Unfundamentalist

Above All, Love

Post-Evangelical Life

by Holly Love in Christian Issues

Back in December, I wrote here and on my blog about how I was having a hard time attending my evangelical church after the election. That piece struck a nerve. To date it has almost 7,500 Facebook shares, making it the most read post that I have ever written, by far. This tells me that lots of other people are feeling the same way and struggling with the same things that I was in the wake of November 8th.

I want to tell the rest of the story–what happened after we left that evangelical church and started going to a “mainline” one. It’s not the story of theologically weak/watered down preaching that I thought it would be. For my fellow dissatisfied evangelicals who aren’t sure about leaving: there is light at the end of the tunnel.

My family is now attending a Presbyterian church (USA) about five minutes from our house. I had always thought of the PCUSAs as the “liberal” Presbyterians, and they are, in a sense. This is the first mainline church that I have personally ever attended, and I wasn’t sure what to expect. I was probably not alone in having a mental picture of mainline churches as being kind of like this: wishy-washy, unfamiliar, lukewarm.

But … surprise: that’s not what I found at all. Our new church feels surprisingly similar to the traditional Baptist church of my early childhood: pews, hymnals, a full choir. All the children coming to the front for a children’s message.

There are some welcome differences, however–the associate pastor, music minister, and… [Read more…] about Post-Evangelical Life

How Evangelical Kids Can Get Their Faith Shaken on the First Day of University

by Randal Rauser in Christian Issues

Let’s consider the first morning at university for one hypothetical 18 year old raised in a typical evangelical church subculture. His name is David.
Getting ready for university
David’s Christian leaders were seeking to grow his faith strong. And so, as he grew up in the church he was taught a deep suspicion of many views contrary to his evangelical Christian convictions. For example, he was taught that the Neo-Darwinian theory of biological evolution is wrong. But not simply that it is wrong: he was taught that it is a lie, that it is a theory on its last legs which is sustained by little more than the anti-Christian animus of those who propagate it. He still remembers the sober words of his youth pastor: “Don’t let the evolutionist make a monkey out of you.”

David was also warned about atheism. Atheists, he was taught, are godless people who hate God and repress a deep anger toward him. They don’t want to live in accord with God’s law and that’s why they reject belief in him. So they are merely fools, as it says in Psalm 14:1.

With that background, David faces his first morning as a new student at a large public university, a school with more first year students than people living in his home town. When he arrives David encounters a bewildering number of cultures and languages, to say nothing of the staggering number of life philosophies on other. The Christian subculture in which he was raised is now inundated by a tsunami of alternative perspectives he hardly… [Read more…] about How Evangelical Kids Can Get Their Faith Shaken on the First Day of University

Trump’s Travel Ban Hurts American Children

by Sana Khatib in Current Events

Embed from Getty Images

[Editor’s note: though this piece was written in response to Trump’s first travel ban, the issues still apply to the subsequent new travel bans.]

My son is eleven and my daughter is nine. They have only ever known a black president; that is as far back as their memory will take them. When President Obama was elected to be our 44th president, my son was attending a majority-African American preschool. The students celebrated by making paper crowns with an image of their president in the center. The celebrations continued as my husband and I joined President Obama at Grant Park, in Chicago, to listen to his acceptance speech. People were cheering, crying, and hugging strangers. The crowd was overwhelmed with emotion and a sense of pride for how far our country had come. We were a part of history.

Eight years later, we are now living under a Trump presidency. The night the election results were clearly falling in Trump’s favor, I could not sleep. I awoke at 3 a.m. to check the results yet again, at which point it was clear that Trump would become our next president. My heart sank from fear of what this would mean for me and my loved ones, as Muslim Americans with Syrian heritage. I hoped for the best–that Trump would not fulfill his promises to surveil, register, and ban Muslims. I hoped he wouldn’t continue to encourage a re-emergence of white supremacy, an irrational fear of African Americans, Hispanics, and other minorities, and a… [Read more…] about Trump’s Travel Ban Hurts American Children

An Illusion of Freedom

by Christy Wood in Christian Spirituality

Growing up in a Christian cult (Bill Gothard, of IBLP and ATI), I’ve had plenty of experience with legalism. Formulas abounded in my world–if you do such and such, then you are guaranteed this fabulous result, but woe to you if you don’t. Rules, standards, commitments, all these kinds of things supposedly made you a better Christian and more likely to have God’s blessing on your life. “Godly” people acted this way, dressed that way, and avoided these things, etc. Performance, outward show, controlled behavior, fear, and anxiety…I’m excessively familiar with all of this.

Unfortunately, you don’t have to be in a cult to experience legalism. There is plenty of it spread throughout “mainstream” Christianity. How exciting.

Many Christians will tell you that they aren’t legalistic (even though they are following a specific code of behavior) because they aren’t trying to earn their way to heaven. However, if you ask why they do good things, you will find that they are still trying to earn something: blessings, God’s pleasure, or maybe just the image of a “Good Christian.”

I truly believe the Christian community is starting to wake up. There are a good handful of us talking about legalism, exposing it, reacting to it. I love this! But we cannot confuse rebellion against legalism with actual freedom that comes through grace.

I’ve seen it and I’ve been there. We hate legalism, we realize how stupid it is, and we reject it and embrace things that we’ve always been told were wrong.… [Read more…] about An Illusion of Freedom

The Love of My Refugee Friend

by Sheri Faye Rosendahl in Current Events

This guest post is by Sheri Faye Rosendahl.

American Christians, those who support the refugee ban, I have a friend I would like you to meet.

Let me tell you about my dear friend. He happens to be a refugee in the Middle East where he and his beautiful family live in an incredibly old refugee camp that looks more like cement apartment complexes than the camps you see on the news. Kind of like a unique sort of small neighborhood.

And, oh yeah, the camp is partially surrounded by a massive, internationally-deemed-illegal, wall that cuts through their country’s land. 

Now, this is not your “normal wall.” It hovers over the camp, twenty-six feet of concrete intimidation. The wall is complete with security cameras, motion control sensors, and multiple watch towers staffed 24/7 with the finest snipers. It feels as if you are in an open air prison. So maybe unique is the wrong word, it is more like a small neighborhood you might see in a bad, chilling, sci-fi movie.

Another fun (and by fun, I mean terrifying) fact about where my friend lives: there are often night raids that can occur at any given moment. What exactly is a night raid? Well, soldiers from the neighboring country (you know those sniper guys and some of their friends who are often posted up on their wall tower) storm in with their big guns, fingers always clasping the trigger, search random houses, and make arrests, often of young boys.

Sometimes, the streets are filled with tear gas and… [Read more…] about The Love of My Refugee Friend

Answered Prayer

by Jill Crainshaw in Christian Spirituality

This guest post is by Jill Crainshaw.

Dr. William Barber, II, is a hero. He wrote an op-ed this week following the National Prayer Breakfast. I have continued to think about his essay and about the powerful words he quoted from Frederick Douglass (1818-1895): “I prayed for freedom for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.”

****************************

“These times we’re living in
call for courageous people,”
the preacher said that day.
I am not brave.
Never have been.

Bravery is something to be
read about in storybooks
where quixotic heroes
ride out on prancing
stallions to do battle,
sabers flashing in
magnificent sunlight.

Bravery is something to be
prayed for in church
where harsh living
daylights must first pass
by saintly stained-glass
sentinels of bygone years
before being transmuted
into the kinder, gentler
beams that caress Sunday
morning’s bowed heads.

Isn’t it?

Or maybe we should
pray for freedom,
like Frederick Douglass did,
walking in faith
until our legs are braver
than our thoughts.

So, in this present cloud
of unknowing, being not
brave, we resolve, if
we can find the honesty
to do it, to live on
as best we can,
stringing together each
momentary breath
like pearls of hope to
place with the gentleness
of a lover around our
fear to name its wounds
as our own and journey on
not in spite of
but with it.

For out there, where the
times we’re living in
call for courageous people,
the groaning ground that
soaked up the… [Read more…] about Answered Prayer

Mercy Is Not Enough

by Chuck Queen in Christian Issues

The Hebrew prophets proclaimed over and over again the need for justice in the land. Micah was very clear about what he considered essential: “O mortal, what is good, and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness [to do mercy], and to walk humbly with your God” (6:8). Isaiah says, “Seek justice,” and then he immediately enumerates some specifics of what that involved in his day and time: “Rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow” (Isa. 1:17).

Seeking justice meant standing with and advocating for the most vulnerable in society. That included at least three primary groups in ancient Israel: widows, orphans, and aliens (foreigners, immigrants, undocumented persons). The prophets railed against Israel’s leaders and the people at large when they prided themselves in being faithful to their religious rituals and practices, but neglected justice.

Unfortunately, many Christians in more conservative, evangelical traditions such as churches affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, Pentecostal groups, the Church of God, the Church of Christ, etc, and some of the more conservative churches within mainline denominations, have never been challenged to consider all the biblical texts dealing with justice. They think justice means that a person gets what he or she deserves or they interpret it as satisfying some demand of the law. They have never been taught the concept of restorative justice that pervades the prophetic tradition… [Read more…] about Mercy Is Not Enough

An Open Letter to My Fellow Christians

by Matthew Distefano in Christian Issues

Dear Family (Christians and otherwise),

I’ll begin by saying that I love you. I truly do. All of you, even those who slander me and spread gossip, threatening me with the very fires of hell itself, are my brothers and sisters in Christ. For if not by the grace of the almighty God, the one Jesus called Abba, none of us would be here. So I write this to you as a member of the family we call humanity, and as one who understands that we all need grace in the most abundant of ways.

As a family, we are at a crossroads. Call it a time of apocalypse (Greek for “an unveiling”). No matter what we think of the current sociopolitical situation, whether we endorse the present administration or bemoan it, we cannot deny the gravity of the state we find ourselves in. As a nation, and indeed a world, we are divided. In more ways than not! Political party lines, divided. Religious lines, divided. Racial lines, divided. Cultural lines, divided. And while division, or rather, differentiation, is not necessarily a bad thing, what we are experiencing is a crisis in which our divisiveness is being driven purely by fear of the other, where anything and anyone that doesn’t fit into our current myopic worldview is met with violent denunciation, rather than being driven by an acknowledgement of our differentiation, and a growing empathy and understanding of it.

Our message, more often than not, is “be afraid, be very afraid.”

Because of this, there will come a time when we will have to… [Read more…] about An Open Letter to My Fellow Christians

Why "God Is Sovereign" Is Not Enough (And What You Can Do Instead)

by Holly Love in Christian Issues, Current Events

I’m in an interesting place right now. Things are going really well for me personally, and for my immediate family, in most areas.

It’s the outside world I’m worried about. It seems like it’s going to hell in the proverbial handbasket, literally being dismantled before my eyes, and that I have no power to help or do anything to prevent the collapse.

I’m speaking, of course, about the catastrophe that began with the presidential inauguration last Friday, and also about a work situation that I can’t be too specific about. Both of these situations are out of my control, and both are hurting people I care about. And that hurts me, very much.

I have had some iteration of the phrase, “Don’t worry, God is sovereign,” thrown at me twice in the last 24 hours, by two different people, in response to each of these issues.

Situation 1: Yesterday, in a conversation about the work issue, a person in a position of power who is not directly affected by the situation told a group that basically all we could do was pray and have faith that God has “got this.”

Situation 2: Today at school, one of my fifth graders, who has been continuously worried since November 8th about his parents being deported, was literally crying so hard he couldn’t breathe or speak. I knew that he had had trouble sleeping as we got closer and closer to the inauguration, and he said that he had been having terrible nightmares about what would happen once DJT became president. I am… [Read more…] about Why "God Is Sovereign" Is Not Enough (And What You Can Do Instead)

Inauguration Day, the Women's March and the Lonely in Between

by Sarah Anderson in Current Events

With all that’s happened in the turning tides of the political climate in Washington, D.C., I find a misquote—of an original Albert Einstein quote—to be appropriate:

“Everything should be as simple as it can be, but not simpler.”

It’s obvious we live in a divisive time. But lately I’ve started to wonder if we live in an oversimplified one as well. I wonder if our heightened emotions have mistakenly led us to believe things were much more straightforward than they are. We feel so passionately about so much. And the louder our voices get, the deeper our convictions go. We are certain unity is possible. (If only the other side who could begin to see things our way.)

It’s simple.

But it’s not. For me, at least. And feeling this way has led to me feeling isolated in a way I didn’t expect. Because I am not sure my beliefs can be as neatly packaged as each party narrative would have me believe. As a result, it feels like I don’t belong anywhere.

I align myself with some of the ideals, both the Inauguration, January 20th, and the Women’s March, January 21st, represented. And feel undoubtedly uncomfortable with others. Meaning the most radical and controversial place to be, and as a result, the most lonely position to take these days, is that which acknowledges the intricacy in all of it. That refuses to call simple what is not simple.

A few years ago I made a theological change. Where before my starting point in the story of… [Read more…] about Inauguration Day, the Women's March and the Lonely in Between