Religion & Politics - Calvinism, Empathy, & Persecutions

 Calvinism may hold the key to understanding America’s white evangelical movement (Kansas Reflector).

Such measures enjoyed support and even celebration from the American Christian right, leaving many to wonder: What kind of religion endorses such cruelty, the withholding of health care, winking at racism and embracing xenophobia?

There’s little Christian about this, it seems, unless viewed through a theologically Calvinist lens.

The Rev. Robert Johnson, who leads Church of the Resurrection’s new Lee’s Summit location, said the seeming detachment from suffering, tolerance of destructive ideas like “Manifest Destiny” and more likely have Calvinist roots.

“In their minds, God has already chosen,” said Johnson, who earlier led a United Methodist Church in Wichita. “Social justice is viewed as impudence to God’s executed will, and it’s also anti-empathy. In fact, empathy is meaningless.”

I grew up in the American Baptist denomination; a watered down Calvinism is how I viewed it and still view it. That may have more to do with a familial fatalism on my mother's die than a statement of the denomination's actual theology. 

“For them, empathy is a cudgel for the left,” the article explained. “It can manipulate caring people into accepting all manner of sins according to a conservative Christian perspective, including abortion access, LGBTQ+ rights, illegal immigration and certain views on social and racial justice.”

Allie Beth Stuckey, author of “Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion,” was quoted as saying: “Empathy becomes toxic when it encourages you to affirm sin, validates lies or supports destructive policies.”

Christian right beliefs have buttressed political conservatism for decades, from the Confederacy’s “Lost Cause,” to Jerry Falwell’s “Moral Majority,” to today’s MAGA movement. Falwell’s Liberty University didn’t originally admit Black students. To be fair, not all evangelicals hold such beliefs, but we should try to understand where the beliefs of so many might come from.

A review of Anthea Butler’s “White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America,” by Bianca Mabute-Louie, identifies evangelicalism as a nationalist political movement to support white, Christian hegemony. Racism is a feature, not a bug, of the movement.

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Calvin believed that “even before creation,” God had chosen some people for salvation, a belief associated with predestination, according to Christianity.com. Calvin fumed at how Catholicism reduced religion to “salvation by works.”

His refrain? People shouldn’t try to manipulate God nor place Him in their debt. Saved people are saved only Him, not by good works.

“This is the perfect theology for what we see in the evangelical movement,” Johnson said. “This is why they may not consider themselves bigoted or racist. They have found a denominational justification for our racial caste system. It’s why they don’t like social activism. To them, there is no social Gospel, only individual salvation.”

I left the Baptist Church for several reasons, but I left the Church for this kind of thinking - that there was predestination - and for the church's history of violence towards those who disagreed with its interpretations of the religion. 

When I joined the Eastern Orthodox Church, it was because it stood for free will and had no institutions like the Inquisition. Empathy is not alien to Orthodox thinking because Christ was empathetic.

The Eastern Orthodox Church, however, has no influence on American politics.

 Grace Byron writes in her Doubting Thomas (Granta) (Going to Castleton makes her an Indiana writer):

At twelve I harbored two obsessions: my acoustic guitar and God. I took lessons weekly at a Christian Music Store in Castleton, Indiana, a lovely little suburb that has since crusted over with chain stores. There was a mall that had a Spencer’s, the kind of novelty emo store popular in the early 2000s that sold My Chemical Romance T-shirts and sex toys. All the things a good Christian was not supposed to want.  

As kids raised in the church, we were supposed to be content to live in a world of answers, all neatly laid out in hymnals and Vacation Bible School. I wrote ‘To God be the glory, not me’ on all my silly little guitar compositions. It was obsessive, a talisman to ward off uncertainty. It started after hearing that Beethoven had done something similar – he wrote ‘es muss sein!’ on his symphonies. Was there a way out of the frenzied paranoia? Could holiness be discovered in a world less hellbent on shortcuts? Could the question mark be a gateway?  

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In the Evangelical church we were supposed to accept the answers we were given as final. Questions and doubts were met hesitantly, like youthful rebellion. Early Christian writing developed as a form of self-surveillance. The diary was a technology of admitting fault and sin and finding answers to why one falls into temptation. The Christians I knew were less interested in contemplative dialogue – unless it was confirming their already deep-held beliefs about the world and their place in it. This wasn’t a synagogue or a sangha. It was a church. Besides, the mystics and seekers – even among the Christian faith – had never gotten very far. God’s will was supposed to be clear and easily definable. Even when we got confused, we could find counseling and clarity in a fifty-minute sermon. Don’t you want the promise of easy answers? I do. It’s alluring to know the way.  

 There is a very fine writer by the name of Marilynne Robinson who writes about the good side of Calvinism; I can see her point without agreeing with it. I have never agreed with predestination, and I cannot see how I will. There is a firm point in Orthodox thinking that God could not make something evil, that he is not angry with us, while the West sees God as doing the opposite. Empathy is not anti-God in the East. It is much easier to burn heretics when you think you are serving an Angry God - which seems also easy to translate into the French Reign of Terror and genocide, etc. In the East, we are to persuade heretics of their errors, not harm them. Bottom line, since I am holding myself together with chewing gum and baling wire, it goes back to the difference between Greek and Roman. The Romans were great ones for the law, were very good at destroying their enemies, and the Greek church never had the temptation for worldly power that Rome had. Oh, yeah, I read Hawthorne's The Marble Faun while in prison, and it was not bad - New England Puritan in the dying days of The Papal States - and never before got the real sense of the Pope as temporal prince (Yea, I've seen Rex Harrison in the Michelangelo move, but that was Harrison hamming up it up.) Good lord, I am in a gloomy and loquacious mood this morning. Shoulders throbbing and neck stiff, you'd think I'd just shut up.

All this might be moot except here we are with White Christian Nationalism rising, the Evangelical heirs of Falwell and Robinson letting Israel commit genocide so long as it brings about the end times. There is something seriously wrong with this kind of thinking that might just get a lot of us killed. Oh, yeah, been listening to some videos about Heinlein - was he a fascist or not. None have mentioned the dictatorship he predicted in his Future History was a religious one. So, I never bought the fascist argument, but do have to wonder if anyone gave proper attention to the dictatorship predicted. (They all want to jump on Starship Troopers - which actually asks a very old question, who should be citizens. There was a time I could not have voted because I had too little property; Americans, not knowing their history, assume everyone can vote and always have.) 

And I should say that not all Western Churches agree with the Evangelicals (who seem to be really Pentecostals), but they're not in the middle of politics now, are they? I am also not sure that they condemn Christian nationalism in the way that the Eastern Church does.

About Marilynne Robinson, there is Marilynne Robinson: Distinctive Calvinist from Reformed Journal.

At first glance, Robinson is a surprisingly traditional Calvinist. She defends the hallmarks of traditional Calvinism: the majesty of God (though not in those terms), original sin, the providence of God, and predestination. She also has a high view of scripture. Moreover, in addition to defending Calvin against all comers, she also defends the Puritans and occasionally cites Jonathan Edwards with approval. In each case, however, she gives a special Robinsonian spin to their doctrines.

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 In another essay Robinson alludes to the same “offensive” doctrine and puts it in a historical context, thereby absolving Calvin from responsibility for it. “Terms and concepts associated with Calvinism also shock and horrify, for example the idea of an elect, of sin and fallenness, of judgment and condemnation, as if these were the products of one Frenchman’s fevered brain rather than basic issues in Christianity from its beginnings.”2 Her main line of defense that predestination is not determinism; that it is both scriptural and has a long doctrinal history preceding Calvin. “The elect” and “election,” she points out, “are terms used twenty-three times in the New Testament, seven times by Jesus, and are therefore significant in all classical theology, though folklore attributes the notion to Calvin and blames him for it.”3 She repeats the latter point in various contexts, and is quick to point out that “Predestination was accepted by every significant theologian (Chrysostom seems to have been the exception) before Calvin or contemporary with him, including Augustine and Aquinas.” After making this claim (which I believe is too sweeping), she adds this interesting observation, “Whether predestination is ‘double’ or ‘single’ is a quibble with which Calvin was too honest to have patience.”4 Only a “quibble”? I doubt it.

And Chrysostom belongs to the Orthodox Church.

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