The Southern Male Democrat

One of my most favorite memories of growing up in the Southern Baptist church is of singing Blest Be the Tie. Every sixth Sunday, we would take communion (little wafers and Welch’s grape juice, of course) and at the conclusion, we would all join hands across the aisles and sing the first verse of Blest as our benediction.

I could literally feel the love of both God and my extended church family. It provided me with a faith that has never wavered. Though my faith remained constant, as the years wore on, I felt that my blest tie with the Southern Baptist church was broken by its increasing politicization.

I didn’t understand why so many of my fellow Christians were trying to spell G-O-D with the letters G-O-P. I didn’t understand why they would get so riled up about various sexual issues, when the Scriptures mention poverty much more often. And frankly, given the Southern Baptist’s history of church autonomy and not being political, I wondered why more believers weren’t worried about the ramifications of tying our faith to one political movement.

What I didn’t know was that I was not alone. There are still Christians who believe in the separation of church and state. There are Baptists who believe strongly in the priesthood of the believer as outlined in the book of First Peter. (Sorry to get theological. In a nutshell, the concept means that every individual has the capability to interpret God’s word for themselves.) Many Christians concern themselves more with issues of social justice than whether a small minority of our population can get married. (It always cracks me up that conservatives use terms like the “Defense of Marriage” act while scoffing at numbers indicating that up to 10 percent of the US population is gay. So why do their marriages need “defending” from such a small group? )

Now the Christian “left” is in full bloom. Many of the former Southern Baptist churches have left the convention to form the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF), a more moderate association. Mrs. SMD and I are about to join a CBF church and every Sunday, their bulletin mentions separation of church and state as a principle of faith. Every week, I get emails from a group called Sojourners whose mission is to articulate a biblical call to social justice. They are leading the way in showing Americans of faith that we can practice our faith and still practice progressive politics.

But none of that excited me as much as seeing the publication of the Evangelical Manifesto last week. Sojourners summarized it as follows;

On the question of public life, the manifesto recognizes that the political categories of left and right simply don’t fit religion, and it is a big mistake to try to fit religion into them. The people I meet across the country are yearning for a moral center to our public life and political discourse, with a fundamental emphasis on the common good. They want to understand better the moral choices and challenges that lie beneath our political debates. More and more people want to see a common-good politics replace the politics of individual gain and special interests.

 

The manifesto affirms that:

We must find a new understanding of our place in public life. We affirm that to be Evangelical and to carry the name of Christ is to seek to be faithful to the freedom, justice, peace, and well-being that are at the heart of the kingdom of God, to bring these gifts into public life as a service to all, and to work with all who share these ideals and care for the common good. Citizens of the City of God, we are resident aliens in the Earthly City. Called by Jesus to be “in” the world but “not of” the world, we are fully engaged in public affairs, but never completely equated with any party, partisan ideology, economic system, class, tribe, or national identity.

After many years of feeling like an outcast from my faith tradition because of my politics, I am finally finding a home. Blest be the tie that binds, indeed.