Article

America

Creed

Justice

5 November 2024

6 min read

Is it okay to be mean as long as you are mean and right?

Here's what a mean street preacher really taught me.

Nathan Betts

Nathan is a speaker and writer on topics related to faith, life and God. He lives near Seattle, Washington. His writing is featured frequently in The Seattle Times. nathanbetts.com

Behind a passer by a street peacher holds up a large yellow sign with a message on it.

Street preachers on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

LaTerrian McIntosh on Unsplash.

A few months ago, my cousin was visiting my hometown of Seattle for work. We planned to meet one evening for a Mariners baseball game during her visit. I suggested that we meet near the wonderful Ken Griffey Jr. statue near the stadium gates. What I hadn’t realized was that this was the precise spot a street evangelist had also decided to station himself in order to share (mostly shout) his message of judgement and destruction the same evening. Kind of like a pre-game verbal hors d'oeuvres. I arrived at the meeting point a few minutes before my cousin, giving me ample time to hear the preacher preach.

Now, I grew up in church, and, in fact, am myself a speaker and writer on topics involving faith and God. In other words, I’ve had over 40 years to experience the church’s, umm, “quirks”. I’d like to think that very little coming from the mouths of faith preachers could shock me. Alas, I was wrong.

As I began to listen to the preacher, lines like “weeping and gnashing of teeth” scorched through the preacher’s megaphone. Yep, nothing new there. The preacher used the word “judgment” a lot. Actually, impressively a lot. I’ve never before heard the words “God” and “judgment” used in conjunction more times within a two-minute span. There was a raging intensity to the sermon, but still in the range of normal for street preaching.

Then, my cousin texted me that she was outside the ballpark but might have gotten the location wrong. I realized she and I were at two different locations. While I texted my cousin back, I tuned out the preacher’s message. That is until I heard him shout through his megaphone, “He hates you.” I stopped texting. I looked up at the preacher. Did he just say that God the Almighty hated all of us outside the ballpark? Families, little boys and girls, and elderly? Did God hate all of us lining up for the game? It was “bark at the park” night so even the dogs were casualties in the preacher’s line of fire. If nothing else was gleaned from the man’s message, it seemed, we were all to understand that God hates us.

Minutes later, when my cousin and I finally found each other, I told her that she had had the good fortune of missing out on the street preacher informing her that God hates her. She replied, “Oh, I have plenty of others who tell me that!”

Sadly, many of us have received that negative message from different sources in our world and too often from people sharing some association with God.

In America, as election season comes to the boil, I’ve noticed (and maybe you have too) the not-so-subtle attitude that it’s okay to say mean things about another person as long as that person is on “the other side”. A verbal dig here, an eyeroll there, name-calling and slanderous nick-naming the enemy for the sake of ridicule have become all too common, if not a soft virtue in political discourse. It has become hard to discern where the moral line is, or if such a thing still exists within political dialogue.

Conversations like the following happen so frequently following a political debate or interview, they’ve become cliché: “I almost cannot believe he said that!” Response: “Well, yes, that was pretty bad. But he’s right, isn’t he?” Translation: it’s okay to be mean as long as you are mean and right.

Evangelicalism has gained a hard edge with little resemblance of the good news from which it has its very name.

The meaning of the word ‘evangelical’ here in America is a complex thing, to be sure. But perhaps one of the reasons it is understood as a political word more than a religious one is because the combative and rude nature of discourse seen in politics has become increasingly acceptable even in Christian settings. As a friend of mine said to me years ago, “It feels as though Christians have turned rudeness into a spiritual gift.”

The thing is, you probably don’t know the preacher I heard in downtown Seattle, but you’ve probably heard or know a person who makes Christian claims in the same kind of rude ways. The result is that evangelicalism has gained a hard edge with little resemblance of the good news from which it has its very name.

I’ve had the privilege of speaking to audiences on topics of faith and God for around 20 years now and I’ve lost count of the number of people I’ve met who feel unlovable, already hated, and unforgivable for the decisions they’ve made in life.

So when I hear a preacher shouting a message through a bullhorn in the name of God and I hear not words of hope, peace, grace, love, and forgiveness, but strictly judgement and burning, I fail to see how this God can be the one who came to earth out of love for people in the person of Jesus Christ.

It’s true that the Bible does depict God enacting justice and judgement. But equally true is that the Bible not only displays, but out-and-out defines God as being love. My concern with the street preacher’s message is that although he might have communicated the justice of God (albeit in a warped way that would make old-time revivalists look tame), his message left little room for hearing about and feeling the love of God.

If there is anything we need to hear today, it is the message that God, in his very nature, is love. One particular writer of antiquity, and a close friend of Jesus Christ, once penned a letter to first century churches. In attempting to explain what God is like and what people of faith should be like he wrote: “Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.”

For those of us who have never been to a church, we only need to watch or attend an American football game to see a sign with the words John 3:16. That reference, taken from one of Christ’s biographies states that, “This is how much God loved the world: He gave his Son, his one and only Son. And this is why: so that no one need be destroyed; by believing in him, anyone can have a whole and lasting life.”

This is a message we need to hear. It’s something we need to let into our bones—that those of us who feel beyond the reach of love, are in fact loved by God.

In a strange way, I can’t help but admire the guts those street preachers have, banging out an unpopular message to strangers in crowds. The problem lies in the fact that often their message, so boldly proclaimed, is God’s disappointment, disapproval, or outright hate for people.

Because this is the truth and too important to miss: God doesn’t hate you. He loves you. He always has and he always will.

Article

America

Conspiracy theory

Culture

Politics

18 September 2024

5 min read

US election: the primal stories trumping facts

Projections and polls cannot capture the power of stories shaping identity.

Jared Stacy

Jared Stacy holds a Theological Ethics PhD from the University of Aberdeen. His research focuses conspiracy theory, politics, and evangelicalism.

a map depicts US states coloured red and blue.

538 election prediction map.

ABC News.

Washington D.C. — Election throes in America are intensifying while citizens prepare to cast their votes. The last week alone has been something like a whirlwind, not to mention the entire campaign itself.

Last week, Americans tuned into the first and possibly final Presidential debate between Trump and Harris. On the heels of the debate came a flurry of propaganda leveled by JD Vance (and promoted by Trump) against Haitian migrant communities in Ohio. These claims resulted in bomb threats and school closures.

And to wrap up the week, a second assassination attempt on Donald Trump in nearly as many months. Trump and his campaign, quicker and more direct that the first attempt, quickly cast the blame towards Democrats, specifically for what they see as violent rhetoric in describing Trump as a “threat to democracy.” Trump meanwhile continues to campaign on threats and claims of election fraud, refusing to signal he’d accept the certified results of the election in the event he loses.

That’s just another week in an unpredictable American presidential election.

Americans are besieged, all of us, by a throng of pollsters, partisans, and pundits. Each trying to ride the raging bull of the election cycle.

And life goes on. For now, in this time, in my small corner of American life, I find there is this mixture of exhausted apathy and existential rage. In view of the spectacle, there’s a general exasperation of “what will happen next?” But more personally, dispersed on social media, is the existential zeal and dread—“we” have to defeat “them!”

The danger of this mixture is twofold. Just as odd as it is potent. It is also combustible. And just as it can lay dormant; it can also be summoned by a mere spark.

Americans are besieged, all of us, by a throng of pollsters, partisans, and pundits. Each trying to ride the raging bull of the election cycle with predictions and projections. Some offer prayer.

I listen in on conservative Christian talk radio. Prayers offered on air for God to intervene. What follows is a litany of slogans— “secure our borders” and “defend life” and “the economy” — and of course prayers for the salvation of those who think differently.

Then, there’s more daring outrage merchants with deep pockets. Those who try to shift the election through nefarious means. Like the case of Tenet Media, a media network of right-wing American podcasters who were recently indicted by the Justice Department for receiving Russian funds through fronted companies.

It seems to me that the heart of the matter in the midst of this election, deeper than policy and beyond the spectacle, is that none of us are entirely sure what reality another person inhabits.

A new study published last week found that most registered Republicans (at 67 per cent) trust the Trump campaign as their primary source for election information. Trump’s word, for nearly three quarters of his party, is given more authority than government certification, media-based news, or local news.

This raises the possibility that, in 50-some-odd days, if Trump refuses to concede, if he repeats claims of election fraud, his base seems ready and willing to believe it.

Our social and political worlds have been set on fire not for want of facts but by stories which overpower fact with meaning.

Alongside the debates about policy, the propaganda that stokes division and dehumanizes migrant communities, is a deeper crisis of source authority. Of not just “facts” but truth, of meaning, of reality.

The study revealed that most Americans signal they tend to trust information that comes from “data” and “facts.” But oddly enough, nothing about that statement seems to accord with the on the ground reality of America’s social fabric.

We should know by now: facts have never been enough.

100 years ago, as novelist Rebecca West reflected on the chaotic series of events that sparked World War I, she admitted, “I shall never be able to understand how it happened. It is not that there are too few facts available, but that there are too many.”

What seems “real” for many Americans is not (and perhaps has never been) rooted entirely in the all-powerful “fact.” Our social and political worlds have been set on fire not for want of facts but by stories which overpower fact with meaning. These stories are primal. They’re the kind which create identities and bind communities. They are rich in meaning and so prove entirely immune to fact-checking operations. Source authority has no power apart from primal stories. And though projections and polls tend to focus on the data, they cannot capture the power of stories which create identity and contain community. This is the stuff the vote is made of, too.

This past week, JD Vance defended his propaganda in the form of conspiracy theories of Haitian migrants eating pets by telling CNN, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do.”

Ends-justifies-means has always been ascendant in politics. Nobody is arguing that MAGA invented political expediency. But this election is careening towards deep waters which we would do well to avoid.

“Propaganda is a means to an end,” said Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels in 1934 before an audience at Nuremberg, “…it provides the background music...[it] miraculously makes the unpopular popular, enabling even a government’s most difficult decisions to secure the resolute support of the people.”

I do not know what the next 50 days will hold. I remain deeply concerned that the word of Trump aspires to assume an authority which sees democracy as a meddling imposition in one man’s destiny. But I do know that none of this is fated. As Augustine observed during the throes of Rome’s collapse: “Bad times! Hard times!” this is what they are saying. But let us live well and the times shall be well. We are the times. Such as we are, such are the times.

May it be so.