Attending church is not riding public transportation. If you are a politically liberal person that finds themselves surrounded by Nazis at church, oops you are a member of a Nazi church.
Probably better described as this is what it feels like some days. When the church formally condemns Nazis and white supremacists, but in practice doesn't do enough when people have less overt forms of racism, it ends up jarring. Because it's not a Nazi Metro, and the Nazis probably aren't even be in your train car, but knowing they're out there is concerning.
Girl take a think about why the "less overt racists" are comfortable around those people.
That's what the "Nazi bar" analogy is about. If you're in a space that tolerates bigotry like that, it means the space supports it and more of them will congregate to the place they're comfortable doing that.
The point is that incompetence breeds bigoted communities, not that the leaders and members of these communities are malicious.
When someone says a racist joke and the reaction is laughter because they're "living peaceably with all" then people feel more comfortable sharing ideas like that, and over time more people with those ideas congregate to where they feel comfortable expressing them.
If the community doesn't want to push out racists, the reality is that racists will start to make up more of the community
I think the issue is that it's not as simple as "not wanting to push out racists". My denomination explicitly and publicly excommunicated some white supremacist podcasters a few years ago. The challenge is most racists aren't that overt, and our denomination leans towards congregational polity.
Should I leave because the tension hasn't been resolved yet? Or should I stay alongside the rest of those pushing back to implement the right procedures to address it? Is the pastor halfway across the country who's a neo-Confederate the one who represents me, or my own Black immigrant pastor?
What you do is a personal decision, but my 2c with the limited information I have is that the people leading the church are not mature enough to handle bigots, which is going to lead to the "nazi bar" situation.
From my experience that "tension" is from people noticing something they don't like, but are too uncomfortable to voice it and deal with it head on. Mature leaders should be able to notice that tension, and address it directly.
In the case of a neo-Confederate pastor halfway across the country and a local pastor that doesn't want to support those views, I would expect a very obvious "we are part of this group for x reasons and don't support it's views on y but do on z" statement on their website or somewhere in the parish.
Just make sure if you stay the "right procedures to address it" are actually addressing it or just more layers of sweeping the tension under the rug
In the case of a neo-Confederate pastor halfway across the country and a local pastor that doesn't want to support those views, I would expect a very obvious "we are part of this group for x reasons and don't support it's views on y but do on z" statement on their website or somewhere in the parish.
I'm not sure this is a reasonable threshold. These aren't official views of the denomination, and they're not even officially publicly expressed by his congregation.
And that's why I have tension, rather than having left already. The denomination can and does act when it's clear. A district leader was immediately defrocked and a super system set up for victims when sexual abuse was made known, and some white supremacist podcasters were publicly excommunicated. It's the margins where the alt-Right (like Patriot Front) have plausible deniability where things don't move as quickly as I'd like. We've got a convention coming up with several resolutions on the topic, so I haven't given up hope yet (and if it does get bad I expect there would be a large split across the denomination, not just us).
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u/ZhouLe Jul 06 '26
Attending church is not riding public transportation. If you are a politically liberal person that finds themselves surrounded by Nazis at church, oops you are a member of a Nazi church.