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| "The Secret of England's Greatness," Thomas Jones Barker, National Portrait Gallery, London (my photo—I wanted to include the frame). |
In my series of blog posts, almost six years ago, on building trustworthy churches, one of the posts was centered on Gordon Aeschliman's book Cages of Pain: Healing for Disillusioned Christians, published in 1991. I read that book in preparation for my service at Friends United Meeting (1993-2000), which began during a period of theological and cultural conflict at FUM. That all happened before I'd heard of deconstructing one's faith.
By the time I wrote the post "Choose curiosity, part two," the reality of deconstruction was more familiar to me, particularly through the actual experiences of people I trusted. As I say in that post, I thought about the factors that helped explain why I hadn't had some of the disillusioning experiences that had caused them to question their earlier understandings of faith.
As I continue to wonder how I can support Friends who care about building a trustworthy church, I've thought about those factors. How have I been sheltered from pain and disillusionment?
One very jarring moment happened a couple of months ago at the National Portrait Gallery in London, when I stood in horrified fascination in front of T. Jones Barker's painting, "The Secret of England's Greatness." This painting may have been inspired by an anecdote, one version of which is recounted in the gallery's description of the painting, in which Queen Victoria supposedly explained to her colonial visitors that the Bible, rather than England's wealth or military might, explained her nation's greatness.
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| "Black History Walks" on the "Greatness" painting. Screenshot from this video. |
I was stunned by the painting's blatant colonialist condescension, an observation that I'm hardly the first to make! The original intention was surely to elevate piety and charity as noble characteristics of the Empire and its self-attributed civilizing mission. And if it were possible to neutralize the imperial agendas from Christian missionaries' work in the golden age of Western missions (some would say not possible!!), there were cumulative blessings in many places. (See Robert Woodberry's "The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy.")
But it's equally true, as historian Michael Ohajuru quotes in the "Black History Walks" Youtube video on that painting, "When England came to Africa, they had the Bible, we had the land. They said, 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land."
Part of what shook me at the gallery was the realization that, had I been around in 1863, when this painting was first exhibited, I probably would not have been shocked. I would have been sheltered from the Empire's coercive cannons. From what am I now being sheltered?
Scot McKnight's blog recently featured a guest post by Aimee Byrd, "Her Aversion to Christian Language." After commenting on a number of words and phrases dear to most evangelicals I know, she says,
I’m not tossing out the whole Christian vernacular. I’m not saying, let’s get rid of the language. Or that the language is bad. But I don’t put my trust in the words. And I see how they can catch a virus, or how bacteria multiplies on them, and they can make you sick. It’s a tricky sickness because it disguises itself and masks as sanctification, another tainted word.
I am having to dig deeper, read wider, listen stronger, ask more questions, and be more descriptive about what is meaningful, beautiful, agonizing, disintegrating, real, and good. This is more difficult and much richer.
Given that her situation, and her aversions, are shared by many in our Quaker yearly meeting, and by countless others who are clearly not sheltered, I need to pay careful attention.
Speaking of Scot McKnight, I've just finished reading a book that he wrote with co-author Tommy Preson Phillips, Invisible Jesus: A Book about Leaving the Church and Looking for Christ. The authors use their own experiences of deconstructing former certainties, as well as many quotations and case histories of others with similar experiences, and statistical data about developments in North American institutional Christianity, to open up the major crisis represented by today's exodus from established churches.
McKnight and Phillips believe, and try to document, that most of those exiles still feel attracted to Jesus—just not to those who claim to be his official representatives and spokespeople, and the structures, methods, and toxic propaganda that those who hold power in the church are using to try to keep the rest in line. The authors describe how that power and propaganda are used, and the painful results for so many.
Invisible Jesus is not an apologetic aimed at those exiles and refugees to try to lure them back, nor a handbook of strategies for church leaders to use for that purpose. It's more a book for people like me, who are trying to understand what's going on. In today's Christian establishment, why is Jesus so invisible!? For that analysis, I think the book is an effective resource. It is eloquent on the beauty and centrality of Jesus (and on the importance of identifying anything that gets in the way of authentic relationship with him). It doesn't deal directly with the situation of those who have even given up on the reality of Jesus himself, although there's a lot of value in their careful distinction between the Jesus who never gives up on us, and the figurehead presented by toxic theologies. I recommend the book.
Related:
William Barr, Max Boot, and "the vapor trails of Christianity"
The dilemma of the uninvited missionary
The "theology of disillusionment" in the Russian Orthodox context.
On Russia and Syria, diagnoses and prognoses. (However, on the Russian bases in Syria....)
Whose Simone Weil? A survey by Jack Hanson.
It’s telling that Weil has risen to new prominence in the same moment as Arendt: both are safely dead, safely female (and so, it is assumed, feminist); perhaps above all, both are so safely historical in their antifascism that readers can pick and choose what to apply and what to allegorize, what to take as eternal truth and what to dismiss as being simply of their time, or their unique, unreproducible personality.
Friends Peace Teams' work in Chechnya.
Blues from Dnipro, Ukraine. "Help Me."
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