In his New York Times column this week, my friend David French wrote about what it was prefer to be “canceled” by his denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America. He later told me how stunned he was by how many individuals responded immediately—grieving their very own “cancellations” from churches or ministries they’d loved and served.
I used to be not surprised in any respect.
Most people, after all, aren’t canceled in the best way we typically use that word, but in a far more just like the situation described by the late Will Campbell. He wasn’t “fired” by the National Council of Churches, he would joke. They just unleashed a swarm of bees in his office each day until he voluntarily left.
Similarly, many individuals who feel “homeless” lately aren’t told by their home churches or traditions, “Get out!” Instead, they face a quieter type of exile.
They face those they love, who expect them to adapt to latest rules of belonging. Sometimes, that’s to some totalizing political loyalty. Sometimes, it’s to a willingness to “recover from” their opposition to whatever their church or ministry leaders now deem to be acceptable sins. Sometimes, this doesn’t even occur to those people in their very own churches but of their larger theological or denominational homes, or vice versa. It’s confusing. It’s disorienting. It’s sometimes angering.
What it truly is, though, is grief.
People who’ve faced this in their very own contexts often ask me, “How long does it take to recover from this?” I often quote the landslide-losing presidential candidate George McGovern when he was asked an analogous query by later landslide-losing candidate Walter Mondale: “I’ll let you already know once I get there.” But an earlier version of myself would have had a very different view.
When I used to be a young doctoral student at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, I hosted a panel discussion on the subject of war and peace on our campus in the course of the weeks after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. I wanted a real debate—not only a caricature of 1—so I sought to incorporate a pacifist within the group, ending up with the pastor of a really progressive Baptist congregation in our community, one which had long parted ways with our denomination after years of controversy.
Afterward, the pastor said that he didn’t think those of us on the conservative side of the split really understood what it was prefer to lose a way of belonging, a way of home. “It’s like going through a divorce,” he said.
In all of my punkish arrogance, I responded, “Actually, it’s more like after the divorce when the ex keeps showing up on the lawn with a bullhorn, despite the restraining order.” My implicit message was, The controversy is over. We won. You lost. Move on.
All the ways I used to be fallacious would require a complete book, but here’s certainly one of them: I had no concept that trauma here was not a metaphor. What this pastor described was not about Robert’s Rules of Order and even about which systematic theology textbooks can be taught on the alma mater. He was expressing grief, and I didn’t know what that was like until many years later.
We wouldn’t tell someone who’s experienced the lack of a parent, sibling, spouse, or lifelong friend to “recover from it” or “move on.” Most of us would do what Jesus did with Mary and Martha, grieving the death of Lazarus: weep right alongside those that experienced the loss (John 11:35). Many of us, though, are less sure what to do after we ourselves experience this sort of grief, this sort of loss. In fact, many individuals wish to hear, in a moment of unexpected church homelessness, a word of hope.
I say: Not so fast.
The hope is real, after all—and that’s not only within the Book of Revelation sort of long-term view, but without delay. God is doing something latest. Old alliances are shaken, but latest ones are being formed.
In the civic political space, lots of us are finding that the elemental division isn’t where we’re used to it being, between the left and the best, but straight through them. People with fundamental differences on essential issues are finding that what unites or divides them is whether or not democratic principles and constitutional norms are needed to have those critically essential debates.
The same is occurring within the religious space. We are accustomed to the dividing lines we knew every time we got here of age: Calvinist versus Arminian, cessationist versus charismatic, complementarian versus egalitarian. The dividing lines are elsewhere now, and weird alliances are forming. From the very starting of the church, God has worked with what one scholar describes as “patient ferment.” Change is all the time disorienting, and sometimes painful.
And much of what God has to do can only come out of this sort of shaking. “I believe that to beat regionalism, you need to have an excellent deal of self-knowledge,” Flannery O’Connor once said. “I believe that to know yourself is to know your region, and that it’s also to know the world, and in a way, paradoxically, it’s also to be an exile from that world. So that you may have an excellent deal of detachment.”
O’Connor needed a rootedness—a way of being a Southerner and of knowing other Southerners, specifically Bible Belt Protestants. She also needed, though, a sort of exile—the experience of being a Roman Catholic minority in Milledgeville, Georgia. Whatever is next—perhaps the conforming of the American church more closely to the worldwide body of Christ—requires the sort of change that may feel scary. And lots of us will grieve what’s lost.
For a few of us, we’d like to offer heed to what Jesus said to his followers: “Remember Lot’s wife” (Luke 17:32, ESV throughout). Grief shouldn’t cause us to look perpetually backward. But many also need to recollect too that Jesus, at the same time as he said for us to expect it, recognized that losing one’s home base can be painful (Matt. 10:17–21).
The apostle Paul told us that we were to “rejoice” in our sufferings, but he didn’t tell us to see them as anything lower than suffering. Instead, we’re to see that “suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope doesn’t put us to shame” (Rom. 5:3–5). To short-circuit endurance and character to get straight to hope is to do something different than what the Holy Spirit does.
People who don’t allow themselves the time to grieve what’s lost, in my experience, often find yourself in bad places. Some of them wind up with a cynicism that sees all connection as suspect—and we all know what happens to human beings after we give ourselves to isolation. Some of them, within the fullness of time, find yourself pursuing the mirror image of what they once had, as if the antidote to each problem were the other of it. Fundamentalisms of those on the best develop into fundamentalisms of those on the left, or vice versa. The end of that path is disillusionment and exhaustion.
That’s why T. S. Eliot, in my favorite poem, “East Coker,” writes:
I said to my soul, be still, and without hope
For hope would hope for the fallacious thing; wait without love
For love can be love of the fallacious thing; there may be yet faith
But the religion and the love and the hope are all within the waiting.
For those that feel homeless, grieve with hope—but remember, there actually is a spot called Home. And don’t forget that even in hope, it’s okay to grieve.
Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.
