On a recent work trip down South, I visited a church for its Wednesday Lenten service. I chose the church casually, simply identifying a familiar denomination and going from there.
I love the communion of saints and especially the sense of home that comes from walking into even an unfamiliar church, the liturgy drawing me in like the arms of distant cousins at a family reunion. But as the service progressed, I began to feel out of place, like I’d wandered into the wrong hotel ballroom and discovered myself in a stranger’s wedding reception. I caught a strange whiff of American politics that I couldn’t make sense of in a Lenten service.
Afterward, I went back to my hotel room and searched the pastor’s name online. What I discovered disquieted me. I’d just been led in worship and guided into penitence by a Christian nationalist pastor who was a member of the Black Robe Regiment, a gathering of clergy initially committed to overthrowing the 2020 US presidential election. The whiff now made sense. So did curious references to Israel in the church service as I learned of the regiment’s antisemitic leanings.
With each Google hit, I grew more and more indignant. Who did this man think he was to lead me toward repentance? I shared my dismay with friends, and they agreed. The whole experience had clearly been a sham, an exercise in religious pageantry, a quiet yet sinister display of Christian nationalism. Or was it?
As I traveled home later that week, I kept turning over that evening in my mind. Together, we had bent our knees to confess our sins. Together, we had acknowledged our self-indulgent appetites, our intemperate love of worldly goods and comforts, our indifference to injustice and cruelty. Together, we had voiced our pleas for God’s mercy and a renewed spirit of true repentance.
The liturgy united the congregation under the same words of penitence. In such a context, shouldn’t I be able to expect that my neighbor was just as sorry for his sins as I was? Shouldn’t his sins that seemed so obvious to me be illuminated for him in these words of confession?
In the call and response of the liturgy, we had spoken as one voice, the pastor’s voice blending with mine and those around me. And yet I could not—I refused to—number myself among those who needed forgiveness like he did. How could I when dark shadows lurked within that dimmed sanctuary in the hearts of some around me? Personal repentance was hard enough, but corporate repentance, I was discovering, was even more complicated.
In the fundamentalist Christian circles in which I was raised, we often joked about the Sadducees. They were “sad, you see” because their religious trappings belied disbelief in the Resurrection. They didn’t know what they were missing, we said. They had all the right outfits and ceremonies without the right beliefs.
The Pharisees, too, were sad because, like their priestly counterparts, they were whitewashed tombs (Matt. 23:27–28), clean on the outside but filled with dead theology on the inside. They were the ones Jesus identified as hypocrites in Luke 18, the ones who would pray with great gusto as they set themselves apart from the low-life tax collectors who lamented under the weight of shame.
Right beliefs always birthed right actions, we believed. This logic applied to everything from saving sex for marriage to not cheating on your income taxes to choosing a version of the Bible that was the most accurate translation.
When it came to repentance and forgiveness, we were to be known by certain fruits (Matt. 7:16), namely public confessions before the congregation (often for private sins) and a clear turning away from evil to do good. Metanoia, the Greek word for repentance, means literally “to change one’s mind.” Repentance was hard, we were told, but cathartic, too. To ask for forgiveness was to experience sin made as white as snow, to be made right with God—a rightness that should be evident to all (Isa. 1:17–19).
As I considered the Pharisees and Sadducees in light of my Lenten worship visit, the parallels were clear. A Christian nationalist pastor was a Sadducee, belonging to a regiment of self-righteous religious leaders drawn away by earthly power and worldly concerns. A Christian nationalist pastor was a Pharisee, ready to criticize the spiritual convictions of others as “less than”—less than committed, less than strident, less than ready to take up arms and fight for the cause of righteousness.
The news headlines testified clearly: the Black Robe Regiment did not have right beliefs or right actions. Surely that made me the humble tax collector in Jesus’ story, then. No wonder I’d had such difficulty worshiping in that service.
I held this position of pride as a signifier of my own contrition and my own righteousness until I remembered one vital detail from Jesus’ story in Luke 18—the location. Jesus had situated his parable of these two men within exactly the same space—worship at the temple. Misguided or not, they were both still showing up at church.
In a church landscape where congregations are increasingly divided along political lines, I’ll admit that I long to worship with people like me—people who think like me, live like me, believe like me. Misguided parishioners can stay home, please. Misguided pastors? Surely we’ve got enough of those.
But more often than not, I realize—usually in confession—that these impulses are not fruitful for the body of Christ or the common good. It is valid to desire a faith community that upholds orthodoxy and orthopraxis. Paul warns the church at Galatia to beware of ministers who would “pervert the gospel of Christ” (Gal. 1:7–9). He instructs the Corinthians to avoid associating with believers who persist in sin (1 Cor. 5:10–12). Yet God also reminds the church through the prophet Samuel that he alone is the best discerner of hearts (1 Sam. 16:7). The Spirit teaches us how to hold those truths in tension.
Scripture and the confessional liturgy of the church also call us to a deeper level of humility. Regardless of how sorry anyone else might be for the things they’ve done or left undone, I am called to repent. Regardless of how our politics divide us, acknowledging our sin does not. We are each dead until made alive through Christ. The ground is level at the foot of the cross.
Confession also reminds me that whether or not my neighbor and I see eye to eye on what requires repentance, Christ calls me to forgive. If our sins are so great that they must be cast to the east and west to be far enough away not to haunt us (Ps. 103:12), the Christian nationalist pastor and I must both be desperately in need of redemption, neither of us fully aware of what the breadth and depth of that forgiveness must be.
Holy Week is an annual reminder that the upside-down kingdom of Jesus enlightens the eyes of those who have been drawn to earthly power. I pray that they find the Jesus who arrived in Jerusalem on a donkey more compelling than a president in a luxury car in the White House driveway. I hope that earnest study of Scripture reveals the error of their ways.
I also pray that my sins will become even more evident to me than others’ are. That the Holy Spirit will enlighten my eyes to see how often, like Peter in Gethsemane, I, too, abandon Jesus in favor of power. I pray that Golgotha will cast an appropriate shadow over my own self-righteousness.
The empty tomb gapes with extraordinary welcome for all of us in the face of our unbelief. Alleluia.
Clarissa Moll is producer and moderator of The Bulletin at Christianity Today.
