A Response to Brian McLaren's "Church in the Trump Years"

C: As we think about those two ways of being, the separation of wheat and weeds, good fish and rotten fish… I can’t help but notice this article that separates out clergy into two camps “Active Collaborators” and the “Silently Complicit.”

G: Those both seem like negative categories, weeds and thorns, rotten fish and lutefisk… I don’t think those categories fit the Kingdom of Heaven.

C: Agreed… but the image of a “way” is instructive… isn’t that the way Matthew and the Didache and Psalms and Proverbs… the whole wisdom tradition really,…talk about two ways of being human, the wise way and the foolish way, paths of righteousness and paths of wickedness.

G: So perhaps all those #Resist signs outside of that Congressman’s office you hold vigil at could give us new categories—there are two ways for clergy to act in the Trump era—the Highway of Cooperation and the Highway of Resistance?

C: I like that, and we could even keep the slow lane/fast lane distinction.

G: We?

C: Okay… I could keep them. Then you have Cooperators in the fast lane—they support Trump as ruler even if they disagree with his policies, and you have the slow lane of people focusing on personal morality to the detriment of the social good… and on the other side, the Highway of Resistance, you have a fast lane, the clergy who have made every sermon about resisting Trump, protest in their collars, hungry to get arrested so they can be seen as the new Bonheoffer, or even hungry to get other clergy arrested so they become radicalized and move into the fast lane.

G: You’re being a little harsh there.

C: I’m harsh because I was them in the Iraq War—I wasn’t clergy but I was all in in the Fast Lane, and I don’t think what I did stopped the war or made for better policies. In fact, I think some of the stuff I did was counter-productive… we weren’t the adult in the room, or at least we didn’t look like it.

G: Processing your stuff much?

C: I am. So, the slow lane are those resisting by writing letters and making phone calls, bringing signs and granola to the vigils, and preaching in a way that their congregation can hear the incongruities between the Beatitudes and “Winning” without making it a referendum on the Presidential vote those congregants cast. They tear themselves in two making sure folk recognize they are respected, even as they deeply disagree about taking in refugees, and… well, everything.

G: You do realize you are sounding a lot like those clergy Dr. King wrote against, right?

C: I don’t sleep well at night.

G: You aren’t making it plain, put it in proverbs, maybe you’ll get there.

C: Okay… ummm…

Happy is the Pastor who brings along the weak ones.

Sad is the Pastor who rushes out ahead and can no longer find their flock.

Happy is the Protestor who supports women's healthcare and reproductive rights from cancer screenings to contraception to safe abortions--can that not be said to be pro-life?

Sad is the Protestor who decides to “take back” the term Baby Killer.

Happy the Pastor who conducts herself more presidentially than the President.

Sad is the Pastor who leaps into the mud to be slaughtered by the pig.

G: But you aren’t happy.

C: True. But, my greatest fear is that the fast-lane folk are going to wreck and in the process clog the slow lane of resistance as well—delegitimize all of us—our congregants won’t be able to hear us, or care to, and then we have a one-way street to 8 years of Trump and decades of cleaning up. I fear that I’ll be an old man before we recover from the damage Trump will bring to this country and this world.

G: Aren’t you a sunny one today.