to prop up a status quo that no longer exists; we should spend it first in making recompense for those times our institutions have failed, then we should devote our significant human and social capital to positive and hopeful contributions to the public conversation.

We should throw our weight — in volunteer hours, energy, attention, and dollar terms — into improving the lot of our LGBTIQA+ neighbours, in anti-bullying campaigns, in creating safe spaces where they can explore and develop their identity in conversation with Christians rather than across picket lines or ideological boundaries, we should spend time listening to minority voices in our community (and in our churches). This would start rebuilding some of the capital we’ve done our best to pour into the toilet, one $1 million donation to the ‘no campaign,’ or campaign against bullying programs, or letter about the right to expel gay kids and fire gay teachers at a time (not that it started with any of these).

We should invest capital in telling stories of our own — stories about marriage and what it means — not about why others are wrong, but about why God’s way is good, true, and beautiful. We should realise that making media — whether online, in print, or on television — comes at a cost; a cost proportionate with how beautiful it is. And we should start investing in a long term campaign for hearts and minds. For many years the church was a significant part of ‘the wedding industry’ in Australia; we’ve lost our monopoly, but it still raises revenue for many churches (and ministers). We could direct a proportion of that income to promoting marriage, and having good material to distribute when preparing a couple for marriage seems a no brained. White looked like it had a cracking aesthetic. We should back it; perhaps to model an inclusive conversation about love and marriage, funded by Christians, or perhaps as an ideological contribution to the public conversation funded by Christians.

We should stop writing prophetic, apocalyptic, think-pieces that offer no solutions, only commentary — and bad commentary at that — and start turning to the pages of our own divinely inspired apocalyptic text — a text all about what life looks like for faithful witnesses of king Jesus, the bridegroom, in the world that executed him on a device designed to bring maximum public humiliation. A text about our hope in the ruins. A text about a white wedding. The wedding of the lamb, whose bride is the church (Ephesians 5).

“Hallelujah!
    For our Lord God Almighty reigns.
Let us rejoice and be glad
    and give him glory!
For the wedding of the Lamb has come,
    and his bride has made herself ready.
Fine linen, bright and clean,
    was given her to wear.” — Revelation 19:6-8

We should stop saying ‘I told you so’ — stop feeling hopeless and aggrieved — stop playing the victim — stop being doomsday prophets with no map for turning back — and start living as the hopeful bride of the crucified and risen Lord Jesus. Dressed in white.

Our hope does not rest in a redirection of the public narrative, or a return to ‘Christian values’ — our hope doesn’t rest in religious freedom, or our unfettered access to the free market on a level playing field. Our hope doesn’t rest in marriage here and now. This future with Jesus is our hope. Nobody in this world can stifle it. It’s time that hope re-captured our hearts and imaginations (and that we spent less time worrying whether other people think we’re pretty enough).

On religious freedom (my submission to the Federal Government’s Expert Panel on Religious Freedom)

In the wash up from the changes to the Marriage Act and the constant presence of ‘religious freedom’ in the debate, the Federal Government appointed a committee to investigate religious freedoms in Australia. I was part of a committee effort from our denomination which you can read here, but also chucked in my own submission online (submissions close on Wednesday). Here’s what I wrote.


 

To the Expert Panel on Religious Freedom,

I wear many hats. I am a husband and father. I am a pluralist. I am a secularist. I am an Australian citizen. I am a community volunteer. I am a neighbour. I am a friend. And I am a minister of religion in the Presbyterian Church of Australia. One thing remains true as I wear each of these hats — I am a follower of Jesus; a Christian; and this fundamentally informs each of these roles I undertake in our society. As I wear each of these hats — often simultaneously — my contribution to society beyond the protection of my own interests relies on certain freedoms that we take for granted in Australia; freedoms that I believe have been essential in building our nation, and freedoms that I believe are important (though not essential) for our shared future.

It seems clear to me that the definitions around many of these hats have become unclear, especially in the public conversation about religious freedoms and the role of faith in our modern democratic nation; perhaps nowhere more pointedly than in the recent debate around same sex marriage. The postal survey represented a pivotal moment in the conversation around religious freedom in Australia; a turning point, perhaps, in our secular, liberal, pluralist, democracy; wearing several of my hats it seemed to me that there is widespread confusion about the nature of our democracy and the relationship between institutional religious groups, religious individuals, our neighbours, and those engaged in political decision making. I write to tease out some of this confusion and to make a simple suggestion about the nature of religious belief in our nation, and its connection to life in the public sphere, the commons, or the private sector — that is, life outside the ‘sacred’ space of religious property and the privacy of one’s own home; it seems to me that unless all parties to the conversation about religious freedom understand the nature of religious belief — even for minority communities or individuals — this process will disenfranchise and alienate religious adherents, and perhaps lead to a more fractured society, and a public space that only appears more harmonious because people and communities are withdrawing from participation in our common life for fear of consequences of making ones ‘private beliefs’ public.

As someone committed to a pluralist, secular, Australia, I chose to abstain in the Federal Government’s postal survey. I felt like I was being asked to vote for or against the religious freedom of others and remain uneasy about the precedent of putting such freedoms to a popular vote. I took this position because as a Christian, as someone who takes the Bible’s account of human nature as authoritative, I believe that each human is not only made in the image of God, but that we are created as worshippers, that each human, whether we worship a transcendent being or not, is fundamentally religious, that we are creatures who practice our beliefs about where ultimate meaning is found — that our actions are a mix of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, and that these motivations are often religious in nature, whether explicitly religious (in terms of participation in organised institutions or codified belief systems), or mirror religious practices — like rituals, sacrifice, and the pursuit of life according to some sense of meaning or purpose.

This is not a new or unique way of contemplating human nature or religious belief, it sits within a classical stream of Christian teaching, and can be found threaded through the Old Testament, expressed in the New Testament, perhaps most clearly in the words of the Apostle Paul who suggests those humans who don’t worship the God revealed to the world in the person of Jesus have “worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator” (Romans 1:25). I write this to explain, in part, how Christians understand secularism and pluralism. To live in a secular democracy is to live in a society where different religious views — or communities of people who worship differently — are united in some sort of secondary commitment, not united around a shared view of what is ultimate (that would be a theocracy), but agreeing to come together in disagreement on these questions to pursue common goods; agreeing to do this on the basis that no particular religious system sets the agenda or controls that which is held in common. Christians can participate in a secular democracy with great enthusiasm, using the freedom it affords to follow the example of Jesus Christ, pursuing the sacrificial love of our neighbours (even our enemies) free to proclaim our beliefs about what is true and good for humanity; the message that the God who made everything is knowable and that he is ‘reconciling all things to himself’ through Jesus (Colossians 1:20). We can do this knowing that people can and will disagree with us — that they will form their own communities and we can trust that they will also seek the good of their neighbours, and the community at large, from their particular beliefs; this is the sort of pluralism that our democracy — built on compromise between communities (religious or otherwise) — requires. As a Christian and an office holder in the institutional church I am the first to put up my hand to admit that Christians have, at times, sought to wield our influence — both historical and numerical — to limit the freedoms of others, and to pursue our own vision of the good human life through the laws of the land rather than through the appeal of our beliefs and practice to our neighbours; this failure on our part, and the attempts of Christians to limit the (essentially religious) freedom of others (in, for example, the marriage debate) may go some way towards explaining the pendulum swing against institutional religion in the public debate in Australia, but it does not necessarily justify the limitation of religious freedoms in our nation.

As a Presbyterian Minister I represent a stream of the Christian faith described as ‘protestant’ — tracing the fundamentals of our doctrine and practice back to the Protestant Reformation, a movement that celebrated its 500th anniversary last year; a movement launched by the reformer Martin Luther. The Reformation reiterated a view that religion is not simply a private matter; it is not what Australian poet Manning Clark described as ‘a shy hope in the heart’, but a fundamental conviction about truth and life in the the world that shapes action in private, at home, and at work. This conviction birthed what was labeled ‘the protestant work ethic’ — a commitment to vocation recapturing the words of the Apostle Paul in his letter to a church in Colossians, outlining how Christian belief leads to Christian living. Paul said “whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.”

The Reformation turned this principle (and others — perhaps especially that because of Jesus and the role he plays in bringing direct access to God for all who believe — we don’t need ‘religious’ middle men to come between us and God, or to teach with divine authority) into a doctrine described as ‘the priesthood of all believers’. Martin Luther wrote a letter to the German nobility outlining this belief and its implication that there is no essential difference between an employee of the institutional church — the clergy — and the average Christian in the community. He said:

“As St. Paul says (1 Cor. 12.), we are all one body, though each member does its own work, to serve the others. This is because we have one baptism, one Gospel, one faith, and are all Christians alike; for baptism, Gospel, and faith, these alone make spiritual and Christian people. Thus we are all consecrated as priests by baptism, as St. Peter says: “Ye are a royal priesthood, a holy nation” (1 Peter 2. 9)…”

The implications he draws from this position are that for those who hold these beliefs, every public function of a person — every hat one wears — is a God given vocation to be used in service of God and man. Every Christian is viewed as ‘priest’ — we’re all office bearers in God’s church.

“A cobbler, a smith, a peasant, every man, has the office and function of his calling, and yet all alike are consecrated priests and bishops, and every man should by his office or function be useful and beneficial to the rest, so that various kinds of work may all be united for the furtherance of body and soul, just as the members of the body all serve one another.”

This perhaps explains why so much of the conversation around changes to the Marriage Act focused on seemingly ancillary occupations like bakers and florists; for a Christian baker or Christian florist in this theological tradition (and many others), faith is not simply a private sacred matter but a position or belief that informs one’s approach to the workplace, and to life in public. Faith in Jesus — the belief that because he lived, died, was raised from the dead, and now rules from heaven as Lord and king — compels us to submit every inch of our life to him, and that in response to his great mercy to us we should love and serve others, and ‘offer our bodies as a living sacrifice’ (Romans 12:1), seeking to represent and honour him in word and deed. In the other immortal words of Luther, it is here we stand, we can do none else. Belief in Jesus can’t simply be compartmentalised as ‘private’, or put to the side and taken up again as we enter and leave our houses and church buildings.

When one couples these standard protestant positions — the “priesthood of all believers” and the “protestant work ethic” — it becomes clear why so many Christians in our community are concerned about religious freedoms that focus exclusively on private religious belief or those ‘public’ figures appointed by Christian institutions (the clergy). Another classic position in protestant (especially ‘reformed’) theology is the belief that there is no neat divide between ‘secular’ and ‘sacred’ — this is true, as outlined above, for the lives of adherents, but it is also true for how we view the world; public space in a secular democracy is not ‘secular’ in the sense that we believe God is absent, the apostle Paul taught that ‘in Jesus all things hold together’ (Colossians 1:17), and that ‘the earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it’ (1 Corinthians 10:26, where he quotes the Old Testament (Psalm 24:1) while explaining how the Corinthians should take part in ‘contested’ public life; life shared by worshippers of other gods).

It seems clear to me, as a minister of religion, and as a citizen, that it would be harmful to the unity of our nation — built on a commitment to disagreement (rather than on shared worship of a common ‘god’), to restrict religious freedoms to religious office bearers in ‘sacred space’ — to do so would be both to misunderstand the nature of religious belief and its link to practice (at least in my own tradition, where I speak with some expertise — but also, evidentially, in others), and would lead to people holding these religious convictions to withdraw from common life in public space to enclaves and private spaces; surely the best future for our nation is one where our diversity produces richness and resilience through civil disagreement and tolerance, rather than a fragmented nation where different communities withdraw into their own bubbles such that we are able to find less and less in common; less to unite us as citizens?

I thank you for your service of our community and nation in your consideration of this complex matter; I am praying for wisdom and endurance for you all as you work your way through submissions. As you do, I urge you to consider the nature of religious belief and its relationship to public life, or ‘life in the commons’ and the implications this has for notions of ‘secular’ and ‘sacred’ when making recommendations about religious freedom in Australia.

 

In Christ,

Rev Nathan Campbell

Presbyterian Church of Australia

Of slippery slopes, stairs, and stepping machines: how to be hopeful when the world is moving

The official ‘no’ campaign made their public presence about everything but marriage; they made it about the ‘slippery slope’ — particularly same sex parenting (robbing kids of a mum or dad), and a ‘radical gender ideology’ where ‘genderless marriage’ is the first step towards a marxist/queer agenda that is represented by Roz Ward’s Safe Schools. That is; they created a slippery slope.

The politicians responsible for orchestrating the postal survey and the proposed changes to marriage insisted this was a single issue vote, about one particular thing, the definition of marriage. Now. It’s not wrong to ask questions about trajectories and ramifications, and I do think handling it as a single issue was perhaps naive when it comes to understanding how integrated faith and practice is for religious people, but if you’re looking for the architects of the slippery slope; it’s us; if the no case is correct, there’s now a political mandate for the government to rapidly slide the whole way down the rainbow without each step being checked, weighed, and balanced.

It might feel like this is a slippery slope if we want to feign ignorance (or actually be ignorant) of the campaign for gay rights in Australia; but what if we take a longer term view of things around, for example, one of the key players in the push for same sex marriage. And what if we see this not as the start of a slope, or the edge of a precipice, but rather a next step. And what if there’s actually a legitimate case to be made that at least some of those steps where steps up.

One of the faces of the push for marriage equality was Tasmania’s Rodney Croome. He’s one of the architects of this path (whether slope or steps), and here’s my case that this isn’t a slippery slope — or if it is that it’s an incredibly slow slope with ample opportunity to change course or even stand up… Croome was an activist for gay rights in 1994 (and before that). In 1994, Croome and his partner presented themselves to the police, in Hobart, to be charged with the crime of being homosexual. Now. Maybe that was the start of an inevitable slope that leads to Safe Schools, or maybe it was just one step towards getting rid of some laws that are actually unjust restrictions of conscience that are coupled with a profound and legal right to truly discriminate against somebody for a choice about their identity and community of practice… The longer view makes something like a campaign for same sex marriage seem more like a further step in a journey than like one of those scenes in a movie where the floor drops out from under the protaganist and they endure a rapid descent (hopefully into a pile of freshly made laundry, or a rubbish bin, rather than flames or snakes).

Perhaps if we had this perspective we’d be able to better hear and understand why these LGBTIQ+ activists aren’t content with marriage equality and are moving on to the next thing on their list; the next ‘step’ towards the Australia they want to live in. Perhaps we should see more of an analogy between how they are pursuing their trajectory and the argument we’re making for religious freedom.

The Australian Presbyterian magazine ran a piece about the threats to religious freedom wrapped up in marriage equality. It included this piece. I’d love you to flip the logic and the actors around; picture Croome and his partner before they were eventually successful in decriminalising homosexuality in Tasmania.

“It will intimidate religious leaders (and their insurers) with the relentless threat of anti-discrimination lawsuits; traditional moral teaching will become something to be whispered in private. There ain’t room in this village for both state-enforced homosexual orthodoxy and Christian moral orthodoxy”

Let me rewrite it the way I see it… for a bit more context, Croome’s decision to front the police was because the Federal Government brought in (in keeping with the UN) a right to sexual privacy that had not previously existed and Croome wanted to test that this law did, in fact, invalidate Tasmania’s laws (the UN had also specifically ruled against Tasmania’s laws).

“It’s hard to get insurance (or legal recognitions) for our relationship with the law actually declaring our relationship illegal; homosexual relationships are something we only whisper about in private. This village state-enforces Christian moral orthodoxy against homosexual orthodoxy.”

The incline on that slippery slope is pretty steep; so it’s been hard for the LGBTIQ+ community to climb to this point.

I’ve had some pushback in the last couple of days about my commitment to a generous pluralism; here’s a failure of pluralism right here — where it was not offered to the gay community. This is why they are marching (literally at Mardi Gras) towards a particular victorious outcome. Because we weren’t generous or pluralistic. Now that the boot is, perhaps, on the other foot, and coming down on us, we have the opportunity to take our lumps and learn our lesson.

And look, I like religious freedom, I’d like us to use our religious freedom to be religious rather than secular; and I think we get it by better explaining that there is no secular sacred divide for Christians (and we probably need to explain this to Christians as well). I think generous pluralism is actually, short of state controlled monotheism, the only system that will allow religious freedom in a properly secular democracy. It’s also the answer to the potentially new state-controlled monotheism if the doomsday prophets are right.

My favourite book I read this year was Alyssa Wilkinson and Robert Joustra’s How To Survive The Apocalypse: Zombies, Cylons, Faith, and Politics, at the End of the World. They make two points that are important for this post. First, that pluralism is the hopeful and virtuous way forward, even if we fail, even if we’re on a slippery slope, or over a precipice. They reject responding to change with fear.

“The better answer to the fear that accompanies a Secular age is to refocus the work of politics to finding common cause; locating, building, and maintaining overlapping consensus among our many and multiple modernities. There is no turning the clock back to pre-apocalypse times. There is only identifying and building a renewed consensus. This is what Taylor describes as a project worthy of any society deserving of the name “secular.” He argues that we need a radical redefinition of the secular. What should be called secular, he says, is not the inverse of the religious, but the (proper) response of the political community (the state) to diversity…

… It calls for more, not less, pluralism in the public sphere. It calls for that understanding and those practices to be tested in dialogue to find areas of overlapping concern and agreement.”

Wilkinson and Joustra quote Alisdair MacIntyre (author of After Virtue) to suggest this dialogue requires “constructive disagreement” where we speak frankly and honestly (and publicly) about “the places people won’t agree, the places we might agree, and the places that will be resolutely ruled out of bounds,” and then we figure out how to negotiate that into how the law works and how public space is stewarded. They quote political scientist Daniel Philpott, who says this sort of rationale requires us to both hear and speak “full rationales — untruncated, unsanitized, unfiltered,” dialoguing towards” mutual understanding with those different views.” I’m not seeing that from either pole in the culture wars, or the fallout of the changes to the Marriage Act, we certainly, as Presbyterians, didn’t practice this seeking understanding in our contributions to the postal survey debate (or participation in the Coalition for Marriage).

Second, and most importantly for the slippery slope v steps debate… Wilkinson and Joustra argue that in the scheme of human history, and also in the divine story of cyclical judgment and restoration, or exile and return, we can be sure that no changes before the new creation are permanent and that monolithic societies are incredibly difficult to maintain (especially in the west with a bent towards individualism). Or, as they express it in a mantra throughout the book:

“Society moves in all directions. It’s not “one thing,” which is to say that it’s not just monolithic “society,” and it’s not headed purely up or down at any moment.”

We’re not on a slippery slope; or stairs; as a society we’re on a step machine… moving upwards and downwards… and perhaps in less binary directions — left and right.

So what do we do with this?

If it isn’t just a slippery slope to our doom; or the air over a precipice where we wait for God to blow us back on to solid ground…

If society is an elliptical machine that gives us reason for hope, rather than despair, so long as we as a community of people bound together by a story and a common practice (being the church) have a vision for where we’re going and how that might be pursued for not just our good but the good of our neighbours.

“In Between Babel and Beast, the theologian Peter Leithart argues that there is both good news and bad news for this new politics. First, the good news — we need not abandon the city. The public work of realizing the best of the motivating ideals of our age is work for religious people, Christians and others alike, that can bear and even has borne real fruit. The battle moves in all directions.

But the bad news: Babylon, into which we may pour our energies here, in our lifetime, will never be the New Jerusalem. We don’t build it, any more than we are the point or end of the story, the lodestar of authenticity. We can sing the Lord’s song, but we don’t build the Lord’s city.

Like Daniel, we must make compromises. That means we must temper our expectations and not become defeated when everything is not perfect, yet. But some compromises are better, and others are worse. Wisdom is knowing the difference. Our popular culture is already very busy trying to discern that. Taylor writes, “As Pascal said about human beings, modernity is characterized by grandeur as well as by misère. Only a view that embraces both can give us the undistorted insight into our era that we need to rise to its greatest challenge.”

We might look to someone like Croome as an example; patiently working towards the good and freedom of our community (and surely the removal of unjust laws have been for the good of us all) while working towards the good of his community within that community (and there’s no doubt that the change to the marriage laws and other future agenda items are seen by this community as the path towards their good).

What would it look like for us to do this as people marinated in and formed by the Gospel?

That’s what we have to figure out.

Why I’m a generous pluralist, not a pluralist by pragmatism (or a pragmatist), and why we should be ready for a diet of worms

Nobody likes me everybody hates me
I think I’ll go eat worms
Long ones, short ones, fat ones skinny ones,
Ones that squiggle and squirm
Bite their heads off suck their guts out throw their skins away
Nobody knows that I eat worms, 3 times a day — A song I used to sing as a kid


Image: WWE’s old worm-eating character, The Boogeyman

 

Stephen McAlpine is always worth reading even though he’s a little older, grumpier and more pessimistic than I am. I like him a lot. In his most recent post asking where the progressive Christian voices speaking about religious freedom are he has a dig at those who write blog posts spruiking ‘a confident pluralism’… I’m reasonably sure he’s not talking about me. But just in case others are drawing a link, I thought I’d spell out what my motivations for generous pluralism are; that it’s not that I expect (necessarily) we’ll get a better deal from those who disagree with us, but rather that it is the right position for us to adopt.

“I read blog posts which predict a confident pluralism in Australia which will only target extreme homophobia, as if the recent brittle pluralism on this matter (Coopers anyone?) is merely an anomaly, a blip on the radar that will magically correct itself with the objective is achieved.”

Just to be clear this is not my prediction; but also to be clear, my diagnosis of most conservative Christian responses to same sex marriage here and abroad is that the loudest voices have not practiced a confident pluralism but a zero sum game (and to be charitable to John Inazu who coined the ‘confident’ qualifier for pluralism, or at least trademarked it, his confidence, like Stephen McAlpine’s is largely eschatological and theological, not political).

The snowball that started the Stephen McAlpine internet juggernaut; of which I am a fan; was his series of posts on life in exile. He concluded we’re not in Athens but Babylon, my response was to suggest that the distinction between Athens, Babylon, and Rome is probably not one that Revelation makes — we’re still in Rome, and the question is ‘how should the church operate when in Rome?’ We should consider ourselves operating in the world that crucified Jesus, despite thousands of years of the church influencing western culture.

My paradigm is not one of navigating the easiest road for the church in these times; but making sure we’re being crucified for following Jesus (doing the right thing), rather than for using ‘the sword’ to try to make other people follow Jesus (the culture wars/modern crusades/wrong thing). If you’re seeing something other than cruciformity driving my agenda I’d invite you to first try to understand my words through that lens, and if you still can’t see it, to call me out.

The Babylonian metaphor Stephen often uses (most recently in his cracking post on Israel Folau) is a useful one, provided we see Babylonian exile as involving powerful counter-narratives about humanity that go a long way beyond sex, and sexual ethics as the last thing the church is being called to give up, not the first. Like Stephen, and others, I see Daniel as a powerful motiff or model for how to respond to life in Babylon, but I see Jesus operating in the Roman empire as a subversive alternative (and victorious) king who wins through crucifixion as an even better model (and Daniel as a ‘type’ of Jesus). Like Stephen my confidence is eschatological, not political. Like Stephen, my solution to this diagnosis is that the church should be the church; and so when I pursue a confident pluralism and generously engage with some of the more aggressive members of the homosexual campaign against religious freedom being exercised I’m not doing it to silence the Christians they are silencing (though I do wish those Christians would practice pluralism), I’m not doing it to secure an easier run from the world, I’m doing it to model an alternative — that I’m ultimately not confident will be politically effective, but I am confident is effectively the right thing to do. I’m trying to practice a political ethic derived from the Golden Rule, operating not just as an approach we take in our relationships as individuals, but corporately.

For the record I think it’s highly likely that it’s going to feel like we’re eating worms, or being fed to them, as Christians in Australia if we don’t radically change our approach (and even if we do). And this might be good for us. It might be deserved. But it might also be the cost of following Jesus.

Why not pragmatism?

Once upon a time, I was reminded the other day, I called myself a ‘Gospel utilitarian’ — I thought the best thing to do was the pragmatic thing to do that secured the best results for Gospel proclamation. I wrote about this. I was convinced. And then I went to Bible college and thought more about how important ethos is for our proclaiming of the Gospel (logos), how you can’t just be about results but first have to cultivate virtue, and this virtue then amplifies what we have to say; the ethos of the Gospel of the crucified king is cruciformity. This is why Paul both consistently appeals to the example of Jesus (and his own example) but also retells how the example of Jesus has caused him to be beaten and bruised for the Gospel (2 Corinthians 10-11, Galatians 6).

The pragmatic approach described by John Stackhouse in his ABC piece (quoted yesterday), at least as I understand it, calculates a political strategy based on achievable results; it’s is essentially utilitarian, seeing politics as requiring dirty hands or compromise (which it absolutely does), but seeing the potential results as worth it. I can understand people landing on this position, though much of what is good about it you also get with pluralism (which is why I think David Brooks only identified two categories of political engagement in his piece I quoted yesterday). I’m not a pluralism as a ‘dirty hands’ option, but because I think it’s how you best keep ‘clean hands’ in a dirty world (for more on the hands metaphor see this piece). I understand and appreciate pragmatism, having held what I think is a fairly similar position, but I think pluralism (which looks like dirty hands to the idealist) is its own expression of virtue ethics; it says ‘as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord’ and requires us to set about building our own virtue forming institutions (especially the church), or rather it allows the Spirit to go about God’s business of transforming us into the image of Christ, as God’s handiwork — created in him to do good works, but allows other people the freedom to pursue their own handiwork. This is the best way, I believe for us to be able to proclaim the Gospel, and seek to persuade others to join our communities, or adopt our (true) monotheism.

Why then pluralism? How the Golden rule is different from ‘treat others as they’re going to treat you’

As I articulated in yesterday’s post about pluralism being preferable to idealism, there are many ways one might approach the fractured world we live in where we do face an aggressive polytheism that wants to eradicate a (perceived as aggressive or oppressive) monotheism (this polytheism is especially the secular idolatry of sex and individual liberty, so long as that liberty conforms to the collective mores). I don’t think we can totally blame the other at this point; the church (institutionally) has earned a reputation for trying to make people outside the church conform to our own patterns via politics, and being too slow to let go of that chokehold as our culture has become more diverse. This is where I believe pluralism is the right thing to do, but also why I don’t believe pluralism will achieve a desirable outcome for us politically, because mostly the people who follow the Golden Rule, are those who follow the golden ruler, Jesus, not ‘golden statues’. The golden rule is a subversive ethic because our default isn’t to treat people as we would have them treat us, but treat them as they’ve treated us (or as we’ve perceived it) or as they might treat us in the future. The self-seeking default is to hold on to power and play the zero sum game of ‘I win/they lose’ for as long as possible. Christians still playing this game have not realised that we lost the numbers a long time ago and now we’re systemically losing the sympathy of our neighbours and reinforcing the ‘oppressor’ narrative; so we shouldn’t be surprised when we become oppressed. My concern is that we get oppressed for the right stuff — faithfully proclaiming Jesus. Not the wrong stuff — being political oppressors, no matter how well intentioned, of those who do not worship Jesus.

Pluralism is where I think you  land if you take a communitarian approach to life in this world, and want the freedom for the church to be the church (religious freedom), seeing that as a good thing. Personally, I am ok with the church being the church without religious freedom, that’s been how the church has operated in many other times and places (still); and God will still freely be God even if those proclaiming the Gospel are in chains; his word, as the book of Acts finishes, will continue unhindered.

Pluralism is what it looks like to say “I want our community to have the freedom to define ourselves and live according to our vision of the good, so I will treat other communities built around different visions of the good with the same freedom.”  The government in a secular nation has a responsibility to not have a state religion, the government in a liberal democracy has a responsibility to uphold the freedoms of its citizens but to balance those freedoms with the freedoms of others; this is a politically coherent position in our framework, but building an ethic around what works politically is another form of pragmatism. For me, pluralism isn’t primarily a politically smart or socially defendable position, it is those things because it seems to me to be the right thing to do when you have many communities formed around many religions, and people with no religious affiliation forming their identity around other visions of a good life; pluralism is the right thing to do (as opposed to aggressive/oppressive monotheism or polytheism) because it is what I would have people who disagree with me offer me. It’s the right thing to do even when they don’t or won’t. And let me be clear, I don’t expect them to, ultimately, because I believe pluralism is only really something you can offer from a position of absolute confidence and certainty, or from genuine epistemic humility. You either have to be so confident that your view will ultimately be vindicated (in the Christian case ‘by God’, in other cases ‘by history’ or their gods) that you are able to operate with charity to those you disagree with, a sort of ‘there but for the grace of God go I’ approach; or so genuinely humble about the views that you hold and open to being persuaded that you want to afford the opportunity for people to persuade you to every other group, a sort of ‘it’s possible I only know this by God’s grace, or I might actually be wrong about everything’ approach. It’s possible to be both (which is where I think generosity kicks in over confidence as a qualifier for pluralism). I don’t think modern secular ideologies have either the confidence (built from thousands of years of tradition and a coherent and compelling story) or the humility to play this game. There are certainly good reasons why oppressed minorities don’t feel this confidence based on how they’ve been wrongly treated, so I’m not condemning the passion of those who are fighting hard against their perceptions of an oppressive reality, that’s not my point; my point is that Christians have every reason to be confident, charitable, humble and generous in offering this sort of pluralism even to those who would crucify us, and even if thye do, because our confidence is not in earthly politics and human recognition and affirmation, but in God. I really love this quote I found in a book somewhere a long time ago. I come back to it regularly:

Incarnation means that God enables divinity to embody humanity.  Christians, like Jesus, are God’s incarnations, God’s temples, tabernacling in human flesh (John 1:14; Phil. 2:3-8).  Christians, spiritually transformed into the image of God, carry out God’s ministry in God’s way. Frequently incarnationalists relate to seekers from other world religions personally and empathetically (as Jesus taught Nicodemus).  Sometimes, however, they declare God’s social concerns by shaking up the status quo and “cleaning out the temple.”  The end result of incarnation in a non-Christian world is always some form of crucifixion.” — Gailyn Van Rheenen, Engaging Trends in Missions, 2004

We can confidently engage with others personally and empathetically — seeking to persuade but not restrict those who hold to other views — and even be crucified, because of the God we believe is at work in and through us.

The Daniel “Diet of Worms” Diet

One of my favourite recent posts from Stephen McAlpine was his ‘four Ds’ look at what it means to be a church shaped by Daniel’s life in Babylon; where the church defies, declares, dies and is delivered. I’ve always found the idea of a ‘Daniel Diet’ (popularised in some books in your local Christian book retailer) a relatively bizarre take on Daniel, but there is a certain sort of ‘diet’ Daniel anticipates for Christians (by first anticipating it for Jesus). I think Stephen nails it. There’s also a certain sort of optimistic mocking of worldly power in the light of who God is and his hand being at work in the world, I like the scholarly view that the Book of Daniel is a satirical critique of human empires and worldly power.

One of the better books I’ve read on political theology and strategy in the secular age is How To Survive The Apocalypse, authors Alissa Wilkinson and Robert Joustra have a slightly different take on the Babylon motiff; they point out that in our modern age we don’t have a Nebuchadnezzar; our individualism means we’ve thrown down any institutional authority and replaced it with all of us clamouring to be king; a sort of anarchy where different communities or tribes (or individuals) are at war, just like in The Hunger Games (an example they cite). This war certainly profits some ‘king like’ sectors of the corporate realm — we’ve replaced politics with the market, or politics now serves the market).

“The question for politics today is how to build Babylon after Nebuchadnezzar has been dragged through the streets and hung at the gates.” — How To Survive The Apocalypse

They’re not pessimistic though, following Charles Taylor they suggest that change always moves simultaneously in a bunch of directions and our modern storytelling reveals a dissatisfaction with this sort of world; there might be a hope that we can patch things back together and that the church might be a part of this. But that will require a sort of uncompromised willingness to compromise; or a ‘faithful compromise’; we need to learn from Daniel, and perhaps, more recently Martin Luther, who has his own ‘diet’ where he pursued faithful monotheism within the confines of the church. We need to be both ‘faithful’ in our own community, and pluralist or compromising in the community at large. Both confident and humble. It is possible. Here’s Luther’s ‘Diet of Worms’ diet for faithfulness (ok, I know this is a bad pun).

Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. May God help me. Amen. — Martin Luther, Diet of Worms (like most historians, I don’t believe he actually said “here I stand”… which is a shame).

We need to have Luther’s preparedness to stand for what we believe, and be crucified, but Daniel’s readiness to be part of the world that was happy to throw him to the lions, committed to its good (and optimistic in such a way that it fosters generosity). Here’s Wilkinson and Joustra:

“This may sound a bit unsatisfying, but it’s also the context for the hard work of making culture. It is a call to proximate and slow justice, to work among the ruins of a Secular age because it is our age, and we are responsible to find, restore, and build on the best of its motivating ideals. That’s Chief Astrologer Daniel kind of territory: making faithful compromise, resisting what needs resisting, changing where change can be made, building where the best is already present. Maybe the often-repeated Jeremiah invocation to “seek the welfare of the city” is just a good Hebrew summary of Taylor’s argument to find and build on the best of the motivating ideals of our Secular age. Nobody argues Babylon is or will be the City of God. But it can be better than it is now, and we can be part of that work…”

They touch on pluralism, identifying a sort of listless and historically radical pluralism operating in our world that defaults to ‘no religion’ and the destruction of institutions, but suggesting the answer to a world that probably won’t give us the pluralism we might desire is, counter-intuitively (or golden rule shaped) more pluralism, not less.

“… the better answer to the fear that accompanies a Secular age is to refocus the work of politics to finding common cause; locating, building, and maintaining overlapping consensus among our many and multiple modernities. There is no turning the clock back to pre-apocalypse times. There is only identifying and building a renewed consensus. This is what Taylor describes as a project worthy of any society deserving of the name “secular.” He argues that we need a radical redefinition of the secular. What should be called secular, he says, is not the inverse of the religious, but the (proper) response of the political community (the state) to diversity…

It calls for more, not less, pluralism in the public sphere. It calls for that understanding and those practices to be tested in dialogue to find areas of overlapping concern and agreement.”

This will hurt. It’ll probably be incredibly costly for many of us; but it’s the right thing to do and our confidence is not in the politics of this world, but the polis of the next. Not the cities of our age, but the city of God. But this is both our diet (in the trial sense) and our diet (in the suck it up sense). Here we stand, we can do none else.

 

Why generous pluralism is a better ideal than idealistic purism and provides a better future for our broad church (or why I resigned from GIST)

This week I resigned from a committee I’d been on since 2011, I was at the time of resigning, the longest serving current member. I resigned because I did not and could not agree with the statement the committee issued on the same sex marriage postal survey, and I wanted to freely and in good faith publicly say why I think it is wrong, and to stand by my previously published stance on the plebiscite.

Our two-fold purpose is to equip believers in Presbyterian Church of Queensland congregations to:
a) live faithfully for Jesus in a secular society and
b) engage in gospel-hearted apologetics that point to the great hope we have in Jesus.

The Gospel In Society Today Committee’s statement of purpose,

In short, I did not think the committee’s paper fulfilled either aspects of its charter — it is not ‘Gospel-hearted apologetics’ in that there is nothing in it that engages particularly well with the world beyond the church in such a way that a case for marriage as Christians understand it might convince our neighbours of the goodness of marriage, or the goodness of Jesus who fulfils marriage in a particular way; nor do I believe it effectively equipped believers to live faithfully for Jesus in a secular society; instead, it equipped believers who were already going to vote a particular way to keep voting that way and to have some Gospel-centred reasoning to do so. I’m not convinced the way it encourages people to vote or speak about that vote, or understand the situation grapples well with our secular context; as someone not committed to a no vote already, I found the paper unpersuasive even after a significant review process.

But there was also a deeper reason for my resignation (resigning over just one paper would not be a sensible course of action) — this paper reflects a particular approach to political engagement in a fractured and complicated world that I do not support, and there was no evidence the committee would adopt an alternative strategy. I resigned because the committee failed to practice the generous pluralism that I believe the church should be practicing inside and outside our communities (on issues that aren’t matters of doctrine — there’s a difference between polytheism and pluralism). I had asked for our committee to put forward the views of each member of the committee rather than the majority, because the committee’s remit is to ‘equip believers in our churches to engage in Gospel-hearted apologetics’ and ‘to live faithfully for Jesus in a secular society’ — and I believe part of that is equipping believers to operate as generously as possible with people we disagree with in these complicated times.

The statement issued by the committee is no Nashville Statement; it is an attempt to be generous to those we disagree with, without offering a solution to a disagreement that accommodates all parties (or even as many parties as imaginable); it is also an idealistic document, and so as it seeks to push for an ideal outcome it represents a failure to listen and engage well with other people who hold other views — be they in our churches, or in the community at large. It is this failure to listen that led me to believe my energy would be better spent elsewhere, but also that leads me to so strongly disagree with the paper that I am publishing this piece.

This is not, I believe, the way forward for the church in a complicated and contested secular world; it will damage our witness and it represents the same spirit to push towards an ideal ‘black and white’ solution in a world that is increasingly complicated. I’m proud of this same committee’s nuanced work on sexuality and gender elsewhere, and don’t believe this paper reflects the same careful listening engagement with the world beyond the church and the desires of the people we are engaging with (and how those desires might be more fulfilled in knowing the love of Jesus). By not understanding these desires (not listening) our speech will not be heard but dismissed. This paper is meant to serve an internal purpose for members of our churches (so to persuade people to vote no), but it is also published externally on our website without any clarification that it is not to be read as an example of Gospel centered apologetics, so one must conclude if one reads it online, that this is a paper that serves both purposes of the committee.

I’m not the only voice speaking out in favour of pluralism, nor am I claiming to be its smartest or best spokesperson. John Inazu’s book Confident Pluralism and his interview in Cardus’ Comment magazine gave me a language to describe what I believe is not just the best but the only real way forward in what Charles Taylor calls our ‘secular age’ — where the public square is a contested space accommodating many religious and non religious views. If we want to resist the harder form of secularism which seeks to exclude all religious views from the public square, it seems to me that we either need a monotheistic theocracy (but whose?) or a pluralistic democracy that accommodates as many views as possible or acceptable; and this requires a certain amount of imagination and a sacrifice of idealism. The thing is, for many of us who’ve been brought up in an environment that defaults to the hard secular where the sexual revolution is assumed (ie anyone under about 38, or those who are a bit older but did degrees in the social sciences), we’ve already, generally, had to contest for our beliefs and adopt something like a pluralism. There are ways to prevent pluralism — like home schooling or insularly focused Christian education, but if people have grown up in a ‘public’ not stewarded by a particular stream of Christianity that deliberately excludes listening to the world, or if they are not particularly combative and idealistic types who have played the culture wars game from early in their childhood, then they are likely to have adopted something that looks pluralistic.

Here’s a quote from John Inazu’s interview with James K.A Smith, from Comment:

“JKAS: What have you learned since your book has come out? Would you already do something differently based on how it’s been received, whether by religious or non-religious audiences?

JI: What’s particularly true of millennial audiences, whether religious or secular, is that, as a descriptive matter, the reality of pluralism is already well-ingrained in their lives. This is their existence, so it’s not surprising to them that we have deep differences and we encounter people who are quite unlike us, because that’s how most of them have lived their lives. That’s less true with older generations.

Where I’ve seen the most resistance from the religious side of things is with a concern about getting too close to people who don’t share our values. That has always struck me as odd because the gospel example here is Jesus going into very messy spaces and being the light in those spaces.”

But it’s also not just Inazu who has spoken of pluralism; it’s also John Stackhouse in a recent piece for the ABC Religion and Ethics portal. In a piece titled Christians and Politics: Getting Beyond ‘All’ or ‘Nothing’, Stackhouse says:

“In the light of this reality, we can see now that there are three kinds of people who undertake political action.

The ideologue has it easiest. He simply asks himself, in any situation on any issue, what’s ultimately right. Then he does everything he can to realize that ideal. That’s the way many Christians today are engaging in political action, whether on the left, right, or whatever. If we believe that abortion is wrong, then we work to outlaw it. If we think that gay marriage is consonant with Christian values, then we should make it legal. Graphic movies, globalization, immigration, climate change – whatever it is that we believe is right on any issue we simply seek to universalize by whatever means are available.

The pragmatist also starts with the question of what’s ultimately right. But then she carefully appraises the situation and works for what she deems is currently possible. If abortion is wrong, but the best she can do is get a ban on partial-birth abortions, she works for that. If gay marriage is wrong, but the best she can do is see “civil unions” instituted instead, then that’s what she aims at.

The pluralist asks about what’s ultimately right and what’s currently possible. But he interposes a third, admittedly odd, question between those two: What is penultimately right? Might it be God’s will that what is ultimately right not prevail immediately? The pluralist Christian might have strong views about x. He also is pragmatic enough to know that a total ban on alternatives to his views of x is politically inconceivable in his society. But he is also willing to consider the possibility that in God’s providence, it is better for there to be more than one view of x allowed in society. He might see that, yes, ultimately God’s will is to get rid of this or that, but penultimately it serves God’s purposes for society to allow this or that to remain. He doesn’t always come to that conclusion, to be sure, and often acts just like the pragmatist. But he at least asks that question, and sometimes acts differently as a result.”

Now, it’s interesting to me, particularly in the process that led to my resignation from the committee to consider how the dynamic between these three camps plays out within Christian community (it’s also interesting to consider how these three categories mesh with three I suggested using the metaphor of hands — clean hands, dirty hands, and busy hands in a post a while back); I’ll go out on a limb here and say idealism is always partisan, and so we need to be extremely careful when speaking as an institutional church if  we choose to pursue idealism in the secular political sphere (especially on issues of conscience where there are arguably many possible faithful ways to respond to a situation with an imagination that rejects the status quo served up to us by others); while pluralism is the way to maintain clean hands as an institution in that model.

The idealistic stream of Christianity will see the pluralist as not just compromising politically but theologically, because while the pluralist will be operating with perhaps something like a retrieval ethic, the idealist will operate with something more like a creational ethic or a deontological ethic or a divine command ethic and so see their path as clearly the right way, and thus other paths as wrong. The pragmatist will have sympathies in both directions, and the pluralist will seek to accommodate all these views so long as they still recognise the truth the idealists want to uphold (if they don’t they’ve become ‘polytheists’). I predict the church, generally (and specifically in our denominational context) will face a certain amount of problems if not be damaged beyond repair if we put idealists in charge and they tolerate pragmatists but exclude pluralists — especially if those who have grown up needing to be pluralists to hold their faith. A push to idealism rather than confident, or generous, pluralism, will alienate the younger members of our church who are typically not yet in leadership (and this dynamic has played out in the Nashville Statement), and it will ultimately lead to something like the Benedict Option, a withdrawal from the pluralistic public square into our own parallel institutions and private ‘public’.

It’s interesting to me that GIST fought so hard against withdrawing from the Marriage Act, because, in part, the government recognises marriage contracts entered into by the parties getting married and conducted by a recognised celebrant according to our marriage rites — so there is already a difference between how we view marriage and how the state does — pluralism — but has now reverted to arguing that the government doesn’t just recognise marriage according to a broader definition than we hold but promotes and affirms particular types according to a particular definition. I know that was our argument because it was the one I spoke to in the discussion at our General Assembly.

Here’s my last smarter person that me making the case for pluralism in these times, New York Times columnist David Brooks in his review of the Benedict Option. He opens by describing two types of Christians not three — and Stackhouse’s pragmatist and pluralist categories fall into the ‘ironist’ category.

“Faith seems to come in two personalities, the purist and the ironist. Purists believe that everything in the world is part of a harmonious whole. All questions point ultimately to a single answer. If we orient our lives toward this pure ideal, and get everybody else to, we will move gradually toward perfection.

The ironists believe that this harmony may be available in the next world but not, unfortunately, in this one. In this world, the pieces don’t quite fit together and virtues often conflict: liberty versus equality, justice versus mercy, tolerance versus order. For the ironist, ultimate truth exists, but day-to-day life is often about balance and trade-offs. There is no unified, all-encompassing system for correct living. For the ironists, like Reinhold Niebuhr or Isaiah Berlin, those purists who aim to be higher than the angels often end up lower than the beasts.”

If the purists run the show we’re going to end up with a very pure church that ultimately excludes most impure people ever feeling loved enough, or understood enough, to bother listening to what we have to say. Purists are necessary though to keep us from polytheism or losing the ideals. Here’s more from Brooks:

“My big problem with Rod [Dreher] is that he answers secular purism with religious purism. By retreating to neat homogeneous monocultures, most separatists will end up doing what all self-segregationists do, fostering narrowness, prejudice and moral arrogance. They will close off the dynamic creativity of a living faith. 

There is a beautiful cohesion to the monastic vocation. But most people are dragged willy-nilly into life — with all its contradictions and complexities. Many who experience faith experience it most vividly within the web of their rival loves — different communities, jobs, dilemmas. They have faith in their faith. It gives them a way of being within the realities of a messy and impure world.

The right response to the moment is not the Benedict Option, it is Orthodox Pluralism. It is to surrender to some orthodoxy that will overthrow the superficial obsessions of the self and put one’s life in contact with a transcendent ideal. But it is also to reject the notion that that ideal can be easily translated into a pure, homogenized path. It is, on the contrary, to throw oneself more deeply into friendship with complexity, with different believers and atheists, liberals and conservatives, the dissimilar and unalike.”

Brooks uses ‘Orthodox’ to qualify pluralism, Inazu ‘Confident’; I’ve settled on ‘generous’ (see my review of the Benedict Option for why).

If our denomination puts the idealists/purists in power without an ethos of including the pluralists (a functional pluralism) they will always by definition exclude the pluralists; whereas if we adopt a pluralistic approach to the public square (and to how we give voice to those who disagree with us within the camp of orthodoxy) then we will necessarily also give space to the pluralists. The choice we are faced with is a choice between a broad church and a narrow one. What’s interesting is that pluralism actually becomes an ideal in itself; one of the reasons I resigned is that I am fundamentally an idealist about pluralism, once it became clear this would not be our posture or strategy, I could no longer participate (because I was excluded, but also because I am an idealist and saw the purist-idealism as an uncompromising error).

So this is a relatively long preamble to establish why I think the position adopted by GIST (idealism/purism) and how it was resolved within the committee (idealism/purism/no pluralism) is deeply problematic and a strategic misfire in our bid to engage the world with ‘gospel hearted apologetics’.

Generous pluralism and ‘living faithfully for Jesus in a secular society’ and ‘engaging in gospel-hearted apologetics’ in a polytheistic world

GIST’s philosophy of ministry acknowledges that we live in a ‘secular society’ but maintain some sort of difference from that society by ‘living faithfully for Jesus’. The idealism that Stackhouse speaks of, or purism that Brooks speaks of, will fail if society is truly secular.

Idealism will fail us because at the heart of idealism is not simply a commitment to monotheism as the option we faithfully choose amongst many contested options in the broader public, but as the option the broader public should also choose as the temporal best (following Stackhouse’s definitions). So we get, in the GIST statement, sentences like, which holds out a sort of ideal around marriage (rather than a ‘faithful life’ within a secular society):

“Ultimately if we want to see our society return wholeheartedly to God’s design for marriage, we need people to embrace God’s solution to the sin which has led society away from it.” — GIST Statement on Same Sex Marriage Plebiscite

It seems unlikely to me that this ideal of society returning wholeheartedly to God’s design for marriage (essentially a Christian society) is possible this side of the return of Jesus (which is why I’m a pluralist), and I am confused about this being an ideal that we are to pursue as Christians.

Here’s why. I think this sort of wholehearted pursuit of God’s design for marriage was an ideal in Israel (but the sense that the ideal is not actually possible is found in God’s accommodation of divorce in the law of Moses, though he hates it and it falls short of the lifelong one flesh union). I think this ultimately is a form of the pursuit of monotheism for all in society; a noble ideal formed by an eschatology where every knee will one day bow to Jesus (Philippians 2). Israel was to pursue a sort of societal monotheism — this is why they were commanded to destroy all idols and idolatrous alters — utterly — when coming into the land (Deuteronomy 4-7) and to keep themselves from idols. There is no place for polytheism — or idolatry — within the people of God (and yet the divorce laws recognise there is a place for ‘non-ideal’ broken relationships and dealing with sin to retrieve certain good outcomes). Israel was to be monotheistic and to guard the boundaries of monotheism within its civic laws. We aren’t in Israel any more — but the church is the kingdom of God, and we as worshippers of Jesus are called to monotheism in how we approach life, this is why I believe it’s important that the church upholds God’s good design for marriage in a contested public square as part of our faithful witness to God’s goodness.

Now, while an Israelite was to destroy idols when coming into the land, and Christians are to ‘keep ourselves from idols’, outside of Israel our monotheism as Christians manifests itself in the Great Commission — the pursuit of worshippers of God — disciples — through worshipping God. When Paul hits the polytheistic city of Athens as a monotheist he adopts a pluralist strategy; one based on listening to the views of the people in Athens, on understanding their idolatrous impulses, and of confidently redirecting those impulses to the true and living God. His confidence is that when the Gospel is presented as a monotheistic truth in a pluralistic culture God will work to draw people back to his design for life.

Societal shifts towards God’s design have happened historically (think Constantine and Rome), and they do happen through Christians living and proclaiming the Gospel, but I’m not entirely sure that a Christian society should be our aim rather than a society of Christians (and the difference is how people who aren’t Christians are accommodated in the laws and institutions of each — ie whether the culture is pluralistic or monotheistic). Ancient cultures were also profoundly different to our individualistic, ‘democratised’ age in that the way to convert a culture was either to conquer it (think Babylon and Israel — or the spread of Babylonian religion to the hearts of most of those they captured (but not all Israel), or Rome and the imperial cult), or to convert the king. Kings functioned as high priests of the civic religion and the very image of God, and so to convert a king was to turn the hearts of the people to a different God (think Jonah in Nineveh, or Nebuchadnezzar’s response and edicts after witnessing God’s work in Daniel, and to some extent, Constantine in Rome). It is pretty unlikely that a society wide shift like this will happen when there isn’t a close connection to the ‘civil law’ and the religion of a nation.

“How then should Christians seek to influence the laws of the state in this area? In terms of voting the answer to this seems relatively straightforward. Since we’re being asked by the state what in our view would be best for our society, and seeing as God’s good design for marriage is best not just for Christians but for all people and for our society generally; we are encouraging Christians to vote ‘no’ in this plebiscite.” — The GIST Paper

I would argue this approach to voting is only straightforward if you adopt a purist-idealist position and reject pluralism as a valid good. That it isn’t actually straightforward that the best thing for our society is that non-Christians be conformed to our vision of human flourishing, and so our definition of marriage, without the telos — or purpose — of human flourishing and marriage as part of that being established first.

I’d also say this is an odd interpretation of what we are being asked. The question is not ‘what would be best for society’ — to approach it that way automatically leads to adopting an ‘idealist’ position; it begs the question. What we are being asked, literally, is “should the law be changed to allow same-sex couples to marry?” In a secular society that’s an entirely more complicated question about what communities and views a secular government should recognise in its framework. The government’s responsibility is to provide the maximum amount of compromise or breadth for its citizens that can be held by consensus. It’s a tough gig. The government’s definition of marriage, including no-fault divorce, is already different from the Christian view. I marry people according to the rites of the Presbyterian Church which includes and articulates a vision of marriage connected to the telos of marriage — the relationship between Jesus and the church; the government’s definition of marriage is broader than mine, but includes mine.

This is the point at which I disagree significantly with the paper (I also disagree with the way it treats recognition as affirmation, fails to listen to, understand, and respond to the ‘human rights’ argument for same sex marriage by simply blithely dismissing it, and how it sees secular laws as establishing ideals rather than minimums (the state can and does pursue ideals through incentives and campaigns, but there are no incentives being offered to gay couples to marry that they do not already receive). The law is a blunt instrument that recognises things held as common assumptions of the minimum standards of life together, like ‘robbery is wrong’ and governments can incentivise not-robbing with welfare payments, and prevent the evil of robbery by incentivising or subsidising local governments or businesses introducing better lighting and security. Ethics aren’t formed so much by law but by the development of ideals and virtues (and arguably this happens through narratives not law, which is why so much of the Old Testament law is actually narrative even in the little explanations of different rules).

Generous Pluralism, the GIST Paper, and the Priesthood of all believers

This GIST paper was adopted after a lengthy review process, and through much discussion including three face to face meetings and deliberation by flying minute. Throughout the course of the discussion (and before it) it became clear that there were different views about what ‘faithfully living for Jesus in a secular society’ looks like; and so what equipping believers to do that looks like. I suggested we put forward the best case for different responses (an alternative to the majority view, and for it to be clear who held it and who did not, on the committee. In the discussions around the paper the majority of the committee held that we did not want to “give credence” to views other than the no vote being what equips believers to live faithfully for Jesus; even while acknowledging that my position was legitimately within our doctrinal and polity frameworks. This was ultimately why I resigned.

I don’t believe this decision to exclude a possible way to live faithfully for Jesus (and what I think is the best way) fulfils the committee’s charter if there are actually legitimate faithful ways to abstain or vote yes.

I also this fails a fundamentally Reformed principle in how we think of believers, and this principle is part of why I think a confident or generous pluralism within the church, and within the boundaries of orthodoxy, is the best way to equip believers. A confident pluralism isn’t built on the idea that all ideas are equally valid, but rather that we can be confident that the truth will persuade those who are persuaded by truth. That we can be confident, in disagreement, that a priesthood of all believers do not need a priestly or papal authority to interpret Scripture and the times for them. Believing that such a committee writes to equip such a priesthood of all believers (those our charter claims we serve), and that they should apply their wisdom, submit to scripture, and participate in the world according to conscience is the best way to equip believers to live faithfully.

A position of generous pluralism applied to a secular society outside the church probably leads to abstaining, and possibly to voting yes, depending on your ethic (how much a retrieval ethic plays into your thinking and how much you think the law affirms or normalises rather than recognising and retrieving good things from relationships that already exist (where children already exist).

Because a confident, or generous, pluralism relies on the priesthood of all believers and trusts that Christians should come to their own position assessing truth claims in response to Scripture I’m relatively comfortable with space being made for people to hear views other than mine. An example of this is that I host the GIST website, free of charge, on my private server at my cost. People are reading their views at my expense, and I will keep doing this as an act of hospitality though I believe their views are wrong. I also host and only lightly moderate comments and critical responses to things I write. This is a commitment I have to listening, to dialogue, to hospitality, to accommodation of others, to the priesthood of all believers (and a confidence that the truth will persuade those who it persuades), and to pluralism — and the lack of this commitment from others on the committee is in favour of purism-idealism, is fundamentally, why I resigned from the committee.

While the GIST paper tries to hold the created order (or ‘marriage as a creation ordinance)’ in tension with the resurrection; following the Oliver O’Donovan ‘resurrection and moral order’ model (and this was part of our discussions as a committee); the problem with creational ethics (or arguments from God’s design/natural order) that establish a universal good for all people, even non-Christians, is that they do not, in my opinion, sufficiently recognise the supremacy of Jesus or how Jesus fulfils the law and the prophets (because ‘moral law’ is still law we find in the written law of Moses that Jesus claims is written about him). This is a point at which I diverge slightly from the capital R reformed tradition, but where I think I am probably prepared to argue I’m standing in the traditions of the Reformers (sola scriptura and the priesthood of all believers).

Turning to the Reformers for a model of a political theology from our secular context is interesting; the governments operating around the Reformation (for example the German nobility, or Calvin’s Geneva) were not secular but sectarian; and, for example, Luther wrote to the German nobility to call them to act as priests as part of the priesthood of all believers, rather than be led by the pope (a vital thing to convince them of if he was going to make space for the reformation). It’s fair to say that Calvin and Luther weren’t pluralists, they played the sectarian game at the expense of Catholicism or other forms of later Protestantism (see Luther’s Against The Peasants, and of course, his awful treatise on the Jews). When someone claims their political theology is consistent with the Reformed tradition and seeks to apply it to a secular democracy, I get a little concerned.

“It is pure invention that pope, bishops, priests and monks are to be called the “spiritual estate”; princes, lords, artisans, and farmers the “temporal estate.” That is indeed a fine bit of lying and hypocrisy. Yet no one should be frightened by it; and for this reason — viz., that all Christians are truly of the “spiritual estate,” and there is among them no difference at all but that of office, as Paul says in I Corinthians 12:12, We are all one body, yet every member has its own work, where by it serves every other, all because we have one baptism, one Gospel, one faith, and are all alike Christians; for baptism, Gospel and faith alone make us “spiritual” and a Christian people…

Through baptism all of us are consecrated to the priesthood, as St. Peter says in I Peter 2:9, “Ye are a royal priesthood, a priestly kingdom,” and the book of Revelation says, Rev. 5:10 “Thou hast made us by Thy blood to be priests and kings.”

This is an interesting paper from Luther in that it doesn’t provide any sort of model for interacting with a government that is secular or not as faithful as any other members of the priesthood of all believers — instead what his political theology in his context is about is a government he treats as Christian being coerced by a church he holds to be the anti-Christ.

The Reformation was built on an epistemic humility that comes from the challenging of human authority and tradition. Where the GIST committee, in its deliberation, appealed to the Reformed category of a ‘Creation Ordinance’, I’d want to appeal to the Reformed approach to scriptures that sees everything fulfilled in Jesus — even the creation ordinances like work, Sabbath, and marriage. It’s reasonably easy to establish that Jesus is our rest and Lord of the Sabbath, that his resurrection restores our ability to work in a way that is no longer frustrated (1 Cor 15:58, Ephesians 2) — that there’s a telos or purpose to these creation ordinances that is best fulfilled in Christ, so that they can’t universally be understood by idolatrous humans without Jesus, and yet our arguments about protecting marriage or upholding marriage is that we are upholding God’s good design for all people. GIST’s paper is infinitely better than anything the ACL or the Coalition for Marriage is putting out that only argues from creation, in that it includes the infinite — by incorporating the resurrection; but the idea of a creation ordinance that should push us away from accommodating others via a public, generous, pluralism is an idealism that I would argue fails to accommodate the relationship between creation and its redeemer, and the telos of marriage (which doesn’t exist in the new creation except as the relationship between us and Jesus) (Matt 22, Rev 21).

A Confession

I’d served this committee for seven years. In the first two years I was in a minority (with another member) with a majority holding to a different sort of idealism; an idealism not built on the Gospel, but on God’s law or the ‘whole counsel of God’ (with no sense of how God’s whole counsel is fulfilled in Jesus). We orchestrated a changing of the guard on this committee that was not generous or pluralistic; we excluded a voice from the committee that was a legitimate representation of members of the Presbyterian Church of Queensland.

We pursued a platform narrower than the breadth of the church and so alienated a percentage of our members; I’ve come to regret this, while being proud of our record (and despite the committee being returned unopposed year on year since). I don’t think excluding voices is the best way to fulfil our charter, but rather a poly-phonic approach where a range of faithful options are given to the faithful — our priesthood — in order to be weighed up. This will be a challenge within the assembly of Queensland where there is a large amount of accord, but a much larger challenge within the Presbyterian Church of Queensland, which is broader (and more fractured).

Conclusion

At present in the Presbyterian denomination our committees are operating like priests or bishops; sending missives to our churches that carry a sort of authority they should not be granted in our polity; I understand the efficiencies created by governance and operations via committee, but if Luther’s priesthood of all believers is truly a fundamental principle of Reformed operation in the world we should be more comfortable and confident that people being transformed by the Spirit and facing the complexity of life in our secular world will act according to conscience and in submission to God’s word, but might operate faithfully as Christians anywhere between idealism, pragmatism and pluralism, as purists or ironists; and if we put the purist-idealists in charge (or our committees function from that framework) we might significantly narrow the church and limit our voice and imagination; cutting off opportunities for Gospel-hearted apologetics from those who might walk through our idol-saturated streets and engage differently with our idol worshipping neighbours.

Hungry Hungry Hippos: The danger of modern politics as a zero sum game, and the need for a more hospitable public square

Did you ever play the game Hungry, Hungry Hippos?

It goes a bit like this. Only with more punching and tantrums.

It’s a mildly fun competitive board game for kids; my fear is that this is pretty much what has trained today’s adults in how to participate in the public square. Nobody plays Hungry, Hungry Hippos and sets out to ensure an equal distribution of marbles to all players so that everybody wins. We play to get more than our fair share. That’s how you win; in fact, it’s what defines winners and losers. In the ultimate victory in Hungry Hungry Hippos, you’d get all the marbles and your opponents get none.

If I’ve understood the economic theory correctly, and it’s possible I haven’t because I’m not an economist… Hungry, Hungry Hippos is a ‘zero sum game’. It’s a game where my winning is directly relating to the losing of others; every marble I munch is one my opponents can’t munch. I get 1 marble, and my opponent doesn’t just get zero, they lose the opportunity for a marble, so the ‘sum’ of the interaction is zero. Or, as wikipedia puts it:

“Zero-sum games are a specific example of constant sum games where the sum of each outcome is always zero. Such games are distributive, not integrative; the pie cannot be enlarged by good negotiation.”

Modern politics; or the modern public square, feels like a game of Hungry, Hungry Hippos. We play politics these days as a zero sum game; there’s a finite amount of resources available for distribution, or there’s an issue where there’s a clear binary; winners and losers, and the major parties race to pick a side to champion (and therefore one to destroy), and we all line up behind them. We’ve lost the idea of a public square and political realm that operates for the common good of all people and we play the game as though goods are to be distributed in a sort of zero sum way; that’s sensible when it comes to dollars. You can’t just print more money to pay everybody everything they want… but it’s terrible for social policy. We’re perhaps so used to competing for marbles (or resources) when it comes to dollars and projects (whether its playing off health, education, and infrastructure development, against taxation policy) and then distributing those dollars according to priorities with a sort of ‘zero sum’ outcome, that we’ve forgotten that sometimes a commons, or a public sphere, might allow everybody to win, or nobody to win, or even for us to think in terms of things other than winning and losing, and find ways to negotiate towards acceptable outcomes for everybody.

It’s not just our political parties that take the Hungry, Hungry Hippos approach to public life and policy making; its lobbyists, activists and interest groups (pretty much all the same thing)… all these groups out to get their fair share of the marbles, or their interests recognised at law at the expense of all the other players. All looking to win. In fact, I’d say it’s the lobbyists/activists who keep us playing this way, they’re often the ones with particular interests, it’s not that our political parties don’t have ideologies (though often it seems our politicians have the ideology of staying in power by being populist, and that’s why there’s a growing disillusionment with the political process in Australia), but in my observation (and dealings with politicians directly or indirectly), often politicians know that their jobs involve compromise; that’s the reality in their party rooms, and it might just be a matter of different interest groups playing a different game and producing creative alternative proposals, that would see more democratic, less ‘zero sum game’ outcomes for people.

Maybe the alternative to Hungry, Hungry Hippos democracy, which is, in social issues, about making sure your views become the views favoured, protected, or enshrined, in legislation; that you not just ‘your fair share’, but a win, is Hospitable Hippos. Maybe this looks like allowing other participants in the public sphere to get their share too, perhaps even get their share first… perhaps even to get their share at our expense, or given to them by us rather than it being something we fight to take… Could this be what it looks like to move from a ‘distributive’ zero sum game to an ‘integrative’ game where the pie is enlarged, or at least we’ve got a better sense of how to eat the pie together in peace and enjoyment.

I wrote the other day about how Christians in particular should be approaching the public square; our ‘common’ life together with our neighbours as though it’s a dining table where we think in terms of hospitality; and I’ve previously written about how real secular democracy that makes space for different views, rather than just imposing ‘majority rule’ (the Hungry, Hungry Hippos approach) involves a commitment to a generous pluralism. Here’s a couple of principles, from the Bible, that should be governing Christian participation in the public square, or the life of ‘common’ community, that should cause us to rethink those times when we fall into the trap of playing Hungry, Hungry Hippos, pursuing victory at the expense of others (when there might be shared outcomes) in a ‘zero sum game’. The shortcut to thinking about why this might be good and right for all of us, not just Christians, is to imagine the other side winning a total victory and you losing, and using that imagining to come up with something a little more empathetic.

So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. — Matthew 7:12

Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.” — Matthew 22:36-39

(The first commandment is probably not quite so applicable to an atheist, or community of atheists, operating in a pluralistic context).

Here’s a bit where Paul fleshes out what these bits

Do nothing out of selfish ambition or empty pride, but in humility consider others more important than yourselves. Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others. — Philippians 2:4-5

To name the elephant in the room, or the hippo, this is evident in the debate around same sex marriage, which has returned to prominence in the last couple of weeks, and people have been furiously bashing buttons to make sure their little underfed hippos get as many marbles as possible; at the expense of the other players. This debate has been framed by both marriage equality advocates and Christian advocates for maintaining the definition of marriage as a zero sum game.

It scares me, as a Christian, to think what might happen if marriage equality advocates win the zero sum game, and then decide to respond by treating us Christians as they feel like they’ve been treated. There’s a palpable push from some advocates for change to not protect religious freedoms beyond a secular/sacred divide (so people conducting marriages as religious celebrants will be protected) that, as someone who rejects the idea that there’s a secular/sacred divide, or that religion is a private matter within the home or the institution of the church, is threatening… The maw of those hippos, and their deadly, terrible, teeth frighten me a little…

But we Christians are no better. We’ve set this debate up as an all or nothing thing; as though the definition of marriage provided for us from our religious convictions about God, the world, and humanity, should apply to everybody because we say he says it is good for them. No matter how you frame it this is neither hospitable, pluralistic, or generous to those who have a fundamentally different vision of human flourishing. It pushes other views, and the people who hold them, away from the table (which isn’t actually our table), and insists they eat on our terms, or not at all. It is an attempt to define what a ‘fair share’ is that leaves us holding on to more marbles than our neighbours.

By taking this zero sum game approach we’ve essentially invited our neighbours to do the same thing… in fact, we’ve given them no real alternative option, we’ve decided this how the game is going to be played, or we’ve joined in without questioning whether this is how we should be playing it. By approaching the table, the ‘board’, or the public square as a competitive environment rather than a place where we work out how to live together across difference, despite difference, in a spirit of generosity, we’ve invited other people to crush us. To me this seems to fail those two key principles Jesus says sums up the Old Testament law (which is ironic, given where we draw our arguments from), and it’s a failure to truly love the other.

There are other options that might see us keeping our marbles, rather than losing them… there’s an approach to this marriage debate that we could take that would maintain our ability to be different and distinct, but also to share a table (metaphorically and literally) with those who are also different and distinct to us, without seeking to destroy them. It’s possible we could approach this debate with less punching. We just have to change the game.

What does this look like? A hospitable, or generous, pluralism?

It looks like stepping back from fighting to define marriage for everyone, and instead asking that Christians — either in public or private — be free to understand marriage according to our convictions (and that our neighbours with other religious, political, cultural, or moral, convictions be free to do the same). It seems that lots of us think this is the thing we’ll salvage after we lose the big war, by fighting robustly on the definition front to show how much we care — but that’s not how Hungry, Hungry Hippos, or a zero sum game works.

It looks like giving up fighting for our rights to win and define things for everybody.

It looks like recognising that the government are the guardians of the commons; that we live in a democracy (not a populist country ruled by a tyranny of the majority), so that the results of a plebiscite are largely irrelevant if there are even some people in our community who feel excluded from the table by our approach. Democracy, at its best, protects minorities from the majority because it views all people as equal.

I understand that many, many, advocates for the definition of marriage are arguing on the basis of a view of human flourishing connected to the family, to the uniqueness and importance of gender difference, and ‘for the sake of the children’; these are views I share, but they are views that are contested, there are other views of human flourishing held by our neighbours and we get into dangerous territory when we, as Christians, start suggesting that our God’s views, or the views of the majority, should dictate the practices of all (again, ironically, the same people arguing most stridently against marriage definition also argue most stridently against anything that looks like sharia law).

We don’t have to lose our marbles to participate in public life and politics as Christians, but maybe we might consider giving some up? Being less hungry, and more inclined to share the table with others…

 

When ‘secularism’ defaults to ‘atheism’ and why that might be a problem for Christian kids (or the government)

UPDATE: The Queensland Government has released a fairly emphatic statement on the story in the Australian.

“Ms Jones said the Palaszczuk Government supported religious instruction in state schools in consultation with parents.

“No one is telling a child what they can and can’t say in the playground,” she said.

“There has been no change to the religious instruction policy in state schooling.

“We are an inclusive education system that aims to provide a good education for all students of all faiths.

“The policy in place in Queensland state schools today is exactly the same as the policy in place under the former Newman Government and has been the same for more than 20 years.”

There’s a story in the Australian today that I’ve been following for a little while that I’m still struggling to get my head around.

A little while ago the Queensland Government conducted a review on RI lessons in state schools. I wrote a letter to the Education Minister Kate Jones. I’m an RI teacher and a parent of a child who attends a state school who loves talking about Jesus. Jesus is part of her life. She loves kids church. We talk about him at home, our assumption as parents is that there is not a millimetre of life in this world where Jesus is not king and God is not present. There is not a subject she’ll be taught at school — be it math, science, or reading and writing — that is not in some way revealing something of the nature of God, and the nature of humanity.

As good Presbyterians, we believe that our faith answers questions not just about the meaning of life but about the purpose of life; and that love and safety for others is ultimately tied to these questions of meaning and purpose. Christians, for a long time, have engaged in a practice called ‘catechising’ their children; that means teaching, or instructing them of the foundations of our belief. It’s an ‘education’ word.

Here’s what the catechism most Presbyterian churches use says about the meaning and purpose of life:

What is the chief end of man?
A. Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever

It’s very hard, if this is true, for a Christian to believe you can remove this fundamental purpose of existence from other spheres of life. I think the paragraph this media coverage hangs off in a review of religious instruction material misunderstands the fundamental nature of religious belief. I think it requires something impossible of my children. Here’s what the Queensland government’s review of the material I teach in RI says:

“While not explicitly prohibited by the EGPA or EGPR, nor referenced in the RI policy statement, the Department would expect schools to take appropriate action if aware that students participating in RI were evangelising to students who do not participate in their RI class, given this could adversely affect the school’s ability to provide a safe, supportive and inclusive environment for all students.”

Exactly what ‘appropriate action’ is for an activity that is ‘not explicitly prohibited’ is up in the air; and apparently the Ministers office has been largely unresponsive to people seeking clarification.

One thing that this debate hangs on is the meaning of words. I’ve been catechising our kids using this book called Story Catechism; which teaches our kids how to see the world through the story of the Bible; which is ultimately the story of Jesus. The ‘good news,’ which is what ‘gospel’ means, and the word for ‘gospel’ in Greek is where we get the ‘evangel’ bit of ‘evangelism’. I am shaping my kids to be ‘Gospel kids,’ which means I’m shaping them to live the gospel, which means the most natural thing in the world for them will be to speak the Gospel.

As good Aussies, we’re keen to raise our kids in a secular democracy as generous pluralists; I want my kids to know that other people should be free to choose their own religious beliefs, even if that means rejecting Jesus, and should be free to understand meaning and purpose differently; and I want my kids exposed to those other ideas so they can make their own decisions about belief. This potential overreach from the State Government seems to be a threat to that; I say potential because until its clear what’s actually at stake here, or what principals will be required to do if a Christian kid is ‘evangelising,’ I suspect this is one of those ideas that sounds nice in theory but one that will create a crazy amount of admin work for our already overworked teachers and school administrators to implement and police. It does seem to place a dangerous tool in the hands of any principal who is, themselves, aggressively ‘secular’ or who faces a noisy ‘secular’ parent or group of parents. I say ‘secular’ because the meaning of the word secularism is contested; as noted by philosopher Charles Taylor in his massive A Secular Age.

Secularism does not mean atheism; it does not mean ‘freedom from religion’ but ‘freedom to hold any religious belief’. It doesn’t mean religious beliefs should be excluded; but rather that all religious (and non-religious) beliefs should be included. There’s a danger that the pursuit of ‘safety’ as the ultimate human good will actually not teach our kids to be good participants in a secular democracy; that it will instruct them not to be generous pluralists in a secular world; but rather, sectarian. That our children will withdraw into the safe space, the cultural ghetto, of the religious instruction class room, where they’ll be told what is fundamental to their humanity is their religious belief; and then the ‘commons’ — the playground — will be a place where they are unable to be truly human. I can imagine lots of religious parents seeing this as the moment where they withdraw their kids even further, into Christian schools, or home schooling, which again is unlikely to produce the sort of generous pluralistic approach to common life that our society requires in order to flourish.

Here’s what I think the next three steps are for Christian parents reading the coverage in the Australian today.

  1. Teach your kids the Gospel; that Jesus is king over every part of their life, and that God created the world so that everything they learn at school, that is true about the world, helps them understand his divine nature and character. Teach them that the Gospel is good news that gives them hope and purpose, and that like mathematics, their job is to reveal God’s divine nature and character; that we are ‘God’s workmanship created in him to do the good works he has prepared in advance for us to do.’
  2. Teach them to respect the different views of others; and that they don’t have to agree with their school friends (or teachers) but they do have to listen respectfully and consider what they say, in order to understand one another, in the same way we hope we will be understood.
  3. Tell your kids that because Jesus is king; it’s him we listen to, and that that might mean being misunderstood and even punished by their school. And that will be part of life in a world where ‘secular’ is contested.
  4. Write to the education minister seeking clarification; without assuming an anti-Christian agenda; explain how such an ambiguous statement seems inconsistent with Christian belief and practice. I’ll be writing my own letter and will post it somewhere.
  5. Participate in public discussion about this story (whether its on radio talkback, the comments sections in websites, or on social media). Be gracious, assume that this is just a misunderstanding or well motivated overreach from the government; not part of a sinister agenda to persecute Christians.

Pluralism, same sex marriage, and the silencing of the lambs: charting a new way forward for Christians in Australia

“I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves.” — Jesus, Matthew 10

If some of the hyperbole I’m reading online is to be believed, the ‘enemy’ of the Australian church now has a face. And a name. Michael Barnett. His face and name might be familiar to you if you tuned in to the SBS show Living With The Enemy a while back, because he and his now husband, Gregory Storer, spent some time with Sydney Anglican, and fellow blogger, David Ould (I wrote about the show back then). I’ve been chatting online to both Gregory and Michael in the midst of this latest issue, and will feature some of that conversation below. I think rumours of Michael Barnett being the enemy are greatly exaggerated, and I do wonder if we’re our own worst enemies when it comes to how we Christians with traditional views on marriage speak about our views, and what we ask for in our political context.

The situation

Michael Barnett is a campaigner for LGBTIQ rights (not just a same sex marriage campaigner) and has been tweeting in support of a group called Pride In Diversity. Lots of Australian companies have signed up with Pride In Diversity to ensure work places are safe places for members of the LGBTIQ community. The list of companies includes IBM, and Macquarie University, and those companies happen to employ members of the boards of the Australian Christian Lobby and its affiliated training centre the Lachlan Macquarie Institute. Michael has publicly pressured Macquarie and IBM to act according to commitments they’ve made to the Pride In Diversity movement, and this is, in turn, being linked to the Coopers brewhaha (see my reflections here) in a narrative that says, essentially, ‘same sex marriage campaigners (especially activist members of the LGBTIQ communityare out to destroy free speech and religious freedom, the stakes on the marriage debate are higher than the marriage debate’.

I want to say at the outset that I wish we’d get better at talking and listening to each other across the divide on this issue, but that if you view the issue of same sex marriage, and other LGBTIQ rights through the lens of human rights where opposition to change is communicating that LGBTIQ people are sub-human, then I can understand the tactic being employed here with companies who’ve signed up to say they recognise the full humanity of LGBTIQ people. It’s also a shame that Christians in general aren’t better at understanding the position of LGBTIQ people and their desires (and I’m not casting aspersions at the particular individuals caught up in the campaign here, I’ve had some interactions online with Stephen Chavura, and met Lyle Shelton, and while we disagree on this stuff, I believe they do their best to be compassionate and empathetic across this divide). I have, however, been present (both in the flesh and virtually) when Christians have specifically claimed that we do not need to understand the desires of the LGBTIQ community, and I think that’s a terrible indictment on us all. I’m slightly (though not overly) concerned, as a Christian, that there might come a time when holding a traditional view of marriage within the Christian community will be cause for similar action from LGBTIQ rights advocates, and I’m hoping to articulate a middle way that listens to the concerns of LGBTIQ people (including Michael Barnett, see below), but charts a way forward for Christians.

I do think religious freedom is at stake in this debate, free speech even, but I think we (Christians) are actually doing more against these noble common goods than those who are fighting back after years of having their freedom to define marriage according to their own religious beliefs (religious freedom), and to call their relationships marriage (free speech). I’m hoping to demonstrate that this isn’t a disingenuous shifting of the goalposts, but is actually the way we should always have been understanding this issue Biblically.

The ACL’s Lyle Shelton framed the issue this way:

“The message from the activists is clear: if you don’t support our campaign to change the Marriage Act then you have no place in Australian society. The unrelenting, uncompromising, totalitarian nature of these activists should concern every Australian who wants to be free to believe in marriage.”

I wonder if the words ‘unrelenting, uncompromising, totalitarian’ could equally be thrown at Christians by members of the LGBTIQ community who are pursuing changes to the Marriage Act? And I wonder if, properly understood as a religious freedom issue, we might not be better off, as Christians, throwing our support in behind changes to the Act in order to preserve our ability to believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I don’t want this to be purely a pragmatic way to respond to what seems to be the inevitable changing of the Act. I don’t want it to be a thing we do because we fear that if, or when, we lose this ‘fight’ we will be facing an ‘uncompromising, totalitarian’ ruling class who want to stamp out our views. The fear driven ‘slippery slope’ rhetoric in this discussion serves nobody, but it is quite possible that having been perceived as uncompromising and totalitarian in our attempts to maintain our position on the definition of marriage at law, those who oppose us will treat us as we’ve treated them (and it’s interesting that the ‘golden rule’ for Christians is not ‘do unto others as they do to you’ but ‘treat others the way you would have them treat you’). I don’t believe we should respond pragmatically — to secure a certain sort of treatment — but rather our response should be driven by a consistent theological position — including a theological understanding of what it means to be human (which is that to be human is to love something ultimately (worship) and be shaped by that love), and this golden rule.

Like Lyle Shelton and Stephen Chavura, because of my Christian convictions, I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman, entered into for life, and I believe this because when Jesus spoke about marriage he said:

Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’ — Matthew 19:4

However, unlike Lyle Shelton and the Australian Christian Lobby, and many other Christians campaigning to maintain this definition of marriage — Jesus’ definition of marriage — in Australian law, I do not think the view Jesus takes on marriage is necessarily the view that should define marriage in Australian society.

I believe that on the whole, people do better if they love Jesus, and order their lives (and their sexuality) around that first love, but I accept that many of my neighbours do not love Jesus above all else, and have that love shape how they live and love. I think we make a positive case for this by living good, and beautiful lives, as a community, amongst our neighbours. We make the most compelling argument for our way of life by living it, and explaining how our lives reflect who Jesus is.

A religious freedom solution in our secular, pluralist, democracy

We talk about religious freedom being at stake in this marriage debate, and yet we refuse to afford religious freedom to our LGBTIQ neighbours when it comes to how marriage is defined in a secular, pluralistic, democracy. This is our context and it’s worth briefly unpacking what each of these words means.

Religious Freedom

On the whole, Christians who advocate for religious freedom — like Freedom for Faith — do a fantastic job of advocating for religious freedom for people who are not Christians; we’re consistent in our advocacy for our Jewish and Muslim neighbours and their freedom to worship, even though we believe they worship a false understanding of God (even if they’re also Abrahamic religions, they worship a God who is not Trinitarian, and deny the divinity of Jesus… much like the Pharisees were participants in ‘man made religion’ once they failed to recognise the divinity of Jesus).

While atheists and other members of our community who do not identify with an organised religion might not consider themselves religious, and so subject to the need for protection of religious freedom, there are a couple of things I think we Christians need to consider.

Firstly, when we talk about religious freedom we all also want freedom from having religious views (including functional atheism)  imposed on us by law, part of religious freedom is freedom from the undue influence of other religions.

Secondly, as Christians, we believe that all people are ultimately worshippers even if they are not participants in an organised religion. This isn’t to say that there is no such thing as atheism, or that atheism itself is a religion (I’ll leave that to David Foster Wallace in This Is Water), rather it is to say that we all love and desire things in ways that allow those loves and desires to shape us (sometimes there’s ‘one thing,’ one ultimate love, other times people are polytheists and love many things that compete, or cooperate). We Christians recognise that this ‘worship’ is a religious belief that shapes the way people approach life, sex, money, work, knowledge… everything really. Including, importantly, how we believe humanity and marriage should be understood and defined.

That LGBTIQ advocates for same sex marriage view this as a human rights issue, and want to define marriage differently is an expression of what Christians should understand as religious views of the world (even if they don’t themselves understand things this way). When Paul does the ‘everybody worships’ thing in Romans 1; when he makes the case that everyone is religious, he says:

“They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator”

Our own theology makes this a religious freedom issue.

Secular

Secular does not technically mean that our public is free from religious interference, rather it means that there is no state religion that dominates all other religious views. This tends to mean that our law does not favour one religious belief over another, though a way this is commonly understood is that we should keep religious beliefs out of decision making; that we should make decisions on the lowest common denominator for the common good. I’ve suggested that we’d do best if people with religious beliefs acknowledged those beliefs, and the different impacts they have on religious communities, and that the secular state should attempt to make space for these community views to govern interactions in the ‘commons’We should say more often that our view of marriage doesn’t just come from nature, but from Jesus, and it is legitimate for people who believe Jesus is God to follow Jesus’ definition of marriage.

Pluralistic

That we’re pluralistic acknowledges that not only are we secular (with no state religion) but there are many religious views held and communities created by citizens of Australia, and the people who hold these different views can and should expect to be able to practice them in our nation (provided they don’t cause significant harm to other citizens). A pluralist approach to politics makes space for a plurality of views rather than enshrining the views of a majority (or coalition of minorities) over other minorities.

Christians, based on our theology, should be relatively comfortable operating in a pluralistic context. We are free to be pluralists, but not polytheists. The distinction is important. Christians are called to absolute fidelity to the triune God in our worship. We are to organise our loves around our love for God (which is why we’re to love the Lord with all our hearts, then second, to love our neighbours as we love ourselves). We are monotheists. In the Old Testament this monotheism meant there was no place for idols in Israel. Faithfulness meant the utter destruction of other gods in the hearts (and land) of Israel. But we are not in Israel. Australia is not the kingdom of God; the church is.

There’s still no place for idols in our hearts, as the kingdom of God, and we should take the metaphorical sledgehammer to those idols (or perhaps cultivate a love for Jesus that expels other gods and loves from our hearts). And there are implications here for same sex attracted Christians who hold to conservative/traditional theological convictions, just as there are for heterosexual Christians who hold to these convictions. Christians in the New Testament also recognised that the rules for Israel no longer applied — they certainly preached and lived in such a way that they hoped idols and false worship would be shown to be less valuable, good, and beautiful than the true God, true worship, and thus God’s design for humanity and relationships) — but they didn’t take a sledgehammer to other people’s Gods. This is also how the Old Testament prophets seemed to approach the idols of the nations around Israel — using rhetoric to remove the idols of their ‘power’ (like Isaiah 40, which describes how an idol statue is made from the wood that the craftsman then uses to cook his dinner, and offers the analysis that this probably isn’t what a god should be like). When Paul gets to Athens he shows what pluralism looks like for Christians. He seeks to understand the desires of those in the city that lead them to worship things other than God, and then he has a conversation with them. He doesn’t try to legalise Christian worship and make other forms of worship illegal. Christianity — at least theologically, if not always historically — makes space for other religions, and other gods, outside the hearts of those in the church; that’s part of what distinguishes it from other forms of organised religion.

Democracy

The nature of a democracy sometimes feels like it’s a case of majority rules, when we might be best to think of it as we all rule. Democracy does away with monarchy, and it stands in contrast to other forms of government where a powerful autocracy, or to totalitarian regimes where ideological groups or communities rule over people from outside that particular caste. The beauty of democracy is not found in populist politics, but in the way it views each citizen as equal, and in the promise that those who govern govern for all, to protect different minorities and communities not simply to reflect the will of most of the people. That we are secular and pluralistic and that we believe religious freedom and freedom of speech are common goods or human rights reflects that we are also democratic.

The proposed solution

A solution on the marriage equality issue that is democratic, pluralist, secular, and allows freedom of religion is an outcome that should be desirable to all. Sadly it often feels like we Christians want a solution that continues to recognise our beliefs at the expense of the beliefs of others; and we fight for this in ways that are more populist than democratic, and more theocratic than secular or pluralist (even if we predominantly make ‘natural law’ arguments for maintaining a traditional definition of marriage).

There is another way, one that few public Christians and representatives of traditional churches seem prepared to make. We could, as lovers of religious freedom, support changes to the Marriage Act to be more pluralist, secular, and democratic, where we offer our support to changes that recognise other religious beliefs in the common law, but maintain our own approach to marriage as individuals and within our communities. This would mean being free to hold and act according to personal convictions (though probably not in state institutions), while being prepared to let others do the same.

It seems so simple. We could say “I support your right to define marriage as you see fit, and to have that definition recognised in our nation’s laws, while holding my own convictions about what marriage is that are different, but also recognised in our nation’s laws.” We could say that understanding that the LGBTIQ community desires marriage equality for reasons that are essentially religious (as we understand religion), and that this is from a conviction that religious freedom is a good thing. Which is what we keep saying.

I can understand why it’s not simple, or why people don’t seem prepared to make it. Sometimes it’s a result of our historic privilege, and the belief that Australia is a Christian nation (or at least has been at the ‘establishment’ level); though it’s debatable whether this has ever been the case outside the elite, and it certainly doesn’t seem to be the case now (despite the census data). Privilege is hard to give up, especially for conservatives who tend to see this history as a good thing, and change for change’s sake as a bad thing. Sometimes this opposition is based on a belief about what is good (according to God’s design), and attempt to be loving (even in ignoring the desires of others). I’m not sure this is a feasible option given that Romans 1 says that the loves and desires produced by false worship now shape people because God makes it that way, and I’m not sure it’s truly loving to fail to understand others or offer them the freedom and privilege we enjoy. I’m also fairly sure that many of the reasons people give, like ‘won’t somebody think of the children’ or ‘this will ‘normalise’ something that is not natural (ie children have a mother and a father)’ are the result of people who’ve missed the memo; that these things are already ‘normal’ and that this comes from the bottom up in our society (via culture), and that this ‘new normal’ also seems to come from God in Romans 1. If the Christian framework is true then these are bad arguments that can’t convince, and if the Christian framework is not true then these are bad arguments that won’t convince.

But it won’t work!

One of the things I often hear when I raise this idea is that the campaigners for LGBTIQ rights want more.

That this campaign for marriage (and human rights/equality more generally) is a slippery slope. That “they” hate us and are out to get us. And they are people like Michael and Gregory. This is the thin end of the wedge in some great anti-Christian conspiracy. Now, this might certainly be true for some. But let’s get the golden rule back in the mix; even if it is true, we’re called to love people and treat them as we would have them treat us. It’s also very possible that people like Michael and Gregory intuitively recognise the irony of us Christians calling for ‘religious freedom’ and labelling our opponents as totalitarian, unrelenting, and uncompromising — when we also won’t listen to, make space for, or compromise with their positions, and that this irony is actually something more like hypocrisy, and it does actually cause hurt because it communicates that we actually don’t see the concerns of this community and its desires as fully or equally human to our own.

The objection I hear is that doing this won’t work.

That these campaigners want more and they won’t rest until they get it… despite their consistent statements that they want a particular thing, that they believe is a right according to their understanding of what it means to be human. We do tend to conflate a whole bunch of issues into a narrative (usually a narrative of fear) — and so the 18C stuff (which is about race) gets thrown in the mix here too (although, to be fair, the modern ‘left’ do this with the whole ‘intersectionality’ thing too). Losing some of the privilege we’ve enjoyed via a bad approach to democracy while white, protestant, men have been largely the ones in power is probably going to involve some real pain for us too. But maybe that pain is good, and maybe it’d be less painful if we’d been doing the ‘golden rule’ thing.

Now. One of the ‘golden rule’ things I’d like to try is to actually listen to people and take them at their word. So I asked Michael on Twitter if this sort of ‘pluralist solution’ would work for him. I first had a bunch of replies from Gregory, Michael’s husband, on Twitter, which he has given me permission to quote here, and then I had an email exchange with Michael. It seems to me that they (as in these two individuals, not the entire LGBTIQ community) would be happy with such a solution, and that Michael’s campaign is not about silencing Christians, but rather about securing the sort of equal rights that Pride In Diversity allied companies sign up for… and maybe the sort of equal rights they’re asking for actually do line up with our desire for religious freedom, and freedom of speech, and we need to start practicing what we preach.

I outlined the position I’ve gone into in more depth above in an email to him, and his response included these words (if they aren’t totally representative of how he’d respond to all these extra words here, he’ll have right of reply in the comments, and I’ll be sending this to both Michael and Gregory):

“Thanks for your thoughts.  I appreciate your thoughtfulness. This is how the story goes from my perspective. I just want to get on with my life, but since beyond 2004 I’ve been trying really hard to overcome the discrimination LGBTIQ people face in society, mostly because of the impact of the ACL and their supporters… I don’t want to take down the ACL and LMI boards but when Lyle Shelton names me in his blogs I feel I have no choice but to explore those possibilities.” — Michael Barnett

I had a longer back and forth with Gregory on Twitter.

Me: If I’m happy for people to live freely/for secular laws to govern all, does this satisfy goals?

Gregory: I’m not an expert on the requirements…

Gregory: It certainly is the ideal situation for all.

Me: Can a Christian hold traditional views within the church/progressive views outside the church & not be a hater?

Gregory: of course, I know lots of them

Me: If Christians were better at a ‘generous pluralism’ understanding the LGBTIQ community’s desires and limits of our ‘moral frame,’ and so were ok with SSM etc…Would it be appropriate for such Christians to hold public positions in ally organisations?

Gregory: They already do.

Me: cause the ‘enemy’ narrative is: once we lose this, we lose ‘everything’ and that there is no public place for us.

Gregory: “That is not true and not the case.”

Gregory: “There is no reason why people can’t live together in harmony.

Now. You, Christian reader, might not be prepared to take Michael and Gregory at their word, or might not be prepared to see them as representative of the whole (unless they’re the ‘villains’ who are out to get us). But I’m, because of the ‘golden rule’ going to take their words on faith, and believe that a generous pluralism is the way to go on the question of the definition of marriage and religious freedom. So I’m going to approach this latest kerfuffle as it is; not a reason to be hysterical about the future for those who hold traditional marriage, not a reason to jump on the bandwagon with Andrew Bolt and other commentators who want to use it to fuel outrage and division in the Australian community; but as an opportunity for us Christians to consider how we might better practice what we preach on religious freedom, and how we might be good neighbours in our secular, pluralist, democracy.