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This week’s episode considers the idea of “reverent worship,” the last of an eight-item list of defining features contained in a church bulletin. What does the appeal to “reverent worship” tell us about conceptions of divine love? How does this emphasis relate to the other items on the list? And how can this appeal to “reverence” mask abusive, high-control religion? Listen to this week’s episode to find out!
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AXIS MUNDY AXIS MUNDY The 2024 elections are upon us, y'all.
And no matter what happens, there's going to be a lot to process and a next chapter to prepare for.
That's why we're holding two live events in order to help you stay informed about what's happening and to get ready for what's coming.
On November 21st, we're holding an event with Americans United for Separation of Church and State at the University of Southern California.
We have an illustrious group of leaders and scholars, including Andrew Seidel, Rachel Lazar, Kyate Joshi, Diane Winston, and Dan Miller.
We're going to talk about what happened and prepare for what's next.
On November 22nd, we'll be talking about Christian extremism and the 2024 elections at the San Diego Convention Center.
Matt Taylor will be giving opening remarks, and we'll have a roundtable with familiar faces like Leah Payne and Lloyd Barba, not to mention me and Dan, and a few others.
Tickets are available now and you can find everything in the show notes.
You can also watch online if you can't be in LA or San Diego.
November 21 and November 22.
Two chances to be with us at Straight White American Jesus and a number of other great scholars and leaders.
Join us in person or online.
Hello and as always, welcome to It's in the Code, a series that is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
I, also, as always, am your host, Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
Delighted to be with you, as always.
Before we dive into this week's episode, just want to keep in front of people that we have a couple live events coming up.
We're going to be out in California in November, not long after the election, so however that goes, we will be with a group of great people Talking about that, thinking about that, examining that.
First event will be November 21st in L.A. And Brad and I will be there.
A lot of other people will be there.
It's a live event.
You can come in person if you're able to do that.
If you're not, you can buy a ticket and join us virtually.
Would love to have you there either way.
And the 22nd, we will be at the Convention Center in San Diego having an event there as well.
Both times, we'll be going out with folks afterward, just kind of informally, people who want to go hang out, get a chance to catch up, talk a little bit more.
Would love to see you there.
If you can make it, check out the website.
More information about that.
For now, I want to dive into this week's episode.
I have a lot to say, and I'm afraid not enough time to say it.
We have been looking at a small card that came from like a church bulletin, had a list of eight items on it that essentially you would encounter if you went to this church.
It's like their statement of, if you come visit us, if you come to our church, here's what you will see.
We've been just working our way down that list.
And we are on the final of the eight items this week.
And I've been really...
Really anticipating coming to this.
It is reverent worship.
So let's dive in here, okay?
And the first thing to note about this...
Is that it seems out of place.
An earlier item on the list, of course, was loud singing.
And we might wonder, well, why doesn't worship fit there?
Why didn't they group these things together?
And I think that the reason is that reverent worship here, it's not intended to refer how they worship on a Sunday morning.
I don't think it's intended to tell us primarily about their worship services.
I think that's part of it.
But this isn't about song selection.
It's not about what we talked about with the loud singing, about traditional hymns as opposed to praise and worship statement or something like that.
This is a statement about the fundamental orientation of the church itself, its reason for being, its fundamental understanding of what the Christian faith is and what it demands.
I think it tells us something fundamental about the identity of this church.
I think it tells us something fundamental about the experience of God around which it is constituted.
And I think, most importantly, this is the angle I'm going to come at it from today, I think it's intended to tell us how this church believes people should feel about God.
So the reason I think this comes at the end is that it situates everything that has come before.
It's one of those things where you could put this first and then say, like, everything else is an outflow of this, or you could put this last as a kind of summation of everything else.
I think it fits there, okay?
So I want to look at this notion of reverent worship, and I want to approach this in terms of religious emotions.
In other words, I want to think about the kinds of emotions demanded within a particular Christian context.
And more generally, this would apply to, you know, any religious context, because I think that the kinds of emotions that they sort of demand of us tell us everything we need to know about them.
And here I want to talk about Christian love, okay?
And stick with me for a minute, because you're going to say love is not on the list, on the card, anywhere.
There's no mention of love, which, by the way, could be its own sort of telling feature, okay?
But just stick with me, because I'm going to tie love to reverence, okay?
Because Christians of all stripes, liberal Protestants, conservative Protestants, historical black church, white church, Catholic, Orthodox, whatever you—any stripe you want to find of Christians, they're going to talk about love.
They're going to speak of God's love for us and of our love for God or the obligation to have love for God, to love God.
But here's the thing.
They don't always mean the same thing.
That word love is a prime example of what people might call a kind of floating signifier.
It's a word that kind of floats around, and people can fill it in different ways.
Different kinds of Christian traditions, different kinds of Christian churches, different kinds of Christian congregations can infuse that word, as it were, with their own meaning and their own understanding of that.
Okay?
So, within theological high-control churches, like the one that we're considering—and folks, yes, I've been to the website, I've looked at it— I think we're going to revisit that some in future episodes.
It's what I would consider to be a high-control church.
And within that context, love or appeals to love become toxic and abusive.
And I think that all of that is captured in this little card.
Now, to get into why that is, I've got to say a little bit more about this church.
Again, I'm not going to name the church.
I'm not going to tell you where it is.
It's, you know, all of you are more internet savvy than I am and will have an easier time finding that information than I would have initially.
But the church that produced this list is a theologically conservative, reformed church, okay?
And so for those of you who might not be familiar with the history and intricacies of American denominations, the Reformed tradition, capital R, Reformed, is that tradition that traces its theology back to the 16th century Reformer, Protestant Reformer, John Calvin.
So if you've heard the term Calvinism, or that a church might be Calvinistic, or that certain teachings are Calvinistic, that's the Reformed tradition.
The other word that gets thrown around that also refers to the Reformed tradition is Presbyterian.
So you're driving around and you see First Presbyterian Church, or Presbyterian Church USA, that's a denomination.
Presbyterian, Reformed with a capital R, these are all the traditions that come, or the denominations even, that come out of the Calvinistic tradition.
And lots and lots of Protestant traditions and denominations have historically been shaped by Reformed theology.
It's a hugely influential force in the history and development of Christianity.
And that also doesn't always mean the same thing.
So there are churches, there are whole denominations, denominations with the word Presbyterian in their title, or the word Reformed in their title, Churches with historically Calvinistic roots range from extremely progressive liberal Protestants to extremely conservative, doctrine-error, high-controlled denominations in individual churches.
So how do you know the difference?
Okay?
It's a general statement.
There will be exceptions to this, okay?
But in general, the more progressive a particular church is, the less it is going to emphasize traditionally Calvinistic doctrines such as predestination and what we call human depravity.
And I'll get to kind of what those mean in a few minutes.
The more conservative a church is, the more it will emphasize these dimensions of historically Calvinistic thought.
Okay?
And so much so that in many ways Calvinistic theology has become a conscious mark of theological conservatism in the U.S., I went to a college, a Christian college, where being theologically conservative was a mark of honor.
It was like a badge that you would wear because it meant you were the most kind of authentic, serious Christian, whatever.
And within that, many of the people most, you know, sort of adamant about wanting to be conservative Christians would adopt a Calvinistic theology.
And I tried this for a while.
I tried to be Calvinistic.
I could just never get it to make doctrinal sense, not even for the reasons I'm going to talk about today, but for more just strictly theological reasons, reasons of logic and coherence and so forth.
I'm not going to get into that today.
I only say that to illustrate that, again, there is so much of an identity in many ways between Calvinistic theology and conservative Protestantism that the one is often viewed as sort of being part of the other.
To be a truly conservative Protestant, you need to be a Calvinist.
This church that we're talking about fits into that mold.
This church is not liberal, it is not progressive, and it is very explicitly Calvinistic.
You can go to their website and you can read their What We Believe statement, super Calvinistic.
You can read their blog posts and things from their pastor that are explicitly laying out Calvinistic doctrines about things like predestination and And so this church very much operates in line with what most people who know about Calvinism tend to associate with that doctrine,
which is the element of divine omnipotence, that God has defined as all-powerful, the doctrine of predestination, a strong focus on so-called human depravity, and so forth.
Okay?
So everything about this church's beliefs and practices situated within that kind of Calvinistic background.
It's described as a Reformed church on its website.
It has the word Bible in its web address.
It's everything about it.
Okay?
So let's remind ourselves, maybe we're not familiar, of the main points of the Calvinistic Christian story.
The understanding of Christianity as outlined within Calvinism.
And here it is, very briefly, okay?
First, God creates human beings.
Great.
The first human, Adam, sins and violates God's command.
And as a result, and this is the distinctive Calvinistic part, doesn't originate with Calvin, actually originates with, like, St.
Augustine, but Calvin's the one who makes it famous in Protestant circles.
As a result, all subsequent human beings are born into the situation of what's called original sin.
We are born guilty before God.
Before we take a breath, before we have done anything on our own, we are already guilty before God.
All human beings are born sinful and condemned to hell by God.
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As individuals, all human beings are fallen and depraved.
That's what I mean by saying that there's human depravity.
We are, by nature, incapable of doing what God demands or of paying the penalty that is owed to God because of our original sin.
Basically, we are all born under condemnation, and there's nothing we can do to escape that.
But...
says the Calvinist.
God nevertheless predestines some individuals to eternal salvation.
This is part of God's omnipotence.
All people deserve hell, but God chooses and has chosen since before the creation of the world, God identifies particular people who will become Christians and be saved and not suffer eternal torment in hell.
And because this is undeserved and unearned by humans, this is a really core part of Calvinism.
We don't do anything to bring that upon ourselves.
God is not obligated to do this for us.
When somebody says, well, yeah, but humans have to respond in faith, the predestinarian will say, yes, faith is itself a gift from God.
God gives you the faith and the ability to respond to God and therefore to become a Christian and be saved and so forth.
So this is an act of radical grace because it is undeserved and unearned by humans?
Another piece of this Calvinistic story is that God would be fully just in simply allowing all human beings to go to hell.
This is how they deal with the question when somebody says, well, that doesn't seem fair.
Why doesn't God save everybody?
Or why does God still let some people go to hell?
Most people go to hell.
The Calvinistic answer is all people rightfully are already condemned to hell, so God is not obligated to do anything to meet the standard of justice.
Instead, the fact that he predestines any means he goes above and beyond what is required of him, and so God, through God's sovereign will, chooses not to simply condemn everybody.
That's the Reformed or Calvinistic story of Christianity.
That is the story that very explicitly this church holds to.
That is the context in which this little card has been produced.
So within this context, what we might call love for God is encoded as reverence.
That's how the word love is filled, with reverence.
So when it says reverent worship, you could read that as loving worship if you want, but this is a Reformed church.
It's saying love is reverence.
Reverence is love.
That is what love for God is supposed to look like.
It is reverence.
Why?
Because God is so mighty and so powerful and so far above humans and has given us so much more than we deserve that we are obliged to revere God.
So that's on our side.
That's how it encodes love of God, love for God.
On the other side, it also codes God's love for humans.
So when somebody says, well, what does it mean if it says, you know, God so loved the world that he gave his only sin?
All that sort of stuff.
What does it mean to say God loves human beings?
That's this notion of grace, of unmerited love.
When they say that God loves us, that means that God gives us something we don't deserve, and that therefore God should be revered for doing so.
You get how this comes full circle.
So that's how love is encoded here.
Love on our part is reverence.
Love on God's part is unmerited grace, this gift He gives us that we don't deserve.
And if you get this theme of we don't deserve, it's because the Calvinist will remind us all the time that we don't deserve it.
Our lack of desert, our fallenness, our depravity is kept fully in front of us all the time in this kind of Calvinistic theology.
Here's another aspect about love, whether defined as grace or reverence, is that love is a kind of flip side emotion or attitude.
What I mean by that is there's always the other side to it.
Think of the proverbial two sides of the same coin.
If one side is reverence, there's a flip side to that coin.
If one side is grace, there's a flip side to that coin.
And on God's end, the flip side of grace is wrath.
We don't deserve God's love because we are fundamentally broken and disobedient.
We were born as children of wrath would be the Christian language.
So even as Christians, we are constantly in danger of experiencing God's wrath and punishment if we don't show God proper reverence.
If we don't obey God, if we don't do what God commands us to do, if we stray from that path, we rightfully come under God's wrath.
That's a constant reality of God's quote-unquote love is wrath.
On the human end, the flip side of reverence is fear.
To show proper reverence is to fear God.
We know that we are deserving of wrath and punishment.
We know that these could come at any time if we as the weak, sinful, sad little humans that we are don't meet God's demand, we can experience wrath.
So that's the flip side.
So you have on one side reverence and fear, and on the other side you have grace and wrath.
So I said a minute ago, a little bit earlier, that this understanding of love is abusive, and I meant it.
It is prime for abuse.
It's a form of religiously abusive doctrine.
Now, that's a big claim, and I recognize that that's a big claim, and I cannot tell you how many conversations I have had in my life where people tried to deny this point.
I spent years of my life trying to articulate a vision of Christianity like this and trying to basically, you know, do the mental and spiritual gymnastics to convince myself that this was not an abusive perspective.
But I think that it is, and I stick to it, okay?
And here's why.
This articulation of love on both sides defines relationships that we recognize as abusive.
Think of the domestic abuser.
He's like, well, I didn't want to hurt you, but I love you so much that when you did this or this or this, I had to respond that way.
It's because I love you so much that I hurt you or hounded you or locked you up or whatever it is that I did.
The abusive parent.
I didn't want to punish you so harshly, but when you disobey me, I have no choice.
What else am I going to do?
This is exactly the logic that is used of God.
Exactly the logic that is used of God.
God loves us so much and exercises grace so much, wants to bring us back that when we stray from the path, He has no choice but to exercise His wrath.
It's the flip side of His love and so forth.
The Bible is full of stories like this, images of God that fit this pattern.
The Christian tradition after the Bible is full of this as a rationale for the Christian abuse of others.
The Bible and the Christian tradition are full of examples Of the narcissistic, insecure God of wrath and power expressing so-called love by punishing those that God doesn't think give God the attention or reverence that He's deserved.
Story after story after story after story.
And folks, we have all known someone or we have experienced relationships that claim to be about love, but that devolve into wrath and fear.
And we rightfully denounce those relationships and such claims to love.
We denounce the abuser who abuses his partner.
We denounce the parent who abuses their children.
We denounce any relationship that is built on that.
We deny that they are expressions of love.
We rightfully denounce the idea that people who threaten us with wrath, who threaten us with punishment, who threaten us with pain, who insist that they love us but hurt us nonetheless, we absolutely denounce the idea that they are deserving of our love, let alone that they have a right to demand it of us.
We define all of that as abusive.
But when it comes to our relationship with God, who, according to the conservative Christian, is supposed to be our best example, God is supposed to be the exemplar of what we follow, suddenly none of that applies.
Suddenly, on the contrary, the hurtful actions of an authoritarian abuser are encoded as love, and we are commanded not only to accept that as love, But to reciprocate, to show love and reverence, the proper response to being abused and punished and tormented by God is to revere God, not to critique God, not to question God, not to defend ourselves against God.
Or we will suffer more punishment until we fall in line.
So that's, on one hand, when it says reverent worship, all of that, for me, is encoded.
This is the Christian worldview that is there.
But what's maybe more disturbing than this vision, if it was just about theology and metaphysical speculation about the nature of God and the soul or whatever, okay, I guess.
I still think it's abusive.
It's a terrible thing to tell kids, by the way.
Just think about growing up, hearing this message about who and what you are.
But anyway...
The problem is, in really concrete terms, is that it also becomes the paradigm for human relationships.
And that's what makes this whole list chilling for me.
We'll find obedient children.
Remember that thing from the list?
If you don't remember, go back, listen to the episode.
We'll find obedient children because they relate to authoritarian parents, especially fathers, who mirror God's own authoritarian relationship with humans.
We'll find smiling wives.
Remember, that's the first thing on the list.
We will find smiling wives because they have to smile.
This is what submission means.
Wives are to submit to their husbands.
Submission, I would submit in this model, is a model of reverence.
We'll find manly men who give strong handshapes because masculinity is coded in the same authoritarian way that we understand God.
God is defined as being about power, being strength, will, violent action undertaken against those who oppose him.
This becomes the model of masculinity.
Folks, this theology is a recipe for this worldly abuse.
It's not just a spiritual, quote-unquote, sort of reality.
It is about this world.
It is the one that is not only when you experience terrible things, well, you must have done something wrong.
You're experiencing God's wrath.
It's time to find out what you did to anger God.
But it also means that when parents are abusive, it must be our fault.
When partners are abusive, it must be our fault.
When we are punished, For not revering authority figures the way we should, that's on us.
That's what's at work here.
So when this card describes reverent worship, for me, it's not naming a feature of its weekly Sunday morning service.
Again, I mean, that's part of it.
It's going to say on a Sunday morning you're going to see reverent worship.
But again, this is why I say it's giving its reason for being.
It's giving its own fundamental orientation.
This church is stating its highest aspirations for an entire Christian way of life built on these conceptions of reverence and fear on one side and grace and wrath on the other.
So, in my view, it does indeed encode an abusive, high-control conception of Christianity, and that's alarming.
That's why everything on this card weighs so heavily on me.
Now, I've got to wind this down, but I also recognize that that's pretty intense.
It moved pretty fast through this episode, and I've made a lot of big claims.
And I anticipate that a lot of folks have thoughts on this, and so I welcome you to send those to me.
DanielMillerSwaj, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
I want to hear your comments and thoughts on this.
I know there's a lot I haven't gotten into, and I've heard from other folks on other episodes in this series about aspects you'd like to hear more about.
We've only got like 20-25 minutes in these episodes.
I think we're going to follow up on some of those in upcoming episodes, so I'd love to hear that.
I'd love to hear if you've got experiences of this.
I'd love to hear if you think I'm wrong about this.
And I hear folks all the time who say, I understand everything you're saying, but here's why you're wrong.
Here's why you're taking too hard a line.
Wherever you're at with this, I'd love to hear from you.
Daniel Miller Swadj, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
In the meantime, again, November 21st, November 22nd, couple live events.
Check out the website.
Take a look at that.
Would love to see you there.
Would love to hear from folks.
I say all the time when I respond to folks' emails that this is kind of what keeps us going.
Man, those live events are awesome.
Great chance to talk with folks.
Would love to see you there.
If you're not a subscriber and you would be able to do that and you'd consider doing that, I'd ask you to do so.
So what helps us do what we're doing?
We're coming into the election, folks.
We're trying to do a lot of work.
We're trying to do a lot of things.
That helps us keep doing what we're doing.
And as I also always say, I recognize not everybody's in a position to support us financially.
That's fine, too.
Keep listening.
Keep reaching out.
Keep telling others.
Help us to grow what we're doing here.
As always, thank you for listening.
Please be well until we talk again.
and again let me know what you think don't forget y'all Two live events coming in November.
Some straight white American Jesus.
One at the University of Southern California and LA with Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
And then the next night at the San Diego Convention Center.
Tickets are available now and you can find everything in the show notes.
You can also watch online if you can't be in LA or San Diego.
November 21 and November 22.
Two chances to be with us at Straight White American Jesus and a number of other great scholars and leaders.
