Lessons from this year’s Theology Beer Camp

The theology nerds who show up at Theology Beer Camp are steering a middle path between Christian nationalism and anti-religious secularism.   

We think the Christian church went off the rails in the fourth century when it climbed into bed with the Emperor Constantine.  

We believe Western civilization has been deformed by colonial imperialism and white supremacy.  

We believe the Christian church (Catholics and Protestants alike) have often replaced the love ethic of Jesus with an authoritarian spirituality that gives the powerful a pass.  

We pursue interfaith dialogue and emphasize what the great religions of the world share in common.  

“We worship a God defined by a passionate love for all creation.”

We worship a God defined by a passionate love for all creation.   

We feel called to share God’s love with our neighbors, our families and ourselves.  

We believe God is, in a sense, figuring things out in real time. Because we are free to accept or reject God’s invitation, the future is open and undetermined.  

We believe God invites us to join the struggle against hate, bitterness and hardness of heart.  

And we bring the biblical witness into conversation with the best science available to us.  

We are committed to breaking down the barriers that have excluded from positions of leadership women, people of color, LGBTQ folk and those with prophetic opinions.  

At Theology Beer Camp, progressive Christians are free to speak the truth as they understand it.

Reflections on this year’s camp

I’m just back from this year’s camp at Pine Ridge Presbyterian Church in Kansas City, Mo.

I’ve learned to avoid the “Where do you worship” question. Although a solid contingent of beer campers attend churches at the progressive end of Mainline Protestantism, most have roots in evangelicalism. They have left their old religious world but haven’t found a congregation that speaks their spirit language. They feel like children who have been disowned by their parents, until they arrive at Tripp Fuller’s Beer Camp. 

Most progressive white Christians who grew up evangelical have had a rough ride. Many of the speakers at Theology Beer Camp shared the struggle of being gay in an aggressively homophobic congregation. Theologically educated women who experienced an undeniable call of God to pastoral ministry were scolded and silenced by the very churches that nurtured them in the faith.  

It takes a lot of love (and years of counseling) to come to terms with that level of trauma. When you don’t experience the healing embrace of a caring congregation, the natural response is to slide into a kind of sorrowful secularity. I spoke to several people who haven’t attended worship in years. Even familiar hymns that were once a joy to sing can trigger panic. 

Thus, there was very little distinctively Christian music at Theology Beer Camp. But you can’t build a movement without music. 

A group of musicians, cobbled together on short notice, led us in “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” and a U2 number with the plaintive chorus, “How long to sing this song.” We sang. We sang loud. We sang from the heart. Just like in the old days. 

The music brought me to tears. 

Three days of intense theological conversation is a healing balm for theology nerds like me. For people who have been deeply wounded by evangelical religion, the absence of bad, banal theology is a true blessing. But we must learn to sing the Lord’s song in this new land we have been thrust into.

Beyond biblical inerrancy

In the course of his stimulating conversation with Dianna Butler Bass, Church historian Bill Leonard addressed the fundamental problem with MAGA religion. “Biblical inerrancy is carrying us to places we don’t want to go,” he said. “You may be a Bible-believing church; but you’re not a gospel believing church.”  

Moments later, Bass made a bold declaration: “The gospel transforms our lives, and it transforms our world.” 

If the speakers at Theology Beer Camp have it right, the gospel is that the heart of God is love. Not the sentimental kind of love that produces warm fuzzy feelings, Cornel West insisted, but the kind of love that stands with the oppressed every time. 

Theology nerds need the safe place Theology Beer Camp provides. But we must also be movement-builders. “Without a movement,” West reminds us, “theology gets abstract; there is no connection to real human suffering.” 

Ilia Dleo, a Catholic theologian with a deep love for Teilhard de Chardin, came as close as anyone to nailing down the Theology Beer Camp definition of “gospel”: “When God is fully alive in us, and we are fully alive in God, we become persons. Jesus reveals to us what kind of God we are in relation with. A God of love who must love. We are called to be the face of that God in the world.”

Who was missing

There’s one big problem with Theology Beer Camp, and it’s common to progressive Christian spaces like this: I couldn’t help noticing who wasn’t there: twenty-somethings and people of color. The average age seemed to be about 55.

Maybe young people just aren’t big on conferences — even with beer. They are certainly less into beer than their parent’s generation. And many likely can’t afford to lay down $1,000 on a three-day ticket, travel and a hotel room.  

But how do we explain the overwhelming whiteness of the gathering? 

Jemar Tisby, a Black historian who is part of “The Convocation Unscripted” podcast, addressed the elephant in the room at the beginning of his conversation with Dianna Butler Bass and Kristen Du Mez: “I still feel this cultural distance. Is there a two-way street, or are you still expecting us to come to you?”  

I appreciated the honesty. People of color were sprinkled throughout the room, but most of them were on the program. It certainly wasn’t because issues like Black history, the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, or the taint of white supremacy were overlooked by the planners. Quite the contrary: These issues were front and center. 

In fact, several speakers emphasized the past failings of white liberal Christians.

Gary Dorrien, a leading authority on the Social Gospel and Civil Rights movements, wondered aloud how theologians like Walter Rauschenbusch and Washington Gladden ignored the tenets of white supremacy in the heart of the Jim Crow era.  

Adam Clark, a Black theologian trained at Union Seminary in New York, pointed out that leading white theologians, like Union’s Daniel Day Williams, failed to grapple with the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s.  

Tisby, who cut his theological teeth in Reformed evangelical circles, told us the Black Christian leaders he works with are more likely to speak of “decolonizing” theology but rarely speak of deconstructing and reconstructing their faith. In fact, he called this passion for deconstruction “the fundamentalism of the progressives.” 

Tisby noted that leaders at the progressive end of the Black theological spectrum often “share spaces with people we disagree with on many issues. We’ve got to learn what it means to be messy and still have a movement.”  

Tisby is right; largely due to the tragic racial history of the United States, Black and white Christians are very different. It would be difficult to find a religious setting where a white evangelical could address issues like systemic racism without experiencing stone-cold silence or fierce blowback. Black evangelicals, by contrast, can provide a fine-tuned analysis of racial injustice without rejecting traditional ideas like biblical literalism, heaven and hell eschatology, or a strict sexual ethic. In predominantly Black settings, liberals and conservatives can dialogue about racial justice while agreeing to disagree on theological questions.     

White Christian nationalism may look like an emerging phenomenon to white liberals, but Black Christians have been battling it for centuries. Black Christians who disagree about biblical inerrancy and the doctrine of atonement usually end up voting for the same candidates.  

White people, by contrast, can’t address ethical issues without splitting into mutually hostile tribes. A rough ethical consensus must exist in a congregation before tenuous baby steps in the direction of serious theological and political conversation can be taken.  

Theology Beer Camp is a great place to raise these questions and to realize we need even more.

 

Alan Bean leads the nonprofit Friends of Justice and lives in Fort Worth, Texas, where he attends Broadway Baptist Church.

 

Related:

Is Theology Beer Camp right for you? | Opinion by Alan Bean

Ruffled feathers: Wild Goose Festival is a case study in how hard it is to disentangle from white supremacy — even when you want to | Analysis by Amy Hayes