Empowering the Remnant

Let's remember that nature hates a vacuum!

John Pavlovitz had some telling observations in a recent post, including:

· American Bible Belt Evangelical Christians have gone all-in with Donald Trump…Jesus has been rendered nonexistent in their midst, deported from their gatherings.

· …practically speaking, Jesus of Nazareth is absent in this supposed community of Jesus-followers and as a former pastor, I’ve fully grieved it all.

· It’s all been fairly disheartening to see one’s faith tradition swallowed up by a violent, bullying, gun-toting, whitewashed, Don’t Tread on Me cultural smallness, that has nothing in common with the generous, open-hearted, least-loving Christ of the gospels.

Specifically looking at the numbers from the last election, we can see the extent of it:

· 80% of Evangelical Christians voted for Trump (Associated Press)

· 56% of Catholics voted for Trump (Washington Post)

· 62% of Protestants/Other Christians voted for Trump (Washington Post)

That certainly paints the lay of the religious landscape, and while only an estimate, it looks like something in the neighborhood of one third of American Christians did not drink the Kool-aid, did not sell out their understanding of the Gospel and replace it with White Christian Nationalistic materialism.

Pavlovitz goes on in his post to remind readers that there are vibrant Progress faith communities that are doing “joy-giving, life-affirming, wall-leveling work—alongside people of every color, orientation, and nation of origin.”

Thank God for that.

Still, being in a group of one third of the population is suddenly to realize you are part of a minority, and that minority is in opposition to an empowered and bullying majority backed by oligarch tech bros apparently set on turning America on its head.

Is it enough that many of them are progressives and believe in and practice social justice? What are the guiding principles? What do we do to empower that minority? What do we call them? The Remnant?

Notwithstanding the film of that name, and the Remnant book series, in the Bible, the term remnant refers to a small group of people who remain faithful to God after a time of hardship or catastrophe. See Isaiah 10:20-22. In the New Testament, there’s Romans 9:27-28 and Matthew 7:13-14.

I’d suggest that a critical part right now, when many are still struggling with the emotional aftermath of the election and the existential pain of realizing how much of the Christianity they thought they once knew is changed or gone, that it begins with a call back to the basics. It’s a demonstrated fact that nature hates a vacuum, and the apparent breakup of American Christianity is already creating lots of gaps and vacuums. It begs the question that was the title of a film series by Francis Schaeffer back in the 70’s: How Shall We Then Live?

My last post was about incarnational leadership, because this Remnant will need leadership, and that leadership needs to be modeled on traditional Christian moral and ethical values. Where do we find those described? One key place is in The Beatitudes.

The opening section of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew, chapters 5-7) contains the eight verses known as The Beatitudes. The name comes from the Latin Vulgate version of the Bible in which each verse begins with the word beati (in Greek makarios) meaning blessed. In short, The Beatitudes provide us with a very succinct summary of the ethos of the kingdom of Heaven that Jesus says he has come to announce. They lay out the principles of life in that kingdom.

The Beatitudes are not a collection of nice sounding and poetic platitudes that happen to be the opening lines in the Sermon on the Mount. Rather, they are moral and ethical principles that lay out what the kingdom life looks like. And, because we live in the fallen world that Jesus declares he came to redeem, they also describe the likely consequences to be born by those who live by these principles.

The Beatitudes are principles to be embodied, to be incarnated. To incarnate is to en-flesh (from the Latin carne), in other words, to manifest, to implement, to live out. These are not pie in the sky positive maxims, but real attitudes and behaviors that all people of faith, leaders and followers, are to incarnate.

You can read my entire article “A Primer on the Beatitudes” at the Oriented Leadership website by clicking here.