Two Tales of one Tactic: Trump's SoB rant and the Nashville Statement

Unity in Diversity

As an Anabaptist, I don't spend a lot of time making favorable comparisons between the church and the United States government. That said, there is one particular value, which they share, which I like, and which I have been ruminating about recently; let's call it unity-in-diversity. In US parlance this takes the form of the national motto e pluribus unum (out of many, one). In Christianity it appears in Jesus' upper room discourse in John 17:20-21 where he prayed "that they may be one" and in 1 Corinthians 12 (among other places) where Paul uses the image of a single body with diverse members.

Both within the church and within the US, this has been a historically hard value to live in to. Unity-in-Diversity seems to be more often a tension we live in that a truth we live out of. In both cases the natural human desire for community is in tension with the also natural human desire for safety and the fear of "the other". The ordinary result of this tension when applied to States is nationalism, or when applied to smaller groups of people we would probably call it tribalism. In any case it is the attempt to establish a community which feels safe because it contains people who are like us and excludes people who are not like us (the gold-standard read on this subject is probably Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities). This tendency towards tribalism is one which may well be fairly natural to humans but it is something that both the New Testament and founding values of the US resist fairly adamantly.

In the new testament, Jesus' final "high priestly" prayer for those who follow him is that we would be "one" and not just that we would be "one" but that our unity would be a reflection of the unity between the first and second persons of the trinity (all being united in the 3rd person)(1). Paul goes to great lengths to establish, enforce, and reinforce the principle that all who follow Jesus are members of a single "body"—the Body of Christ—and that, far from implying some form of homogeneity, our unity also requires our diversity. We are specifically called to be different from one another and also unified as members of one Body. Our diversity is understood to be unified around the central person of Jesus Christ; 1 Corinthians 12:12-27 is worth quoting at length:

Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body—whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink. Even so the body is not made up of one part but of many. Now if the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? But in fact God has placed the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. If they were all one part, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, but one body.
The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!” On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor. And the parts that are unpresentable are treated with special modesty, while our presentable parts need no special treatment. But God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it. Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.

Similarly, the Unites States has historically understood itself to especially value unity in it's diversity. The theory might be put something like "You are free to be any sort of American you like, so long as you are American" Rather than insisting on perfect homogeneity, the founding documents carve out protections for the exercise of particular individuality. While the country has always struggled (and often failed tragically) to live up to this value, the fact of the value itself remains. Again the diversity of America is imagined to be unified around a central political philosophy. After his visit to the US G.K Chesterton described the phenomenon this way:

The Americans are very patriotic, and wish to make their new citizens patriotic Americans. But it is the idea of making a new nation literally out of any old nation that comes along. In a word, what is unique is not America but what is called Americanisation. We understand nothing till we understand the amazing ambition to Americanise the Kamskatkan and the Hairy Ainu. We are not trying to Anglicise thousand of French cooks or Italian organ-grinders. France is not trying to Gallicise thousands of English trippers or German prisoners of war. America is the only place in the world where this process, healthy or unhealthy, possible or impossible, is going on. And the process, as I have pointed out, is not internationalization. It would be truer to say it is the nationalization of the internationalized. It is making a home out of vagabonds and a nation out of exiles.
― G.K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America

In both cases the idea seems to be that diversity is to be celebrated in the context of a broader and more powerful definitional unity. We may all be different sorts of Christians, but we are all in Christ; we may all be different sorts of Americans but we are all Americans. Now it is obvious to me that those to claims must be in some degree of tension with one another—there cannot be more than one center in your centered set—but that tension only exists because both entities (the US and Christ) claim to be the unifying center around which our diversities orbit; thus the value of unity-in-diversity is a shared one(2).

Further, both groups (the Church and the US) have a long history of inter conflict over this issue. Much of the book of Acts is the story of the early church learning, fighting over, and adjusting to the fact that more and more types of people (Samaritans, Eunuchs, Women, Gentiles) were all offered full participation in the body of Christ without being asked to renegotiate their particular identities in favor of the "original" Jewish identity(3). Similarly, while it is accurate to say that unity-in-diversity is a founding value in the philosophy of the Unites States, the actual application of that value is one that has been only slowly playing out over the centuries. At our outset, the "diversity" was limited to a handful of non-Catholic Christian denominations and a limited but real scope of economic diversity. Our founding documents exclude the full participation of black, native American, and female human persons from the unity-in-diversity(4). In the evolution of our legal documents it is clear just how excruciatingly slow and difficult the unfolding application of the ideal has been as the acceptable domain of "American" has been expanded.

Two parallel stories

So it struck me recently that Evangelical Christianity and the Unites States have recently experienced the deployment a particular tactic. In Evangelical news, a few weeks ago the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood released the Nashville Statement, an extremely anti LBGTQ+ statement with signatories from all around the conservative Evangelosphere denying the Christianity of people who believe that God is cool with LGBTQ+ folks, condemning all same-sex sexuality as sinful, and even condemning people who identify as anything but straight and cisgender (you can find my thoughts on those subjects by clicking HERE for LGB theology and HERE for transgender identities). In America news, President Trump referred to Colin Kaepernick and the other athletes who protested police brutality and violence against black men by taking a knee during the national anthem as a "son of a bitch", suggesting that they ought to be fired, and then proceeded to characterized his statements as a defense of the US flag and, by extension, America itself. Two systems which claim to value unity-in-diversity, two lines drawn in the sand.

See the issue here, is that there are really way more than two "sides" in both of these situations. In the America story, there is Kaepernick and the racial justice advocates who agree with him and have celebrated his cause from the start(5). Then there is the president and his supporters who want to homogenize American diversity and believe that police brutality is a good thing. And then there is the group of Americans who aren't really on board with #blacklivesmatter yet, who don't really like thinking about racial injustice in this country and who mostly wanted to have a Sunday afternoon free from pesky thoughts about systemic oppression; they generally didn't like Kaepernick's protest and would likely be characterized as politically "moderate" or "centrist" they have been coming around to the Kaepernick point of view recently but they have been moving slowly. 

Again within Evangelicalism there are those who believe that God is has no problem with, and in fact loves and delights in the LGBTQ+ community, that LGB sexuality and trans* identities are not sinful and that the Church has a need to repent for millennia of homophobic and transphobic hatred and violence, they want full inclusion for LGBTQ+ folks in the life of the church(6). Then there are the conservative culture-war Evangelical types who believe that there is a dark "homosexual agenda" out to corrupt children, destroy families and generally enmesh American Christianity in dark sexual sin, they want anyone who persistently identifies as LGBTQ+ to be excluded from the life of the church (7). And then there are the many (often younger and more academically oriented) Evangelicals who still think that LGB sexuality is sinful but are genuinely disturbed by the homophobia and transphobia of the Nashville crew, and are very much upset by the clear damage the church has done to actual LGBTQ+ folk. They want very much to find a way to be practically and genuinely loving to LGBTQ+ people but do not (or can not) change their convictions on LGB sexuality or trans* identities(8). They want LGBTQ+ folks to be more included in the life of the church but they are not sure about full inclusion.

Now Kaepernick and a few allies had been engaging in their protest for a year prior to Trump's comments; also the argument over the full inclusion of LGBTQ+ folks in the life of the church has been going on for quite some time. Arguments and fights would pop up from time to time, discussions would take place, individuals would find that their thoughts, opinions, and positions were shifting. 

And then the Nashville Statement.

And then "that Son of a Bitch".

Leading figures on one side, were suddenly "forcing" the decision. In the America story, Trump's tactic was to send out a clarion call that people who kneel during the national anthem are not "us". He attempted to cut them out of the unity-in-diversity system of America but re-categorizing them as people who don't respect the country (go back to the Chesterton quote if you doubt that this amounts to a denial of their American identity). And so, willing or not, Americans have been drawn into a new conversation. Of course many of the original participants are carrying on with the original debate, but now the entire third group—the group that wanted to be left alone—is now arguing over whether or not Kaepernick's form of protest actually disqualifies someone from being a "real American". And, while Kaepernick's original protest was not particularly popular, it is beginning to look like most of that same group are really upset at the idea that anyone would force him not to engage in it. They didn't like his methods but they are even more opposed to government limitations on free political speech. And that is what led David Graham over at the Atlantic to conclude that Trump has turned Kaepernick's protest into a success.

And over in Evangelical land the same tactic was deployed, this time by the culture-war Evangelicals. The Nashville statement attempted to redefine the terms of the discussion as it existed in the American church. This time the re-categorization attempt was more blatant. Article 10 specifically claimed that to approve of same-sex sexuality or the gender identities of trans folks "constitutes and essential departure from Christian faithfulness and witness", and on the off chance that this was insufficiently clear, one of the statement's authors clarified later that it really is saying that they aren't Christian(10). Article 7 declared sinful the celibate-because-of-their-theology LGB Christians like Wesley Hill and Eve Tushnet whom many of the signatories had regularly cited and even lauded in the past on the grounds that these folks identify as "homosexual". Further, the statement as a whole lumps transgender identities in with its condemnation of same-sex sexuality, a move which may seem "intuitive" to many who don't participate much in these discussions but which has been really troubling to the academic evangelical crowd who tend to be far less settled in their positions on transgender identities than on their thoughts about gay sex. So, like Trump, they have forced a new conversation onto the existing discourse and, like Trump, they have made it far less comfortable for that third category of people in the more-but-not-necessarily-full camp. People whose position ws more "off to the side" who disagree with the full inclusion folks but who saw the exclusionists as overly harsh and extreme were forced into a conversation wherein they have to take a side(9). And, again, this doesn't seem to be working out as well for the authors of the Nashville statement as they might have hoped.

In an attempt to shrink the Overton window to exclude those they oppose, both Trump and the Nashville statement writers seem to have inadvertently excluded their own visions of their respective communities instead. As it turns out, "American" can very much include those who protest injustice by choosing to #takeaknee during a nationalist liturgy and LGBTQ+ Christians are very much fellow members of the Body of Christ (11).

Some tentative conclusions

The outcome of this polarizing exclusion tactic on the part of (respectively) Trump and the Nashville crowd has been somewhat mixed in the eyes of the original protesters. Racial justice advocates have been understandably worried that this sudden expansion of the conversation will and/or already has erased the issue for which Kaepernick started protesting. It is not at all difficult to find reminders that "this is about black lives and police brutality, not about freedom of speech or opposition to Trump per se" all over the internet. And these concerns are very much justifiable. The original activists need to continue in their work of keeping the central focus central, their reminders and concern should not be dismissed as "hand wringing". So long as they do that work though, this tactical move by Trump is likely to benefit the cause of racial justice. On a fundamental level, American's of the third group are being forced to choose whether Kaepernick's vision of America or Trumps is the more legitimate. And if most of the country sides with them on that question (the one that might occlude the issue of racial justice without their hard work) then it will not be Kaepernick and racial justice advocates, but Trump and the MAGA crowd who will be thought to not understand America.

I would argue that the same dynamic is currently playing out within American evangelicalism though in this case the full inclusion crowd is less worried about having their message occluded. The fact that the exclusion camp chose to deploy a similar line-in-the-sand exclusion tactic has forced those Christians who encounter it to confront the question of whether the exclusionists or full inclusionists have the better understanding unity-in-diversity within the Body of Christ. And the outcome of that question will, I submit, restructure the entire conversation in a way that is likely to prove largely positive for the full inclusion position.

After all, one of the most well remembered (I hope) parts of Martin Luther King Jr's Letter From a Birmingham Jail is it's excoriation of the "white moderate" where he says:

I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.

The choice to deploy the tactic of redefinition has served fundamentally to make the "white moderate" and "full exclusion of LGBTQ+ people" positions far less popularly tenable. Now I am firmly on the side of the racial justice advocates and for the full inclusion of gender and sexual minorities within the life of the Church; I also firmly believe that complexity and nuance are vitally important and that often (but not always) there are important truths to be found in the deliberations and considerations of those who are not at the poles of an issue—it is critically important to be able to have the conversation(12). I also believe that the ultimate success of any popular struggle for justice is dependent on its being accepted as a legitimate (even if not yet accepted) position in society. There have been times and places where exclusion-by-redefinition has worked(13); fortunately, in both of these stories, it seems to be backfiring.

Footnotes

(1) I am not an expert in theology of the Trinity so please let me know if I have misunderstood this one.

(2) I should mention here that, in both the US and the Church the overall "conversation" about unity-in-diversity has often included significant arguments over the degree of "homogenization" which should/will be required for inclusion in the unity. In the US this has historically meant conformity to the mores and expressions of the dominant "white" culture whereas in Christianity it generally revolves around particular liturgical and "orthopraxic" questions. Thus I would consider the question of homogenization distinct from, but always entwined with the value of unity-in-diversity.

(3) I recommend Megan DeFranzas Sex Difference in Christian Theology and/or Wes Howard Brooks' Empire Baptized for a good overview of this one.

(4) For good reading on this I recommend most of the work of Mark Charles but particularly his work on the Doctrine of  Discovery and its subsequent impact on the founding structures of the US; as well as Howard Zinn's A People's History of the Unites States.

(5) I recommend the work of DeRay Mckesson for a good primer on the recent conversation here but the overall view may be best encapsulated by Rembert Browne's recent piece Colin Kaepernick Has a Job.
(6) My recommended books on this would be James Brownson's Bible, Gender, Sexuality, Justin Lee's Torn, Matthew Vines' God and the Gay Christian,  Ken Wilson's A Letter to my Congregation, and Sarah Ruden's Paul Among the People.
(7) Al Mohler's We Can Not Be Silent is the most representative book I have found for this view, also Mohler was one of the chief signers of the Nashville Statement; the most celebrated scholar for this position is probably Robert Gagnon.
(8) Folks in this position take a number of different positions so I would recommend looking at Scot McKnight's A Fellowship of Differents, Preston Sprinkle's People to be Loved, Wesley Hill's Washed and Waiting, and Melinda Selmys Sexual Authenticity for a representative overview.
(9) Again, these folks are not at "the poles" for a wide variety of reasons, some because they hold to rigorously worked out conclusions which just aren't quite compatible with either pole, others just because neither side "feels quite right" to them.
(10) Denny Burk, the current president of the CBMW has clarified this HERE

(11) Harry Enten over at FiveThirtyEight.com has a good summary of how this process has worked viz. the civil rights and gay liberation movements.
(12) I think this point holds more strongly in the Christianity Story than in the America story. The non-polar Christians have evidenced a far more "thought out" set of responses than the non-polar Americans in my experience. I haven't found much of value in the public thinking and writing of "white moderate" Americans on this subject (though a few folks have presented their reactions to Kaepernick in more nuanced ways) whereas I have found a lot of value in the writing of non-polar Christians. I would particularly recommend the work of Gabriel Blanchard over at Mudblood Catholic, and would commend the Nashville responses of Preston Sprinkle and Scot McKnight as representative of the non-polar Christian reaction, for a far more "conservative" reaction you might want to read Rod Dreher's piece.
(13) For a resonant account of how this tactic was successfully used by Al Mohler as part of a larger strategy to shift the Southern Baptist Convention to the extremely conservative positions it holds today, check out Dave Gushee's book Still Christian