From the Salmon

Jeff Sharlet’s Harper’s article ”Soldiers of Christ: Inside America’s Most Powerful Megachurch” has gotten quite a bit of attention recently on many of the sites I visit. Sharlet visits Pastor Ted Haggard’s New Life Church in Colorado Springs and writes a fairly colorful piece about the 11,000-member church that has sprung up around Haggard’s particular brand of free-market, spiritual-warfare theology.

Now, I have very little experience with churches like this, so it’s hard for me to know if and where Sharlet may be sensationalizing his experience at New Life. I do know that it’s not terribly difficult to make pretty standard “Jesus-speak” and Christian ritual come off as being fairly creepy. But as I read the article, it’s not really the worship style or the ostentatious building that bothered me. It was the metaphors. And sadly, I know all too well that these metaphors do exist in many churches.

One metaphor that runs throughout Sharlet’s article is the language and imagery of the Church at War — from huge angel statues with broadswords to a children’s area called “Fort Victory” to an overwhelming emphasis on the theme of spiritual warfare. This is an image that I wrestled with in some of my earliest posts. I imagine it’s a topic I’ll revisit, but for now, I wanted to write about a different metaphor that was equally pervasive — that of the “free-market church.”

Fred Clark at Slacktivist has already written a nice post in response to Haggard’s claim that “They’re pro-free markets, they’re pro-private property… That’s what evangelical stands for.” While I’m equally bothered by the conflation of political economy and church doctrine, and while I hope you’ve seen threads of that throughout my writing so far, that’s still not what bothered me most.

What bothered me most was this passage:

In devising New Life’s small-group system, Pastor Ted says that he asked himself and his staff a simple question: Do you like your neighbors? And, for that matter, do you even know your neighbors? The answers he got — the Golden Rule to the contrary — were “Not really” and “No.” Okay, said Pastor Ted, so why would you want to be in a small group with them? His point was that arbitrary small groups would make less sense than self-selected groups organized around common interests. Hence New Life members can choose among small groups dedicated to motorcycles, or rock climbing, or homeschooling, or protesting outside abortion clinics.

If you don’t like your neighbors or even know them, why would you want to be in a small group with them? Are you kidding me??

To paraphrase one of my favorite lines from Anne Lamott, you can safely assume you’ve created a God in your own image when God happens to prefer the same people you do.

Look, I understand this feeling. I’ve led small groups before, and I’ll be the first to admit that it can be challenging to foster community in a group that doesn’t necessarily like each other. In the context of our culture, self-selected groups organized around common interests do make more sense. But Jesus’ entire ministry flew in the face of what made sense in the context of culture.

Love your neighbor as you would love yourself. That’s challenging enough, but Jesus couldn’t leave it there. Love your enemy. Love the tax collectors and prostitutes. Love the Samaritan. Love the unlovely. When you throw a party, don’t invite friends, family or rich neighbors; invite the poor, the crippled, the alien among you. Over and over, Jesus called his followers to a life that was counter cultural.

To return to Haggard’s question, why would we want to be in community with people we don’t like or don’t know? Because that kind of community requires humility and empathy and listening and selflessness and courage and faith. That kind of community forces us to see in each other the same dignity and worth that God sees. It stretches us and unsettles us and helps us grow.

But free-market theology wants nothing to do with this. It’s too costly. Too hard. It’ll never sell.

Free-market theology is a rebranding of God to capture the largest market share. It starts from the question “What kind of God do people want?” and then responds with a targeted, fine-tuned package of Christianity. It’s meeting people where they’re most comfortable and saying, “Yeah, we’ve got a God for that.”

This isn’t just a top-down phenomenon, either. In today’s car culture, with a whole menu of denominations and worship styles for us to choose from, it’s somewhat natural that we become consumers of church. And I’m certainly not immune. My wife and I took a year to find the church we attend, and to get there every Sunday, we drive about a half hour across the Bay. That’s a far cry from the arbitrary community of the early church or of the historical church model: the parish.

I think all this choice we’ve created is a bug, not a feature. Churches actually compete with each other for attendees and financial resources. And this competition shatters the idea of one body, one Spirit, one hope, one faith, one baptism — the unity that is the bedrock for the diversity within the church. Look, if you succeed in this marketplace, it doesn’t mean your church is more godly. It simply means your church is more popular.

God help us.