The Subversive Jesus
In a recent NPR interview, responding to a question about why he wrote his most recent book, Russell Moore, former president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission for the Southern Baptist Convention, said:
“It was the result of having multiple pastors tell me, essentially, the same story about quoting the Sermon on the Mount, parenthetically, in their preaching — “turn the other cheek” — [and] to have someone come up after to say, “Where did you get those liberal talking points?” And what was alarming to me is that in most of these scenarios, when the pastor would say, “I’m literally quoting Jesus Christ,” the response would not be, “I apologize.” The response would be, “Yes, but that doesn’t work anymore. That’s weak.” And when we get to the point where the teachings of Jesus himself are seen as subversive to us, then we’re in a crisis.”
Theological differences aside, Moore seems to suggest that we need to pay closer attention to the notions that make up faith and those that do not. For example, Moore has long been critical of the intersection between white supremacy and Christian faith, although he is not the first (or the last) to address the issue. In many diverse corners of American Christianity, there is a sense that the church is at least implicitly (if not explicitly) structured around whiteness, misogyny, and homophobia (to name a few).
A problem, of course, is that in the work of dismantling oppression within our religious structures, we run up against their historical embeddedness. Antisemitism is deeply engrained in various theological systems and has been (in a formal sense) since the Council of Nicaea in 325. And despite the reality that women led and funded the work and life of early Christian communities, their contributions were largely erased, and today’s church still struggles to move beyond the sin of patriarchy and the narrowness of gender norms and binaries.
There is the dual problem of disentangling the cultural trappings of the stories we have inherited and our own enmeshed and intersectional being. I often think it would be nice to have clear lines of delineation between my religious, economic, social, and political selves – but this, so it seems to me, is a kind of psychological and modern fiction. Wherever I go, my faith informs who I am, and my faith becomes informed by where I go.
Returning to Moore, he indicates that a crisis of faith occurs when we experience Jesus as subversive to us – I would take a different view, in that any serious engagement of the life and teachings of Jesus (and the long history of the church) positions us for transformation and growth. Healthy religious forms of life are probably always a little subversive to our institutional and personal lives – and that is a good thing.
