Reading a book this morning on Christian history from a global perspective that I picked up a while ago and never got around to reading. The focus of the author is to highlight the role of mission and how the tradition grew and formed in its various contexts; as opposed to the usual Eurocentric view that has tended to dominate Christian history. I'll try to layer in some interesting ideas as they emerge.

The major takeaway up front is to be reminded that there is no single, clear trajectory of the Christian tradition; it is something fluid, constantly evolving and recontextualizing for every new time and place. It emerges from lived experience, responses to challenges and controversies, and interactions with other cultural forces. Contextualizing, more than preserving, is the more accurate understanding of the tradition.

What's more, for the first few centuries at least, belonging to the church (in a universal sense) was about relationship rather than adherence to rules or doctrines. Bishops, were meant to be those who could trace their lineage of appointment back to the apostles; sort of like an apprenticeship model that lent credibility to one's leadership. Cyprian's famous quip, "outside the church there is no salvation," is a response to the question of rebaptism by those who were not baptized by bishops who carried the proper lineage credentials.

I guess what I'm getting at here is that we spend a lot of time arguing about what set of beliefs or practices constitute the right version of Christianity but history is rarely that neat and tidy.

Finally got a used copy of Bernadette Devlin's memoir and started reading it over the weekend. I'm just getting started and I'm sure more notes and reflections will come. However, a couple things stood out that I wanted to briefly comment on.

In the forward she acknowledges the protest movement in Northern Ireland of which she is just one small piece. Of her generation of struggle she writes, "we were born into an unjust system; we are not prepared to grow old in it." I love that. It captures both the bigness of the problem as well as the hope needed to keep going in resistance to it. This is the sort of mantra I want for parenting as well; teaching my kids that the world they have inherited is not their mess but it needs to be their fight. And to root themselves in the history of struggle that came before them, people just like Bernadette.

Another thing I wanted to draw attention to is the way she specifically points to her religious upbringing as what helped radicalize her. She writes,

"If it hadn’t been for the fact that I had an essentially Christian background from my mother, poverty would have made me bitter rather than socialist."

There are many, MANY good reasons to turn away from Christianity - both in its present and historical expressions, and I fault no one for doing so - however, there is also a strong legacy of struggle and justice within it. This again speaks to the sort of tradition that I want to raise my kids in. Not the forms of it that are tied to capitalism and colonialism, but to seek truth in the saints who fought for justice on behalf of the most vulnerable and oppressed. This is, in my opinion, the only kind of faith worth having.

Spent my long weekend quarantined in my room and reading William T. Cavanough’s Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of Church. It’s a reasonably quick read, comprised of 9 interconnected essays that explore the way nationalism in the West has more or less replaced religion. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of his argument was in his dealing with America, a nation where many might argue that the Christian religion is still alive and well.

Cavanough suggests that America as a nation came to view itself as God’s blessing to the world, replacing the priority of the church. In this way, American style freedoms are thrust upon the rest of the world with evangelistic zeal. In a particularly acute moment Cavanough suggests that “[America doesn’t] worship God, we worship the freedom to worship God.” This subtle distinction, I believe, really starts to help diagnose the state of American evangelicalism. It idolizes itself.

In a later essay he outlines the rules that allow this idolatry to perpetuate:

“American civil religion can never acknowledge that is is in fact religion: to do so would be to invite charges of idolatry. Here liturgical gesture is central, because gesture allows the flag to be treated as a sacred object, while language denies that that is the case. Everyone acknowledges verbally that the nation and the flag are not really gods, but the crucial test is what people do with their bodies, both in liturgies and in war.”

There’s a passage in the book of Isaiah that Jesus references. In it, the prophet condemns Jerusalem for coming near to God with their mouths and honouring God with their lips while their hearts were elsewhere. The thing about self-deception is we usually can’t diagnose it ourselves. I also think it’s fitting that that judgement is communal and not individual. Cities, communities, and especially nations often have narratives of self-deception woven in. These are places of belonging and identity making.

Cavanough’s overall brilliance in these couple essays is in highlighting the way the development of the nation-state generally has replaced the role of religion across Europe and North America and specifically how in the case of America, it has blurred the lines between nation and god.