New Wave Iconoclasm
Years ago when my wife and I were just starting to walk with the Lord again, we had resumed attending the Episcopalian church we had been at previously. It was a tumultuous time for Episcopalians in this country and we would eventually leave the church when the interim priest denied the bodily resurrection of Christ. There was one Sunday in particular which was the Sunday in the spring when you set your clocks an hour ahead. Needless to say, we were late for church and, since we were already in town, we decided to find another service to attend. Having been raised in fundamentalism, liberal mainline Protestantism was about all that I could handle at the time.
“Let’s try the UU Church,” I said.
The service was one of the strangest things we’d ever seen. The woman minister basically chewed up little bits of Pema Chodron quotes for us and spit them onto our plates so that complex concepts like mindfulness would be easier for the soft-boiled laity to chew. “Mmmmm. Mindfulness,” everyone sighed. There were lots of white robes and organ interludes. There was standing and sitting and even an offertory. The building itself was an old brick Methodist meeting house and ushers met you at the door. It had the appearance of being church but was so clearly only the carcass of something that once was. Elvis had left the building long ago. Ichabod. We stood to sing the final number from a hardcover hymnal which was shelved on the back of the pew in front of us, just like the churches in which we grew up. As we neared the end of She’ll be Coming around the Mountain when She Comes, the congregation was encouraged to “really sing it out on the last verse.” And they did.
As my little family peeled away from the assembly, one of the Sunday school teachers ran to catch up with us. “Come back again,” she said. “We’re not a normal church. You won’t ever hear any Christian exclusivity here.” No doubt. Episcopalians who don’t even believe the Apostles’ Creed they recite began to look like conservatives in light of this circus.
According to the Cambridge Dictionary, cultural appropriation is defined as the act of taking or using things from a culture that is not your own, especially without showing that you understand or respect this culture. While I do not consider what is being called cultural appropriation to be a damnable heresy, the priests of critical theory do. The charge I am bringing, I am leveling at the woke churches that are falling all over themselves to parrot the mantras of the new piety movement. Desperate for a righteousness of their own making, they confess being of European descent as if it was the blaspheming of the Holy Spirit. Can there be any forgiveness for such a sin? They repent to their confessors of micro-aggressions and implicit biases like pre-converted Luthers, remembering new crimes as soon as they have finished naming the old ones.
This summer, the National Museum of African American History and Culture proudly offered a whiteness chart in order to aid in the identifying of the institutionalized whiteness that is such a plague to our nation. In order to make either repudiation or repentance of whiteness that much easier, the NMAAHC offered the use of this picture chart to the critically illiterate. One can look at the poster and see the description of a mother and a father with two children, the lift their eyes from the chart and see this symbol out there in the world. The result should be that racism would be understood as being alive and well. After all, intact families and other symbols of racism are still all around us. Icons of whiteness are named: Christian symbols, Christian holidays, the belief that hard work should precede success, the appreciation of meat and potatoes as good food, practicing a delaying of gratification, attention given to the art of decision-making, the belief in causes having a relationship with effects . . . I wish I was kidding.
A church that wants to be woke, that wants to embrace the lexicon of newspeak, that wants to fashion a golden calf but insist that it be called YAHWEH needs to cease and desist from using the language and symbols of Christianity. Either be woke and be consistent or repent of having abandoned the Gospel in favor of the local gods of the hour.
According to the prophets of the woke, these named symbols of oppression are good for nothing but trampling under foot. To continue to use nuclear family nouns for God (Father) is systemic oppression. To display crosses or Bibles in the sanctuaries of liberal churches should no longer be understood as acknowledging Christianity to be a tiny broken piece of glass in the mosaic of expressed faith; rather, it should be seen as either the remaining artifacts of an oppressive regime, worthy only of being demolished, or as being an act of cultural appropriation and something to be eschewed completely, since the core tenets of Christianity are either not understood or not respected by these churches. Which is it? Are these woke, liberal churches not taking down the Confederate flag or are they trying to speak Ebonics?
In short, if you don’t believe the Apostles’ Creed, stop calling yourself a Christian. If you don’t believe the Apostles’ Creed, get rid of the Bibles in your pews. Stop calling yourself a church. Stop praying to some vaguely Christian vestige of God. Stop celebrating Christmas. Stop taking holidays. Stop calling them holidays (holy days). Stop saying goodbye (God-be-with-ye). Stop using the furniture of the oppressors. Stop wearing their clothes and celebrating their feast days. Stop listening to their music. Stop halting between two things. If you are with the God of Abraham, the Father of Jesus, then own Him. If you are not pleading for His blood to be on you and your children then stop using the advent of Christ’s coming into the world as a reason for your kids to get two weeks off from school. Stop going to your parents house for Easter dinner. Stop saying My God when you are overwhelmed or Jesus Christ when you stub your toe. Delete your Mahalia Jackson albums from your Spotify account and demand that Gospel music be removed as a legitimate genre. Stop acknowledging the work of men like Bach or Martin Luther King Jr as being anything but destructive, because all that they accomplished was directly shaped by Christianity. Stop all of this and more because these are blatantly Christian artifacts and they should either be destroyed or they should be venerated. Pick a lane.
A friend of mine was the worship minister at a nearby Congregationalist church. He was inevitably taken to task for trending the music towards the most offensive songs in the hymnal. The squeamish, wilting minister asked him to, in the future, refrain from choosing songs that highlighted the blood of Lord unless it was Good Friday and, even then, people tend to dislike the gore.
This reminds me of the time that Christopher Hitchens was interviewed by Unitarian minister Marilyn Sewell. She tried wielding her progressive aikido against Hitchens in such a way as to discredit his anti-theism with her own “being Christian” yet not believing in any of the supernatural components of the faith. Hitchens very quickly and very plainly took her weapon away from her by stating that if she did not believe the Apostles’ Creed, she was not in fact a Christian. Either words have agreed upon meanings or the tool of language must be abandoned. A is not A and non-A. But anyone who believes in logic is guilty of whiteness. If that person happens to be black and believes in logic, then he is simply a white man with a black face. Blackface on whiteness is as sinful as you can get.
In order to buy into the insanity of newspeak, one has to accept equivocation as a helpful tool of language. Thankfully, the fundamentalists of the progressive left don’t even want to play that game any more. No more trying to call it Christianity, but meaning moralistic therapeutic deism. If only the churches who believe themselves to be culturally relevant by adopting woke politics would catch up to the trends they are following. One thing is crystal clear . . . mediocre, lukewarm, cultural Christianity no longer has a home in this country. Amen and amen. It’s about time.
