Wesley Hill, with a needed word:
At various points in my life, I’ve taken up the partisan banner with gusto. Although I planned to vote for Barack Obama for president in 2008, I remember being unsettled by Obama’s then-pastor the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s remarks that emerged during the course of the campaign. “God damn America!” Wright had said, and I had absorbed enough Hauerwas at that point to sympathize with the point. But I still couldn’t look my GOP-voting parents in the eyes and say that I was ready to defend Wright as someone with whom I was in full, unimpaired communion. Then I read this from the “progressive” evangelical Jason Byassee in the “conservative” evangelical magazine Christianity Today:
“Charity requires that evangelicals do business with Wright. He, like them, is part of the body of Christ. Not less than John Hagee or Rod Parsley — extremist ministers aligned with John McCain —Wright’s churchmanship means he is more brother than enemy.”
Did I really believe the bonds I share with fellow Christians like Wright — and my parents — required me in some way to believe that all of us were part of the same dysfunctional kinship network? And what would it mean for my speech and action if I really did believe that? And what would it mean for me to learn from Wright, as a fellow Spirit-filled believer, even when I thought he was wrong? […]
I left the SBC myself, for reasons of conscience and doctrinal considerations, so I can’t very well cast stones on anyone else who does. But I hope that those of us who have left won’t view ourselves as having somehow succeeded where our Southern Baptist siblings have failed, as having escaped unscathed from the judgment that’s coming for us all. I hope we’ll view ourselves as all alike floundering about in the ark of salvation, opposing each other on vital, urgent matters but, for that very reason, occupying the same space and trying, however haphazardly, to listen the same Lord. And I hope we’ll be granted the repentance and amendment of life that these awful days surely call for.
I think Hill could be much more clear about his support for Russell and Maria Moore (et al), but to do that would require him to say something about what he is specifically not saying here: that it might actually be better to leave than to continue making bets in a burning house.
Hill’s advice is, at its core, wise and godly and, in its relational implications, utterly necessary and needed. I myself have much to say and praise in thanks to connections within the SBC. But Hill’s own faith-enabling “second naivety” did not occur by staying in the SBC. It would hardly be fair or even true to think that others couldn’t (or shouldn’t!) find their own faith deepened and widened outside of a house that has been burning for decades.