A response to a cartoon

Let's consider the cartoon below. It is apparently being circulated by Christian pastors and others who may be trying to make a point about declines in church membership and active participation and engagement. But from my universalist perspective there may be a counter-argument to be made here and a reasonable explanation as to why someone might find this cartoon offensive. 

Let me say right now that I believe in joining and engaging with whatever religious or spiritual organization that you feel comfortable with after you have gone through time for discernment with God, taken some time with it, and your membership and participation have been determined to bless and benefit everyone in the circle. This is about faith, belief, and doctrine, to be sure, but it is also about how we view long-term commitment.

With commitment in mind, then, I want to lay out a few controversial points that I think the pastors and others passing this cartoon along will disagree with. Uniting oneself with a congregation or community will not work if you or that community come to the point of considering membership in a transactional way. If either side in this is thinking about some kind of exchange taking place, or in terms of a sale being made or a client-therapist-buyer-seller-sinner-preacher relationship being established, in order for things to progress then at some point someone will become dissatisfied and the relationship will suffer or end. We live in a world governed largely by competition, transactions, sales, profits and losses. Those in power often maintain their positions by encouraging dependency. People seeking the solace and strengthening that faith and faith communities can provide are often seeking an alternative to the harsh and cold world and the means of coping with and overcoming the violence that has been done to them in that world. We, all of us, need solidarity, not capitalist ethics and relationship dependencies in the pews.

Tithing has its roots in our communal religious and spiritual traditions and has come down to us as a form of fasting and as a form of generosity or charity ("solidarity lite"). But there are legitimate questions here about a proper Biblical approach to fasting in the first place. Is it Biblical to require the poor and the oppressed---the Lazaruses of our present day---to fast and to give? Is their life not already a story of fasting, faith and generosity? Yes, there are the accounts of the poor widow's offering and Christ's observations in the moment (Mark 12:41–44, Luke 21:1–4), but here I think the accent is on Christ condemning the wealthy and the powerful and not arguing that the poor must be squeezed.

We know that "people with means...are substantial givers. Middle-class Americans donate a little less. But the lower-income population surprises by giving more than the middle—and in some measures even more than the top. (As a percentage of available income, that is. In absolute dollars, those in higher income groups give much, much more money.)" The lower-income folks have an expansive definition of tithing, and one that I think is essentially correct, at least in terms of social practices. Someone may cover the mom in line at the supermarket who comes up short, or put up money for a son-in-law's tires so that he can look for work, or help someone make their rent. In my experience the people who are so generous do not often think of wat they are doing as charity, though they may not know the word "solidarity" or what it fully means or implies. Still, they model the concepts of solidarity by giving without the expectation of getting back and by giving in order to strengthen the social fabric that wraps around them as well. Instead of being transactional and talking about tithing, then, we should think about how we teach and model solidarity and where we find it in Scripture. The Bible is full of lessons on solidarity. The three that come readily to my mind are Hebrews 11, Acts 4: 32-5:11, and Christ's resurrection. Once solidarity is institutionalized and is communicated as an expectation and lived out daily, and once transactionalism is overcome,  the tithing and sacrifices will likely come.     

Well, it may be said, the folks in that cartoon are white and middle-class and seem to be squared away. I want to ask fellow Christians to seriously engage with the work of Marcus Borg and take up the project of doing economic analysis from a Christian perspective. The people in the pews may not be doing as well as fellow parishioners think they are. We live in a society that makes talk about things that matter and the struggles that we're going through uncomfortable and humiliating. Either people never talk about these hard truths of theirs or they abandon boundaries and go on as if theirs are the only and the most important problems and as if what they are suffering through is not the outcome of systemic inequities. So, in addition to not being transactional, engaging in solidarity, and doing economic analysis we also need to develop and teach healthy boundaries before we get deep into pushing church membership and tithing on folks. 

I'm coming from a place here of thinking about joining and fully engaging with a religious or spiritual community in terms of relationships---a marriage, say. You know that if you get married thinking "Well, we can always get divorced if things don't work out" then your marriage will likely not work out. The same holds true when you consider joining a religious community. You had better go into your marriage knowing your partner's faults and shortcomings, and both of you need to bend and be vulnerable to the other. Something similar happens in religious communities. Your heart will break and be broken and both you and your community will need to be flexible and take the long view. You know that if you get married but still keep up with old partners or go around looking at others as potential partners then you're not being fully faithful to the person you promised faithfulness to. Something like this applies to you joining a religious community as well; it's either a monogamous relationship or it won't last. It's okay if you can't do that now, "dating" is fine. You know that if you get married and you're not sharing the household tasks and paying the bills together and budgeting together then your marriage won't last. Most divorces start with fights over money. Again, there is a corollary with joining a religious community: plan, work, struggle and share the burdens to make it work, even if it means smaller communities made up of the blessed poor that God so loves. You don't want to marry someone who talks only about themselves, who is struggling with alcoholism or drug abuse, who is always deep in drama, who can't manage basic living skills without trouble, who can't handle their own power or work with someone else's in rational ways or who abuses their power and your trust. You also don't want to join a religious community where people with such issues proliferate and hold the keys to heaven and hell. And if you have been through a bad marriage or two you're probably not in a hurry to jump into another marriage. The same is true of joining religious communities; let God speak to you and study on how to bring that into focus, be rational about it, take your time.

Patrick Weaver Ministries grasps much of this in ways that I don't yet. See what they have to say about some of this.

For most of us, I think, the good traits and the most difficult problems that we bring to marriages and other relationships will be much the same as what we bring to any organization or effort we engage in, religious and spiritual communities included. Most of us have to work very hard to deconstruct what is negative in us and this is a lifetime project for many more of us than want to admit it. The capitalist society that we live in makes us unnaturally competitive and unable to find balance and cooperative paths to power. Churches may look at these conditions as sinful, or they may honor this with a gospel of prosperity, but neither approach finds the needed understanding. Our practical challenge is to make deconstructing ourselves and rebuilding ourselves a radical and social act of partaking with one another in the divine nature, or theosis (See Psalm 81/82, 2nd Peter 1:4. See 1 Thessalonians 5:17 and Matthew 25: 37-40 as aids). Is your religious community a place for rebuilding and healing?  

By this point I have probably lost the preachers and many readers. I'm going on too long and this is abstract. I do want to close with an additional point.

Many of the preachers who are circulating this cartoon and others like it claim in their sermons that they are swimming against the tide and say that they are risking their livelihoods and freedom by their strong teaching. I think that they are swimming very much with the tide by not taking on those in power who bring us a bit of hell (employers, banks, the prison-industrial complex, healthcare run for profit are examples), exaggerating their counter-cultural stance, and preaching an eternal hell because it is one way of preserving order in a society that jumps from crisis to crisis. Where is their attack on the systemic evils that oppress the people in the pews? 

On the other hand, there are some pretty brave Christians out there who really are challenging the oppressive powers and are paying a price for doing that and aren't posing as being counter-cultural. A committee of Mennonites led a peaceful demonstration calling for a ceasefire in Palestine/Israel last week and about 150 people were arrested at that demonstration. Where is the church in talking accurately and with love and solidarity about Palestine and supporting those who were arrested? Fellow believers cry out for justice but we're not listening. Where is the church in supporting  the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II and Repairers of the Breach when Bishop Barber says, "On March 2, our moral movement will be in Washington D.C. and at 30 statehouses across the country, launching a period of mass mobilization to the polls of the nation’s 85 million poor and low wealth voters leading up to the election in November. If mobilized around an agenda to address and end poverty and low wages, there is not a state where–if just 10 to 20 percent of poor and low-wage voters who did not vote in the last national election come to the polls this time around–they would not be able to swing the election and elect leaders who would vote for living wages, health care and voting rights."?