Freedom for the American Church?

Methodists have their “Five Essential Freedoms” they consider definitional for who they are. They are “Freedoms of (or for) . . .” These freedoms are:

1. Freedom of all races to worship together.
2. Freedom of women to be treated as equal in the church and at home.
3. Freedom of the poor to have dignity in church and in the world.
4. Freedom of the laity to have authority. 
5. Freedom of the Holy Spirit to move in worship.

In my opinion, these are all laudatory “freedoms.” Christians ought to be free to exercise or experience each one in their churches or Christian gatherings. They ought also, gain in my opinion, be free to advocate for and support such ways of living in the larger world to whatever degree possible. But simple “ought to’s” won’t get us there.

If anything is clear in our time is that neither knowledge or moral suasion are much help as primary movers of change. We’ve tried them both for more than two centuries now as chief assumptions about how to get things done and they haven’t worked very well for us. Both knowledge and moral suasion have their place. Don’t get me wrong. They’re just not the primary movers we’ve depended on them to be.

What is? Where’s the fulcrum that moves people to consider and embrace change? I believe it is our desires. What we want, long for, what grips our hearts as a most desirable future. St. Augustine said we become what we adore. And adoration is the language of desire, love even. And when you bring desire/love into the conversation almost inevitably you bring ultimate things in to, even if as non-existents or repudiated.

And there is where the tale of the church in America gets into debilitating knots – our desires, our loves. From the beginning of our country, even in spite of our legal “wall of separation,” Christian faith and national drive and destiny have maintained a real and powerful symbiosis. A symbiosis that has served America well. The church not so much. Yet it has persisted in serving as chaplain of Good Ship the America, drinking the national kool-aid so fully and often that today its proper love of God has been scandalously disordered to render the church a mere cheerleader for national interests.

In this way, the church in America has become enslaved to perspectives and practices endemic to the American project that have made it impossible for it to serve its evangelical mandate. To wit,

-the racism in our national dna has mutated the church into a body largely responsible for national leadership that promotes and exacerbates it.

-the church has done little to help move the country beyond it patriarchal origins, it has accepted that view of women and generated theological justification for it in both the church and larger society,

-it has underwritten a competitive, acquisitive national spirit that is eager to gain wealth that leave the un-achievers to their “just desserts,” a way of life that fuels an economy premised on continual, ever-increasing consumption which infects the global economy we in large measure preside over,

-these pathologies that bedevil America are replicated in the church, as in a male-centered approach to leadership which the church has adopted along with its virtues of efficiency and production, growth, and status, and

-the spirit of this age and place have effectively muzzled the Spirit of God in the life of the church.

Disordered love or desire must be healed before it can move toward its true desires and love. Thus, we need “freedom from,” a liberating experience that enables us to actually move in different directions. Only God can deliver us. Only God can deliver a word of judgment and mercy to us that breaks the shackles we have locked around our feet and hands. Only God can so humble and then embolden us by his word and work for and in us that we might truly love him and have our desires reordered by him to their proper end. Dietrich Bonhoeffer once diagnosed the problem of American Protestantism was just this lack of a Reformation. He was and is right. Just such a crushing, comforting, and constructive Word is the only thing that will help.

Freedom from racist, patriarchal, consumptive, competitive, and hierarchical pathologies must be our experience in the present. What Charles Wesley described in his great hymn “And Can it Be,”

“Long my imprisoned spirit lay,
Fast bound in sin and nature’s night;
Thine eye diffused a quick’ning ray—
I woke, the dungeon flamed with light;
My chains fell off, my heart was free,
I rose, went forth, and followed Thee,”

must become our heart’s cry too. 

From such an event, the laudable Five Essential Freedoms might become reality for us. It all remains in God’s hands, of course. We do not know his plans for the American church and we dare not assume God necessarily wills recovery and new life for us. But we do know he wills for us to love and cleave to him and rest in Christ whatever our historical career from here on may hold for us.

Have we enough hope and nerve to ask God to bring such a word of judgment and mercy on us? I don’t know. I hope so, but I do not know. Much will be lost that we value and treasure. Little will remain the same. All will be made new, but uncertain and ambiguous as well. The American church as a “sickness unto death” (Kierkegaard). But the Bible testifies to a God who works best from the grave, bringing life out of death. This one, this God, is our only hope!