Church Life

From Foreigner to Family Member

Angela K. Evans

By visiting local ICE detainees, a Denver church learned the power of faithfully showing up.

Christianity Today November 22, 2019
Associated Press

It took Martin Akwa almost three months to make it to the US-Mexico border from his native Cameroon. As part of the English-speaking western minority in Cameroon, Akwa says he had been marginalized for a long time.

In retribution for his protests against the French-majority government, he was assaulted and left for dead. His father was arrested on the family farm as Akwa and other workers fled gunfire. One Sunday, Akwa endured tear gas while leaving church along with his mother and four younger siblings. He says he and his family had to flee their home for the bush, where his mother and siblings remain. His father is still in jail.

After months of traveling alone, passing through unfamiliar countries, and staying in refugee encampments, Akwa arrived at the US-Mexico border in early 2018. After claiming asylum, he was sent to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Aurora Contract Detention Facility just outside of Denver, Colo., unsure of how to proceed and completely on his own. While working on his immigration case without any legal help, he quickly fell into isolation and despair.

But his situation changed when he heard about local volunteers who visited detainees on request who had no nearby family or friends. It may not have been the community he was used to, but, for Akwa, it was enough.

“I never had anyone that I could explain my feelings to,” Akwa said. “I was so very happy to see the volunteers. I was there by myself with no one to talk to. So when I saw people visiting me, I felt relief. I felt sometimes good. It made me feel happy, it almost made me feel like I was back home.”

For the last two years, a small group from The Embassy Church in Denver has been visiting detainees every Sunday at the detention center run by the private prison corporation GEO Group, Inc. They spend an hour locked in the visitation room, talking through muffled, scratchy phones with different detainees sitting behind glass. They hear stories of heartache and suffering.

Called a missional community, the small group is a place for people to connect and build relationships with others at the church, while at the same time focusing on a specific mission, a way to share and demonstrate the gospel in the community. Greg Mortimer, who began the group several years ago, says they struggled to find that vision before he heard about Casa de Paz and its founder Sarah Jackson.

Since 2012, Casa de Paz has offered short-term housing recently released detainees and visiting family members and is strategically located near the detention center. In January 2017 Mortimer reached out to Jackson, inviting to share her experience with immigrants in the community.

Like many of their neighbors, most of the community members had no idea there was a detention center nearby. Even those who are aware usually don’t understand the conditions people are held in, Jackson says, or that it is a for-profit prison.

“Parents are separated from their children … people who are extremely ill are being held, or people are in detention for lengthy periods of time,” she added.

By April 2017, Mortimer’s group began volunteering regularly with Casa de Paz, meeting people after their release from the detention center and driving them home, to the airport, or wherever else they wanted to go.

One night in August of that year, Mortimer drove a Salvadoran woman and her son to the airport. Recently released from detention, the pair was traveling home to Utah where they had lived since 2012, the year they came to the US seeking asylum. The woman’s younger son had unknowingly missed an immigration court date, and when ICE agents came to the house to arrest him they took his mother and older brother too. While the mother and one son had been released, her younger son remained in detention. With no other family or friends in Colorado, the woman asked Mortimer if he could visit her younger son, which he and his community agreed to do.

Word quickly spread, and soon Mortimer was receiving multiple visitation requests each week. He began organizing visitation groups every Sunday afternoon, both from his church and other volunteers from Casa de Paz. Although the nonprofit already had a visitation program, it was more “ad hoc,” sporadic visits based on inconsistent volunteer availability, Jackson says. Now, there is a structure and a commitment.

"Never in a million years would I have imagined when I went and spoke at Greg's small group that we would be here a couple of years later," Jackson says.

What started as a way for their missional community to serve—with seven or eight members visiting detainees weekly—quickly grew into something much bigger. As members of other churches and even unchurched volunteers began reaching out to Jackson, she connected them to Mortimer.

Now, Mortimer says, more than 200 people have volunteered, 60 of whom are regular monthly participants. Every Sunday, between 15 and 20 people visit the detention center over the course of four one-hour shifts. The group currently has a waitlist of detainees requesting visitors—67 people without friends or family in Colorado asking to spend time with someone on the outside.

“What we’ve noticed is after the first visit, almost immediately there’s an emotional connection, so we end up visiting them regularly,” Mortimer says.

As they built relationships with the detainees, the ministry began to grow in inevitable ways. The group has pooled funds, hired immigration lawyers and walked people through the asylum process, all the while learning about the people they visit, their cultures, political situations back home, and families. They have educated themselves along the way, bringing in other immigration experts and lawyers to their bimonthly missional community gatherings to further understand what their friends in detention are facing.

One member, Kaylee Garbett, traveled to Pennsylvania for a week to attend World Relief’s immigration law training, a 40-hour educational course designed to help local churches better serve the needs of immigrant communities. For Garbett, it wasn’t so much a change of heart about immigrants, but “a change of knowledge,” she says. “I was totally ignorant before the training.”

The training gave her “a more holistic understanding” of both the immigration system and the legal needs of her friends in detention. Not only was she able to connect with others in the field, but it gave her a framework to approach the weekly visitations. It caused her to consider her own limitations as a volunteer since she’s not a legal professional.

“I think this is important because the nature of volunteers is to want to help and it can be easy to give false hope out of optimism,” she says.

Every Sunday, the group puts their faith into action, their knowledge into engagement.

“That's the way advocacy should be for Christians,” says Michelle Warren, advocacy and strategic engagement director at the Christian Community Development Association. “I become aware, I learned a little bit more. I do something with what I know.”

Warren travels the country helping churches and Christian leaders understand, discuss, and take action on immigration issues. She came to the Embassy Church group in the beginning of 2018 as its members began to ask bigger questions about the systemic injustices they were seeing. Warren encouraged them to continue engaging with those most vulnerable, to sit with the people right in front of them.

“Everybody wants to create one case study that everyone follows … but it just doesn't work. This is all built one person at a time,” Warren says. “It's a slow work.”

The work also comes with challenges. While Warren encouraged Mortimer’s group, she also counseled them toward a sustainable model for service, a way to engage with the suffering of others without becoming discouraged. In May 2018, the group experienced its first deportation—a man they had been visiting for months was returned to his home country, and they never heard from him again.

As much as the group experiences joy when someone is released, they’ve also experienced heartache when someone is deported. In the process, they’ve had to learn to lean on each other, voicing their own emotions and their own limitations in the face of a daunting system so that they can continue the work. Mortimer also brings together volunteers from a variety of different churches once a month to process the detention visits through a gospel lens, diving into relevant topics like the theology of suffering.

“What Greg's group has shown is that when you visit with community, your friends or your family or your small group or your church members or a complete stranger, then it's more sustainable,” Jackson says. “Then you can have a bigger impact and you also can stay a little bit more sane in the midst of the chaos.”

After months of visiting Akwa in detention, he was released to live with some volunteers from the visitation program while his asylum case was processed. For the next seven months, he began to build a life in Denver—making friends, playing soccer and joining a local church. But his freedom didn’t last. In April 2019, he was once again detained.

Mortimer went to visit him, explaining that they were doing everything they could to help him without hiding the reality that he could likely be deported. Akwa had to start thinking through his plan if he was indeed sent back to Cameroon—from what he’d heard, he would most likely face arrest the minute he stepped off the plane. He could possibly be killed, according to Mortimer.

Akwa began to weep as Mortimer sat behind the glass. After about 10 minutes Mortimer spoke. “I can't sit here and pretend like I understand what you're going through at all,” he said. “But Jesus was a brown-skinned, undocumented refugee. Jesus understands you, because he was you.”

Akwa sat up straighter; he had never thought about that part of Jesus’ story — how Mary and Joseph escaped into Egypt to avoid King Herod’s wrath — in that way. He put his hand up to the glass, and Mortimer reached out to do the same. Then Akwa began to pray.

On October 22, Akwa won his asylum case. He no longer lives in fear of deportation.

Angela K. Evans is an award-winning journalist based in Denver, Colorado. She writes about politics and immigration, with a focus on giving voice to marginalized communities.

Cover Story

The First Christian

Jennifer Powell McNutt and Amy Beverage Peeler

Mary’s preeminent example as a Christ follower neither began nor ended at Christmas.

Sedmak / iStock / Getty

Once upon a time, the Virgin Mary pervaded the life and thought of the Western world. Her presence was so expansive, in fact, that even European fairy tales acknowledged her status. Take Cinderella. An abusive stepmother was still the cause of Cinderella’s impoverished conditions, but in one of the earliest tellings of the tale, she knew the one to call upon was the Virgin Mary. In no time at all, Cinderella’s hunger was resolved, and a prince was proposing. By replacing the Virgin Mary with a Fairy Godmother, the story of Cinderella was successfully secularized for today without disenchanting it. But it’s not just fairy tales that have stripped Mary from a well-loved story. She’s missing from The Story, too.

It’s not that Protestants have entirely forgotten Mary. At this time of year, the mother of Jesus gets some attention. But Mary is not a Christmas figure to be stored away like the manger and the Star of Bethlehem until next year. She played an extraordinary role throughout the life and ministry of Jesus, from the Annunciation to the day of Pentecost. By overlooking the roles she played throughout Jesus’ ministry, we may think that we are protecting Protestantism from falling into old “Catholic” habits of elevating her beyond what Scripture declares about her. But there’s nothing “Protestant” about neglecting what Scripture does say about her—and about the other women named by the New Testament writers.

Before Easter this year, I (Jennifer) stepped out of my comfort zone and preached a sermon at a church on the women named in Luke 8, who traveled with Jesus and financially supported his ministry. In one sense, it was an obvious choice for a sermon. I wanted the congregation to know who the women of Luke 8 were before they met them again at the tomb on Easter. After all, every single Gospel account mentions that women were the first witnesses to the risen Christ. And there is no better evidence of the truth of the Christian claim that Christ truly, bodily resurrected than the fact that the Gospel writers absurdly and consistently base it on the testimony of women during a time when a woman’s testimony was legally worthless. Still, I was uncertain about how a sermon with this kind of focus would be received. Afterward, I had just a swarm of people saying to me that they had never even heard of these women before. They told me that while they had heard sermons focusing on a number of biblical characters other than Jesus, they had never heard a single Sunday morning sermon focused on a woman. And this was in a congregation that’s part of the Presbyterian Church (USA), a denomination that takes pride in its inclusion of women into all areas of ministry! As I officiated communion afterward, a line of women softly whispered to me “thank you,” some with tears in their eyes. Women have a hunger to know that women were faithful and active participants in Jesus’ ministry. They were not just recipients of his miracles. Not just people shown love and respect, but people transformed by Jesus for new life as participants and witnesses in his ministry.

Numerous women are named in Scripture as supporters and participants in Jesus’ ministry. Many more are named as co-workers with Paul. These women are not entirely forgotten by Protestant churches today, but when we tell the stories of Priscilla, Phoebe, Susanna, Chloe, Junia, or the many other women of Scripture, we almost always reserve that focus for the women’s retreat. The whole testimony of Scripture is for the whole church—both men and women. What would it mean for men in the pews to think about the examples of women not as particular “women’s stories” but as universal Christian exemplars? Women in our churches have long had to learn special listening and application skills as they considered the many examples of men following Jesus. It is the normative filter for women in the pew. What if the tables were turned to better reflect the practice of the Bible? What if the New Testament writers didn’t just name female disciples to show women that they too can participate in Jesus’ work? What if the New Testament writers also intended men to learn from women how to follow Jesus? What if Mary, the Mother of God, is for men too?

Reforming Mary

It is easy to assume that sidelining Mary has always been the case from the start of the Protestant tradition. When the Reformers turned their backs on “Papa” (or the Pope), did they not also turn their backs on “Mama”?

In truth, as the Reformers dismantled the cult of the saints, they were wary to let go of Mary. In certain regions of Germany, when nearly every feast day associated with the saints was abolished, Mary’s survived. As images and statues of the saints were destroyed due to the spread of iconoclasm, Mary’s statue was memorialized. Instead of leaving her behind, Protestants repositioned her as one of the most important examples in the Bible of justification by faith through grace alone.

Reforming the theology and practices surrounding Mary were complex, as it turned out. The first Protestant reformers, Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli, maintained a robust view of Mary for their generation. They did not scoff at Mary’s Immaculate Conception (the idea that Mary was born free of sin at conception) since it continued to be the best way of distancing Christ from original sin. Luther believed that by the power of the Holy Spirit, Mary continued to be sinless throughout her life, and this affirmation went hand-in-hand with the idea of her “perpetual virginity.” Zwingli and John Calvin taught this as well. For Protestants, these affirmations had less to do with Mary and everything to do with protecting Christ and the salvific nature of the Incarnation.

In this way, Mariology and Christology were significantly intertwined; untangling the two was a highly sensitive matter. By continuing to affirm Mary as the Mother of God (or theotokos), the Reformers appealed to orthodox affirmations of Christian theology rooted in the earliest ecumenical councils of the church. To Luther, the “first sermon on earth” was the proclamation that Mary was the mother of the Lord, and this was preached by no less than by a woman (Elizabeth). “No one should be afraid, if he had tough times growing up or is miserable and despised,” Luther said. “It is not a bad omen. Look at Mary’s example. And look what God made out of her! … Her renown and her honor will remain among many until the end of the world: for no one can preach Christ without speaking of his mother.”

Giovanni B. Barchi / Semak / iStock / Getty

Nevertheless, there were two fundamental ways in which Protestant Reformers pushed back against the church’s teaching on Mary. Because the heart of the Protestant Reformation was determined to elevate Christ’s sacrifice on the cross as uniquely sufficient for human salvation, the reformers rejected the popular idea of Mary as a co-redeemer with Christ and her mediation of salvation within the life of the believer. Mary, who was purported to stand beside Christ on the Day of Judgment as the “Queen of Heaven” whispering words of mercy to counter his harsh judgments, was removed from the scene. The Protestant Reformers were on a mission to make Jesus more approachable, more merciful, and more gracious, which meant that Mary needed to take a motherly backseat to her son. Righting the ship meant directing the church toward grace offered through Christ on the cross alone. God did not need Mary to be merciful on his behalf.

The demotion of Mary’s role from co-mediator meant reinterpreting her significance within the salvation story. Mary shifted from medieval intercessor to a paradigmatic example of faith for Protestants. In order to do this, the Reformers had to reinterpret the medieval view of the nativity story, and the meaning of Mary as “full of grace” was the crux of the dispute. For the Roman Catholic Church this meant that Mary was deserving of God’s choosing. She was full of the virtue of humility, literally holier than thou.

In contrast, the Reformers argued that Mary was “full of grace” because God gifted her with grace. She was only worthy of God’s choosing because God’s choosing made her worthy. As Luther protested, the Magnificat (Luke 1:46–55) was not a song about how great Mary is but about how great God is. In a word, Mariology was caught in the crossfire over the true meaning of justification.

Consider the second line of the Regina Cæli, an ancient Latin Marian Hymn of the Christian Church and one of the four seasonal Marian antiphons of the Blessed Virgin Mary: “The Son you merited to bear, alleluia.” For Catholicism, Mary had merited her role as the Mother of God. For Protestantism, God chose Mary despite her lowliness and honored her beyond what she deserved. Surely there is no womb worthy of carrying the Son of God? The true message of the nativity story was that Mary heard the Good News that a child was coming and accepted God’s grace toward her with extraordinary faith. For Luther, Mary’s greatness lay in the greatness of her faith: “This virgin had a faith of which there is no equal in the entire Bible.” Mary’s example was a model of the Christian life.

Most Protestants today would not be comfortable with Medieval Luther teaching his congregants the importance of reciting the Ave Maria or his affirmation of Mary’s bodily assumption at her death (widely affirmed in Luther’s time but rendered official Roman Catholic dogma in the mid-twentieth century). But today’s Protestant church is in no danger of overemphasizing the role of Mary in the story of salvation. Rather, we underestimate her role throughout the Gospels.

More than a Mother (But Not Less)

The opening drama of the canon mentions Mary only a few times. Matthew’s genealogy leads to Joseph (Matt. 1:16), and from that point on he takes the lead. Mary is only the recipient of the action: She is betrothed (presumably by her family) to Joseph (1:18), she is discovered (presumably by Joseph) to be pregnant (1:18). He was going to put her away quietly, but instead takes her in (1:24). Matthew portrays the dramatic encounter between the angel and Joseph so that the reader can see what caused the compassionately costly change in plans. After the entry of the villain Herod, the angel comes again to Joseph and he takes his family to Egypt (2:13–14) and back again (2:21) to avoid the threat of death. Mary is carried along, not unlike her vulnerable child.

Juan De Flandes / Met / Wikimedia Commons

The text and tradition bless us with a compelling picture of a caring father in the person of Joseph, but it would be wrong to imagine that his prominence completely overshadows Mary in this account, to think that Matthew tells Joseph’s story while Luke tells Mary’s. The division is not quite so neat. Mary may remain in the background for Matthew, but this is not because her presence is unimportant. It is because she is the anchor around whom, and in whom, the action turns.

Mary is the subject of only one active verb in Matthew’s birth narrative: She bore. She bore a Son (1:21, 23). She is, Matthew says six times, his mother. Joseph exercises his faith by caring, and so too does Mary. She performs the mundane, often unnoticed but life-and-death important act of mothering. And she does so in the most dangerous of circumstances. While Joseph decides her fate, she carries this baby. While Herod schemes his death, she nurses him, changes him, feeds him, sings to him. She exercises her faith, to quote Tish Harrison Warren, in the liturgies of the ordinary, and therefore valorizes the countless women throughout time who have done the same.

Luke has much to say about her as a mother as well, but expands her active faith to include the roles of prophet and proclaimer.

Mary gets to sing the first of many solos in Luke’s Gospel. On her retreat to the house of her friend and family member, Elizabeth, when she is greeted with Elizabeth’s exuberant Holy Spirit knowledge of her pregnancy, Mary breaks forth in praise. She magnifies the Lord (1:46) who has magnified her. She praises God for being sovereign, for being holy, and most of all for being Savior. The Majestic God has paid attention to her, a slave.

She is not, however, focused on her own good fortune alone. Her story is an example—the central example since she will be the locus of the Incarnation—of the character of God. Hence when she sings God’s praise, she does so as a prophet. She speaks truth about God. She affirms who God has been in the past; she foretells who God the Son will be in the future. God has and will put down the mighty and lift up the humble. God has and will fill the hungry and send the rich away empty. Luke puts forth Mary as a prophet who knows of God’s word to Israel (her story closely mirrors the praise of Hannah in 1 Sam. 2) and knows of God’s work to come in her son.

Luke also shows Mary as a proclaimer. In the opening chapter of Acts, when the followers of Jesus are waiting in the Upper Room passionately joined together in prayer, Luke indicates that the gathering consists of both men and women, but he names only one of the latter: Mary the mother of Jesus (1:14). Luke keeps the focus on the full group at the beginning of chapter 2. All are together at the same place (2:1) when the wind and fire of the Spirit fall upon them. They all speak in different tongues, uttering just what the Spirit allowed them to utter (2:4), testifying vocally and publicly to “God’s deeds of power” (2:11) to the men gathered in Jerusalem (2:5, 14, 22, 29).

It is possible that Luke only means all of the twelve disciples (the full symbolic number just having been restored with the selection of Matthias). The twelve apostles do take a prominent place as those who stand with Peter (2:14) and receive a question from the crowd (2:37). Luke leaves several markers, however, to indicate that though the apostles are easily seen, they are not the only ones being heard. The testifying group also includes all those who gathered waiting for the coming of the Spirit. Luke leaves clues that the testifying group specifically includes Mary:

First, those who testify are called Galileans, which Luke established in his Gospel that Mary is (1:26). Second, Luke specifies that the listening crowd is made of men (he uses the more gender specific term anhr and not the more general human term anthropos). Because he uses the terms with some fluidity, this could simply be his way of referring to a mixed gender crowd with a masculine term. It is striking, however, that in the same passage where he describes the crowd as men four times, he never uses the same term for “men” to describe those who are testifying.

Most important for Mary’s inclusion in this group is Peter’s extensive citation of the prophecy of Joel. After the gospel cacophony, Peter rises to speak. What you have seen and heard, he says, is not drunkenness but a demonstration of the Spirit of God being poured upon sons and daughters. The balanced phrase is not an example of inclusive translation. “Daughters” appears in the Greek of Peter’s speech, and “daughters” appears in the Hebrew of Joel’s prophecy. His cited text from Joel also calls the anointed ones male and female slaves (doulh), a designation that Luke uses only two other times in his two-volume work, and both describe Mary, in her climactic yes to the invitation to the Incarnation (1:38) and in her Magnificat (1:48). It is little surprise that many in the Christian tradition have often believed that Mary was present at Pentecost. Mary, therefore, (along with the other women) testified vocally and publicly to the fulfillment of God’s promises in her Son Jesus. How else could Peter say that what they had seen and heard was a demonstration of this kind of work of the Spirit if Mary and the other servant daughters of the Lord had remained silent?

Hence the New Testament witness portrays Mary fulfilling a number of different callings. The Scriptural location that unites them all is the Annunciation. In this inaugural event God initiates, choosing her and sending an angel to her location to proclaim God’s favor and grace. He speaks to her first about becoming a mother: the mother of the Messiah, which will bring her great honor. But the timing is off: A pregnancy at that moment will only bring shame. With eyes wide open to the blessing and the curse, she assents. She agrees to be the site for the glory of the God who does the impossible. Her act of faith is the beginning of all of her ministry. Mary was the first to receive the Good News of Christ’s coming and to assent to it. From that point on she continued to assent, to faithfully bear and raise him to adulthood, to witness his first miracle, to demonstrate his redefinition of family through faith, to watch his death on the cross, to receive his Spirit. She was there every step along the way as faithful witness, supporter, and proclaimer of Christ.

Blessed Is She Who Has Believed

In this day and age, it is easy to overlook the fact that the Bible names ordinary people on its pages alongside the names of emperors. When compared with the literature of its time, this is truly audacious. The fact that the Bible records the names of women at all was an extraordinary, unheard of practice. That means that when the Bible names women, it is doing something special that requires our notice. When we see a woman’s name in Scripture, whether once or many times, something extraordinary is happening that requires our attention.

So when the Gospel writers keep naming Mary’s involvement with Jesus’ ministry, it’s a big deal—it’s not a simple roll call with Mary thrown in with Thaddeus and Andrew. The Gospel writers want us to understand how important Mary was, serving from the Annunciation to Pentecost as both God-bearer in her physical body and as gospel-bearer, a faithful witness and proclaimer to the work that God was accomplishing in our Lord Jesus Christ. Both her identities matter, and they were never at odds. In everything she did, she was a faithful follower of Christ, first and foremost. She never deserted him. She listened to him teach, she watched him heal, and she never doubted that he could do the miraculous, according to the stories that Scripture has revealed. She knew who Christ was before anyone did because she was the very first person to whom God chose to reveal Christ’s identity. The pattern of Christ’s resurrection-reveal to women has a precursor.

The entire Christian life is, in a way, mirrored by the experience of Mary. Each one of us—both male and female—are called to live in Christ and he in us. We are all expected to carry Christ at the core of our being—like Mary carried Christ in her womb—and to labor with him and for him. But unlike a human mother giving life to a human child, Christ gives us new life by his indwelling. Who better to reflect that truth of the Christian life than the one who literally bore Jesus on our behalf through the power of the Holy Spirit? Mary is for both men and women. All of us are invited to follow this first follower as she followed Christ.

Jennifer Powell McNutt is the Franklin S. Dyrness Chair in Biblical and Theological Studies at Wheaton College, parish associate at First Presbyterian Church of Glen Ellyn, Illinois, and co-founder of McNuttshell Ministries, Inc. Amy Beverage Peeler is associate professor of New Testament at Wheaton and associate rector of St. Mark’s Church in Geneva, Illinois.

Did this article prompt any thoughts? Help you to better love God and neighbor? Got a story that relates? We’d love to hear from you about it.

Culture

The Quiet Liturgy of Fred Rogers

Ryan J. Pemberton

‘Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood’ taught us to love—not fear—our neighbor.

Tom Hanks stars as Mister Rogers in TriStar Pictures’ A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD.

Tom Hanks stars as Mister Rogers in TriStar Pictures’ A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD.

Christianity Today November 22, 2019
Photo by Lacey Terrell / ©2019 CTMG, Inc. All rights reserved.

“Would you be mine, could you be mine, please would you be my neighbor?” The threefold question repeats for nearly 900 episodes of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. It’s the recurring song Fred Rogers sings as he enters the front door, removes his jacket, replaces it with a zippered cardigan, and makes his way down the stairs of his television set home to swap out his dress shoes for canvas sneakers.

Growing up watching the slow-moving, soft-spoken Fred Rogers on PBS, I could not have imagined his resurgence in my mid-thirties. Yet Won’t You Be My Neighbor, the 2018 documentary on Fred Rogers’ television show, is already the highest-grossing biographical documentary of all time.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood releases on November 22, a dramatic retelling of the unexpected friendship between a journalist and Rogers, starring Tom Hanks as the most beloved neighbor in America. With an estimated budget of $40 million and one of Hollywood’s most amiable stars in the lead role, the man in the red sweater has become an unexpected commodity. But why the sudden popularity now?

Notably, Fred Rogers’s television entrance always climaxes with the same subject: “neighbor.” Specifically, it is an invitation to be a neighbor. In a way, it’s an echo of Jesus’s conversation with a lawyer in Luke 10, where he asks, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”

“What is written in the law?” Jesus asks in reply.

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind,” the lawyer replies, recalling Deuteronomy 6:5. “And your neighbor as yourself” (Lev. 19:18).

“You have given the right answer,” Jesus says. “Do this, and you will live.”

“And who is my neighbor?” he asks (Luke 10:25–29, ESV).

Jesus refuses to give the lawyer what he wants: a rule to follow. Nor does he offer a neat definition of neighbor to apply like a blueprint. Instead, Jesus tells a story that invites his listener to be a good neighbor—something that will continue acting on the imagination long after their conversation, and, in turn, shape his heart.

It’s a liturgical response to a practical question—not unlike Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, the children’s TV show that ran from 1968 to 2001. “If there is a central biblical theme to Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, this is it,” Amy Hollingsworth writes of the Good Samaritan in Rogers’s show in The Simple Faith of Mister Rogers.

In fact, what if the whole of Fred Rogers’s work was a liturgical invitation to embody the story of the Good Samaritan? What if Rogers was, over and over again, offering a model of what it looks like to be a good neighbor, loving our neighbor as ourselves?

The Liturgy of Love

Liturgy refers to the repeated movements, practices, and phrases that shape us into particular ways of life. They are “loaded with an ultimate Story about who we are and what we’re for,” writes philosopher James K. A. Smith in You Are What You Love. These rituals occur not only in our church services; they’re present in shopping malls, on our cell phones, and, of course, in the television and films we watch. “Our loves and longings are steered wrong, not because we’ve been hoodwinked by bad ideas, but because we’ve been immersed in de-formative liturgies and not realized it,” Smith writes. “As a result, we absorb a very different Story about the telos of being human and the norms for flourishing.”

Similarly, the late French philosopher René Girard suggests that our desires are learned by observation, rather than existing as innate, immutable aspects of ourselves. What we strive after is an imitation of what we see others pursuing and enjoying—what Girard calls “mimetic desire.” The work of Smith and Girard suggests that the formation (and de-formation) of our desires is quietly happening all the time, through all of our activities and habits, especially television and film.

Enter Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. “We had a director who once said to me, ‘If you take all of the elements that make good television, [and] you do the opposite, you have Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,’” Margaret Whitmer, one of the show’s producers, shares in the 2018 documentary. “Low production value, simple set, unlikely star. Yet, it worked. Because he was saying something really important.” Rogers initially worried people wouldn’t understand the depth of what he was trying to accomplish, especially when so many parodies of his slow, earnest style appeared in comedy sketches, according to Hedda Sharapan, another producer.

But the repeated language and practices, the steady, sing-song voice, and the unhurried pace of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood wasn’t a misunderstanding of what makes for good television. Nor was it merely a reflection of Rogers’ personality. Each word and movement were painstakingly crafted for an intentional impact on his audience.

“He wanted to do things right, and whatever he did right, he wanted to repeat,” journalist Tom Junod writes in a 1998 Esquire article, “Can You Say…Hero? Mister Rogers, Especially Now,” which inspired the latest film. “Whatever he did right he would have to repeat, as though he were already living in eternity.”

Fred Rogers was a pioneer in recognizing television as a powerful vehicle of formation. It was this vision paired with his theological training that made for a truly unique approach. “He was ordained in the ministry of television,” reflected Nicholas Ma, the director of Won’t You Be My Neighbor? As Rogers later acknowledged himself, “What we see and hear on the screen becomes who we are.” Out of a deep love and concern for children, Rogers filled his television show with intentionally crafted symbols, movements, and phrases—all designed to shape his audience into a particular way of being.

The Liturgy of Slowing Down

At the start of each episode, the camera passes through a model neighborhood before focusing on a single house. As it enters the home, the camera pans past a blinking yellow stoplight—a symbolic invitation to slow down. Another repeated practice involves Rogers feeding his fish on-air. His actions challenge the part of us who see his actions as a needless exercise in patience, unfit for television. Instead, by observing him taking care of his pets, he reminds us that caring for God’s creatures takes time—and it is worth it.

Out of a deep love and concern for children, Rogers filled his television show with intentionally crafted symbols, movements, and phrases—all designed to shape his audience into a particular way of being.

In the story Jesus tells in response to the lawyer’s question, two characters—a priest and a member of the tribe of Levi—pass by a traveler who had been robbed, stripped, beaten, and left for dead beside the road. Maybe they’re avoiding this person in their hurried pace. As anyone in ministry knows, the many voices calling out to those in religious leadership can leave little time to properly see our neighbor. We need rhythms and rituals that slow us down, counteracting our malformed relationship with time and our neighbor. The liturgies of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood repeatedly disrupt how we live within time so that we might see those around us not as interruptions to our efficiency or our “real work,” but as neighbors with whom we learn how to be.

Fear of neighbor is another possible explanation these two religious leaders pass by the beaten man in Luke 10 without helping. While touching “unclean” bodies could make them unfit to perform their religious duties, first-century Jewish priests had an obligation to bury a neglected corpse. Their avoidance must have gone beyond religious duty. Fear of the other is rampant during our own day as much as it was when Rogers repeatedly addressed it on air.

In the first week of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, the ruler of the Land of Make-Believe, King Friday XIII, orders guards to stand watch against foreigners and the corresponding change they will bring, demanding a wall be built to ensure safety. Characters fly balloons over the wall in response, carrying invitations to live counter to the dictates of fear, lives characterized by peace, friendship, and love. The invitation is a success, and King Friday reverses his commands for a wall, giving the opportunity for enemies to become neighbors, and neighbors to become friends (a clear echo of the Good Samaritan story). This early scene captures a key objective Rogers had for his show: re-shaping anger or fear of neighbor into love and compassionate care.

“Evil would like nothing better than to have us feel awful about who we are,” Rogers told Hollingsworth on the set of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood in 1994. “And that would be back in here [in our minds], and we’d look through those eyes at our neighbor, and see only what’s awful—in fact, look for what’s awful in our neighbor.”

The accuser, unlike our Lord, teaches us to fear our neighbor. The Good Samaritan story not only forms us into those who love our neighbor as God’s image bearer, it expands our understanding of who qualifies as our neighbor.

The Liturgy of Relationship

Though I didn’t realize it growing up watching the show, the intro song to each episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood invited me to see myself as a neighbor in relationship with other neighbors. In the beginning of each episode, Mister Rogers wasn’t just swapping out his clothes—he was becoming vulnerable to his audience. He made himself intimate, approachable, and available.

We are in need of transformation that digs deeper through repeated stories, language, and practices that bend the walls of our minds and hearts toward shalom.

Rogers invited his viewers to be open to our own neighbors by modeling it himself. His television set home was always open to neighbors. “I’d like for you to know my television neighbor,” he often told viewers, introducing another member of his community. In the May 9, 1969 episode, one year after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, Rogers cooled his bare feet in a plastic pool on a hot day when his local police officer stopped by. At Rogers’ invitation, Officer Clemmons, a black man, joined him in the foot bath. The invitation offered an important counter-formation in viewers’ minds in a time when African Americans were violently removed from “white” swimming pools. Rogers realized that the minds and hearts of our nation’s children needed a different story and he offered them one.

“The icon Fred Rogers not only was showing my brown skin in the tub with his white skin as two friends,” Francois Clemmons shares in The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers, by Maxwell King, “but as I was getting out of that tub, he was helping me dry my feet.”

Foot washing, of course, is just what Jesus calls his followers to do (John 13:14). In this subversive, timely example, Rogers showed us what such love in action looks like. The model of neighborly interactions with others of all skin colors, mobility levels, and otherwise invites viewers to slow down, to question any relationships governed by fear, and to turn those interactions on their head with vulnerable love.

“Some things you see are confusing, some things you hear are strange,” Rogers sings in his song, “Look And Listen,” for more than 30 episodes. “But if you ask someone to explain one or two, You’ll begin to notice a change in you.” Ultimately, these liturgies explore a way of life that manifests the shalom Scripture promises.

Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

Fred Rogers’s return to the mainstream comes at a time when the political, ecclesial, and ethnic schisms in our lives have left us looking for help in navigating divisive days. The solution must be complex enough to address the malformation of our hearts and minds: we no longer know who our neighbor is, because we’ve forgotten what it means to be a neighbor. Jesus’ tale of the Good Samaritan who found his neighbor beaten and bloodied beside the road to Jerusalem is not a story to be heard once and understood. It is intended to be told and re-told, acting on our imagination so that this story might be lived out, so that we might live (Luke 10:28).

But living into this story requires a deep counter-formation. And that counter-formation requires a creative, subversive approach. We are in need of transformation that digs deeper through repeated stories, language, and practices that bend the walls of our minds and hearts toward shalom.

“He’s a lot more complex than I thought,” the journalist, played by Matthew Rhys, says of Rogers at one point in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. Fred Rogers’s life represents a liturgical invitation to embody the story of one who was a neighbor when a neighbor was needed—that others might receive the invitation to be a neighbor. It’s an invitation we refuse at risk of our own destruction. So we say, thank you, Mister Rogers. Thank you for welcoming us into your neighbor-hood.

Ryan J. Pemberton is the minister for university engagement at First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley and author of Called: My Journey to C. S. Lewis’s House and Back Again and Walking With C. S. Lewis: A Spiritual Guide Through His Life and Writings. Follow Ryan at @ryanjpemberton or RyanJPemberton.com.

Books
Review

Seeing the Lord Behind the Lord’s Prayer

Tina Boesch

Wesley Hill shows how each petition points to the character of Christ.

Source Images: Zu_09 / Matthew Maude / Getty Images

It can be a challenge to say the Lord’s Prayer sincerely these days. Living in a modern industrialized society where food is processed, packaged, and abundant, do we honestly desire daily bread?

The Lord's Prayer: A Guide to Praying to Our Father (Christian Essentials)

The Lord's Prayer: A Guide to Praying to Our Father (Christian Essentials)

Wesley Hill (Author)

Lexham Press

144 pages

$15.99

If you set out to craft a prayer at odds with contemporary Western values, you could not do much better than the Lord’s Prayer. The seven petitions that Jesus taught his disciples to pray (Matt. 6:9–13) run against the grain of our culture at every turn. It’s strange to plead “Thy kingdom come” while living in a country that long ago rejected monarchy in favor of popular sovereignty. It’s dissonant to confess “Thy will be done” in an age that celebrates autonomy and self-determination. Jesus confronts us with a subsistence prayer in a culture of affluence, a commitment to forgiveness in the face of outraged polarization, and preservation from temptation in a landscape defined by desire and indulgence. The Lord’s Prayer challenges our notions of what’s truly desirable; and that’s precisely the reason we need it so desperately.

In The Lord’s Prayer: A Guide to Praying to Our Father, Wesley Hill walks us through the seven petitions, inviting us to discover the meaning, vitality, and relevance of each phrase. Any author writing on an ancient prayer may feel pressure to unearth some previously undiscovered truth, but Hill offers a fresh reading that feels less like an archaeological dig than a tour through a living cathedral in which he himself worships. His approach emphasizes the One revealed through the prayer—Jesus Christ. “Jesus embodies and enacts the prayer He taught His followers to pray,” Hill writes. “Each petition of the Lord’s Prayer is a window onto Jesus’ character and actions before it is instruction for us.”

Many today are reluctant to pray to a divine Father. But Hill reminds us that “father” is first and foremost a relational term. The Bible uses it to describe God’s relationship to Israel, but its ultimate meaning is revealed in the Father’s relationship to his only begotten Son. As Hill observes, “God’s fatherhood must always and only be understood through His unity with His self-giving Son. Any picture of God as ‘Father’ that leads us to think in terms of domination and cruelty rather than of humble service and unending love is not a true understanding of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, ‘who loved us and gave himself for us’ (Gal. 2:20).” When Jesus invites us to pray to Our Father, he’s granting us the same “breathtaking intimacy” he enjoyed as the Son.

In a sermon from the early fifth century, Augustine counseled a group of candidates for baptism to say the Lord’s Prayer daily because it would remind them that the “the Only Son hath numberless brethren; who say, ‘Our Father, which art in heaven.’ So said they who have been before us; and so shall say those who will come after us.” Augustine’s prediction proved prescient. Over the centuries, the prayer has been an essential part of daily devotion for most Christian communities—Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant.

It’s fitting, then, that Hill brings representatives from these various traditions to the table: Imagine a dinner party where Martin Luther and Pope Benedict XVI talk about the nature of petitionary prayer, Augustine and Calvin weigh in on sin’s true depths, and Karl Barth and Sarah Coakley discuss the nature of God as Father. Though these theologians arrive at differing conclusions on some substantive issues, their voices harmonize around a prayer common to all believers. This plurality of voices is especially appropriate when reflecting on a prayer whose concerns are communal, not individualistic. We ask our Father to provide our bread, to forgive our debts, to spare us temptation, to save us from the evil one.

The Lord’s Prayer is transformative within daily devotion, reminding us that our highest, deepest longing should be for God himself. As Hill observes, “the point isn’t so much to ask God for more things but for us to realize that God transcends our limits and frustrations and that our saying so befits His splendor.”

Hill’s guide reveals the character and mission of the One who taught us to pray. In it we find Jesus—one with the Father, becoming living bread to nourish the world, facilitating forgiveness of sin through his own sacrificial gift on the cross, and redeeming us from the power and control of the Evil One. John Chrysostom, an early church father, once observed that “prayer is the light of the soul.”

If your relationship with the Lord’s Prayer is fraught with ambivalence, this slim devotional volume will bring you into the radiance of a Savior who is the light of the world.

Tina Boesch is a writer, editor, and designer living in Louisiana. She is the author of Given: The Forgotten Meaning and Practice of Blessing (NavPress).

This article appeared in the December, 2019 issue of Christianity Today as "Countercultural Petitions".

Ideas

‘Religion Poisons Everything’

Natasha Moore

Three things not to say when responding to severe criticisms of Christianity.

Christianity Today November 21, 2019
Source images: Getty / Envato

A commenter going enigmatically by “notme” once responded to my rundown of a controversy over Scripture classes in schools:

What has religion got to offer but War, Intolerance/hatred (of other religions and minority groups), and poverty? religion should not only be banned from classrooms but from the whole planet

I faithfully reproduce the comment as is, grammatical warts and all, keyed in, I imagine, in the first flush of a righteous indignation.

They’re common accusations, straight out of the New Atheist playbook. Religious belief is irrational, snarling, psychologically and socially stunting. In the enduring formulation of Christopher Hitchens in God Is Not Great (2007): “Religion poisons everything.”

But underneath the cynicism, the absolutism, sometimes the smugness, I wonder if what I’m really hearing is pain. The pain of someone who sought grace in a church community and instead found judgment and guilt. The pain, perhaps, of someone who invested their trust in a Christian group or friend only to meet with hypocrisy or cruelty. If I listened with more imagination and humility, what I might hear is the lashing out of the wounded.

Christians have, after all, tortured heretics, burned witches, hoarded wealth, propped up slavery, rubber-stamped colonialism. These are not accusations; they are history.

Both have a terrible legitimacy. Christians have, after all, tortured heretics, burned witches, hoarded wealth, propped up slavery, rubber-stamped colonialism, expelled or massacred entire Jewish communities, silenced women, persecuted gay people, and moved known child molesters from parish to parish. These are not accusations; they are history.

And not only history. You don’t have to look far—probably not much farther than the murky corners of our own hearts—to see the same old ugliness cropping up today: the self-righteousness, the love of respectability and comfort, the inertia and cowardice, the militant certitude, the blindness to inconvenient truths, the fear of difference, the fear of losing power, the fear of change or challenge.

On the Other Hand…

And yet if the gospel is true, it is nothing less than the master story of life on this planet—the reconnection of fallen, broken creatures to their Creator and his purposes for them. If it is true, won’t it work? Even allowing for the tenacity of sin and the bumpy work of sanctification, won’t it change things for the better, not just for the reconnected, but with ripples traveling far beyond them?

There’s plenty of evidence that this is exactly what’s happened in our world over the last two thousand years. That as followers of Jesus loved their neighbors as themselves, turned the other cheek, cared for the least of these, forgave as God forgave them, and let their light shine before others, the world changed dramatically.

Philosopher Jürgen Habermas insists that the egalitarianism underpinning all our freedoms and democratic ideals is the direct and exclusive legacy of the Judeo-Christian ethic.

It’s a tangled tale, but one corroborated by various high-profile atheists like popular ancient history writer Tom Holland. “In my morals and ethics,” he recently wrote, “I have learned to accept that I am not Greek or Roman at all, but thoroughly and proudly Christian.” Philosopher Jürgen Habermas insists that the egalitarianism underpinning all our freedoms and democratic ideals is the direct and exclusive legacy of the Judeo-Christian ethic: “Everything else is just idle postmodern talk.”

David Bentley Hart fleshes out the content of this debt in his book Atheist Delusions:

Even the most ardent secularists among us generally cling to notions of human rights, economic and social justice, providence for the indigent, legal equality, or basic human dignity … It is simply the case that we distant children of the pagans would not be able to believe in any of these things – they would never have occurred to us – had our ancestors not once believed that God is love, that charity is the foundation of all virtues, that all of us are equal before the eyes of God, that to fail to feed the hungry or care for the suffering is to sin against Christ, and that Christ laid down his life for the least of his brethren.

If both are true-if Christians gave the West things we all rather like, such as inalienable human value, democracy, charity, and humility, and also gave us the Spanish Inquisition and the Salem Witch Trials and South African apartheid – what then? How do we make sense of the disjunction?

Coping Strategies

There are quite a few coping strategies out there. Frankly, I’ve found them mostly inadequate. So, for the intrepid fellow traveler along the tangled byways of Christian history, here are a few friendly “Dead End” signs to mark roads not worth taking—and some suggestions for alternative routes.

1. “They weren’t really Christian.”

This one certainly looks inviting. In most Western societies for most of the last millennium, it’s been at least advantageous to identify with orthodox Christianity. Where Christian identity is default, plenty of things will happen under the banner of faith that bear little resemblance to the person and teaching of Jesus Christ.

But we can’t get ourselves off the hook this easily. Partly this is because disentangling the motivations of a medieval crusader or heresy inquisitor from the Bible is not straightforward. It’s entirely possible to make arguments from Scripture – in some cases, uncomfortably coherent arguments – in support of “holy” war, the auto-da-fé, racial hierarchies, anti-Semitism, environmental despoliation, and more.

Would practically all Christians today agree that those are gross abuses of the text? Yes. Are we so confident that our own interpretative frameworks are unimpeachable—our exegetical maneuvers so free from the slant of self-interest—that we feel able to dismiss the faith of such misreaders as pure sham? Hmm.

Our engagement with history is so often superficial and incredibly supercilious. We fail to acknowledge how indebted we are to these blinkered, striving men and women who came before for the very weapons we level against them. And we forget our own blinkers, the contempt and disbelief that future generations will no doubt reserve for us and our blind spots. As T. S. Eliot wrote in another context: “Some one said: ‘The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.’ Precisely, and they are that which we know.”

Miroslav Volf offers a more subtle version of “they weren’t real Christians” in his description of “thin” and “thick” religion.

The uncomfortable truth is no one comes out of history with clean hands. The law of unintended consequences is too potent, the feet of even our most cherished heroes too caked with clay. This is not to abdicate the responsibility either to act justly or to repent of the sins of the past. But it is to advocate for a measure of historical humility, an appreciation for how difficult it is to draw straight lines in a cracked and crooked world as cracked and crooked people.

Miroslav Volf offers a more subtle version of “they weren’t real Christians” in his description of “thin” and “thick” religion. A “thin” religious commitment may well be genuine but is not given primacy in an adherent’s life. It therefore easily becomes “thinned out,” instrumentalized, serving as a justification for actions which spring from far different sources.

“Thick” faith, on the other hand, will be content-rich and potentially transformative. In the case of Christianity, it will prick and nudge those who hold it toward things like enemy-love, self-sacrifice, generosity to strangers, and forgiveness. This does not absolve Christians from violence done in the name of Christ but does suggest, as Volf puts it, that what is needed in response to religious violence is not less religion but more religion—of the “thick” kind.

2. “It’s not so bad in context.”

Again, this pathway isn’t impassable, but it probably won’t take you where you want to go. It’s true that most people would benefit from a more nuanced understanding of almost any historical episode you care to name. It’s true that our sense of many periods and events is so reductive and so selective as to be tantamount to myth.

When critics accuse the church of hypocrisy, violence, misogyny, and the like, can we not concede that what they say has all too often been true?

As a first or primary response to the wounded or the outraged, though, the history lessons seem less appropriate—and much less Christian—than a wholehearted and heartbroken admission of guilt. When critics accuse the church of hypocrisy, violence, misogyny, and the like, can we not concede that what they say has all too often been true? Defensiveness is a very human reaction; repentance is (or ought to be) a very Christian one.

My colleagues and I have been immersed in making a documentary (and more recently, writing a book) called For the Love of God: How the Church Is Better and Worse than You Ever Imagined. Making it has been both a bruising and, surprisingly, mightily heartening experience. One of the gratifying/depressing reactions we’ve had has been the number of secular viewers and critics who’ve found themselves pleasantly surprised by our candidness. “You are acknowledging all sorts of bad behavior in the name of Christianity over the centuries!” exclaimed one interviewer in disbelief.

This should not be extraordinary. If anyone should be fluent in the language of confession, it’s a group of people who meet together week in and week out to admit that we have left undone what we ought to have done, and we have done what we ought not to have done, and there is no health in us.

To openly and without reservation own the wrongs of the past is the road less traveled, but alongside the advantage of honesty, it can also open up the possibility of a more engaged and fruitful conversation about the contributions as well as the failures of the church.

3. “The good outweighs the bad.”

Once more, it’s not that I don’t think the argument is valid. To the extent that it’s a meaningful thing to say, I sincerely believe the overall contribution of Christianity has been a positive one. But the wrongs are incontrovertible, and however much we might want to haggle over the scorecard, good deeds don’t cancel out evil ones.

In grappling with the most shameful and the most shining moments of Christian action in the world, my colleagues and I have been using a governing metaphor that audiences have loved. It rests on the distinction between a musical composition and its performance.

Take a sublime piece of music like Bach’s celebrated “Cello Suites,” and have a complete novice sit down to play them. The result will be far from sublime – but it shouldn’t affect your understanding of the genius of Bach as a composer. We know to distinguish between a good and a bad performance of the same composition. For believers and for skeptics alike, going back to Jesus and measuring the deeds of his followers against his teaching and example offers a solid way forward through the labyrinthine complexity of a very mixed history.

Jesus wrote a beautiful tune. Christians claim that it has never been bettered. When those who claim to follow Jesus have played in tune with him, that has been of great and unique benefit to the world. When they’ve played the tune atrociously, it’s caused harm untold. But the tune itself continues to sound down the arches of the years, calling each of us to our appointed place in the orchestra.

The Church’s ‘Double Consciousness’

In the course of making the film, we had a conversation with novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson. When asked about the widespread suspicion of the institutional church, she spoke movingly of people’s reaction to John Ames, the small-town pastor who narrates her novel Gilead.

“I do book signings,” Robinson says, “and people come up and talk to me and often they say, ‘I just love John Ames. He’s just like my pastor.’”

What she calls a “double consciousness” of the church is operative here—the contrast between a sort of “televised religion” and people’s actual experience of the church. “When you write about somebody and they say, he’s just like my pastor, he’s just like my uncle who’s a priest, they’re having a very deep recognition … But if you sat them down to describe a priest, a church, they would come up with the conventions that are everywhere now.”

There is something in this that’s profoundly characteristic of our cultural moment. In 2017, an Ipsos poll conducted across 23 countries found that 49 percent of adults agree that religion does more harm than good in the world. In the US it was lower, at 39 percent; in my own country, Australia, it was significantly higher: fully 63 percent of Aussies are apparently convinced that overall, we would be better off without religion. Yet, intriguingly, 60 percent of the population ticked a box in the most recent census declaring an affiliation to one religion or another. And another survey found that 88 percent of non-churchgoers in Australia like the idea of having a church in their neighborhood.

Apart from the observation that most polls would be considerably enhanced by a few well-chosen follow-up questions, what the disparity suggests is that for many people, our personal experience does not tally with certain powerful ideas that come to us via the cultural ether.

This is not only a religious phenomenon; as The Atlantic has reported, while in 2016 only 36 percent of Americans thought the country as a whole was headed in the right direction, 85 percent declared themselves “very or somewhat satisfied with their general position in life and their ability to pursue the American dream.” “What explains the gulf between most Americans’ hopeful outlook on areas and institutions they know directly and their despair about the country they know only through the news?” asked The Atlantic’s James Fallows.

Whatever the answer, it’s worth remembering that however bitter and cynical our public discourse may seem or become, bubbling beneath the surface is something both more interesting and less predictable. With all its quirks, frustrations, and serious failings, the case for the gospel message is nowhere more irrepressible than in the tangible experience of disciple-love to be found in the church visible just down the road.

Natasha Moore is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity in Sydney. She is author of For the Love of God: How the Church Is Better and Worse than You Ever Imagined, which is also a documentary.

Theology

In the French Riviera, Both Arab Immigrants and Their Secular Neighbors Need Jesus

Dale Hanson Bourke

A missionary couple shares the fragrance of Christ in the perfume capital of the world.

Christianity Today November 21, 2019
Katherine Kirchner

When Nicole Derieux committed her life to Christ as a teenager, she imagined leaving her Scottish home to become a missionary in some far off land. Today, sitting on her terrace overlooking the French Riviera, Nicole laughs. “This isn’t what I could have ever imagined,” she says, “but it’s exactly where God wants me to be.”

Nicole and her husband, Vincent, head a ministry called Parfums de Vie (“fragrance of life” in French) in Grasse, a picturesque French city known as the perfume capital of the world. Located a few miles up the hillside from Cannes, the region attracts billionaires, movie stars, and royalty. But behind all the glitz and glamour are vulnerable foreign workers, most from North Africa, who struggle to survive while doing the menial work for the rich. The Derieuxs minister to that population.

“Many of the workers only speak Arabic, live with their families in terrible conditions, and struggle to have a decent life,” says Nicole. “Some have work visas but others are undocumented, making them even more vulnerable.”

When the Derieuxs first moved to the region they asked, “Who would Jesus befriend?” Instead of the rich and famous, they sought out those who are largely invisible: the workers who clean the hotel rooms, haul the garbage, and sweep the streets. “Jesus spent his life living among the marginalized and the poor,” says Vincent, whose own grandparents were evangelized by American missionaries who came to France after World War II.

As the Derieuxs began to learn more about the lives of the mostly Muslim workers, they sensed a great need among their children, in particular. “Although they attend French schools, they go home to families who often don’t speak French and to conditions that make it very difficult to do homework,” says Nicole. “The children often fail in school, because they have no support system.”

School holidays and weekends pose another problem: The parents have to go off to work and leave the children unattended.

Nicole, a former French teacher, and Vincent, who grew up in Orange, France and once served in the French special forces, began to offer their home as a place for kids to do homework. After some success, they started hosting camp days, where the children could safely play games and enjoy outdoor activities instead of roaming the streets or staying in their tiny apartments. The Parfums de Vie ministry was officially launched in 2008.

“We are always very clear with the parents that we are Christians and we will tell the children Bible stories and offer them books about the Bible. We tell them we will pray in front of their children. We never want the parents to be surprised,” says Nicole, who along with Vincent has studied Arabic to communicate effectively with the children’s parents. “There are a few families who are uncomfortable with our approach, but most are so grateful for how we help their children.”

The Derieuxs pray for every child in the program and are careful to share their faith without openly proselytizing. Their witness has proven effective. Some of the children, members of their families, and volunteer tutors have embraced a personal faith in Christ. “People were suspicious at first, but they have watched us over the years,” says Nicole. “They see who we are and how we live out our faith. We are not preaching, we are living out the gospel.”

Today, the ministry has grown so much that it has taken over a former mechanic’s garage within walking distance from the school. When school lets out each afternoon, children of all ages stream into the garage, sit down at the tables, choose books from the library, and meet with volunteers who help them with their homework.

Vicent Derieux

The effectiveness of tutoring, mentoring, and taking a personal interest in the children has been stunning. Narjes, the child of North African immigrant parents, began to fail during grade school because of the difficulty of her living situation. She entered the Parfums de Vie program eight years ago and soon went from failing to being the top student in her class. Her grades were so good that she qualified to enter an elite French boarding school, where she continues to excel.

Now 18, Narjes speaks English fluently (in addition to French and Arabic) and has set her sights on a university in the United Kingdom. She hopes to study psychology and neuroscience so that she can help kids and one day come back to work at Parfums de Vie.

“The children look at Narjes and some of the older students who are excelling and begin to imagine a better future for themselves,” says Nicole. “It is wonderful to see a child realize that his or her future can be so much more. And their families are so proud of them.”

The harder challenge, perhaps, is getting locals to accept the ministry. The citizens of Grasse often have negative feelings toward the immigrant community and also view Christian missionaries with skepticism. Nonetheless, they notice the good work of Parfums de Vie and respect that the Derieuxs are addressing hard issues and helping solve problems with the youth.

“In general, the French are vey suspicious of religion and view evangelicals as part of a cult,” says Nicole. “But they know we are Christians and respect us for the work we do. Some have volunteered to tutor children and others have supported us in other ways.”

One avenue of support came from the head of the famous French perfume company, Molinard. The managing director of the company, Celia LeRouge-Benard, was impressed by the Derieuxs’ work in Grasse, where the company is headquartered. She donated most of the cost of developing two fragrances, “Toujours Espoir” (Always Hope) and “Etoile Celeste” (Heavenly Star). “The French are mostly closed to the gospel, but perfumes touch their hearts, and they love that the fragrances support a good cause,” says Nicole.

Vicent Derieux

The Derieuxs support their work through online sales of the two perfumes and also sales in a few retail outlets. “We have a donor who is a businessman and has challenged us to find ways to create income, in addition to taking donations,” says Nicole.This donor provided a loan to help the family purchase an aging villa, half of which they use as a short-term rental unit. Income from the very popular rental—which has a private pool and a spectacular sunset view of the Mediterranean—helps cover the cost of the property.

The rest of the home, where Nicole and Vincent live with their son, 11-year-old Etienne, serves as an informal hostel for their ministry. The kitchen routinely feeds a dozen or more children who drop in when they’re hungry, the living room includes bunk beds, where two teenage girls are living temporarily, and other beds crammed into corners often provide a safe place for women and children to stay.

“Sometimes there is violence in the families. Sometimes a husband, who has the work visa, will leave, and his family will be left without any income,” explains Nicole. “Our home is always open to those in need.”

The sometimes chaotic home doesn’t seem to phase the family. “At school, Etienne, an only child, told the teacher he has five brothers and sisters,” laughs Nicole. “When I asked him why he said that, he explained that the other children who live with us are really like brothers and sisters to him.”

The Derieuxs have plans to grow their ministry. They hope to purchase (rather than rent) the garage in order to convert it into a more effective learning center; expand the perfume business so that its income can support more camps for kids during school vacations; and possibly extend their ministry to other communities with similar demographics.

But their ministry reaches more than just poverty-stricken immigrants. It also affects the atheists and secular French in the local community. “Living out the gospel by helping the marginalized not only ministers to the poor but also to those who are ‘rich’ and have little interest in spiritual things,” says Nicole. “Living out the gospel changes hearts.”

To learn more about the ministry of Parfums de Vie go to villadesparfums.com

History

Five Ways We Misunderstand American Religious History

Thomas S. Kidd

From religious liberty to religious violence, it helps to get our facts straight.

Christian History November 21, 2019
Library of Congress

In this series

Is America a “Christian nation”? When we worry about the direction our nation is heading, or celebrate when we see as a positive religious turn in American culture or politics, we are making assumptions about our own religious background as a country. Most of these assumptions are based on civics classes we took in primary and secondary school. While our assumptions claim a historical basis, there are a number of misunderstandings, some subtle and some overt, that Americans often have about their religious history. Here are five of the most common:

America's Religious History: Faith, Politics, and the Shaping of a Nation

America's Religious History: Faith, Politics, and the Shaping of a Nation

Thomas S. Kidd (Author)

HarperCollins Children's Books

320 pages

$17.45

1. Religion had little to do with the American Revolution.

The American national Congress during the Revolutionary War was ostensibly secular, but it sometimes issued proclamations for prayer, fasting, and thanksgiving that employed detailed theological language. Whereas the Declaration of Independence had used generic theistic language about the creator and “nature’s God,” a 1777 thanksgiving proclamation recommended that Americans confess their sins and pray that God “through the merits of Jesus Christ” would forgive them. They further enjoined Americans to pray for the “enlargement of that kingdom which consisteth ‘in righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Ghost’ [Romans 14:17].”

Some have argued that the Declaration of Independence illustrates the “secular character of the Revolution.” The Declaration was specific about the action of God in creation, however. A theistic basis for the equality of humankind was broadly shared by Americans in 1776. Thomas Jefferson did not let his skepticism about Christian doctrine preclude the use of a theistic argument to persuade Americans. Jefferson was hardly an atheist, in any case. Like virtually all Americans, he assumed that God, in some way and at some time in the past, had created the world and humankind.

The Virginia Declaration of Rights, which had been adopted just weeks before the Declaration of Independence, had spoken blandly of how “all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights.” Drawing on the naturalistic theory of government crafted by John Locke, this first section of the Virginia Declaration made no explicit reference to God. Yet when Jefferson and his drafting committee wrote the Declaration of Independence, they made the action of God in creation much clearer. “All men are created equal,” and “they are endowed by their Creator,” Jefferson wrote. The Declaration was not explicitly Christian, but its theism was intentional. This is not to say that the founding documents are uniformly theistic. The Constitution hardly referred to God at all, save for a paltry reference to the “Year of our Lord” 1787.

2. Religious conflict and violence is worse today than it has ever been before.

Religious vitality in America has always existed alongside religious violence. To cite just one example, in 1782, during the latter years of the Revolutionary War, an American militia in the Ohio territory attacked Moravian mission stations in Native American communities along the Muskingum River. The Moravian Delaware Indians were pacifists, having embraced the German-background Moravian missionaries and their teachings about Jesus, the Prince of Peace. The interethnic mission station attracted unwanted attention from many of its neighbors. The Delaware converts sought to allay the suspicions of hostile forces surrounding them—including non-Christian Indians, American Patriots, and British authorities—by employing Christian charity. They shared what food they had with their neighbors, even in times of scarcity.

American militiamen, however, were certain that the Moravian station at Gnadenhütten (“tents of grace”) was a staging ground for Indian attacks on frontier settlers. Driven by genocidal rage against all Indians, Christians or otherwise, the white volunteers imprisoned and methodically murdered almost a hundred Moravian Delaware men, women, and children around Gnadenhütten, even as the doomed converts were reportedly “praying, singing, and kissing.”

The stage was set for the Gnadenhütten massacre by a convergence of white Americans’ hatred for Indians, the violence of the American Revolution, and the earnest missionary labors of the Moravians. Not all religious violence in American history has been as grotesque as that at Gnadenhütten. Sometimes the violence has taken rhetorical, legal, or other forms (what we generically would call religious “conflict”). Unfortunately, religious fervor and religious viciousness are not only part of a distant colonial American past.

Indeed, episodes of religiously tinged mass murder have become common in the years since the September 11, 2001 jihadist attacks in New York and Washington, DC. Mass shootings have become almost a routine feature of American life, often targeting places of worship. These include shootings at congregations such as the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin (2012), the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, Texas (2017), and the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh (2018). The shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015 was unusual only in the sense that the congregation had endured a similar paroxysm of violence almost two centuries earlier, when an alleged slave rebellion led by Denmark Vesey led to the execution of dozens of African American Charlestonians and the burning of the church building.

Religion has been a source of hope for many Americans and a focus of hate for others. The vitality of faith has endured, even in the face of murderous animosity, especially toward religious and ethnic minorities.

3. The concept of religious liberty primarily grew out of Enlightenment theory.

Only the colonies of Pennsylvania and Rhode Island offered religious freedom in any way resembling its modern meaning. The great religious diversity of many colonies caused conflict and elicited calls for religious liberty. These calls included Maryland’s 1649 Act Concerning Religion, which promised the “free exercise” of religion for all Christians. Nevertheless, well into the Revolutionary era many of the established churches still treated dissenters with contempt, if not outright violence.

The Great Awakening of the 1740s generated a new wave of activism for religious liberty. Especially in New England, where the Congregationalist Church was established, evangelical Separates (those who started illicit separate meetings) and Baptists called on authorities to allow them to worship God in freedom. In Connecticut in 1748, a group of Separates petitioned the colonial legislature for religious liberty, calling freedom of conscience an “unalienable right” upon which the government should not intrude. Connecticut refused to act upon the Separates’ plea.

Baptists were the most consistent advocates for religious liberty as the Revolution approached. As Separate Baptist churches and missionaries spread throughout the South, they fell under increasing persecution. In Virginia, where the Anglican Church was established, political and religious authorities took an especially harsh approach to dissenters. They put a number of legal requirements in place that made it difficult for dissenters to build churches and get preaching licenses. Many Baptists simply ignored these requirements. They suffered accordingly. Dozens of Baptist preachers were put in jail in Virginia in the 1760s and 1770s. One of them, James Ireland, was arrested for illegal preaching in Culpeper, Virginia, and was mercilessly hounded by anti-Baptist thugs. Ireland’s supporters followed him to the jail, and Ireland tried to keep preaching to them through a window. Ireland’s antagonists beat up his supporters, and some even urinated on him through the window as he attempted to keep speaking.

The plight of the Baptists drew the sympathy of nonevangelical leaders such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Madison and Jefferson already believed in religious liberty as an intellectual precept. Theorists associated with the Enlightenment, such as England’s John Locke, had argued for religious toleration for Protestant dissenters. The Enlightenment, as a catch-all term, can broadly refer to an emphasis on human rationality, scientific discovery, and naturalistic philosophy in the late 1600s and the 1700s. The abuse of Baptists and other dissenters hardened Madison and Jefferson’s resolve to achieve disestablishment, or the end of state-supported religion. Madison deplored the persecution of dissenters. In a 1774 letter, he lamented the “diabolical hell conceived principle of persecution” raging at the time in Virginia. He asked his correspondent to “pray for Liberty of Conscience to revive among us.”

4. Christians in early America didn’t have to contend with skepticism and heterodox theology.

The early decades of the 1800s saw huge religious growth, diversification, and conflict. The period of disestablishment of the state churches also afforded a more prominent role for religious skeptics. Surging Christian commitment in the Second Great Awakening actually fed the skeptical backlash. But the story of doubt about traditional faith was an even older one. In the colonial era, some Americans expressed serious questions about traditional Christian theology, especially about Calvinism.

Some of the earliest skeptical views, particularly universalism, emerged from Calvinism. Universalists espoused the notion that God would eventually save all people through Christ. If God chose some (the elect) for salvation, why would he not choose everyone? Charles Chauncy, Jonathan Edwards’s key adversary during the First Great Awakening, became one of America’s first universalists. Chauncy secretly cultivated universalist views for years before finally going public in the 1780s. He even coined a code term (“the pudding”) for universalism because it was so controversial. Chauncy posited that since God was preeminently benevolent, he would not “bring mankind into existence, unless he intended to make them finally happy.”

Deism was less an outgrowth of Calvinism than a rejection of it. We can see this most obviously in the case of Benjamin Franklin, who by his teen years had come to doubt his Puritan parents’ faith. His father gave anti-Deistic tracts to the bright boy, but Franklin found the Deists’ arguments more convincing than traditional Christians’ arguments against Deism. Thus, as Franklin wrote in his wildly popular Autobiography, he became a “thorough Deist.” To Franklin, Deism meant downplaying doctrine and focusing on virtue and benevolent service as the essence of Christianity. He also doubted the divinity of Christ and the reliability of the Bible.

Deism was fashionable among educated men in the American Revolutionary era and was overrepresented among the Founding Fathers. Thomas Jefferson was a more strident Deist than Franklin, though Jefferson mostly kept his skepticism quiet until his political career had ended. Jefferson did consider himself a Christian, but he only revered Jesus as a moral teacher, not the Son of God.

Jefferson was convinced that Jesus’s followers had imposed the claims of divinity on him after he died. This accounts for the so-called Jefferson Bible, which was Jefferson’s multilanguage edition of the Gospels. Jefferson used a penknife to cut out sections of the Gospels that he found implausible, especially a number of the miracles attributed to Jesus. In the last verse of the Jefferson Bible, Jesus’s disciples “rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulchre, and departed.” There was no resurrection in Jefferson’s account.

5. The connection between white evangelicals and the Republican Party began with the Moral Majority.

Although President Dwight Eisenhower was not especially devout, he wanted to reenergize American civil spirituality. The evangelist Billy Graham helped him do that. Graham assured Eisenhower, whom he had urged to run for president in 1952, that as president the general could “do more to inspire the American people to a more spiritual way of life than any other man alive.” For Graham, Eisenhower, and their supporters, the Judeo-Christian tradition represented a shield against the atheistic menace of communism. The term Judeo-Christian first became popular during the period. Although Graham’s preaching was as explicitly Christian as any minister’s, the civil religion favored by Eisenhower was generically theistic, not Christian. Anticommunist civil spirituality reached its height in the mid-1950s when Congress added the phrase “one nation under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance and made “In God We Trust” the national motto.

Untold thousands of people around the world became born-again Christians due to Billy Graham’s preaching and that of other evangelical and Pentecostal ministers during the era. But in retrospect one of the most salient developments associated with Graham’s work and the “neo-evangelicals” is their growing linkage with politics and the Republican Party. Evangelicals had been engaged in politics before the 1950s, of course, but Graham facilitated the transformation by which American evangelicals—especially white evangelicals—would become known primarily for their political behavior.

To Graham, this transformation was understandable, given the existential threat he perceived in global communism. He later expressed regret about his turn to politics as a distraction from the pure spirituality of his preaching. The gospel remained the core message of his crusades, but the specifics of that preaching received relatively little media coverage after he burst onto the national scene in 1949. Graham would receive much more secular coverage for appearances at patriotic occasions and for his friendship with politicians, usually (though not exclusively) Republican ones, beginning with his fateful courtship of Dwight Eisenhower to run for office in 1952. Graham’s remarkable access to presidents from Eisenhower to George W. Bush helped other evangelicals envision permanent proximity to powerful politicians. It was an enticing prospect.

Thomas S. Kidd is the Vardaman Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University. This essay is drawn from his new book America’s Religious History: Faith, Politics, and the Shaping of a Nation (Zondervan).

News

The Democratic Candidates’ Favorite Bible Verses

Daniel Silliman

Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, and Cory Booker are quoting a lot of Scripture on the campaign trail.

Sean Rayford / Tasos Katopodis / Getty Images

Sean Rayford / Tasos Katopodis / Getty Images

Christianity Today November 20, 2019

Democratic primary candidates have quoted the Bible more than usual on the campaign trail in 2019. Eight of the top 12 candidates brought up Bible passages while talking about economic reform, welfare policy, and LGBT rights.

Senator Elizabeth Warren often speaks about her time teaching fifth grade Sunday school in a Methodist church, and then launches into an explanation of Matthew 25. “This is the one where the shepherd is dividing the world into the sheep and the goats,” she said at a CNN townhall. “As we all know, sheep are going to heaven and the goats—they’re not!”

Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, also quotes Scripture regularly. In the first Democratic debate, in July, he referenced Proverbs 14:31: “Those who oppress the poor insult their Maker.” Searches for the verse on Bible Gateway tripled after Buttigieg’s remarks. On the campaign trail, he has also referenced Matthew 6:5, where Jesus condemns the prayers of hypocrites.

Buttigieg, an Episcopalian, told Religion News Service that connecting to people of faith is an important part of his campaign strategy. That comes with risks, though. Buttigieg received a lot of backlash, for example, when he said “there’s plenty of scriptural basis” to support abortion rights.

Senator Cory Booker faced similar negative reactions from people who said he didn’t understand the Bible when he quoted Micah 6:8—which says the Lord wants people to act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly before God—in answer to a question about LGBT rights. Critics said Booker was “twisting Scripture.” Booker’s explanation was that his faith and that verse motivated him to fight against discrimination.

Booker was raised in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and is now a member of the National Baptist Church. He also has deep connections to Judaism and keeps a Hebrew Bible on his Senate desk.

Other candidates, who don’t put so much emphasis on their faith, have also brought the Bible into their presidential campaigns—sometimes in surprising ways. Businessman Andrew Yang, who attends a Reformed Church in America congregation, cited 1 John 3:17—not to be confused with the much more common John 3:16—in support of his signature policy proposal, universal basic income.

“Universal Basic Income is a beginning for followers of Christ,” Yang said, “and all who believe in putting Humanity First, to begin to love our neighbors as ourselves and begin caring for and helping others the way we have been commanded.”

Senator Bernie Sanders, who is a non-practicing Jew, brought a Bible quote when he spoke at Liberty University in the 2016 campaign. He cited Matthew 7:12: “Do to others what you would have them do to you.” He has repeated biblical admonition several times on the campaign trail this year.

A careful examination of the candidates’ Scripture quotes shows the Democrats prefer four different translations: the King James Version (KJV), the New International Version (NIV), the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), and the New Living Translation (NLT).

Reporting by Daniel Silliman / News Report

Warren has a stated preference for the KJV. “I confess, I'm a King James fan,” she told NPR in 2013. “I understand the world has moved on, but for me it'll always be with King James.” She’s in good company—the KJV has long been the most-read translation in the country.

Former Vice President Joe Biden has used a Douay–Rheims Bible to take his oaths of office—a Catholic translation that has been in his family since 1893. When Biden quotes Scripture, however, he uses the NIV. Bernie Sanders, Senator Amy Klobuchar, and President Donald Trump also use the NIV, which is the bestselling modern translation.

Buttigieg, Booker, and Yang quote the NRSV, which is the preferred translation of mainline Protestant churches.

Senator Kamala Harris rarely quotes the Bible directly, preferring to paraphrase. In an Atlanta church in 2017, though, she quoted Proverbs 31:9 from the NLT: “Speak up for the poor and helpless, and see that they get justice.”

News

Is November Too Early for Christmas Music?

Megan Fowler

While most Christian radio stations still wait until after Thanksgiving, Spotify proves that most listeners are busting out their jingle bells earlier than that.

Christianity Today November 20, 2019
Phil Walter / Staff / Getty

Weary of Christmas tunes freezing out fall celebrations? You’re not just imagining the jingle bells and carols coming earlier each year. According to Spotify plays tracked by EveryNoise, most places started their surge in seasonal listening November 1.

But some countries started the party far earlier. The Philippines, heavily Catholic and among the most devotedly Christian nations on earth, is the first to start playing Christmas music, with a spike on September 1. The country streams classics as well as local favorites like Jose Mari Chan’s “Christmas In Our Hearts.”

By October 28, the festive Philippines had competition from some largely secular but spirited countries: Iceland and the Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Norway, and Finland. Iceland currently leads the world in Christmas listening, with holiday tunes making up more than 8 percent of all streamed music, over triple the global average.

The United States crossed into the Christmas music threshold—playing at least 2 percent Christmas songs—within the past week.

In recent years, many countries make the switch before December (in 2017, 31 countries had passed the Christmas music threshold by then). But South American countries like Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil don’t start their Christmas music in earnest until Christmas Eve of Christmas Day, while little Liechtenstein ends on a high note: In the days leading up to Christmas 70 percent of music streamed in the country is holiday music, triple the global average.

Once the holiday music begins, listeners can expect one song to dominate: Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You” is the most-streamed Christmas song on the planet. (You have to go much further down the list to find a distinctly Christian Christmas song, with Pentatonix’s “Mary Did You Know?” currently ranking No. 31.)

For faith-based radio stations, many of which are listener supported, the decision to switch to Christmas music means balancing the urge to be first with the desires of listeners.

For the Word FM Radio Network based in Eastern Pennsylvania, listeners want to wait until after Thanksgiving. The network offers a 60/40 mix of Christmas music and CCM music starting the day after Thanksgiving. One week before Christmas, the 16 stations in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland switch to an all-Christmas playlist.

Meg Geissinger, program director, said the network feels the pull to try being the first station in a radio market to put on Christmas music, but it doesn’t always go as planned. WordFM started Christmas music on the Saturday before Thanksgiving one year, but other stations still had them beat and some listeners thought it was too early for Christmas tunes.

During the holidays, the Christmas music might attract listeners who might otherwise not listen to Christian stations.

“The opportunity to play Christmas music that is quickly recognizable means the person searching for Christmas music may land on our station and stay awhile—this presents a deeper opportunity to introduce the listener to Jesus,” Geissinger said.

Every Noise, a site ranking Spotify streams by genre, lists Hannah Kerr’s “Winter Wonderland;” Darlene Zschech’s “Little Drummer Boy;” Chris Tomlin and Lauren Daigle’s “Noel;” and Sovereign Grace Music’s “Hark! The Herald Angel Sings” as the most-played Xmas songs in Christian Music. (“Christmas Shoes” was in the top 10.)

Can getting an early start on our favorite carols and hymns help “every heart prepare him room”? W. David O. Taylor is no Scrooge—he says if churches want to start singing Christmas songs in November or early December, he won’t tell them to stop.

But as a professor at Fuller Theological Seminary, Taylor turns to the rhythms of the liturgical calendar. Advent, Christmastide (the 12-day Christmas feast beginning on December 25), and Epiphany help Christians rehearse a story of the world, who we are, and what God has done for us.

“Music engenders a way to grasp the world through our physical bodies, it gives us a feel for things that we might not be able otherwise to articulate, it enables us to imagine what, at first glance, may seem improbable or even impossible, and it immerses us in a sphere of metaphors by which we make sense of our personal and social lives,” Taylor said.

Because Advent and Christmas tell such important stories about Jesus’ life, Taylor believes Christians should pay close attention to these liturgical seasons. The secular, cultural trappings of Christmas—school holiday concerts, parties, and shopping—push in to every moment of life. By observing the season of waiting and a season of celebrating Christ’s arrival, the church observes what has come and the longings that still unfilled.

Pastor Courtney Ellis suggests that the church blend its celebration of Christmas and Advent into one season mixed with darkness and hope. She wrote last year in defense of early Christmas, saying:

The holy waiting of Advent combined with the unfettered celebration of Christmas helps us behold the sacred complexity of this season. We’re invited to light candles in the darkness, to proclaim hope through the silence, and to embrace peace amidst the violence of a world in desperate need of a Savior.

Even Mariah Carey observes some liturgical limits on holiday music. She refuses to play Christmas music or perform “All I Want for Christmas is You” until after Thanksgiving.

Books
Review

Does Socialism Have to Be ‘Godless’?

Heath W. Carter

How an earlier generation of believers stretched the boundaries of faith-based political imagination.

Dorothy Day (in dotted dress) looks at book in House of Hospitality library.

Dorothy Day (in dotted dress) looks at book in House of Hospitality library.

Christianity Today November 20, 2019
New York Daily News Archive / Contributor / Getty

Socialist” has more than double the letters of the average expletive and, for generations now, has packed a corresponding punch in American public life. To hurl the word at someone has been to mark that person not just outside the mainstream but dangerously so. What reasonable person could espouse such a “godless” political philosophy, not to mention one so prone to nightmarish consequences on this side of the veil?

Spiritual Socialists: Religion and the American Left

Spiritual Socialists: Religion and the American Left

Vaneesa Cook (Author)

University of Pennsylvania Museum Publications

272 pages

$44.24

For many Americans, the very mention of socialism evokes dystopian visions of totalitarian rule and endless breadlines, whether in the old USSR or in contemporary Venezuela. Certainly such associations lurked behind Southern Baptist leader Russell Moore’s June declaration on Twitter, “I hate socialism. I’ve seen its wreckage up close. It’s based on a faulty view of human nature. Plus, it doesn’t work.” Just last month, Prestonwood Baptist pastor Jack Graham put an even finer point on the matter, tweeting, “No serious Christian can support socialism.”

And yet many serious Christians have, as Vaneesa Cook underscores in her thought-provoking new book, Spiritual Socialists: Religion and the American Left. Cook finds in the past ample evidence that the intersection of Christianity and radicalism in the modern United States has in fact been quite bustling.

The heart of her story lies in the half-century between World War I and the Civil Rights movement, a time when “spiritual socialists,” as she calls them, stretched the boundaries of Christian social and political imagination, even as they helped reorient the American Left away from doctrinaire Marxism. As that latter point suggests, for Cook, as for her characters, socialism is a far more fluid category than the oft-cartoonish representations of it might suggest. Consistent with countless readers of magazines like Christianity Today, “spiritual socialists turned to the Bible rather than The Communist Manifesto for answers and inspiration.” It was their faith that led them to reject the American Dream. They felt a call, deep in their hearts, to seek first, instead, the kingdom of God.

‘A Revolution of the Heart’

Spiritual socialists did not agree on every detail of how the kingdom would come, but nearly to a person they believed that it was not through the state. As Cook observes, “Rather than encouraging centralized power politics, they promoted small-scale, local organization from the bottom up.” Dorothy Day offers one case in point. During the international economic crisis of the 1930s, which prompted countless Americans to put their trust in an expanding national government, she poured her energies instead into the fledgling Catholic Worker movement. She put little stock in the New Deal’s alphabet soup of lumbering federal bureaucracies; but unlike its conservative critics, she also had no faith in the free market.

Day urgently sought a “revolution of the heart.” She practiced and promoted voluntary poverty, lived out ideally in rural communes and urban houses of hospitality, where all would always be welcome. In an age that lionized expertise, she scoffed at the very notion of strategic planning, declaring at one point, “Instead of having plans and blueprints we have the actual people, the kind nobody wants, that the government will not help, the kind that are always being passed on.”

When pressed on the efficacy of her program, such as it was, she loved to bring up the feeding of the five thousand: “we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time; we can be responsible only for the action of the present moment but we can beg for an increase of love in our hearts that will vitalize and transform all of our individual actions, and know that God will take them and multiply them, as Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes.” Her life inspired a generation of Christian activists, and perhaps against the odds the Catholic Worker movement lives on to the present day. It is hard to imagine that Day, who reveled in divine mystery, would be surprised. “It all happened while we sat there talking,” she reflected in the final sentence of her memorable spiritual autobiography, The Long Loneliness, “and it is still going on.”

In local communities, spiritual socialists found the space not only to experiment with radical alternatives to capitalism but also to defy the racial strictures of Jim Crow America. In the early 1930s—at a moment when many on the secular left were emphasizing the paramount importance of class divisions and most white Christians were giving their amen to racial apartheid—the radicals that founded the Highlander Folk School in the mountains of Southern Tennessee forged a more faithful path. They had studied at places such as Union Theological Seminary and Vanderbilt Divinity School, where they had an opportunity to learn from Reinhold Niebuhr, Alva Taylor, and other leading exponents of American Social Christianity. By the time Zilla Hawes, Myles Horton, James Dombrowski, and Don West graduated they were eager to practice what their esteemed teachers preached—and then some.

Highlander quickly became a hub of interracial labor organizing and went on to develop into a laboratory for civil rights activists, who piloted not just teachings but also tactics guaranteed to push the boundaries of a deeply racist church and society. Sure enough, their norm-shattering faith got them into holy trouble. As Cook writes, “The school’s purposeful integration, a crucial cause for spiritual socialists, angered white supremacists in the community and provoked accusations of Communist-inspired infiltration.” But like the Catholic Worker movement, Highlander’s legacy far outstripped its numbers. Its circles encompassed many of the leading lights of the modern Civil Rights movement, including Septima Clark, Ella Baker, Andrew Young, Stokely Carmichael, and Rosa Parks. “It was a place I was very reluctant to leave,” Parks would later reflect. “I gained there the strength to persevere in my work for freedom, not just for blacks, but for all oppressed people.”

Cook’s riveting story features a wide-ranging cast of other characters too, including some, such as Martin Luther King Jr., who are household names and a variety of others that deserve to be. In the latter category are the likes of A. J. Muste, who came up through the Dutch Reformed Church and went on to devote his life to a variety of crusades for peace and justice; Henry A. Wallace, whose espoused a radical faith even while serving as Secretary of Agriculture, Vice President, and Secretary of Commerce under Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s and 1940s; and Pauli Murray, the first African-American woman to be ordained an Episcopal priest, and one of a smaller number of spiritual socialists who emphasized the need to push not only for economic and racial but also gender equity.

Lines of Continuity

Spiritual socialism defies tidy boundaries, and yet, by book’s end, one still longs for just a bit more clarity on its extent and limits. This reader wondered, in particular, whether the lines of continuity between Cook’s characters and an earlier generation of social gospelers and Christian socialists may be stronger than they appear here, and also whether minoritized voices may be even more central to the story than they are in this telling of it.

Yet such lingering questions should not detract from the tremendous service that Cook has done in lifting up a spiritual-socialist tradition that has languished too long in obscurity. The Cold War propelled a countervailing gospel of free enterprise to the fore, and our contemporary context remains deeply shaped by it. Little wonder that, fully 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, so many American believers struggle to conceive of the possibility that anything good could come of socialism. The remarkable witness of the radical Christians at the heart of this book suggests otherwise. Their faith moved mountains. The least we can do is expand our moral imaginations.

Heath W. Carter is an associate professor of American Christianity at Princeton Theological Seminary and the author of Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago (Oxford University Press).

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