Can the Church Save the World? - Part 2

When I opened my Atlanta Journal and Constitution app last Thursday (July 20, 2023), the banner read, “Dangerous Heat Rages On.” The newspaper’s front page declared its top national story: “Nation Endures Searing Heat, Deadly Storms.” The paper then had a tagline for the national story, “Extreme Weather.” As I wrote in the first installment of this 3-part blog series, we can no longer call what we are experiencing, “extreme” weather. No longer can we say that searing heat, massive rain and floods, water shortages, violent storms, and never-ending droughts represent extreme weather. It is all normal now. This is where we are. And it is going to get worse.

Can the church save the world? It’s an audacious question, particularly in light of the state of the church today. There are 2.6 billion persons who identity as Christian today. That number is larger than the population of any country on earth. Moreover, that number is larger than any other religious sector on the planet, followed by the 2 billion persons who identify with Islam. But the church is not well. The body is sick.

 Malignant Christianity

I first coined the moniker, “Malignant Christianity” in mid-2020. It was when the country and the world were coming to grips with the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. Here is the link to the blog: https://www.rightspirit.org/blog/2020/6/9/being-saved-from-malignant-christianity 

Christianity did not get sick in 2020. To understand the sickness today you have to go back to 313 CE when Emperor Constantine established Christianity as the state religion throughout the Roman Empire. With that edict alone, the church’s identity and calling completely changed. To understand what happened is to look into the mind and the motivation of Constantine. His aim was not to humble himself and seek to follow Jesus. It was to get God on his side. It was to elevate his power and to rule as much of the world as he could. Fueled by the fusion of empire with church, his program would seek to conquer, subjugate, and enslave whomever the “other” was in relationship to the empire. In other words, Constantine managed to enmesh the political and military power of the empire with his idea of Christianity. This is an astonishing development from when Jesus carried his cross up to Golgotha because it was the religious, political, and military powers who colluded to crucify him. The God we know in Jesus, who stood with the powerless and marginalized at the bottom of the social strata, was now co-opted to align with raw power at the top. And Jesus wept (John 11: 35).

 Identity and Calling

When God called Abraham and Sarah in Genesis 12, God made clear their new identify and that of their descendants. I will be your God and you will be my people. God made clear their calling – to be a light to all the nations and to bless all the people of the earth. In the same way, being baptized into the death and resurrection of Jesus confers identity and calling. You are a child of God, sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked with the cross of Christ forever. Let your light so shine before others that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.  

Whether one is listening to the calling of the people of God in the stories in the Hebrew Scriptures or the words of Jesus, everything that God’s people are to be about is summed up this way: Love God and love neighbor. To love God is to love what and whom God loves, which is everybody. To love neighbor is to love not only the person next door but also the desperate immigrant at the border, the urban poor living in high density housing and suffering from searing heat, or the migrant halfway around the world dangerously malnourished and mired in water up to the neck because of climate change. It is a love without limits or boundaries.

But that’s not the way things are. Christianity has become malignant. It’s sick and must be healed if it has any shot at all at being the prime catalyst for saving the world from the existential threat of climate change. 

A Brief Pathology Report

There is a large swath of the church straight out of the Constantine playbook. Armed with political influence, it sees its role as the admirals of the fleet of rescue ships, primarily to save people from the coming rapture and wrath of God. Never mind that the entire notion of the rapture, as well as the popular Left Behind series on which it is based, is a lie. It emerged in the 1830s by Anglican John Darby, who had an agenda. It got people’s attention and it sells. This mutation of malignant Christianity offers a deal to have a ticket on the lifeboats through a transaction that includes a particular confession and conversion experience which asks persons to do things Jesus never asked. It is a church that seeks to save people from the wrong side of the cultural wars and from woke-ism. It is where White Christian Nationalism is celebrated as being ordained by God. It resists anything that may mitigate against climate change because all measures are infringements upon “My God-given rights and freedom.” If you are not aware of how powerful this typology of church is, every person seeking the Republican nomination for President is trying to woo the adherents to this malignant version of the church. Of course, Democrat candidates also will nuance what they say to get whatever votes they can.

The particularly distressing aspect of this malignancy is that it both belittles the science and asks its adherents to not pay any attention to climate change. It’s all woke-ism. The rapture is soon coming. And if God is going to rescue them and then destroy the earth, why care about it?

We hear much about “My God-given rights,” whether it is owning an arsenal of assault rifles or making personal choices with an exceptionally large carbon footprint. Never mind that the prominent American value of individualism and God-given rights are not biblical themes. To the contrary, the scriptures and the teachings of Jesus hold as primal importance the value of community and how we are to live and love together as part of a human community.

So that the reader does not presume that I am solely focused on what seems like the role of the MAGA “Christians,” there are also very progressive and liberal expressions of the church that wear their woke-ism as a badge. They are quite arrogant about it. Loving their causes, they get folks riled up about all kinds of social issues. They see and label anyone who is right of center as the boogeyman. Paying scant attention to the bedrock claim of the church – God raised the crucified Jesus from the dead – they devote energy to their causes. Sadly, the evidence reveals more talk than action, more finger-pointing and blame than trying to bridge differences.

Tension with the Truth

A friend of mine who is a bishop of one the ELCA synods in the south told me that two-thirds of the pastors in his synod are under great duress in the congregations they serve. Because they have preached and taught about racial justice, white privilege, and climate change, influential parishioners have attacked them for being a “mouthpiece of CNN and MSNBC.” Pastors often feel threatened by the realities that if they preach or teach about racial justice, gun control, or climate change, large donors will leave. Even worse, the pastor may be forced to resign.

In a papal encyclical letter in 2015, Pope Francis declared that the Catholic Church views climate change as a moral issue that must be addressed in order to protect the Earth and everyone on it. Lauded by many around the globe, Pope Francis also got substantial pushback from people arguing that the “church needs to stick to spiritual things.”

 Dare We Hope?

Despite the sordid history of empire Christianity and today’s manifestations of malignant Christianity, there are yet followers of Jesus and congregations of all sizes and stripes whose life and witness in the world serve as a sign of what is possible. These are congregations who understand themselves to be contrast societies, that is, in the world and not of it. The death and resurrection of Jesus has grasped them in such a way that they are intentional about being the heart, hands, and feet of Jesus in the world. They come not as saviors or judges, but as humble and joyful servants. They know that God does God’s best work among God’s people in the dark, when matters look their bleakest, when we are at the end of our proverbial rope. They are able to see what the world cannot see, dream what the world cannot dream, and work for what the world cannot give itself.

If the church is going to be the catalyst that brings about a new day in our attention to climate change and can save us from a cataclysmic future, these churches will have to show us the way.

Can the church save the world? Against all odds, I believe it can. I will shine the light on that hope in my coming third and final blog in this series, to be released in early August. Stay tuned.

In the abiding hope of the empty tomb,