What gospel narrative are you proclaiming?
When I drive, I like to listen to the radio more often than not. And I’m not really loyal to any one station. I like a variety of music and stations. So that means that I am often hitting scan on the radio. I come across such a variety of stations. I stop for a few reasons. First, there’s a song that I like. So I’ll stick with that station until there’s a song I don’t care about, or commercials come on. Second, when I hear a preacher. It’s not because I’m going to like what I hear though. I find most of what is proclaimed on the radio and passes for Christianity is really bad theology. I listen because I’m just curious what far too many people are exposed to as the Gospel, which is anything but the Gospel at all. It’s some other gospel narrative that doesn’t free people, that separates people, and judges people. And third, I’ll stop on the so-called “news” station which is really more of talking head pundits with their opinion and spin. They are another form of preacher proclaiming just another gospel narrative in contrast to the Gospel of Jesus.
A couple of days ago, I happened to stop the radio on for a few minutes to listen to the local talking head afternoon radio guy. It helps me get a handle on what and who I’m supposed to be upset about apparently. Thank goodness, or else I might go around being content and seeing the good in creation. Can’t have that. Doesn’t sell very well does it?
Every time I have tuned in, even for the few minutes that I can stomach the show, it’s always the same thing – watch out for the enemy and look at what evil plan they are carrying out. It’s just a matter of who is labeled as the bad guys. I don’t know, this just seems exhausting to me – to go around continually seeing enemies who are out to destroy this or that. It’s also blandly predicable. No originality. Yet, apparently many people thrive on this. Maybe it’s like caffeine or something. Again, I don’t drink coffee or soda, so I don’t get it.
On this day when I listened, the target was teachers. I don’t know exactly what sin they committed and frankly it really doesn’t matter, does it? It could just as easily been any number of other targets for any number of supposed sins that the talking head wanted to expose. Here’s what I heard – a summary in my own words. How terrible the teaching profession was. That all teachers were “leftists.” That teachers were trying to indoctrinate kids. That the unions were just an extension of a political party. Blah, blah, blah. All this in about five minutes! That kind of vitriol should almost be an Olympic sport. These are old talking points used to drive fear and create an enemy to scapegoat. It’s always better to lay blame and all the sins for society on a group of people than do critical thinking and self-examination and figuring out how to actually improve society. Being a privileged victim is en vogue apparently.
My wife has a background in education. If what this preacher of this particular gospel narrative related to education is saying is true, then apparently I married a monster who is better suited to be cast as the villain in the next James Bond movie. I mean, who knew that teachers had an evil cabal in which they get together and pass around their evil plans for world domination by brainwashing children into become little villains of tyranny like the teachers. I can see that working out so well – children everywhere have been brainwashed into completing their homework every time and with out complaint, right? But sure, indoctrination. Anything to make the enemy sound evil. Sometime biting sarcasm is the only reasonable response to such ridiculousness.
And thanks to this radio preacher with his gospel narrative that will save us all, I’m now aware of the vile nature of some of my congregants, my neighbors, and even (gasp!) my friends. Oh the horrors of these….these…teachers.
I don’t know, if I had that much of an issue with the evil teachers, I’d probably pull my kids out of school and indoctrinate, I mean teach them, myself. But hey, that would actually require work and we all know it’s much easier to complain and get someone to just do what we want them to do, rather than lift a finger and do something productive.
Thankfully, I had many wonderful teachers in my life. People who cared about their students’ wellbeing. And so have my kids. People who loved learning and wanted to instill that in others for the benefit of humanity. People who encouraged critical thinking and self-examination. People who taught because they knew it would make a difference in the world, their communities, and int he lives of their students and families. I can’t recall any teacher of any subject trying to indoctrinate my kids. Maybe they were just so good at it and I’ve been so indoctrinated that I can’t recognize it anymore? Education isn’t about brain washing. It’s not about indoctrination.
It’s understandable though how some think that’s what it is though. I invite you to read my review of “The Evangelicals” by Frances Fitzgerald. In part 2, I wrote about what the author hits on regarding the fundamentalist approach to education. Here’s just one sentence: For Thomas Road people (Jerry Falwell’s church), education – in the broad sense of the word – was not a moral or intellectual quest that involved struggle or uncertainty. It was simply the process of learning the right answers. The idea that individuals should collect evidence and decide for themselves was out of the question.” (Pg. 282). If this is what your view of education is, then it makes sense that anyone who teaches people to think for themselves is really doing indoctrination because it conflicts with those obsessed with power and control.
I often wonder what these talking heads would have to say if they spared us their fear mongering, always looking for an enemy, scapegoating and labeling. They are proclaimers of a gospel narrative that I can’t identify with. A gospel based on fear and control. A gospel of idolatry – an idolatry of being right and seeing salvation through partisanship, politicians, and ideology. These are not freeing gospel narratives, and rarely do they come with good news. They are based on a theology of might makes right, only the strong survive, and the ends justify the means. There is always an enemy to fight and destroy and that our utopia heaven is just over the horizon if only we dispatch the enemy. Except there’s always another enemy. It never ends. There is never a sabbath rest. There is no love of enemy or seeing the imago Dei in others. There is only winning. It’s a theology of empire.
I don’t see how the message that is proclaimed is in alignment with Christ’s message at all. Yet, many Christians go around proclaiming these messages and following those who proclaim them. I’m left wondering why. What is the appeal of these gospel narratives that the Gospel of Jesus doesn’t have? The answers are too complex and long to list here I’m sure. And that’s not the point any way.
I’m saddened each time I hear these messages being broadcast – whether by a political talking head proclaiming his gospel narrative from his radio pulpit, or supposedly Christian preachers doing the same thing trying to scare people into believing Jesus while expanding the circle of who doesn’t belong in the kingdom of God. I’m really sad for these folks. It must be so very exhausting to always be fighting, to be dehumanizing people, to label people, to hate, and to exclude. You have to be ever vigilant or else someone who doesn’t belong might sneak into the kingdom. And we can’t have that. It would mess things up.
Why do so many bother to proclaim a gospel narrative based in a partisanship or ideology or politician? All political parties will come to an end – it’s only a matter of when. Ideologies will come and go. And politicians – well, seriously, how long are they really in position of power anyway? All of these gospel narratives are, at their core, predictable and empty. They leave thirsty people still thirsty. They leave hungry people with hunger pains. They leave the stranger further away. They leave the naked in the freezing cold. They leave the sick for dead. They leave those imprisoned in solitary confinement. They are oriented towards death. And these gospel narratives all die off, unfortunately leaving a path of destruction and death with them.
Stop looking at the world through the lens of left/right, right/wrong, Democrat/Republican, liberal/conservative, Biden/Trump, etc. There’s no good news in that lens. There is no salvation either. There is no peace. There is no forgiveness. There is certainly no grace or mercy. There is no shalom. There is no imago Dei. There is only conflict, war, fear, anger, revenge, violence. These things are not in alignment with Christlikeness. They are anti-Christ to their core.
What gospel narrative are you living by? One that separates and divides, is full of fear, constantly at war with enemies? Or the Gospel narrative of Jesus – a Gospel that frees people from all of this. It’s not an easy Gospel. There is hardship. You’ll die to self. You’ll find a way to love an enemy and see the image of God in them even though you don’t want to. And it will transform you. You’ll set down violence and war, not because you want to, but because the way of peace leads to life and meaning. You’ll gain a new appreciation for grace and mercy as you offer those things to your enemies even though you don’t want to. You’ll let go of the idea that you are in control, because you aren’t. You’ll be changed and transformed. And a work in progress. You won’t have all the answers and sometimes you feel like you have none at all. And that’s where you’ll gain a new sense of what faith is all about. And you’ll see the face of God in places you never thought you would – in the face of the poor, in the sick, the foreigner, and your enemy.
What in the world do the proclaimers of these other gospel narratives offer that could possibly beat that? The only answer I can think of is that they offer you the idea that you are in control, that you don’t have to change, that you can have certainty. Their message is really old, just packaged in a new language every so often. It’s the same message that the serpent sold to Eve in the garden – you’ll be like God.
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Matt,
First off, your post is pretty long – longer than usual. And honestly, my response is too. Partly because of yours, but I am replying on the fly, and so I don’t think I can be comprehensive about everything I would like to feedback with. Also, I hope my words will be coherent over all too. You touch on a LOT of things I find interesting. You open up more than one reaction to any single point too.
Secondly, Thanx for working out the issues covered here.
Wow!
Where to start and where to take it?
Hmmm…
For one thing, talk radio specifically tends to be the domain of one side of the political divide, has been a long time, AND tends to be packed with more vitriol than a lot of other publications (in my experience). I will come back to that.
Before I get into THAT, let me say something about New Testament PHARISEES in terms of talking heads and opinionaters. The faith tradition from with I come (a kissing cousin of evangelicals) took a page from Chuck Swindoll and many Baptists 40-45 years ago to champion “GRACE vs. LEGALISM” and highlighted Pharisees as the premier legalists of their day. Pharisees became the scapegoats of the modern church, strawmen to which you could IMPLY contemporary opponents were like them.
When I was a kid, this tended to revolve almost strictly around “doctrinal issues” and matters of faith which seemed – SEEMED – completely removed from worldly politics. In fact, we had enough infighting within the faithful to get plenty vicious and to vilify people we opposed. To label someone as “pharisaical” was to marginalize, stigmatize, and neutralize them – typically about church business. And some of those fights could be shockingly cosmetic as far as substance went.
“Legalism” though, isn’t a Bible word, and I would argue it’s not a Bible concept either. Labelling others as “pharisaical” had the look and feel of being biblical, but really it was an extension of the other AND, I believe, only ever served to justify breaking trust in the church with people we didn’t like for whatever reasons (some might have been good reasons to chafe, but not, in the end, worthy of breaking fellowship).
Hmmm… Legalists/Pharisees, in Swindoll’s hands would jump out of the bushes to harass unsuspecting people for their moral failings. There was no GRACE of God in that. And while I think there was SOME truth to his observation – meaning I think there are people who are LIKE that, alright, I think he was smearing Pharisees to paint them with that brush.
AND YET, that is sorta the picture painted of them in Mark 2 – or so it SEEMS.
It wasn’t until I went to the academy to study Bible that I got a clearer understanding of the cultural context there which challenged the view I inherited from Swindoll. For one thing, the Jews did not have some well-defined (or even half-defined) split between religion and state. That is an American ideal which in reality works out NOTHING like it sounds.
And while there may well have been SOME Pharisees who would harass common Jews about their morality, (we really must accept that Pharisees by-n-large did promote a program of temple purity for the nation as a whole), the political edge to that dynamic carried the REAL WEIGHT. Jesus was making a bid to be King of the Jews, and that meant he needed extra scrutiny by the guild of national scrutinizers … drum roll please… the Pharisees.
Turns out there was more than one school of Pharisees too. In fact, though they don’t line up with modern, American political ideals of liberal or conservative, they did tend to land in two over arching camps – one considered more strict and staunch, the other more laissez-faire – more live-n-let-live.
I would argue that Pharisaic ideology overall would come nearer corresponding to liberals of today, with Sadducean ideology being the more conservative, but honestly those categories don’t really line up, so that is just being arguable. But I have my reasons….
So, anyway, these Pharisees were not officials in the government, and they held no official authority at all. But as something of a populist movement, one ever bit as religious as political, they carried something of a moral authority, and if you wanted to be King in Israel, you would want their endorsement. In those days, though, there was no TV, radio, internet, or even newspapers. Basically town hall meetings (which were basically synagogue assemblies and religious in nature) would be times and places where the bulk of these kinds of endorsements or scrutinies would be broadcast for average Jews to be made aware.
I remember studying these things in school and beginning to put Rush Limbaugh and other political opinionators into this sort of category. These people were being much more pharisaical than some fuddy-duddies at church. If a person throws their hat in the ring as a candidate to make a bid to be president (or congressperson/judge/treasurer or dog catcher), these opinionators are there quick to shape public opinion with their scrutiny or endorsements. But in America, this all tends to be “secular” after a fashion.
But as your post demonstrates, there are competing gospels at work in this. And the opinionaters are actually sizing up gospels, though in America we have either no concept of that or a very burred image of it. AS I SAID, we have a firm separation of church and state here, but of course that ideal works out NOTHING LIKE it sounds either though.
How am I doing at nailing Jell-O to the wall?
Yeah. Rush Limbaugh, though, to get back to that talk radio part I bookmarked at the start, was quite a splash on the political scene back in the 1990s. He set a new standard for opinionating. Shock Jock Howard Stern always claimed he taught Limbaugh everything he knew. I never understood how Stern justified that, and so I really don’t know to what extent that is a fair statement, but I heard him claim it. And certainly Limbaugh became a watershed person/moment/movement that I believe picked up and heavily modified certain tactics of the LEFT to be redeployed in service of the RIGHT. His own fiery personality surely contributed much too, but taken altogether, I see more than one force at work there, even though I can’t personally map them all out.
Limbaugh was quickly followed by others.
I didn’t discover Limbaugh until his TV program was nationally syndicated. But within a couple years, I was living in Arizona, test driving cars, and listening to A LOT of talk radio. Like you a lot of other radio too, but WOW! I got into the political part especially. My personal favorite was Ken Hamblin, the Black Avenger. But I was listening the day Gordon Liddy instructed his listeners that when the ATF and JACK BOOTED THUGS show up at your door, you gotta take aim at the HEAD SHOT because these goons wear body armor and you can’t kill them with a shot to center mass.
It was incendiary comments that got him in a lot of hot water at the time. Probably sounds tame today.
But I completely concur with you that this is the gospel of the RIGHT. It is a gospel, a competing gospel, one that is NOT the one St. Paul or any angels preach either!
And for a while there, to get back to the main thrust here, I saw Limbaugh, Hamblin, Liddy, and the like as modern day Pharisees, which basically they were/are.
But it wasn’t until I was preaching at the Montford Unit correctional facility back during the election of Kerry vs Bush that I suddenly saw that actually Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, and Connie Chung were too. They weren’t as staunch as the other school of American Pharisees, but they too were sizing up candidates, reporting on their every move, and while it was an extreme argument, it was nonetheless arguable that their bias for one over another candidate showed whether they outright endorsed him or not.
But it was as I was driving to the prison for the service that I heard the Peter Jennings report break that Kerry had been accused of accepting financial contributions from the mafia! I heard this from Peter Jennings! I wasn’t listening to Rush Limbaugh that day, but I could only imagine what he made of that headline! Jennings might have handled it with a soft touch, but he nonetheless exposed it to me. And I had to say, as a voter (I no longer vote, but in those days I did) who was considering a vote for Kerry, this was a good and important point to scrutinize. Depending on how sober minded people determined Kerry’s level of involvement and to what extent he might be beholding to the mob, my opinion might change of him too. This was information I could use!
The Pharisees of Jesus’s day provided THAT KIND of service.
Now… that I had two schools of American Pharisees mapped out for myself, there was the matter of their differences.
In the mid 1990s, I had become about half indoctrinated by Ken Hamblin especially. Not by him alone, but him more than Limbaugh or Liddy. Due largely to Hamblin’s influence, I voted for Bob Dole even though I didn’t like him. I had become enough suspicious of Clinton that my vote was definitely AGAINST Clinton more that FOR Dole. (I think you understand my meaning – a matter of motives.)
But honestly it wasn’t JUST the political talk that got me going. I also listened to Dr. Laura a lot, and a few other talk people too, all on the same very conservative radio station. I got a rather well rounded diet of conservatism even beyond politics per se. And the attraction to me was the sense of personal empowerment I felt by learning to take personal responsibility for myself.
I still value that, and it was something I learned from conservative talk radio at a formative time in my young adult life. I got motivated to pursue my career (which ultimately led me to “seminary”) which also tends to be more a matter for conservative types.
However, there was that matter of the separation of church and state which WORKS NOTHING LIKE THAT STATEMENT SOUNDS too. And it was around that same time that Steve Farrar wrote a book I listened to on audio as I test drove cars. Today, I can’t recall the title of his book, but it was around the same time as his book POINT MAN made the circuit too.
But in this book, I became deeply disturbed because the gospel he promoted was a straight up syncretism with conservative, secular politics with the faith. It was the first time I personally was blatantly confronted with this boldfaced influence.
In this book, Farrar offered a Bible study designed very specifically to ostensibly be a study of Ahab and Jezebel but really it was dragging Bill and Hillary through the biblical mud. It was absolutely shameless about it. Bill and Hillary be damned!!! It was a Jesus finger to their face!
Actually, that aspect alone was so distasteful to me that I wanted to throw up. But even worse, I kept looking at how there were these accusations about the lawyer in the White Water case who supposedly was killed by a hit man at the Clinton’s behest, there was Bill’s flagrant infidelity, and Hillary’s shameless feminist ambitions – stuff that IF there was any truth to (and to some of it there was plenty) would naturally be upsetting to country-simple, conservative people, alright, but the complaints just weren’t really biblical!
Yeah. I said biblical there.
I kept thinking to myself (and this was before I went to “seminary”) that if Farrar had applied all this same scrutiny to King David, then David (a man after God’s heart) would not be fit to be king either.
Whoa!
This was shamelessly using the Bible, and in unfair ways, to do the devil’s work. And I could plainly see it.
So, where we had kind of a third order of insanity.
X, thanks for reading and responding, as usual. I’m going to respond as I read your comments. I’ve never been able to figure out why talk radio is full of vitriol. It doesn’t have to be. The classical radio station isn’t and there is talking there. Different topic, but still, the medium is the same. I wonder if some of this has to do with the anonymity of the medium – we can’t see the people talking and so it allows others to spew harsher language.
You stated – “Legalists/Pharisees, in Swindoll’s hands would jump out of the bushes to harass unsuspecting people for their moral failings.” What an interesting way to phrase this. I hear this very idea in what I was talking about, even though this wasn’t about religion, it was politics. But we’ve talked about this before – religion and politics are very closely related.
On to the discussion of Pharisees and Sadducees. You mentioned that you think that the Pharisees would be more liberal and Sadducees more conservative. I don’t either would fit our American political spectrum. The Pharisees were trying to conserve the Jewish culture while the Sadducees capitulated to Hellenistic culture mixed with their judism. It wasn’t so much an ideological divide between Pharisee and Sadducee as it was a cultural divide, but even that is simplifying the situation. Having said all of that, I understand what you are saying. But I also don’t understand why everything has to come back to fitting with our modern American ideological definitions. I think that’s a form of American empire.
Wow, about the comments from talk radio. I had no idea that Gordon Liddy said such things. This has really been going on for a long time. I see so much tie in with the ascent of the Evangelical movement influencing GOP politics too. Or maybe the more fundamentalist strain of Evangelicalism anyway. I just think of certain sections of “The Evangelicals” that I read especially as the book moves into the 1980’s and beyond.
I appreciate what you are saying about not just the right having a Pharisitical (is that a word), side to it, but also the left. I would agree. It’s just not really on talk radio. It shows up in plenty of other places though. The left also has an alternative gospel message going. I remember when Obama was described in Messiah-like descriptions. And it bothered me then too. It seems that right now, the right’s version seems more dangerous and vicious than the lefts. I think this ebbs and flows though. I remember thinking this same thing about the left in the 1980’s with it’s extremism to the point that groups on the left were attacking each other. This stuff seems to show up with either side is morally, theologically lost.
As for seminary being for more conservative types, I think it depends on the denomination. ELCA pastors are significantly more liberal than the rest of the denomination.
Thank you for pointing out the idea that there are efforts to match the gospel with ideology. It happens on both the right and the left. It’s one thing to say that ideology can have similarities and even match up with the Gospel. It’s quite another for people to argue that the Gospel is left/right or that Jesus would be a Democrat/Republican. To me, the second thing is a form of taking the Lord’s name in vain because it is using God for one’s own purpose.
Thanks again for the comments. I love the conversation.
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Flat ran out of time…
More another day…