AAR Presidential Address: David Gushee, In the Ruins of White Evangelicalism
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- Опубликовано: 26 авг 2024
- 2018 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion
November 17
Denver, Colorado
David P. Gushee is the Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics and Director of the Center for Theology and Public Life at Mercer University in Georgia, where he has the privilege of teaching both college and seminary students. He is the author or editor of over twenty books, dozens of book chapters, and thousands of opinion pieces. His most important books include Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust: Genocide and Moral Obligation, Kingdom Ethics: Following Jesus in Contemporary Context, The Sacredness of Human Life: Why an Ancient Biblical Idea is Key to the World’s Future, Changing Our Mind: The Landmark Call for Inclusion of LGBTQ Christians, and Still Christian: Following Jesus Out of American Evangelicalism. Working with Colin Holtz, he has just completed Moral Leadership for a Divided Age: Fourteen Leaders Who Dared to Change the World, to be released in October 2018.
Raised Roman Catholic in northern Virginia, in high school Gushee wandered into a Southern Baptist church where he had a born-again experience that entirely changed the course of his life. Pursuing Jesus and the pastorate, he attended Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, serving in student ministry and eventually becoming an ordained Southern Baptist minister. In seminary, however, studying with the late Glen Stassen, Gushee also discovered the discipline of Christian ethics, which he pursued with a doctorate at Union Theological Seminary in New York.
For thirty-five years, Gushee attempted to be both a Southern Baptist Christian, and an evangelical Christian, while also serving faithfully as a Christian ethicist in the tradition he had learned at Union Seminary. He became well-known on the evangelical side of the Christian fence, writing and lecturing globally and gaining influence as one of progressive evangelicalism’s most important moral thinkers. He also developed a following as a public theologian, with extensive media work and opinion writing in such places as Beliefnet, Christianity Today, Huffington Post, Baptist News Global, and Religion News Service. His scholarship, leadership, and activism against US-sponsored torture in the George W. Bush years drew national attention.
In 2014, Gushee fell from the evangelical firmament after publishing Changing Our Mind, an analysis of the LGBTQ question within Christianity that ended with his articulating a call for full and unequivocal inclusion, a position which he believed reflected core Christian ethical norms that he had applied to other questions throughout his career. Gushee’s spiritual and intellectual reflection since 2015 has been deeply affected by his disillusionment with white American evangelicalism and his attempt to consider where he has been, what he has learned, and where he goes from here.
In this presidential address, Gushee will perform “religion in public” in a confessional vein. Beginning with the claim that the moral credibility of white American evangelicalism stands in ruins, that he has been complicit, and that white evangelicalism lacks the resources within itself to address its moral collapse, Gushee turns to historic and contemporary African-American intellectual resources, seeking within them an answer to two basic questions: What went wrong with white American (evangelical) Christianity? Where might redemption be found?
Laurie Louise Patton, Middlebury College, presiding
Panelists:
David P. Gushee, Mercer University
Thank you. Mr. Gushee for your courage, honesty, and truth telling. You and others like yourself are such important voices in this supposedly Christian nation's comeuppins. As a follower of Jesus, I have had to disassociate myself from the Evangelical community over its blind hyprocracy and transactional relationship with the Republican Party, and the idolatry of Trumpism. I have been ostracized and demonized by my former associates because my political and social views did not fall in line with theirs. You are one of my hero's. Dr. Cornel West is another. When I cried out to God over the situation in this nation, He told me that there were 7,000 who had not bowed the knee to Baal. You, my friend, are one such person. God bless you in all your endeavours to speak the truth. 💝
This is what real leadership looks like, thank goodness.
I'm a former Evangelical pastor, now atheist. Thank you for being a voice of truth and repentance.
Amazing. Thank you
Thank you. David gushee you're right ...the road is long and narrow. We're going to get there. We're praying for you and your family God bless. You know you saved my life.
Preach!!!
🔥🔥🔥
Having spent nearly 40 years in the evangelical world myself along with a seminary degree from one of those southern evangelical seminaries and having lived in the south for 45 years I am not sure this presentation could be any more harmful to our black brothers and sisters as well as out white brothers and sisters. He speaks with a sledge hammer towards an entire race rather than the ever needed scalpel. This speech with the exception of the part of Donald Trump could have been given in 1959 without hardly any adjustments. 60 years later and he speaks with bludgeoning words as if the self correcting nature of our systems have not taken full effect. What a shame this academic has fanned the flames of hatred and division further.
I don't think that the suggestion to open the doors to homosexuality as to say that such a lifestyle is both ok and morally right would help white American evangelicals correct the moral strain evident before us all except core evangelical leaders.
Though I agree with him on some key points, to allow men and women who say they are Christian, but yet also engage in homosexual behavior clearly would reverse the ethical foundation of preaching the irreverent and inerrant absolute of the Scriptures.
Racism has absolutely nothing to do with homosexuality. And to connect the two both violated and twists black men and women up in a shameful practice that would cause some to internalize such infusions to us.
But overall, he has a point regarding the Christian failings of white evangelical pastors and teachers.
You need to go back and study the word! The scriptures used against homosexuality are within cultic temple worship to the God Molech in the Old testament and Godess Diana/ Aphrodite in the New Testament. It is talking about abusive homosexual sex. It is not a universal ban on a loving committed same sex relationship within the context of marriage. The scriptures talk of heterosexual rape, but we don’t put a ban on all heterosexual sex and we allow heterosexuals to engage in sex within marriage. The same applies to gay people. No one is trying to do away with sexual immorality and sexual ethics. But we need to really understand what our Bible is telling us. God is not pleased with the continuation of prejudice from the church to a whole group of people who have been made in his image. Homosexual attraction is not a choice. If it was a choice everyone who is gay would choose to be straight to avoid the oppressions imposed by society and the church. No one is saying that slavery is the same as homosexuality, but the oppression of a group of people is similar and the point is that the church has been wrong about many things from the first apostles and have had to work through changes. It took 15 years for the Jews and Gentiles to really come together. Peter struggled to let go of what he was taught as a Jew concerning Gentiles, because it was so deeply engrained. It doesn’t mean it is heresy.
If you resist understanding what you're seeing,: Then your stupid religion will die!!