Is It Confusing Though?
Exvangelicals, Pastor Jermell and the narcissism of God, Preston Sprinkle, and Nala
I feel like it might be tedious to say the same thing over and over again, but every day the pounding drumbeat of American “evangelical” dissolution intensifies. I think Joel Berry called it a “shambles.” It’s not hard to understand, though it’s like a great fog of unknowing is blanketing our religious and political landscape. If you’re going to persist in confusing and being confused about matters of sexuality, you will ultimately have to throw over the gospel altogether.
One of the central and most astonishing paradoxes at the heart of the Christian faith is that of being a sinner and yet accepted by God. For centuries, Christians have understood themselves to be people who sin so egregiously that they have no hope in themselves, but that Christ came to deliver, redeem, and restore them and all creation. The cost was high—his very own life. But he paid it willingly. The cost to you is that you must admit that you are a sinner, that you are bound to the darkness and to hell. In desperation, you give up your life into the Lord’s hands and he accepts you on the merits of his own death and resurrection, exchanging your unrighteousness for his righteousness. You are transferred from the kingdom of darkness and into the kingdom of light in (paging Nate Bargatze) one fell swoop.
This is such a precious message for sinners in a shambolic world that it is necessary for God’s great enemy, Satan, and all the spiritual forces that rebel against God to drown out the comprehensibility of this content. Attacks against it come from within the church and without, from the powerful and the duped, from the malign and the confused. But the most important reality to see is that true Christians who privilege the gospel over everything else are going to be culturally damned if they do and damned if they don’t.
I have three or four examples of what I’m talking about. The first is from The Exvangelicals. McCammon relates the story of someone called Stalvey who deconstructed her faith, trying to make sense of all the “confusing” messages she imbibed from childhood. McCammon quoting Stalvey:
One of the first things I knew is that I was loved—I was loved by God. But it was confusing because I didn’t deserve that love…You metabolize the idea that you’re inherently bad.
McCammon narrates the rest of the story:
As she got older, Stalvey struggled with evangelical teachings about who was saved and who was lost. As a teen, she remembers talking to other Christian friends about their friends who were LGBTQ+. “It’s like, ‘What are we allowed to think about this?’ she said, ‘It’s kind of like pulling on the string and everything starts to unravel.’”
McCammon carefully threads Mr. Trump through the whole of her narrative in the first few chapters, which I expect will continue apace, so that the reader might miss the deeper issue. Salvey is confused because she understood herself to be loved by God, and yet was “metabolizing” the idea that she was “inherently bad,” which is, I’m sorry to say, the prerequisite for hearing the gospel. If you think that you are good, and everyone is good, but especially people who identify along the LGBTQ acronym, the work of Christ and the actions of the church and all the people in the church become incomprehensible.
The role of Mr. Trump—one for which I am sort of miserably grateful, I guess—is that he continues to function as the great sifting agent, the catalyst whereby the church is being shaken out like a garment, one that we continue to experience day by day. But he is not really the issue.
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