Stan Moody:
Over a stretch of nearly seven decades, I have been a member of the Christian Right and of the Christian left, a Republican, a Democrat, a recalcitrant husband and Dad, a Baptist minister, a pseudo-theologian, a Maine State Representative, and a chaplain at a maximum-security prison. All of this has been in a futile search for hope within the framework of American exceptionalism – individual, institutional, and national freedom. It has been a wild ride but, in many respects, an empty pursuit of identity. In the thoughts of the Apostle Paul, “I count all such things as loss”.
I have coined a term, “Christian Atheism”, suggesting divided individual and institutional belief within American Evangelicalism. It may come down to something as simple but somehow as seemingly irreversible as this: “Christian Atheism can be defined as belief in Jesus Christ for salvation but rejection of the core doctrine of trusting in the sovereign power of God.” It is the bifurcation of Romans 10:9, 10 – believing in one’s heart that God has raised Jesus from the dead and publicly confessing at baptism that Jesus is Lord but trusting, instead, in the more immediately gratifying lordship of the American Dream of prosperity and success.
“They Have Taken Away my Lord”
It is important to me that you hear the wail that emits from my spirit. In the words of Mary Magdalene on the first Easter morning, “They have taken my Lord away, and I don’t know where they have put Him” (Jn. 20:13).
I have pastored small congregations, the first of which was a little country church that is now surrounded by nine hundred acres of dedicated forestland and little else. In that church was a small group of patient, loving people who sought the presence of their Lord. They listened carefully as I poured out my heart every Sunday morning in search of the Kingdom of God that has been relegated to the ether in the spiritual wasteland we call America.
In that wasteland, highly skilled people have made it their business to employ the best tools that money can buy to present the Gospel of Jesus Christ. But it has all too often become just that—a business devoid of the glory of the God we profess to worship. The person and work of our Lord has too often been lost in egos competing for market share. The cast of characters has developed a worn, tired, familiar look that is evoking pity rather than intrigue. My friend, Civil Rights activist, Ruby Sales, calls it the encroachment of capitalist technocracy into the most self-evident wing of the Christian Church – White Evangelicalism.
They have indeed taken our Lord away and replaced Him with the American Dream of prosperity and success. They have moved on to the polling places to shake hands, court votes, and engineer the disenfranchising of blocks of minority and marginalized neighbors.
The “Church in Exile”:
It has been a long time coming, but it is here at last. Core doctrines of the Church have been subsumed into a political agenda. Worship experience has trumped relationship. And those who hunger and thirst after righteousness are hard-pressed to find it in the House of God.
Yet, God has always reserved for Himself a remnant. I call that remnant the “Church in Exile.” Some of us have church homes; others do not. But whether we do or do not, we share in a common search for the Kingdom of God and the righteousness of Christ (Matt 6:33).
Many years ago, I came to the realization that the work of faith was about touching a life, one at a time. In order to do that, however, we have to give up something of ourselves and our desire to be somebody. That, I believe, is the cost of discipleship, a cost that is almost too great for us consumer-driven Americans to bear. We must, however, if we are to become living witnesses of the beauty and holiness of God to an outside world in desperate need of hope.
The most effective means of keeping rural white America in a state of semi-belief may well be to promote the myth of our nation as the greatest Christian experiment in world history while failing to help each other rise from the depths of despair to live, dynamic hope in Christ alone. Unless it begins through practice with each other in our local churches, it degenerates into a pyramid marketing scheme of questionable merit.
What Can We Do About It?
That is the proverbial question, unaddressed from the pinnacles of power in the hands of would-be Messiahs at all levels of authority. Our belief is that white Evangelicals, slowly coopted by the illusion of religious rights and familiarity with cliché Christianity, need a new wave of liberation theology to wrest the Kingdom of God from the clutches of partisan politics.
It is our hope to give voice to such a deliverance from pagan America, that those standing firm as God’s elect kingdom on earth may find new hope and power in the sovereign God of Redemption. No solution is embedded in the heart of any nation-state. The only solution rests in the hearts of God’s people committed to spiritual renewal, wherein His strength is made perfect in our weakness.
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