Christian Mythbusters

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.

I know when I was growing up as an evangelical Christian, I never really considered where the Bible I carried around with me came from. I knew that I was taught that it was the Word of God, divinely inspired, and I got a sense that the Holy Spirit whispered in the ear of the authors.  It was almost as though it fell from heaven, leather-bound and printed, with chapters, verses, and even gold gilding on the pages. But here’s the truth: that neat image doesn’t reflect the messy, human, Spirit-filled process through which the Bible actually came to be.

The Scriptures weren’t handed down all at once as a miraculous gift. Instead, the Bible is the product of centuries of life with God, woven together from the testimonies, prayers, and experiences of God’s people.

So this week I thought I might try to break the myth of how we got the Bible in the first place. 

The Hebrew Scriptures, what Christians call the Old Testament, grew out of Israel’s worship, history, and struggles. Some books are poems, others recount wars or defeats, still others thunder with prophetic calls to justice. The books often don’t even agree with one another, reflecting how Israel’s understanding of God and faithfulness evolved.

The Torah—the first five books of Moses that tell the stories of the creation of the world and the most ancient history of Israel—was established by the 5th century BCE, likely during or just after the Babylonian Exile, when Ezra and other scribes emphasized its role in worship and community. The Prophets, including Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the Twelve Minor Prophets, were recognized by the 2nd century BCE. But the Writings—Psalms, Proverbs, Esther, Daniel, and others—remained fluid for centuries. By the late 1st century CE, Jewish teachers debated which texts carried scriptural authority. Some point to Jamnia around 90 CE, though modern scholars note that no single council “set the canon” of Jewish Scripture.  It was gradual, shaped by worship and teaching. So, when Christianity emerged, Jewish communities were not yet unanimous about their Scriptures, and that diversity shaped how the first Christians read them.

Early Christians, in turn, produced new writings. Four gospels eventually rose to the center—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—but other gospels circulated. Some read the Letters of Clement (the fourth bishop of Rome, who served in the late first century. Others valued the Shepherd of Hermas and the Didache. Letters attributed to Paul were copied, shared, and debated. It took centuries before consensus began to take shape. Leaders asked: Which writings bore witness to the apostolic faith? Which were used across the Church? Which aligned with the rule of faith, that early summary of Christian belief?

Even then, agreement was never complete. In the East, Revelation was distrusted; in the West, it was affirmed. Hebrews took time to gain acceptance. To this day, Christians don’t all read the same Bible. Roman Catholics, Anglicans, and Orthodox Christians include Tobit and Sirach, which many Protestants label “Apocrypha.” The Ethiopian Orthodox Church includes still more. So the Bible you hold depends, in part, on which Christian tradition handed it to you.

Some people find that unsettling. They want a book that is clean, simple, and certain. But the truth is better. Scripture grew through a very human process—and that’s part of its beauty.

Because the Bible is not a flat, uniform text. It’s a library of voices, each with its own style and context. That diversity is a gift. It allows Scripture to speak across cultures and centuries. It invites us to wrestle with God, to hear voices that comfort and voices that challenge, to enter into a faith that is not static but alive. When we open the Bible, we encounter not just divine inspiration but also the human response to God—people trying to make sense of what it means to live faithfully. And in that space between divine word and human struggle, the Spirit still speaks to us today.

That’s why the Bible is not less trustworthy because it came through human hands—it is more trustworthy, because it bears witness to the God who has always chosen to work through human lives.

Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember, protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.

One of the most common modern misconceptions I hear is the idea that the Bible is the “inerrant Word of God.” That is, every word on the page is without error, historically accurate in every detail, and factually true in a literal sense. This view might feel like it’s always been part of Christianity, but in fact it is a relatively recent development in the history of the church. 

So, this week, let’s take a crack at that myth.

If you go back to the earliest Christians and to the church fathers who laid the foundations of theology, you don’t find them treating the Bible in this rigidly literal way. Take Origen in the third century, for example. He believed that Scripture had multiple levels of meaning—literal, moral, and spiritual. And sometimes, he suggested, the literal sense wasn’t even the most important. 

Augustine of Hippo, one of the most influential theologians of the Western Church, was very clear that when the Bible seemed to conflict with reason or with established knowledge about the natural world, then perhaps the text should be read metaphorically rather than literally. These early leaders of the faith understood that God’s truth could shine through human words in ways deeper than flat inerrancy.

The very idea of inerrancy as we know it today is actually a modern invention. In fact, the technical doctrine of inerrancy only took shape in the late nineteenth century, at Princeton Theological Seminary, when theologians like Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield argued that because God is perfect, Scripture must also be perfect and without error in every respect. That claim was new—and it was a human invention, their own attempt to defend the Bible against the challenges of modern science and biblical criticism. But for the vast majority of the church’s history, Scripture was received instead as a Spirit-filled witness through human authors, shaped by their cultures and contexts, to communicate divine truth.

And here’s where the real problem comes in: it’s actually impossible to read the Bible as inerrant if you are being honest with the text. The Bible contains four Gospels, not one. Each tells the story of Jesus in a slightly different way. Sometimes details don’t line up—like whether Jesus cleansed the Temple at the beginning of his ministry or at the end, or exactly how Judas died. In the Old Testament, the books of Kings and Chronicles sometimes give different versions of the same events. The book of Proverbs tells us to “answer a fool according to his folly” in one verse, and the very next verse says “do not answer a fool according to his folly.” These are not mistakes—they’re signs that Scripture is a conversation, a library of voices wrestling with God and with what it means to be faithful.

When you force the Bible into the mold of inerrancy, you actually lose the beauty and depth of that conversation. You treat it like a rulebook dropped from heaven, instead of a Spirit-inspired record of human beings struggling, failing, repenting, and growing. You miss the texture of poetry, the power of lament, the wrestling of prophets who dared to argue with God, and the Gospel writers who tried in their own voices to capture the wonder of Jesus Christ.

At its best, Scripture is not an answer key to every question. It is a witness to God’s ongoing relationship with humanity. It shows us how God’s people have sought to walk in faithfulness, and how God has continued to love and forgive them when they fall short. Reading the Bible this way—honestly, reverently, and with openness—frees us to encounter the living God, not just defend brittle doctrine.

So no, the Bible is not an inerrant book of facts. It is something much better: it is inspired, Spirit-breathed, and life-giving, calling us deeper into the mystery of God and the adventure of faith.

Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember, protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.

A couple weeks ago, before I went on vacation, we dug into the idea of belief—and whether faith is really about getting all the ideas in our head perfectly arranged. We looked at how fragile and complicated belief can be, and how faith is better understood as trust (in fact, that’s what the Greek word for faith is more accurately translated). Today, I want to explore what might actually lie at the heart of Christianity once we loosen our grip on belief-as-certainty and instead open ourselves to a faith that is curious and growing.

Because yes, the idea that the heart of Christianity is belief in certain ideas is a myth. 

Many Christians assume that the center of our religion is a set of doctrines. If you can recite the Nicene Creed without crossing your fingers, then you’ve got the heart of it. And yes, creeds have their place—they safeguard important truths and keep us grounded in the story of God. 

In fact, one of the gifts of the creeds is that they keep us from believing too little. Most heresies through history haven’t been wild inventions, but narrow partial truths. So, some early heresies insisted Jesus was so divine he only seemed to be a human in flesh. Or others believed he was a human who was adopted by God at baptism, but not fully divine. The truly orthodox and catholic belief is to hold together too competing truths—that Jesus is both fully human and fully divine—even though that might be challenging to conceive!

And there are numerous other examples of where the creeds (and good robust theology) push us beyond simplistic belief in one part of the faith to embracing tensions that baffle the mind even as they nurture the spirit: the idea that God is one being in a trinity or persons, or the idea that the bread that is pressed into your hands on Sunday is also the body of Christ, given for you. 

Far from being small checklists, the creeds widen the horizon of what we dare to believe.

But when Jesus himself was asked what mattered most, he didn’t list doctrines. He gave a double commandment: love God, and love your neighbor as yourself.

That’s why theologians through the centuries have insisted that love is the interpretive key to the Christian faith. Augustine famously put it this way: “If it seems to you that you have understood the divine scriptures, or any part of them, in such a way that by this understanding you do not build up this twin love of God and neighbor, then you have not understood them” It’s love—not intellectual assent—that sits at the heart.

And that’s why Christianity is best described not as a system of ideas, but as a way of life. In Acts, the earliest followers of Jesus weren’t called Christians yet—they were called people of “the Way.” A way is something you walk. Sometimes you walk with clarity, sometimes with questions, sometimes stumbling. But the point is not having perfect answers—the point is the journey of love.

So if we move belief as intellectual assent off of the center stage, what remains is this: trust in God, practiced through love. Worship that turns our hearts toward God. Compassion that meets our neighbor’s needs. Justice that repairs what is broken in our world. Humility that leaves us open to growth. The heart of Christianity isn’t belief—it’s love.

And maybe that’s the best news of all: you don’t have to have every question answered or every doctrine nailed down before you can live faithfully. You simply have to begin walking the way of love—trusting that God will meet you there.

Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember, protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.

Are you familiar with the metaphor that a worldview is kind of like a fish in the water? The water is so constant, so all-encompassing, that it becomes invisible to the fish. Our worldview works the same way. We swim in assumptions we rarely stop to question. A good deal of Christian Mythbusters is trying to get at those assumptions… and then asking if they are actually faithful to the best understanding of Scripture and theology.

One of those assumptions I’d like to try to break in today’s episode of Christian Mythbusters is the very idea of belief itself. We often treat belief like it’s the essence of faith—almost as though Christianity is a checklist of intellectual statements we either accept or reject. But the more time I’ve spent with scripture, with theology, and with actual lived experience, the more I’ve come to see that “belief” is a complex and often shaky thing. Faith, if it is real, has to be more than simply arranging the right ideas in our heads.

The idea that the goal of faith was to “believe all the right things” really started to unravel for me when I studied epistemology in graduate school. Epistemology is the study of how we form our beliefs. Talk about a fish in the water—I had never explicitly thought about how I form my beliefs! Beliefs are just what happen when you study the Bible, I thought… but it’s actually more complex than that. 

Philosophers, when they study epistemology, often describe several different ways people form and justify their beliefs. Empiricism is the idea that we primarily form beliefs from our experiences. Rationalists affirm experience but also believe we form belief through reason (using mathematics and logic, for example). Foundationalists believe that you build knowledge like a house, with basic, self-evident truths at the bottom and everything else resting on top of them. Coherentism is the view that a belief is justified not by resting on a single foundation, but by how well it fits together within a consistent web of other beliefs… and so and so forth. 

Fundamentalist Christians, like myself, on the other hand, tend to approach knowledge through the foundationalist approach to belief. They begin with a bedrock claim—usually that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God—and then build every other belief on top of that foundation. The danger is that if one brick is questioned, the whole structure feels threatened. Progressive Christians, on the other hand, often lean toward a coherentist or even pragmatic way of knowing, where truth is measured by how well beliefs fit together with scripture, tradition, reason, and lived experience. In my own experience, this approach makes space for humility and growth: beliefs can be revised as our understanding of God deepens, while the central thread of faith—love, justice, and worship—holds the web together.

So if Christianity isn’t mainly about belief, then what is it about? I’d suggest it’s about trust in God—with trust being what the Greek word for belief more accurately means. It’s about that and a willingness to give yourself to a way of life shaped by worship, compassion, and justice. Belief has its place, but it’s not the center. The center is love—love of God, love of neighbor, love that transforms the world. Next week I want to dig more deeply into where the heart of Christianity might lie, once we let go of the need for perfect belief and instead open ourselves to a sense of faith that is curious and growing. 

Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember, protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.

It’s been an interesting several days at my parish this week. At 1am early Saturday morning (or late Friday night, depending on how you think of these things) two young women stopped at the bottom of the stairs to the front door of our church. While one of them held up a phone to shoot a video, the other made her way up the stairs, unscrewed the wingnut holding the flagpole in place, and then removed the flagpole upon which hangs our parish pride flag. She carried it down the stairs and off the two women went.

As this is not the first time this has happened to us, we do have security cameras all around our church. So, we reached out to the police and also posted the security camera footage to social media. Then, some local news networks picked up the story and also ran it. The end result was that word got back to the young woman, who apparently lives somewhere on the east side of the state. Her father brought the flag back, along with a card from her that included an apology and a gift to the church. 

I don’t want to get more into the details of the flag theft itself or the experience trying to get it back, but there is one part of the experience that was almost more disheartening than someone stealing the pride flag from our church—and that is the response of some Christians on social media to the whole situation. So, today, I’d like to break the myth about how Christians can and should disagree with one another and try to articulate a better way.

While there were numerous Christians (and non-Christians) who reached out in support, and there were a small amount of more conservative Christians who acknowledged that they didn’t agree with our church’s theology but also said theft was not an appropriate answer, there was also a good chunk of Christians who cheered on the young women involved with the theft of our pride flag. They said things like:

Good for them, now I hope they burn it.

Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve!!

Beers on me. Doing the lords work

That's no church anyway, that's a sanctuary for the lost and confused

Always made me sick to see that flag.

And those are just the comments I’ll read on air. Another commentator responded to the whole social media uproar by writing, “The blatant hypocrisy from the self-proclaimed ‘Christians’ here is staggering. The loudest hate often comes from those who claim to follow Jesus.” 

As I read the comments, I kept thinking of a few different groups. I kept thinking of LGBTQIA+ people reading those comments, how the wounds they had already experienced from Christians were just being torn open again and again. I thought of those who have given up on the church reading those comments and feeling sure they had made the right decision. And I thought of non-Christians reading the comments and likely thinking that there was no good reason here to look into Christianity. 

I’m well aware that the stance my own church has taken with regard to our LGBTQIA+ siblings is not one the majority of Christians agree with… but I wish we could disagree differently. It certainly feels like many conservative Christians are hyper-fixated on their belief that homosexuality is a sin—so much so that apparently, they are comfortable with the sins of theft and destruction of property. 

I also want to be super clear about one part of our own response. Someone came against me for saying this young woman was hate-filled. That’s not something I ever said. What I said on WOOD TV8 for instance was, “even if this was a prank or joke, stuff like that contributes to a culture where LGBTQ people aren’t safe.”

I don’t think there was any intentional hate in the theft of our flag. It’s not even about hate. It’s about respect, including respect for those with whom you disagree. It’s about love, being able to see something differently but to express it in a way that still exhibits the love of Jesus for the other. And it’s about safety and, sadly enough, LGBTQIA+ people hear Christians talk about them and simply do not feel safe. And that’s not OK. Christians, we must do better.

Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember, protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.

Today is an odd and somewhat unsettling confluence of events. It is the 80th Anniversary of the day our country dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, bringing World War II to an end. At the same time, August 6 is also one of the major feasts of the church—the Feast of the Transfiguration of Christ upon the mountain.

As I’ve been preparing for a service my church is doing tonight at 6pm to commemorate both events, I keep returning to the disturbing juxtaposition of these two days. And so, today I’d like to step back from Mythbusting and instead just reflect a bit on the mountain and the mushroom cloud.

The Feast of the Transfiguration commemorates the day when Christ ascended Mount Tabor with Peter, James, and John and was transfigured before them, his face shining like the sun and his clothes becoming dazzling white. The ancient lawgiver Moses appeared with Jesus, along with the great prophet Elijah. They discussed Jesus’ impending departure in Jerusalem—his suffering and death. A voice came from the cloud, commanding the disciples to listen to Jesus. Then, just as suddenly, it was over, and the disciples were left alone with him.

I can’t shake the curious similarities between the two events. In both the bombing of Hiroshima and the Transfiguration, blinding light blazed forth. The light of the bomb was profoundly destructive—immediately killing between 70,000–80,000 people, and eventually claiming up to 166,000 lives through radiation and injuries. Almost all of them were civilians, including an estimated 38,000 children.

The light of Christ’s Transfiguration, in contrast, was meant to reveal the divine glory. But those who unleashed the horrors of nuclear warfare were Christians, those who follow the Jesus from whom divine light poured forth. President Truman was a devout Baptist. Secretary of War Henry Stimson came from a family of clergymen.

Truman believed dropping the bomb was the only way to end the war and avoid even greater loss of life through a land invasion. Still, it haunted him. In a speech after the war, he said, “You know the most terrible decision a man ever had to make was made by me at Potsdam... to loose the most terrible of all destructive forces for the wholesale slaughter of human beings.”

Many believed the bombing was necessary. But I don’t know how to weigh the lives of soldiers fighting in a war against those of innocent civilians. I don’t know how to measure the lives of those trapped in the machinery of war against the children who were vaporized in a flash.

So even as I celebrate Christ’s Transfiguration, I must acknowledge that followers of Christ have often twisted divine light into a justification for destruction. The light meant to illuminate God’s love becomes consumed by the fires of war, hate, and violence.

At Hiroshima, humanity revealed its capacity for unimaginable violence. On Mount Tabor, God revealed the Son—who chose the path of suffering love. Perhaps this is part of the divine mystery: that to save a violent and broken humanity, God descended into the depths of human violence. And as Christ carried the violence of our human race deep into the heart of God, somehow God’s love can perhaps heal our violent ways… if we will let him.

Maybe what we’re left with is the voice—the voice from the cloud that said, “Listen to him.” The disciples didn’t understand it at the time. They expected glory and triumph (to Make Israel Great Again), not suffering and death. But eventually they came to understand. And when they did, they took up their own crosses and walked the same path.

If you’re a follower of Jesus, I hope you’ll spend some time listening to the voice of Christ today, asking what Jesus is calling you to do. Maybe it’s to support nuclear disarmament. Maybe it’s to learn more about the suffering caused by war… and then act. Or maybe it’s simply to see your enemies more clearly—not as villains but as fellow broken children of God. Maybe that’s where the light starts: in our ability to see each other with mercy, dignity, and grace.

Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember, protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.

Last week I told you a bit about the book my parish read last month as a part of our summer book group: The New Asceticism: Sexuality, Gender, and the Quest for God by Anglican priest and renowned theologian Sarah Coakley. As I told you, Dr. Coakley’s goal in the book is to reach past the traditional divides between “conservatives” and “liberals,” to suggest that the approach of neither is truly satisfactory and to encourage a different way of engaging some of the most pressing theological issues of our time.

After she noted the impossibility of the conservative approach of applying the Bible literally (because no matter what, everyone has some verses they contextualize and interpret and some they do not) and then likewise pointing out the problem of the liberal approach of simply unmooring entirely from Scripture and tradition, she suggested a new third way. 

In that third way, she suggested that both liberals and conservatives would do well to dive deeply into the ascetical tradition of the church to find a better way to wrestle with and engage contemporary questions about sexuality. 

The ascetical tradition of the church is the ancient Christian practice of spiritual training—much like how an athlete trains their body. It’s about intentionally shaping your habits, thoughts, and desires so they line up more closely with God’s will. And when that lens is applied to questions surrounding sexuality, interesting points rise to the fore. 

When we approach sexuality through the lens of ascetical theology, we move beyond debates about rules or libertinism and instead begin to ask, “What kind of person am I becoming through my desires? Are my longings drawing me into deeper union with God—or away from that union?” Coakley insists that Christian maturity requires patience, prayer, and humility—what she calls the “long obedience” of contemplative waiting. It's not about quick moral answers or rigid categories, but rather about becoming attuned, over time, to how God might be shaping us through even our most intimate experiences.

In this sense, sexuality is neither a problem to be fixed nor a freedom to be celebrated uncritically. It is, instead, part of the larger spiritual terrain through which we journey toward God. And that means we need prayerful discernment, not just policy positions; vulnerability before God, not just identity labels. Desire must be held in the crucible of divine contemplation, not resolved too quickly.

So, the myth that Christians must either prudishly repressive or liberally unmoored misses the point. The truth is more demanding and more beautiful: God desires to transform our whole selves—body, mind, and heart—into vessels of love and holiness. And that transformation happens not through ideology, but through the slow, sacred work of spiritual practice.

And that means everyone has work to do. The liberal answer of insisting upon complete freedom for sexuality is inadequate because it doesn’t invite theological reflection upon the way that desire can at times be destructive and at other times salvific. 

And the conservative answer of rigidly excluding LGBTQ people means that conservative Christians are missing out. They are missing in seeing how the holy and self-giving love in queer relationships can teach them more about what Godly love looks like. 

Rowan Williams points this out in an essay called The Body’s Grace, where he acknowledges the traditional understanding of opposite-sex relationships (where marriage exists primarily to provide an appropriate setting for sex and the procreation of children). As Williams notes, the problem with that imagined ideal is that “the facts of the situation are that an enormous number of ‘sanctioned’ unions are a framework for violence and human destructiveness on a

disturbing scale: sexual union is not delivered from moral danger and ambiguity by

satisfying a formal socio-religious criterion.”

Thus, Williams notes that queer relationships “poses the question of what the meaning of desire is in itself, not considered as instrumental to some other process (the peopling of the world).” To put it another way, queer relationships experience sex without the same assumed instrumentality of straight relationships and, thus, can help straight people better understand what a graced and embodied desire might look like, particularly one that is healed by God’s grace and focused on the flourishing of the other. 

Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember, protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today. 

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.

I’ve talked before about the summer book group I lead at my church, with us taking a different book each month that has been on my “to read” list and diving into it. The book we read for this month’s book study was a theological doozy: The New Asceticism: Sexuality, Gender, and the Quest for God by Anglican priest and theologian Sarah Coakley.

Dr. Coakley is an absolutely brilliant theologian. She studied at both Harvad and Cambridge and, in her career as a professor, has taught at Lancaster University, Oxford, Harvard, and Princeton. She was the first woman appointed to the prestigious post of the Norris–Hulse Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge, the position she retired from in 2018. 

As you might expect, the book was not exactly light reading. However, it was stunningly good. Her goal in the book was to reach past the traditional divides between “conservatives” and “liberals,” to suggest that the approach of neither is truly satisfactory and to encourage a different way of engaging some of the most pressing theological issues of our time.

With that book fresh on the mind, this week I’d like to try to see if Dr. Coakley can help me break the myth of the divide between conservative and liberal Christians. 

In general, she notes that conservative Christians tend to take recourse either to literal interpretations of biblical injunctions or, in the case of Roman Catholics, to the teaching of the church. The difficulty is that those supposed biblical injunctions (whether with regard to sex, sexuality, divorce, or any other question) are rarely as simple as they appear.

I would suggest that this is abundantly clear in the willingness of most evangelicals to engage in careful interpretation with Jesus’ apparent forbidding of divorce after marriage, suggesting that context helps us understand what he said differently for our own tie. However, that same interpretive work is rarely done with regard to Biblical texts that condemn the things they want to condemn or support the things they like to support. And so, those who are outside the church see Christians as a bunch of hypocrites who clearly pick and choose what verses to follow literally and which ones to interpret differently. 

So far, none of this is likely surprising for most of you to hear coming from my mouth as a progressive Episcopal priest.

However, Dr. Coakley also suggests that mainstream literal Christianity often provides insufficient responses to the pressing questions of our time. In her words, “Liberals tend to suggest, overbearingly, that they know better (in light of modern psychological theory) than anything that the Bible or tradition or authority could disclose to them.” 

The difficulty with this common liberal approach, in my view, is that it simply unroots the work of theology from any authority beyond modern sciences. It not only entirely unmoors it from a sustained reading of Scripture but also sets theology adrift in culture with no attention to the insights of two thousand years of Christian tradition…. And wrestling… and questioning. 

There must be a better way. 

Next week, I’ll talk more about the suggestion that Dr. Coakley offers. But for now, let me give you a preview. In her book she suggests that both sides should look afresh at the ascetical tradition of the church. This is the ancient Christian practice of spiritual training—much like how an athlete trains their body. It’s about intentionally shaping your habits, thoughts, and desires so they line up more closely with God’s will. And this is something both conservatives and liberals should believe in.

She suggests that traditional Christian askesis actually might be able to bring conservatives and liberals together in a sustained conversation about what it means to have the love and teachings of Jesus shape and mold the desires within us towards holy ends.

We’ll talk about that next week. Until then…

Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember, protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today. 

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.

I thought last week was my last Pride-themed edition of Christian Mythbusters. Not so much. Last week the local county Republican party published an article denouncing our local Pride festival, calling it adult-entertainment, suggesting it was dangerous to children, and saying it should be held indoors and behind an 18+ doorway. 

Which is just ridiculous and offensive. So here I am, apparently with a few more myths to break.

As much as the Ottawa GOP apparently wants to believe that a drag show is always adult entertainment, just saying it is over and over again in your newsletter doesn’t make it so. 

Perhaps some help from the dictionary can assist here. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines drag as “entertainment in which performers caricature or challenge gender stereotypes (as by dressing in clothing that is stereotypical of another gender, by using exaggeratedly gendered mannerisms, or by combining elements of stereotypically male and female dress) and often wear elaborate or outrageous costumes.” 

The article included pictures of some of the drag performers, with an expression of alarm that children are there. However, the performers are not nude. They are not even scantily clad. The drag queen’s rear end in the photo they highlight is actually covered with tights in addition to her glittery costume. One wonders if they have walked the boardwalk in Grand Haven recently, because there is far more skin on display on the boardwalk than was ever displayed by performers at the pride festival.

They seem unable to draw the distinction between medium and content. Drag is a medium of performance that can have a variety of content suitable to different ages. In the same way that all movies are not R-rated, not all drag performances are inherently adult-themed in content. The medium is simply performance art that bends gender expressions and expectations. 

One does not have to read that far behind the lines to discern what their actual objection is: the fact that the performers are dressed in clothes from a gender other than the one they were presumably born into… and those performers are dancing. Not pole dancing. Just… dancing.  

It is precisely this kind of language—particularly raising claims of danger to children—that continues to put not only drag performers at risk but also trans and other gender non-conforming individuals. By portraying people who are not gender conforming as dangerous to children they dehumanize and vilify anyone who is not gender conforming, insisting that this sort of thing simply has no place in the public square.

And when an official political party in our community takes up these attacks, they embolden other forms of transphobic hate. I wish the leadership of the Ottawa GOP would spend some time listening to the experience of trans and gender non-conforming people. I can show you screenshots of the vile, hateful, and violent attacks on our festival on social media. 

And what breaks my heart is that so many of these people claim to be followers of Jesus. I consider myself friends with several pastors in the area and I cannot imagine they would be encouraging their congregants to treat LGBGTQIA+ people this way. 

Because kids are in danger, absolutely. Kids are in danger from hateful rhetoric that says it’s dangerous to break gender norms or have a different sexual orientation. That’s why 43% of LGBTQIA youth considered attempting suicide. It’s why one in five attempted it in the past year. 

Kids are in danger, but it’s not from the Grand Haven Pride Festival and our drag shows. It’s from a culture that marginalizes, excludes, and attacks those who are different. And kids deserve to be protected from that. 

Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember, protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today. 

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith.

Well, it’s the last Wednesday in Pride Month, so I have one more edition of Christian Mythbusters during which I’d like to break the myths surrounding the far-too-often hostile relationship between those who claim to follow Jesus and the LGBTQIA+ community.

The Grand Haven Pride festival earlier this month was a fantastic event. It was the third festival and I’m grateful that the festival organizers let my own church, St. John’s Episcopal in Grand Haven, begin that day by hosting a Pride-themed community worship service. We were joined in financial support by our siblings at the United Methodist Church of the Dunes in Grand Haven and even had the blessing of having the Associate Pastor at First Presbyterian Grand Haven, the Rev. Kristine Aragon-Bruce, as the preacher for the day. 

The love and joy of the day will feed be for quite a while. But I will also be haunted by some of the ugliness in what led up to the day. 

As with any other festival or event, we posted details and invitation on social media, including our own local city’s Facebook Group: Grand Haven Informed. And while many people expressed enthusiasm, even sharing how proud they were to see an event like this in Grand Haven, others responded with… different emotions. 

People didn’t just disagree with the festival or the values surrounding Pride month. They attacked it, they attacked the organizers, they even attacked me personally for my role in it, saying some pretty hateful things about all of us. We saved screenshots of the most vicious comments, so we would have information to give to the police if any violence occurred, but thankfully the day went off largely without a hitch. A few people showed up with signs to protest, but everyone pretty much ignored them until they gave up and went away.

It will never cease to amaze me how people can claim to follow Jesus, the Lord who taught us that all the law and prophets hang on love of God and love of neighbor, and then call other people who disagree with them vile, scum, and an abomination. Truth be told, if I hadn’t found The Episcopal Church and escaped the death-dealing heterosexist and transphobic interpretation of Scripture I was raised with, I doubt I’d even be a Christian anymore.

But I’ll tell you why I am still a Christian—a big part of it is the numerous faithful gay, trans, and queer Christians I know. All of these people who are surrounded by so much hate and yet respond over and over again by living their life according to the teachings of Jesus and the way of love.

I think of Dan and Paul, who were the first couple to welcome my wife and I to the Cathedral community in Nashville when we lived in Tennessee. I think of Paul patting me on the hand, telling me he didn’t need me to welcome him into church—he’d been here forty years, he was the one welcoming me. I think of Greg, who is the single greatest evangelist for Jesus Christ my parish has ever known, who even though he is a single gay man in his sixties has adopted numerous people into his life, being a mentor to so many. And I think of Sadie, dear Sadie, the trans woman at my parish who has suffered so much abuse every time she tries just to get a job and earn a living, but who shows up on Sunday full of smiles and hugs for everyone.

If these people (and many more) can continue to show up and be in the church, and follow Jesus, who am I to get discouraged? Because together, arm in arm, joined in advocacy and fellowship, we will continue to fight until the entire church is a safe place for all of God’s children. 

Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember, protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.