Years ago I had a late-night conversation with S.I. Hayakawa, the author of “Language in Thought and Action” and an expert in studying the history of language patterns and habits of thought. I asked him what his thoughts were on the church in America, and he remarked that in the future, the conservative evangelical “white” church was going to have much more in common with the “black” church than people then perceived.
As I listened to President Obama’s eulogy for Senator Clementa Pinckney on Friday and heard the responses in the congregation—and as I sat in my own church this past Sunday following the Supreme Court’s ruling on marriage equality—I realized that Hayakawa’s prediction was likely coming true.
From President Obama’s eulogy:
“The church is and always has been the center of African American life…a place to call our own in a too-often hostile world, a sanctuary from so many hardships. Over the course of centuries, black churches served as hush harbors, where slaves could worship in safety, praise houses, where their free descendants could gather and shout ‘Hallelujah…’… rest stops for the weary along the Underground Railroad, bunkers for the foot soldiers of the civil-rights movement. They have been and continue to be community centers, where we organize for jobs and justice, places of scholarship and network, places where children are loved and fed and kept out of harms way and told that they are beautiful and smart and taught that they matter. That’s what happens in church. That’s what the black church means—our beating heart, the place where our dignity as a people in inviolate.”
Our conservative churches—regardless of color—have the opportunity to become places of refuge from prejudice that historically only the African-American church in America has probably understood. It will not be persecution or slavery at the level they endured, but it will be in an increasingly oppressive environment that the conservative evangelical church has not experienced before in this country.
The Supreme Court ruling on marriage equality has jolted many into realizing that we are no longer living in our own Promised Land but, perhaps, are headed into what Fuller Theological Seminary President Mark Labberton calls “the exile of the evangelical church.” At church on Sunday, amidst a huge crowd celebrating our country’s freedom, things seemed the same, but then again they didn’t. No one said it aloud, but I think conservative evangelicals are waking up to the idea that even if we seem big in our own megachurches, we are a minority, “often the stranger, the counterpoint, the one who now lives distinctively in the culture.”
For some, I think the court’s decision will only fuel the fire to fight louder. But then Tuesday morning I read David Brooks’s New York Times column, “The Next Culture War.” In the column, he asks his more socially conservative friends to basically consider a different culture war than the one “that has been a communications disaster, reducing a rich, complex and beautiful faith into a public obsession with sex.”
Brooks ends with, “Social conservatives are well equipped to repair this fabric, and to serve as messengers of love, dignity, commitment, communion and grace.”
I wish I could agree, but I don’t know that we are well-equipped for where we suddenly find ourselves. We have lived a long time in a place we declared was our Promised Land, but as Labberton observes, “A great deal of American life is part of Promised-Land vision—a version of the American dream that just has Christian language wrapped around it. It’s not fundamentally a different dream defined by the kingdom of God.”
It may be that the best thing that can happen to the American evangelical church now is to follow the example of those who have quietly gone before us and learn how to become hush harbors and bunkers. We have never known what it is to live in exile, but we may yet. Not as victims of our culture but minority messengers of love, dignity, commitment, communion and grace.