The Overview (Tuesday, February 8)
A call to end online worship services, a town limiting free meals from churches, pondering different "worlds" of American evangelicalism, and more.
First, it’s my Mom’s birthday today. Happy Birthday, Mom!
Second, a lot has happened in the past two weeks, so let’s get down to business. Here’s the Tuesday, February 8 edition of The Overview:
1) Writer Tish Harrison Warren created quite a stir with the publication of her January 30 newsletter for the New York Times. The article encouraged churches to cease offering online services as we close in on nearly two years of life under the coronavirus pandemic. Throughout the article Warren makes the case that churches work best when people are in community with one another. And while the pandemic necessitated an emergency pivot, the facts on the ground have sufficiently changed for churches to get back to normalcy.
There is still risk, of course, but the goal was never — and ought never be — to eliminate all risk of illness or death. Throughout the past two years, we have sought to balance the risk of disease with the good of being present, in person, with one another. And the cost of being apart from one another is steep. People need physical touch and interaction. We need to connect with other human beings through our bodies, through the ordinary vulnerability of looking into their eyes, hearing their voice, sharing their space, their smells, their presence.
Criticism to Warren’s article came fast and furious. Some accused her of ableism, not accounting for the needs of those for whom a return to church would be a much greater risk than for the average parishioner. Others said the option should remain just that—an option—given the promise that online services provide to those who, for whatever reason, cannot regularly attend in person.
I certainly sympathize with Warren’s critics, and she made it a point to highlight certain feedback in the following Sunday’s edition of her newsletter. But her larger point stands: the body of Christ cannot be disembodied. Online church, she writes,
presents in-person gatherings as something we can opt in or out of with little consequence. It assumes that embodiment is more of a consumer preference, like whether or not you buy hardwood floors, than a necessity, like whether or not you have shelter.
Ultimately, the church must take better care of those who cannot worship in person for whatever reason, through visitation, service, community-building, etc. But I fear that normalizing online church is not the long-term solution her critics hope it is.
2) In a story from my home state, a really interesting religious freedom conflict is churning on the southern Oregon coast. St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church and the Episcopal Diocese of Oregon are suing the city of Brookings over an ordinance that limits the number of free meals a nonprofit can distribute each week.
The early days of the pandemic saw an uptick in food insecurity around the country,1 prompting religious bodies and other nonprofits to step up providing meal services for those in their communities. From the NPR story:
St. Timothy's … began offering meals six days a week, serving up to 70 people each lunchtime.
The church also offered coronavirus testing and COVID-19 vaccination. At one point, the city asked St. Timothy's to allow people who needed to sleep in their cars to use its parking lot, and the church agreed, the [lawsuit] says.
But the services for homeless people began to rankle residents living near St. Timothy's, who complained of trespassing, littering and noise in their neighborhood, Oregon Public Broadcasting reported. The residents sent the city a petition in April asking for the church's homeless services to end.
In October, the City Council approved an ordinance creating a permit for "benevolent meal service" and restricting it to twice per week. The only nonprofits in Brookings offering free meals to homeless people are churches.
This case immediately reminded me of a 1993 U.S. Supreme Court case, Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah. In that case, a city passed a series of ordinances prohibiting “the ritual sacrifices of animals,” a direct reference to the activities of a local religious body that was in the process of moving into the community. The Court unanimously ruled for the church, saying,
The ordinances had as their object the suppression of religion. The pattern we have recited discloses animosity to Santeria adherents and their religious practices; the ordinances by their own terms target this religious exercise; the texts of the ordinances were gerrymandered with care to proscribe religious killings of animals but to exclude almost all secular killings; and the ordinances suppress much more religious conduct than is necessary in order to achieve the legitimate ends asserted in their defense. These ordinances are not neutral….
The Brookings case is different for a number of reasons. But a major similarity is the city’s attempt to restrict what amounts to sincere religious practice based on concerns from members of the surrounding community. Even if this case turns out differently than the Lukumi case, from a First Amendment perspective the government’s actions here are, at the very least and to use a legally technical term, sketchy.
3) Over at First Things, Aaron Renn has a thoughtful essay about the fissures in American evangelicalism. Renn begins by describing “three worlds” of evangelicalism, which have existed at distinct times in American history:
The Positive World, the pre-1994 period when American culture held largely positive views of Christianity
The Neutral World, the 1994-2014 period when Christianity was an acceptable (but not necessary) component of pluralism
The Negative World, the post-2014 period when American culture adopted largely negative views of Christianity
Renn goes on to explain how different engagement strategies were more appropriate at different times — indeed, in different worlds. The “culture war” strategy made sense in the Positive World, while the “cultural engagement” strategy made sense in the Neutral World.
In the Negative World, though, there has yet to be a defined, effective strategy among evangelicals convicted to reach the broader culture with the gospel. Renn cites Tim Keller—as “thoughtful and winsome” as any evangelical elite today—stoking protests at Princeton Theological Seminary for his views on sexuality and gender roles as evidence that the Neutral World-tendency toward sensitive engagement is long gone. We are, Renn says, living in a different world.
What are evangelicals to do? Renn says there are several options:
Negative-world strategies will have to grapple with the “rise of the nones,” people with no professed religion who may be unfamiliar with Christianity and find it quite odd or even offensive. One-third or more of Americans in the younger age cohorts fall into this category, portending a radically different cultural landscape in America. This means evangelicals must include a Benedict Option–style focus on building churches and Christian communities that rely less on support from secular institutions and are resilient to outside pressure. They should stop outsourcing their political thinking to movement conservatism and their sociocultural analysis to secular academics. They should remain prudentially engaged in politics based on their own traditions of Protestant political and social thought. They must be willing to accept a loss of social status, but they need not succumb to the very pessimistic mood that pervades Rod Dreher’s work. They must accept that realignment will be a reality, with a reconfiguring of alliances and cooperation based on today’s needs and different forms of shared values.
I’m not entirely sure what Renn’s “reconfiguring of alliances” looks like in practice for evangelicals living in the Negative World he describes,2 but the first few sentences of this paragraph resonate with me. We should be thinking creatively and strategically about existing in a post-Christian society, one in which we are at best ignored and at worst persecuted. We should be investing more in Christian institutions to better insulate against pressures from secular culture.
While I don’t agree with everything from Renn’s essay, it is one of the more thought-provoking pieces of writing I’ve read in a while.
4) Writing at the Acton Institute, Rachel Ferguson has a thoughtful perspective on the debate over reparations. Like other conservatives and libertarians, Ferguson is skeptical of direct cash payments to descendents of slaves. However, she also recognizes the harm wrought on generations of black Americans, not just because of slavery but also because of discriminatory laws and policies throughout the country post-1865.
Rather than distributing taxpayers’ money to black Americans, Ferguson promotes the idea that government could sell off certain public resources (valued at roughly $2 trillion) and establish programs—like entrepreneurial loans, for example—available not just to black Americans, but to anybody demonstrating financial need.3 In addition to sidestepping thorny questions of who would be eligible for direct payments, Ferguson says, “[T]here’s something attractive about the refusal to perpetuate the historic white supremacist strategy of pitting poor black and poor white Americans against one another.”
Importantly, Ferguson says, even if such a proposal is not politically viable, that shouldn’t prevent a reparative posture from Christians:
Even if the plan for restitution that I offer above gets us a lot closer to justice, that won’t make it politically viable. But the white church in America doesn’t need to take a vote or ask for permission to take up the project of repair and restoration between themselves and the black church.
We can debate how far it would take to get to a place of holistic justice for the sins of our past, and odds are that any substantive proposals for reparations from the government are all but impossible to enact on a national basis. But there really is nothing stopping churches and others from alleviating the consequences of these sins in their own backyards. It may not be perfect, but it’s a start.
A former student, Seth Billingsley, researched this phenomenon in an award-winning project for the Center for Public Justice. Check it out here.
If it includes getting into bed with populist, illiberal movements and actors, then count me out. “For what will it profit a man,” Jesus said, “if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?”
Blacks are poorer as a demographic than whites, so they would theoretically reap the benefits of such programs more than whites.