K ingdom Ethics Christianities
The Gushee family is in transition as these words are written. Our youngest child, Marie, is heading off to Emory University. We have become empty-nesters. My in-laws are moving to Atlanta to be near their daughter. And I just turned 49. I remember when I was young! I reflect sometimes about the Christian journey that God has taken me on since my childhood, about whether we have successfully passed on a viable Christian faith to our children, and about whether that Christian faith will be central to them and their children after we have gone to be with Jesus. This has me thinking back to the two most recent stages of our journey: 11 years living in Jackson, Tenn., and four years in Atlanta. I would like to reflect on the Christian experience of our family in these pivotal 15 years for us, because I think it has relevance beyond our family. The years 1996 to 2007 were spent in Jackson. We moved there so I could take a teaching position at Union University. Jackson is the hub city of western Tennessee. Two hours to the east is Nashville; one hour to the southwest is Memphis. It is big enough to host a Double-A baseball team and a symphony orchestra, but small enough that you can expect to run into an acquaintance every time you leave your house. The city remains deeply divided along racial lines. North Jackson is overwhelmingly white and at least middleclass if not wealthy. East Jackson is overwhelmingly black and primarily poor to lower-middle-class. We lived in North Jackson. The religion and politics of this part of Jackson are Bible Belt white conservative. Three sizable, overwhelmingly white private schools can also be found in North Jackson, along with Union University. This was the world our family lived in until we moved to Atlanta on the threshold of our youngest daughter’s freshman year in high school. I have called this column “Christianities” because I am convinced that there is no such thing as “Christianity,” but instead various versions of Christianity,
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generated by different readings of scripture and Christian tradition as well as by cultural dynamics. The Christianity that predominated in our Jackson context was of a particular conservative white Southern Baptist/ evangelical type. It was Bible-centered, focused on personal piety, embraced conservative beliefs related to everything from sexuality to cursing to alcohol to gender to race to politics, and demanded pervasive centrality in a believer’s life.
The normative Christian in this version of Christianity goes to church three times a week, prays and reads her Bible, tells other people about Jesus, abstains from sex until marriage, gets married at 22-24 years of age, doesn’t drink or curse, raises her children in the Christian faith, opposes abortion, believes women should not be pastors, and votes Republican. We moved to Atlanta so I could accept a position at Mercer University. Much went into this decision, including our family’s inability to accept the last two items in the above list as definitive for Christian faith. We joined a wonderful Baptist church with a female pastor and nonexistent ties to the Southern Baptist Convention, and I became an ethics professor at a Baptist seminary linked to the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. We had chafed deeply at the casual sexism and assumed political conservatism of the Jackson version of Christi-
David P. Gushee anity, and so were quite glad to enter a religious subculture in which those values were rejected. This new subculture still produces Christians who go to church weekly and love God, but open expressions of personal piety and an open embrace of demanding standards of personal morality seem somewhat less frequent here. Is it really necessary to trade off robust personal piety and rigorous personal morality for a Christianity emphasizing social justice? Why can’t we put the best of both of these versions of Christianity together? In May I took Marie on a fatherdaughter trip with a group from CarsonNewman College to Cape Town, South Africa. There the 15 of us studied, toured, served the desperately poor with a great ministry called Living Hope, and thought about the meaning of Christian faith in a country as beautiful but stratified as modern-day South Africa. We found in the black townships of South Africa, and in the committed Christians who lived and served there, a faith that had the robust piety of Jackson and the social justice commitments of Atlanta. These were people who loved Jesus and loved justice; it was the best of both worlds, discovered 10,000 miles from home. In other words, getting outside the white, southern, Baptist, US setting we encountered once again something like the holistic transformational evangelicalism that we first encountered in Philadelphia with ESA and my dear friend Ron Sider. This is the kind of Christianity that we still find most compelling— the version I hope that our Marie, Holly, and David will teach to their own children in the next generation. David P. Gushee is director of the Center for Theology and Public Life at Mercer University, Atlanta, Ga., where he is also a professor of Christian ethics. His latest book is Religious Faith, Torture, and Our National Soul (Mercer University Press, 2010).