Amen, A-Woman, A-nonbinary

Nothing like a riot to take the nation’s mind off your own public goof. Just days ago we were all laughing over a man and his “a-woman.” He now claims he was only joking (Proverbs 26:19). But it’s not funny. The reason it’s not funny, however, is less the ridiculous feminist hoo-haw that birthed it, more the shocking ignorance it revealed. The 117th session of the US Congress was opened by a Congressman with a prayer. The Congressman, having begun his prayer invoking a whole host of deities, ended his prayer “Amen, and A-woman.”

I’m increasingly used to our culture’s ignorance of basic Christian truths. The underlying consensus that once privileged Christianity is long gone. So it doesn’t surprise me when movies portray Protestant churches with crucifixes on their walls, or when politicians speak of Two Corinthians. What surprised me then about Emanuel Cleaver’s prayer wasn’t that he is an ignorant Congressman, Congresswoman, but that he is a pastor in the United Methodist Church.

How does a man become a minister of the gospel without knowing that amen has nothing to do with men? Because as craven, heathen, ignorant, worldly, backward as Congress is as an institution, it runs a distant second in all those categories to mainline churches. In fact, we have the Congress that we have precisely because we have the mainline churches that we have. That, and we have evangelical churches that play Squiggy to mainline Lenny.

It’s an old but telling joke that an evangelical is a fundamentalist who says to a liberal, “I will call you brother if you will call me scholar.” It’s a relatively new and heartbreaking reality that Big Eva left chastity behind and is quickly losing her ability to blush. We lost the culture. We lost the mainline churches. We lost the institutions of higher learning. We lost the neo-evangelicals. And Big Eva is blocking our calls.

How is it that these losses seem to mean less to us than our “loss” of the election? Because even the most fundamentalist among us have bought into the lie that politics is what matters. Politics, of course, does matter. Fifty years ago I might have been writing a piece on the woeful indifference to politics that defined fundamentalism. That all changed, however, when fundamentalists, from Jerry Falwell to Michael Farris learned that nothing brought coins in the coffer more quickly than culture wars.

We have lost our first love, a-woman that Jesus loves and died for, the church. By all means let the church be militant, pressing the crown rights of King Jesus. But first her virtue must be guarded, protected, cherished and honored. Before we can go forth from Eden to gardenize the jungle we have to purge the garden of all enemies.

Pray for the church. Pray that she would be cleansed, that she would grow in love and loyalty toward the Groom. Pray that she, the last Eve, would be a help suitable to the Last Adam, that we would rejoice that He has already overcome the world, that His is the kingdom and the power and the glory, world without end, The Man.