Special Citizenship for Evangelicals

By Bill Mefford

Make no mistake, the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court is going to be a disaster. Women's rights, voting rights, LGBTQ rights are all endangered and impending is a pseudo-Christian theocracy where evangelical Christians who want to use their faith to discriminate will be protected as a special class of citizens. The American ideal of equality is likely going to cease to be anything more than rhetoric if the new court gets its way.

Barrett is the first choice of evangelical leaders because she is anti-abortion, pro-big business, anti-worker, and she will likely rule to dismantle the Affordable Care Act (ACA), or Obamacare just a week after the election, which has been an obsession for Republicans for years. I am not sure why, but throwing people off of their health care seems to be their one organizing principle.

The Supreme Court is shaping up to be a form of entrenched institutional injustice for decades to come. Not good. But I believe the reason why evangelical leaders love her nomination so much is the same reason why they have sold their birthright for a bowl of pottage - because the Supreme Court will create a super class of citizenship reserved for evangelicals where they will not have to obey non-discrimination laws that protect historically vulnerable groups from being discriminated against.

Evangelicals claim their love trump for being “pro-life” all the while they do not mind that well over 200,000 lives have been lost due to his cruelty and incompetence. They also had no problem when this “pro-life leader” split up families, caged kids, and pilfered government funds for his family’s criminal enterprises. He is not pro-life, but then again, most “pro-life” evangelicals aren’t either.

No, 82% of evangelicals love trump because he does whatever he wants and he gets away with it. He is above the law and he flaunts it. Evangelicals crave that. When a Colorado baker discriminated against Charlie Craig and David Mullins who were getting married and wanted to have a cake at their wedding which the baker refused to make (and I refuse to say his name here), evangelicals cried persecution! They are doing this all over the country - refusing to offer services to people just as racist southerners did when they refused to offer equal treatment to Blacks which spurred sit-in’s and others forms of protest during the Civil Rights Movement. And now that they have a friendly SCOTUS evangelicals and the well-funded legal groups that feed off their affluence will set out to establish legally-mandated protections for evangelicals to discriminate against whoever the hell they want to and not face any repercussions. Like their idol trump, they want to be above the law.

So, let’s play this out. Assuming Barrett joins the Court and makes the far right wing 6 votes strong, in ten years with the trump appointees on the Court there could likely be no protections for LGBTQ people, or for intermarried couples (some evangelicals see racial intermarriage as unbiblical), or anyone else evangelicals lake offense at (undocumented immigrants perhaps?). Evangelical business owners will get to pick who they want to serve and evangelicals in public positions like doctors or nurses, county clerks, coroners, school teachers and counselors, and anyone else you can think of who gets paid by taxpayer dollars; all will be allowed to decide they do not want to serve people they deem are condemned by their acontextual, ahistorical reading of Scripture. There will be so many carve-outs of non-discrimination laws that those laws will have little use and less impact.

Just as trump and his evangelical base want socialism for themselves and rugged capitalism for everyone else, trump and his evangelical base want to be the ones to demand rigid adherence to law for everyone else while they fly far above any level of legal or even social accountability. I can hear the Scripture being rewritten even now, “I can break all laws through my personal Savior (trump) who gives me grace.”

When I led the work on immigration reform for the United Methodist Church I got all kinds of hate emails from mostly evangelicals inside and outside the church and one common refrain, often misspelled, was, '“WHAT PART OF ILLEGAL DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND?” And yes, it was usually all caps. Oh how I wish I had kept those hundreds of emails so that I could remind them of their strict demands of others while they want a free ride for themselves and for their supreme leader.

An evangelical gospel is one where people who hold to their rigid belief system get the goodies while everyone else, especially liberals, inherit hell. Jesus is their personal Savior which all too often conveys ownership of Jesus rather than subservience to his lordship. And he has come so that those who hold him in their social, political, economic, and cultural image will have all the desires their little culturally imprisoned hearts and minds can imagine. An evangelical gospel is complete hypocrisy and antithetical to what God calls us to in Scripture, but even more, their gospel promises harm to real people and destruction to the church.

So, once the special class of citizenship for evangelicals is established, the already-present resentment and bitterness directed towards all people who claim to be Christian will be amped up like nothing we have ever seen before. People will want nothing more to do with the church or with Jesus. It will wreck the mission of the church and make the church even more irrelevant than it already is. The denominations not dead yet will most likely be fully killed off not because they share in the special class of evangelical citizenship but rather, because, as we have seen time and time again, denominations have very little if any capability of responding to changing contexts and rising needs.

So, a lot of bad news, right? Yes, but not entirely.

Evangelicalism is a dead creed, but very much an alive and powerful political force. Thus, what will be needed in the future is exactly what is needed right now: small bands of Jesus-followers in local contexts working towards collective spiritual, economic, social, and political liberation. We will need liberationists. We will need people in love with the biblical Jesus and in love with the people in their neighborhoods and communities. The denominations have failed to create an authentic peculiar people so our means of discipleship will not be top-down from people who loves their titles and positions and who guard their fiefdoms with their lives. No, we will need local groups, deeply immersed among those directly impacted by injustice crying out in the wildnerness, “Make straight the path of the Lord!”

We will need prophets and pastors, teachers and artisans, tentmakers, dreamers, innovators, and helpers. Look around, these people are honestly all around us. They do not have fancy titles and rarely have their written books or made a name for themselves. They are too busy serving and loving, giving of themselves and expecting nothing in return. Liberationists too have a special kind of citizenship, but it is not citizenship dependent on the idols of power, affluence, and political relevance. It is a citizenship granted by a Creator’s love, a Redeemer’s sacrifice, and a Sustainer’s never-ending friendship.

We need to keep an eye out for the citizenship that harms and we need to live into the citizenship that liberates.

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