For several years now I’ve been asked questions about the emerging church and my feelings about the movement that I am a part of. These questions have always been confusing to me, because I’m not really part of the emerging church. I’m not a pastor, have never been a pastor, and don’t know very much about church or how to do church. I leave church to smarter, more gifted men and women. I honestly don’t think about how people should do church.
I have friends who are strongly associated with the emerging church movement, but they will tell you we have never had conversations about church. In fact, they would probably tell you I am completely ignorant about how to do church. I care about writing books. That’s my job. I have no more opinions about how to do church than a plumber. I wrote an essay about it in Blue Like Jazz, but the piece was really from the perspective of the man in the pew, and I’ve never really talked about it since.
But I really like my emergent friends. The one thing my very conservative friends and my liberal friends have in common is that they are extremely kind. I think kind people are kind and mean people are mean and it hardly matters whether they are conservative or not. It has more to do with irritable bowels, I think, or a persons controlling personality vs. their ability to trust Gods grace and speak His truth without associating a persons response to that truth with their own threatened identity. Regardless, I keep the kind friends and slyly slip away from the mean ones. Life’s too short.
When you are a writer, most of the things said about you in the press aren’t true. It’s not all bad, it’s just not all factual. Recently somebody handed me a Bible in which I submitted commentary and the bio in the back stated I lived in Portland with my wife Kate. I was shocked. I didn’t know I was married, and I’ve never dated a Kate. I felt like a terrible husband. Another reason I shouldn’t be a pastor.
When the recent political season came around, and I said a prayer at the Democratic Convention, and then later campaigned for Obama. I read many ridiculous things about myself after that. Some of the comments were mean. But I know they weren’t talking about me. They were talking about somebody they thought was me. I slyly slipped away to avoid the conversation, because while my name was being thrown around, my identity was secure for other reasons, and I was bored with the hype.
But last week, the Weekly Standard printed an article regarding me and, apparently, my political beliefs. The article was so very far off I feel a need to respond. I’m not going to get into a debate about the ideas, as I don’t think an article this biased is an invitation to a reasonable discussion. But the mistakes and inaccuracies presented need to be corrected.
I think the writer basically searched around on the internet and pieced together his article without fact checking. I was not contacted or interviewed by the Weekly Standard for their piece, which seemed odd for a biographical essay.
My book Blue Like Jazz grew out of a time when I was disillusioned with church, but my position on the church is not as hateful, or political, as the Weekly Standard has presented. I wrote in Blue Like Jazz: “It doesn’t do any good to bash churches, so I am not making blanket statements against the church as a whole. I have only been involved in a few churches, but I had the same tension with each of them; that’s the only reason I bring it up.” The Weekly Standard failed to present a balanced perspective, which, if taken in context, was the aim and the overwhelming interpretation of the book. You’d have to look pretty hard to paint me as a flaming liberal, and you’d have to overlook even more. What saddens me about their article is it addressed people of faith. I understand Fox News and/or CNN presenting a biased opinion in order to sell advertising to a target demographic, but I don’t think that is an appropriate strategy to address matters of faith.
The article describes the church I attend as “a socially conscious church in Seattle” and then makes the leap of positioning me as part of the emergent church movement—perhaps because I am under the age of forty. I am not a member of the emergent church movement. I attend a conservative church (in Portland, not Seattle) that reaches out to the poor. I doubt most of the people at my church voted the way I voted in the last election, but quite honestly, we don’t talk about it. We are involved in larger things. My theology is essentially reformed, though I’d elaborate on “sin nature” much further than many reformed theologians would, adding their own biases to the mix of total depravity and seeing it evidenced in both religious and non-religious personalities.
While I have friends who are part of the emergent church, and friends close to Obama, I also have many, many extremely conservative friends. I am never attacked by liberals for my association with my conservative friends, even though they number, perhaps, ten to one. I guess this is “guilt by association,” but apparently the writer of the article only looked at a tiny percentage of my associates. It’s bad journalism.
There is humorous criticism of Republicans in Blue Like Jazz, but I would also point out that in the same book I referred to my more liberal friends as “fruit nuts.” I voted for George W. Bush, actually, and have always made that clear. I did oppose the invasion of Iraq, and wrote a single article about my opposition. I feel a need to point out that the Weekly Standard attempted a character assault based largely on associations rather than facts.
As for my support for President Obama, I travelled around the country during the campaign and publicly disagreed with Obama’s position on abortion. I encouraged conservatives to do more on the issue than speak loudly because I saw the last 40 years as hardly being successful as far as reducing the number of abortions or ending the tragedy taking place in our country. This is hardly a soft stand on the issue. Not many people in the Obama camp were saying such a thing. And yet they accepted me and listened to my position. I found them to be open to dialogue. I still do.
Finally, it is true that I think “very fondly of those wacko Republican fundamentalists,” but I love the “fruit nut liberals” too! I’d love to enter into a debate about this, but debates about such topics have proven fruitless. And besides, I don’t have time. I’m married. The Bible says so. I can’t wait to meet her!
Best,
Don
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