True Grit, Evangelicals & Real Justice: Part 1

True Grit is a synonym for courage, honor, fortitude, braveness, unfaltering courage; devotion to what is right; indomitableness...

True Grit, a western film I watched as a boy, has been remade with two leading actors, Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon.  If you haven’t seen it, I recommend doing so.  Not only for the quality of the film, but also for the interesting but shaded and ambivalent approach to justice that the Coen brothers projected.  Jeff Bridges’ character is an interesting mix of moral and immoral characteristics.  Though he is on the side of justice as a US Marshall, he himself has a sketchy past as well as fledgling methods of justice when it comes to his criminals. 

His character reminds me of a book that I just finished called, The Unlikely Disciple, in which a Brown University student leaves his very liberal college to attend America’s largest Evangelical University, Liberty University.  In it, he comes in as a 19 year old “mole” looking to report on what it is like to be a pious evangelical college student.  He has to fake that he is one while there and ends up writing one of the most fascinating outsider perspectives on the evangelical world that I have ever read or heard of.  I couldn’t recommend the book more.

Throughout the book, one of the most stark and riveting observations that Kevin Roose makes is the radical disconnect between form and content when it comes to the beliefs and convictions that evangelicals hold.  This may remind us of the quip, “The Medium is the Message.”  In Liberty’s case, Roose continues to unveil that many times for evangelicals, the medium is not the message.  To be fair, this blanket statement cannot cover all the categories and aspects that one could summon up to apply but for Roose, it became a recurring theme during his time at Liberty.  The obvious wincing that Kevin experienced when confronted with a belief or conviction about God and people that did not always match up with how a person with that belief or conviction would end up treating others, is what we’re after here.   This kind of moral finagling within Evangelical culture, or any culture for that matter, is what I call Incredulous Morality. 

An incredulous morality is a morality that claims purity and a high standard and seeks to achieve that high standard.  At the same time though, the methods or mediums employed to achieve that morality can contradict or undermine those high standards.  An incredulous morality seeks justice or realignment with a moral compass while at the same time, the immorality of one’s methods is not recognized or worse, they are justified.  As a professor friend of mine once smirked, “If God is on our side then we don’t have to count the bodies.”  Even worse is when an act of benevolence is offered as a replacement for justice, when swine are given pearls instead of hog-food.

This contrast could also be compared to the analogy of a ship and crew setting sail on a moral mission.  The ship is steered by a moral captain and encases a moral crew who are devoted, life and limb to the moral mission.  Yet, when the ship is not powered by the winds of their moral God, the power has to come from somewhere so it ends up coming from below deck where whips crack the back of slaves tethered to an oar.  Many times throughout history, if not continuously, these kinds of ships have been owned and operated and set sail on behalf of the church.  Are they still sailing today?  I can’t help but answer yes.  So why the disconnect and how did we get here?  Many of us don't realize that we are part of the crew until we are out in the middle of the ocean; what do we do then?  More in part two