In the final show of 2016, Matt, Alastair, and Derek consider whether God would have become incarnate had Adam not sinned, and the value of thinking about such hypotheticals.

Thanks to all of our listeners for your support this year. This show has exceeded all of our expectations, and we are grateful for your patronage.

When we started this here show, we weren’t sure that we would make it to episode 2–much less 100.  We’re very grateful for your kind support and patronage the past few years. In this 100th episode, we answer a smattering of your pressing and urgent questions about Alastair and his tea-drinking habits, our favorite novels, and so on.

Here’s to the next 100.

Over the weekend, I suggested that the text of the now infamous and widely criticized Executive Order on refugees was, as written, “neither insane nor obviously unChristian.”

This was prompted by observing a variety of responses to it which assumed, in the loudest possible terms, that it was both insane and obviously unChristian. So I thought I would say one or two things about my assessment of the EO, and our response to it, here.

1. After reading a number of essays on the order, I am not prepared to revise my initial assessment that it is neither intrinsically insane nor obviously unChristian. Such a judgment is about the weakest and most denuded form of opinion one could offer: The latitude it allows is enormous, and deliberate. That I took that as my opening position says a good deal about my general impression of the state of discourse on the question. Still, I have been persuaded that there are reasonable ways of reading the refugee ban that acknowledge its shortcomings but do not, in substance, dismiss it whole-cloth.
2. Even if the principle of the matter might survive, the rollout was a disastrous display of, as Yuval Levin aptly put it, “rank incompetence creating dangerous chaos.” This, I take to be widely agreed upon at this point; the confusion and the disruption to innocent parties that it introduced could have, and should have been avoided.
3. Much good came from the outpouring of energy, especially the safe (even if incredibly painful and seriously delayed) arrival of those refugees into our country. Conor Friedersdorf’s point that the Trump Administration mitigated their action based on the outrage seems right; of course, the Trump Interpreter suggests that was the course of action all along.
4. I’m not sure the conjunction of (1) and (2) generates the sort of enthusiasm needed to demonstrate against the document. While we like to think that the sufferings of refugees on our doorsteps and in our airports would be enough to move us into the streets on their behalf, it’s a lot easier — and more satisfying — to do so if we are convinced that we are locked in a broader struggle against a foe who might, if we are not careful, make our country more like 1938 Germany than 1950s America — even though both would be a step backward.
5. Benjamin Wittes suggests that the document’s manifest incompetence is actually a sign of malevolence. I’m not sure he proves his case — but I’m also not sure what would be required for such a case to be proved. He suggests that the EO’s over- and under-inclusive marks out malice in the design; but pointing to the countries previous bad actors came from is no evidence for where they might come from in the future. On the over-inclusive side, he suggests that the EO will keep out thousands of innocent refugees on the odds that there are a handful of bad actors within them — and while that’s certainly true, it’s hardly a sign of malice. It may be that Trump’s calculus is that the harm such bad actors could inflict on American society is disproportionate to the duty required to receive refugees (during this period). I don’t agree with that — but it seems relatively easy to come up with explanations that are more plausible than malevolence for the errors and omissions in the document.
6. One other point on that: As stated above, the implementation was indisputably incompetent. That alone seems to provide evidence, albeit retrospectively, that the original drafting was animated more by factors unrelated to malice than Witte allows. But as I say, assessing malice within an institutional context like this is nearly impossible.
7. One way to assess malice would be to place the Administration in a broader narrative about their ends and aims. Trump said he would ban all Muslims during the campaign; and now that he’s banned some, we respond with all the indignation our priors allow and require. The prior narrative treats any evidence as further confirmation of its priors — and thus, we are led into exaggerated and distorted readings of what the EO actually does. Again, all that whips up the enthusiasm and activism necessary for the cause; but only at the cost of deepening the distrust of progressives (and the media) among those not sympathetic to their aims.
8. Perhaps that should not matter —perhaps we already know what is afoot, and we need not read the text closely at all. But in these fraught times, it seems we could do with a good deal more nuanced parsing of our government’s actions. In an environment where our trust in public institutions and each other is plummeting, we cannot have too much care in how we measure and describe the realities we are depicting. The only way to seriously counteract the disease of hyperbole and lying that emanates from our White House is to remain scrupulous, as citizens, in our communication with one another.
9. How we ought treat refugees is necessarily a remedial policy: It does nothing to address the underlying causes of refugees, as Michael Brendan Dougherty was banging on about last week. (It’s probably best just to follow him, now.) It is a policy for people whose lives are in the middle — who, having been displaced, find themselves placeless until their homes can be restored. As such, I think it is clear we have special obligations to those who have become refugees in part because of our country’s behaviors.
10. But it is not obvious what those responsibilities require: While they might require allowing refugees to come, they might also require contributing to the stabilization of the region so that the refugees don’t have to leave in the first place. Only such a policy would almost certainly require further American entanglement in the region — and who has the political will these days for that? To even propose the thought is to raise the specter of ‘empire’ with many progressives, especially progressive Christians. The work of caring for refugees ‘on the way’ is important; but for most of us, that is where it stops.
11. Consider, for a moment, the Christian political imagination on the matter of caring for refugees: In this case, it is entirely oriented toward welcoming them here — a policy, I note, I happen to agree with unreservedly. But I wonder why there is not more discussion about going there? I have occasionally wondered (privately) the past two years about the nature and extent of the duties on us as Christians here to protect Christian communities in the Middle East. One way of satisfying those duties would be to go to the Middle East, find a persecuted community, serve them and die with them. One’s life would not, I think, be in vain if one stood in solidarity with such Christians in this way, even if it would be decidedly odd and almost certainly met with skepticism. Another way of satisfying them would be to go and serve them by protecting them, as some private citizens have. Such an act would be a kind of vigilantism, which I am deeply opposed to; but if the state fails to protect its citizens, then it is possible that one could undertake such a form of resistance in a just way.
12. I am not committed to either of those being either permissible or right. My point is only that our political imaginations about what it means to care for refugees are rather narrow.
13. It is easy to depict those who want a careful, nuanced reading of both the EO and the Trump Administration’s actions as failing the commandment to ‘love thy neighbor.’ I was so accused, often, and I understand the impulse: Reasoning and the parsing of a statement seems like cold comfort when people are suffering. Yet the assertion that love obviously requires repudiating the EO in its substance simply begs the moral question: It claims to know in advance what the right path is, when that is precisely what is in dispute. For instance, a Trump supporter — and again, I hasten to assure you I am not a Trump supporter — could reasonably argue, it seems to me, that ‘extreme vetting’ is as good for refugees as it is for America. Specifically, if another 9–11 type event were to happen, and it were to be an asylum seeker that did it, the backlash would doubtlessly be even more intense. While the massive disruption refugees in the process now face is bad — really bad, and if it can be avoided, it should be — such disruption is also an almost inevitable consequence of any kind of policy change on immigration and, for those who are innocent, predominately temporary. As this line of reasoning would go, love requires allowing for some pain for the sake of the longer-term well-being of the person.
14. None of that persuades me. It is not my argument. Nor have I heard Trump or any of his people make it. But it does not seem like a crazy argument, nor obviously unChristian. Policies are prudential efforts, and to dismiss the reasoning involved on grounds that the other person has not love — is the kind of moral reasoning which cannot secure a meaningful, lasting opposition to the policies it claims to oppose.
15. It is now commonplace within the progressive Christian world to denounce any suggestion that our country might have special obligations to persecuted Christians. The EO itself didn’t say that, of course; Trump did, but Trump says almost anything to make his listening audience happy (and it was CBN he said it to). The ban allowed for the prioritization of individuals based on them being members of persecuted religious minorities. This seems just, and right.
16. Yet I suspect in practice the EO would prioritize persecuted Christians, and so we might wonder whether this is allowable. And here, I see little reason why not. If refugee policy is remedial, then it is one way of redressing past injustices which our country was complicit in perpetuating or allowing. If those injustices had a disproportionate impact upon Christians in the Middle East, then it seems perfectly just to disproportionately extend remedy to those communities. (Note: the Yadizi may have been, in terms of percentages, decimated more than Christian communities, but my point here is theoretical.) Such a policy need not be an endorsement of their religious claims: Suggestions that it leads to a “religious test” for our country more broadly are, to be blunt, laughable.
17. But I would add one more reason such disproportionate admittance would be reasonable: Suppose our country also had, in the recent past, neglected obligations to allow a proportionate number of persecuted Christians in, then disproportionately admitting them would be compensating for past failures. The idea, then, that the government can never have special preferences for particular religions — including one which happens to be my own — in its refugee policies seems, then, to be utterly false.
18. Of course, Christians are permitted — and perhaps even commanded — to prioritize ‘their own’ as well. This has no bearing on public policy, at least not in the United States, even if that didn’t seem to matter to some. “As we have opportunity,” Saint Paul will say, “let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers.” That such an explicit endorsement of special obligations among Christians was so universally ignored among progressive Christians over the weekend suggests, if nothing else, that their tepid commitment to Christian doctrine generates a disinterest in the sufferings and burdens of the distinctive Christian community. Universalism in eschatology leads to cosmopolitanism in politics — and thus, the ability to reason about or understand the distinct goodness of particularities and our attachments to them goes away. All the intra-Christian debates about refugees and immigration can, I think, be understood upon this axis.
19. I cannot help but think that one of our society’s great needs the next four years will be to keep our wits about us. Whether we are up to it, I am less certain.

In this episode, we discuss Martin Scorsese’s new film Silence, which is an adaptation of Shūsaku Endo’s book of the same name. Film critic Brett McCracken makes his Mere Fidelity debut; he reviewed the film here, and can be followed on Twitter here. Alastair offers his typically brilliant insights, while Matt (like usual) struggles to work out his feelings. Give it a listen.

If you like the show, please do leave us a review on iTunes. We are also available on Google Play.

If you’re interested in supporting the show financially, you can check out our Patreon here.

We are thrilled to have Yuval Levin join us to discuss his important book The Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in an Age of Individualism. Levin is widely regarded as one of the brightest conservative thinkers working today. He helped found both National Affairs and The New Atlantis. And Andrew Wilson included Fractured Republic in his list of 2016’s best books. This is a conversation not to be missed.

In this latest episode of Mere Fidelity, we take up the question of Lent and individualism with Steven Wedgeworth, pastor of Christ Church Lakeland and writer at The Calvinist International. As with all great Mere Fidelity episodes, this one started with a Twitter discussion for which Keith Miller is entirely to blame.

In a recent essay for The New Republic, religion reporter Sarah Posner contends that the Religious Right has “effectively become a subsidiary of the alt-right, yoked to Trump’s white nationalist agenda.” By effectively wedding themselves to Trump’s narrative about ‘American carnage,’ she goes on, evangelicals have “returned the religious right to its own origins—as a movement founded to maintain the South’s segregationist ‘way of life.’”

That is a provocative thesis, which—if true—would put the final blow into the already hollowed corpse of one of the most criticized political movements in American public life. One would expect that as excellent a reporter as Posner would have some substantive evidence, some smoking gun from life inside some of the central Religious Right institutions. But she does not. It is a thesis without evidence—but one that Posner really seems to want to be true.¹

After all, this is at least her second iteration of her argument—and it is no stronger than her first go. Last October, Posner profiled Richard Spencer, who has successfully wormed his way into becoming the It Boy for white nationalism. Spencer, Posner records, considers the Religious Right as a front for the alt-right’s nationalist, racist aspirations. Posner writes:

While Spencer reviles conservatives, he believes they secretly share his white nationalist beliefs. “Saying that you want a culture of life, or Christian values,” he said in a recent podcast, “that’s just basically saying you want to live in a white country that’s normal and decent.” Or, as he explains to me at the Willard, the Family Research Council’s name already implies a call for “more white children.” In Spencer’s eyes, the Alt-Right is an “intellectual movement” so powerful that “in the future, we’re going to be thinking for conservatives…” This superior Alt-Right intelligence will eventually allow the movement to harness the institutions the religious right built, he believes, and entice religious conservatives into white nationalism. It would be easy enough, he says, because “there’s not a single intelligent person in that entire world.”

That story generated the first iteration of Posner’s attempt to yoke the Religious Right and the Alt-Right. In a New York Times op-ed published one day after her Rolling Stone essay, Posner functionally repeated Spencer’s claims. As she puts it, “hitching their wagon” to Trump means that “religious-right leaders are also tying their fortunes to the alt-right…”

Now, one might reasonably wonder what the Religious Right thinks of Richard Spencer’s suggestion that “family values” are simply a front for racism. I’m no Alt-Right aficionado, but it is not clear to me that Spencer is credible enough a source to simply take his word for it. There is a significant gap between the Alt-Right wanting to become allies with the Religious Right, and the Religious Right going along with the scheme. But by the end of the Posner Trilogy, one has no idea what the Religious Right in fact thinks about the Alt-Right—because Posner does not even report that she tried to ask them.

Instead, she throws the weight of her argument on to Randall Balmer’s contention that the origins of the Religious Right were about racism. See, the Religious Right were originally racists; the Alt Right are racists; ergo, the Religious Right and Alt Right are clearly besties! Never mind that huge swaths of the post-Christian Alt-Right would barely be able to stomach the nationalistic piety of the Values Voter Summit. Their constituencies simply do not align. While the Religious Right is predominately white, the grandmas who are keeping the Family Research Council and the American Family Association alive would almost certainly think ‘cuckservative’ is a swear word. None of the sociology seems to matter, though, given the story Balmer tells. The history of the Religious Right reveals all.

Only Balmer’s history is wrong. As his story goes, the Religious Right galvanized around the 1983 Supreme Court decision to strip Bob Jones University of its tax exempt status for its interracial dating ban. It’s a convenient story, and has a grain of truthfulness—the Religious Right did express an exceptional amount of concern about the Court’s decision and its impact on religious liberty protections for Christian institutions. But the anxieties that the Bob Jones decision exacerbated within the Religious Right had been building within the movement for a long time—and they had far less to do with race than Balmer (and Posner) assumes. It is a history that deserves retelling.

Carl McIntire and the Religious Liberty Crises of the 1970s

Only one radio station in American history has ever had its license revoked because of its programming: Carl McIntire’s WXUR, in 1970. A self-described fundamentalist, McIntire relentlessly challenged the socialist and progressive theologies of the mainline Protestant ecumenical groups, and tirelessly announced across America’s airwaves the gospels of liberty, capitalism and Jesus Christ. His reward for these efforts was a two-decade fight with progressive organizations who sought to use the so-called “Fairness Doctrine,” which the FCC had implemented in 1949, to silence him. They eventually won, prompting hundreds of stations across the country to pull McIntire’s programming off out of fear and threatening one of his central bases of national influence.

But McIntire would not let his martyrdom be in vain. As Markku Ruotsila writes in Fighting Fundamentalist, his stellar new biography of McIntire, the episode allowed McIntire to present himself as “the victim of political persecution and as a champion of freedom of speech,” which was precisely what he wanted. The miscalculation of his progressive foes “ended up swelling the ranks of the Right and deepening the resolve of the fundamentalist faithful.”

Ruotsila’s portrait seriously undermines Balmer’s hypothesis that the Religious Right was created ex nihilo by the Bob Jones decision. As Ruotsila tells it, the conservative Christian community’s “sense of grievance was fed at least as much by instances of government action against their access to the media as it was by the IRS’s assault on their schools.” For fundamentalists, freedom of speech and religious liberty were under attack, which required a counteroffensive. “No man,” Ruotsila writes, “kept this perception and this call to action alive as much as did the principal victim of the liberals’ assault, Carl McIntire.”

On Ruotsila’s telling, Carl McIntire was a major contributor to the (re)politicization of conservative Protestant Christianity in the twenty century. He both prefigured the tactics of the Religious Right and was then overshadowed by their emergence, making him something of a forgotten forerunner of the movement. Part pastor, part political activist, the full-time agitator McIntire was as divisive as he was influential. He studied with J. Gresham Machen, mentored Francis Schaeffer—who was instrumental to the emergence of the Religious Right—and fell out with them both. He chafed against Machen’s abandonment of political activism, and set up his own magazine (the ‘Christian Beacon’) and denomination to counter it. That became a familiar tune; he eventually established the American Council of Christian Churches to fight the Social Gospellers, the Commies, the Catholics and just about anyone else who got in his way. But especially the Commies. McIntire was there in the 60s, helping kill the influence of mainline Protestantism on American political life by saturating the airwaves (including in the press) with allegations that they were un-Christian and un-American.

It is true that McIntire resisted the civil rights movement, but Ruotsila’s picture of the racial dynamics of his life makes them seem more complicated than that fact alone would suggest. (His small denomination had several African American pastors in it, for instance.) Instead, Ruotsila thought the Civil Rights movement was a threat to capitalism and freedom. With typical verve, he suggested that the “Communists are surely behind it.” Ruotsila is judicious; he acknowledges that the argument was “carefully framed to obscure [McIntire’s] own prejudices,” but proposes that he “also genuinely believed it to be a statement of fact.”

McIntire’s opposition to the Civil Rights movement, in fact, was an enormous missed opportunity for groups who could have been natural allies in their opposition to federal government power. Ruotsila points out that in the 60s, the IRS targeted two groups: black civil rights leaders, and white Protestant fundamentalists like McIntire. Under Kennedy’s administration, independent, fundamentalist churches in McIntire’s network reported being harassed by the IRS because they were not part of recognized denominations. In 1965, a series of unfounded attacks on McIntire appeared in the press, which Ruotsila describes as a “coordinated effort by a relatively small coterie of liberal religious and civic groups.” The Johnson administration carried on the harassment of religious fundamentalists through the IRS, and McIntire was even hauled before the FBI for an inquiry about whether he was personally involved in the Kennedy assassination. (Seriously.)

Naturally, McIntire made the most of the mortal danger such governmental powers posed to freedom, which his foes painted as “paranoia and conspiracies.”  But Ruotsila’s judgment on all this is straightforward: As “bizarre as McIntire sometimes sounded, the fact was that he was under siege and was being targeted.” McIntire had, indeed, sometimes gone as far as to call for investigations into his foes. But “never had he done what liberals now started doing to him—advocating and lobbying for silencing him on the air by federal order.”

McIntire thus set the template for the Religious Right, both in his tactics and in his sense of grievance about the government—but he would not be the new movement’s leader. Francis Schaeffer’s returned to his mentor’s ways in the late 1970s, helping to galvanize the New Christian Right. Jerry Falwell was not simply a fundamentalist cut from the same cloth as McIntire: he was also a correspondent, a supporter, and a fellow victim of government overreach. During the Carter administration, the IRS took action against Falwell, which “precipitated the cancellation of Falwell’s television program on forty stations and more than a hundred stations’ refusal to carry it.” Falwell’s  ‘Moral Majority’ would embody McIntire’s political vision, even if Falwell betrayed McIntire’s purity instincts by partnering with more moderate ‘evangelicals.’ Still, McIntire’s populist methods, his use of boycotts and petitions, his use of radio all became parts of the Religious Right’s arsenal, along with his use of grievances to animate support on his behalf.

This history is the indispensable backdrop for understanding why the Bob Jones decision so threatened conservative Christians. While evangelicals indisputably have a less-than-exemplary record on questions of race, their own history within the South is not necessarily identical or equivalent to the history of the Religious Right. The most charitable interpretation of Bob Jones is that the Religious Right defended the wrong practice for the right reasons, namely, the freedom of religious institutions to govern themselves.  But given the extensive anxiety about the IRS, the FCC, and other federal government efforts to impinge upon fundamentalist preachers, almost any similar case would have generated the same kind of outrage. The history of the Religious Right can be reduced to defending racial purity only if the 1970s and Carl McIntire simply never happened.  

We shouldn’t let the religious right off the hook, but we should criticize them fairly.

The Religious Right should have seen this coming, of course. It was inevitable that in signing up with Trump, they would be viewed as responsible for what happens while he is in office. And so they should be. But being held responsible for what his other supporters do and say is a different matter. While it is politically expedient for progressives to pursue such a narrative, it is immensely dangerous to force the Religious Right to carry the cross of the Alt Right. They are not natural bedfellows—and those who oppose both should wish to see them divided against each other, and not united in their grievances against progressives.

The reasons for this are many, but I’ll name two. First, the alt-right is a virus that, once set loose, may prove far more vicious and violent than the Religious Right ever did. While I have no doubt it is tempting for progressives to pursue the death of the Religious Right by such means, the unintended collateral damage of such an effort could be considerable. Viruses are not so easily controlled once released into the wild as we might think. Progressives once shouted repeatedly that traditional marriage supporters were on the “wrong side of history” as a way of pre-emptively undermining their confidence. The strategy was effective, as it is far harder to hold onto your views as a minority. But if the Alt Right is bad, why embolden them by perpetuating their hopes that they will have a home within the institutions of the Religious Right?

Such is the prudential reason. But there is one further principle that ought to restrain progressives: charity. Two groups aligned upon the same candidate, but for very different reasons and aims. Collapsing those reasons together not only creates an intellectual muddle: It undermines the social conditions for true and genuine self-reflection within the Religious Right about what they have wrought on America. Such a tactic contributes to social distrust and division, inasmuch as it over-accuses and so emboldens Religious Right leaders to reject all the rest of the critiques that will doubtlessly come their way the next four years. Keeping apart constituencies that Donald Trump (somehow, for now) holds together is an act of civic friendship—and we are in a great need of those these days.

The fabric of American society has been rent apart for the past thirty years, and the Religious Right has been centrally—though by no means solely—responsible for that. And yet as contentious and as divisive as the culture war has been, progressives and conservatives could plausibly unite around the proposition that the alt-right’s aspirations and ethos represent a serious and grave step backward for American life. Such common ground will not undo the ill will the past thirty years have generated—but it could be the start of a mutual effort to stitch together again the fraying stitches of our common life.

Featured image via: http://www.capecentralhigh.com/journalism/before-glenn-beck-carl-mcintire/

Alastair, Derek and Matt get together for a good ol’ fashioned Bible study on Genesis 1.

If you like the show, please do leave us a review on iTunes. We are also available on Google Play.

If you’re interested in supporting the show financially, you can check out our Patreon here.

We enjoyed our last Bible study on Genesis 1 so much that we decided to do it again. Listen in as Alastair, Matt and Andrew discuss the second half of the chapter.

If you like the show, please do leave us a review on iTunes. We are also available on Google Play.

If you’re interested in supporting the show financially, you can check out our Patreon here.

Matt, Derek, and Mere-O’s own Jake Meador discuss the implications of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ for political theology. (Note: Matt posted the wrong episode before, so please shame him appropriately.)

If you like the show, please do leave us a review on iTunes. We are also available on Google Play.

If you’re interested in supporting the show financially, you can check out our Patreon here.

Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option has been one of the most talked about books of 2017, and his blog is one of the most popular socially conservative blogs in the country. Now, the man himself joins us to talk about it. Listen in as Matt, Alastair and Andrew discuss Rod’s proposal for how Christians should relate to the world.

Note: As you’ll hear in the first few minutes, we’re going on hiatus until later this summer, owing to travel and general busy-ness for a number of us. As such, we’ve suspended any Patreon donations. However, we’ll be back and better than ever in August. So, catch up on some old episodes while we are gone.

I cannot remember reading an essay that has moved me as much as Margaret Talbot’s devastating New Yorker piece on our opioid crisis. The prose is mostly unadorned, because it can be. Many of the stories Talbot recounts are so tragic they need no embellishment; others are so inspiring that they need no amplification.

The essay does more to describe the human and social costs of our opioid epidemic than any other I have read. It is noticeably understated in its diagnosis of the problems. But the essay is even more conspicuous in its silence about a major social player who may have an interest in the lives of those it recounts, namely, the churches. Whether this absence is owing to the author’s oversight, or that of the churches, I cannot say. One hopes it is the former.

Three interconnected thoughts emerged for me while reading, which are as of yet untested for their merit. First, we have been oft warned of late that we are on the cusp of entering into Gilead, the land of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian Handmaid’s Tale. Such handwringing is hard to take seriously on its face. But while the visions are not mutually exclusive, reading this made me think that our future is much more likely to be one in which half our country lays about the streets, self-medicating on whatever narcotics they can attain in order to ease their pain and their suffering.

Of course, we are woefully under-equipped to even understand such a social dilemma, in part because we have no sense of history. If we say anything of it at all, we have only critical things to say to the prohibitionists, who saw a similar social problem afoot and worked tirelessly to defeat it. That there is unlikely to be a similar energy toward addressing this crisis is an indication, I think, that we are all implicated in the problem.

And that is my final thought: the crisis is upon all of us, not only those communities which Talbot visited. It is easy to look down patronizingly upon the self-medicating opioid addictions of those who have little to live for, all the while taking a long sip of a caffeinated beverage to sustain ourselves for a long night of work. Caffeine and testosterone — and yes, even cocaine — are acceptable middle and upper-class forms of drug use, and signal a deeply interrelated social disease, namely, a fragmentation of our lives from families and from the communities in which we rest, laugh, and live. Opioids are but the negative corollary, the despairing form of the same exhaustion with life that besets Wall Street. We can none of us be exonerated from their plight; it is our crisis.

It is perhaps this final thought that comes close to identifying why the essay so moved me. After all, who among us who still has a shred of self-awareness has not sometimes felt the kind of hopeless and despair that animates so much of their community’s struggles? Is is not because the stories of those in misery are so far from me that I felt this essay so keenly: it is more because they are so very nearly my own.

James K.A. Smith’s recent criticism of those who have made a particular sexual ethic a criterion of ‘orthodoxy’ has generated a minor kerfuffle, as these things go. My friends and Mere Fidelity collaborators Derek Rishmawy and Alastair Roberts have both weighed in, Alan Jacobs has offered a characteristically concise yet helpful clarification, and Wesley Hill has offered a sober and elegant reflection on related themes.

I’m not sure how much is left to be said that would be helpful, but before I give the substance of the question a go let me make a few broader observations about the way these discussions transpire.

The Danger of Needlessly Alienating Those Who Agree with Us

First, I think conservatives are perpetually in danger of piling on those who call into question aspects of our approach to this issue, even—and perhaps even especially—when the individuals doing so agree with the broad contours of traditional Christian sexual morality. I argued loudly on behalf on behalf of Julie Rodgers and defend the Spiritual Friendship crew every chance I get.

Even when I disagree with their formulations, conservatives need just the kinds of internal critiques that such individuals and communities provide to not ossify (further) into a doctrinaire assertion of our position, and to help us creatively consider the possibility of newer and more true ways of articulating the beauty and goodness of our position.

How far can ‘orthodoxy’ be extended?

What, though, of the substance of the question: Can ‘orthodoxy’ be extended appropriately to include at least certain (and how many?) aspects of a “traditional” Christian sexual ethic?

I take it that nearly everyone has agreed to this point that such questions appropriately frame the problem. Prof. Smith seems to describe the conservative position as encapsulating “sexual morality and marriage,” and Prof. Jacobs raises questions about a “sexual ethic.” Such a formulation raises significant questions, of course, about what is involved in formulating any ethic, sexual or otherwise, and what the relationship is between the practices in which a community embodies that ethic and the narratives or propositions that compose our public articulation of that ethic.

On one level, this clearly names what is at stake in our churches’ debates over gay marriage. Can two members of the same sex marry, and do so with the blessing and under the authority of God and his church? How shall the Christian community arrange itself, such that these relationships have the intelligibility and support and integrity that different-sex marital relationships are given? What ought, normatively, the churches do with loving, pious gay couples in their midst?

Such normative questions are important. The creeds and the set of doctrines Smith so helpfully throws under the label of ‘orthodoxy’ are also of relatively little use, I think, in answering them.

On Extending ‘Orthodoxy’

We should note, though, that trying to link traditional answers into the creeds in this sense does not narrow them, but rather seriously and significantly expands them. And, as a result, questions about the boundaries proliferate: if a “sexual ethic” is a part of the creed, why not a pacifistic ethic of war? Or an abolitionist ethic of slavery, or an ethic of poverty relief? Or, as Smith points out, baptism?

These are sound reasons to be wary about extending ‘orthodoxy’ to ethical stances, I think. And yet, that distinction itself seems to presuppose that the ‘gay marriage’ debate within our churches is a debate fundamentally about ethics, such that the same descriptions of the doctrines which fall under the umbrella of “orthodoxy” could generate both an “affirming” and a “traditionalist” view of whether gay people can marry.

It’s this move that I think we should call into question, and that helps explain why conservatives (like me) tend to lump affirming positions under the rubric of ‘heresy.’ How one describes “sex” and “marriage” are not secondary implications of a theological anthropology, but rather essential aspects. “The Lord is for the body, and the body for the Lord” is said of the body in its sexual dimension, and expresses something like the totalizing role sexuality plays in our understanding of persons. (Paul differentiates the body in this respect from the stomach, which the Lord “will destroy.”) The sex of our Savior, the gender of his bride, the nature of their union together, the fruitfulness at stake in it: describing the scope, the content, and the means of salvation is impossible without staking out some sort of view on such matters.

But theological anthropology is also—theology. The biblical depictions of sexual complementarity and marriage demarcate humanity’s relationship in the church to God through Christ, and render the name of “Father” intelligible to us. Even in his humanity, the witness of Christ is unintelligible apart from the mother who bore him and the father who adopted him. If this familial architecture is only accidental, or inessential, or on an equal plane theologically to a same-sex familial structure, then the scope and content of what Jesus would mean when he says “Father” (of God) would doubtlessly also be very different than what he in fact discloses to us.

What Same-Sex Marriage Would Mean for the Bride of Christ

To put a sharper point on it, it is because Christ has a bride that we are able to name God as Father in the Lord’s Prayer, and for that name to have the peculiar content that it does. I think Ben Myers is simply too strong to say that the name “Father” and “Son” have no anthropological corollaries that inform our grasp of them. Paul in Ephesians doesn’t think so: It is from the Father that every family on earth is named. While this asymmetrical ordering is ontologically irreversible, epistemically the Fatherhood of God seems inextricable from the sonship which we are brought into through Christ and his—bride. Inasmuch as humanity is known and revealed in the person of Jesus, we are also known and revealed within the complementary relationship that Jesus has with his church.

Is there a valid ‘affirming’ sexual ethic?

Still, such descriptive theological anthropology is not sufficient for the argument against affirming gay marriage. After all, one might accept such a theological anthropology and still argue that it can generate both the “affirming” and “traditional” sexual ethics. I don’t want to speak for them, but from reading them for a while I suspect Jacobs and Smith agree with the broad contours of the theological anthropology I’ve described above and reject the claim that there is a single position that flows from it, namely, the traditional sexual ethic.

Answering this problem is, if I may be honest, the single most challenging and important aspect of the debates over gay marriage—and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the one which conservatives have devoted the least time to developing properly. There are two pieces of the conservative argument:  a theological anthropology in which sexually-complementary relationships are an essential feature, and negative prohibitions against sexual unions which fail to instantiate them. The question is how the positive vision generates the negative norms, such that affirming and practicing same-sex sexual relationships can be said to undermine and contradict that positive vision, rather than merely supplement or add a new form of life to it.

The first thing someone attempting to explain why a theological anthropology generates only a traditional sexual ethic would have to do is differentiate, somehow, same-sex unions from other permitted forms of non-marital unions. After all, there are other obvious forms of human life and of sexuality which the New Testament positively welcomes—‘sibling’ relationships between the sexes in church, for instance, and celibacy for individuals. On the traditional view, celibacy does not contradict marriage, but rather transposes it, elevates its essence and its life into a new key. Nor do ‘sibling’ relationships contradict marriage, but rather are understood and developed within the church in consort with the practices at the heart of fruitful marital relationships.

Additionally, one would have to argue that certain ‘ideals’ are themselves normative, such that imperfect forms of unions are impermissible. After all, one might argue that same-sex sexual unions are not contradicting traditional marriage so much as imperfectly disclosing them, or supplementing them in some way. Such a case is more difficult to make than it seems—the last time I tried, I spent an entire weekend arguing with a friend who thought non-marital sex was permissible for identical reasons.  

Still, if the advent of Christ has something to do with the impermissibility of sexual unions—then it does so, it seems to me, for reasons informed by the anthropology which is therein disclosed and the bounded set of practices which are authorized by Christ himself to be signs and witnesses of that anthropology and the grace embodied within it.

Why Sexual Ethics Cannot Be Altogether Separated from the Creeds

In that sense, “sexual ethics” both are derived from the creed and its embedded anthropology, and a means of entering into their logic and their structure. To admit two signs of permissible sexual unions—different-sex and same-sex—into a community, and to treat them as equally normative and permissible, equally disclosive of the reality of God’s love to the world, reduces the witness of the church to incoherence. Who is named “Father” in a lesbian union, such that they can equally claim to be a family who have derived their name from God the Father?

It is for this reason, I think, that “sexual ethics” actually function on a different logic than pacifism or other ethical questions. It seems to me that the pacifist and the just warrior agree on the nature of the eschatological peace to which the church is ordered and moving. They disagree about the licit means by which individual Christians might strive to secure the limited and partial peace of our time. To put it differently, they might both agree on the contents of the ethics of reconciliation, but disagree about the timing and means of its worldly implementation.

However, it seems to me that if same-sex unions are a contrary sign to the anthropology disclosed by Christ and his church—which is the only theological grounds on which I think they are impermissible—then the eschatological vision cannot hold them both, at least not unless we adopt the ethical equivalent of twice two being five. The early progressive affirmation of same-sex unions frequently was accompanied by what amounted to a denuded theism, in which every name for God is permissible. While evangelical progressives are aiming for a more respectable form of the argument, which preserves (say) calling God “Father,” the question is whether trying to have both is consistent. After all, what we affirm with our lips is not always determinative of the meaning or significance of our practices. (I don’t say this to be cheeky, but more than anyone else Prof. Smith has himself made that point known among evangelicals. We would do well to heed it.)

It would be reasonable and right to raise questions for me about other aspects of sexual ethics, to see whether I am willing to grant that they also function as signs of contradiction in the way I’ve described same-sex unions. Take, for instance, the use of contraception: does intentionally prohibiting that dimension of one’s sexual life render one’s marriage a contradiction? I am happy to grant that it does, and in a very serious way. But then, this claim is as well attested to in the tradition as the prohibition on same-sex relationships, among both Protestants and Catholics, at least until that fateful and tragic Lambeth conference of 1930.

If my claim that affirming gay marriages renders Christian anthropology and the grammar of the creeds unintelligible is right, then it is almost certainly an unintelligibility that those who affirm gay marriages theologically will fail to recognize. Deviation from traditional sexual ethics renders us incapable of affirming and seeing the truth about sexual ethics. This is true from the couple who divorces without cause to the man addicted to porn. I take it that it is a feature of heresies that they present themselves as the truth, and a feature of heretics that they avow and insist upon their own orthodoxy.

Such a problem of self-deception is not limited to progressives, not by any means. But it exists nonetheless, and means that how ‘orthodox’ and ‘heresy’ are used should vary according to whether one is speaking of an ecclesiastical context, an individual, or a leader of the church. One might adopt, tacitly, a position that is in fact heretical without realizing it; one might even consciously affirm that position, without being a ‘heretic’ in the sense that one should be excommunicated from the church. But a deliberative body like the church that affirms and approves of these things—well, that’s a different ball of wax. It seems eminently unreasonable to excommunicate individuals on grounds that they affirm gay marriage; it seems eminently reasonable to leave or separate from churches that affirm gay marriage.

Allow me to conclude with this: the practices through which the church orders sexuality, marriage, and celibacy are a “sexual ethic.” But they are an ethic that, when embodied, reveals and bears witnesses to the truths of God’s boundless and generative love for the world, of his blessing upon creation through his grace, the blessing which in marital unions takes the form of children and within the church takes the form of converts. Such an ethic cannot be “derived” from the propositional content of the creeds; it is the life which enables the creeds to be prayed gladly and fervently, and without the haze of confusion or inconsistency. Such an ethic is not a “first order” or “second order” issue; it is the presupposition upon which the church names and calls its children through baptism. It is a set of practices that, when undertaken by individual couples under the blessing and authority of the church, will come to an end; the form of this world is indeed passing away. But our marriages come to an end only as the marriage into which we are all finally united with Christ begins, and we join our groom at the wedding supper of the Lamb. The practice of procreative sexuality ends with the eschaton; the grammar of sexual complementarity which stands beneath it and informs it endures forever.

The ongoing dispute over the shape and meaning of “evangelicalism’s” understanding of sexual ethics took a sharper, more institutionally focused form yesterday. The CBMW convened what they are calling a “Coalition for Biblical Sexuality,” and released a series of affirmations and denials regarding the Bible’s teaching on both sexual desire and “transgenderism.” The list of signers is a “who’s who” of the Reformed evangelical world, with what I would describe as a generous smattering of individuals from other backgrounds. The statement is meant, as John Piper puts it, to “clarify Christian convictions.”

While I am generally ‘statement-averse,’ it seems reasonable to want a succinct depiction of the theological boundaries on these issues. If nothing else, such statements are efficient: they remove much of the work of retelling all of our convictions on a certain matter by giving us a public document to point to. It’s a lot easier to find all the people who are on board with a certain vision of the home, for instance, by asking what they make of the Danvers Statement.

Yet this virtue is also a vice: by creating a public context in which all the people who affirm certain doctrines or ideas are identified under the same banner, statements tacitly shift the playing field, such that to not sign is to signal disagreement. The only way to counteract this effect is through public criticism, and the subsequent formation of alternate communities. Hence, progressive evangelicals have already written their own counterstatement.

And here I am. My name will remain off the list of signers, for reasons that I think are serious enough to make public. It is a predictable role for me to fill. But I simply cannot lend my endorsement or my support to this statement, even though it has been eagerly affirmed by many people whom I admire and count as friends.

These are my reasons.

Problems with the Nashville Statement

The preamble to the statement announces that we are in a “period of historic transition.” The crisis it proclaims is grave: the “secular spirit of our age” stands against us, threatening the integrity, clarity, and conviction of the churches that proclaim the Gospel. There are two options here: either we recognize the “beauty of God’s design for human life,” or we embrace a sexual ethic and understanding of maleness and femaleness grounded in an “individual’s autonomous preferences.” Either our witness is counter-cultural, or it is not biblical.

It is not this contrast that worries me. Rather, I think on some level the crisis is a real one: beneath the arguments and debates over the appropriate shape of sexual desire lies the possibility that we would denude and diminish the church’s witness by being co-opted by a set of dispositions, attitudes, and practices that are deeply and inescapably antagonistic to the Gospel. I suspect, though do not know, that such an anxiety betrays the middle-class orientation of the document’s drafters. In any suburban evangelical church one is far more likely to encounter people for whom the whole set of issues under consideration simply don’t matter theologically than one is to meet, well, someone like me. By announcing the crisis up front, the drafters leave no question about the nature of their aims; they intend to caution as much as proclaim.  

The conflict with the “spirit of our age” sets up the series of affirmation and denials, where we discover a very narrow ethical focus on same-sex sexual desires and questions of transgender identity. While Article 1, for instance, offers a broad affirmation of the nature and theological significance of marriage, the denial aims only at gay and polygamous marriages. A narrow, minimalist focus for a statement of this sort is understandable. Such questions are the controversies of our day; it is undoubtedly the case that the signers of the statement would say more, not less, if asked about related subjects. But I take it that such a narrow focus is not simply a rhetorical problem: it represents a failure to bring the statement up to the minimum standards for biblical, ecclesiastically centered judgment of those who are wrong.

In the first place, it is easy to see how the dichotomy the statement opens with maps on to the sociological realities which surround the statement. The statement draws its power and effect from its institutional location: if nobody who signed it ran churches or parachurches, nobody would care. While it is reasonable, and even likely, that those who frame the statement would want to resist collapsing those who adopt the “spirit of our age” into them, those who are outside the evangelical churches, such an effect is inevitable. In the same way, those who sign the statement are the people who denounce the “spirit of the age,” and do so against those who wish to affirm the licitness of gay desires and sex-transitions. The narrow focus of the boundary-setting that this statement  aims at thus turns evangelicalism’s attention outward, toward its outer edges and toward those who lie beyond them. 

Even if the statement draws the boundary in the right place, then, it inherently and intentionally obscures the fact that whether evangelicals embrace the “spirit of our age” is not a decision before us: It is a decision that has been already made. A “secular spirit” manifests every time an evangelical pastor remarries someone who was divorced without cause. It comes to the surface every time an evangelical couple pursues in vitro fertilization, and so undoes the “God-ordained link” between the reproductive organs and the union of the couple’s love. Every time an evangelical couple “feels the Lord calling” them to surrogacy, there the “spirit of our age” appears. And yes, it happens every time an evangelical utters the damnable phrase, “Well, I’m an evangelical, which means I’m okay with contraception”—as though that were somehow a mark of evangelical identity. (I’ve run out of fingers trying to count the number of times I’ve heard that, from pastors and from laypeople.)

To point out such realities is to introduce matters on which good evangelicals can “agree to disagree.” But doing so also discloses how the strategy being deployed by progressives on sexual ethics was originally used by evangelicals for purposes more comfortable and convenient to our heterosexual and child-idolizing circles. An anthropology that affirms the theological significance of bodily life will weigh equally against a whole host of procreative practices that do not come up in this statement. Such practices are as deep and fundamental rejections of our bodily and sexual life as gay sex and transgender surgery are. That there is internal disagreement among evangelicals is no justification for the narrow scope of judgments and denials; such disagreement, after all, is the position that progressive Christians are seeking to gain.

I have long argued that we should understand our current crisis about sexuality through two principles. First, the spectacles and obvious disputes this statement responds to are the sideshow, not the main action. Those obvious manifestations of the “spirit of our age” are not the ones we should worry about; it is those that are not obvious, the subtle temptations that lure us in without us realizing their deadly force. Such arenas are more difficult to detect; but they are even harder to root out, as we are most inclined to willingly compromise ourselves ethically when we want what a practice promises us. Such a principle means the difference between affirming gay marriage and allowing IVF or any of the other practices which are part and parcel of the same ideology is irrelevant. The Church of Jesus Christ does not get a pass on its standards of holiness.

The second principle follows on the first: the spectacles of obvious disagreement happen precisely because we have not been more focused on ordering our own houses. I suggested above this statement fails to meet a minimal, biblical standard for expressing judgment. Jesus’s demand that those who seek to correct others examine the planks in their own eye is framed in an interpersonal context, to be sure. But the same principle is given ecclesiastical form when Peter suggests that “judgment begins at the house of God.” The latter verse is interesting because Peter frames such introspective judgment as a response to suffering. This statement, though, meets the possibility of ‘martyrdom’ that the “spirit of our age” presents with silence about our churches’ failures. Such silence is no more sanctified than the silence that evangelical pastors retreat to when asked about gay marriage. It is a silence that would be the equivalent of failing to acknowledge the many and diverse ways a church allowed or affirmed racism in a statement denouncing the KKK.

The failure to acknowledge the depth of evangelicalism’s complicity in the “spirit of our age” is interdependent with the statement’s description of the norms to which we are all held. Article 2 affirms that “God’s revealed will for all people is chastity outside marriage and fidelity within marriage.” The denial makes it clear that the statement is focused on who one’s sexual desires and actions are ordered toward, namely, one’s spouse or non-spouse.

Yet God’s revealed will is for chastity within marriage as well. There are more forms of wrongdoing in the sphere of sexuality than directing one’s sexual desire toward a third party. It is possible to reduce a spouse to an instrument of one’s pleasure, or to engage in intrinsically wrong acts together. If the narrow scope of the document’s denials were accompanied by a robust affirmation of the possibility of such wrongdoing within marriage itself, I’d be more sympathetic to it. But it does not. Such an oversight could be justified by appealing to the document’s minimalist approach. But even if that mitigates the problem, the statement still only offers a truncated, narrow form of the virtues in the realm of sex and marriage to which all Christians are called. 

At the same time, the document’s narrow focus also includes an unfortunate (at best) narrowing of the community who the drafters think can claim the name “evangelical.” While the gang at Spiritual Friendship are capable of defending themselves, I take it that the denial of Article 7 is explicitly aimed at ruling out the subversive retrieval of “gay” they have been working on the past few years. While I am more than happy to accept many of the other boundary lines, I do think it a prudential failure in the face of the crisis this document outlines to pre-emptively winnow our ranks of those individuals who agree with our conclusions about the integrity of marriage and the morality of same-sex sexual behavior, but disagree about the meaning and significance of a “gay identity.” Paradoxically, while the minimalist approach is (presumably) aimed at generating consensus from the largest number of people, it does so only by cutting out from our midst some of conservative Christianity’s most eloquent and informed defenders.

The failure of this document, then, is (again) not merely rhetorical. The omissions are as significant as what it explicitly includes. Nor do I think those omissions are merely a matter of differing prudential judgment about what our times require: I have described the statement as failing to meet the minimum conditions for public judgment, because I think there are actual Bible verses that indicate as much. While evangelicals practice self-loathing more than they ought, a statement from churchmen that asserts that a particular view of sexuality is essential to the faith must acknowledge our own complicity and entanglement in the very spirit that is being denounced. Otherwise, it fails to bear the authority of the Gospel it proclaims, an authority which stems from the confession of our sins and the proclamation of Christ’s saving work. Such a dual announcement is the necessary and indispensable precondition for our judgment of the world. The absence of such a confession leaves the affirmations and proclamations withering on the vine, without the grace and life of humility which allows us to see that we, the evangelical churches, have helped make this world as well. If the confidence and courage that the statement enjoins sound forced or hollow, this is why.

Conclusion

With the signers and the drafters of the Nashville Statement, I am persuaded that the current controversies over sex, gender, and marriage are of maximal importance. With those individuals, I agree that there are matters here essential to the truthful, beautiful articulation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. With those individuals, I agree that the crisis in the evangelical church is real, and that those seeking to alter our institutions so that they affirm gay marriage undermine and distort the faith that all Christians, in all places and times have affirmed.

But issues of maximal importance deserve maximal responses. It is possible to say too little, as it is possible to say too much. If I have sometimes erred toward the latter vice in my exposition and defense of a traditional account of sex and gender, I have done so only because the deflationary and minimalist approach to such questions is itself an intrinsic part of the intellectual atmosphere which has left the orthodox Christian view unintelligible to so many.

But my frustration with the statement goes even deeper than its minimalism. The addition of such confessions would not have materially changed most of the document. It is just because they are so easy to include that this statement disappoints me so much. Little would have been lost, and much gained, through the acknowledgment that our own communities are central repositories of the problems this statement identifies.

If the difference between Christianity and what is on offer in our world is genuinely one of anthropology, then it can only be met and countered appropriately by demonstrating the difference in its fullness, in the places where those differences affect not just those who are gay or identify as trans but those of us who are happily married and have kids. The moral status of gay desires and transgender identity bottom out (at least in part) in what we make of our bodiliness, and of the womb, and of the social forms such material realities generate. Yet those are realities which implicate us all. Caitlyn Jenner could only become a phenomenon in a world formed from countless choices by ordinary, faithful, well-intentioned people who failed to see that the body has for them the same malleability and plasticity in other areas that Caitlyn Jenner expressed about it in the realm of sex and gender.

Six years ago, in a (justly) forgotten book, I argued that evangelicalism had tacitly adopted secular practices and habits through inattentiveness to our bodily life. It is not our explicit affirmations and denials that matter, I suggested, but what happens beneath the surfaces and outside the edges of our view. But that means the way to recover a community and a society of people who value the goodness of bodily life in its fullness is not through reducing the chief expressions of our public witness to the last, thin thread of sexual ethics that we can all still agree on. Rather, we must set about rediscovering and reviving the broad and beautiful backdrop of the goodness of mortal flesh, a goodness we have each denied in a thousand different ways. We cannot authentically or authoritatively name and resist the “spirit of our age” until we recognize that before the world made Caitlyn Jenner, we made it.  

What does the Nashville Statement mean? And to whom should we look to help us understand? Conservative evangelicals have been gripped by such questions since the CBMW released the statement two weeks ago. Yet while its advocates and defenders have touted its importance and its benefits, I fear the ensuing discussion has left conservative evangelicals as bereft of sound guidance on questions of gender identity and sexual orientation as we were prior to its release. My reflections here are variations on that theme.

Statements, Counterstatements, and Conservative Evangelical Critics

The self-parody of the progressive ‘Christian’ response to the Nashville Statement is the place to start. While more sober criticisms contained enough truth to sound respectable, they were soon overwhelmed by farcical counterstatements that reaffirmed the progressive sexual ethic is not recognizably Christian. Their pseudo-theological dressings mean you have to squint to see what they really want: polyamory. Which is mildly disappointing, I must say. A paganism undefiled by the trappings of evangelical formalism would be more fun than the lukewarm, ‘respectable’ version on offer. Progressive Christians should put down their Enneagram charts and make paganism great again. After all, I can think more enjoyable ways of fighting to make polyamory permissible than releasing a statement.

Such a sad spectacle, though, merely confirmed the Nashville Statement’s defenders in the righteousness of their cause. As Albert Mohler told the Washington Post, “the vitriol in response to our document showed why such clarification is necessary.” Denny Burk claimed to be “astonished” by the attention, but suggested that it was a sign the world had heard the good news. Owen Strachan claimed the mantle of John the Baptist.

And then there was the small band of conservative critics who tried to raise concerns about the statement’s presuppositions, meaning and purpose. Though such criticisms were relatively widely read, prominent advocates acted as though conservative evangelical critics simply did not exist. Strachan reduced critics to two categories: progressive pagans and weak-kneed evangelicals. Mohler’s typology of critics had four categories, none of which fit Preston Sprinkle or Carl Trueman. And then there was Alastair Roberts, who signed it, defended it and then critiqued it. But you wouldn’t know about the last if you followed the statement’s leading advocates: they only touted Alastair’s endorsement. After the existence of conservative critics was confirmed in the Washington Post, Strachan switched tactics, arguing the statement’s 170 signatories outnumber the five critics who were named.[1]

The effort to publicly downplay and dismiss conservative critics has gone hand-in-hand with exaggerated claims of the statement’s importance and the breadth of its signatories, in order to convey that it represents all of conservative evangelicalism. Burk had the audacity to put the statement in the same ‘tradition’ as the creeds. Strachan described it (apparently without irony) as a “landmark in theological history” from a “globe-spanning” coalition—thus shrinking the world to the U.S. and U.K. and demonstrating the very parochialism progressives are often charged with. Strachan is of course right that the 170 signatories is more than the five critics. And yet—only 170? Play the “who’s missing from the signatories” game. It’s a long and not uninfluential list. I was not surprised Rod Dreher met conservative evangelical pastors unhappy with it, none of whom apparently wanted to be named. I suspect conservative evangelical discontent about this statement runs deep, even if it is mostly silent.

My aim in describing this landscape is not to match Strachan’s hyperbole with an overinflated account of the scope of dissent. It is just the silence of such conservative individuals and institutions that makes Strachan’s claim this document speaks for evangelicals seem reasonable. Yet while people remain silent for many reasons, these days everyone assumes that silence means consent. And exaggerating the quality, importance, and scope of this statement also intrinsically raises the stakes for public disagreement—which is, I suspect, partially the point of such rhetoric. As the defenders’s unwillingness to publicly engage conservative evangelical critics indicates, the payoff for doing so is also quite low. Until conservative evangelicals with influence publicly demur, then, this statement sets the framework by which conservative evangelicals are known and judged.

Culture War or Catechesis?

The preoccupation with progressives by the statement’s lead defenders also calls into question the accuracy of its stated purpose. Denny Burk, President of CBMW, has suggested that “one of the most important things to understand about The Nashville Statement is that it was not primarily aimed at the outside world,” but at the “evangelical Christian world where so much confusion on these questions seems to remain.” It is emphatically not a “culture-war document,” he writes, but meant to “catechize God’s people.”

While forming God’s people is a thoroughly laudable aim, I wonder: why then the website, the press release, and the signatories? The means of communication are not neutral, after all. They deliberately invite attention not just from evangelicals, but the world. If the form of such statements is part of catechesis, then why were Bible verses left off? And why were reasons for each of the affirmations and denials not given, or definitions of terms not supplied? Such additions would dramatically expand the statement’s length. But what does that matter, if the purpose is catechism and not the culture war?

And why is there not more attention to the pastoral dynamics of how these affirmations and denials are to be worked out in the context of local communities? For a statement signed by a heavy concentration of Baptists, its form and substance have little to do with congregational life. It is a “statement” by an evangelicalism that has left ecclesial communities behind in favor of trans-denominational, parachurch partnerships.

And if catechism is the aim, why has the public defense barely registered (at best) conservative critics like Wendy Alsup? Why does “catechesis” require maintaining the public appearance of unity? A real catechetical process is meant not to force a person into doctrinal conformity, but to elicit questions and objections for the aim of understanding. The disparity between the stated aim of this document and the actions of its defenders make it plausible to infer that conservative critics also no longer count as “God’s people.” Is this too part of the document’s purpose?

And if the aim is the formation of Christians, doesn’t that mean confessing our complicity in the spirit of the age becomes—non-negotiable? Mohler obliquely alludes to Ron Belgau’s version of this critique, assuring us that evangelicals really know our shortcomings. But if the statement’s purpose is catechesis—shouldn’t it then express something of the atmosphere of repentance, especially if evangelicalism’s leadership already agrees such a response is justified? Confession is the first act of Christian witness, the grounds on which we name our own status as forgiven by God and subsequently as authorized to pass judgment. It is the presupposition of speaking Christianly, rather than merely affirming Christian doctrines. There is no such thing as Christian pedagogy that fails to include it when passing moral censure, as this statement does. Any judgment that lacks confession cannot be the judgment of grace—or of God.

In short: the Nashville Statement is more apt for catechesis in our endless culture war than the confident, faithful affirmation of the Gospel within our churches. We know it is more apt for such a purpose partly because that is how its defenders have used it, contrary to their claim that it is not a “culture war document.” The statement’s affirmations and silences, its form and its presentation are consciously designed to reach as broad an audience as our media allow. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with that. But it is literally unbelievable that the drafters are “astounded” by the attention they have received. How precisely does one write a statement announcing a crisis, and then claim to be surprised when controversy ensues? When Owen Strachan touts the statement made “national news” for purportedly non-controversial beliefs, it’s hard to not wonder: Is it possible they have had their reward in full? 

Idealism and Intentions

Beneath the various defenses of the Nashville Statement lies a subtle but pernicious idealism that appeals to the intentions of the authors as the definitive answer for what the statement is and means. For the drafters, the statement’s social positioning, origins, and context have no bearing on how we are to interpret its significance. Their intentions are the only criteria that matter. We are asked to see this statement not as a reflection of a movement of Christians invested in a narrow understanding of gender roles but as an inclusive document that makes room for all evangelicals. We are asked to ignore the fact that its form and content are designed to generate public attention, and simply accept on testimony that this is not a culture-war document. We are asked to forget that the preamble passes a sweeping judgment on the spirit of our age, but the affirmation and denials only name manifestations that are easy to distance ourselves from. We are asked to accept that this statement is important enough that it belongs in the same sentence as the creeds, but told not to make the “perfect the enemy of the good.”

The appeal to such intentions would be more persuasive if its signers agreed on what it means. But the statement is no model of clarity where it counts for conservative critics. Burk claims it’s purpose is the churches, but John Piper claims the audience is both the church and the world. Mohler reads the statement and says nothing about it acknowledging complicity. Burk’s inventive reading discovers such an acknowledgment in the preamble.[2]

Or consider Article 7. The ‘plain sense’ obviously writes out Wes Hill and Spiritual Friendship. They are the only group known publicly to whom such an article would uniquely apply. Because those who are affirming are ruled out on the other statements, the only reason to add the boundary in Article 7 is if one thinks Wes Hill is outside of it. But Tom Schreiner signed the statement, and he says it doesn’t apply to Spiritual Friendship. Alastair Roberts says it does. Are we supposed to wait for an authoritative pronouncement on the statement’s scope, as Burk did on Article 10? Are we even supposed to take that ‘clarification’ as definitive?

The appeal to intentions in order to settle matters of dispute is a shibboleth in evangelical circles, but there are (at least) two deep, relevant problems with it. First, it is ironically a close cousin of the ‘spirit of the age’ that the Nashville Statement so forcefully denounces. One person ignores the social and material conditions of their bodies and angelically asserts they have a different gender; another ignores the social and material conditions of their words and angelically asserts that they have meant something different than what we heard. Such a principle is self-exonerating; it means no one can be wrong about what they have done, because their private, inaccessible intentions are the final arbiter of what they’ve done. It is a principle that subsequently breeds deep self-deception and insularity, as it is a trump card that ends disagreement and dissent.

Second, such an idealistic criterion is also a double-standard that defenders of this statement have not been willing to grant to their interlocutors. Burk’s claim that this was not a new moment in our culture wars turns entirely on whether we accept his testimony about this statement’s purpose. But Burk has also developed a trajectory that helps people interpret the meaning and significance of statements within the broader social currents, which empowered much of the recent conservative critique of James K.A. Smith’s comment on the limits of orthodoxy. But the social conditions of our public actions do not only matter when convenient. They set the framework for responsible speech and action, and entail that we are not the exclusive or even best interpreters of our own words.

The Flight 93 Statement

The Nashville Statement is the Flight 93 statement. It is striking how similar its defenses have been to arguments that evangelicals should vote for Trump. The sense of crisis the preamble announces is so pervasive that it justifies not just any statement, but this one. Anything else makes the perfect the enemy of the good. One signer told me Article 10 alone should impel me to sign, because the urgency of the hour demands it. ‘Choose ye this day’, the statement announces, and voting third party is clearly a waste. The impulse to close ranks and reassert evangelicalism’s identity publicly and the eagerness to indulge in the rhetorical excess of the statement’s importance have the same roots in the despair that governs our politics. Those Nashville pastors were right to detect an elusive commonality between evangelical support for Trump and the dynamics surrounding this statement, even if the vast majority of its signers were strong and faithful critics of Trump’s campaign.

Only time will tell, but I fear the Nashville Statement will be no more a win for conservative evangelicals than the election of Donald Trump. While it has exposed the silliness of progressive foes, it has also galvanized them and dangerously inflated our confidence in our own rightness and strength. The statement draws some of the right boundaries, but in the wrong way. And at least one boundary ought not to be drawn, or needs to be clarified. It comes to many right conclusions, but reflects principles and ideas that have born bad fruit within evangelicalism.

It is not my perfectionism that animates my resistance to this statement. Rather, it is my abiding concern that the church of Jesus Christ not pursue short-term “wins” like the Nashville Statement at the expense of sowing seeds for the long-term renewal of our own sexual ethics. My concern for the Nashville Statement is thus pastoral; my critique is that the document is not pastoral enough. It is not perfection I am seeking, but the humility to name our sin. The only way forward for an evangelicalism broken by the sexual revolution begins not with the announcement of the truth, but by confessing all those things we have both done and left undone.

A Coda

The first time I ever considered becoming a theologian was at a youth conference my freshman year of high school. My dad had pastored a small church for several years. When a pastor from an affiliated church realized I was his son as I argued with him, he told me I would probably become a theologian. He was almost right. I do not claim the title. But he also told me something about my dad that I have never forgotten: “I like your dad. He’s a straight shooter—he’ll tell you exactly what he thinks.” In this, I am my father’s son, and proudly so.

We have been reminded this week that the work of charity is a truth-telling one. It is also more than that, as I have again learned while struggling to reach an equitable assessment of the significance of the Nashville Statement and its public discussion surrounding for conservative evangelicalism. My own failures of charity are manifold; they are doubtlessly present in this essay.

But with those signers, I think charity demands that we at least honestly confess the truth. So will I try to do: The deliberate overlooking of conservative evangelical critics of this statement, the double standards at work in its defenses, and the extraordinary pressure to affirm it because of the hour’s urgency suggest that we evangelicals are more interested in proclaiming our virtues than practicing them.

[1] Burk has now responded to Ron Belgau’s critique. This is the first such response, and it is notable because Belgau is…Roman Catholic.

[1] To Burk: Doesn’t the statement answer its own rhetorical question by announcing who has held firm, namely, those who signed it? Is the question of evangelical’s future the equivalent of an admission of responsibility for its present by the signers? Or are they themselves, by signing the statement, showing that they are not the problem?

This week Alastair, Derek, and Matt take up and read Book 1 of Augustine’s Confessions. If you’d like to read along–which we encourage you to do–Henry Chadwick’s translation is available widely at a reasonable price.

If you like the show, please do leave us a review on iTunes. We are also available on Google Play.

If you’re interested in supporting the show financially, you can check out our Patreon here.