Life during the pandemic was as tumultuous as it was terrifying. I moved back to my childhood home in the early weeks of the pandemic, uncertain of what the looming apocalypse would look like and wanting to be among familiarity if these were the last of my moments on earth. I remember my mother bringing in groceries and spraying them down with disinfectant, her mask drawn up to her eyes. I remember the fear of going to my grandmother’s house with gloves on to fix her phone and the harshness in my voice demanding she stay away from me. I remember driving away wondering if I wasn’t careful enough, if I would wake tomorrow to find her coughing, then dead.
During that year, I found myself completely disenchanted with the Church. At a moment of complete global chaos, our pastors and staff were in-fighting about the government. Was it morally acceptable to follow Ceaser if he told us to worship online? To be physically distant in the room? To disinfect?
This was not a distant viewing. I read the messages of vitriol and hatred as they poured into my living room. I watched as Bible study leaders and pastors I had once respected shared conspiracy theories on Facebook about the government manufacturing a deadly illness in order to obliterate Christianity, never mind that all religions (and secular spaces) were treated equally. I listened as brothers tore apart sisters and as sisters tore apart their brothers, then turned around and blamed anyone but themselves for the carcasses, feigning victimhood while masquerading as the predator.
In those moments of chaos and fear, I needed the Church most. And in response to my need, the Church decided there were more important issues. So long as the Church could win the culture war, ascertain the “truth” and hold political leaders accountable, it didn’t seem to matter how much rotting flesh – spiritual or physical – piled up in our sanctuaries or littered our parking lots like repellant.
This is how I ended up at an online church with dangerous theology. Like me, there were a legion of people disenfranchised with the Church, particularly after gazing at a man like Jesus. In a last-ditch effort to save my faith, I stayed in that church, which brought a wealth of condemnation on me from the very Christians who pushed me out. I left a more traditional interpretation of faith because I saw in a myriad of Christian communities (this was during my eventual nine-year exile I’ve detailed before) the same vitriol I saw spewing in the streets. I craved a respite from the horrors of the world and now that I had left a continuation of those horrors perpetrated by people claiming to have a supernatural antidote, they tried to warn me against the dangerous theology. I could not hear it. The issue was, these people had wasted so much witness on politicized opinions or objective conspiracies that could easily be logically argued or factually disproven that when it came time for something serious and real, I could no longer pretend to find them credible.
How you respond to the world around you actually matters for your evangelism. The Bible is not a digestible, straightforward collection of books. If you want people to believe that a man called Jesus was somehow fully man and fully God, he was murdered and buried, and then came back to life in the flesh before ascending jetpack-style into heaven, you’re going to need a tremendous amount of credibility. If you want someone to follow you through a rabbit hole of theology and tradition, you need a track record. If all someone knows of you is that you peddle controversial opinions or share misinformation on the internet, your witness has weakened.
I ended up leaving that less traditional church because the comment section each week was full of the same tasteless and cruel insults towards conservatives as you typically hear towards liberals in most religious spaces. I realized that a community I sought kinship from was just an inversion of what I had been running from. Rather than hating the people I loved, or loving the people I hated, this community hated the people I hated, and it didn’t make me feel any better. For the next three years, I did the motions of Church life. I volunteered and joined small groups where I sat startingly invisible, reintroducing myself to the same person week after week. Although I attended a more traditional church, and felt fed by the sermons, I never bought into Church the same way post-pandemic.
It wasn’t as though COVID was my first experience witnessing the atrocities of life in Christian community. I had survived church splits and the vitriol associated with the dethroning of a pastoral authoritarian. I had met with a youth pastor who made empty promise after empty promise, and another who did not rest until the youth group was purged of anyone he didn’t like. I had seen the villainy of the church up close, but something about that time in American history was just different.
I remember, too, President Trump holding up a Bible, and the way Christians in my life ate it up like snake oil. I remember Christians likening Trump to Christ, or Christ to Trump, worshiping both man’s every word. I remember them following his every move, trusting whatever he said and demanding obedience, craving his affection. I see that to this day. For years, I had never understood how a nation divinely freed from slavery could gather and melt their jewelry, forming it into a golden cow, and worshiping it because Moses took too long coming down a mountain. I always thought it was because idols like that felt culturally foreign – something belonging to an Eastern religion, perhaps Hinduism or Buddhism. I didn’t realize at first that when idols are made in front of you, they’re made with the material you’re most accustomed to. Once I saw that image of Trump as a golden calf, I began to see all of this culture, my country, and the people who once raised me in faith, in an entirely different light.
I hope that whatever is left of Christ’s Church in the land we call the United States, can hear this weary plea of mine. This, to be clear, is not a derision of Republicans or Trump. As illustrated by my first anecdote, the perverse problem of tribalism is not a one-sided issue. Rather, all of us, myself included, are corrupted by the fallible idea that to stand for anything inherently means standing against something else. In a way, it does. In order to be kingdom-minded, we have to stand firm against the gates of hell. But it is this target – hell orchestrated and occupied by the Enemy – that we are to fight against. It is not, to be perfectly clear, kingdom-minded to be against those who think differently than us. It is not kingdom-minded to give up on the sick simply because they are not yet well. And it is absolutely not kingdom-minded to claim to have a cure that is just the same derision and vitriol the world manufactures but rebranded with a cross as the logo.
The American Church is on its last leg. I hope God gives me enough days to watch it topple over and turn to ash. I believe so fiercely in the blood and the body of Jesus. I believe in his hands that raise the dead up and cure leprosy. I believe in his instruction to turn the other cheek even though the punched one is bleeding. I believe in the prayer for the Father to forgive them for they know now what they do even though I’m pretty sure they do and often fail to speak that prayer in practice.
To be a Christian under the Emperor, be him Donald Trump, Joe Biden, George Washington, or Abraham Lincoln, is to declare allegiance and adoption to one God in three parts alone. To be a Christian under the Emperor is to say that I will keep my eyes on the cross instead of the White House, to only give to Ceaser what is his. That is to say, I will only ever give God what is God’s. I hope that I can learn to walk humbly in this land, submitting to my God’s will.
If there is anyone out there wondering if there is something more to life than the ballot box, more to life than wars and arguing about which dead children are sad and which are an ideological necessity, more to life than standing against a neighbor, come to Jesus. We, speaking as a participant and financer of American Christianity, have tainted his name with our lies, insecurities, and idolatries. We have claimed to be well while being sick, even, perhaps, sicker than you. This is not acceptable, and I am sorry.
We have tainted his name, but I promise you he still speaks in the quiet. Find him and he will find you.
If there is anyone in the Bride of Christ still breathing in my homeland, now is the time to rise up and hold your pastors, elders, and staff accountable to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It is time to follow Jesus and repent of our perverse adoration of human men and their measures we kill for like they are living gods who can save us if we give them enough of our attention.
Repent, O Church. Come back to the simplicity and silence of the LORD. His mercy is forever and His path is narrow.
Have mercy, O God. Have mercy on our wicked souls. Have mercy on this land covered in blood we pretended to justify.
Next week we’ll discuss truth and love.
Bryce Van Vleet is the #1 selling author of Tired Pages and Before We All Die Let’s Have One Last Chat by the Fireside. He also hosts the podcast Death in Dakota, sells poetry art here, and masquerades as the spoken word artist Liihey. You can support him by clicking through blog posts or donating (scroll to the bottom of the page).
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