I like to mix it up a bit here on the blog. Having offered yesterday a vigorous defense of the possibility for sado-masochistic sexuality to be redemptive in the lives of its practitioners, let me begin today with words of praise for Fuller Seminary president Richard Mouw. At his blog, Mouw has a great piece up on “evangelical manners”. A lenthy excerpt with my own commentary is below the fold.
I do wish we could talk more as evangelicals about public manners, and specifically about practical ways in which we can be more civil people. Here is the kind of case that I have in mind.
I gave a talk to a good-sized audience on a large university campus, on the subject of civility. The folks who attended were mainly from campus ministry groups, many of them evangelical. There had been some controversy over “culture wars” issues on that campus in recent months, and they asked me to address questions about how we can best deal with public controversies in a Christian spirit. One point that I made with a special emphasis was the need to talk with our opponents face-to-face, whenever possible, before going public with our criticisms.
Afterward the leaders of one of the evangelical campus groups came up to talk with me. They told me how they had run ads in the campus newspaper, stating the evangelical understanding of sexual fidelity, with some mention of their opposition to same-sex relationships. One of the gay-lesbian groups had countered with an angry published response, and they had gone back and forth a bit, trading letters to the editor. “It has gotten a bit out of hand,” they said. “Realistically, from your point of view, how should we have handled it differently?”
I told them that I thought they should have asked for a private meeting with the gay-lesbian leaders at the outset. They should have shown them the ads, and said, “We know you will disagree with our position, but we do want you to see this ahead of time. And if there is anything in here that you think seriously misrepresents your point of view, we want to know about it. We want to say what we believe, but we do not want to be needlessly offensive in doing so.”
The evangelical leaders thanked me for my advice, and they told me they wished they would have done the kind of thing I proposed.
Several weeks later, I received a note from one of them. “We met with the leaders of the gay-lesbian group—we invited them to lunch, and they accepted,” he reported. “We told them that we wish that we had contacted them privately before running our ad. We apologized for how we have typically gone about making our views known, and we asked their forgiveness. It started off awkward, but by the end of the conversation we were talking about other stuff, and then they said we should meet again, and the next time lunch was on them. I think we are on a new path—not compromising, but making our case in a kinder way!”
Though I share with President Mouw an evangelical perspective, I take a different view on what is permissable sexually. Nonetheless, I want his call to civility to reach a wider audience in the Christian world. Whether we are activists for gender justice, full inclusion for gays and lesbians, or missionaries committed to sharing the Gospel, how we engage in dialogue with those who oppose us is a defining test of our character. It’s not enough to avoid raised voices and angry words; we have to balance our candid rejection of our adversaries’ worldview with a willingness to feel the pain our views cause them. Honesty matters, but so too does kindness. And perhaps kindness matters more, as the (in the end) deeply Christian and profoundly gay poet Auden wrote:
…without
the Spirit we die, but life
without the Letter is in the worst of taste,
and always, though truth and love
can never really differ, when they seem to,
the subaltern should be truth.
Most evangelicals believe that “truth and love can never really differ”. The God we worship is a God of radical Love, greater than we can imagine or describe — that Truth is our core conviction. But sometimes, those of us who call ourselves Christians have this disturbing habit of prioritizing the truth over love. In our eagerness to spread and defend a biblical worldview, we’re often cruel, insensitive, and self-righteous. I’d go so far as to say, however, that if the manner in which we bear witness to our version of the Truth is not gentle, thoughtful, and loving than we aren’t really doing our jobs right as Christians. God cares as much about means as about ends, as much about right action as about right intention.
For me, as a “progressive evangelical” who melds liberal social views with a passion for Christ, Auden and Mouw remind me this morning of the same thing: in the end, Truth and Love are one and the same. But if my words and my actions do not reflect the latter, then I’m not living in the former.
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