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Notes -
Love Thy Neighbor Unless They're in the Outgroup
I’m told the denomination my family has been a part of for generations is “Missionary Oriented.” We support and fund full-time professional missionaries. Anyone who’s been in it for a few generations seems to know someone - if not be related to - a missionary who served in Swazila - oops, sorry - Eswatini or more recently Papua New Guinea, or PNG as the missionary kids call it.
Twenty-odd years ago I took a world religions course that had a requirement to visit other religious services. One week we went to a Hindu temple. A few of us stood in the back and observed while the vast majority of my fellow students danced and chanted in front of literal idols. The next class, one of the students who had stood with me in the backs asked how we could not feel absolute sorrow for the Hindu children being led astray in that environment. The professor berated him for being closed-minded. The man stood up and walked out of class and never came back.
The other day I had dinner with a different man who came up a few years after me. He went to seminary, took a church in a small rural community, and the Red Tribe scalped him. If he still identifies as Christian it’s only nominally: “When my faith was strongest God abandoned me.”
Then there’s this story from NPR: A queer Methodist minister didn't feel safe at an Idaho hospital; their conference won't return to Boise next year. I have always judged the United Methodist Church as a Christian denomination, but I never felt real contempt for them until I saw this kind of cowardice. Mary Moffat Livingstone died of disease at 41. Damien De Veuster’s flesh literally rotted off his living body. Countless others suffered and died in pursuit of their faith. These United Methodist clergy will not go to Idaho because of microaggressions.
I have less contempt for the actual heresies of the progressive theologians inside my own denomination than I do for the cowardly Motte and Bailey they played for decades. They helped destroy the pastoral pipeline. Modernity did most of the grinding, but those worms didn’t help.
All these bleeding hearts with endless empathy for the “fargroup” cannot stand to be near their actual neighbor. My denomination trains people to go into some of the most culturally distant places on earth, yet it could not prepare a young man to minister in the culture of rural Nebraska.
This pattern has been covered before in the classic I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup.
For the first time in my life I look forward to going to church. Per capita, it may have the most influential and connected congregation in the denomination, including several theologians and family members of people at the highest levels of the church hierarchy. The pastor is Blue Tribe, but that’s not surprising as that’s the pipeline. The leadership of the whole denomination is Blue Tribe. And it’s worked out very well for my pastor, as he probably also pastors one of the most Blue Tribe churches in the denomination.
My denomination does not seem lost to me. Despite being Blue Tribe and bamboozled for decades by the Mottes of the progressives, the church has now stripped multiple heretical theologians of their ordinations. As a true progressive in my congregation discusses if we really need Paul, my Blue Tribe pastor politely says, “Sorry, we settled that one a long time ago.”
So I sit here enjoying my pastor’s deep sermons and going to small group at the house of one of the denomination’s theologians in the cool part of town, and I wonder if I am a detestable cowardly worm. I have harbored plenty of ill will toward the progressives - what they have done to Christianity and to the church my family has been part of for generations. It has probably crossed into hatred. Still, I keep mulling a question: is there any more convenient mission field than the outgroup? Paul says not to associate with any so-called brother who is an immoral person, or covetous, or an idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or a swindler… “Remove the wicked man from among yourselves.” I’m not sure that applies to disagreements over refugees and welfare.
My denomination, like many, is shrinking in the developed world. I am sentimental, I do not want it to schism and die, or just fade away. Maybe I can at least slow the fading if I can help mend some of the tears.
The Culture War is so toxic because everyone is a theocrat. An old now defrocked classmate of mine rails to his hundreds of thousands of followers about the dangers “CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM!” while preaching the enforcement of his own version of Christian morality with the dog-whistle: "Jesus says love thy neighbor." By which he means state-enforced welfare and socialism.
War is violence; we tag “culture” onto “war” to differentiate it from literal war, but the reality is we’re still trying to wield violence at arm's length. What if they gave a culture war and no one came? You can love your neighbor by actually helping them yourself. You can persuade, organize, and gather as many people as you want to voluntarily sacrifice their own time and resources for the vulnerable.
But now I’m just preaching my own political philosophy as if it were the moral one… is it my idol?
This post motivated by me planning on grabbing coffee with my pastor and chatting with him as he is taking on a bigger roll in the church
Hosting a conference isn’t missionary work. They’re not shirking a duty to their flock or their fellow man by hosting it in Portland or wherever.
Your apostate acquaintance is a different story. Are you suggesting that the UMC ethos was responsible for leaving him unprepared?
I grew up as a casual Methodist. I can’t say I miss it. Perhaps they really failed to inculcate the fear of God.
Extraordinary.
I’m not sure what you mean.
I think moving the conference because their feelings were hurt is lame. I also think it’s orthogonal to the missionary spirit, in which immortal souls are supposedly at stake.
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I'm not UMC; I've quipped for some time that instead of trying to turn our denomination into the UMC, the heretics should just go be United Methodists... which some did when they had their credentials stripped.
It's of course multi-factorial, but yes: I would assert that the Blue Tribe ethos curated in the last 30 years within the pastoral pipeline contributed to his inability to function in a Red Tribe environment.
Does the UMC even materially believe in hell anymore?
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I think that depends on details we’re not privy to. Is anything he’s promoting sinful, or is it simply imprudent? Is he presenting his views on these policies as God’s revealed will, speaking where God hasn’t spoken, or is he honest that they are his attempt to apply Christian principles however imperfectly?
But honestly that’s not where I’d start. Blue tribe alignment isn’t the most important question, but it is often related to more important questions. So I’d move past the tribal question and ask those. It matters whether you’re dealing with Harry Emerson Fosdick or Tim Keller.
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"Everybody is theocrat" is the something that many people only recently realized. Everybody knows that politics is downstream of culture, but culture is downstream of of theology. If it will not be a Christian theology that is going to be informing the culture, then it will be something else. There is no "separation of state and religion", all policies are based on morality and ideology of decision makers. Everybody was culture warrior even before, even if they did not think it was so. They were like fish that were not aware of the water they swim in. Your regular grandma did not read Augustine, she probably could not formulate elaborate theological arguments, but she knew what is a man a woman or what is marriage based on age old culture influenced by specific ethos. Not in her wildest dreams did she imagine that this could ever become a question, nobody was prepared to defend such a basic thing. Not anymore, people are no longer seeped in the same water and we see this interaction real time - at home, at work and also in church.
However there is a huge shift even with your friend. No matter what his supposedly heretic theology is, he can just go out there and say that whatever policy he prefers is purely because Christians like him want it. This claim itself fries brain of many secular people - no, there is no need to couche this argument in some secular language that by itself is seeped in utilitarianism or harm reductionism or some other type of moral philosophy. No, my Christian sect wants this and we want it because it is our moral preference. It is the only justification (in scripture, tradition or whatever) that is fully sufficient for us to pursue this specific policy.
By the way the genie is already out of the bottle even on religious front - even discounting the fact that progressives moved the needle for society to accept their religious doctrine of let's say that a man is a woman as state policy. This is however more visible as they embraced Muslims into their coalition. For example schools should have halal food. Not because it is good for environment or that it is cheap or anything like that. Our Muslim voters want it and that is why we will deliver it. It is purely formed by their preference informed by their religion and no other tortured secular justification needs to be done anymore. But this was always so, we only pretended that these utilitarian justifications were morally and theologically neutral, as if history ended and secularists were just independent arbiters in safari full of religious animals. This veneer was already broken, especially by progressives who were able to smuggle increasingly insane moral prescriptions under secularist or "liberal" framework. This only shows that secularists have no better justification for "good" or "bad" policy than any other group, because what is good and bad is subject to moral philosophy and theology. Secular liberalism, intersectional progressivism, Christian socialism, political Islam - it is all just ideologies based on specific moral and theological framework that fight for influence and power.
Only if you have an overly broad definition of theology and religion. I know many people on the right like to categorize Wokeism as a theological/religious movement but then they immediately balk when you ask what base theology did Wokeism form from. So either every collective philosophical movement really just tickles the religious part of the human mind and is consequently a "theology", or you have a much stricter definition of "theology" and then no, not everyone is a theocrat.
Wokeism = Secular Christianity. Scoop out the Holy trinity and you get the logical conclusion of championing the meek, the downtrodden, the oppressed.
This isn't true, though. Wokeism has a lot of similar principles, but it also attaches to it its own set of faith-based claims about reality. That's what makes so many people call it a religion (including myself, as far back as 2015 back when it was just called "social justice" - though, quite honestly, this should have been obvious even as far back as the late 00s, by my estimation), rather than merely an ideology. Its core tenets rely irreducibly on faith to support claims about how certain individuals are oppressed by other individuals in society.
Yes. It does rely heavily on unproven claims and implications such as all differences in crime sanctions arising from police forces who simply hate dark skin, etc.
It also wants you to label huge groups as 'oppressors' with a very broad brush and claims that the individuals inside those groups cannot be legitimate victims, so feel free to tread on them. Jesus wouldn't approve of group identity based discrimination and revanchism.
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Most Motteposters grandmothers will be of the Silent Generation, which is the generation that effectively invented modern divorce. Your regular grandma grew up in a society where marriage was for life, but participated in the process (1/4-1/3 of the time by frivorcing her husband herself, but in almost every case by treating her contemporaries who did so as respectable women making a praiseworthy life choice) of making it for as long as both members of the couple still feel like it. Almost nobody complained - and in particular the social conservatives who should have done mostly didn't. (Reagan signed no-fault divorce into law as governor of California).
If your grandma actually did something to preserve the age-old view of marriage, then she was an outlier, not a regular grandma.
Sure, I do not even deny it, the point being that it is not some conscious choice, but slow changing of culture. For instance silent generation grew up in schools where crosses, framed ten commandments or morning prayers were the norm even if not many of them consciously thought of it. Now those are often outright banned by the very same silent generation, but there are progress flags and Earth Day and other such things in schools instead. It is change in culture and ethos.
I like the way James Lindsay explains it in the form of various philosophical systems where theology is the grounding pilar, it is fundamental meta-narrative that determines the ultimate nature of reality, truth, and human purpose. Theology synthetizes other particular philosophies such as cosmology, epistemology, anthropology and sociology. So for instance Christians have God at the center of their theology, this informs epistemology through divine revelation and empirical observation of God's creation, man is created in image of God, Christian virtue ethics is objective morality based on God's commandments. I think he compared it to Marxism which views Man (species being) at the center, epistemology is based on your standpoint in class and other hierarchies providing you with unique insights, nature of man is as social being that is entirely shaped by material conditions etc. These are incompatible philosophical systems.
Using Scott Alexander's language, Culture War is Conflict Theory all the way down especially with such radical differences on basic things like ontology, epistemology or ideas of how society should function. Somebody will be in charge, if not you then somebody else that may have vastly different philosophical system which will seep into culture and ultimately politics. Mistatke theroy is just camouflage, you take the dominant theological/philosophical system as given, an then argue as if progressives and classical liberals or Christian nationalists or Islamists are just mistaken in how their policy proposal will bring about "greater good". But in reality you are just theocrat for your own system and view other competing systems through that prism. Mistake theory is luxury to be indulged for debates inside this philosophical system where people are theologically aligned.
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I notice that you've chosen two culture war topics whose modern implementations scripture doesn't clearly address. Christ never instructs us to form a government that taxes its citizens to entice an underclass onto welfare, or to encourage entering a country uninspected. Those are prudential policy questions where faithful Christians can and do disagree, and I'd agree Paul's command doesn't apply there.
Paul names the sexually immoral first in that very list, why test the command against cases he doesn't mention rather than the ones he does? Sexual immorality and infanticide are where scripture speaks plainly, and where the discipline of 1 Corinthians 5 should apply..
Disagreeing over how a government should care for the poor is a dispute about means toward a biblical end. Living in unrepentant sin is not a policy position, it is the thing the command addresses.
I'm focusing less on sexual immorality because several of the most well known theologian and pastors who were driving inclusion of homosexuals into the clergy were defrocked.
I agree that 1 Corinthians 5 probably doesn't apply to many political differences. I'm more exploring how to approach hostile people within the church and maintain a religious community.
A section I thought about discussing in the post but felt it was too far of as aside was how liberals seem to dislike conservatives far more than the other way. It's where I think very likely the UM clergy is projecting his own hatred towards the right.
To meme or not to meme? Political social media posts and ideologically motivated aggression in job recommendations
Political (Meta-)Dehumanization in Mental Representations: Divergent Emphases in the Minds of Liberals Versus Conservatives
I believe that likely the UM clergy is imagining microaggression is projection of his own feelings towards the outgroup.
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Whilst Paul does not address government policy qua government, Paul states he who does not work does not eat (ie Paul recognized the danger of welfare without work requirement).
Thus, Christian mercy is mixed with Christian pragmatism. That is, while the scripture tells us to give the stranger a drink, it also tells us not to give the same stranger drink after drink.
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Traditional Catholics attempt to grow throughout the entire world. If I ever travel to Saudi Arabia, I have the number to call to find out where the underground Latin mass is.
And there is an interesting pattern- in the western hemisphere(including Latin America) and Europe(less ultraconservative parts of Ukraine and the Balkans), we're clearly a separate- even if only slightly- stratum from standard average novus ordo practicing Catholics. This includes Italy and Poland, where services are offered more conservatively. In Africa and India, we're not. Very hostile bishops in the western hemisphere will struggle to articulate doctrinal criticisms, often falling into vagueness. Meanwhile charismatic bishops in Africa can see no difference, or Maronite bishops(who love their 70's guitar hymns). I suppose it can be described as a tribal difference- namely, the difference of valuing high fertility and being more socially conservative than is accepted in the contemporary west. This is, in practice, a bigger deal than difference in beliefs around orthopraxis.
This is especially striking because we're... not shrinking. That kind of growth within a stagnant broader denomination attracts self comparison. And Africans who think the same way about the role of women, or the church's attitude towards contraception, and yet openly defend dancing on the altar during mass, feel more kinship than Italians who find Humanae Vitae deeply embarrassing but have very similar ideas about how the Catholic religion should be practiced.
Now of course in the USA there are many other tribes of practicing Catholic, because the collapse of universal Catholic K-12 education splintered the practicing Catholic world and only the Knights of Columbus have managed to somehow avoid this.
I don't know how, exactly, this slots in with your broader exploration of tribal loyalties. Unlike in your case, there are both red and blue tribe conservatives among the traditional Catholics worshipping and socializing with each other- with both represented in the clergy. But overcoming tribal differences comes only to a point, I suppose.
Per Albion's Seed (see also multiple SlateStarCodex posts explaining the theory with explicit application to the US culture war) the Red and Blue tribes (as tribes - the political coalitions are broader) originated with different Protestant denominations. If you are a believing Catholic who takes the unProtestant bits (particularly Papal primacy, but arguably also the Catholic view of the sacraments) seriously then in my view you are not Red or Blue. Certainly you are a profoundly non-central example of Red or Blue. (The same applies to serious believers in any other non-Protestant religion, but not to secular/Conservative/Reform Jews or cafeteria Catholics who are assimilated into the surrounding post-Protestant secular culture).
The red and blue tribes describe divisions in American into assimilative cultural identities and are at this point not fussier about precise religious identity than they are about direct descent from the border reavers- neither the blue or red tribe follows the religion that their British forebearers once followed(Presbyterianism is an old, shrinking denomination which like most such denominations has liberal clergy and Republican congregations). Mormons are comfortably red tribe and not even trinitarian. And the blue tribe may not even have a majority that believes in God at all, let alone hyperCalvinism.
The Mormons are not Red Tribe. From "I Can Tolerate Anything except the Outgroup":
Does that sound like a Mormon to you?
Yes. Mormons love soda, own guns, SUV's are literally nicknamed 'Mormon Assault Vehicles', BYU has a strong football program, mormons marry early, American exceptionalism is literally part of their religion, they're officially creationist, etc, etc.
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Yeah...?
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American Catholics are so profoundly Protestant in attitudes even if they find beauty in the Catholic tradition.
I'll counter your generalization with a generalization - I don't necessarily agree. Many of my friends in college were jaded-ex-religious-turned-leftist types, and you could immediately tell who was raised Catholic. It depends on the area, of course, but I think Catholics have a stink about them that Protestants just don't. I think it has something to do with the papacy and how old the Church is compared to the many Protestant communities that are comparatively much younger.
I’m not surprised you could tell. There are a bunch of groups that just sort of make it obvious, but most of them don’t have a Pope. Homeschoolers, new Agers. Mormons.
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American Catholics by and large are willing to take their own counsel on matters of key religious doctrine (eg abortion).
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Before straining to love enemies and the outgroup, Christians should first aim to love friends and brothers. I’ve seen many discussions online about the antisocial climate of American churches, that they lack a genuine community, and my relatives have had similar complaints. The studies on church attendance are grim. If the average churchgoer does not find brotherly love at his church, that’s a more serious problem than whether his love extends to enemies and tribe-traitors and the like. Loving enemies is the great heroic ask of Christ within the context of giving away clothes and willingly being slapped. Augustine (iirc) mentions this rule and is adamant that yes, it’s really possible and we have to do it, which is evidence that in his time it was considered somewhat improbable. But preceding it in importance in the Sermon is the rule about brotherhood:
How many today have true “brothers in Christ” for whom this would even be applicable? I think very few. Friends who happen to be Christian, of course, but it’s uncommon to have Christian brotherhood, ie an intense fraternal bond mediated by religious camaraderie. Yet this was supposed to be the characteristic social relationship of the faith. Tertullian in 200ad wrote —
Well, modern Christian statements about love seem “extremely false and feigned”. There’s not a lot of love in churches. There’s more love at a Juggalo gathering or a Grateful Dead parking lot. That is my read on it, at least.
That is true, however I do not think that church is the best place to create brotherly bonds. At least men create them shoulder-to-shoulder, doing specific activities and not just visiting church during mass. At the end of each mass priest invites people to various activities from pilgrimages, charity events, outdoor masses with live music and anything in between. This is where you have to step up. Or you can even join international fraternities such as Knights of Columbus.
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I'm reminded of the New Model Army as an example of Christian brotherhood. They were really serious about Christianity and almost incomprehensible doctrinal issues to us moderns like what books of prayer there should be and how exactly churches should be organized.
Their fervour and discipline and conviction gave them such battlefield strength that they held Britain and Ireland in their hands, marching around and smashing any rebels they found.
Also extending the lifespan of the British monarchy by 1000 years by trying to ban secular Christmas celebrations.
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