Inside/Outside

To review: communities of any sort rely to a certain extent on exclusions--selections of insiders and outsiders--in order to exist. A community that includes everyone equally and without question lacks any coherence as a community. If this is so, then is the Church--the universal-catholic body of Christ--a community? If so, where and how does exclusion work? If not, what is it?

I have written extensively about people who insist that the Christian community is extremely, overtly selective, a body of the elect. Between these chosen few and, well, the rest exists a bright-line distinction. Just how permeable this inside/outside boundary is depends upon whom you ask. For Fred Phelps (and to a much lesser, less paranoid-hate-filled extent, some others in the Calvinist tradition), the boundary is a wall erected prior to humanity's existence. God knows who is predestined to choose the Way of Salvation and who is not, and the Holy Spirit enables/pushes those so predestined onto that Way. All others? Reprobate. Never had a chance.

For Steven Anderson (and, to a lesser extent, some other fundamentalist non-Calvinists), the line is not pre-ordained but no less solid for all that. God's invitation extends to all, but humans in their pride can overtax God's invitation and face a kind of expulsion from grace, becoming reprobate. Regardless of their support for or dismay at Anderson (or Calvin), though, most evangelicals would affirm that humans can choose whether to accept God's invitation to salvation but that this invitation closes upon either the human's death or Christ's second coming, whichever happens first. At that point (in most evangelical thinking), a person's insider/outsider status becomes permanent, and she spends eternity in heaven or hell.

The key question for most evangelicals isn't so much whether insider/outsider statuses exist in God's community but about whether humans on earth can discern who occupies the inside/outside zone. Here we return to the dialectic of certainty and anxiety that characterizes much of conservative evangelical faith life: are you 100% certain that YOU are saved? Being concerned about but simultaneously certain of your own insider status (i.e., that you're saved through faith in Christ) is a given for most conservative evangelicals.

On the question of others' the inside/outside status, though, evangelicals split. For many evangelicals--even, I would venture, most evangelicals--the ultimate salvation status of an individual soul is unknowable, a matter between the soul and God. When pressed, for instance, most evangelicals in my experience will stop short of declaring with any certainty whether someone is not saved. Even the most wicked, unchristian person, they reason, might have believed in his or her final moment.

Others, particularly of the fundamentalist persuasion, are more cavalier about declaring certain beliefs or practices (if not particular individuals) as clearly living outside of the bounds of Christian community. GLBT people are the current favorite reprobates for many fundamentalists. Anderson's understanding of scripture, for instance, leads him to believe that any homosexual is definitionally and irrevocably doomed to hell (and that he as a Christian is to rejoice about such a fate). Ditto abortionists.

Consider evangelical response to the murder of Dr. George Tiller, who performed late-term abortions. Conservative evangelical radio shows and blogs buzzed what the proper Christian response to the murder should be. Most--really, all of them save for a few extreme commentators--denounced vigilantism and murder. Some asked whether or not relief or even celebration constituted an appropriate Christian response to the murder of Dr. George Tiller since from their point of view the murder saved the lives of thousands of future babies (unasked: how Dr. Tiller's murder may have compromised or doomed the health of many women in need of late-term abortions for medical reasons). But in addition to this debate, evangelical pundits posed a subtler question: how was it that Dr. Tiller was involved in a church--an usher, no less--if he was by profession an abortion doctor?

Most rejected out of hand the very idea that one could be a professing Christian and yet perform abortions. He may have claimed to be a Christian, but (claimed many) anyone who can abort fetuses and call himself a believer is either deluded or mendacious. Moreover, a community of faith that accepts such a person--even elevating him or her to the status of usher--surely this community is at best gravely misguided if not altogether apostate.

Of course, those opinions doubtless represent only part of the inchoate mass of believers called "evangelical," but the logic is widespread enough to merit examination: I can tell by X action or belief that you are probably not really a Christian. Nor is this merely the purview of fundamentalists. In my health care rant of a few days ago, I wondered about how someone could call themselves a Christian and yet affirm a system guaranteed to harm or kill the poor.

This discriminatory discernment (discriminatory in the non-bigoted sense of discriminating) is fascinating to me even as it worries me.

More tomorrow,

JF