Similarity between the Catholic Church and the Churches of Christ

In the 1500s Ulrich Zwingli devised the three basic methods of establishing authority for church work and worship: Command, Apostolic Example, and Necessary Inference.

Ulrich Zwingli, possibly more influential than Luther in the long run, and much more influential on the acapella hardline Churches of Christ in the USA, was rebelling agains the stranglehold of the Roman Catholic Church. In the 1500s everyone was a member of the Roman Church, or they suffered dire consequences. The Roman Church at the time claimed they were the only way to God, forgiveness and heaven. If you weren’t baptized by a Roman Catholic priest, you couldn’t receive communion, couldn’t receive the forgiveness of sins, and couldn’t go to heaven when you died, or so they claimed.

Ulrich Zwingli set out to prove them wrong. There were many reasons why people wanted to rebel against the Roman Church, one was that the Roman Church took 10% of wages every year, another was that the monopoly of the Roman Church encouraged corruption, another was that the formulaic way the Roman Church approached spirituality encouraged hypocrisy.

But Ulrich Zwingli, as a Catholic priest in Zurich, Switzerland, was more interested in the formula of how the local congregation was supposed to work, and whether there was actually supposed to be a hierarchy beyond the local congregation. So he delved into the original early worship formats of the churches as recorded in the New Testament writings: the communion Supper, baptism, singing, giving, preaching, the elders, deacons and evangelists. And Voila! out popped the Churches of Christ.

Okay, there were three hundred years in between, but the essentials were there: no choirs, no solos, a cappella singing, no instruments, elders and deacons in each congregation, no fealty to a hierarchy beyond the local congregation. It was all there. Maybe they missed adult baptism, but that was sure to follow later. John Calvin in nearby Geneva followed his playbook exactly.

In addition, Zwingli attacked the magic hold of the Roman Church: the presence of Christ in the bread and wine of communion, he said was only symbolic (Luther flipped his lid over this one), and also baptism: only symbolic. After all, it was the Enlightenment when Science ruled.

But what had Zwingli done? Had he really swept away the corruption of the Roman Church? A little bit. He had constructed a formula eliminating the concentration of money and power in Rome, which certainly helped. But he had continued the false hope that the format produces spirituality.

In the hardline Churches of Christ it is openly mourned that one first has to find a church that has remained faithfully obedient to the work, organization and worship found in the early churches of the New Testament, and only secondarily to seek a congregation that also is loving, vulnerable, honest and encouraging. This is the opposite of what Jesus taught.

First of all, Jesus never said to join a congregation, or attend a congregation, or how to organize a congregation. Perhaps it was understood, because our records of Jesus record that he attended synagogue regularly until he was kicked out. What he did say was that his disciples would be known by their love.

The hardline Churches of Christ took the easy way out. It’s so much easier to judge people by whether they baptize correctly, worship correctly, or organize correctly, than to look at our own hearts, and examine the way we treat one another. In fact we have set up another corrupt system parallel to the system that Zwingli was trying to tear down.

AI and the Conservative Christian

Artificial Intelligence is all over the news right now. Fear of AI taking over our lives has made the world think in existential and spiritual terms. 

But when conservative Christians speak about AI, or any current issue today, their audience is very small. 

The Christian sect I was raised in, is a splinter group that came out of the Churches of Christ (acapella). It had its origins in the Disciples of Christ/Christian Church/Churches of Christ which had its heyday in the early 1800s. The preachers who preached in the movement in the early 1800s were speaking to a national movement, and they spoke the spiritual language of that movement. 

Today preachers in the Churches of Christ (and all conservative Christian groups) speak to a small section of society in words and metaphors that are incomprehensible to the nation, and the spirit of our times. 

My question is: If Jesus had appeared on earth in 2023, who would he speak to, and how would he speak? 

1. He would find the open doors in our society: What questions are our society asking? –Is our society safe from AI, and what can we do about it? Can I obtain eternal life/immortality through AI?
2. He would speak in the vernacular of the people, starting with common touchstones, things that 98% of society already believes in. 

What would Jesus not do? My opinion:

1. He would not quote Scriptures to people who haven’t read and don’t believe in the Scriptures. 
2. He would not use words, terms and metaphors that are unfamiliar to the people worried about current issues.
3. He would not start a church. He would start a movement. 

Churches today: 

1. Conservative churches today are memorials to long dead movements in society. The Churches of Christ, in which I grew up, were a southern memorial to a split between the North and South over slavery and modernism. The hard-line Churches of Christ are still mostly segregated, and decry welfare that goes to unwed mothers (read: Black mothers), and Medicaid that goes to lazy people (read: Black people). So they have a way to discuss their prejudices on racial issues, but maintain deniability. Most evangelical churches have their roots in the South in the years just before the Civil War started. And many of those same evangelical churches are still based on the Lost Cause of the Civil War.
3. Sometimes I think that liberal churches have become an echo chamber for anyone who can make a claim of Victimhood. Because they have seen that the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s thru 1960s was an era when the churches were way behind in upholding truth and justice, they have run ahead to Rescue any and all Victims (except conservatives). Their knee-jerk wokeness drives most people away.
5. Is there a swathe of society looking to churches to speak to them about the issues that threaten our society today?

Why we are Gullible

Because we want to believe that what we belong to is working.

As we become evangelical believers we are swept up in a love affair with God, an expansive mountaintop experience that must be shared.

But the people we try to share with are not interested. So where do we turn? 

We turn to our church, our missionary ministries, both church and parachurch, like Youth for Christ, Young Life, and Intervarsity, we turn to advice ministries like Focus on the Family and charity ministries that promise the child we sponsor is receiving enough food and school funds because we are sending $40 per month. And we turn to Christian colleges and universities. 

When these ministries raise money, they have someone stand up and give a testimony of how the ministry needing money has influenced them to turn to God, and what a difference it has made for them in their life. Then they quote numbers of how many people have turned to God that year, or how many people attend their ministry weekly.

If you join a local board of one of these international ministries, it functions like a band booster club of parents who raise funds for the high school band. The board makes no decisions, they only raise money. They go on all day seminars to learn how to raise money. They learn how to thank each giver seven times during the year, to make sure that donor gives again the next year. 

The deeper you dive into parachurch ministries the more disappointed you become, or at least the more disappointed I became. The lack of transparency in parachurch ministries is disappointing. Yet we still hang onto these ministries, because what do we have if we let go of them? The percentage of time and money spent on raising money is absurd, but only absurd to those who compare it to Jesus’ ministry when he was here on earth. 

Is our church like the vibrant group of new believers in Luke’s account in the book of Acts? If not, what options do we have? We can shop around for another church. We can join a brand new church plant that unfortunately focuses on poaching members from other congregations, and once again, needs lots of money. As a general rule, the larger the ministry, the more disappointing the lives of those who lead the ministry. We can turn to an authoritarian cult like church, or a miracle based church. We believe the testimonies we hear, without checking the facts. The testimonies glow brighter and brighter.

We are gullible because we need to see some evidence that the evangelical faith is producing fruit. 

When Reality comes crashing into our Hopes and Dreams for our Faith: 

• We might lose all faith.
• We might turn to a less literal faith.
• We might turn away from organized church. We might stop attending any church.
• We might turn to an authoritarian cult like church.
• We might focus on hard work rather than flashes of healing. 
• We might deny the facts. 

What went wrong?

Possibilities:

• The flashes of astonishing church growth may have been a turning point in history, not an expectation of constant growth year on year. 
• The miracles may be exaggerated (are the Scriptures infallible?).
• Our churches may not be organized like the early churches in the book of Acts. This has spawned the House Church Movement.

Evangelical Churches may be too mired in propping up the Lost Cause Movement: the belief that Southern values were attacked during the Civil War, and that if we could go back to farm, family and genteel country life, where a handshake is all you need for a contract, and people stay married and have lots of happy children, then the North would realize their mistake. If only we all drank iced tea, watched NASCAR and football on TV, owned a gun, ended welfare and banned gays from teaching our children.
We need to believe that our lifestyle is truly Christian.

So conservatives watch conservative TV programs and liberals watch liberal programs. Research indicates we seldom check facts, we just believe what we already want to believe. We are gullible because we need to hold onto our faith. We are ten year olds.

Why we will Never have Universal Healthcare

95% of the world thinks universal healthcare is a great idea. Having Medicare for all in the USA is championed by the Democrats and the Progressives, but not the Republican Party. 

The reason the Democrats will never win on this issue is because they have paired this policy with other policies that are not popular, and the Republican Party has championed opposing these unpopular policies. 

The biggest reason Republicans keep winning, which is a mystery to Democrats where I live, is because they have championed men’s issues. Since the 1970s maleness has been under attack: traditional male attitudes are described in the media as “toxic masculinity”. High school teachers are primarily women with master’s degrees who vote Democratic, and their unconscious and conscious message is that blue collar boys who fail in school, and don’t have a college education, you will be useless and unemployed. 

Girls get it, almost two thirds of college students are women. Boys get it. Boys who don’t have an aptitude for math and science have complied with society’s message by being drug addicted, unemployed and killing themselves at increasing rates. The most dangerous age for males is 16-24 years old. 

My great grandfather was apprenticed as a harness maker at 11 years old. He had a career. He did not overdose. He did not feel useless. He became employed in a general store, bought half interest a few years later, bought the store, then started a bank with other business owners in town. He was elected mayor. He felt useful. 

Now we have the opposite. Blue collar boys have to sit at desks for hours per day, which is torture, studying subjects that do not interest them, taught by highly educated women that are not like their blue collar fathers. Those boys go straight home after school to play war games on their computers. Republicans have been able to tap into that male frustration. Republicans do almost nothing for these young men’s employment or mental health, but they know how to acknowledge this male despair and harness their votes. 

Democrats are puzzled why minorities, whose voices Democrats champion, would opt to vote for Republicans who say racist things about blacks and hispanics. It is simple: Republicans don’t think men are toxic.

Go into any evangelical church. What do you see? Men, proud of being men, publicly praying, speaking, singing, sitting with their families. Evangelical churches are a haven for men tired of being told they are inherently toxic just because they were born male. The contrast with liberal (Democratic) churches is palpable, where men apologize for being men. Unless you have visited an evangelical church, you will have no idea of this huge gap in male energy between liberal and conservative.

There is a third road: one in which we can learn from both sides of the conversation: women have broken out of the box and are not going back in. Women are enjoying their choices and are demanding respect for their work and their safety. 

Traditional men like to compete, get strong, protect, serve, build, work with their muscles and their hands. Unless Democrats learn to honor those blue collar values, they will lose, lose, lose, and we will never get to have healthcare for all. 

The Pilgrim Fathers and the Churches of Christ

A webpage explored the similarity in singing practices between the Pilgrims who settled in the American Colonies beginning in 1620, and the a capella Churches of Christ (Restoration Movement). Another post explored how Calvinist the Churches of Christ are. In this post I’ve charted the similarities and differences between the Churches of Christ and the Pilgrim Fathers, who were the conservative wing of the already conservative Puritans.

Pilgrims

1. Sang a capella without any instruments
2. Sang only Psalms from the Bible
3. Establish authority by using the principle of Command, Apostolic Example, and Necessary Inference
4. Congregational with Elders and Deacons
5. Male leadership
6. Believed in Predestination, God chooses who will be saved before they are born
7. Infant sprinkling for the remission of sins
8. No card playing, or dancing
   
9. No celebration of Christmas
10. Drank beer or ale
11. Mandatory church attendance
12. Shunning of the unfaithful
13. Long sermons
14. Weekly Lord’s Supper communion
15. High value placed on printing and publishing
16. Obedience to a harsh God

Churches of Christ

1. Sing a capella without any instruments
2. Sing popular hymns
3. Same method of establishing biblical authority descended from Ulrich Zwingli in Switzerland in the 1500s
4. Congregational with Elders and Deacons
5. Male leadership
6. Each believer chooses to believe in God, and chooses to obey God, drawn through the gospel.
7. Adult immersion for the remission of sins
8. No gambling, dancing, or males and females swimming together
9. No celebration of Christmas
10. No alcohol
11. Mandatory church attendance
12. Withdrawal from the unfaithful
13. Long sermons
14. Weekly Lord’s Supper communion
15. High value placed on printing and publishing
16. Obedience to a harsh God

The Churches of Christ remain the most faithful to the Pilgrims and to the Swiss Reformers: Ulrich Zwingli, John Calvin and John Knox. Popular teaching in the hardline Churches of Christ is that anyone with a Bible can quickly and easily reproduce the early church format that the Apostles established, that we have come about by just reading the Bible. Contrary to popular teaching in the hardline Churches of Christ, the movement has a long history that predates the Restoration Movement, and reaches all the way back into the Protestant Reformation in Switzerland.

The Protestant Reformation came out of the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment. Superstition was gradually replaced by scientific research done by experiments that could be reproduced by anyone. Logic was taught in the Enlightenment. How to argue logically, and fallacies of logic were established. So why not use these principles to reform the Roman Catholic Church?

Are we supposed to be organized by Apostolic succession, electing priests, bishops, arch-bishops and popes? Or is there an established precedent in the New Testament? Gradually the New Testament became a rulebook, a set of laws, a New Law in fact, that could free the Swiss cantons from the control of Rome.

The Churches of Christ are the most Calvinist

The Pilgrim Fathers and the Puritans were ardent Calvinists. As Great Britain swung back and forth between Catholic and Protestantism, as each monarch dictated, the British Calvinists moved back and forth to Holland and Geneva, Switzerland, to practise their Calvinism with freedom and enthusiasm. When the opportunity arose to sail to the New World and establish a pure church, some jumped at the chance, starting in 1620. 

Meanwhile Scotland took a more Calvinist route than England. By the time Alexander Campbell left the Old Light, Anti-Burgher Closed Communion Presbyterian Church in Scotland, to sail to the New World in 1790, Calvinism was firmly established. But the Protestant Reformation had reached a new horizon in the brand new United States of America. There was a burgeoning unity movement. Instead of closed communion and clearly delineated catechisms, there were those who wanted a unified free church based on the priesthood of all believers, no professional clergy, and a bootstrap relationship with God. 

The Cane Ridege Revival of 1802 on the western American frontier, had enthusiastic singing, hours of preaching about unity of all believers, and ecstatic pentecostal demonstrations. 

What sifted out was the Restoration Movement: the Disciples of Christ, Christian Church and Churches of Christ. 

The hard line Churches of Christ, contrary to their mythology, inherited the most of Calvinism of all three of the groups. Similarities between the Churches of Christ and John Calvin’s church in Geneva:

1. Congregational: decisions are made at the congregational level, no bishops over the for churches. Only elders over each congregation.
2. Establishing authority  for each act of worship via Command, Example or Inference found in the New Testament Scriptures, post-crucifiction only. 
3. A harsh God. Calvin interpreted that as a God who was going to send everyone to hell, but chose a few (through no merit of their own) to be saved. God chose them before they were born. If you didn’t get chosen, you have no reason to complain, because you were a sinner anyway, and we all deserve hell. In contrast the Churches of Christ teach that God is an angry God who will send you to hell, but you can save yourself from hell if you choose to believe, and be baptized in the biblically commanded way. Nobody else will be saved. Also, nobody can be sure they are saved. The best we can do is obey God, mostly by attending church as much as possible, worshipping in the authorized manner, according to the approved example of the early church as recorded in the New Testament. If you make a mistake in this regard, you will be lost. So choose your congregation carefully.
4. A capella singing, with no musical instruments. Calvin, the Pilgrim Fathers, the Presbyterians and the Puritans were all clear: there were no instruments of music mentioned or commanded in the New Testament, therefore to use them is a sin, and might endanger your salvation. 
5. Ex-communication: Calvin was strict about not allowing blatant sinners to take communion in his congregation, and the hard line churches of Christ have followed his tradition, with a few modifications. 
6. Long sermons.
7. The comfort of knowing we are the only ones who are doing it right!

Evangelicals and Sex before Marriage

Old Joke: Why does your church ban sex standing up? Because it might lead to dancing. 

For those too young to get that joke: Many churches considered dancing a sin that would lead to promiscuous sex. 

A recent NYT article outlines the dilemma that evangelicals face around premarital sex: Do we move with the times, or does celibacy outside of marriage promote healthy sex in marriage, and better mental health over all?

The theory goes like this:

1. God instituted marriage as the healthy way to express sexuality, to join a man and woman together sexually. The most quoted passage in the Bible by Jesus and NT writers is “In the beginning God created them male and female. ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh‘?”
2. This promotes physical health (less STDs), mental health (less trauma), and more intimacy between husband and wife. 
3. There is less abortion when sex is reserved for marriage.
4. Sex before marriage promotes disease, mental disorders (especially among women), and dilutes the intimacy later in marriage. It also promotes infidelity later in marriage. 
5. Pornography does the same thing sex before marriage does. 
6. Half of evangelical churches include masturbation as sinful as well. 
7. Conservative Catholics elevate the virginity of Mary, and view celibacy as especially holy, and sex as carnal, causing infants to be born in sin. The latter is not Catholic doctrine, but is definitely a Catholic myth. 

What is the truth about these claims?

1. It is true that sex promotes a healthy marriage, and the fewer previous partners one has had before marriage, the better the sex is in marriage. A Redbook survewy in the 1980s reported that women who were having the most orgasms per week were in their 50s, in a long marriage and had had few sex partners. 
2. It is true that there is less abortion among married women. Though older married women are the second highest group that have abortions.
3. Sexual promiscuity does promote STDs, affects women to have similar symptoms as rape victims, and sometimes dillutes the intimacy of sex in marriage. 
4. Research on porn indicates it promotes less intimacy. However 70% of evangelical men use porn and perhaps 40% of women. 
5. Almost everyone masturbates whether they believe it is sinful or not. 

Evangelicals:

1. Have about the same level of premarital sex as non-evangelicals, though they tend to wait about 6 months longer to start having sex (average age 16).
2. Evangelicals who wait until marriage are not more mentally healthy than their counterparts, and they do not have better sex in marriage than their counterparts who did not wait. The Christians that are successful in waiting until marriage often have homosexual orientations, and thus it was easy for them to shun heterosexual sex before becoming heterosexually married. 

Evangelical writers sometimes point to the past or to the Amish as examples of healthy marriages where there is no premarital sex.

1. Those writers are not really familiar with the Amish, and don’t know how much premarital sex the Amish are having, or how healthy their marriages are. They are relying on a romanticized view of religious people working on farms in old fashioned clothing, driving buggies. 
2. We do not live in closed communities. Evangelicals, in an effort to protect  our children from sexual immorality, have established private Christian schools and colleges, have established church youth groups, and invite speakers to come and convince our teens to save themselves for marriage. One of the most famous speakers has repented for discouraging teens with his book, “I Kissed Dating Goodby”, is separated from his wife, and no longer calls himself a Christian. 

Evangelicals who have been successful in getting teens to wait until marriage:

1. Have strong support groups for their teens, especially the young men.
2. Encourage their teens to get married much younger than the general public: at age 18-21yo.
3. Have high divorce rates. 

Another argument that evangelicals and fundamentalists make is that it doesn’t matter whether saving oneself for marriage helps or hinders, it just is a rule that God made and we have to keep it. This argument doesn’t make much sense. Under the Law of Moses rules were laid down with not much justification, but in the New Testament every rule is given a justification, the writer attempting to persuade the reader. (Interestingly the rules about rape and adultery in the Law of Moses were the most progressive for women of that time.)

The rules about sex were given:

1. In an era when women had very little power.
2. When pregnant women and women with children needed a lot of support (they still do today).
3. When there was very little birth control that was reliable. Every era has had access to birth control, with varying degrees of reliability. 
4. When the most successful child rearing happened in intact mother-father families (still the case today). 

Concerns that everyone has are:

1. Women still tend to get hurt more than men in dating relationships and in hook-up culture.
2. Women still have more to lose in a promiscuous culture that leaves her to raise her children alone. 

Acapella Singing by the Pilgrims and the Puritans

I grew up in the Churches of Christ, which traces their history through the Cane Ridge Revival of 1801 in Kentucky and back through Alexander Campbell to the schisms of the Presbyterian Church in Scotland, and the Reformations of Ulrich Zwingli and John Calvin in Switzerland. 

So, to me, having grown up with the biblical interpretation model of Command, Example and Necessary Inference, it is fascinating when I find these principles focussed and enforced by the first Puritan settlers in the New World. 

The Puritans arrived in the New World in 1630, and were slightly different from the Pilgrims who had landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620. The Pilgrims were Separatists (refusing to be associated with the Church of England). The Puritans who landed a few years later,  wanted to be associated with the Church of England, but also wanted to reform it. Both the Puritans and Pilgrims had spent time in Holland or Switzerland worshiping in Calvinist Churches when it was not safe for them in England. They fled to these churches because they had been influenced by their theology earlier, and when they arrived they were further indoctrinated into Zwinglian and Calvinist theology.

Side note: Puritans and Pilgrims wore bright clothing as evidenced by the museum preservation of much of their clothing. The reason that later artists depict them in somber black, white and gray is because they are conflated with the Quakers who came 200 years later.

The Puritan immigrants (not Separatists), not wanting to use the same Psalm book the Pilgrims (Separatists) used (Ainsworth’s Psalter), decided to translate the Hebrew Psalms of the Bible afresh into English poetry for singing in their church. They imported a printing press and away they went!

In the preface to The Bay Psalme Book of 1640, the first book composed and printed in the New World, is their scriptural justification for composing this book, and their biblical arguments for why they sang the way they sang: acapella, congregational, Psalms only. 

How surprised was I when I discovered that the arguments they used were none other than the arguments that were drummed into my head growing up in the Churches of Christ acapella in the Bible Belt of the United States, 350 years later, though they came to slightly different, and stricter, conclusions.

First of all they insisted that only the Psalms be sung, no other hymns allowed. They understood that someone could be “ordinarily inspired” to write a song of praise to God, but that song would possibly be contaminated with worldly influence. The only way to be sure that the song was totally pleasing to God was to sing one of the Psalms contained in the inspired Bible. Only then would you know that what you were singing was wholly pleasing to God. They went through lengthy arguments about how prayers and sermons are not wholly inspired by God, but there is a clear distinction in their minds between prayers and sermons, and Psalms of praise to God sung by the whole church. Clearly, in their minds, Psalms of praise require a higher level of inspiration. 

When the apostle Paul said we are to sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs, we find that he was referring to the Hebrew labels for the Psalms referred to by King David as Psalms, hymns and spiritual songs, each one labelled with one of those labels. So, to be safe, we have to use only those Psalms, hymns and spiritual songs found in the Psalms. With one notable exception: singing the Ten Commandments.  So, to be safe, we have to use only those Psalms, hymns and spiritual songs found in the inspired Bible. With one notable exception: singing the Ten Commandments. 

When the apostle Paul instructed the church to sing, he instructed everyone to sing, no solos, because there are no Examples of solos in the New Testament Church! If God had wanted choristers, then God would have given the qualifications of choristers in the New Testament. God gave qualifications for Apostles, elders and deacons, but no qualifications for choristers. Since there are no qualifications that we can read in the New Testament, therefore there can be no choristers in the New Testament Church. (Nevermind that there were choristers in the Hebrew Old Testament and no qualifications that we can read there.) 

In the preface of the psalm book it is determined that we are free to make up our own tunes, because God had not seen fit to preserve the Hebrew melodies, therefore God was setting us free to make up our own melodies for the songs of praise. They said they were familiar with almost 40 tunes that they would match up with the Psalms according to meter. Most of the tunes were in Simple Meter, or Common Meter, some were in Long Meter, a few were in 6’s and 7’s (number of syllables per line). The Psalms were printed in the Bay Psalme Book, but none of the tunes were printed. The congregation was already familiar with the tunes, and the Precentor of the congregation would call out the number of the Psalm, and then the title of the tune (e.g. Cambridge) and the first note to start on. Then he would lead the song. The tunes were named after towns. 

When it came to instruments of music, the preface to the Bay Psalme Book freely admits that King David used several instruments to praise God. However the writer finds that these instruments were part of the Ceremonial Law, not part of the Moral Law that applies to the New Testament Church. How surprised was I when I realized they used the exact argument the Churches of Christ use against the instruments of music of the Old Testament!

It is clear that the Puritans (and the Churches of Christ later) were people convinced that God is a God of rules and regulations. 

And how funny it was that they used the same Command, Example and Necessary Inference biblical interpretation that I grew up with, yet came to some very different conclusions! 

A few years later the Puritans joined the Pilgrims and established a small Bible college to educate preachers (Harvard). The Puritans and Pilgrims were later known as the Congregational Church because they made their decisions within the local congregation by voting, shunning the hierarchy of the Church of England. Later they became the United Church of Christ, the conservative wing is called the Church of Christ Congregational. 

Why Evangelicals don’t know they are Racist

​Evangelicalism as an offshoot of slave society

“You got niggers in your church?” the woman asked me after I showed her my wedding photo album (1980, Churches of Christ, rural Alabama). 

Chevy Chase surveying his labors

Historians have noted that the South has been particularly religious, in the evangelical sense. Since 1980 historians have called the tragic identity of southerners after the Civil War the Lost Cause, and have noted it is a religion that combines southern Confederate values and Christianity. 

My relatives raised in the Churches of Christ (non-instrumental) would have said that they were restoring the One True Church that Jesus established on the Day of Pentecost, A.D. 33. Left out of the narrative was that the Churches of Christ split off from the Christian Church/Disciples of Christ in the north (1840-1880) because the northern congregations were beating the abolitionist drum, according to David Harrell, leading up to the Civil War (1860-1865). I heard that the One True Church had to leave the Christian Church because they were using instruments of music in worship, and because they had established a convention and elected a president, clearly the first steps toward establishing denominational hierarchy not found in the One True Church in the book of Acts. But I never heard that we split off because we hated abolitionists and wanted to keep slavery. 

Everyone knows that the Ku Klux Klan were racists who believed that the only way to protect white jobs and control the sexual sins of the black man were to lynch a few every once in awhile. But we didn’t know why they burned a cross. It was because they were an evangelical Christian organization. They did not allow Catholics or Jews to join, only Protestant Christians. They sang a hymn and prayed at every meeting. We pointed at them as the racists. They never believed they were racists at all, they were just pointing out the biblical order of society and races. We couldn’t see that we were part of a larger movement that included the Ku Klux Klan and all the white evangelical southern churches. 

​Almost all of the denominations and sects split​ during the abolitionist movement, south from north. The Southern Baptist Church, The Southern Methodist Church, the Churches of Christ, the Presbyterian splits, almost all of them embraced slavery in the south and eschewed the Abolitionist Movement. Long after the Civil War they upheld the superiority of whites, and the tragedy of the undisciplined Negro, who unconsciously longed to go back under slavery where they were well treated, and benefited from an organized productive life as slaves. 

My parents taught me privately to not be racist. And by the 1950s nobody talked about supporting slavery, but they did hate the Supreme Court for interfering in their Lost Cause Civil Religion, as they hated “Martin Lucifer Coon” for registering black people to vote. “What are they even marching for?” “Why are they causing trouble at the lunch diners? Nobody wants to mix. They prefer being separate.” “Why are they rioting?”
“Excuse me, there’s a Negro congregation across town on Lexington Avenue. I’m sure you would be much more comfortable over there.” (1964)

I never heard about Martin Luther King, or the struggle to vote, in my home, or in my church. I heard that the Baptists were wrong because they believed in Once Saved Always Saved, and used instrumental music in worship (The apostle Paul said, “Sing and make melody in your heart”, NOT on a piano, “in your heart”). But I never heard that black people were not permitted to buy an FHA financed house, and were not permitted to live in a white neighborhood and attend white schools. 

The Lost Cause Civil Religion is a continuum. On the right is the KKK, and on the left are those who welcome black people into their congregation, as long as the black person leaves the congregation the same as when they entered, no changes, no discussions of race, except to confirm our beliefs.

Fear of the black man was what drove much of the Lost Cause Religion: 

• Jingoistic patriotism, flag and country, and Dixie flag and the South shall rise again.
• Traditional male-female roles: men provide for their families, men defend women’s honor, women keep the home and raise children, men go to war, 
• bootstrap ideology, work hard and you will succeed,
• opposition to socialism because socialism rewards the lazy, 
• authoritarianism: harsh towards the weak, obedient to the powerful, competitive with peers. 
• Children should be seen and not heard, paddled often, should be fearful and obedient. 
• Whites were righteous, god-fearing and trustworthy. Blacks were addicts, thieves and violent. 
• Our religion is right, yours is wrong. We’re saved, you’re going to hell. An evangelical prayer before every team sport.

One of the deacons in our church in Indiana used to tell Jewish jokes to his Jewish boss, who didn’t laugh. He was employed as a catalog photographer. When he was replaced by a black photographer he was incensed at the boss, the company, and President Carter’s policy of reverse discrimination. There was no self reflection. When the congregation started using overhead projectors he objected because they were unscriptural innovations. His Jewish jokes weren’t sinful, but the government and the overhead projectors were sinful. 

When we drove from Indiana to Mississippi to see our grandparents, every bathroom stall had anti-black pro-KKK graffiti–every bathroom stall. 

So now I realize that I was raised in a milder version of the Ku Klux Klan. And when I pointed out inconsistencies in the Churches of Christ I was met with the same nasty attitudes shown to the Freedom Riders and the Lunch Counter Protesters, and the Voting Registration Marchers in the 1950s-70s. I was opposing the real religion: The Lost Cause of Genteel Southern Society based on the backs of cheap black labor. That was and is the true religion of Evangelicalism in the United States. 

The Lost Cause Religion can be seen in Evangelical Christians voting for the Republican Party:

• The embracing of the slogan Make America Great Again, by going back to the era when there were no blacks in the professional jobs at work, and one could tell jokes about Jewish stereotypes and not get fired. 
• Evangelical Christianity is the true religion of the USA.
• This nation was made for white people, the others need to be quiet and try to fit in. believing that anything that is not white and evangelical is evil. Agreeing that voting stations in black neighborhoods should be closed.
• The belief that voting for Republicans saves more innocent lives because they are ProLife.
• Accepting that Mexican children can be separated from their parents and housed in chain link prisons for months and years resulting in permanent mental illness.
• Voting for more and more military power.
• Sending their children off to fight in wars far away.
• Wars with Arabs who believe in an evil religion. 
• Being baffled by the anger around Black Lives Matter. What are they even fighting about? Blacks are treated better than Whites now. 
• Democrats cheat and Republicans don’t cheat. The belief that Trump tells the truth (everyone who has played golf with him says he cheats on every hole).

Jesus was hated after he told the story of the Good Samaritan. That’s like telling a story about the Good Negro here in the Bible Belt, and how the Evangelicals crossed the road to get away from the bloody body in need. 

They told me I was raised in Christianity, but what I was raised in was Racism and Authoritarianism: the opposite of Christianity. Evangelicalism is not primarily about Jesus, it is primarily about perpetuating the Lost Cause Religion of the South. If Jesus can fit in the cracks somewhere, then fine, we’ll let him in. But what the Bible Belt Evangelicals really want from Jesus is a nice Christmas dusting of snow so we won’t have to see the evil in our hearts. 

• 

Racial Humor in the Religious South

No-one has been prosecuted for the many Martin Luther King statues that have been desecrated, some of which are on display in a museum in Amsterdam.

As Black Lives Matter becomes mainstream it is interesting to me to see my religious relatives’ anger rising. Where did this come from?

My parents were less racist than most as I was growing up, but we grew up in the Bible belt, north of the Mason-Dixon line, where there were small enclaves of acapella Churches of Christ, non-instutional (my 90 year old father has never quit preaching about the painful split (1957-1964) in the acapella Churches of Christ.

I had always been taught that the Churches of Christ split from the Disciples of Christ and Christian Church when they formed the American Christian Missionary Society in 1849. What we were taught was that missionary societies, in and of themselves, were unbiblical, an organization bigger than the local congregation, with no authorized organizational structure in the New Testament. Churches (local congregations) were authorized in the New Testament to send out missionaries, but not a larger organization.

What we were not told was that the American Christian Missionary Society our sect split over had taken an abolitionist stand. Further we were not told that the Methodists, Baptists and Presbyterians split at exactly the same time (North vs South) over abolition vs slavery. And that most of the Churches of Christ were in the South, and the Christian Church and Disciples were in the North.

There is still doctrine in the Churches of Christ, non-institutional (NI), against any organization on earth, greater than the local congregation, to do the work Christ assigned to the local congregations. There is still rampant racism as well, not overt racism, which is taught against, but I had never seen a black person in a congregation I attended until I was 14 years old. The Churches of Christ are strong only in the South, and areas where southerners moved to, or where slavery was strong in the north and west.

When I studied to be a minister in the Churches of Christ, NI, I first interned in 1977 at a church in Buckner, IL. I learned from the congregation that it was located in an all white county. In the late 1960s a black family had moved into nearby Benton, IL, and people burned their garage down the first night. The family moved out the next day. The congregation told me that there used to be a sign up at the edge of town that said black people were not permitted to spend the night in that town.

The minister (in his 50s) I was working with, Eural, was renovating his house. He casually referred to the black insulation board as “nigger-board”. When I raised my eye-brows he looked embarrassed and said, “That’s what they call it at the lumber yard. I don’t think they have another name for it.” He was very upset when his daughter dated a black man in 1976. He told her that he knew men years ago who would warn the black man, then if he didn’t stop dating a white woman they would kill him, and those men were still alive. So she stopped dating the black man.

One of the elderly congregants, Sister Flatt, asked me if the beast of the field in the book of Genesis wasn’t black people. I later learned this is an old doctrine. (When I acted upset at that idea, she quit inviting me for Sunday dinner.)

The second place I interned in 1978 was in Gainesville, FL in an all white congregation. The minister (50s), Jim, was from Arkansas, wore cowboy boots every day, was writing his thesis for his doctorate in education, and wanted the congregation to sell the minister’s house because blacks were moving into the neighborhood. The other intern I worked alongside, from St Louis, MO, made comments about black people frequently, at least 3 comments per day, thought it was funny to call blacks “Jigaboos”. Nobody thought of themselves as racist.

One of the elders in the congregation invited me for supper. He was a laconic country boy, blue collar, with three sons, living on a small farm. He worked as a postmaster in a small town. He had named his last son, Plenty, because he had plenty of sons. Plenty told jokes at the supper table. (Trigger warning: these will keep you up at night.) “A guy killed three niggers and skinned ’em. He sold the skins to someone as wetsuits, but the customer brought them back, complaining the snorkels were at the wrong end.” I was upset by the joke. His father sat stolidly shoveling food in his mouth. His mother said, “Plen, I wish you wouldn’t tell that.He doesn’t want to hear that.” Plen was a small teenager (16) and attended a mixed rural high school. Looking back on it I realize he was terrified of his fellow black students.

I was taught at home that racism was wrong, but my father, a minister, never taught against racism from the pulpit or in a Bible class. He didn’t see it as a huge problem. (My father treated almost everyone as a second class citizen, white or black.) He relegated teaching against racism to what should be taught at home. He did however teach against mini skirts, homosexuality, women having careers, divorce, pornography, as well as the usual laundry list of lying, stealing and hating, enough to keep us feeling guilty all the time. When Martin Luther King Jr was marching to help blacks in the South gain the right to vote, my father never mentioned it to his congregation, or to us. When Martin Luther King Jr was shot, he never discussed it.

What strikes me now is that I was duped into participating in the Lost Cause movement. The Lost Cause movement is a civil religion of sorts, similar to the movement after the War of Independence in 1776. After 1776 the American civil religion became democracy. “All men are created equal” originally meant “All landed gentry (usually with slaves) are equal to the royals in England.” But after 1776 it meant that we were the newest, most modern, socially progressive nation in the world, and every real American was deeply proud of that fact. That became our civil religion. Almost all churches have an American flag on the dais, illustrating that nationalism permeates American religion. Europeans saw Americans as progressive leaders, but also as naive idealistic teenagers.

The problem with all men being equal is that it made people think that slaves might be equal too, which upset those whose livelihood and economy was based on slaves. (Aside: It is odd that the genocide of the Native Americans 1830-1890 occurred at the same time that abolition was being preached.)

The North has its own brand of racism, as can be seen in the ironic fact that Minneapolis served as the latest catalyst for BLM.

After the Civil War (1861-1865) and Reconstruction, the South was devastated and demoralized. They were compelled to develop a new identity from the ashes: The Lost Cause, which became their particular civil religion, separate and distinct from the North. The Lost Cause includes:

• honor,
• patriotism,
• tradition,
• Bible-believing Christianity,
• family,
• traditional roles,
• strict child discipline,
• protection of women (especially from uncivilized black men),
• having been Victimized by the North, (being misunderstood because the North has had no experience with southern blacks),
• slaves were actually well-treated and happy under slavery, but now blacks are adrift, shiftless, and useless. (Therefore they are better suited to prison and not voting, not all blacks, just most of them.)
• the South has never been racist.

I served as a minister in Starke, Florida, in 1980, for a tiny congregation. Starke, FL was the home of the state prison. As soon as I was hired an older member, Brother Wall, of the congregation had to talk about whether I was a Yankee or not. He had to tell me how General Sherman’s scorched earth policy included awful treatment of women and babies. Sister Wall told me with disgust that you couldn’t get any blacks to clean your house anymore. There were no mixed neighborhoods in town. I attended the high school graduation. there were ten cum laude students, 8 were females and two were feminine males, all white. 95% of the men in the congregation chewed tobacco, and 25% of the women. Every pickup truck had a spit can on the dash.

The Lost Cause is alive and well in the Evangelical Church and can be seen in reactions to the Black Lives Matter movement:

• anger at LGBTQ steps forward, including the latest decision by the Supreme Court that nobody can be fired for being gay or transgendered. This violates their belief that the bible condemns homosexual acts.
• empathy for the police who are being heaped with insults during the protests,
• viewing the protesters as rioters, violent, against law and order,
• a call for more law and order, and submission to authority, and more discipline of children,
• seeing police killings as normal reactions to individuals who are rude and obstructing justice,
• the same number of whites per capita are killed by police as blacks, so why don’t All Lives Matter?
• if people would submit to the Bible, as we understand it, there wouldn’t be all these problems. Why are people upset anyway?

If you told them they are participating in a civil religion called the Lost Cause, my relatives would be irritated and deny it. My relatives would endorse all the values of the Lost Cause, except the ones about blacks. They believe they are not racist, and would welcome blacks in their congregation. However, they are perfectly comfortable with Confederate flags, Confederate monuments, angry at BLM, and happy to attend covertly racist congregations, where they do not hear anti-racism sermons in their churches. They are blind to abuses of the Lost Cause movement.