Revisiting Evangelical Piety

Reflections on the Lectionary for September 22nd

Portrait of the author as a young evangelical, circa 1995.

I spent most of my teenage years immersed in evangelical culture. When I was fourteen I started working at a summer camp owned by a famous evangelist’s organization, and I ended up working there for seven summers. And when I wasn’t working at the camp in the summers, I spent the rest of my time at Christian bookstores and going to Christian concerts and participating in Fellowship of Christian Athletes events. These days I have a lot of critiques of that time in my life and I had a lot of unlearning to do, although compared to a lot of ex-evangelicals I don’t have a lot of regrets. The people I met in those settings were mostly very kind and devoted, and like me, they were looking for truth and a way of life. Even if I think of things very differently these days, I don’t look back with bitterness, and I don’t wish very often that I had done things another way.

But there are some exceptions—some places where the gap between my teenaged evangelical self and my adult self are especially large, and some places where it’s harder to get past some of the harm that came of the things I learned then. I noticed, looking through the texts in the lectionary for September 22^nd, that I was feeling a lot of resistance to the texts, and I realized that my resistance was connected to the ways those texts showed up back in the mid-90s when I was an evangelical. That happens sometimes. It’s a strange thing, to encounter a text now (as an ordained minister, a PhD in religious and theological studies, and a tenured professor of biblical studies) that I also encountered then (as a 14 year old in thrall to Focus on the Family and trying to make sense of things in Bible studies). It can be weird to come across a passage now, with all my ways of thinking about scripture that make sense to my mid-40s self, and then also recall being in a Bible study or a quiet time booklet or watching a VHS tape of a famous evangelist as a teenager and learning about the same passage.

I’m realizing, as I get older, that the places where I feel the most resistance to my teenage-evangelical self’s understandings don’t necessarily have to do with theology or salvation, as I might have expected. I have completely moved on from the theology and soteriology (theories of salvation) that I subscribed to then, and when I encounter them today, they don’t really get under my skin or anything—I just don’t pay them much mind. But the places where the resistance shows up are the places having to do with piety, personal behavior, and what I might broadly call ethics. So much—so much—of evangelical culture really came down to behavior-shaming. And so much of the behavior-shaming really came down to making people feel bad for being human. Maybe this was especially true for me because I worked in such an intense and closed system; for ten or eleven weeks every summer I essentially lived and worked on an evangelical commune, with the same fifty people, our lives structured by the Bible and authority figures who taught us what the Bible meant, quoting scripture to us for everything from how to talk to each other to how to clean toilets. (Seriously). I suppose that’s a situation that’s almost always going to lead to frustration. But for me, it also led to a lot of guilt and shame, and most of the criticisms I have of evangelicalism today have to do with the small-time impositions of morality and social structure that were hammered into me then. And some of the most egregious passages show up in the lectionary this week.

If you grew up in evangelical culture, you definitely have heard about Proverbs 31. Setting and enforcing gender roles and gender binaries was (and is) one of evangelicalism’s most treasured pastimes. My experience in evangelicalism was that there was an almost constant stream of instruction about gender and sexuality—a relentless flow of guidance about how you should think about your body and your mind as doorways through which Satan could easily enter. As a boy, I got a lot of this, but the girls got a lot more of it. We were told, all the time and with great gravity, how important it was to be in control of our bodies and to be righteous in our relationships in every moment.

The problem was, and still is, that the Bible is a lousy handbook for sexual morality. It’s a little better for gender roles, but not much. The Bible offers a lot of stories about gender and sexuality, and even a few rules, but those stories and rules assume such different societies than ours that they are almost useless. (There are rules for how you can have sex the women you capture in war, for example, or rules about a man paying the father of the woman he rapes, but there isn’t much in the way of instruction on how to be in a healthy relationship or what the wedding vows between two people who love each other should say). There are precious few places in scripture that actually back up an evangelical viewpoint about sex and gender, and so there was a lot of cherrypicking. One of the things that got cherrypicked was Proverbs 31. That section of Proverbs is about “a wife of noble character,” as some translations put it, implying that many wives were not of noble character. Proverbs 31 got trotted out all the time as a kind of blueprint for what is sometimes called “biblical womanhood,” the kind of womanhood that is supposedly offered by the Bible. Looking back on Proverbs 31 now, there isn’t actually too much in there that is very objectionable. There are some parts that pigeonhole women into certain kinds of virtue or that assume gendered labor roles, to be sure. But on the whole, grading on an Bronze-Age curve, it’s not bad, and you could even read it as a kind of manifesto for strong, independent, industrious, self-reliant womanhood.

But my objection to it isn’t necessarily to the text of Proverbs 31 itself, but to the way I saw it deployed in evangelical gender projects. Proverbs 31 became a test that every woman had to pass, but that none could really pass successfully. It set a standard for “a wife of noble character” that no woman could meet (especially if they weren’t, or didn’t want to be, someone’s wife). I watched a lot of my teenaged friends—and this is true—feel wracked with angst that they would never measure up to the standard of Proverbs 31, years before they were even old enough to get married. You could buy Proverbs 31 t-shirts and Proverbs 31 study Bibles; the messaging was everywhere. And the message was that women needed to be domestic savants, perfect mothers, and most of all a credit to their husbands. So, even though I can see that Proverbs 31 has a life of its own independent of the ways it gets used in evangelical gender instruction, I still kind of don’t want to hear about Proverbs 31 anymore. I bet I’m not alone.

The lectionary for this week also contains James 3:13-4:8 (but it excludes 4:4-7 and 4:8b, presumably because those verses are too strange). During my evangelical days, I heard a lot about “wisdom,” which this passage from James mentions a few times. But “wisdom” in those days didn’t really refer to “wisdom” in the way most people would define it; it meant something closer to “watch what you say and watch what you do.” “Wisdom” or being “wise” was a shorthand for avoiding a whole range of potentially dangerous behaviors. Many of those behaviors, predictably, had to do with sex, or at least they had to do with boys interacting with girls and vice versa. It was “wise” to not gossip, it was “wise” to wear modest swimsuits, it was “wise” to not curse (not even faux curses like “darn” or “dang”), and it was “wise” for boys to not be seen lingering too close to the girls’ cabins. “Wisdom” really meant putting a lot of guardrails around your humanity, and trying to hem it in.

This isn’t actually too far off from what James is actually saying in this passage, I think. The book of James seems to presume some kind of small, close-knit community where the people are having a hard time living in proximity to each other, and it seems to be directed toward the kinds of conflicts and disagreements that might arise in such settings. The “wisdom” of this part of James does seem to have something to do with keeping one’s own impulses in check. The argument of James is at once reasonable (“the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace”) and a bit extreme (“you want something and do not have it; so you commit murder”). There isn’t a lot of in-between for James; there is holiness and righteousness and a godly way of living, and if you aren’t doing that, then you’re abjectly self-centered and violent. James doesn’t see a lot of gray area, but I think most of us live in gray areas most of the time. Most of us live our lives somewhere short of the “wisdom” that James is imagining; we are not perfectly “pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy” all of the time. But neither are we murderous, devilish, unspiritual, arrogant vessels for the devil. James is casting human behavior in a binary kind of way—you’re either good or you’re bad—and the evangelical world I grew up in really mirrored that mindset. There is, no doubt, lots to commend this passage, but I have a hard time seeing it because of the baggage it brings with it from the evangelical world.

This is connected to another major theme that I noticed in evangelicalism, which also shows up in the final passage from this week’s lectionary that I want to discuss: self-abnegation and self-denial. The passage from Mark is, on the surface, a little teaching about the paradoxes of seeking status: “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all,” as it says in 9:35. (Interestingly, the word “servant” here is not translating doulos, as we might expect, but diakonos, a term that signaled something fuzzier in terms of status…a diakonos might be enslaved or not, while a doulos probably was). In my opinion, Jesus then muddies the point a bit, when he brings in a child as an example, saying that welcoming a child means welcoming Jesus himself, and that welcoming Jesus means welcoming “the one who sent me,” presumably God. So what’s at stake? Is it becoming “last and the servant of all,” or is it welcoming children? Are they both somehow the same thing?

In the evangelical world of my teenage years, the answer was that self-denial and self-abnegation were the pathway to holiness. I think this was rooted in the Calvinist traditions of evangelicalism and the sense that human beings are irredeemably corrupt and prone to sin. Embrace that you are sinful and lowly, the instruction went, and you can fill your proper role in the world. In that way of thinking, the child Jesus brings in as an example does not represent innocence, but it represents lowliness, a person without status. You have to be like a child, they said, not because children are good but because everyone knows a child has very little to offer. Children are basic without a lot of pretensions, and you should be too.

Maybe all of that was exaggerated for me because I mostly encountered evangelicalism in a setting where I was washing dishes and cleaning bathrooms and mowing grass, on duty 23 hours a day and 6 days a week for $50 a week. Self-denial became a part of the rationale for continuing to do that kind of work (although it was also a lot of fun). But the message of self-denial shows up all over the place in the Christian tradition, including in the kinds of messages sent to people with very low status (enslaved people, people living in poverty, women who are on the wrong side of gender binaries) as a way to keep them from questioning their circumstances. Self-denial is not a very healthy ethical structure for most people most of the time; it opens the door to exploitation and abuse. And I’m not even sure it makes much sense in the context of this passage, where Jesus is explicitly responding to an argument among the disciples about who was the greatest. Jesus isn’t saying that all people everywhere ought to deny themselves and become the servant of all; he’s saying that the disciples who had been arguing over greatness had gotten it all wrong. Humility might have been an important message to those disciples in a way that it’s not for everyone always.

Maybe I’m just grumpy about these passages from this week’s lectionary, or maybe it’s some unresolved tension from my former life in evangelicalism. But as I said earlier, I actually really value that time of my life in many ways. A lot of good came from that time, but even today, when I encounter scriptures like these that were so much a part of the moral instruction that came along with evangelical life, I have a reaction against them. There’s a big part of me that just doesn’t want to hear it anymore—a part of me that can’t hear these passages, even though I have the capacity now to understand them differently than I once did. I have rejected the kinds of moralizing biblical interpretation that saturated my life then, and so I have a difficult time feeling generous toward the passages that were a part of that instruction. The lectionary for this week is a reminder, for me, that most of us don’t encounter the Bible in any naïve or innocent way, but we bring histories of interpretation with us—our own histories and the ones belong to other people—and we are always reading in the flickering light cast by human experience.