When to be a Christian. And when not.

Rod Dreher, and the art of picking and choosing when the compassion of Jesus matters.

If there is no God
Not everything is permitted to man
He is still his brother’s keeper
And he is not permitted to sadden his brother
By saying there is no God.

-Czeslaw Milosz

I am not a Christian.

Now, I was a Christian. Baptized in the Churches of Christ by my father at age 9. Moved to the Mennonite Brethren, and then to the Mennonites in adolescence and adulthood. Went to a conservative Christian college. (I had precisely one beer and no sex at all during those four years — I was trying to be good.) In my late 20s, post-9/11, a long-brewing crisis of faith finally broke. I’ve been in churches since then, but I haven’t been a church person for about 20 years.

Honestly, I miss it. I’d like to be a Christian. I think the community a church provides is good for the soul, however you conceive of it, and that being responsible to a community is also useful. It’s not easy to find those things outside a church! And lord, I miss the hymns sometimes. But I have a problem: I can’t pray a lie.

So I’m on the outside.

This presents something of a conundrum, sometimes. Because weirdly, I still want Christians to be their best selves. (It’s one reason I tread carefully around the issue of abortion. I’m pro-choice, but I understand why the Christians I grew up with are anti-abortion.) And while I’m out of the church, I know my early immersion in it continues to shape my moral sense. I don’t want to cause my brother or sister to stumble. So it makes me angry when I see self-identified Christians seemingly not trying all that hard. It’s frustrating when I see people in public life act in the name of Jesus, but in ways that don’t seem to fit with his example.

But I’m not ever sure when it’s wise to speak up. After all, it’s easy to quote scriptures without accepting their discipline in your own life. And it’s really easy to think God would be on your side, aligned with your preferences. Also: I’ve been on the other side of it: There’s not much that’s less convincing to a Christian than having their own sacred words thrown back at them by an unbeliever.

Still…

Is Ron DeSantis a man of God?

You’ve probably heard by now how Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis shipped a bunch of undocumented migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, part of a cute political stunt designed to earn the applause of Fox News viewers and anger liberals. He succeeded.

What’s interesting to me is how much of the criticism against DeSantis the last day or so has been rooted in religion. The governor has been running around a bit lately, talking about “putting on the full armor of God,” after all. Here’s Jonathan V. Last:

Let’s pretend, just for a moment, that Jesus would have nothing to say about whether or not the state should seek to discourage undocumented migrants as a high-level matter of government policy.

Those planes were filled with actual human beings. People with dignity. People with hopes and dreams, problems and challenges. People with names and families.

And this Christian man used them as props. He didn’t clothe the naked or feed the hungry. He literally did the opposite: Evicted them—and not because he felt that he had to, because it was a requirement of the law. But because he saw that he could use them as a means to the ends of his personal ambition.

I’m trying—really trying—not to get too hot here. But Christians should look at this act and be revolted. They should be horrified.

Now, I agree with this. Of course I do! I could quote to you a few chapters and verses why I think Last is right. But what’s the use? I run into the problem I ran into before. Why would a Christian listen to me about the most Christian way to act?

I can’t think of a reason. So, instead, let me talk about Rod Dreher.

The Benedict Option

He’s a writer, and an interesting guy. I started following him during the Iraq War, because he was a conservative who turned against it early. And he was a Catholic who left the Catholic Church because of his deep anger about the sex abuse scandal¹. A man of conscience, and even if his conscience didn’t fully align with mine I could at least recognize him as such.

Over the last decade or so, he’s become unbearably shrill on matters of sexual identity, given to endlessly prattling about the “soft totalitarianism” of LGBT folks and advising his readers to prepare for an apocalyptic post-Christian society. He’s Greek Orthodox now, and his religion is central to his politcal identity and commentary. You may have heard about his book, The Benedict Option, which urges his fellow Christians to stand aside from American culture in order to “fortify their own communities and faith as one sub-culture among many in the United States.”

The last few years have confirmed an extraordinary cultural shift against conservative Christian beliefs, he argues, particularly with the rise of gay rights and legalization of same-sex marriage. “Christians who hold to the biblical teaching about sex and marriage have the same status in culture, and increasingly in law, as racists,” he writes. Their future will become increasingly grim, he predicts, with lost jobs, bullying at school, and name-calling in the streets.

This, Dreher says, is the “inevitable” fate for which Christians must prepare.

“Could it be that the best way to fight the flood is to … stop fighting the flood?” he asks. “Rather than wasting energy and resources fighting unwinnable political battles, we should instead work on building communities, institutions, and networks of resistance that can outwit, outlast, and eventually overcome the occupation.” This strategic withdrawal from public life is what he calls the Benedict option.

That’s a lot.

WWJD?

Given all this, given that Christanity is central to his moral outlook, what is Dreher’s take on DeSantis’ migrant-shipping stunt? About what you’d guess:

My argument is that he, and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, are trying to make liberal elites understand the cost of their easy compassion. … Some critics say that DeSantis et alia are owning the libs at the expense of desperate human beings. Well, those desperate human beings are in far less danger being dumped in a fancy liberal resort town than at any other point in their journey from their home countries, in which they chose to break the laws of the United States to enter. There are plenty of people near the borders of America who are tired of bearing the burden, financial and otherwise, of open illegal immigration. Nothing meaningful has been done about the problem as long as that burden has been concentrated in a few border states. Now those states' governors are trying something new to compel liberals to understand what they have been dealing with. I see nothing wrong with that.

When it comes to sex, Dreher can’t stop talking about the Christian ethic.

When it comes to exploiting migrants for political gain, he never mentions it.

This isn’t a matter of interpreting the Christian ethic differently, which well-intentioned folks can do. Maybe there’s some Orthodox way of looking at this that I’m not familiar with and don’t understand. But I don’t think that’s it, because of one thing: He just drops that part of his analysis entirely.

Which can make his faith — and the faith of the millions of self-described Christians who feel exactly the way he does — seem less like an overarching moral framework than a handy excuse for his pre-existing preferences.

I said earlier that religious upbringing still shapes my moral intuition, so here’s where I say: We have all sinned and fallen short of the glory. I’d do well to look for the log in my own eye before pointing out the speck in Dreher’s. And again: I am not a Christian. There’s no reason for him to pay any attention to me. Were I a Christian, I have no doubt he’d all be able to point to my theological inconsistency on this issue or that.

But there’s still a speck.

Top o’ the (alma mater) pops

1. Earlier version of this post omitted the reason why he left, which was awkward.