since we're on the topic, I may as well share the facebook post that will most likely torpedo any remaining hope I had of ever working in an evangelical church again. worth it.
"pray for America, everyone!"
weren't you praying for America before? what changed?
I've heard several variations on this over the last few days, but it sounds like many of my fellow evangelicals are convinced that yesterday's Supreme Court ruling is a sign that God will "no longer favor" our country. so THIS is what it takes? so God was fine with us building our economy (southern plantations and northern textile mills alike) on the backs of slave labor, but not this? He didn't bat an eye at our little regime-influencing adventures in Central and South America and the Middle East, but this is just too much to ignore? the guy we say we trust on our almighty dollars was willing to sign off on us herding indigenous tribes onto dead-end reservations that have become pits of drunken hopelessness and herding blacks and latinos into dead-end housing projects and neglected school systems (and then somehow citing the inevitable epidemic of poverty and crime as something wrong with their culture), but a court deciding to let a bunch of SINNERRRRRRRRRRS sign the same legal contracts as us is a bridge too far?.
since you're sitting there waiting to unleash hell when I state my position anyway, I'll go ahead and give you the satisfaction. yes, the supreme court's ruling showed they define marriage differently. they're part of the government; as far as they're concerned marriage is another voluntary contractual agreement which is entered into by two consenting adults and endorsed by the state. the sanctity and sacrament of it are things we're thankfully free to publicly attach to it thanks to our First Amendment rights. the same provisions that allow us as the church to celebrate holy matrimony before God are, out of necessity, the same provisions that prohibit us from using our carefully cherry-picked points of doctrine to deny the simple legal contract to those who don't share all our beliefs. did they say anything about forcing churches to marry every gay couple who wants it? again, they're only concerned with marriage before the state; the church has always had the right to refuse to marry whichever couples they choose (there are just as many technicalities on which they could've refused to let my wife and I get married there too), and barring an absurdly creative reading of the First Amendment it's unlikely that'll change. besides, my experience convinces me evangelicals like us are more than capable of keeping folks we don't want in our churches out as it is, law or no law.
and that's my real issue - this idea that everything was great but now God is giving up on America because of this? as mostly conservative evangelicals (I'm an evangelical libertarian - one really IS the loneliest number!), we've had an incredibly good run the past half century or so. we've had unprecedented political and material influence with which we could've accomplished just about anything we believed in. we could've been feeding and clothing the poor in our cities while we were busy building ruinously expensive new sanctuaries and trumpeting the gospel of prosperity from the safety of the suburbs. (when I say 'we' I mean the church, not government programs - I AM a libertarian after all.) we could've fought for the rights of persecuted people of all faiths while we were looking the other way as our government meddled with democratically elected regimes over the price of bananas. we could've spoken out against racial hatred rather than turn the evangelical church into what is still one of the most segregated institutions in America. we could've been a permanent and visible fixture making great positive changes to culture and society, rather than walling ourselves off into Christian bookstores where Christian radio stations play Christian music.
yesterday's ruling didn't prove that our country is disregarding us, it proved we've utterly disregarded our country. what should our stance be on gay marriage or on homosexuality in general? we were never instructed to bring the wrath of God down upon anyone we caught violating our [interpretation of] Christian doctrine, but we WERE in fact COMMANDED to love those around us and be the representation of Jesus Christ in our world with the understanding that IF someone is doing wrong, it's God who convicts them and guides them to reconciliation. I'm not challenging your right to be upset by this decision, and I'm not even going to tell you you're wrong for feeling conflicted about the issue; I quite frankly don't have the time or patience to go through the various Bible verses or points of doctrine in question at this moment, and I've already talked a lot as it is. my gripe is that if we'd paid a little more attention to what we were told TO do and spent a little less time wringing our hands over what we were told NOT to do, we could've been a positive cultural influence rather than just another lobbyist group. you can be as upset as you want over this; I'd just like to know where all that outrage goes when we're confronted by poverty, hunger, homelessness, racial division, broken homes, and many other global ailments besides.
last week, nine Christians were murdered because of their race in a brutal act of hatred not unlike what's going on in many parts of the world every day, and there was a momentary outpouring of sympathy. yesterday, the supreme court greenlit gay marriage in America, and we decided the end of western civilization is upon us and Jesus better come back soon to safely pluck us out of the imminent collapse of society. a sign that God will no longer favor America? or a sign that God no longer favors the church that would rather be a moral majority than a suffering servant?
