Country First?

One American political party has adopted "country first" as a campaign slogan. That same party is the party of political preference for the bulk of the evangelical community in our nation. I have been waiting for the significance of that statement to dawn on someone in the conservative evangelical community, but to date they seem to be blissfully unaware of the idolatrous overtones of their politics.

Christians are warned not to divide their loyalties. We put "God first" or else God is not God in our lives. Nothing in scripture authorizes God's people to equate their loyalty to God with loyalty to their nation. There is much that forbids it. Jesus commands us to be singlemindedly devoted to God and his kingdom (Matt. 6:24-34). His kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36).

Christians should not even put "country second." Discipleship requires that we share the same priorities as our Lord. If God so loved "the world" that he sent his only Son to die for it, and the Son was obedient unto death, then the good of the world as a whole deserves more concern from his disciples than the good of any single nation. At best, then, country only comes in third.

That's not a message that most American evangelicals have ears to hear. They don't have ears because they have no desire to pay attention to the genuine demands of discipleship. The thought of self-conscious self-sacrifice for the benefit of strangers is completely foreign to them. They're looking for cheap grace. They only have ears for those who will tell them what they want to hear and who ask them to make sacrifices only for what is near and dear.

It would be hard for me to conceive of a more damning indictment of American evangelicalism if it weren't for the research that indicates how widely evangelicals defend the government's use of torture as an investigative technique.

Hats off to David Gushee, Bill Underwood and Mercer University for their prophetic witness against torture last week.

Southern Baptists Selling Off Assets

The Fort Worth Star Telegram is reporting that Southern Baptists have sold the broadcast facilities of its former Radio and Television Commission.

After the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention, the Radio and Television Commission was turned over to the North American Mission Board (NAMB). As chronicled in Mary Kinney Branson's Spending God's Money: Extravagance and Misuse in the Name of Ministry, NAMB was so badly mismanaged that trustees eventually relieved its fundamentalist president of his duties.

The North American Mission Board is not the only agency of the Southern Baptist Convention to sell off assets. The International Mission Board has been selling off valuable assets all over the world.

The Southern Baptist Convention has been imploding both financially and in membership ever since the fundamentalist takeover. It's death is progressing so slowly that few people realize how hollow this body has become.

One who is not surprised is Dallas Morning News reporter Christine Wicker whose book The Fall of the Evangelical Nation thoroughly documents the numerical decline of this denomination.

Desperately Seeking a Second Naivete Church

Christine Wicker's new book, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, tells two stories very well. First, it explains how Americans have been duped into believing that evangelicals comprise a significant and growing percentage of the population. She demonstrates, using evangelicals' own statistics and reports, that committed evangelicals comprise only about 7% of the U.S. population and the percentage is declining, not growing. Here's a quote:

For the past thirty years, 7 percent of the population has swayed elections and positioned itself as the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong. By puffing its numbers and its authority, it has gotten legislation passed that opposes the popular will and has divided the country into acrimonious camps. It has monopolized the media so effectively that other religious voices have been all but silenced. It has been feared and loathed, revered and loved. It has been impossible to ignore. But underneath its image of power and pomp, the evangelical nation is falling apart. Every day the percentage of evangelicals in America decreases, a loss that began more than one hundred years ago.

The second storyline is about the desire that she and millions of other Americans have for a faith that does not require them to surrender their intellect.

Wicker describes her own childhood conversion experience as a Southern Baptist and the crisis of faith she experienced in college as she examined her faith and began to question what she had been taught. She has been exposed to critiques of religion by what Paul Ricoeur calls "the masters of suspicion" -- Darwin, Freud, Marx, Nietsche. It's a familiar story and one of the reasons why evangelicals lose most of their converts after they leave High School.

In our society, more and more are learning to view religion from some form of critical perspective. Wicker and many of the people she describes in her book are among them. The naive faith of their childhood is no longer adequate but their critical perspectives often lead them into a lonely wilderness of diffused, unconnected spirituality. That worries Wicker. In essence, she and millions beside her are searching for a church where people are moving beyond a first naivete faith, are willing to wade through the desert of critical thought, and are striving toward a second naivete faith where, as Ricoeur describes it, they are "called again."

Wicker's book is essential reading for all Baptists. She understands us, both fundamentalist and moderate, better than many of us understand ourselves. What she doesn't seem to realize is how eager and close some of us were to fostering the kind of churches she longs to find. Then, fundamentalists purged our denomination of everyone with the courage to think.