A Little Introspection, Please

We conservative Christians are really, really skilled at naming everybody else’s sins.

We shout about Marxism and CRT and LGBT perversion. We trumpet our warnings about public school indoctrination and the dangers of listening to Taylor Swift, whose occultic leanings, I’ve been assured, are quite possibly the spirit of the antichrist, gaining access through global teenage angst, ready to usher in the apocalypse, quite possibly this November.

We rail against toxic empathy and illegal immigrants and drag queen story time and Planned Parenthood. “Tim Walz wants to put tampons in boys’ bathrooms,” we warn. And we suddenly care a whole heckuva lot about women when it comes to the transjacking of women’s sports and prisons. We’re the best advocates ever for victims of sexual assault when the rapist is a flaming leftist. “Epstein was evil.” Weinstein? Lock him up and throw away the key.

And we’re not necessarily wrong about a lot of this. We might be overshooting the target ever so slightly on the Taylor Swift stuff, but overall, we’ve got an important point to make. I’m no exception. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve typed the phrase “Women don’t have penises” in the last decade. (I’m also struck by how accustomed I’ve become to using the word “penis” in everyday conversation. This is certainly a dramatic deviation from my somewhat prudish baseline tendencies.)

Bad ideas create victims, and it’s good and right and just to oppose the bad ideas that victimize the entire world. A sincere and earnest desire for the kind of righteous living that leads to human flourishing is a really good thing. Marxism is problematic. Women’s spaces do need defending. Empathy divorced from reason leads straight off a cliff. If we actually care about the plight of our fellow humans, silence is an unacceptable response to active threats. We have a duty to warn.

But…

What happens when we become so obsessed with warning people about external threats that we fail to notice the threats that are coming from inside our own house? Are we as relentless about removing planks from our own eyes as we are about removing the specks from others?

I would have to argue that, collectively, we’re not.

Hear me out. If a drag queen sexually abuses a child, we’re ready to light it up and watch it burn. We shout it from the rooftops. We want the world to know. Not only do we want all drag queens to be banned from reading opportunities for all time, but we also demand the heads of the library board members who allowed it.

To be clear, drag queens are sex clowns, and sex is not for kids, so I fully support efforts to prevent these events, but here’s where I’m going—

Is our commitment to safeguarding children this thorough and unyielding if, instead of a drag queen, the predator is a beloved church elder? Do we sound the alarms and phone the neighbors and turn over every rock until justice has been served? Or do we suddenly find ourselves talking in hushed voices behind closed doors, lecturing everyone about how it’s actually righteous to make sure we don’t air out the church’s dirty laundry? Are we relentless in our pursuit of justice, or are we secretly pretty eager for concrete evidence to be hard to acquire?

Do we only scream “Innocent until proven guilty” when the person in question is someone we like? Did you wait until Weinstein was announced guilty in a court of law before drawing conclusions about him? How about Hillary? Did we wait for a public trial before shouting “Lock her up?” I’m just curious. Do our standards change the minute our own posterchildren are the ones in the hot seat?

I’ll give you another one: If the local public school were trying to mandate the display of the 5 pillars of Islam in every classroom, heads would roll. Christians would rightly show up in droves at the schoolboard meetings to oppose this legislative overreach and shout our commitment to religious freedom. But when the local public school mandates the display of our own religious tenets, suddenly the religious freedom of others doesn’t seem to matter at all, and we justify it by convincing ourselves we’re just teaching accurate history. The ends justify the means as long as our own ideology is preeminent. Is this right? Is this fair? Or is it astoundingly hypocritical? How many mental cartwheels are we willing to turn in order to resolve our cognitive dissonance here?

Marxist authoritarianism is bad, but Christian nationalist authoritarianism is okay? Because God? CRT’s racism is evil, but rightwing antisemitism and kinism can fly under the radar as long as hitching our wagons to the people who peddle them advances our cause?

If childless cat ladies are an attack on the traditional family, do we have any business sharing memes depicting Donald Trump (a double divorcee with three baby mamas) as God’s chosen instrument, a messiah of the free world?

If feminism is cancer, why aren’t we aggressively plucking out its patriarchal roots? Have you seen the types of heretical garbage the early church fathers had to say about women? You don’t think that baking these ideas into our shared theology is consequential? Why aren’t we spending any time or energy addressing this?

And while I was personally glad to see so many Christians speaking up last week when two grown males punched women in the face on the world stage to secure gold medals in women’s boxing, a number of these people remain inexcusably callous to battered women trapped in abusive marriages. Misguided theological frameworks like Voddie Baucham’s “permanence view” of marriage permeate the church and actively teach that battered women must remain married to their abusers until death. How can we expect a watching world to believe our claims to advocate for women when we’re allowing this kind of thing a free pass in our midst?

“But it’s so much worse on the other side” is a pretty crappy reason to allow rot to go unchecked in our own house. It seems to me that if we want people to trust us, it’s pretty stinking important to be trustworthy, and this means being fair and honest and humble and as relentless about uprooting our own inadequacies as we are about uprooting other peoples’.

The Bible reminds us that “Judgment begins in the house of the Lord.” It also tells us to remove the planks from our own eyes before tending to the business of removing specks from the eyes of others.

I’m working to build the Psalmist’s prayer into my regular rotation. “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”

If we never slow down to even wonder if we ourselves are part of the problem, then we’re not making it very easy for the good Lord to use us as instruments in the solution.

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