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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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