The Intimidation Factor. Charles Redfern

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СКАЧАТЬ Two influencers told me I was not a godly man and the rumor mill spun tales of Obama endorsements from the pulpit.

      God’s Word gave me no help in my quest for popularity. I now suspected Ken Sande was missing something, so I began reading the Gospel According to Mark with an eye for Jesus’ conflict-resolution methods. It became clear: Christ intentionally sparked grumbling when he healed on the Sabbath and challenged the religious leaders. I closed Mark after the third chapter and chose a different path: I took the criticism seriously—especially the one stipulating I didn’t preach from the Bible. I preached veritably verse-by-verse in a series on Psalms 120–134, the so-called “Songs of Ascents.” It didn’t work. One of the most prominent leaders pulled me into a side room and said he saw no sermon improvement.

      I sat down after he left. It was obvious. Soon, the he-doesn’t-fits would ripen into we-gotta-fire-hims, with a shredded congregation as a result even if I survived. I had no choice but to gamble and submit my resignation—in mid-September of 2009, when the unemployment rate hovered at 9.8 percent and foreclosures thundered across the land. I’d give the church a three-month notice in which I’d confess my wrongs (“I should have taken more time to get to know the congregation during my first year; I should have been more patient and devoted more time to listening; I should have paid more attention to body language that was being conveyed to me”). The idea: I’d model grace under fire during my lame-duck months. Perhaps such modeling would pull the church out of its irascibility and—just maybe—I could rescind the resignation.

      I conferred with Andrea and she agreed (Her comment: “Our life is surreal”) and, after notifying the general board, I read my confessional resignation aloud the following Sunday.

      The board met that week and said I should step down at the end of the month—with a guarantee that I’d be paid through November. That made things awkward. I was already slated to take the last Sunday off because of a family obligation, so next Sunday would be my ignoble last. There’d be no grace under fire, no exit with dignity, no time for closure. I was out.

      I was asked to attend a meeting the following week—after I was no longer the pastor—and slammed with a job review filled with personal invective.

      Welcome to bully Christianity, where not even a resignation in the Great Recession is enough.

      I admit it. I was angry, and I found no solace in the broader evangelical scene. I visited other churches and met other evangelicals. One normally reasonable and well-respected colleague stoked those Obama-the-Anti-Christ fears in an e-mail. He was serious. I nearly spilled my coffee on my laptop. I visited one church in which qualms about the Affordable Care Act were delivered as a “prophetic word,” which meant Obamacare’s defenders sided with the devil. All seemed to march to tea party’s drumbeat as they saluted Rush Limbaugh.

      They needed a reply, so I swung partisan in the opposite direction as a balancing act. I joined my local Democratic Town Committee. I also joined my town’s Green Energy Committee, signed on with the board of directors of the state-wide Interreligious Eco-Justice Network, and volunteered for the steering committee for the Connecticut Roundtable on Climate and Jobs (a labor-environmentalist-clergy alliance advocating sound ecological policies). I wrote for an on-line religious journal in Connecticut before becoming a HuffPost contributor in 2011 (one friend described my columns as “rants”), then fanned out to other publications. I was even a panelist at conferences on climate change, both in Connecticut and in Washington DC.

      What a thrill. I always wanted to be a panelist.

      Meanwhile, my family hacked through the Great Recession’s brambles as I dropped job applications into the era’s black hole. Not even temp agencies wanted me. The bank account dried up. We missed mortgage payments, filed for relief, and threaded the lender’s maze: Bank representatives claimed they lost the paper work and asked us to re-file; collectors threatened foreclosure unless they received this month’s check. Our mortgage company was later cited for abuse.

      I asked myself the dreaded question as I muttered on my neighborhood walks: Am I being evicted from my spiritual home as well as my physical home? Am I really a bona fide evangelical? I fit nowhere: Not with Pentecostals (tried that), not with right-wing evangelicalism, not with so-called progressive Christianity (I visited some theologically liberal gatherings; they felt like spiritual dead zones). I loved the Vineyard, but the association hadn’t planted any churches in the Hartford area.

      Finally, I remembered the American Baptist Churches, the denomination that ordained me right out of seminary. They always treated me well. I scheduled a meeting with Connecticut’s executive director. Could I come back if I wolfed down humble pie?

      Yes. They’d welcome me back—with open arms, even, especially since my ordination was still active (miracle of miracles: someone forgot to file the paperwork). Soon, I was the salaried, intentional interim at a church in a mid-Connecticut city. We caught up on our mortgage payments and silenced the bill collectors. The people of that church lauded me in job reviews while giving me helpful critiques and took no offense at my politics. I could even make those trips to Washington DC and hobnob with leaders in the evangelical environmental movement. I no longer walked in fear of bullies. The same was true at another intentional interim pastorate at a church near New London.

      I eventually saw the weaknesses of today’s condescending Democratic Party (all pro-lifers and supporters of traditional marriage were “extremists”) and distanced myself from overt partisanship.

      Then calamity struck: My cancer revived with a vengeance. Surgeons sliced out a huge chunk of my tongue in August of 2015 and rebuilt it with skin from my left arm. The disease struck my entire mouth in January 2016. We beat it back with rugged chemotherapy, complimented by radiation, but then it spread to an area near my sternum and returned to my tongue. Radiation burned it away from my sternum and more chemotherapy jailed it on my tongue, but I was told my cancer was incurable. I now speak with a severe speech impediment and can only eat soft food.

So much for preaching, speaking, and trips to Washington. I resigned from all the boards and helplessly watched events through chemotherapy’s haze. The unthinkable unfolded. In 2016, many evangelical leaders endorsed a philandering, thrice-married, misogynistic, science-denying, anti-Mexican casino owner and reality television star, and surveys indicated that 81 percent of self-identified white evangelicals voted for him. That figure has since been questioned, but Trump remains popular among self-identified white evangelicals even as he plunges deeper into mendacity and obscenity. White evangelicals have slipped into an ethical vortex: In 2011, just 30 percent said a personally immoral politician can behave virtuously in a public role. In 2016, that figure leaped to 72 percent.8

      I saw it now. The back-to-the-Bible people have drifted from the Scriptures, enticed by the allure of earthly power. But earthly power demands earthly weaponry. To put it in the Apostle Paul’s language, we participate in the “acts of the flesh,” among which are “hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions, and envy” (Galatians 5:20–20). We emulate bullies instead of peacemakers and employ intimidation instead of sound argument and grace. We abandon Jesus’s operating motif, found in Matthew 20:28: “The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve.” We forget the insight of 2 Corinthians 12:9: God’s power is “made perfect in weakness.”

      We’ll see how far evangelicals have drifted in the following chapters.

      1. Ladd wrote his analysis in the scholarly The Presence of the Future and the more approachable The Gospel of the Kingdom.

      2. See Smith, Revivalism and Social Concern.

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