The unholy trinity

An evangelical blogger that I read every day just posted an article in which he speaks about the unholy trinity. He says:

Someone wrote me the other day using the phrase “the other Trinity,” referring to evangelicals’ obsession with homosexuality, abortion and evolution. All are important issues, but does anyone else have the suspicion that we are no longer dealing with a balanced approach to Christian ethics, but a situation where the reactive energies attached to these issues are the engines dominating much evangelical engagement with the world?

He makes some very good points. Among them are how we have managed to argue our way around the requirements of the Gospel to love everyone and change it into the idea that we can, in effect, hate certain people. He points out that we say that we “hate the sin, but not the sinner,” but that in actuality it is almost impossible to tell the difference.

He further makes some convicting comments:

We can also, conveniently, keep the light of truth off of ourselves . . . .

Where I live, our community is ravaged by poverty. Visible poverty is everywhere, much of it of the kind that would shock and sicken the typical suburban adult. There is a plague of meth and other drugs. Federal drug enforcement has the former mayor of our county seat under lock and key. We have DEA in the air half the year. Domestic abuse, incest, fraud, stealing: they are all rampant and we all drive past them every day. We see some of the problems up close in the lives and families of our students.

But when Tim Hardaway says, “I hate gays,” it strikes a chord in many Christians, because we hate homosexuality in a way we don’t hate poverty, racism, the neglect of children, government corruption, and the violence that surrounds us. We’ve allowed ourselves to feel the hatred of one sin that offends us, while we’ve thrown the blanket of denial and minimizing over our true character.

But, this over-concentration on the unholy trinity also has had one other terrible side-effect. That over-concentration has been used by political activists to convince too many of the christian community that they may only use those three subjects to make any decisions on political matters. That would have been bad enough, but only on the unbalanced side.

The worse problem is what those political activists were able to do to our overall sense of balance. Notice what the blogger wrote, and before you judge, I should mention that the blogger is a Baptist pastor who is a chaplain. He is not precisely a raging liberal by a long shot. But, he does live in a community where, as he puts it, “visible poverty is everywhere, much of it the kind that would shock and sicken the typical suburban adult.”

And, what has happened is that, as he put it, we have forgotten some rather essential matters, matters that are mentioned over and over and over in the Old Testament. Uhm, in fact, the Early Church Fathers actually debate whether or not the first eleven chapters are meant to be literal or allegorical, but that is a side point. What is true is that, “in a way we don’t hate poverty, racism, the neglect of children, government corruption, and violence that surrounds us.” At least, we don’t hate it in the way we supposedly only hate the sins of homosexuality and abortion. Uhm, I do not consider that the failure to believe in a six-day literal creation is a sin.

And, as a result, our political appreciation is also unbalanced. Those who have succeeded in making the unholy trinity the only judgment allowed in political matters, have also gone farther. Think about the subjects I just wrote about. Be honest, how often have you heard evangelicals speaking about poverty as though it is only the fault of the poor? I would beg to differ with that. Our only solution to all the other problems listed has been to throw everyone in jail for as long as we can do it. And, it has given us some interesting statistics. For instance, the proportion of our citizens in jail is the highest proportion in the world bar none. But prison ministries are starving for money and volunteers. I can understand the argument for placing people in jail, but, uhm, should we not be trying to reach them as well, if we are serious about the Gospel?

I am not arguing that Christians should belong to one political party or another. Rather, I am arguing the complete opposite of that. Neither party has shown itself to be overwhelmingly great for Christians. So, one would expect to see Christians more evenly spread among both parties. But, they are not. And, one reason for that is that we have been taken in and convinced that the unholy trinity are the mortal sins of evangelicals, which must be dealt with sternly and immediately. Unfortunately, we have also been convinced that the poor, the widow, the orphan, the drug addict, and the systemic problems that led to our burgeoning economic disaster, are but venial sins that can be conveniently overlooked. Or, worse, we have been convinced that trying to deal with the poor, the widow, the orphan, in other words, trying to deal with problems that may need a systemic solution is a liberal heresy. It would be bad enough if we were to think of those things as venial sins. But, that we have decayed to thinking of them as liberal heresies is indeed a heresy, but not a liberal one.