Christian Civility: The Test of Intra-Faith Relations
How is your civility? Do you play nice with Christians with which you disagree? It would test my patience to deal with a group from the Westboro Baptist church in Topeka if I ran across them protesting at a funeral. My inner 12 year old would lobby me to toss a water ballon into their midst. As I have aged I’ve learned it might be better to simply kneel and pray that God is actually gracious. I’ve done this on two other instances and was asked to leave the property after explaining the content of my prayer. It seems my intercessory prayer was not welcome.
Here is a post from The Huffington Post by Paul Brandeis Raushenbush. It speaks to a social gospel of Christian civility as disagreeing Christians deal with one another. A paragraph or two and a link to the article follows.
Christian Civility: The Test of Intra-Faith Relations
January 18, 2011Inter-faith dialogue is hard, but intra-faith can be harder. Every Christian claims Jesus, so essential questions of how we understand Jesus, his earthly ministry, the meaning of the crucifixion, the nature of his call upon our lives (questions to which a non-Christian is largely indifferent) become the grounds of our essential debate and, literally, a matter of life and death. When we encounter a Christian who thinks and believes differently, we experience that difference as an attack on the principles upon which we have built our lives and as a betrayal to the faith. This feeling only increases when you add in politics. In recent elections, both sides of the political aisle found inspiration and legitimization from Christian constituencies. Political debates often adopted theological rhetoric, and religious leaders adopted political strategies. The result has been a “winner take all” attitude with Christian groups being particularly brutal toward one another.
Christian Civility does not mean that we won’t disagree. There is a difference between incivility and disagreement. Incivility breaks down communication and ruptures God’s kingdom, but disagreement between Christians is inevitable — and even productive. One example is the disagreement between Christian leaders around the Civil Rights Movement in America. Many Christians were encouraging Martin Luther King, Jr. to temper his demands, to slow down his movement and to not create so much tension or disagreement. MLK responded in his now famous Letter from Birmingham City Jail: “But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word ‘tension.’ I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth.” Like MLK Jr., all of us benefit from clarity about where we stand. A call for civility is not a call for lack of conviction, rather it is about remaining engaged with those with whom we disagree in the hopes that we might somehow continue to move forward together forging new consensus as we go. The Civil Rights Movement is one example of civil tension that led Christians to a more authentic faith.