Principles and Guidelines

A few weeks back, I wrote a little about the moralism with which my generation of Nazarenes grew up. It was a very specific way of life that focused largely on rules. We had a right and wrong for just about everything - and while there may have been grey areas, we tended to just avoid them as bad so as not to fool around with where the line might be.

It's been reflected in the way we view our constitutional document: the Manual. In fact, for a long time, the various sections of the Manual were labeled "rules." What we now know as the Covenant of Christian Conduct was the "Special Rules," specifically because it was a list of dos and don'ts. We got to be very good about our Manual legalism. As Wesleyans, we might've been a little less legalistic about the Bible, but the Manual was another story. I hear tales, these days, about families where the rules weren't followed to the letter - but you never heard about those families at the time (if they really existed), because rules were awfully important.

This past month, at General Assembly, was really the first time I saw any public acknowledgement that life is a little messy. Our delegates were willing to admit, from the floor, pastors even, that accepting into membership, even leadership, people who occasionally drink alcohol, is a pretty common practice. That's light years ahead of anything I would've expected, but it was truly refreshing.

I'm not saying that the most recent US Presidential election had anything to do with this (because I'm loathe to equate anything positive with that shit show), but I wonder if, give the realities of that last post I mentioned, we might now be a little more comfortable looking around the curtain of moralism at the pompous wizard running the show?

This new generation (mine, but really the one immediately behind me) seems unwilling entirely to play the old games. We're much more comfortable with both ambiguity and grace. We see the Manual as more of a guidebook than a rule book and it's throwing a bit of a wrench into things. This General Assembly had us asking, "Why not set strong standards and then hold to them with grace, rather than legalism?" Which might've been a slap in the face to old Phineas Bresee.

We'll get into an argument about that, too, because it seems to me each generation sees themselves in the old man - he possessed enough legalism, grace, social justice fire, and prohibitionist dominionism for everyone to have a piece. That's become our go-to perspective on the Church of the Nazarene as well; each generation makes the denomination into the entity most appropriate for itself. One generation, those spry, pesky Baby Boomers, held onto the reins of power for an awful long time, but that time does appear to be ending and what comes next is totally up in the air.

There's a generation in between that's going to have an unfairly small window out of which to operate - and they might want to have their say, but times are most definitely changing. Things will certainly get more complicated, but probably a little bit healthier, too. Of course, health in one area often leads to the exposure of dysfunction in another - some area our kids will grind against and reject when their time comes.

Regardless, the moment of change may have arrived. It came quickly and almost without warning, but the movement from rules and structure to guidelines and grace is inevitable, especially given the way my generation looks at and interacts with the world. Because of my experience, I have a real hard time calling the next phase "good" or "better," but it's certainly refreshing. The age of moralism might finally be dead in the Church of the Nazarene.

And that is undoubtedly a good thing, no matter how it came about, or what might be yet to come.

Nazarenes, Moralism, and _ru_p

I got to spend a few days at the General Assembly of the Church of the Nazarene - this is the every-four-years gathering of my denomination, with delegates from around the world, but still largely dominated by very traditional, white middle-class Americans (despite the awesome fact that such people now makeup less than a quarter of our global membership). For ten days, there was a pretty big, insular bubble over downtown Indianapolis - one summed up by a tweet from a local waitress saying we weren't buying much alcohol,but the place is fresh out of dessert.

I had more than a few conversations about the crazy year in US politics. Most every friend I had from outside the US and/or under 40 had a similarly head-shaking confusion about the whole thing - a now familiar response. Those in another category were shaking their heads for other reasons. More than once I got some version of the same question - "Why have you [liberal/young/progressive/contrarian] gotten so much more upset that we [older/traditional/evangelical/Nazarene] voted Republican this time around; we've been doing it your whole lives?"

I recognize I had some angry responses to the election, inauguration, words, actions, tweets, thoughts, etc of Donald Trump, but I do think I've found some distance as a result of incredulous, but begrudging acceptance of reality. For the first time, I didn't really think about that question in terms of politics or even theology. Maybe it was the comfort and familiarity of the Nazarene bubble, but it feels like people in my generation - both radically liberal and heart-warmingly conservative - ended up with the same answer.

In short, our parents' generation* spent vast amounts of time and effort to make sure that good little Nazarene kids were uncommonly moralistic.
We were taught a vast array of dos and dont's with seemingly incomprehensible levels of logic that we just ate up and internalized. We didn't watch the Smurfs, because magic, or the Simpsons, because Bart was so disrespectful - I even remember having a conversation with my Dad about why I could watch GoBots, but not Transformers where the reason amounted to "the good guys don't always win on Transformers."

We skipped proms and dances, avoided movies, and thought the neighbor having a beer was as hell-bound as any terrorist. I spent most of my childhood genuinely believing you couldn't be a Democrat and a Christian (but that being American and Christian were almost synonymous) - and that abortion was the only issue worth voting about. We were inundated with the evangelical subculture, which I only realized in about fifth grade when a friend of mine thought I was talking about Opera when I told him my favorite musician.** (Notice I didn't even mention sex, because that's not something we do... mention sex, that is - definitely out.)

So, even if we learned to question and react against what amounted to benevolent indoctrination later in life, that foundation remains; it's buried deep inside each of us at subatomic levels. We've been shaped and formed with a guilt complex second to none,*** where even thoughts of the taboo were met with fear and hidden away. Above all else we were taught that Nazarenes - that good Christians - did things in a very specific, particular way (the right way).

We're the third generation, really, our parents were the kids of true believers, so they didn't understand exactly why we do things the way we do, but they respected them enough to drill them into our heads by rote. We learned all the whos, whats, whens, and wheres, even if the whys were sorely lacking.

So perhaps you might begin to grasp just how earth-shatteringly disarming it was to see those same people who spent so much time making sure we had a sound moralistic way of life so easily embrace a man whose very existence epitomizes the opposite of all we were taught was good and holy. That last word's not even a pun; one guy, last week, actually said to me, "I'm willing to be corrected if I'm wrong, but I'm hard-pressed to think of a single thing in Trump's life that would be acceptable to Nazarene thought and practice."

Yup. Not an exageration. He said it and it echoes everything I've been thinking and resonated pretty strongly with my Nazarene peer group - regardless of whether they were living out that moralism wholesale or striking against it in vividly intentional ways. Politics don't even enter into the equation - we're all just scratching our heads how the denomination we're trying to inherit could so totally accept a dude they (without name recognition or money) would never let walk in the doors of the church when we were kids.

It's a simple as that. You trained us to be this way. How else do you expect us to react?





*I do mean this collectively - as one generation to another - not so much my (or anyone else's) specific parents.

**Super props to fifth grade Troy for being so knowledgeable about opera, by the way.

***This sounds super harsh, because I'm focusing just on the moralism, but, really, there's a lot of benefits to this kind of upbringing - we had a strong sense of identity and a fantastic grasp of scripture and it's importance. Not incidentally, both of these things are really coming back to bite that previous generation, since we are challenging the status quo at present with a lot of well-earned Nazzy street cred.