I’m doing some short devotionals for the Inspire 2017 conference in Detroit this summer that I plan to attend. My assignment was to do it on the beginning of 1 Thessalonians but I’m also, in each one, picking up a bit of CRC church history with it.

As I read through Henry Beet’s book on church history and De Ridder and Van Halsema’s “My Church” I am struck by how cut off the CRC is increasingly from its history and therefore its identity. I think how we feel about the CRC got swept up in how we felt about US history and the hypocrisies within it.

This from Steele

After all, if the 1960s made one overriding point, it was that our great principles and traditions had not saved us from our hypocrisies. If our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution, with all its brilliant amendments spelling out a precise discipline of freedom, were the greatest articulations of democratic principles ever written, they had in fact given us only a stunted democracy in which millions languished outside the circle of full freedom. Here again, my swimming coach— sitting there feeling a vacuum where he had just felt such a confident authority— was emblematic of America. Nature abhors a vacuum, and it was the abrupt and radical decline of America’s moral authority in the 1960s that literally called so many long-repressed segments of society to rebellion. Challenging our traditions and conventions, our entire way of life, was a first step toward recovering the moral authority we had lost to our hypocrisies.

Steele, Shelby. Shame: How America’s Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country (pp. 78-79). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.

The 1960s formula for authenticity (dissociation from America’s old hypocrisies) gave America a new cultural idea: that America’s moral authority and legitimacy were linked to the actual rejection of traditional America as a fundamentally hypocritical society. Thus, rebellion is what made you authentic and what opened the way for society to recover moral authority. Rebellion, “revolution,” dissent, civil and uncivil disobedience, “dropping out,” “speaking truth to power”— all this became the moral high ground in the 1960s. In the long run, it would generate a new, alternative American identity, not to mention a new American liberalism.

Steele, Shelby. Shame: How America’s Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country (p. 80). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.

In order to become “authentic” and disassociate your moral core from the racism, sexism, and bigotry of American history (or Western history for you Canadians) you had renounce Western Civ in all its ways.

I think we learned this reflex in the political sphere and practiced it in the ecclesiastical. Were we not contaminated by the Doctrine of Discovery? Were we not down stream from the racism of our Dutch ethno-centrism? Did this not manifest itself in the Timothy Christian affair? Did we not join in the white flight thus showing our hypocrisy that we cared more for our property values than our brown skinned brothers and sisters moving up from the south? Did we not try to assuage our guilt by supporting “missionaries” in the inner city like Stan Vander Klay?

Henry Beets and anyone who was in power prior to the (pick a line of demarcation in CRC church history) is complicit in that evil world. We must repent of our Dutch ethnicity, burn the wooden shoes, and now show our bona fides as we seek justice and anti-racism and listen to (select) people of color and do what they say!

Change of voice.

Or maybe we can have a more nuanced understanding of our past. Don’t we have the doctrine of total depravity to understand that dead saints were sinners too? Can we not try to sift the past? Can we not redeem it without total renunciation?

CRC people have become reactively anti-whatever it was we have associated with what was revealed in our hypocrisies.

Steele things white guilt needs to end. I think Dutch CRC guilt needs to end. It’s time to be grown-ups about the past, not reactive adolescents of the 60s.