There it is, on the southern edge of Milton, Georgia: Crabapple First Baptist Church.
It’s about half a mile across Georgia 372 to Crabapple Crossing Elementary School and about a mile down 372 to Peace, Love and Pizza. There’s nothing particularly unusual about this suburb a little north of Atlanta.
But Tuesday, March 16 changed everything about it. A young man who had grown up in Crabapple First Baptist was arrested and charged with shooting and killing eight people, six of them Asian women.
As you know, there’s a whole narrative out there about former President Donald Trump and the “China Virus.” While president and leader of the free world, he routinely blamed the coronavirus’s origin on the Chinese and accused them of infecting the U.S. Those words surely gave permission to many people who were so inclined to punish or even attack persons who looked to them like they were “Chinese.” News reports have documented the frightening increase in assaults on Asian persons in the last year.
But the former president is not the focus of these brief words. Rather, I want to call attention to a thoughtful essay in Christianity Today on those tragic events by Jason Dees, the senior pastor of Christ Covenant Church in Atlanta.
Whether you are active in a religious organization of any stripe, are “spiritual but not religious,” are a None (religion is not even on your radar screen), or a Done (you’ve had it with religion!), Pastor Dees raises some important concerns for the culture at large — also known as our common life together.
He asks, “Who are our people? … Any pastor [priest, rabbi, or imam, etc.] … must understand who those people are that make up the church and how we are to know them and have a meaningful connection with them.”
I assume that the larger the “church,” the more difficult “meaningful connection” would be.
The megachurch movement among evangelicals seems to have pretty much run its course, but it surely did propagate many very large churches. Pastor Dees, appropriately, is concerned that, even in churches, despite their best efforts, people may fall through the cracks or skate through unnoticed.
Dees is also concerned with what it means to identify with a particular religious group — what it should mean to embrace, say, Islam or Christianity, and what it should mean for one’s daily interactions with others.
To that point, according to Dees, the shooter, Robert Aaron Long’s self-description on Instagram was, “Pizza, guns, drums, music, family, and God. This pretty much sums up my life.”
Granted, most of us find it hard to be articulate about our identity, especially at age 21, but this probably was not what Long’s pastor at Crabapple First Baptist would like to have heard.
Pastor Dees raises another question that I believe has broad social relevance, “What gospel are our people believing?” Again, for the Nones and Dones, etc., what do you believe about yourself, about other people, and about the inevitable social institutions surrounding you, and the earth you are obliged to live on?
Dees goes on to observe, “I don’t know exactly how Robert Aaron Long understood the gospel or Christianity, but I do know that there is a kind of Christianity that isn’t very Christian.”
Then he names two: “a kind of Christianity that is concerned with being received by the right social groups and holding to the right social narratives … There is also a stream of Christianity that follows an American moral code, a sort of ‘God, guns, and country’ Christianity. Neither of these are faithful to the actual call of the gospel.”
I take these words to be a dog whistle. Without saying so, I believe Dees is talking about Christian nationalism, a brand of Christianity that is convinced of the absolute righteousness of its positions; will use any means, including violence, to gain power; and sees God as a warrior leading his loyal subjects into battle merged with a brand of politics that would give over to the loyal followers of that God the levers of governmental power.
So, once again, as the pandemic did, the crimes that Mr. Long is accused of have revealed deep divides in our nation: anti-Asian racism; religion as a means to power versus religion as a conduit for compassion; and “meaningful connections” versus alienation, isolation and loneliness.
What, then, are we to do? Religions are dangerous, like playing with fire. They can burn the house down or they can light the way. We decide. Why not take the light of that fire, whatever its source, into the darkness of racism and power-seeking and alienation?
Dick Conville is a retired college professor and longtime resident of the Hub City.
