Sharp Objects in the Garden: The Cumulative Cruelty of Evangelicalism

I’m two weeks in to a month of sabbatical, which means that I finally started feeling the itch to get my hands dirty and work in the yard. To my delight, there was small garden area by the driveway overgrown with Bermuda grass ready to oblige me.

We do not have Bermuda grass in our front yard. We used to, but when a collapsed sewer drain required the plumbing team to dig up most of our meadowy “yard” three years ago, we chose a different kind of grass for the reset. So as I dug with shovel and by hand, I was digging deep into a very old and resilient substructure of roots and runners.

For me, at least, the time-intensive, physical act of weeding (grassing?) often catalyzes a parallel spiritual experience of digging, asking the Spirit to reveal what lies in the depths that I have yet to expend time and attention to notice. And today, with recent attacks on people I love swirling around in my head, I noticed both anger and sorrow.

When I pulled on these runners, I thought they would go upward to the tall, obvious grass above the surface. A new book is out that alleges to expose major evangelical leaders as shills for a leftist agenda. The book is nearly unavoidable—from the NY Times bestseller list to e-mails in my inbox to the first book promoted in my Audible app. And the few reviews I have read clued me in that its guns were trained on my subdivision of evangelicalism, where Tim Keller’s winsomeness is valued rather than reviled, where Russell Moore’s forays into addressing racial prejudice and sexual abuse are seen as Biblical faithfulness rather than leftward drift, where Beth Moore’s solidarity with silenced women is lauded as heroism rather than condemned as heresy.

But the runners my hands follow don’t rise up to the grass proliferating above the surface. That would be much easier, to lay all the blame on the voices du jour and their posts and podcasts and publications. Rather, as I pull on the infrastructure of this grass it goes down deeper, deeper into the soil where the true lament lies. And what I lament there is cruelty.

I was raised in the South where we left our Reagan/Bush ’84 bumper sticker on the pickup truck well after the election. While my friends in 6th grade were listening to Guns N’ Roses or Def Leppard, I was listening to Rush Limbaugh or Wes Minter, Atlanta’s voice of conservative talk radio. In these circles we upvoted facts and downvoted feelings. We ridiculed brainless liberals who fought for the environment rather than defending unborn human beings. We assumed that poor people were simply lazy. And we shot down, with deep-seated ferocity, anything that even hinted of being gay. I was about as deep fried in Southern, white, conservative evangelicalism as anyone could be.

As I scan those years and the people who shaped me, I cannot think of one person who I would describe as cruel. They are wonderful people. Yet—and this is the insidious part—there was a cumulative cruelty about our homogeneous, suburban context that only became clear after I left and replayed the tape on a different day in a different place.

The misogyny has been exposed through being married to a sweet, strong woman who pinpoints words and presuppositions that devalue women. The racism has been exposed through friendships with African-Americans and noticing how differently I perceive the treatment of young black men now that I’m raising black sons. The homophobia has been exposed through honest conversations with close friends who have had the courage to tell their stories of same sex attraction in the context of faithfulness to Jesus. The assumptions about poverty have been exposed by living in Appalachia among poor whites and in urban centers among poor blacks and Native Americans. The nativism has been exposed by living in a border state and meeting amazing human beings that some reduce to “illegal.” The suspicion about power differentials has been exposed by hearing one abuse survivor story after another in which a parent or pastor’s power was leveraged to silence victims.

I feel anger and sorrow because this cumulative cruelty took root in the soil where we heard that patience and gentleness were the fruit of the Spirit, where we boldly proclaimed the sanctity of life, where we valued truth. Yet somehow this soil also nurtured unkindness rather than choking it out.

The people being charged with selling out to a leftist agenda—many of whom I know, admire, and am privileged to count as friends—are generally characterized by humility, compassion, nuance, and kindness. Also, most of them are still quite theologically conservative. As am I. I have not left the fold for a leftist agenda. I still hold views that actual leftists would call bigoted and narrow-minded. I have simply been awakened to the syncretism, the un-Christlike mean-spiritedness inherent in the political right that has infiltrated evangelicalism.

When I hear the attacks on those seeking the way of Jesus over the priorities of a certain sociopolitical group, I grieve a broader evangelicalism that would turn such a book into a bestseller. I grieve the context of harm in which these attacks are situated and how far it feels from the ethical life and teachings of Jesus. Ultimately, I grieve the fact that, had I not moved outside of my white, Southern, evangelical bubble, I might consider cruelty a necessary means of winning a cause that I thought had something to do with Jesus.

Toward the end of my hours of removing the Bermuda grass, I dug up something I wasn’t expecting: a strip of drywall screws. I don’t know how they got there, but it was an unsettling discovery as I thought of what they could do to an unsuspecting person’s bare feet. There is a role for drywall screws when they bind Sheetrock to wood as part of a safe house. But they have no place in a garden.

I am under no delusion that I can rid the church of all the sharp objects and wild growth that obscure the love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control that grows abundantly in so many gatherings of Jesus’ disciples. But as I lament the cumulative cruelty that has marked the culture in which I was raised, I can also resolve to lead my own family and church to worry less about right, left, or any other category that belongs to this age. I can speak my piece against the syncretism I have emerged from and that constantly threatens—from the left and right—to water down our allegiance to King Jesus and his eternal rule. And I can be part of something generative rather than destructive, to nurture fruit from the age to come that beckons our neighbors to join this life in Jesus as we wait for him to make all things new.

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