It's In the Code Ep. 97: "In Essentials, Unity. In Non-Essentials, Charity."
Subscribe for $5.99 a month to get bonus content most Mondays, bonus episodes every month, ad-free listening, access to the entire 500-episode archive, Discord access, and more: https://axismundi.supercast.com/
“In essentials, Unity; in non-essentials, charity.” This is a Christian “slogan” or theological aphorism that dates back almost 2000 years. But we still here it within diverse Christian contexts today. What is the impulse behind it? What does it tell us about Christian identity and “unity”? What are the different uses to which Christians put this aphorism today? How can it signal an inclusive, inviting, and open Christian community? How can it also serve the purposes and aims of high-control Christian communities? Give this week’s episode a listen to find out!
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC
Order Brad's book: https://bookshop.org/a/95982/9781506482163
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Axis Mundy By now a lot of you have heard me talk about becoming a Swag Premium member.
You're on the fence.
You're not sure you should do it.
You've been meaning to do it, but you haven't done it yet.
Now's the time.
Until Mother's Day, our yearly subscription is on sale for just $50.
That's right.
$50 for the entire year, you'll get access to our entire archive, including every episode if it's in the code.
You'll get our bonus episodes.
Every month, Dan and I sit down for two hours to talk, answer questions, and tell stories.
All of our bonus content on Mondays are surprise episodes, ad-free listening, and then you'll get to come hang out with us in the Discord server.
If you've been waiting, if you've been on the fence, if you've been not sure, now is the time to do it.
As always, welcome to the series, It's in the Code, part of the welcome to the series, It's in the Code, part of the podcast Straight White American My name is Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Thrilled as always to be with you, grateful as always to have you listening and joining me here.
Back after some interviews by Michelle Dowd and Beatrice Marovitch, and before that we had done a long series on The concept of biblical inerrancy, sort of filling out a lot of questions, a lot of topics that come up with the claims of being biblical.
And so here we are in the series, kind of returning to what we do, which is responding to the comments that you have, the questions that you have, the topics that you come up with, Always and forever behind on the emails.
Not as behind as I used to be, but behind on the emails.
But I do respond to them as I'm able.
I do value so much the feedback that you give me on topics and themes and so forth.
And so We're going to dive into an interesting one here today, and it is a—I guess you could call it a slogan, maybe a kind of theological aphorism in a way—but this is the Christian saying, In essentials unity, in non-essentials charity.
That's a theme that you might have heard of.
A lot of people have emailed or commented and said, I've heard people talk about this, or my pastor used to say this, or I was in seminary and they would say this.
Wondering about the background, things that it does, and as well, as you know, so much of what I do is informed by the clients that I work with at the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery.
The negative experiences of this phrase, people who report that this makes them really uncomfortable or that they find it disingenuous or triggering or sometimes they get upset and sometimes they're not even sure why.
That's what we're sort of diving into.
Maybe you've heard of this, maybe you haven't, but again, the slogan is, in essentials unity, in non-essentials charity.
There's actually a third component to kind of round out the saying, so the whole thing reads, in essentials unity, in non-essentials charity, in all things Christ, or in all things Jesus Christ.
This saying, it's not new.
A little bit of background on it.
It's a theological or kind of ecclesiastical formulation that goes a long way back in the Christian tradition.
Some attribute it to Augustine.
As I understand it, I think most patristic scholars say that's probably not correct.
It's usually attributed to a person named John Chrysostom.
And John Chrysostom was a 4th century bishop of Constantinople, so the Eastern Church, or what would emerge as the Eastern Orthodox Church.
He's known as one of what people refer to as the Church Fathers, or the Patristic Fathers, in this kind of formative period of the Christian tradition.
And so that's where it probably originates, but the saying also figures really prominently within various mostly Protestant circles in the period following the European Reformation.
And I think this is probably where people who know something of the history of it are sort of more familiar with that.
But if you Google the phrase, which I did, you'll also find not just references to John Chrysostom and the Church Fathers and, you know, German Lutherans using the term in the 16th and 17th centuries or things like that.
You'll also find references to this phrase all over the place.
It is alive and well and very well sort of represented in a lot of contemporary Christian contexts, right?
You can come across a lot of different kinds of ministry groups that have this defined as sort of a key value, right?
This notion of, in essentials, unity, in non-essentials, charity.
I found it on a bunch of church websites, right, that churches describing themselves this way.
Even some places where you run across it in, like, church bylaws, right?
That's actually part of, like, how the church understands itself and its sort of formal documents of incorporation and so forth.
So, it's an idea that is very present.
Obviously, it's present to those of you who reach out and said, I've heard people say this, I don't fully know what it means, or I've heard this a lot, I'm really not clear on it, or that just drives me nuts when people say that, or whatever.
So I want to start—that's a little bit of the history—I want to start from there with just a little bit of the sort of impulse behind this phrase, right?
Again, if we go back to somebody like John Chrysostom in the, you know, 5th century, 4th century, that's pretty early in the Christian tradition, right?
And what I think it reflects are two things that I think are true of Christianity from its origins, okay?
The first is—and if you're familiar with the Christian tradition at all, this won't come as any surprise—that Christianity has long been focused on the development of doctrine, a key What predilection of Christians has always been spelling out the beliefs that define what being a Christian is, the beliefs that one needs to profess to be understood as a member of the Christian community, and so forth.
And just as many of you know, and some of you might not, not all religions work that way.
The role of belief or confession or profession of quote-unquote orthodox beliefs, right beliefs, is not something that plays that role in every kind of religious tradition.
But it is a very, very Christian sort of way of thinking about religion.
So that's the first piece.
Christians have always been interested in doctrine.
The earliest texts in the Bible are lots, among other things, often articulations of doctrine.
But the second that goes with this is that there has never been agreement within the Christian tradition on a whole wide range of issues related to doctrine.
So while doctrine is really important, there often isn't agreement on this.
And again, that's evident in the earliest documents.
If you read the Bible, the Christian New Testament, you have somebody, for example, like the Apostle Paul writes like half of the New Testament.
And one of his central preoccupations is countering what he considers to be false teachers, teachers who are teaching false things about Christianity.
Well, I mean, what that shows is that there were other people who professed to be Christians who had alternative views to what Paul had.
And I'm not interested at all in, like, settling whether or not their views are correct or whether Paul was correct or whatever.
The point is that it illustrates that there was this focus on right belief, but there has always been a lot of disagreement about what that right belief is.
What that means is that it's probably true that everybody who would profess to be a Christian holds that in some way God is uniquely revealed and present to human beings in the person Jesus of Nazareth.
Okay.
And in some way, the death and maybe the burial and maybe the resurrection of this figure, Jesus of Nazareth, effect the reconciliation of God with human beings.
Somehow or another, this is a quote-unquote sacrifice that is made that reconciles people with God.
Okay, so maybe there's agreement on that, but it turns out within that kind of formulation, there's a lot of room for disagreement with virtually every dimension of that statement.
In what way is God revealed in Jesus?
What does it mean to say that?
What does that mean about this figure, Jesus of Nazareth?
If there is some way in which his life and death and resurrection somehow reconcile people with God, what does all that mean?
What is resurrection?
What about his life did this?
What does it mean to—how does one avail oneself to that?
On and on and on and on and on, okay?
What I want to highlight here is that from its origins, Christianity has had to grapple not only with claims to doctrinal truth, But with questions about Christian unity despite doctrinal diversity or controversy and disagreement, right?
There are Bible passages about how we have one faith and one baptism and everybody who's in Christ is one family and so forth.
Christians have always had to try to reconcile what does that kind of unitive statement mean in the face of really substantive disagreements about What the hell it is that Christians are supposed to believe, okay?
So I think that background, going to an issue or a tension that has existed since Christianity became a thing, is what gets at the spirit of what Chris' system is saying.
I think what he's saying is Christians are Christians.
They're fundamentally held together within, so to speak, Christ, in Christ.
And that Christians need unity in their profession of Christian essentials, but that there should also be charity or acceptance in divergence of areas that are important but not essential.
That there needs to be room for a range of experiences or practices or articulations of belief in those things that are not essential.
Okay?
So that's the background.
That's the spirit of it.
And one of the reasons I think that this stands out so much in the Reformation period, and partly why it's also a very Protestant principle, is that the Catholic tradition, of course, always claimed to be the arbiter of Christian truth.
In the Reformation period, you get this fragmentation of what had been Christendom, you get a proliferation of different Protestant Christian groups, you get profound theological and social disunity.
And so what I think, or I think one of the reasons why this phrase sort of becomes so prominent in the Reformation period is because it sort of heightens that tension.
What does it mean to be quote-unquote one Christian community despite all of this difference in diversity and so forth?
And so I think that the phrase, and I'm building here to how I think the phrase is used now, I think the phrase can communicate a lot of different things, right?
For some, it's a plea for inclusion.
It is their way of saying, we do agree with you in the essentials, but we should have freedom to practice or believe or do whatever we do over here in these areas because they're non-essentials.
For some, I think it's a defense against the charge of being schismatic or divisive, right?
I think it's a way for some of these Protestant groups to say, yes, we've separated from other Christian groups, but that's because we hold to essential doctrinal commitments that they have abandoned, right?
If it wasn't about central things, we wouldn't have split off.
We had no choice.
On the flip side, it can also be used as a way to legitimate the expulsion or exclusion of others.
So, you get Christian groups that sort of push other groups out, and they'll say, well, of course we can exercise charity in non-essentials, but their doctrinal views represent an abandonment of essentials, and there has to be unity in such things.
Hi, my name is Peter, and I'm a prophet, in the new novel, American Prophet.
I was the one who dreamed about the natural disaster just before it happened.
Oh, and the pandemic.
And that crazy election.
And don't get me wrong, I'm not bragging.
It's not like I asked for the job.
Actually, no one would ask for this job.
At least half the people will hate whatever I say and almost everyone thinks I'm a little crazy.
Getting a date is next to impossible.
I've got a radio host who is making up conspiracies about me, a dude actually shooting at me, and an unhinged president threatening me.
But the job isn't all that bad.
I've gotten to see the country, and meet some really interesting people, and hopefully do some good along the way.
You can find my story on Amazon, Audible, or iTunes.
Just look for American Prophet by Jeff Fulmer.
That's American Prophet by Jeff Fulmer.
And I think that when people hear this phrase now, We can hear all of those same resonances in different contexts when different people or groups or congregations use this phrase.
I think that those are all meanings that sort of carry forward.
So it has always been a polyvalent phrase.
It has always been a phrase with multiple meanings.
It has always been a phrase that is filled in, so to speak, in different ways by different groups.
That's why it can be difficult to kind of understand in a specific context exactly what somebody means when they say that, right?
And I think that it's also immediately clear to anybody who bumps into this, right?
You hear this, you know, in Essentials Unity and Non-Essentials Charity, like, well, that sounds cool, but what counts as an essential?
What counts as a non-essential, right?
I think it's clear to anybody that as much as this phrase promises a measure of unity and acceptance, Those questions of the boundaries of that unity, the limits of that acceptance, immediately come up in this distinction between essentials and non-essentials.
And I think that that brings up the really divergent effects and uses that this slogan has when it's used within a contemporary Christian context.
And here I really am reaching out or reaching to the ideas and questions and insights offered by those of you who've reached out about this topic.
So, on the one hand, when somebody says this, or when we run across this, it can be a theological statement of inclusivity, and there are contexts where it is clearly that.
The essentials can be defined quite broadly or vaguely, allowing for acceptance of a significant degree of difference.
In other words, somebody can say, hey, you know what?
As long as you want to call yourself a Christian, you are welcome.
That's our essential, that we share this common profession.
And all the doctrinal nuances of that stuff, there's room for all of that, right?
So you can basically have a very broad conception of what that inclusivity means.
Right?
There can also be a strongly practical dimension to this, right?
And here we can imagine people from really different Christian groups, or sometimes even inter-religious groups, like moving outside the boundaries of Christianity, where this—normally the in-essentials unity, the real essential part for most Christians is that we're talking about Christians.
Like, that's the really most fundamental part.
But there are contexts where we can even move beyond that.
So, let's imagine that you have a bunch of really divergent Christian groups, or religious groups, or other groups that maybe don't even identify as religious, but their aim is alleviating poverty.
And I can imagine and have known of Christian groups that will say, look, for the purposes of this project, this aim of alleviating poverty, that is our essential.
Non-essentials here is anything other than that.
So, I don't really care if somebody else is the same kind of Christian that I am.
I don't even really care if they're Christian.
I don't even care maybe if they're religious.
If they share this social concern of alleviating poverty, for these purposes, that is our essential around which we are unified.
Everything else is secondary to that.
And again, if that's a more pragmatic context, that might not solve what it means, you know, on a Sunday morning in one of those church congregations But my point is that there are contexts in which the phrase can be as kind of inclusive as it sounds, right?
It's also a phrase tied in with this that we might commonly associate with ecumenical efforts, that is, efforts to bring together and find and create common ground between different kinds of often very divergent Christian groups or Christian traditions, okay?
Let's call that the laudatory use.
Let's call that the inclusive use of this phrase, okay?
But the phrase can also be used to shore up or defend high-control Christian articulations.
And I think this surprises people in some ways, and I know it surprises some of the people that I've heard from, because I have heard people say things like, I knew of this Christian congregation or tradition, and they seem so judgmental and so exclusive and so narrow in their views, but they would constantly harp away at this idea of having charity and non-essentials.
It felt like a real disconnect for me.
It felt really contradictory.
I don't understand how that worked, right?
And we can understand the confusion there because the way I just articulated it, That phrase could really seem to cut against the grain of high-control articulations in Christian practice.
So, how is it used within high-control religious contexts?
How do we make sense of that?
Here's my take, right?
My take is that it can be used as a means of masking the totalizing, high-control dynamics of those kinds of Christian communities.
Okay?
Here's why.
Within a high-control religious context, everything is an essential.
This is how and why they justify regulating virtually every aspect of somebody's life.
This is how they go about justifying having normative views on, say, our social and political views.
This is how they justify being involved in questions about sexuality and behavior and quote-unquote private lives and so forth.
It's precisely because everything is essential.
Whole domains, a totalizing, holistic conception of the human life is part of and essential of being a Christian.
Therefore, this Christian community has a role in sort of every aspect of our lives.
Okay?
But the totalizing nature of that control is at the same time masked behind the affirmation that they do, in fact, exercise charity in the face of non-essentials.
And if you say, well, how does that work?
Here are a couple examples, right?
I think it's like the illustration we can think of if, you know, we know that person in our life who's always unreasonable, always hard to reason with, hard to agree with.
They're just kind of contrarian all the time.
And it's that person who's like that, but they'll always say, hey, you know what?
I'm a reasonable person, but, and then they go on to say something really unreasonable, right?
Or the racist who prefaces things, they say, well, I'm no racist, but, and then they say racist things, or I don't want to sound like I'm, you know, being sexist, but, and then they say something sexist.
I think it's very much the kind of institutional form of that.
Hey, you know what?
We're a charitable group and we welcome, welcome people who don't agree with us.
But hey, on the essentials we got to agree, but it turns out that if you were to start cataloging it, there's almost nothing that falls into the non-essential category.
Which means that functionally it operates as a form of gaslighting.
And this is what I think I encounter sometimes when I'm talking with people who really struggle with this phrase.
They'll talk about how it rubs them the wrong way.
Right?
And the way that it operates is this, because if you feel as if your religious context is problematically high control, you feel like there's nothing but judgment and control in sort of virtually every aspect of who you are, Well, hey, that just shows there's something wrong with you, because of course we're an inclusive community.
Of course we're a community marked by charity and acceptance and non-essentials.
So, hey, you know, if you're having a problem with that, maybe you just need to check yourself, because we're a really inviting and inclusive community.
We make a lot of allowances for different views.
So, if you feel judged, maybe you need to really ask yourself how far out of line you are with where God wants you to be, because we're really inclusive.
Right?
Again, it's the person who can say, you know, I don't know why you take so much offense at things I say.
You know I'm not a racist.
So, I mean, maybe you're the one who's making everything about race.
Because, God, every time I say something, you seem to think it's racist, even though you know I'm not a racist.
Or, you know, you get so offended about everything.
I was making everything about, you know, sexism.
But, no, I'm not a sexist.
I'm married to somebody of the opposite sex.
How could I be sexist?
You know, that kind of thing.
It's the same kind of gaslighting.
And I think it operates to keep people in line.
It turns the focus back on you.
If you feel uncomfortable with how we as a community or an institution are involved in your life, well, the problem is with you, not us.
And the more you feel That there are issues with that high control, the more it shows that the problem is with you and not us.
And in that regard, it becomes a highly effective kind of ideological mechanism to mask the high control nature of a religious community behind the claim and the affirmation that, in fact, we're not high control.
And I think this is why—we talked about it being polyvalent, having lots of meanings—this is why the same expression can have such different effects, because it can be articulated in radically different ways in different contexts.
Okay?
So how do we know?
I want to kind of close with this.
I need to wind it down.
How do you know if the slogan is being advanced in good faith, so to speak, when somebody says, we exercise charity in non-essentials?
How do you know if that's true?
How do you know if they mean that?
Or better yet, how do you know that's true, even if they think that that's what they do, but it isn't actually what they do?
What are some signs?
The first one is just this.
If it doesn't smell right, it stinks.
If you think it stinks, that means it stinks.
If it doesn't pass the smell test, it's probably gone bad.
What I mean by that is, if you're part of a community, or you engage people who are part of a community, and it simply doesn't feel like charity is something that they value, If it doesn't feel like charity is something that's actually exercised around non-essentials, if it feels like in principle we have charity around non-essentials but I couldn't tell you what a non-essential is because everything seems to matter a lot, listen to that intuition.
That intuition is telling you something.
Another one I think is, and this is not universally true, as I say, Google the phrase, you will find it in all kinds of Christian organizations that cover the theological spectrum, the political spectrum, the social spectrum, right?
So I don't want to overstate this, but I think as a general rule, the more a group has to insist that it isn't judgmental or exclusionary, the more likely that it probably is.
Again, it's the same way that, you know, if somebody really isn't a racist, You've probably never heard them start a phrase or a sentence or a statement with, I'm not a racist, but, and then whatever comes after.
If a community really is accepting and inclusive of those with different views, they probably don't have to spend all of their time trying to convince you that they are inclusive of those with different views.
They will simply make you feel welcome and include you.
So the more they talk about it, the more that maybe it's something that doesn't apply.
The more it highlights that ideological usage.
Got to run, but again, I want to thank everybody for listening, all of you who support us in so many ways.
We say it all the time, and we mean it.
We cannot do this without you.
If you have not subscribed to support us, and that's something you would consider doing, I would ask you to do so.
If you're not in a position to do that, thank you for listening.
Thank you for supporting us in all the ways, and not just financially, folks.
Reach out, Daniel Miller Swag, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com, and keep the ideas coming.
This is a series that builds from you.
I have a kind of a backlog of topics.
I do read the emails.
I respond to as many as I'm able.
My semester is almost done, which means I will once again get caught up on the emails.
But I value those, and that's what keeps us going.
So please keep them coming.
Follow-up questions, additional comments, the ideas that keep you up at night, the things that rub you the wrong way, the things that you don't understand.
Keep those coming, stay engaged, and thank you so much for listening until we have a chance to talk again.
Thank you.
By now, a lot of you have heard me talk about becoming a Swag Premium member.
You're on the fence.
You're not sure you should do it.
You've been meaning to do it, but you haven't done it yet.
Now's the time.
Until Mother's Day, our yearly subscription is on sale for just $50.
That's right.
$50 for the entire year, you'll get access to our entire archive, including every episode if it's in the code.
You'll get our bonus episodes.
Every month Dan and I sit down for two hours to talk, answer questions, and tell stories.
All of our bonus content on Mondays are surprise episodes, ad-free listening, and then you'll get to come hang out with us in the Discord server.
