When We Fight About What Jesus Would Do

I heard a sermon once a few years ago, in a United Methodist congregation that was living in a state of unacknowledged denial about the depth of division within that congregation, within the United Methodist Church, and within the United States writ large. Something about the sermon didn’t sit right with me, and in due course I figured out what it was.

The central injunction of the sermon – the big “takeaway”, if you will – was that division amongst us could be bridged by focusing on what God loves. And at face value, any Christian – certainly any Methodist – would probably easily accept the advice to focus on what God loves.

But while it’s all well and good to tell everyone to focus on what God loves, actually doing so as a community is not simple.  I would venture to say that most conscientious Christians are making an effort to focus on what God loves.  The difficulty is that, in doing so, we still face the responsibility of engaging with and interpreting Scripture, of applying reason, tradition, and experience to our understanding thereof, and of listening to the Holy Spirit – and people end up coming to different conclusions about what’s important. 

That’s the real challenge we face: What to do with our biases, what to do when we take different things from the Bible. What to do when we come to different conclusions about what God loves.

Some people believe God loves a strict gender binary and those who enforce it.

Others believe God loves LGBTQIA+ people in all their queerness, not despite it.

Some people believe God loves a white, evangelical, capitalist MAGA America and its thin blue line.

Others believe God calls that America to desperately-needed repentance from all of that: from white nationalism, white supremacy, fundamentalism, capitalist empire, patriarchy, gender essentialism, and the myth of redemptive violence.

The sermon failed to address this difficulty at all. It made the blithe assumption that it was easy to agree what God loves. It totally ignored the challenge of recognizing what or whom God loves that we struggle to love, so that we grow beyond our comfort zones. It ignored the need to acknowledge and repent of the ways we slap a “Christian” sticker on an oppressive status quo that just happens to suit us.

I worried that, for lack of such specificity, the sermon simply left everyone exactly where they were: namely, believing that in guarding their particular barricades and despising their particular political and/or intra-denominational opponents, they were focusing on what God loves.

The sermon allowed us all to carry on with the comfortable assumption that we could best focus on what God loves by seeing to it that those other crazy heathens would be defeated, at whatever cost. It did not concern itself with any possibility that any of us might need encouragement to repent. 

We needed a more specific challenge, a more specific application of some useful hermeneutic, if we were going to come away from that sermon doing anything other than feeling affirmed in our existing opinions. Looking across Christians in the United States today, it seems obvious to me that there is a widespread preference to believe that one already loves what God loves, and that it’s the people one disagrees with who do not. 

I think it probably cannot be repeated too often that we’re all bound to be wrong about something, and we may never even know what it is.  Epistemological humility may not be an extremely powerful antidote to tribalism, but I continue to come up empty for better options.

Yet even humility only takes us so far. What about the specific challenge, the specific hermeneutic? We need an answer to the question, don’t we? If some of us are wrong about what God loves, how are we to know?

In some regions of the country, hundreds of congregations are leaving the United Methodist Church in the name of holding firm against things, beliefs, practices, that they are convinced God does not love.

Sure, they’ll probably say that God loves LGBTQIA+ people, but they’ll also often say those same people should be celibate, shouldn’t get married, shouldn’t have kids, shouldn’t be clergy, shouldn’t live according to their own sense of their gender identity, shouldn’t have pride parades, shouldn’t have drag queen story hours. And they’ll point at a few Bible verses and make some assertions and ignore all historical context and all contrary Biblical scholarship and interpretation, and say that everyone who disagrees with them is abandoning the Bible, walking away from Jesus, betraying the Gospel.

The rest of us argue that God is more concerned with empathy and compassion and true justice than with conformity to a story about binary gender and patriarchy. We point at all the Biblical evidence to that effect. And they tell us we’re going to hell.

Why?

The answer I have come to is this: Because their understanding of the Bible, whether they know it or not (and many of them likely do not know it), is built to uphold straight white male power. The power is primary – constitutive, even. The theology is shaped to serve and promulgate the power.

We see how readily these guardians of orthodoxy and Biblical authority will ignore Biblical criticism of capitalism, patriarchy, militarism, empire. It’s plain to see that they, too, despite their frequent protestations about adhering to the “plain meaning” of Scripture, are doing interpretation. It’s just that the Biblical authority they are so keen to defend is not actually the authority of the Bible, but rather of the worldview they are uncritically taking for granted and then attributing to the Bible. The worldview they were taught, and are exhorted to defend, because it assigns power to the “right” people – by definition, mostly cisgender white men.

According to a 2023 report of survey results, “[T]he stronger a respondent’s belief in being ‘safer with guns than without,’ the higher they scored on both male supremacy and racial resentment.” That’s how inextricably connected these worldview issues – patriarchy, gender essentialism, racism, violence – truly are. At the bottom, it’s all the same Moloch.

So here’s my humble proposal for a specific challenge, a specific hermeneutic: Don’t trust theology that just happens to oh-so-casually baptize an oppressive status quo. Start from the understanding that the society humans have made is not just, because it obviously isn’t, and see what Jesus says and does about it. And what he says and does about it is, he skewers it and undermines it and rebukes it for being a sham of a proper society.

Good theology needs to tell straight white patriarchy and ravenous capitalist empire to repent: to repent of ruthlessly exploiting underpaid labor around the world, to repent of extracting every last resource and despoiling every environment, to repent of abusing and wasting humans and all life for any reason or no reason.

The Moloch worldview seeks to manipulate and control people using fear. It wields fear, it wields mistrust, to get people to say, “What we need is for these disfavored groups” – LGBTQIA+, BIPOC, women, socialists, immigrants – “to know their place and to do as they’re told, and then everything will be fine.” It abuses the language of Christianity to get people to believe that enforcing its hierarchy of fear is what God wants.

That Moloch worldview is wrong.

So, if we’re going to try to focus on what and whom God loves, and have that focus be a bridge across division and to a better future, then the focus we need is this: a focus that says, “The Moloch worldview is a lie. With its delusions of power and hierarchy it has made a ruin of the world. We must embrace our responsibility to love each other and the entire more-than-human world – enough to repent, and to try to make things better.”

For good theology, that would at least not be a bad start.