I am going to continue insulting what passes for moral and spiritual leadership in white American Christianity. There are a lot of pastors and teachers and leaders who have seen the nazification of the American church but have had almost nothing to say about it. Instead of treating all the bigotry, the racism, the sexism, the misogyny, the paranoid obsession about sexuality and gender, and the overweening white supremacy as the spiritual cancer that it is, they have allowed the cancer to metastasize. We will see whether the current diagnosis is terminal.
When I was in seminary, I had a crisis of faith. Not in God, but in the Christian community. I saw that the people around me–mostly white students–did not care at all about the social and institutional evils of our day. They did not care about racism, sexism, money, or power. They so took homophobia for granted that they were the catalyst to cure me of my own. In short, they had absolutely no insight into the shape of evil in our cultural setting. They also did not care whether the church was genuinely multicultural, or was welcoming to queer people. They did not care whether they knew how to preach the gospel to all people–so long as they could speak effectively to the tiny little group of white people who agreed with them about everything. Most of them felt aggrieved and victimized when other people, even other white people, had differences of theological opinion with them. They had barely any tolerance of, and certainly no love for diversity. They felt entitled to be both correct and admired for their correctness. I did not want these people as my coworkers or even my friends. They could certainly not be construed as allies.
Those folks would have probably identified mostly as moderate or conservative Episcopalians or Anglicans. There were a few exceptions to this rule, who cared deeply about social justice. Regardless, I quit my path to ordination, and proceeded to rage and seethe about the uselessness of the church for several years. Because it is the church’s fault these people are like that. This is the kind of Christian that Christianity wants to exist in the world.
I had a number of bad encounters with Episcopal clergy over the years since then–across the ideological spectrum. At this point in my life, I have had vastly more negative experiences than positive–I would say that the average Episcopal clergy person is wealthy, educated, entitled, bullying, authoritarian, and without spiritual depth or even the emotional maturity I would want to see in any adult over the age of 30. Some of these folks are sad little children rocking up to their 50s and 60s being control freaks and egomaniacs obsessed with the vitality of their own ministry without the insight to know what keeps them from real fruitfulness. I do not think these people are worse than their secular counterparts–but they are a mirror of the sickness that is coddled and tolerated in white culture today.
We (and by we I mean the internet) mock the Karen-Americans for their entitled bullying, but “boss” and “narcissist” are pretty much synonymous in popular culture. The entitled abuse and abusers of power are rampant in our society today because institutions help normalize shitty behavior. This is what passes for leadership in American institutions and the church is no different. Everyone wants the world to be a better place until it comes to them having to change the bad behavior they are addicted to. The kind of casual abuse of power I see in churches is the result of both self-indulgence and lack of insight. Self-indulgence because people are quick to recognize this bad behavior in others, but don’t want to see or admit when they do it. Lack of insight because they think the “little version” of sin doesn’t matter. But know, if you are a tyrant about the little things, you will be a tyrant about bigger things–and you are a hypocrite when you criticize Elon Musk or Donald Trump for their egomania, if you are not too much of a coward to do so openly. Your little things matter–if you cannot be faithful in the little things, you will never have the strength of character to be faithful in the bigger things. The same is true with courage or love or anything else. We are meant to practice these virtues in smaller theatres before going to Broadway. If you don’t, you will never make it to the Tony’s with your soul intact.
People do not behave badly (primarily) because they see the thing they are doing as bad and they do it anyway. Seeing for yourself that you have fallen short–or trying and failing to be kind, or compassionate, or courageous–is a lesser fault.1 In fact, it can simply be the practice on the way to true kindness, compassion, or courage. People behave badly when they deceive themselves or are deceived into doing something they think is good that is actually bad. Think about it. The worst things you have ever done you probably do without ever thinking they are bad, and by justifying to yourself how good and right they are. This is why self-righteousness is particularly morally dangerous.
Self-righteousness, in particular, is a sin or temptation for people who actually care about being good, moral, or religious. I think the temptation to self-righteousness for religious professionals is profound. Human beings in general are tempted to outsource trust in God to other sources. So we look to family, to tribe, to culture, to religious communities for our sense of identity and wholeness. If they are good, we are good. Clergy see themselves as representatives of that community–so if the community itself is morally frail at best, or spiritually bankrupt at worst–how are they to see themselves? Clergy, and people in general who especially identify with receiving heritage or legacy from the past, also tend to let those things form rather than inform their identity. In short, the temptation for these people is to avoid how bad things are or have been. It is too threatening. But that really leaves you open to self-righteousness, whether it is the self-righteousness of an individual, group, culture, or religious community, and gaslighting the shit out of everyone around you.
In the gospels, a significant amount of time is devoted to Jesus’ conflict with the religious leadership of his day, and self-righteousness is a theme that comes up quite a bit. If you remember this story from Scripture:
[Jesus] also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt: 10 “Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 11 The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. 12 I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.’ 13 But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ 14 I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.” (ESV)
It’s not an accident that Jesus casts the Pharisee in the role of the “villain” in this story. It is also not true, as Dallas Willard regularly argued, that Jesus’ attempts to upset the status quo are not pointed.2 No, Jesus doesn’t just do a role reversal of expectations here because role reversals are surprising and help the reader listen. He makes the Pharisee the self-righteous bad guy because this is the kind of sin that a Pharisee is likely to commit, i.e., that any serious religious or moral person, or a “contemporary Pharisee”, a pastor, deacon, or priest.
What is the big problem with self-righteousness? Well, it’s actually spelled out in Luke’s gospel: “to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous”. They trust in themselves that they were righteous. Paul makes a big huge deal about justification by faith throughout his writings, and this isn’t just him trying to work out some abstract theological picture that has nothing to do with how you live your life. The thing that the Bible has to say about the nature of sin and evil revolves around trust. We are meant to trust God. We are meant to partner with God in our lives, to navigate our lives, and to understand the difference between good and evil. There’s not just one kind of thing that interrupts that trust: in Genesis 3, it is the voice of the serpent, an external voice. But in the story of Cain and Abel, the temptation comes from within, from Cain’s own ambitions, his own willingness to see the death of Abel as a good thing–to make the trade of evil for good. That is what all sin and wrong doing amount to in the human psyche–a trade of evil for good. One could say that Cain trusted in himself that good would come out of the evil he did to his brother.
Self-righteousness is at the heart of a lot of our problems today. I would argue that white supremacy itself is a form of self-righteousness, on the cultural level. White supremacists want so badly for whiteness to be good in itself, on its own terms, to be the best, to be unassailable, to be free from every accusation of wrong. They want this so badly that they fight fights about curriculum, and cry about how their kids being taught about slavery makes them feel bad about themselves, they erase the monuments to suffering, and celebrate the actions of wicked people because they are so damn desperate to be good and to be seen as good by absolutely everyone. It is such a wildly dishonest and inconsistent framework–but the key thing here is that many white people want to trust that white culture is right and good and worth believing in, no matter what. Sometimes they say things like “America first”, but really we all know that people “white people who agree with them are first”, not “Americans.”
I think the parallel between this description of the white supremacist mind and a deeply, profoundly morally insecure person is also obvious. Because for every white person who wants whiteness to be good, there is a white person who is also desperate either to be good or to be thought of as good. And I don’t mean ontologically–I don’t mean that they want to be good in the ways that puppies and rainbows and chocolate and kittens are good–I mean morally. They want to be morally whole and sound and good, but they are so fucked up about it they cling to a superficial illusion of goodness or perfection, which maybe they can maintain, instead of actually digging deep and doing the hard work of character building. Because doing the hard work is actually the key to resolving most forms of insecurity.
The hard work in this case is trust and sanctification, both for the self-righteous religious person and the white supremacist–particularly if they are the same person. There are a lot of you out there, particularly in religious institutions. Because the person who actually puts God first can be cured of anything. The person who really trusts that God can make them good (morally) because he has already made them good (ontologically), has no reason to be defensive about anything. If you trust in God for your righteousness, it is not up to you, and righteousness isn’t something that you have to defend, nor can you. But if moral or even ontological rectitude is something you have to fight to defend, then you have a real problem–then you are into the chaotic mess of trying to prove yourself and win arguments and be superior to others and having sides and maybe making up a bunch of damned lies to shield yourself from the truth of your own moral poverty, which is a problem you damn well know you don’t have the tools or ability to solve.
A Post-Script about Abuse, Shame, and Identity
There are a lot of people who are insecure about how good they/their culture are because they know they’ve done or at least participated in evil and they don’t know what to do about it. But there are others whose sense of inherent moral and ontological dignity is damaged because they’ve been shamed and abused, not because they’ve done wrong themselves. If the latter, it won’t be helpful for you to read what I’ve been talking about as somehow applying to you. Not to say that we’re not all capable of self-righteousness, we are, but if your identity is shame-bound because you’ve been mistreated (and not because you’ve doing the mistreating), then character development and faith isn’t going to fix that. There’s a book, Healing the Shame that Binds You, that I would recommend reading and working through. You can learn to take back parts of your identity. I do think there is theology that is helpful for this–but the best medicine is someone seeing you and loving you and treating you how you ought to be treated and you accepting that it always should have been this way. (For me, Jesus is often that person who sees me, but he did not create us to live in isolation–we need other people too.)
In short though, I would say that it is solid advice to anyone to learn how to stop identifying with abusers, predators, and villains. It may be an important moment of your moral or spiritual development to realize that you’ve been the bad guy at one time or another. For some of you, you’ve never been the villain, but you are haunted by this fear of being the bad guy that you can’t shake. Either way, it is counterproductive to let your identity rest in being the bad guy, or worse, to unconsciously identify with the damn villains.
One of the biggest problems that white people in America have is they too often identify with the villains on a cultural scale. They see themselves in the horrors of slavery and genocide committed by white people in the past because on some level they know they are still the children of empire. What they need is a real sense of adoption into the family of God, and to renounce their ties to the evils of American imperialism. That renunciation is real work for white people because it must be comprehensive in order to be effective. Half measures will not do. But we also have to own our own powerlessness as well. One of the biggest temptations to identify with villains is to identify with the position of power they have (because we want to be powerful) and to continue deluding yourself into thinking that you had a choice, there was something you could have done to stop it, etc. It takes real strength to sit with our own vulnerability and powerlessness, and I believe you need spiritual resources to do it.
We cannot pretend discernment comes easily in this space, and the quality of our discernment really matters. We need to rightly identify the things we could and can do, and rightly identify the limitations of our powers and rightly admit where we are powerless. If you don’t do all that, you will either be a doormat–imprisoned by the victim mentality when you don’t recognize your power and you should–or you will be complicit in villainy yourself by identifying with and excusing the things that powerful people did “because they could”.
Since I keep harping about white people bullshit, I will say this: if you weren’t alive in the Civil War, stop pretending like anyone thinks it is your fault that slavery happened. No one thinks that. The idea that Critical Race Theory has as its goal the shaming of white people is just a lie. Its a craven lie told by powerful people who think divisions in society benefit them. They want the average white person to either turn on black people or minorities, or to live in fear of them–so that they can control you with your fears. That is always what white supremacy is about–it is a evil, convenient, economic, power-mongering lie. (Think about it–both race and white supremacy were invented to justify the slave trade. We can do it because they are animals. They are animals because we say so, because we want to make money.) Pretending that it is anything else ennobles it. The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.
Endnotes
- In virtue ethics, there is a difference between incontinence and vice. Incontinence, what I was describing, is consider a lesser fault because it’s a “skill issue” not a problem of moral vision. To use the modern definition of incontinence as an example, I would say that people do not usually piss their pants on purpose. It’s an accident. You tried to get to the bathroom, but you left your desk too late because you can’t shut up on the blog you’re writing. So, you made an error, maybe quite a regrettable error–but not nearly so serious as the person who intentionally pisses themselves all the time and doesn’t see what’s wrong with that. That person would be considered “vicious”–from the word “vice”. A person so indebted to a poor moral habit that it’s changed the way they see the world. They actually see regular pants-pissing as desirable. You can see how that is worse than accidental incontinence. ↩︎
- Yes, Dallas Willard is catching strays here. I have learned a lot from Dallas Willard, but he is deeply wrong about his approach to the status quo, both in his discussion of the Beatitudes, and in other ways. Willard regularly gave students the exercise to “write your own beatitudes”, which is fine, but the further guidance he said was to imagine God blessing the opposite of the thing that society blesses. As if Jesus said this as an imaginative exercise instead of as an indictment of that society and what was good. Willard, for all he managed to learn about how power ought to be wielded–and he learned a lot for a man born in the early 20th century in Cape Girardeau, Missouri–he did not actually seem able to accept that imperialism corrupts white society, including the church, down to the bone. (Also, he was a Southern Baptist, and Southern Baptists are in denial about their own origin story–which is why the SBC is imploding. It will die from their original sin of racism because they would not repent of starting their religious organization to justify slavery.) So Willard could not really accept that Jesus really meant it when he said “woe to the rich”, “woe to to those who laugh”, “woe to those who have plenty to eat” (see Luke’s version of the Beatitudes in ch. 6). We would call it privilege. I would say that privilege screws over the people who have it because it corrodes your character simply by having it unless you actually reject it.
Jesus literally spent his whole life modeling the voluntary renunciation of privilege and what passes for blessing, happiness, or good fortune in the world, but Dallas cannot see that Jesus did not reject it for kicks and giggles or because he is an ascetic, he did it because it’s poison and Jesus was without sin. Dallas was a cis-gendered heterosexual white guy who, for all his efforts, is still identifying as a son of the American empire. That’s why he can’t see that the Beatitudes are not a damn thought exercise. He would say that “identity politics”–by which he means a intersectional understanding of identity– are the problem and have no place in a Christian anthropology. I say that it is these sons of empire who are so identified with their whiteness and their heterosexuality that they refuse to accept the ways that Jesus repudiates the institutional world order.
And yes, as a person born and raised in Saint Louis, Missouri, I will always talk shit about the violent racist extremism that regularly comes out of southern Missouri. When I was a kid, I remember watching the news and seeing yet another lynching of a black person, the Confederate flag, and Klan activity in southern Missouri. So yeah, maybe the white guy from there is not the person who should be regarded as an authority on the validity of intersectional identity. He was set up for failure in that respect. In general, it would be better for these people to recognize when they are out of their depth and maybe be quiet about certain things. But no, they are soooo sure their culture is right. ↩︎