Dr. David Gushee, courtesy Mercer University

The editors of Religion News Service suggest that I need to introduce myself to my new readers. Who am I, and why am I writing a new column called “Christians, conflict and change”? 

Here’s one way to get started: I am a Baptist minister and Christian ethics professor in the heart of the South. I am an evangelical Christian who found the transformative events of last week – Confederate flags taken down, repudiations of racism, upholding of the Affordable Care Act, legalizing of gay marriage – to my liking.  

That certainly makes me an unusual southern evangelical, but not a solitary one. I just represent a minority perspective. About 1/5 of evangelicals can be classified as progressive (left) in their politics or social ethics, and about 1/3 qualify as moderate (center).  Half are conservatives. They get most of the attention, and are especially influential in GOP politics.  

I think it is fair to describe me as a center-left evangelical Christian. On abortion, I am conservative. On economics, I am centrist. On war, I favor just peacemaking but am not a pacifist. I oppose the death penalty. On marriage, I think it’s supposed to be a covenant for life. I also think gay people should be treated according to the same rules and with the same dignity as everyone else.  

I haven’t just stumbled incoherently to my views. I have thought through them as a Christian ethics professor for 22 years, a Christian minister for 28 years, and a Christian for 37 years. I have enjoyed/endured a long career among Christians facing conflict and change.  

I was raised Catholic in northern Virginia. It didn’t work for me at the time, though I appreciate it much more now. My wife is a faithful Catholic, and I attend Mass with her most weekends in addition to my membership and service at First Baptist Church in Decatur, Georgia. Indeed, I am deeply affected by the Catholic consistent ethic of life. The most faithful expositor of that tradition on the US Catholic intellectual scene today is my friend Charles Camosy of Fordham. You should read his stuff.  

I stumbled into a Southern Baptist congregation in 1978 and was converted in a powerful “born-again” experience four days later. Two weeks after that I was baptized, and two weeks after that, apparently due to a lack of better alternatives, I was elected president of my youth group. This set me on a course of leadership that carried me into Southern Baptist local church ministry and eventually teaching at two Southern Baptist schools. 

But if you know much about Southern Baptists you will know that they are very politically conservative and, well, I am not. I was happy to make a move to Mercer University in 2007. Here I can be southern, and Baptist, without being Southern Baptist, and that works better. If you are hopelessly confused at this point, well, sorry about that. Religious politics is messy.

My paradigm of how to go about being a Christian public intellectual was established for me by Reinhold Niebuhr, a leading Christian thinker from the 1930s through the 1960s whom I studied in seminary. He wrote big scholarly books as well as shorter books for public consumption. He wrote weekly opinion columns. He engaged government as a consultant and sometimes activist. He preached or spoke somewhere most every week. And he taught classes at my doctoral alma mater, Union Theological Seminary in New York. 

I am no Niebuhr. But I have been pursuing that kind of career paradigm ever since my career began in the early 1990s. My most influential books are called “Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust” (1993), “Kingdom Ethics” (2003), “The Future of Faith in American Politics” (2008), “The Sacredness of Human Life” (2013), and “Changing Our Mind” (2014). There are twenty altogether, if you count a new book called “Evangelical Ethics” due in August. You can find a complete list at my website.  I do a lot of writing, speaking, consulting, preaching, and activism. Mine is an exhausting but deeply meaningful vocation.

Prior to recent highly visible work in favor of full acceptance and equality for LGBT persons in church and society, my most controversial prior activist campaigns involved climate change and torture. In both cases I wrote major documents for the evangelical community calling for concerted action to stop climate change and to stop US-sponsored torture. In those efforts I learned all about “Christians, conflict and change.” I think my position has been vindicated in both cases, but certainly there is no national or Christian consensus on these issues even today.  

We live in interesting times. The number of self-identified Christians is declining. The dominance of Christians in public life is likewise declining. Many Christians find themselves appalled by social changes like the acceptance of gay marriage. Conflict between Christians and secular folks, and between conservative and more progressive Christians, is endemic – and angry, and painful. I deal with it every day.  

One evidence that I am not a down-the-line conservative is that I think that many of the social changes that have happened in the United States since, say, 1963, have been salutary. I think of movement toward the fuller and fuller inclusion of more and more people as equals in the national community – women, people of color, people with disabilities, millions of immigrants, people of various faiths, and now LGBT people. I am very worried over a tendency toward reactionary responses to these changes among many of my fellow Christians.

I am less sanguine about the deterioration of marriage, the routinization of abortion, and the rise of income inequality. I also worry over our massive, costly, and often unaccountable national security bureaucracy.  

That’s probably enough for now. Think of me as a dissenting center-left southern evangelical Christian. I have orthodox theological beliefs but some unorthodox political beliefs from my tribe’s perspective. If you read along with me in days to come, you will see what I mean.  

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