These things occasionally erupt on what sometimes gets called "Christian Twitter" (an aside: is that really a good idea? I mean, "Christian Twitter"? Isn't that just a gold-plated invitation to disaster?), usually provoked by some straying evangelical suddenly getting woke and questioning some of the darker tenets of that particular wing of current Christian faith. Frequently the straying evangelical is also female, which seems to bring out the sharpest of knives.
One of the latest Twitter kerfuffles apparently involved a woman named Jen Hatmaker. I confess, even after her name has come up in a couple of such kerfuffles (yes, I'm going to keep using that word), that I really don't know who she is. She's enough of a big deal to have a stub article on Wikipedia, though, so I can learn that she was a presenter on some HGTV show, she said something about how the church ought to be inclusive of LGBTQ+ persons, and for that she got dumped on by the evangelical community and her books got dropped from the stores of a large evangelical bookseller. That was kerfuffle enough.
The more recent kerfuffle perhaps sprang from the Hatmaker blowup, or maybe from some other flareup, but it was set in motion by an article in Christianity Today. I link to it only reluctantly, in that it's a pretty fatuous article, but you probably need to be able at least to glance at it to get what's up. The title kinda gives away the game, though.
The obvious answer to the question is "nobody." Look, like it or not, the "blogosphere," like the rest of the internet, is a bit Wild West-ish; you're only "in charge" of whatever patch of territory you stake out. I "control," basically, this blog, and maybe my Facebook and Twitter accounts, and that's about it. Given that the readership of this blog seldom cracks triple digits, it's not as is I even exert much influence with the little bit of cyberspace I tend; someone like Hatmaker or other, I guess, "celebrity" bloggers (does that even make sense in the church? About as much as "Christian Twitter, I guess) like Rachel Held Evans or Carol Howard Merritt get much more of a following and, presumably, more influence.
About all you can really do in the end is talk back. Frankly, trying to crack down on such figures is at least as likely to give them more credibility or interest in the blogosphere as it is to shut them down. About the best you can do is state your disagreement and move on.
One guesses this is what puts off people who ask questions like "who's in charge of the Christian blogosphere?" There's precious little control wielded over what people blog or Facebook or tweet (if there were we would not have the President we now have, would we?), and so folks like the above bloggers can pretty much write what they are moved to write. The right-wing evangelical establishment can throw mud at them, but they can't really silence them, and it drives that establishment nuts. Plenty of mud got slung at Hatmaker, and she somehow failed to recant. So far as I know she's still a supercalifragilistichyperevangelical, so they haven't even managed to satisfy their urge to control by running her off (unlike Held Evans, who has quite contentedly slipped into the Episcopal Church).
Of course, it seems likely that the other major sin committed by the likes of Hatmaker and Held Evans is the heinous, unforgivable crime of having girl parts.
We are, after all, talking about a movement that, if it really got its way, would have women be at home cooking, and routinely getting pregnant. Even tolerating female clergy, though it has been done of necessity (the author of the above article is Anglican clergy), goes against the grain of the hardest-right wing of evangelicalism, and is sometimes still an awkward fit in other parts of that branch of the church. (By contrast, most mainline traditions have been ordaining women for a while now, fifty years or so in some cases.) That non-ordained women like Hatmaker and Held Evans write stuff (even real books with paper and covers and everything!) and have lots of readers (even if a certain number of those readers are mostly there for trolling purposes) and don't participate in the mandatory bashing of LGBTQ+ folk or other disapproved types is just unacceptable.
Not surprisingly, the topics that provoke the most angst over "authority" tend to be those for which "authority" is at best sketchy and involves things like really poor exegesis of scripture (like the infamous "six verses" used to bash homosexuals (or seven, depending on who you ask). Most of the time you don't get big Twitter kerfuffles over things like the Trinity, about which it is almost impossible to speak without committing multiple accidental heresies. I almost suspect that someone could write a blog article suggesting that 2 Peter, a real dogpatch of an epistle, should get eliminated from the canon of scripture and get less grief that the "uppity female blogger" du jour who fails to toe the line on gay people.
Meanwhile, the mainline is pretty quiet. There aren't a huge number of "celebrity mainline bloggers" of either gender, and such churches as have real "authority figures" like bishops don't seem to expend a lot of energy on controlling bloggers. So far as I've heard, the head Episcopal bishop hasn't come down on Rachel Held Evans, for example. (My own denomination is governed by a General Assembly that meets once every two years, with the closest thing to a denominational "voice" in the interim being a Stated Clerk -- hardly an awe-inspiring title, even if the current holder of that title is pretty cool. So far as I know nobody in that office even knows this blog exists, much less cares. But then, I am ordained and have boy parts, so I guess my authority is not in question.)
While the mainline doesn't necessarily incline to suppress voices, I'm not always sure it's good at encouraging voices from within its ranks either. The Christian Century magazine makes a go at fostering a few blog voices in its online version, and a few other periodicals do likewise. Still, it's not so easy to find "Christian Twitter" or a "Christian blogosphere" (ugh) in non-conservative form.
In short, people need to speak up, partly because (as Carol Howard Merritt notes on one of those CC blogs) just because most of the hot-button issues are more or less settled in the mainline denominations doesn't mean they are settled in other regions of the church, and mainline voices still need to be heard, explaining and exegeting and affirming. Also, speaking up is simply a part of bearing witness, and even mainline folk are supposed to do that.
How each person chooses to speak up will vary, naturally, and nobody's promising instant celebrity just because you start a blog or open a Twitter account (and if you're lucky you'll be spared that). But speak up, because there's still good news to be told.
Yeah, that was his song quoted in the title...
No comments:
Post a Comment