Impatient Idealism

What Is Impatient Idealism?

I'm labeling as "Impatient Idealism" something that I think is part of the Zeitgeist. It arises out of some understandable and at least partially good motives. It may yet work some good among us. It is already working some bad.

By "idealism" I don't mean philosophical idealism. Rather, I mean the common use of the word to describe a vision of a "right way" for things to be or happen, perhaps even a right way that has never before been realized, combined with a determination not to settle for less than the achievement of that vision. Idealism, I think, is on the rise.

Both the Internet and the progressive age that has delivered the Internet are causes, I think. Not "progressive" as a political label, but rather "progressive" to describe a time in which human beings are inventing a lot of things, solving a lot of problems, and making a lot of changes that are, for the moment, broadly perceived as positive changes. The Internet is both one of the things that we have invented and a vehicle for the delivery of a lot of other invented things. Because of it, you have a lot less obligation now than existed 50 years ago to have to wrap your life around someone else's "right way" of doing things. You bank when you want to by way of your phone, so that almost no one complains of "bankers' hours" any longer. Burger King's "Have It Your Way" advertising campaign from the 70s was just about customizing your condiments—now you can order your fast food on an app and have it brought out to your car when you arrive.

Social media is perhaps the quintessence of ordering your life around your "right way" preferences. It watches you carefully, and then it gives you the facts that line up with your thinking, the friends who line up with your thinking, and the products that line up with your thinking. You can order so much of your online life around your own ideals.

And in general, I think that can be a good thing. Idealism is better than base pragmatism. We should have ideas that solidify into convictions. We should live with those convictions as guardrails to keep us on the right path when pragmatic concerns would make us something other than what we ought to be. I'm for more idealism.

By "impatient" I mean…OK, I just mean exactly what I wrote. The principal target of our impatience is the government. No political campaign can be successful if it is not based upon ideals; yet, the quickest pathway to success in governing after winning the campaign is pragmatism. There is an inherent tension. Dancing that dance can be a formula for short-term success, just like MasterCard can be a formula for short-term prosperity. But voters and banks alike eventually grow impatient with unfulfilled promises.

And in general, I think that can be a good thing. Unending patience with regard to important ideals is dereliction of duty. In many ways, it is the impatient who get important things done.

Two Examples of Impatient Idealism

Two movements that exemplify Impatient Idealism, each of them external to the actual work of the Southern Baptist Convention, made an appearance at the 2020 Annual Meeting. I'm talking about, Critical Race Theory & Intersectionality on the left and Abortion Abolitionism on the right.

The ideal that the innocent life of babies should be protected by law even before they are born is a compelling one. The zeal to deliver actual results in the pro-life movement at the national level has been decidedly secondary to other concerns. Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump all delivered on tax cuts. They all delivered on increased military spending. None of them delivered on abolishing abortion, although they all courted the pro-life vote by appealing to our ideals during their campaigns.

It's high time to be impatient about this.

Folks in the Abolition Movement have risen to that moment. They have an ideal (abolishing abortion) and they are impatient about achieving that ideal. EVERYONE in the pro-life movement shares that ideal (or else they aren't pro-life), but pro-life complacency and willingness to settle are certainly a real thing. To the degree that the abolition movement turns up the heat on our impatience about this ideal it will be a good thing.

Speaking of abolition, the zeal to deliver equal protection under the law to black Americans began in earnest with the work of the nineteenth-century abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. It has progressed throughout the long saga of the War Between the States; the Emancipation Proclamation; the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments; and the Civil Rights Movement. And yet, after all of that, there are still unachieved "firsts" for Black Americans, and the widespread testimony of Black Americans is that they still experience the institutions of American society differently than do White Americans.

Black Americans have consistently voted for Democrats as a part of a trend that started in the 1930s and reached a crescendo under Lyndon Baines Johnson. The "War on Poverty" among Black Americans has not delivered the results that the politicians promised. Many of the cities that experienced Black Lives Matter protests were led by Democratic mayors and Democratic police chiefs. Minneapolis, MN, hasn't had a Republican mayor since 1973, and that one only served in office for one day. Black Americans have been underserved by Democratic politics.

Of course, some Republicans have been saying that for a long time, hoping that Black people would come on back home to the GOP, but in academia, the more prevalent movement has been to reject the classically liberal foundations of American justice and the American Republic altogether. Having worked through "the system" for more than a century—constitutional amendments, civil lawsuits, legislative victories, etc.—Critical Race Theory has emerged to call into question the very underpinnings of the system and to demand radical changes if Black Americans want finally to achieve equal protection under the law.

That ideal—equal protection under the law regardless of race—is a good thing. It is an unachieved ideal, if considered in its pure and undiluted form. And after all of these generations, Black Americans are well justified in their impatience.

Where Impatient Idealism Goes Awry

I subscribe neither to Abortion Abolitionism (as a movement) nor to Critical Race Theory. And yet I affirm for both of these both their ideals and their impatience? What does that look like for me, and why is it reasonable?

Impatient Idealism is great, so long as the idealism is broadly held and the impatience is tempered by at least a modicum of pragmatic feasibility.

By "broadly held," I mean that idealism should extend to more than just one ideal and to ideals in more than just one category. Prioritization is fine, but totalizing is suspect.

Looking at the Abortion Abolition Movement, although I share the ideal of protecting unborn life, the goal of abolishing abortion, and the impatience with those who have promised far more than they have delivered, some of the specific strategic positions that have come to be part of the Abolition Movement confict with other ideals of mine.

I do not believe that there is any constitutional right to an abortion. It's not in the text of the constitution. It's not in the text of any of the amendments. It wasn't demonstrably on the minds of any of the people involved in drafting any of those documents. It wasn't in the minds of we the people when we ratified them. There is no constitutional right to an abortion. There is just a Supreme Court case inventing the fiction that there is a constitutional right to an abortion.

For at least a significant portion of the leaders in the Abolition Movement, the movement advocates nullification. You might remember a "Nullfication Crisis" from your history classes once upon a time. Nullification is the idea that individual states can simply invalidate Federal actions of which they disapprove. The Abolition Movement wants individual states to nullify Roe v Wade—to declare it not to be law in Texas and to govern contrary to its findings. Andrew Jackson nearly went to war over this idea.

I do not believe that there is a constitutional right to an abortion, but I do not believe that the answer to the abortion crisis is to make constitutional rights something (contrary to the Fourteenth Amendment) that individual states can nullify. Should states be able to nullify our First Amendment rights? Our Second Amendment rights? Alongside our shared ideal that the law should protect unborn infants stands (for me) my ideal that we should respect the rule of law and that we should acknowledge unalienable rights as…well…just as unalienable by the several states as they are by the Federal government.

The answer to the question of abortion is the overturn of Roe, not nullification. Our idealism should extend to not wanting Civil War and not wanting disposable rights under potentially despotic regimes as well as to the rights unborn babies have to life. Broadly held idealism.

The Abolition Movement, in my opinion, totalizes our ideals against abortion and jettisons other important ideals where they provoke tension with our impatience over this one.

Critical Race Theorists rightly observe that we have failed to live up to the ideals of freedom and justice that we have articulated. Martin Luther King, Jr. was especially gifted at pointing out the divergence between what Americans said about our ideals on the one hand and how we were treating our Black fellow citizens on the other hand.

But instead of saying that racism in America has amounted to a failure to live up to American ideals articulated in the Declaration of Independence and in our Constitution, Critical Race Theory suggests (or even outright asserts) that those documents and those ideals are flawed and incapable of achieving racial justice.

CRT, if I understand it correctly, is a call to seek to achieve equal justice under the law for Black Americans by abandoning the very ideals that made me desire that equal protection in the first place. CRT alleges that the Constitution is racist (not just the 3/5 Compromise, but the gist of the document itself and the system it established and perpetuates). Key ideas that lie behind and appear within the Constitution, such as the idea that people should get the same treatment at the hands of the law regardless of race, are singled out as part of the problem. Instead, Critical Race Theorists explicitly call for the law to treat people differently according to groups (akin to Affirmative Action, but applied beyond hiring to address law enforcement, for example).

The American ideals of justice arise significantly out of a biblical Judeo-Christian idea of justice. I cannot walk away from them. And there's no need to do so. Apart from CRT/I, Americans can share the very approach that MLK took by affirming the American tradition of law and justice and calling us to live up to our ideals.

For both of these movements, there's also a dire need to take notice of a little pragmatism. One wants to ask Critical Race Theorists whether their theories have been implemented successfully in ways that have achieved a civilization better for its minority populations than has the American experiment, our flaws and failures acknowledged and notwithstanding. One wants to ask the Abolition Movement whether the retrenchment of racial codes in the South after the Civil War and the realities of the segregated states a full century later really commend to us the path of impatient nullification and potential armed conflict as ways to achieve what we desire?

I'd call us to more (broadly held) idealism, not less of it. And I'd call us to the level of impatience that keeps the process moving, but since patience is a fruit of the Spirit, I'd call us to retain enough patience not to jump out of the process and burn it down.

Note: The Southern Baptist Convention has rejected Critical Race Theory and has adopted a resolution affirming a form of the Abolitionist Movement. I respect the voice of the messengers in both cases, and I'm more comfortable with the latter resolution after it was substantially amended from the floor.

Rescuing Resolutions

This week I have encountered at the SBC Annual Meeting (not for the first time) the idea that the Southern Baptist Convention ought to do away entirely with the resolutions process. The sentiment is widely held, deeply held, and rationally held. The underlying rationale, if I might summarize, is that the resolutions process accomplishes nothing other than causing trouble.

I've decided tonight to offer an alternative point of view that I hope everyone will consider. Here's my outline. First, I want to spell out some valuable things that I think our resolutions process contributes to our convention. Second, I'd like to propose some etiquette that, applied to our resolutions process, could help it not to be so troublesome.

Things Resolutions Accomplish

I believe that the resolutions process accomplishes some worthwhile things. Indeed, to go even further, I think that there are some ways that the Convention would suffer from the absence of the resolutions process. What's more, I think that having a Committee on Resolutions to process the resolutions that we make is the best way to navigate this process.

Pro-Resolutions

First, resolutions provide a means for our convention to create messaging about things like the Equality Act, and that's something that we need to do. The Equality Act endangers the entire American experiment in religious liberty. Southern Baptista and Southern Baptist institutions will approach national and state legislators, executives, and bureaucrats with the resolution that we passed yesterday and will employ it both in the effort to prevent passage of the Equality Act and to challenge it in the courts if it does happen to become law. Perhaps you believe that Southern Baptists can accomplish this goal some way other than through the resolutions process, but you can't say that the resolutions process doesn't accomplish anything. It accomplishes this.

Second, resolutions provide a point of engagement for Southern Baptists in the Convention's deliberative process and empowers individual Southern Baptists to have their voices heard. It's easy for entity heads to have their voices heard. It's easy for high-ranking entity employees to have their voices heard. It's easy for trustees and committee members to have their voices heard. It's easy for very influential pastors to have their voices heard. But it's not easy at all for most of our pastors and for almost all of our laypeople to have their voices heard. I've got to say that a lot of the people I hear wanting to eliminate the resolutions process are in one of those categories that don't need the resolutions process in order to be heard. Honestly, I don't always like what I hear when I hear all of the voices of the SBC, but neither do I like closing all of the doors for people to speak up. Yes, some resolutions may not pertain much to the core mission of the Convention, but a lot of them do. It is good for our process to provide a way for people to speak about those things, and deprived of that, people will grow frustrated, or perhaps worse, ambivalent. Sometimes people leave because they've been engaged and they've wound up being offended. I think we lose more churches from disengagement than from disappointed engagement, though.

Third, the existence of the resolutions process declutters the motions process. Right now, we can refuse to accept motions that are really just resolutions disguised as motions. Eliminate the resolutions process, and the same sorts of things will just start showing up as motions. That's not a better solution. And if you both eliminate the resolutions process and disallow the making of resolution-type motions from the floor, the message to the messengers is that we expect them just to shut up and keep sending those checks. That's not good, and it isn't likely to be tolerated for long.

Pro-Committee-on-Resolutions

Of course, we could keep resolutions but abandon our current committee process for receiving, reading, reviewing, and recommending them. I think that's not a good solution. The committee is helpful for the following reasons.

First, the committee process requires that resolutions be submitted in advance. By imposing a timetable, this process tends to favor resolutions coming from people who care enough about their subject matter to work in advance and who are well enough organized to meet a deadline. That improves the quality of the resolutions that come before the convention.

Second, the committee process offers the opportunity to consolidate similar resolutions, vet them, and prioritize them. As a member of this year's committee, I read every submitted resolution for 2021 multiple times. You don't want to do that.

Third, the committee process offers the opportunity to improve resolutions. You don't have to be an English Composition major to have a great idea for a resolution. Sometimes very good resolutions need a little editing to turn into great resolutions. With the current committee process, messengers only see resolutions in their very best state, as far as form and style go.

Proposed Resolution Etiquette

I do think there are a few things we could do that would make our resolutions process more productive and efficient and would make fewer people hate it. These aren't rules. I'm not proposing any further rules that would handcuff the messengers. I'm just proposing what I think are some needed principles of resolution etiquette.

First, let's try only to bring out resolutions that the broad swath of our messengers either already understand or can come to understand quickly. To pull a few examples from the 2021 process, our resolution "On the Sufficiency of Scripture for Race and Racial Reconciliation" touched upon topics that Southern Baptists have discussed at length for two years. Our messenger body knew what they thought about this. The resolution on "The Equality Act" touched upon pending legislation that messengers may or may not have already studied, but there are things that the messengers DID already know—about the developing conflict between LGBTQ advocates ahd religious liberty—that made it likely that any messengers who did not already know about the Equality Act would be able to understand pretty quickly just from reading the resolution what was afoot. The resolution "On Sole Membership," touched upon a topic that the messengers were not likely to understand, but we believed that a quick explanation could inform messengers about this resolution.

Second, if we could vote in favor of a resolution as it stands, let's strongly consider not trying to amend it. Of course, if you could NOT vote in favor of a resolution as it stands, and if a simple amendment could make the resolution supportable for you, then by all means, propose an amendment. Amend resolutions to save them. But if you're just trying the IMPROVE a resolution that is already good enough to earn your vote, as a matter of etiquette, please consider not trying to make any amendments.

My rationale for this is simple. We only have so much time to consider resolutions. Even if we were to double the available time, I'm still not certain that we would have much time left over. We knew this year that some of our resolutions contained content that the messengers were going to need to hash out in floor discussion in order to achieve a consensus. But we spent a significant amount of time on resolutions for which we probably all had agreement. These days, EVERY resolution seems to be the target of some sort of amendment. We've all got the RIGHT to do that, but here's how it's a question of etiquette: Is my proposed friendly amendment so important that my neighbors should be deprived of time to ask their questions about genuinely controversial resolution topics? In general, if I can live with it the way it is worded, I should.

Third, your default vote should be a "Nay" until the resolution earns your "Aye." Don't treat the committee as infallible; hold the committee accountable. You don't owe the committee your unwavering allegiance, and any committee who expects that the messengers should uphold them at every point is being unreasonable. If you are consistent about this, and if the committee knows that the bar is going to be high, then the committee is likely to be more careful about the resolutions that it proposes.

Fourth, if you would be a resolution-writer, be prepared to submit your resolution multiple years. You engaged in the process. You wrote a resolution. It was beautiful. It was truth. I wanted it to succeed. But we only have a two-day convention, and we only have so much time for considering resolutions. We have to prioritize. Some resolutions we have to leave to the side. That doesn't mean that we didn't like your resolution. You should submit it again next year, when the volume of submitted resolutions may not be so high and the number of unavoidable topics may not be so imposing. Commit to a plan of patience, giving more than one committee the chance to consider your proposed resolution.

Fifth, avoid booing and catcalls. It'd be different if we were Pentecostals, perhaps, but it's just unseemly for you to be so reserved in your worship and then so vocal, active, and energetic in your disparagement of those who disagree with you.

Conclusion

Our resolutions give us a way to have a little release valve for our sentiments. They give us a way to let any and every church say something through the convention. They are needed. But we can still make them better. What other suggestions would you make? There is hope for the resolutions process, and I think we should do what we can to strengthen it.

Jim's Adoption Story

The material below was originally published on a personal website. I am reposting it here today in honor of Jim's 18th birthday. Happy birthday, son. It's been an amazing blessing, with many more on the horizon.

The Calm Before the Storm

My last semester of Ph.D. seminars was just underway. All of my seminars met on Thursdays, so every week I drove to Fort Worth on Thursday morning, spent the day in seminars, spent the night at the seminary hotel & conference center, and spent Fridays in the library before driving home. This particular week was an exception. Tracy had enrolled in a conference for ministers' wives at the same conference center that was my weekly home-away-from-home. We booked a room for Thursday and Friday nights (February 20-21, 2003).

It was a good weekend. I was preparing a research paper concerning revivals that occurred in the Confederate Army during the War Between the States. Tracy was attending her conference. We scheduled to meet a friend (Keith Sanders) and his fiancée (Melissa) in Grapevine on Saturday afternoon, February 22, to watch Gods and Generals. We stayed throughout this rather long movie and then began our drive home.

During the entire trip we never bothered to check our home answering machine.

Panic!

The light was flashing on the answering machine as we walked in the door. Oh well, nothing was new about that. We decided to finish unloading our luggage from the car and deal with the messages afterward.

At the first words of the first message we began to panic. A call from Dr. Shirolyn Moffett in Harrison, Arkansas, could mean one thing and one thing only: a baby. Six messages were on the machine; five were from Dr. Moffett's office. The calls had begun on Thursday, our first day away.

Oh no! They had been calling for over forty-eight hours! By now they certainly had moved to their next prospect family. We had neglected to check our messages, and consequently we were certain that we had lost our opportunity to adopt.

Of course, we decided to call Arkansas immediately just on the chance that Dr. Moffett was still waiting for us. To our surprise and delight, she was. She had received one of our fliers a year earlier, had kept it in her files for the entire interval, and had called us immediately when she encountered an adoptable baby. She made call after call that weekend, but she was determined to hear from us before following any other leads.

Delirium

What we learned thrilled us. A baby boy was on the way. For very good reasons arising out of her loving concern for the children she already had, the mother had decided to place him for adoption. Would we be interested? Absolutely! But we needed to be ready on a moment's notice, because this baby was due to arrive at any time.

Fortunately, we were ready. We had already completed a home study and criminal background check in preparation for another potential adoption that had not materialized. Dr. Moffett promised to give our toll-free telephone number to T--- (our birth-mother), and she called within just a few minutes. The call went well and we were all ready to move forward. Fewer than ten telephone calls put this potential adoption in motion.

We tried to keep our emotions in check, because we had been this far in the process before. Nevertheless, the weekend seemed to drag along as we kept our powerful secret to ourselves and waited on pins and needles for a call from Arkansas.

"Oh, the Weather Outside Is Frightful"

As you can imagine, we did not spend much of the next two days watching the television. So much remained for us to do. We burned up the telephone lines between our lawyers, our families, our friends, and ourselves. We also began the frantic provisioning process. We already owned a car seat and a few basic supplies, but we had expected more than a shopping day or two to prepare for a baby.

On Monday, February 24, I went to work. Between church-related tasks I manned the phone lines for adoption-related telephone calls. We determined that our Texas lawyers would not be necessary: that we could enact the entire adoption through the Arkansas courts without attempting an unwieldy Interstate Compact Agreement.

Tracy was volunteering for Texas Baptist Men Disaster Relief's Temporary Emergency Child Care unit. She had made an appointment to work down at the Dallas headquarters on Monday morning. She went to Dallas for her meeting and then went to pursue that critical shopping list.

If we had been watching the television, we would have heard about the winter weather system that was bearing down upon Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. As it happened, our first clue that Murphy's Law was operating in full force was a report on the radio that freezing precipitation was already falling just to the West of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. When I heard it, I immediately called Tracy and advised her to drive home ahead of the storm. Tracy arrived home to Farmersville and the weather began to degenerate. Sleet fell all night Monday.

The Clock Is Ticking...The Sleet Is Falling

By Tuesday morning the roads were completely impassible. A thick sheet of ice had blanketed North Texas, Oklahoma, and most of Arkansas. I carefully made my way to the church to check for busted pipes or other winter calamities, but except for that expedition we remained in the house all day. Most of the waiting took place within a few steps of the telephone. For one thing, we were continuing to make legal arrangements. More importantly, we knew that T--- had an appointment with her doctor that day, and we were very anxious to hear how close she was to delivery. Part of us wanted the time to be right away: We couldn't wait! On the other hand, part of us nervously wanted a little more time. The weather was so bad that we didn't know how we could possibly get to Arkansas. The news carried pictures of tractor-trailers stalled on slippery inclines of every Interstate highway in the DFW area. The roadside ditches around Farmersville were littered with automobiles.

When T--- finally called, it was 6:00 PM. She had been to the doctor and had been told to expect labor to begin at any time. She had returned home to collect her things, and she was leaving home to go to the hospital. The race was on. T--- insistently encouraged us to get to Arkansas as quickly as we could. One look outside at the driveway confirmed to me that driving was going to be our last resort.

Because I am a licensed pilot, I decided to explore the possibility of flying. Unfortunately, I was not an instrument-rated pilot, and I did not have access to any airplane equipped with anti-icing measures. A quick call to the Fort Worth Automated Flight Service Station for a weather briefing confirmed for me that we would not be going to Arkansas in any airplane that I was flying. Commercial flights were also out of the question. Every major airport was closed. The whole circumstance was shaping up to be a suitable sequel to Planes, Trains, and Automobiles.

Only one good option remained: Joe Nerwich. Joe is a member of our church and a retired American Airlines pilot. He has over 25,000 flight hours. Joe owns an airplane with ice-prevention equipment. I knew that Joe would be willing to help us, because Joe and Johnnie had become good friends. The problem was that Joe was in Colorado skiing. I knew that he had planned to return home on Tuesday, but with the weather foul both in Colorado and Texas, I wasn't sure whether Joe would hazard the trip.

I called Joe's house, but nobody was home. I called his grown children, but nobody had heard from him. I called his condominium in Colorado, but the manager was not sure whether he had left or had stayed. I called his cell phone, but that was just an act of desperation since I knew that Joe always leaves it off. I had no idea whether Joe was fifteen miles or three states away.

In desperation, I tried something outlandish. I called the Fort Worth Automated Flight Service Station and spoke with one of the pilot briefers. I explained our situation to him, hoping that he would understand why I was troubling him. I knew the tail number of Joe's airplane, having flown in his Merlin with him several times. Confiding that Joe was our only hope of reaching our baby anytime soon, I asked the briefer whether he could look in his computer and confirm for me whether Joe's airplane had flown any kind of flight plan within the past twenty-four hours. With all of the post-911 security nervousness at the FAA, I did not know whether the briefer would be able to give me that information under any circumstances. He put me on hold for a minute. When he returned to the phone he said, "I just spoke with the control tower at McKinney. The airplane you asked about has just landed at McKinney, and the passengers have just left the airport."

I recalled that Neal and Carol Watts, members of our church, had accompanied Joe and Johnnie to Colorado, so I called Neal's cell phone. No answer. After a dozen tries, Neal finally answered the phone. The foursome had gone to eat dinner and had not paid any attention to their phones until the drive home. After a brief conversation, Joe agreed to help us. About ninety minutes had passed since T--- had called. At Joe's house we explored potential flight plans, tried to arrange for ground transportation at our destination in Arkansas, and shared our excitement with Joe and Johnnie. When we finally had everything in place, Joe called the airport to check on the status of the airplane.

Unfortunately, the status of the airplane was poor. The ramp was too slick to tow the airplane into the hangar, so it had been sitting outside for two hours. A light sleet had begun to fall again, and the airplane was covered in ice. McKinney does not have deicing equipment, so we were grounded indefinitely. Joe recommended that we go home, get a good night's sleep, and explore our options in the morning.

Tracy and I were not convinced. We contemplated driving to Northwest Arkansas. Maybe the time had come to consider the last resort after all. The drive back to our house from the Nerwiches' house discouraged us from making the attempt. It appeared unlikely that we would make it any farther than the first big hill that we encountered on the drive. I told Tracy that it would be far better to spend the night in our house in Farmersville, from where we could work on a variety of options in the morning, than to spend the night in our car stranded on the side of the road somewhere in Oklahoma, where we would be completely helpless. She saw the wisdom of staying home, so we went to bed (you notice that I did not say we went to sleep).

Jim's Birthday

Before dawn the next morning we were awake and active. Early morning telephone calls revealed that T--- was indeed in the hospital and was in labor, but that the baby had not yet come. T--- was nervous about whether we would be able to make it in time. I assured her that we were doing every responsible thing to try to get there. We arrived at the Nerwiches' before 6:00 AM. Joe prepared breakfast for us and tried to calm the both of us. A lifelong pilot and the son of two pilots, Joe knew that it is dangerous to approach any kind of flying trip with too much determination to get to the destination. I ate, but Tracy could not bring herself to eat much. After the plates were cleared away, we started our drive to the airport.

The city streets and highways were equally slick! We made the fifteen-mile drive in around thirty minutes, arriving at the airport around 7:00 AM. There was Joe's Merlin, forlorn on the ramp, enshrouded in ice. A few steps on the tarmac confirmed that no piece of equipment would be able to tow the 10,000-pound behemoth from its perch. The ice accretions on the wings and control surfaces meant that the airplane could not possibly fly, but nothing would prevent us from starting the engines and using them to taxi about on the ice. Mobility was an option; the problem was finding somewhere to go that could offer any help.

Early that morning I had called the flight department at Texas Instruments. TI's bases its flight operations out of McKinney, and they had recently built an enormous heated hangar. After learning about our situation, the kind people at TI agreed to let us park the Merlin in their hangar long enough for the ice to melt away from the critical areas. Joe and I drove down to the TI hangar to explore the possibility. The Gulfstream inside looked small for its surroundings, so we knew that the much-smaller Merlin would fit in the hangar. The climate inside was comfortable, so we knew that the ice would melt quickly in such an environment. To our chagrin, we discovered that the previous two days' precipitation had deposited several inches of ice all along the tracks through which the hangar doors slide. The only way we could possibly get the Merlin to the hangar would be to take a shovel and bust up yards and yards of ice. That job alone would have taken the better portion of the day.

The sunrise was revealing a clearing sky, so we determined to return to the terminal and hope for a slight thaw. Although the ambient temperature was solidly below the freezing point, the bright sunlight could warm the aluminum skin of the Merlin to a high enough temperature to melt away the ice. We sat in the terminal and "watched for the pot to boil," so to speak. While we were there, the telephone rang: T--- had given birth at 7:00 AM to a healthy baby boy. He was there! Now T--- and Dr. Moffet wanted to know when we were going to be there. We promised to arrive in Arkansas just as soon as we could.

The sun went to work, and eventually we discovered that the ice's grip on the airplane was loosening. Joe and I went outside and began to hand-pick ice from the lift-producing areas of the airplane. The time was about 10:30 AM. The Fixed Base Operator at the airport was able to get a fuel truck out to the Merlin, and we took on sufficient Jet-A to make the trip with emergency reserves appropriate to the inclement conditions. Joe went inside to check the weather and file a flight plan with the FAA. As he was in the back of the terminal, I noticed a City of McKinney road-grader taking up position on the end of the runway. "Look Joe," I said, "The City is going to clear some of the ice from the runway so we can leave!"

What had delighted me had perturbed Joe. Because I had so much less experience that Joe, I did not realize that the City had just ended our chances of taking off any time soon. Joe's twin-engine airplane could have managed the takeoff from an ice-covered runway. He could maintain directional control with the rudder and by varying the thrust from the two engines until we were safely in the air. What the city was doing changed everything. They were creating a narrow center strip of good traction bounded by piles of loose chuncks of ice and snow. The loose debris was a hazard to the engines and the traction differential between the concrete and the icy patches increased the danger that we would lose directional control on takeoff. We had missed our chance by mere minutes.

We left the airport and went to eat lunch at some point between 11:00 and noon. Tracy and I were two bundles of nerves. What if T--- changed her mind? We had already been through an experience like that once before, and I wasn't sure how well we would cope with another journey down that road. With each passing hour we felt that the risk of losing this baby increased. Deciding to place a baby for adoption is difficult enough as it is; we did not want to complicate T---'s struggle by adding any worries that her baby would be alone in the hospital awaiting our arrival. Lunch was anything but festive.

Finally we returned to the airport. The City still had not finished the runway. Joe and I walked through the biting cold out to the runway to inspect things at close range. Joe determined that the cleared portion of runway, although only a fraction of the total runway length and width, was sufficient for us to depart. Excited finally to be making some progress, the three of us loaded the airplane, started the engines, and taxied along the icy taxiway to end of the freshly-plowed runway. After clearance from the tower, Joe lined up the Merlin and spooled up the big Garrett turboprops. Once he tripped the brakes, we jolted into motion and crossed the numbers. With the end of the plowed furrow growing closer and closer, Joe tugged back on the yoke and we put the frozen ground behind us.

From the copilot's seat I knew that although we had left McKinney, we remained a long way from our scheduled landing at Harrison Regional Airport. After we had bid Texas farewell, I began to tune the Harrison ASOS (Automated Surface Observation System) into the #2 communications radio. Weather was critical at KHRO because only a portion of the ILS (Instrument Landing System) was operational. The electronic glideslope was out of service for maintenance. If it had been working, we could have descended through clouds to as low as 300 feet above the ground. Because it was not working, we could only descend as low as 600 feet above the ground. As we passed over Rich Mountain, the ASOS was reporting a 600-foot ceiling at Harrison: just barely high enough for us to land. The news did not surprise me because the ceilings had been low when we had checked the weather before leaving. The good news was in the forecast, which predicted steadily rising ceilings throughout the day. If the ceilings were legal when we were still more than 100 miles away, surely we would be able to land without event by the time we arrived there.

Have you ever noticed that forecasts aren't always perfectly accurate? By the time Fort Smith passed beneath us, the ceilings at Harrison had dropped to 400 feet. They had lowered to 300 feet after we were well into the Boston Mountains. We shot the approach anyway, hoping that we would catch the one patch of higher clouds during our descent to the field. We reached 600 feet and I looked desperately all around the airplane. There, off the right wing, for one fleeting moment I could make out a car driving along a segment of state highway. My temporary visual contact with the ground was inconsequential: the only thing that mattered was whether the runway environment would come into sight off the nose. Alas, all that lay in front of us was an invariant field of gray.

Joe advanced the throttles and coaxed the Merlin upwards to miss the approach. I turned back to the cabin and looked at Tracy. I had withheld the bad weather reports of the previous minutes from her, hoping that they would come to naught. When I told her that we couldn't land, she looked as though that culminating disappointment would send her over the edge. It was the low point of the day.

We decided to try our luck at Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport, the main passenger airport of the Fayetteville area. The weather was much better there and the landing was anticlimactic. The worry was what to do once we were on the ground. We had arranged for ground transportation in Harrison, some 90 miles away. The FBO courtesy van drove us over the to passenger aviation terminal to browse the car-rental agencies looking for a suitable vehicle to carry us into the icy hills. We obtained a 4-wheel-drive Blazer, transferred our provisions from the Merlin, and began our drive. The time was 4:00 PM. We had been trying to make this journey for twenty-one hours. Jim had been awaiting our arrival for nine hours.

The highways were surprisingly clear. The drive was almost serene but for the intensity of our feelings. Traffic was thick in the Springdale city limits, but once we cleared the metropolitan areas and found ourselves in the open spaces of the Ozarks, we began to move more quickly. As we drove farther, the clouds lowered steadily, reminding us of the foe that had bested us hours earlier. Just before 6:00 PM we entered Harrison. Although we had never been there before, we found the North Arkansas Regional Medical Center easily enough. We burst expectantly into the Labor and Delivery wing precisely at 6:00 PM.

The Much-Anticipated Moment

We knew T---'s room number, so we walked immediately to the door and found it open. We knocked tentatively and Tracy stuck in her head. The room was empty! No birth-mother and no baby! Where were they? We turned to leave and saw a trio of young nurses whose faces were beaming with smiles. "We've got a baby here who doesn't have a name. Can you help us?" Bundled in a mobile crib was 7 lbs., 12 oz., of adorable baby. Tracy confirmed that we were naming him James Dale Barber: James for my Dad, Grandpa, and Great-Grandpa; and Dale for Tracy's Dad. The nurses checked our driver's licenses to verify that we were who we were supposed to be, and then they gave us free rein in the empty hospital room to spend the evening with Jim.

T--- had already left, having waited to meet us as long as she could. Her oldest child had suffered a seizure, and her responsibilities to care for him had already taken her to the Emergency Room with him and then home. Tracy unwrapped Jim and we got our first look at his tiny hands and feet. She sat and rocked him for an hour before conceding to let anyone else (including his Dad) to enjoy the privilege. Hospital policy would not allow us to spend the night there, so we bade Jim farewell for a few hours and went to our rooms in the Holiday Inn Express (you notice I did not say that we went to sleep).

Hurry Up and Wait

Adoption law varies from state to state. Our previous adoption disappointment had been in Texas, where a birth-mother cannot sign a Termination of Parental Rights until at least forty-eight hours after the birth. Our previous birth-mother had changed her mind at more than forty-seven hours. In Arkansas, the waiting period is much longer than forty-eight hours. The adoption remained completely reversible for ten days. Furthermore, until those ten days had passed we did not have permission to leave the state of Arkansas with Jim.

We went back to the hospital at 5:30 AM on Thursday morning. A scheduled meeting with T--- did not occur, but we were able to meet the doctor who made everything possible for our adoption. She arrived and briefed us on Jim's health condition. There was good news and bad news. One of the creases on the palm of Jim's hand was slightly abnormal. In an of itself this feature (called a "simian crease") is totally inconsequential. Three percent of the population at large has this feature, and most of them probably don't know it. The significance of the crease is that it sometimes serves as a "soft sign" of trisomy-21, better known as Down Syndrome. People with DS have 47 instead of 46 chromosomes, the additional chromosome being a third 21st chromosome. The rock-solid 100% way to test for Down Syndrome is to perform a karyotype...that is, to count the number of chromosomes. We ordered the karyotype, but the results did not come in until two weeks later. What a relief it was to learn that Jim was just fine. Since then he has been so healthy and so prone to doing things ahead of schedule that it seems foolish ever to have thought that there was anything wrong with him. Nevertheless, I am glad that we went through our little "scare." God has used it to help me as a pastor to identify with people who are facing tragedies with their children. Also, since we proceeded to adopt Jim while this question was still unanswered, we had an opportunity to affirm our love for Jim as his parents without regard to his health or development.

The good news from Dr. Moffett's examination was her willingness to release Jim from the hospital right away. With the medical release in place, all we needed was a legal release to take Jim out of the hospital. Enter J. Hudson Shepard, Harrison attorney. Our legal arrangements were nuanced. We began the process from Texas by contacting adoption specialist David Cole and Associates of Dallas. We also contacted Arlon Woodruff, a good friend who is an attorney in Arkansas. We imagined that these two offices would be able to handle the intricacies of an interstate adoption. As I mentioned before, we discovered that we could perform the adoption entirely in the Arkansas courts, so the services of David Cole were unnecessary. Cole and Associates gave us this advice and did not charge us a penny. They are first-rate people.

We determined to allow Arlon to take care of the legal work in the adoption, but the weather conspired against him as severely as it did against us. By Thursday Arlon still had not been able to make it to Harrison. He looked in his law directory and found Jerry Shepard for us. Because of the weather, most of the lawyers' offices in Harrison had been closed. Arlon was lucky to find Jerry in his office. Jerry was a wonderful attorney and a delightful person. He had all of the legal paperwork in place within an hour, and we were finally clear to leave Harrison. Joe, Tracy, Jim, and I loaded into the Blazer, drove back to Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport, and flew to Jonesboro, Arkansas to spend the waiting period with Bart's mom, Carolyn (a.k.a., Nana).

A Week (or Better) at Nana's House

The only thing that compares with experiencing a joy is sharing it with people you love. We were so excited to be able to take Jim to meet his family. For the Barber side of the family, necessity scheduled the meeting very early. How exciting it was to arrive in Lake City at the house where I spent my own childhood and youth. We knew that Tracy and Jim would be there for more than a week, but Joe needed to get home, and I also needed to meet the demands of job and school. We all stayed through Saturday, March 1, but on that day Joe and I climbed aboard the airplane and returned to Farmersville.

I preached at FBC Farmersville on March 2, showed up for work at the church office the next week, and then attended my Ph.D. seminars at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth on Thursday. I presented the Confederate Army Revival paper on that Thursday. It could have benefitted from some additional work, but I stayed up all night the night before and eventually ran out of time to add anything else. I had missed all of my seminars the previous week, but all of my professors understood and approved of my priorities. My colleagues and professors all celebrated our good fortune with me.

When the last seminar was complete (at about 4:00 pm), I left the seminary campus. The original plan had been for me to spend the night in Fort Worth and then drive back to Arkansas. So much for plans. After nearly a week away from my wife and baby, I decided that I was going to see them right away. The fact that I had not slept in 36 hours was not going to stand in my way. I drove until midnight and arrived safely in Lake City, thanks to God's protection. Only a little time remained in our nervous period, and we planned to appear in court on Tuesday, March 11.

Adoption Day Arrives

In an earlier paragraph, I began to describe the differences between adoption in Texas and adoption in Arkansas. I only made it as far as the differences in the initial waiting period. In that respect, Texas law is more favorable to adoptive parents than Arkansas law, because it only requires parents to wait forty-eight hours instead of Arkansas's ten days to have some confidence that the adoption is going to proceed. The other contrasts between the two states make Arkansas compare favorably to Texas. Texas requires adoptive parents to make two appearances in court. The first takes place a few days after the birth. At this appearance the court takes legal notice that the birth-parents have terminated their parental rights and installs the adoptive parents as the baby's guardian. The second appearance, some six months down the road, is the formal adoption proceeding, at which point the adoptive parents legally become the baby's parents.

In Arkansas, adoptive parents need only appear in court once. After the ten-day waiting period has passed and the birth-parents have terminated their parental rights, the adoptive parents appear in court for an official adoption proceeding. The court issues an Interlocutory Decree of Adoption. Basically, this document establishes a six-month interlocutory period during which the adoption is reversible in extreme circumstances (for example, if someone could demonstrate that the adoptive parents have attempted to perpetrate a fraud upon the court). After the six months passes, the adoption automatically becomes final without any need for an additional court appearance.

The drive back to Harrison requires between three and four hours. It is a beautiful route through some of the most rustic portions of the Ozarks. Tracy and I decided to make the drive Monday afternoon, stay once again at the Holiday Inn Express, and thereby make certain that no transportation problems or weather problems could prevent us from making our court appointment on Tuesday morning. This was the first time that the three of us were alone together. It was one of the most serene and fulfilling experiences of our lives to slip through the wooded hillsides while Jim slept peacefully in his carseat.

The next morning Arlon, Mom, and Debbie Nunally (a friend from Lake City) drove to Harrison from Lake City and met us at the courthouse. Jerry Shepard was already there. The proceeding took only a few minutes, and long before noon we were back in the car and headed for Texas. We stopped in Fayetteville at the Hoffbrau restuarant and then drove straight through to Farmersville, finally able to cross state boundaries with our new son.

Friends from Farmersville and even Royse City had left us quite a celebrative display in our front yard and had prepared the nursery for immediate use. The ensuing days included visits from friends and family, a spectacular baby shower and celebration at the church, and the joy of learning that parenthood was everything we expected and more. Even when we were childless, God had been very good to us, giving us blessings that many people never know. Now we are doubly blessed. Thank you, Lord!

Found Families: A Christian Perspective

"Live Wrong and Prosper"

In June, Wired magazine published an article by Laurie Penny entitled "Live Wrong and Prosper: COVID-19 and the Future of Families." I thought that the article offered a fascinating insight into ways that changes in American family structure have made this pandemic different from the Spanish Flu epidemic a century ago.
Penny's article is a follow-up and expansion upon a Los Angeles Times article entitled "Coronavirus Quarantine Buddies Try to Lessen Isolation," a front-page article that featured a picture of Penny and her "pod"—what she calls the collection of "people [she was] neither related to nor sleeping with" with whom she was cohabitating and quarantining during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Penny argues that such an arrangement—a "found family"—has come of age and is the optimal arrangement for herself and for her generation. Her ancestors might disapprove and say that there is something wrong with anyone who would choose this sort of family arrangement over something more traditional, but in Penny's estimation, this is the only sort of arrangement in which she has any hope of finding relational fulfillment.

Critiquing the Traditional Family

An article like this one would be incomplete without some assessment of the shortcomings of traditional family structures. Penny's article does not disappoint. She borrows heavily (not in terms of word-count, but in terms of philosophical indebtedness) from David Brooks's March 2020 feature article in The Atlantic entitled "The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake." Brooks's thesis, and Penny's, is that the traditional nuclear family was really only suited to the 1950s, and was only artificially suited even to that decade. As Brooks put it, the 1950s constituted "a freakish historical moment when all of society conspired, wittingly and not, to obscure the essential fragility of the nuclear family."
It is a tendency of Marxism to reduce all of life to economics and a tendency of liberalism to reduce all of life to personal choice in search of independence and personal fulfillment. The critique of the nuclear family in these articles falls predictably along those lines. Traditional families lived and died by the sword of economics, and there's no going back, because doing so would curtail our individual freedoms too severely.
And yet, what struck me about Penny's article is that, although in it she spells out her critique and exclusion of traditional family life, the article contains no suggestion that she knows traditional family life apart from academic analyses like Brooks's or secondhand reports. Her family of origin was fractured by divorce in her childhood. Her adult life has consisted of living "in 35 places in five countries with, depending upon how you count them, over 200 housemates." The one time she decided to go all-in and "try to be normal" is represented by a brief cohabitation, sans marriage, with "a dear friend who had just become a romantic partner."
This is how far the family has fallen in Western culture (Penny is from London). The traditional family is so far over the horizon as to be out of view entirely for entire demographics.
Both Brooks's article and Penny's perform a strange feat of legerdemain. They narrate a tale of human family arrangements in which a longstanding arrangement of extended families gave way to the isolated nuclear family after World War II. Then they explain why the isolated nuclear family was unsustainable. Then, having knocked the legs out of the isolated nuclear family, they walk away from BOTH the isolated nuclear family of the 1950s AND the extended family of the centuries preceding the 1950s, but without having bothered to offer any serious explanation for why a serious rapprochement with the extended family might not be in order.
After all, Brooks's isolated nuclear family is not incompatible with the extended family. Brook's presents it as though it is some sort of replacement, but that's an inaccurate view. Nuclear families exist WITHIN extended families. Nuclear families are not the unsustainable thing; the stripping away of extended family is what makes the nuclear family, previously quite healthy and resilient, suddenly untenable. Brooks wants to leap right over the extended family to hunter-gatherer bands, which is a strange leap to make. After all, the story of the nuclear family within the extended family is well-documented in writing back as far as written human history extends. The Old Testament is not the only record of this phenomenon, but it certainly is a noteworthy one. The lengthy genealogies that frustrated your through-the-Bible-in-a-year effort stand as testimonies to the importance of nuclear families within extended families back as far as 5,000 years ago.
In contrast, what do we know about hunter-gatherer bands? Nothing much in the written record (unless we equate them with Native American tribes or other modern tribal societies). All we have are the speculations of people who dig up cemeteries, analyze DNA, and generate theories of what might have happened. It's not that these early clan groups have no part in the story of human families; it's the oddity of leaping over the oldest, best documented patterns of human living (the nuclear and extended family) to locate the future in a largely imagined, utterly undocumented past.
And yet, even though the critique has some flaws, from a Christian perspective, there are opportunities to nod a head in agreement. The New Testament envisions a multi-generational life that appears to be very difficult to sustain, even within churches, apart from healthy multi-generational family life. In a century we've moved from an expectation that children would establish their adult lives in the same community as their parents, through a period of thinking that children might do whatever they like in their adult lives, to an expectation (unless you live in a major city or a university town) that children must absolutely establish their adult lives somewhere other than the town of their upbringing. Extended family survives now, where it survives, on the backs of improved mobility among grandparents who are healthier and wealthier than their own grandparents were, and are therefore able and disposed to chase their grandchildren across the country in search of intergenerational relationships.
Even for Christians, nuclear families are not enough.
Also, Christians receive a needed education from Penny's article about what "traditional family life" means to the people who hear us speak about it. For Penny, that's two heterosexual lovers deciding to live together. Biblical ideas of lifelong monogamy, covenant marriage, and permanent family are fictions to her. For a preacher like myself, this sobering reality means that in my sermons, I have to be more careful to define terms that previously I assumed everyone understood.
One final critique of the critique of Penny's dismissal of the nuclear family is in order at this point. I've survived as long as I have preaching the way that I preach because the traditional family is a lot healthier, even among her own generation, than she seems to want to admit. Don't get me wrong; the statistical shifts away from marriage are unmistakeable. And yet, my facebook friend list is full of Millennials who are getting engaged, getting married, and building two-parent families that they expect to last a lifetime. I don't doubt Penny's assertion that "in LA, nearly half the adults are currently living with a nonpartner," but there's actually a world beyond New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, and Washington. Outside of those locations, quite a few young people are encountering no insurmountable obstacles at all to building stable two-parent homes. Either David Brooks or Julie Penny would have authored stronger articles if they had given a little space to telling just one of those stories.

Promoting the "Found Family"

Julie Penny's favored alternative to the unrealistic ideal of a traditional family is the "found family" or the "forged family." Her preferred defintion is borrowed from Kurt Vonnegut—family is "whoever is around to be loved." In her interview with the Times, Penny preferred to call it a "pod." There's no procreative bond here. There's no sexual bond here. Procreation is not acknowledged as an aspiration anyone would have in these articles, and although there's plenty of room for sex, this kind of sex doesn't create or require anything resembling a "bond." There are some people who happen to be, at this particular moment, in your vicinity. You love them and hope they love you back. That's family. No ongoing commitment expected or given.
Penny's personal narrative gives very little reason to conclude that this way is to be chosen because it is better. Loneliness is all around this essay, barely held at bay by temporary measures, but never farther away than a multi-page letter from the roommates who are booting you out of the house.
Yesterday I participated in an hour-long Zoom call with college roommates in celebration of a roommate's fiftienth birthday. It was a lot of fun. We told a lot of stories. If God is merciful to me, none of you will ever hear any of them. I love those guys. It was a blessing to see how God has blessed and used them down through the years. But ultimately (and I think each of those roommates would write exactly this), what came into our lives when my wife and I married is something so much deeper and more enduring as to make two years in the Baylor Plaza II Apartments spent with good friends an appendix tucked away into the back of the story of our lives. Tracy has shaped who I am. We have struggled together, cried together, served together, and aged together. There are bonds that have been forged, and that's a good thing. Loneliness will someday come by way of illness or death, but otherwise, there is no loneliness so long as there is Tracy. Roommates (nor lovers) just can't provide what a spouse does.
But I didn't sit down and write this article just to trash Penny's article. Why invest in writing a blog article just to say that I disagreed with Julie Penny? Thoughtless curmudgeoning is why God invented Twitter.
I've written this article because Penny's essay offers an unintentional critique of Evangelical Christianity that we need to consider. The idea of the "found family," though it may sound to us unhealthy and bizarre in the California-est way possible, is actually a Christian concept, fundamental to our faith, and yet largely beyond our grasp.

Somewhere Between Oneida and Palmyra

In the ninetheenth century, Evangelical Christianity in upstate New York spun off a number of experiments. Although all manner of Christian doctrine gave rise to one sect or another, many of these groups were searching for a new family model. Two sects are noteworthy for our consideration in this article.
In Oneida, NY, John Humphrey Noyes was trying to do away with the nuclear family. His vision was thoroughly communistic, although not atheistic. He wanted to bring together a community bound by spirituality, labor, and equality. The urge to claim possessions for oneself was, from Noyes's perspective, a principal divisive force within human community. For Noyes, monogamy was nothing more than a capitalist approach to relationships, provoking the same kind of possessive divisiveness.
So, Noyes scrapped the nuclear family, asserted his concept of "complex marriage," assigned the task of child-rearing to the community at-large, and even instituted a sort of human breeding program, attempting a spiritual eugenics (matching people in order to produce the most devout children possible).
The handwriting was on the wall for the Oneida Community by 1880. These sorts of arrangements never last.
The Oneida Community gives a picture of what a Christian version of Penny's new family order might resemble: Sex, relationship, and community without family.
About a hundred miles away from Oneida sits Palmyra, NY. There in the same milieu a young Joseph Smith was devising another, different heresy. Alongside claims about golden plates nobody ever saw written in a language nobody ever spoke delivered by an angel nobody ever mentioned before, Joseph Smith (and his successor Brigham Young) spelled out a vision of Christian family that was on the opposite end of the spectrum from that of Noyes.
Noyes wanted to disestablish the nuclear family; Smith wanted to embed it deeply into the Mormon concept of spiritual life. Marriage plays an important role in Mormon eschatology. Husbands and wives seeks to be married in the temple so that their family will endure forever. Mormon marriages offer the hope of eventual elevation through procreation (and devote spirituality) to an ultimately sublime nuclear family life. Even for those who don't manage to get married before they die, Mormon eschatology offers the hope of posthumous marriage. If you're Mormon, eternity is all about the nuclear family.
Everyone knows that the Christian vision of the family is NOT the partner-swapping communist vision of John Humphrey Noyes. Everyone NEEDS to know that it's also not the family-centric vision of Joseph Smith, either. According to New Testament Christianity, marriage is a holy institution to be honored and respected (Hebrews 13:4); divorce, premarital sex, and adultery are to be rejected (also Hebrews 13:4, as well as Matthew 19:1-12); marriage and sex are strictly heterosexual, grounded in the creation of all humankind within the binary gender space of male and female (Matthew 19:1-12); and marriage serves, in addition to the emotional, relational, and sexual purposes that are obvious, a spiritual purpose by which it mirrors the relationship between Jesus Christ and the Church (Ephesians 5:22-33). Joseph Smith was right (contra John Humphrey Noyes) that the nuclear family is a big, big deal in Christianity.
And yet, the New Testament is also full of speed bumps and guardrails to keep us from overstating the importance of the nuclear family. Jesus denied that marriage is a part of Christian eschatology at all (Matthew 22:23-33), and for the apostles, this temporary nature of matrimony became an important teaching tool for explaining the nature of the gospel (Romans 7:1-6). It wasn't only about eschatology; even for Christian discipleship in this life, the apostles did not make marriage the default plan (1 Corinthians 7:25-35). Christianity endorses Christian marriage, but it endorses it as a temporary, imperfect, mundane institution.
What the New Testament lifts up as eternal, perfect, and spiritual is a "found family," the church. But there's a key difference between Penny's "found family" and this one. The modern idea is that the "found family" is the family that you find. It's a curated group, tailored to meet your individual proclivities with minimal interference. The New Testament "found family" is a family of those found by Someone Else. Assembled across racial, ethnic, national, economic, and preferential lines, the churches became the principal familial units for the earliest Christians.
After all, Christians in the early church were outcasts and vagabonds from their families of origin. Much like Penny's own story and Brooks's "AOC-DC" example, these were people against whom the doors of "traditional family" had been decisively shut. They called one another "brothers and sisters." They announced a theology of divine adoption into a family that was new, transcendent, and divine. Nuclear family existed. It was important. It was honored. It was respected. But it was secondary to the true family of the churches.
Rosaria Butterfield's observation that churches are "on a starvation diet of community," if true, constitutes a wake-up call in this environment. Brooks is right—a nuclear family can't survive without an extended family to prop it up. Even in a dispersed society like ours, churches who cultivate spiritual family can buttress nuclear families in the ways that they need. And for people like Penny for whom the Christian vision of family belongs in the same category as JK Rowling's vision of wizardry education, a true spiritual family environment is far more likely to lead her to the gospel (and to a Christian view of marriage) than is any nuclear family experience in her future to lead her to a Christian view of spiritual family. But although the spiritual family of the church can offer support to the nuclear family, to place too much emphasis upon this reality is to let the tail wag the dog. The nuclear family exists to serve the spiritual family, not the other way around.
If the "found family" seems as foreign and strange to us as the "traditional family" seems to Julie Penny, then that's a crying shame. We had it long before she did, and it meets basic human needs that nothing else can satisfy. I read her article and was tempted to shout out, "The nuclear family is not going away!" But it is, actually, in an eternal sense. And we already have among us the family that will outlast it.

Follow Up about CARES Funding

My post yesterday ("Why I Will Not Lead FBC Farmersville to Apply for CARES Funding") generated a lot more attention than I had anticipated. In my experience, heightened attention almost always creates heightened misunderstanding. This seemed to be true yesterday with regard to the original post. Today I'm providing this post to follow up the other one and offer some points of clarification.

The clarification I will provide will run along two lines. First, I will clarify the objective of the post. Second, I will clarify some specific arguments made within the post by myself and made against the post by others.

My Objective

It was not my intention in authoring yesterday's post to deny your church permission to seek CARES funding.

YOUR church doesn't need MY permission to do anything.

Rather (and I think I expressed this for those who were willing and capable of hearing it), I sought to offer my rationale for the way that I planned to lead FBC Farmersville. Even at that, I'm not giving your FBC Farmersville's decision, for that will come as the fruit of prayerful consideration by the congregation in search of the will of God. I'm very simply describing to you the pastoral leadership I plan to give to our congregation about this matter, and I'm offering you the reasons behind my decision to offer that leadership to our congregation.

This seemed to me a worthwhile thing to post because, although the pro-apply-for-CARES case has been made and made again online, it seemed to me that my line of thinking had been underrepresented online. Is your church planning to apply for CARES funding? You'll have no trouble finding articles explaining the line of thinking that can take you there. Some of us were thankful to have at least one careful explanation of the alternative point of view.

So, brothers and sisters, I beseech you not to get your knickers in a knot over yesterday's post. No knicker-knotting. Unless, that is, it offends you that anyone would DECLINE to apply for CARES funding—unless you think that all churches everywhere MUST apply for CARES funding. Otherwise, why should it trouble you that I have come to these particular conclusions about whether it is wise to accept this particular government handout?

Specific Questions

Are You Saying There Are No Occasions in the Bible When People Accepted Governmental Assistance?

I am NOT saying that. I DID not say that. There are occasions of nearly ANYTHING in the Bible. Many people have pointed out that Nehemiah accepted funding for the restoration of Jerusalem from Persia. Yes. I've read that part of the Bible, too.

First, please go back and read again the section about my objective. I was not trying to make a case describing why your church doesn't have my permission to apply for funding. If it seems to you that the case in my post for your not applying for CARES funding wasn't airtight, that's because I wasn't trying to make that case at all.

Second, I tried very clearly to say that I didn't think Abram's refusal to accept money from the King of Sodom represented any sort of binding or normative example for us whatsoever. It's not my hermeneutical practice at all to take something one of the patriarchs did in some Old Testament narrative and make it normative for New Testament Christians. Abram lied about who his wife was. Twice. Don't do that, no matter what Abram did.

I used Abram solely to this extent: Abram did something and gave his rationale for doing it. Was his choice a wise one, or not? If you believe that his choice was wise and good, then perhaps you ought to ask yourself whether the situation you now face is similar to that situation at all. If it is, perhaps there is something in Abram's story that is worthy of your consideration.

For my part, I believe that Abram's choice was wise, and I believe that our present situation is parallel in some significant ways to his own. This is why find this particular episode in his life to be instructive for me at present. But if you think there are no significant parallels—if you find it unimaginable that a post-Christian culture would resentfully conclude that our churches only survived this because the government bailed us out—then feel free to ignore what happened to Abram after the war. Certainly there are plenty of stories to choose from.

When I look at Nehemiah's situation, I see one government giving aid to another government for the rebuilding of their capital city. When I look at Abram's situation, I see one individual refusing money from a foreign king. Neither of these situations is precisely the one that a church faces when considering whether to apply for CARES funding. We'll have to decide which, if either, of these situations most closely applies. Obviously, I've made my choice.

I leave you in freedom to make your own. Only, when you read a description of my rationale, don't assume that I'm unaware of other stories in the Bible. Had I been trying to demonstrate that your church must never apply for CARES funding, I would've needed to show why no other story in the Bible could be used to justify such a thing. I didn't bother to do that because I wasn't trying to make that case.

Didn't Paul make use of his Roman citizenship?

Yes. And I've not tried to talk you out of taking your government handout that is coming to you as an individual by virtue of your being a taxpaying citizen. Were I trying to suggest that you never ought to exercise any of your rights as a citizen, then you'd have me.

Isn't this just a loan from a bank?

People only say it's just a loan from a bank when they're trying to rationalize taking the money. Generally speaking, if it takes an act of Congress to make it happen, there's more going on than just a loan from a bank.

Consider this text from an email I received just yesterday from my local Baptist association. It's a very honest email about what's going on:

The big picture is your church can qualify for a loan equal to 2.5 times your average monthly payroll costs. Because the loan is forgivable, it really is a grant!

Yes. It really is a grant. From Congress.

Conclusion

So, whatever decision you make, I'm just offering you more thoughts to consider as you make it. Weigh them however you will. Act as the Lord leads your autonomous church to act. Blessings.

Why I Will Not Lead FBC Farmersville to Apply for CARES Funding

One of the major reasons people sometimes give for churches to eschew governmental largesse when offered is the concern about "strings attached." With governmental funding comes governmental control. As the COVID-19 disease and associated restrictions impose a financial stress test upon the nation's churches, Congress has included churches as potential beneficiaries of the "Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act" (CARES Act). Our friends at the ERLC have promoted specific wording in the act to safeguard religious liberties for those who participate. This language in the act goes far to assuage the concerns that accepting the funding will bring about governmental control down the road.

The worry about "strings attached," however, is not the only reason why churches should think carefully before applying for CARES funding. For some, there are theological reasons, not just "slippery slope" concerns, for declining this sort of governmental assistance.

John Smythe, Baptist pioneer of 1609, argued that churches should not receive financial support from anyone other than the church's membership. No biblical commandment exists in this regard, but there is a rationale for this that is worthy of consideration.

Giving is an act of Christian worship. It is common, for those who incorporate giving as an act of corporate worship, to ask God's blessing upon those who have given as well as upon the impact of the gift and the ministries of those who will receive it. Some of us regard this not merely as one of the ways that the church should be funded but further as God's sole plan for the funding of the churches. To divorce the funding of the churches' ministries from these acts of worship and these blessings sought by prayer may not be explicitly forbidden in scripture, but that does not mean that it is a theologically insignificant act.

It is for this reason that I have never sought out bake sales and popcorn sales and other gimmicks for the funding of church ministries: I believe that it is God's design for the churches that the faithful worship of believers through their gifts be the mechanism by which God will bless the various ministries to which He leads His people. I would support nothing that would supplant this holy means of funding God's work; indeed, I wish to support nothing that would even de-emphasize it.

Second, when money from outside the family of faith comes to the rescue of God's people, the result can be the diminution of God's glory among men. Abram's rationale in Genesis 14 is instructive at this point. When he refused to receive spoils of war from the King of Sodom, "Abram said to the king of Sodom, 'I have lifted my hand to the LORD, God Most High, Possessor of heaven and earth, that I would not take a thread or a sandal strap or anything that is yours, lest you should say, "I have made Abram rich."'" (Genesis 14:22-23, ESV). When our church emerges from this coronavirus crisis, I want us to know, as Abram did, that it is by God's goodness that we have made it through.

Not everyone will see it this way, and someone will say that God brought them through BY WAY OF government assistance like CARES. People of faith will know that God works in many ways, and that God-ordained government is an agent by which He often works to accomplish that partial, imperfect, temporary justice that we can experience here below. But please note that Abram's worry was not that Abram would think his riches had not come from God, but rather than the King of Sodom would entertain that thought. Abram wanted his material successes to be attributed even by the heathen to the hand of God.

It is not my hermeneutical conviction that we as New Testament churches are bound by the example of Abram in the narratives of Genesis, but that truth ought not to make us reluctant to learn from the patriarchs. I think unbelievers in our society will very likely remember any sort of "church bail-out," just as they remember the bail-outs of the automakers after the 2008 recession. The impression formed upon their minds will be that churches are weak and vulnerable entities who walk around with their hands out looking for assistance from the public dole.

Abram would try to avoid that outcome, and I think he has a point.

Third, I think we would do well to remember that "strings attached" aren't always external in their nature. Whether the government places external demands or not, the church that comes to rely upon governmental funding is a church that will be conspicuously solicitous toward the perceived likes and dislikes of the government. Those who emerged from the state-church regime of Europe were often very sensitive toward this reality. Part of the reason why Smythe rejected external funding of the churches was that he had seen the way that churches would tiptoe around the sins of their benefactors, and that without the benefactors' having to say a word. At the inquiry of his unhappily-wed benefactor Philip of Hesse, Martin Luther, contrary to his previously expressed theological views, endorsed polygamy. A whole bevy of English clerics found license for the divorce of Henry VIII. The radical reformers of the 1600s knew well the subtle and informal ways that outside money could influence the internal decisions of churches.

In conclusion, I am seeking to place no yoke upon any church nor any believer. I simply commend to your consideration these reasons to refuse financial assistance from the government. They will guide my actions in the coming days; perhaps they will give you as well some points to consider as your church prayerfully chooses your way forward.

Will the Free Exercise Clause Catch the Coronavirus?

Our constitutional right to religious liberty stands on two legs. One of them, the "Establishment Clause," is the opening phrase of the First Amendment, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." The other leg, the "Free Exercise Clause," follows with, "or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Because of the Establishment Clause, you don't have to pay taxes to support someone else's church, synagogue, ward, or mosque. This clause protects you from being forced by the state to adhere to someone else's religious belief. Because of the Free Exercise Clause, the government cannot prohibit you from worshipping (or not worshipping) as your conscience may dictate. This clause protects you from being arrested for going to church.

In 1990, religious liberty had an accident and broke one of the legs. The Supreme Court ruling Employment Division v Smith cut the guts out of the Free Exercise Clause, ruling that any law "of general applicability" was constitutional even if it should prevent someone from following sincerely held religious beliefs. Prior to this 1990 case, any law that penalized you for following the dictates of your faith was unconstitutional if it couldn't pass a test of "strict scrutiny" called the "Sherbert test" (after a 1963 Supreme Court case). By that test, the law, if it puts a burden upon your religious faith, would have to serve a "compelling interest" of the government's and would have to be "narrowly tailored" such that it placed no more burden upon your free exercise of religion than was absolutely necessary.

After 1990, this Supreme Court said that laws "of general applicability" do not have to meet the standard of strict scrutiny. For such laws, the government only needs to have a rational basis for the law, not a "compelling interest," and it need not find the least burdensome means of achieving its goals. Hard cases make bad laws, and in this case, the government's "War on Drugs" had come into conflict with the religious use of hallucinogenic mushrooms by certain Native American tribes. The Supreme Court ruled that, since drug laws weren't deliberately targeting any religion at all, but rather were targeting the recreational use of mushrooms, these weren't malicious laws, and even if they did wind up restricting someone's religious free exercise, such laws are constitutional.

The Free Exercise leg was broken.

Thankfully, it received some emergency first aid. An alarmed Congress immediately put on a cast to stabilize it. Two federal laws—The Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) and The Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) reinstated "strict scrutiny" for violations of religious free exercise. These laws, however, are not constitutional amendments. Congress can take them away as easily as they gave them.

Also, Free Exercise jurisprudence has been walking around on a crutch for 30 years. That crutch is called a "hybrid rights claim." The function of a crutch, as you know, is to keep the injured limb from bearing all of the weight of walking by transferring some of the weight to something else (the crutch). In this case, unable to count on the Free Exercise Clause to bear the weight of protecting religious free exercise in America, lawyers arguing on our behalf before the Supreme Court have had to say, "Look, this not only violates my client's right to free exercise of his religion, but it also violates his right to free speech. Even if you won't apply strict scrutiny to his religious liberty claim, you have to apply strict scrutiny to his free speech claim."

This kind of hybrid rights claim has won some impressive victories, including the recent vindication of Jack Phillips of Masterpiece Cakeshop in Colorado. Seeing those wins announced in the news might make you think that the Free Exercise Clause is on the mend. Don't be fooled; the crutch is bearing the weight.

Enter COVID-19

The Trump Administration's record on religious liberty has been, in my estimation, very good. The irony is that concerns about religious liberty were one of the major reasons why I did not vote for President Trump in 2016 (specifically, my concern that he would follow through on threats to ban Muslim immigration and to force American Muslims to register with the government as Muslims). As it turned out, Stephen Miller was against the immigration of everyone, not just Muslims (which is still a mindset that I oppose), no registration of American Muslims (nor anything like it) has been imposed, and the Trump Administration has taken the side of religious liberty with at least as much vigor as the Obama Administration demonstrated against religious liberty (e.g., the Obama EEOC argued that churches should have no exemptions whatsoever from anti-discrimination law, such that your Baptist church couldn't fire your pastor for becoming Mormon, for example—such an extreme anti-religious-liberty view that the Supreme Court slapped it down 9-0).

Exemplary of the wide berth the Trump Administration has given to religious liberty is the way that churches, synagogues, and mosques have been exempt from every Coronavirus-related restriction that has been imposed at the Federal level. At the state and county level also, largely following the White House's lead, churches have been technically exempt from most of the restrictions that our society has enacted to combat the spread of this virus.

Of course, a LOT of churches—maybe the majority of them—have complied with governmental guidance nonetheless. Voluntarily we have submitted ourselves to the implications of social distancing and then to the even harsher consequences of shelter-in-place orders. At least, most of us have.

Where we have not, we have captured the attention of the world. Churches in Arkansas and Kentucky (and probably elsewhere) have been responsible for the rapid and widespread transmission of the virus, having met before social distancing requirements were in place. Their examples demonstrate the kind of contagion that can be present at a worship service, and the population has this in mind when they see congregations gathering. It is not difficult to imagine that our government at some level might eventually respond by eliminating the exception for churches. After all, most churches are complying voluntarily, and no one can question that coronavirus laws are laws "of general applicability" of the kind that the Supreme Court had in mind in Employment Division v Smith. It is not hard at all to imagine a situation in which leaders of government imposed mandatory bans upon church gatherings.

It is also not difficult to imagine that some churches would defy such a ban. To tell you the truth, I myself would be far more likely to refuse to comply with a mandatory ban upon worship than to refuse to comply with a polite request that we not gather. It's not difficult to imagine civil disobedience against such a law.

Here's what IS difficult for me to imagine: I find it hard to imagine a worse test case to go before the Supreme Court than a church insisting upon meeting during a pandemic, resulting in the spread of a deadly pathogen. Public sentiment would be against us. Legislative sentiment would be against us. The law of the land would be against us.

So be it. We must obey God rather than men. Our first mission is not the protection of our religious liberty.

I get it.

But I also think that we ought to consider what might be the collateral damage of this sort of decision. There are already legislators who want to repeal RFRA. Would a show of public defiance on the part of churches against an effort to stem the tide of a biological plague be enough of a push to give them the upper hand? I think it is possible. Such a scenario could take the cast off of the broken leg. The crutch would remain, but would it be enough by itself? The answer to that question is doubtful—RFRA and RLUIPA are cited in a lot of these very important cases.

The Christian mandate to gather for worship is a matter of gravitas. There's no question about that. We cannot defer indefinitely the assembling of ourselves together and remain obedient to Christ (although I've yet to see a strong case demonstrating any biblical command that this absolutely must happen each and every seven days). How long will these COVID-19 restrictions remain in place? Too long? Nobody knows.

My tolerance for it may be shorter-lived than some of yours.

But while I'm making decisions, I'll also have in mind the damage that could be done to the already-wounded limb of the First Amendment, along with the very real harm that could come to people like Hobby Lobby, Connestoga Wood, Jack Phillips, and Barronelle Stutzman if we are not wise and careful stewards of the constitutional gifts that our forebears have passed down to us.