“But he was using his time in the spotlight to honor God!”
That’s what a Christian friend said when I objected to a college football player saying his team won a ballgame because God was on their side. Such verbal pabulum makes faith look silly, but my friend believes any positive talk about God or Christianity provides free and positive publicity for God in particular and the gospel of Jesus Christ in particular.
But does it?
Brad Bull
I find many people with such belief live in the echo chamber of large churches and have very few non-Christian friends. Thus, they mistake their positive feelings from familiar cliches as something that is going to be seen as positive to non-Christians. They don’t interact with enough non-Christians to know such comments actually make Christians look like imbeciles — and not in the way of “the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.”
Complicating this is a common misapplication of Mark 9:38-41, which reports Jesus saying anyone doing something in Jesus’ name is on Team Jesus. The context, though, is that the person the disciples were criticizing as an outsider was actually healing people in Jesus’ name. Jesus directs the disciples not to stop someone from healing others. Jesus was not endorsing the propagation of recklessly shallow thinking.
More importantly, Jesus wasn’t endorsing hurting others with bad religion. Scripture reports Jesus flipping the tables of those temple leeches using God’s name to exploit people financially. He harshly called the Pharisees “vipers” for using God’s name to garner political power.
That brings us to the perverse video dressed in holy words and released not by private citizen Marco Rubio but in his official role as U.S. secretary of state. If Christians’ bad theology celebrates an adolescent football player’s shallow words to a TV camera, how much more a prominent politician? Baptist News Global reported Nov. 3 about the video released by the U.S. State Department in recognition of International Religious Freedom Day.
Narrator Rubio starts the video saying, “Our faith calls us outward into the limitless darkness of the unknown. It tells us to go forth and preach the gospel to the world as a witness unto all nations unto the ends of the earth.”
“Rubio preaches the Great Commission in a context that will make Christianity repugnant to rational analysts who rightly see his sermonizing as an abuse of power.”
Notice Rubio’s first two words: “Our faith.” Whose faith? The next sentence alludes to the Great Commission charge of Jesus to his followers. Rubio is speaking as a civil servant of all Americans, so his use of “our faith” — our Christian faith — inherently segregates non-Christians into non-Americans. This flies in the face of the First Amendment (fought for by Baptists) that wisely prevents Congress from establishing a U.S. religion. (And to those saying the First Amendment only applies to Congress, the doctrine of incorporation through the 14th Amendment and the application of the Lemon Test have extended that to all levels of government in the U.S.)
In a sickening paradox, Rubio preaches the Great Commission in a context that will make Christianity repugnant to rational analysts who rightly see his sermonizing as an abuse of power. Christians need to remember what Jesus said in the next verse after the Mark 9:38-41 passage cited above. “If any of you cause one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea.”
Another stumbling block hypocrisy comes in how Christian nationalists do verbal contortionism in applying their standards to historic versus contemporary civic leaders. I’m writing this just after the announcement that James Talarico, a Presbyterian seminary student and grandson of a Baptist pastor, won his senate race in Texas, and Adam Hamilton, pastor of the nation’s largest United Methodist church, won his Senate race in Kansas. Despite this pair’s explicit professions of faith, multiple Christian leaders and social media influencers have labeled them as non-Christians because of their political perspectives. Talarico in particular has been maligned for a comment that God is nonbinary, despite the Bible using both masculine and feminine descriptions of God.
Yet, when it comes to the U.S. Founding Fathers, Christian nationalists don’t require a profession of faith. Because Founding Fathers like Thomas Jefferson or Benjamin Franklin commented about God or divine providence, Christian nationalists say, “See! He was a Christian! And Presbyterian pastor John Witherspoon signed the Declaration of Independence. See? They wanted Christianity to be our official religion!”
Thus, Christian nationalists — with whom Rubio has become quite cozy — ascribe Founding Fathers as Christians just for using the word “God” (although neither Jefferson nor Franklin observed anything resembling orthodox Christianity). Christian nationalists also celebrate a Founding Father simply because he was Presbyterian minister. Yet, it’s not enough that Talarico (a Presbyterian) and Hamilton (a pastor) profess their faith in Christ in word and deed. Their opponents don’t just say, “I disagree with their politics;” they label them as non-Christian.
In my conversation about the football player’s God-made-us-win comment, I said: “To say God made one team win is to say God made the other team lose. That raises all kinds of problems.” A third person in the prayer meeting conversation said, “No, God is nonbinary. He can make one team win without making the other team lose.”
What? Even accounting for divine mystery, that doesn’t make sense. But the same type of folks who say God is nonbinary at an illogical scoreboard have a meltdown over Talarico accurately suggesting God is nonbinary in terms of sex organs.
Non-Christians are watching all this. Hopefully, they focus on the gentle spirits of Democrats like Talarico and Hamilton and Republicans like Bill Frist and Bill Haslam and see the light of Christ. The danger, though, is they will be revolted by seeing Christians gulping Rubio’s sewage like it’s lemonade. Secular souls analyze such words with their minds instead of the sentimentality and social safety of how Christians feel at church with familiar catch phrases that fit nicely on a bumper sticker but not in an honest person’s analysis.
Brad Bull has served as a hospital chaplain, pastor, professor at Christian, private secular and state universities. He’s a therapist in private practice.