Married only?

I'm still writing a column for the church newsletter in Mansfield. Here's the latest. Wonder if they will ask me to stop after this one.

A question came up recently on a Christian forum board: Are churches biased against single people? That should translate into "is this church biased against single people?"

Don't answer too quickly. About 37 people responded to the question—and some of the responses were very heated (and bitter). The consensus: older mainline churches (Methodist, Episcopalian, Presbyterian) tend to be accepting toward single people, while newer, more informal churches are not.

This is a place for a definition. When I say "single people," I mean people who could reasonably be expected to be married, but aren't. A 14-year-old boy isn't single yet, but a 55-year-old widow is.

Anyhow, those two classes of churches show two differences.

For one thing, the older churches have more variety in marital status. Older people sometimes lose their spouses to death, and it's not as common for mainline churches to ostracize divorced people, so the result is a fair number of unpartnered adults who will probably stay that way. In contrast, the renewal churches don't have many widows, widowers, or divorced people (they usually just leave). Marriage is the inevitable destination for young people. You'd hear someone saying, "Isn't John Doe married yet?" There's not much room for the idea that John Doe doesn't intend to get married or that John Doe, unmarried, is a stable, complete person.

Another difference you see is that people go to the two different kinds of churches for two different kinds of reasons. For generations, the conservative churches have asked the question, "Are YOU saved?" We have seminars on repairing YOUR marriage, fixing up YOUR finances, and even controlling YOUR weight. Members of the older churches don't tend to be so focused on their own needs. It's the mainline churches that support such organizations as Habitat for Humanity, World Vision, and Alcoholics Anonymous, whether or not anyone in their church is homeless, hungry, or addicted.

It's this intense focus on MY needs, MY marriage, MY family, and even MY enjoyment of worship that leads people to build walls around their families and exclude the concerns of anyone whose name isn't on MY Income Tax form 1040.

That's what makes a church unfriendly toward single people: becoming a group of married people so intensely focused on preserving their own families that they can't see beyond the front door.

So where does Jesus fit into all this? Was his basic message "Join up so you can enjoy the benefits of a stable, Christian culture?" Did he encourage us to withdraw and socialize only with our own kind?

WWJD? (What Would Jesus Drive?) An SUV on the way to soccer practice, ignoring the lonely single person who has nobody to eat lunch with after church?

unChristian: Political

OK, I'll admit that this is only one portion of the book's chapter on Christian politics, but ...

When this market research company wanted to find out about support for a "Christianized" country, these were the five items that defined support:

• Strongly oppose removal of "In God We Trust"
• Strongly oppose removal of "one nation under God" (from the Pledge of Allegiance, I presume)
• Strongly oppose removal of Ten Commandments from government buildings
• Strongly favor federal marriage amendment
• Strongly favor adding the teaching of creationism in public schools.

That's what "Christianizes" America? Public memorials to civil religion? We've got the first three right now, and we're such examples of Christian character as a nation?

What about these Christian initiatives on the federal government level?

• Commitment that all future military action will fit the definition of a "just war."
• Commitment to helping the poorest among us find jobs and health care
• Eliminating pay-outs to rescue obscenely rich companies that have screwed up their business.
• Really getting serious about eliminating government corruption and graft
• Caring for the environment (Even if we do believe George W's silly anti-science stance, it's part of Christian stewardship to take care of the stuff God gives us.)
• Guaranteeing justice even for our enemies—those browner, more hispanic or more gay than ourselves (Wait! are those really our enemies?)

That list might have a chance of being called "Christian character." After all, the drug dealer or hit man who pays with money marked "In God We Trust" hasn't gotten the message anyhow.

unChristian: Irrelevant and Isolated

It's no secret that Christians like to pull away from the world and build walls. The medieval monasteries did that. Ironically, foreign missionaries do that. Amish do that.

A recent Yahoo News article on textbooks used by homeschoolers seemed astonished that the textbooks presented a one-sided creationist view of science. The news writers were surprised by this statement printed in the introduction to one book:

"Those who do not believe that the Bible is the inspired, inerrant Word of God will find many points in this book puzzling," says the introduction to "Biology: Third Edition" from Bob Jones University Press. "This book was not written for them."

The textbook delivers a religious ultimatum to young readers and parents, warning in its "History of Life" chapter that a "Christian worldview ... is the only correct view of reality; anyone who rejects it will not only fail to reach heaven but also fail to see the world as it truly is."

The preference for chiropractors and homeopathy to medical doctors is rooted in the idea that science always sabotages Christian faith. So is the disdain for such mundane matters as academic accreditation, critical thinking, and even statistical analysis. "Don't confuse me with godless facts. I know what I believe." The Bible must not be polluted with comparative linguistics. If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, then it's good enough for me.

But that wasn't what I wanted to write about here.

The book unChristian makes the odd point that younger people, both inside and outside the church, are very interested in spiritual issues, but don't think that the church is a very good place to find answers to spiritual questions. That's just fascinating. It's like saying that McDonald's isn't a very good place to find hamburgers. What can you find at church?

• A weekly public speaking and music event, usually in an idiom that today's people find odd and old-fashioned. (Face it: today's teenagers aren't that thrilled by 1970s folk-songs.)
• Advice on how to be a better person.
• Intense pressure to conform (at least superficially and temporarily) to the outward markings of religious people.
• Intense condemnation of some things that inwardly you really don't object to (having sex with a girlfriend you really love, protecting the rights and safety of your gay friend)
• Lots of politics, and the thinly-veiled implication that America has a Christian political party and a Satanic one. Coupled with this is the dedication to make America's civil institutions into a mechanism for imposing superficial Christian practices on unbelievers.

What can't you find?

• An understanding that we're all "in process" and some of us haven't caught up with the others.
• A way to deal with the tough day-to-day questions: "Will I ever figure out my life?" "Why is God always so silent?" "What if I'm just tired of keeping all the rules?" "Why are you guys always so happy and I'm not?"
• Friendship that will stand by me even when I screw up.
• Intellectually satisfying explanations of some of the tough issues.
• An attitude of confidence and compassion rather than fear and loathing when facing the outside world.

More on loneliness

This is yet more of the scattered rough draft that I began below.

The Loneliness book makes two telling points in the first chapter. (1) We are often lonely because we have structured it that way and (2) loneliness is more of a taboo subject than most others.

I'll deal with #1 later, though it's interesting to note that English departments are terrible at interpersonal relationships. I spend my day teaching young adults, yet I feel alone because never have any interaction with peers and the teaching isn't that personal. I have a tiny cubicle office and we never have department meetings or group lunches or anything like that. I tried a Departmental blog but nobody would join. At GFC, things are getting better, though we still stress events that don't involve any significant interaction.

#2, the one about loneliness being a taboo subject, is worth more time. The two psychiatrist authors say that people are much more comfortable saying they are depressed than saying they are lonely. I know that at GFC, some topics are "safe" and some are definitely off-menu.

First example: A few years back we had men's prayer breakfasts, about once every six months. It was the usual thing: powdered donuts followed by singing and then sort of a round-the-circle prayer request. The leader asked a question about "what you are afraid of." (Probably keyed into a Bible verse he'd read to us.) I broke the rules. I suspect we were expected to say something about fearing a liberal in the White House, fearing that the Ten Commandments plaque would get removed from the courthouse, or fearing that public schools would continue teaching evolution. My rule-breaking comment was that I feared entering old age alone and with no really good pension plan. Ten or fifteen seconds of absolute silence followed. They looked uncomfortably at one another (presumably because they all have great pension plans and will never be alone when they are old). Then someone broke the silence with a comment about a "safe" fear—probably something political.

It's funny how distant we make things.

Safe prayer topics:

• Health problems of some distant relative
• Perceived attacks by the government on one of our sacred cows
• My spouse needs to repent

Unsafe prayer topics:

• I made an idiot of myself at work and now I must apologize
• I'm really lonely
• I feel so disconnected from family members
• I fill my life with so much stuff that I have no time for anything or anyone important
• I wish I didn't feel so insignificant
• I need to repent but I don't want to
• I don't think I like my spouse any more

See a trend?

Second example: I guess I never learn. This one happened at a small-group meeting. Once again someone asked what we'd like people to pray about in our lives. Once again I said the wrong thing. I said that I spend a lot of my time feeling really alone. One member (bless his little heart) took the opportunity to use me as a preaching example and exhorted the group—long and loud—to reach out to this poor guy (me) and not to let this sad case (me) languish in loneliness. It was embarrassing. He went on for hours, it seemed. Probably five minutes. Then that was it. Neither he nor anyone else from the group ever said much of anything to me again about it. No coffee invitations. Nothing.

I think the problem is that those depersonalized prayer requests don't make the listener feel guilty. If my Uncle Herb in New Jersey is suffering from gout, nobody in the group is culpable. Nobody identifies much either. But if I say I'd love a coffee friend, everyone in the group feels like a failure. Every group member is a potential answer to prayer, and obviously they all screwed up. And it's a level of vulnerability that's scary. There's an enormous difference between "yes I have a sick uncle too" and "yes I feel really lonely and unable to connect too."

Really alone

Think of this as a scattered rough draft of another Arkenstone article. Jerry (and others) are really welcome to comment.

Yesterday I ran into a reference to The lonely American: drifting apart in the twenty-first century by Jacqueline Olds and Richard S. Schwartz. (Here's a response in The New York Times.) No, I haven't had time to read them, though I did read some excerpts. The point seems to be that the USA is increasingly lonely, pathologically so. I'd guess (before doing the reading) that men are in worse shape than women. There's got to be a reason that teenagers are on the Internet 24/7, that porn is usually a substitute for healthy relationships, and that we're always setting records in drug/alcohol abuse.

Churches (especially our church—because we stress community so much) should be an effective bulwark against this sort of problem, but it's at least as bad in here as it is out there. Examples:

Focusing on our families. I don't know the source of this one, but (until quite recently) we used to teach people to ditch friendships when they got married. I lost one friend this way. He got married, and I never talked with him again. Another young man got the message from a church leader at his wedding reception, and he told the elder to buzz off. Is this some sort of perversion from Bill Gothard? From Focus on the Family? Where?

• Sidenote that might not make it into a finished column: We hate established experts who have done genuine research at universities because we assume universities are always anti-Christian, but anyone who writes a book, gets it self-published and stocked at Christian bookstores becomes a respected voice. Thus the plethora of nut-case psychological theories in churches.

Terrorists. We love to be afraid, listen to the most unfounded rumor disguised as fact (ask me some time about my brother's experience sharing an office with Fox News in Washington), and have a general distrust of masculinity. Thus, any attempt by men to form friendships is suspect. Tight female friendships are respected and can endure for years, but when men get together, there must be something weird going on.

Structure. The traditionalist role for men is "bring home the paycheck, play with the kids, help dry the dishes, and go to sleep." The approved Christian structure doesn't have room for "a night out with the boys." (They will probably play poker, smoke cigars, drink beer, and go to a strip-tease show.) Women have ample structured time to be with other women. Think about Women's Ministry, Dance Group, Sewing Circle, and so forth. Men?  A weekend once every two or three years. And if we wanted to get radical (obscene? perverted? subversive at least!) and suggest that social structures for finding friendship across gender or age barriers might work, it's definitely forbidden by our taboos.

Loop back. Women have multiple places to find friendship. So do children and teenagers. Men, however, are out in the cold. Well perhaps not all men. Single men definitely, because the only real validity for a man is found in his place as husband/father. Married guys can at least talk with their wives and children. (And we know that married people are never lonely, right?)

Losing a name

This is a rough draft of something that might turn out to be the THIRD column! Jerry's amazed that I've already done two.

Back when I was in seminary, Christendom was divided neatly into about two pieces. Sort of an "us and them" thing.

Well, of course, there were more than two, but the Roman Catholics didn't count and neither did any of the members of Eastern Rite churches. (Though the Catholics are still the largest single denomination in the USA and the Eastern Orthodox Church is the second largest body of Christians in the world. But who's counting?)

Anyhow, the "us and them" of Protestantdom was the Liberals and the Fundamentalists. And we knew we didn't fit in very well with either one. Liberals, my seminary professors assured me, were godless pagans who made a point of ignoring Jesus and justified every kind of immoral behavior by saying that it's the modern acceptable norm. Fundamentalists were simple-minded folk who memorized the King James Version and had no clue that there were any doctrines beyond responding to an altar call.

We wanted to be something else. The "we" was people like Francis Schaeffer, Jerram Barrs, Egon Middelmann (my roommate for a while and a relation of Schaeffer). Interesting bunch. Google them. Anyhow, we knew we didn't want to lose sight of Jesus. We knew that the Christian faith isn't just for the shallow-minded. Ted Smith (a professor of graphic design at Washington University) knew that the truly tacky visual arts that were so common in churches didn't reflect God's nature that well. Lots of us college kids loved the six-word gospel choruses, but Egon liked to remind us that church music used to have a lot of depth, so we sang Bach chorales. As a congregation.

The "we" was bigger than my circle of friends and fellow church members in St. Louis. One example was Robert E. Webber of Wheaton College. I'll let you Google those names to figure out who I'm talking about.

We called ourselves "Evangelicals" to distinguish ourselves from the secular-influenced Liberals and from the simple-mindedness of the Fundamentalists.

Then we lost that name. It has picked up connotations of intolerance, prejudice, insensitivity to the plight of the poor and suffering, and a political agenda that includes establishing a right-wing christian theocracy. (Lower-case "c" intentional.) If you say that John Doe is an Evangelical preacher, people assume that he's mainly focused on easy believism, personal wealth and glory for himself, and is probably corrupt. If someone says that First Steeple Church is an active Evangelical congregation, we imagine them to be picketing some courthouse but never feeding the poor. Let the Salvation Army do that.

I think it's a sad loss, both of the name and of the direction.

Newsletter Column: Arkenstone

Two leaders of the church here asked me to write a monthly standing feature for the new church newsletter. They may have gotten more than they bargained for. Anyhow, here's the "about" blurb that will go with the first copy, then below you'll see a couple of the early efforts.

About the column:

Back in the dawn of the ages, I came to Grace Haven Farm to work with Rivendell Arts Fellowship publishing Arkenstone magazine, which was to be a meeting point between the arts and Christianity. The name was taken from The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, and is derived from an Anglo-Saxon word that means "precious stone." In the book, the dwarves claim the stone as a tribal treasure, but it ends up being a bargaining-piece to end the war between elves, dwarves, and men.

We Christians tend to be very tribal too, and we are tempted to keep the "holy stones" (another meaning for the ancient word) to ourselves, not realizing the power of our treasure to be a meeting-point with other tribes.

Arkenstone: unChristian

I'm about halfway through reading a new book: unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity... and Why It Matters by David Kinnaman. It's scary—more frightening in some ways than the latest monster movie.

Kinnaman is a researcher with The Barna Group, a highly respected research organization that focuses on issues important to the church. They're on our side: Their aim is "to partner with Christian ministries and individuals to be a catalyst in moral and spiritual transformation." The research behind this book focused on "outsiders," those looking at the Christian faith from the outside, in two age groups, the "Busters" (those born between 1965 and 1983) and the "Mosaics" (those born between 1984 and 2002).

These outsiders have a pretty low opinion of us. One outsider from Mississippi said, "Christianity has become bloated with blind followers who would rather repeat slogans than actually feel true compassion and care. Christianity has become marketed and streamlined into a juggernaut of fearmongering that has lost its own heart" (page 15). This individual isn't the only one. Within this research group, 87% said we're judgmental, 85% said we're hypocritical, 72% said we're out of touch with reality, and 70% said we're insensitive to others. Only 55% said we consistently show love for other people, and 30% said Christianity is relevant to their lives.

We have a pretty low opinion of outsiders too. We call them names: "pagans," "the lost," and "unbelievers." We trivialize their problems. We figure it's OK to be deceptive if a higher end is in sight (just remember the Idaho Baptists and their attempt to sneak children out of Haiti).

No wonder both sides feel as if a war is going on.

Back in my school bus driving days, I had to break up a fight between two boys. When I asked what happened, one boy came up with the explanation: "It all began when he hit me back." The victim mentality will justify all sorts of nastiness.

Many Christians I've talked to seem to think there's a vast conspiracy going on, especially on the university campuses, to discredit the Christian faith. Professors apparently meet to discuss strategy and plan attacks. The truth is, especially on the university campus, that half the world doesn't even know we exist and the other half is afraid of us. They know that we want to gain political power, then enact all sorts of restrictions on intellectual and religious freedom. They know we hate the First Amendment.

And in this dreary circle, both sides face each other, never making contact, never actually understanding one another.

Kinnaman doesn't leave us there. Each chapter ends with specific suggestions for healing the breach. For example, the chapter on hypocrisy ends with an account of a Los Angeles area church that sponsored a series of meetings called "Confessions of a Sinful Church." Transparency—being honest about our lives, even about the problems our lifestyles have created—was the aim. It wasn't just a recruitment ploy, but a real apology, and it broke down some barriers between that church and the people in the community.

Arkenstone: School Prayer

This morning, while I was reading the comics online, I ran into one of those fake surveys. This one asked, "Prayer should be forbidden in schools. Agree? Disagree?" Of course, the survey, like the question itself, was a fake. It was just a come-on for a high-interest credit card application.

Has there ever been a serious proposal that some sort of atheist police would prosecute a kid for quietly thanking God for his lunch? Or praying for a better test grade? Or even praying that the teacher would forget about detention?

I grew up in Maryland, years and years ago. When I was in elementary school, we began each day with the Pledge of Allegiance, the Maryland state song (a creepy, bloodthirsty ditty that laments the fall of Baltimore to anti-slavery forces) and the Lord's Prayer. Somehow by the end of the ceremony, we'd pledged our loyalty to the country, the Old South, and God—in that order.

I remember it especially well because the official Maryland version of the prayer was from the King James Version, and we were supposed to say, "forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us." I didn't know what that meant, but I did know that my Presbyterian church upbringing (based on the Revised Standard Version) had me saying, "forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors." I didn't know what that meant either, but I was quite careful to say MY words while they were saying THEIR words. It was a matter of tribal pride for me.

Some will point out that since school prayer was banned we've had an increase in drug abuse, teenage pregnancy, and illiteracy. We have also had an increase in computer use, PowerPoint slides, and free school lunches.

This is the point where I have to ask what prayer actually does.

When a Jewish girl mouths a Christian prayer because the teacher told her to, does God actually begin interacting with her? When an atheist says the words just to avoid trouble, does he become more moral? Or is it just words? More than once, the child who was picked to lead the day's ceremony faced the flag, laid a hand on his/her left pectoral muscle, and began, "Our Father..." Sleepy kid's brain found the wrong meaningless recitation for the moment.

We lost school prayer in Maryland because Madalyn Murray started a lawsuit, which ended up in the Supreme Court, against the Baltimore City Public Schools. No, the Court didn't forbid praying; it forbid the schools requiring prayer. I'd call that an advance for true Christianity. No more kids simply mouthing the words to get the morning started. No more unbelieving teachers required by their contract to lead prayers.

When you give evidence in court and you swear "so help me God," do you actually expect God's assistance? Does anyone else? When you handle our money with "In God We Trust" inscribed, does your faith get a boost? Does anyone's? I would suggest that such casual use of God's name actually cheapens the faith—in the same way that saying "God damn that hammer" cheapens the concept of eternal judgment.

The upside? Nowadays, when a kid prays at the start of a school day, he knows who he's talking to.