Thursday, September 16, 2021

Blind Spots or What do youth group members think about people who claim to be Christians but hold opposing viewpoints on core values, norms, and behaviors?

How do you handle questions from your youth group members about when people who each claim to be Christians have serious differences of opinion about what God expects and requires? This question is at the root of our work at the Kentucky Faith & Public History Education Project because we follow a specific set of criteria for selecting whom to present as famous Kentucky Christians from the past. Because we focus on past Christians, we also have to navigate changing norms and beliefs. What is unacceptable today (slavery, for example) was an issue about which Christians disagreed in the past. What is acceptable today (how we dress, for example) is an issue about which Christians used to be more divided. Our criteria for who is selected as a famous Kentucky Christian for our project are as follows:

  • The individual must have lived, worked or been born in Kentucky. 
  • Their Christian faith must be documented. We search for their own words to explain how they first came to faith and then what changed about their lives because of their faith. If we cannot find quotations or written texts by the individual, we look for statements from people who knew them personally. 
  • They must have contributed to the community in some way that makes their reputation famous.
  • Finally, their legacy should also connect, in some way to their faith.
  •  In addition to these non-negotiables, we are committed to include men and women, African Americans, white Americans, American Indians and new Americans. 

It is impossible to tell a story about human beings without bumping up against behaviors and beliefs that dismay us today. Slavery, Jim Crow, the denial of basic rights to women, and the way the United States dominated and abused the American Indians are just four examples of issues that we call shameful today but that divided people, including Christians, in the past. 

For example, Zachary Taylor's First Lady, Peggy Taylor, was a woman of prayer. She influenced the founding of the first Episcopal Church in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She may have been instrumental in the president's proclamation calling for a national day of prayer and fasting to address the cholera pandemic in 1849. But Peggy Taylor owned slaves, inherited slaves, and was not known to have emancipated slaves. Does this moral failing (that had plenty of adherents among Christian people and denominations prior to the Civil War) discredit Peggy Taylor's faith? Or does it demonstrate a blind spot that was strengthened by the culture she lived in? 

Kentucky's Christian history is not a Black or a White story. It is not a male or a female story. It is not a Protestant or a Catholic story. Christians might say that Kentucky's Christian history is a God story. It is a story that must navigate all the failures and frailties of the human condition. This is difficult to process, especially for teenagers, but necessary to understand. As Jesus is recorded as having said, "No one is good but God alone", so we must each come to realize that the Christian message does not attempt to portray its adherents as perfect and faithful representations of the God of the Bible. The Christian message is clear that no Christian can represent God accurately or perfectly all the time and that every Christian has moments when they are, in fact, abysmal reflections of their God. 

Today we reject the notion that enslaving others is compatible with the Christian message. This makes us harsh judges of people like Peggy Taylor but does it disqualify her as a Christian? 

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