Responding to a thread in CRC Voices on this piece on President Obama’s Christianity

Conversation turned to the CRC Office of Social Justice

I noted the Planet Fitness dust-up in Midland Michigan and CS Lewis’s piece on Christians and politics.

 Let’s look at the Planet Fitness case.

Society has a moral burden to protect the weak Christians say.
1. The weak could be ciswomen from cismen who are stronger through separate changing and bathing facilities
2. The weak could be gender minorities that for whatever reason feel themselves as outcasts. Businesses should make reasonable accommodations to their needs.

If you read a bunch of old Banners like Snapper you’ll note a very different approach in the CRC. Older Banner pieces didn’t so much say “we need to go out and change the world”, they more said “we need to protect our people from the evils out there.”

Why was this?
Was this the majority pietism brought over from the pre-WWII wave of immigrants that seeded the US churches?
Did the post WWII immigrants bring over the more activistic Kuyperian ethos?
Was it the military experience of CRC people in WWII opening up to the broader world?
Was it the activism of the civil rights movement that took hold of the moral imagination of churches north and south in the wake of the success of that movement?
Was it a renewed missionary ethos that gripped the church in the boomer generation?

OSJ

We may complain that the OSJ should be “fair” in terms of the American political spectrum. It should complain about the left as much as it does about the right.

That is a different argument than that the OSJ shouldn’t be involved in “politics” “out there in the world”.

Lewis’ piece nicely illustrates how people apply their Christianity is mediated also by their political perspective.

Both may see “love your neighbor” as “protect the weak”. Some will see the woman who doesn’t want the perv in the locker room as the best application. The other will see the “sexual minority” as “the weak” who needs protection from the hetero sexual majority community. His/her interest should be protected by “power” (institutional racism language) so Planet Fitness takes a stand with “the weak” against the majority. Its not hard to see that if we threw this out into the CRC population generally speaking people would likely respond to it according to their political instincts.

The application of the pre-WWII, pre-civil rights era group might be “Christians shouldn’t go to gyms like this. We should maybe create an alternative. Found Christian gyms or work out at home.”

Post WWII boomers might say “we should have laws about this” one way or the other.

I think the thesis that modern liberalism is inextricably rooted in Christian worldview assumptions will prevail. I just read it in Harari’s text.

At the dawn of the third millennium, the future of evolutionary humanism is unclear. For sixty years after the end of the war against Hitler it was taboo to link humanism with evolution and to advocate using biological methods to ‘upgrade’ Homo sapiens. But today such projects are back in vogue. No one speaks about exterminating lower races or inferior people, but many contemplate using our increasing knowledge of human biology to create superhumans.

At the same time, a huge gulf is opening between the tenets of liberal humanism and the latest findings of the life sciences, a gulf we cannot ignore much longer. Our liberal political and judicial systems are founded on the belief that every individual has a sacred inner nature, indivisible and immutable, which gives meaning to the world, and which is the source of all ethical and political authority. This is a reincarnation of the traditional Christian belief in a free and eternal soul that resides within each individual.

Yet over the last 200 years, the life sciences have thoroughly undermined this belief. Scientists studying the inner workings of the human organism have found no soul there. They increasingly argue that human behaviour is determined by hormones, genes and synapses, rather than by free will – the same forces that determine the behaviour of chimpanzees, wolves, and ants. Our judicial and political systems largely try to sweep such inconvenient discoveries under the carpet. But in all frankness, how long can we maintain the wall separating the department of biology from the departments of law and political science?

Harari, Yuval Noah (2015-02-10). Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Kindle Locations 3637-3648). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Why should we be surprised that the liberal church tradition saw political activism as an expression of its faith? We live in a country that implemented prohibition. We possess an activist culture that broadly assumes activism as the faithful application of one’s moral perspective. Nearly everyone is activistic today. The day may come when we would far prefer the liberal approach because it will look far more Christian than what comes in the wake of the new ascending assumptions.