Stop Conserving Your Influence

What Liz Cheney Can Teach American Evangelicalism

Some people in her own party want Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) to lose her membership on committees and even her place within her party’s conference in the United States House of Representatives because she won’t “move on” from her belief that the attempts to overturn the last election—leading up to last January’s attack on the Capitol—are a clear and present danger to democracy.

Whatever you think of Cheney (as you can imagine, I am a fan), there’s a larger point here—one that applies to many evangelical Christians in a thousand different situations in their churches and communities: At what point will you stop conserving your influence?

I thought about this conundrum last week while reading the transcripts of a New York Times podcast debate between Charlie Sykes of The Bulwark and Rich Lowry of National Review, both of whom are conservatives that admire Congresswoman Cheney’s integrity and conviction. Where they disagree is on whether Cheney has squandered her influence within her party in ways that will prevent her from solving these problems in the future.

“As a politician, you have to be aware of where your voters are,” Lowry said. “Doesn’t mean that you pander to them or play to their worst instincts or always say yes to anything they want. But to live is to maneuver. Especially if you’re a politician.” Lowry said that Cheney’s refusal to back down on these matters wouldn’t be helpful. After all, if you’re not at the table, you can’t have influence.

Sykes noted that this idea is a common rationalization and that it’s circular. People who want others to remain silent or to go along with any sort of craziness often “tell themselves that they need to stay in the room so they can sound the alarm, but they refuse to sound the alarm so they can stay in the room.”

When I read this, I immediately thought of how often I have sat in the surreal situation of a television debate where the person I was debating gave a sad shrug and agreed with me off camera but went right back to saying the opposite as soon as the lights and cameras came back on. I can think of people I’ve known in Christian ministry who told me, behind closed doors, how disgusted they were with a politician they deemed to be immoral but then, in public, praised the same politician as a man of integrity. The same thing is true all through the government.

The argument is that we need grownups in the room. As leadership expert John Maxwell once put it, “Being one step ahead makes you a leader. … Being fifty steps ahead could make you a martyr.” People in the vortex of craziness—whether in a workplace, a church, or a government—often tell themselves they have to play along with things they find insane to maintain their long-term ability to keep bad things from happening. “If I’m not here, someone worse will be,” they reason.

There’s a kernel of truth there, of course. I do a facepalm every time I hear of a young pastor, after just arriving at a church, removing the American flag from the sanctuary or trying to excommunicate everybody who hasn’t attended in a year. “Even if you are right, these are not your biggest problems right now,” I would tell that person. “And this is the wrong time to take them on.”

Daniel in Babylon was willing to go the lions’ den over the demand that he worship the king, but when it came to eating the rich delicacies of the king’s table, he prudently posed alternatives instead. Jesus didn’t believe he owed the temple tax but paid it “so that we may not cause offense” (Matt. 17:27). The apostle Paul circumcised Timothy so that the younger man’s Gentile heritage wouldn’t be a stumbling block to the mission (Acts 16:3).

The problem is that there comes a point where one moves from “choosing battles” to having one’s conscience seared. Peter’s refusal to eat with the Gentiles was, Paul wrote, “not acting in line with the truth of the gospel” (Gal. 2:14). Almost every time someone acts out of fear of getting kicked out of what C. S. Lewis called the “Inner Ring,” the person reasons that this is just “working within the system” or “living to fight another day.”

Whatever you think of Liz Cheney (did I mention that I’m a fan?), no one can seriously suggest that she was a radical revolutionary inattentive to maneuvering. She twice supported the president she now criticizes and voted with him over 95 percent of the time. She had the esteem of her colleagues such that she was elected to the third-highest rank in her party’s House hierarchy. She is a grownup. She was in all the rooms.

There came a line, though, that she could not cross—when she was asked to support things she believed to be contrary to her oath to the Constitution. What was she supposed to wait for? If attacking the Capitol to stop the counting of electoral votes is not the moment she should speak out, what exactly is that moment?

Martin Luther King Jr., in his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” was responding to a group of “white moderate” pastors who had criticized his nonviolent action in the city as doing more harm than good by pressing progress so fast that it caused backlash.

As I’ve mentioned here before, sociologist Peter Berger explained in the same time period how this happens. He showed that a key predictor of whether a pastor would speak out on the injustice of Jim Crow was whether that church was in a building program or a major church growth campaign.

And contrary to the idea of biding one’s time and building one’s influence in order to do the right thing later, Berger found that the longer a pastor served at his church, the less likely that pastor was to challenge Jim Crow.

On the way up, we tell ourselves, “I don’t have the platform yet to speak; when I get one, I will.” After we arrive wherever we were heading, we tell ourselves, “I have too much to lose; if I am not at the table, they will lose my voice.” We think this is the voice of prudence inside us, but maybe more often than not, it’s just ambition mixed with fear.

Not only are the internal rationalizations circular, but so are the external circumstances. Whether in a church, a ministry, a workplace, a city council, or a neighborhood association, we tell ourselves, “I am going to live with this little bit of craziness so that I will be here to stop major craziness.”

Yet while those crazy things are happening, someone watching all this is wondering, “Am I the only one who sees that this is crazy?” When everyone else acts like the crazy situation is normal, that observer shrugs and concludes, “It must just be me.”

And then the craziness becomes the new normal. And folks “conserve their influence” for when it’s needed, for whatever is just a step crazier. I’ve been there, and that way leads to nowhere good.

Sooner or later, one’s influence isn’t conserved but hoarded. Sooner or later, one is operating not out of prudent patience but from a seared conscience.

Stop counting on the grownups in the room to solve the problems. Stop imagining that the crises erupting around us will settle down on their own.

Sometimes the grownup in the room is the only one who can point out that the room is on fire.

The Unbearable Sadness of Midnight Mass

Note: I give some spoilers here.

While on a series of long plane rides last week, I found myself checking out the Netflix series Midnight Mass. I expected to get the gist and then stop, but before I knew it, I was watching several episodes at once. I found the series narratively gripping, creepy as can be, and crushingly sad. By sad I don’t mean melancholy or tragic. I’m an Enneagram 4, so that’s the kind of thing I like. I mean sad.

The series is about a Catholic church in an economically depressed fishing community on an island. An old monsignor that serves the church for decades disappears and is replaced by a young priest. Miracles start happening. (I rolled my eyes several times at the common mistakes that show up in stories written by people who don’t have much contact with religion, such as a really Catholic parish with really Protestant music, a judgmental church lady who narrates her every action like a supervillain with a concordance, etc.)

The show gets darker and darker until it’s revealed that the young priest is actually the old priest—that on a trip to Israel he slipped into an ancient ruin where he was attacked by a vampire and became one himself.

What was disturbing was not so much the horror of it all (although that was more intense than what I usually prefer) but the way that every bit of that horror was explained in terms of the Christian story. The vampires were described as angels—complete with the explanation of how every encounter with an angel in Scripture necessitates the warning to not be afraid. The drinking of human blood was explained in terms of the Lord’s Table, even quoting Jesus’ words in John 6 to justify the creatures’ killing and consuming unwitting human beings.

Religious studies scholar Matthew Cressler writes in The Atlantic that the series ought to make Christians uncomfortable. He notes that the series writer and producer Mike Flanagan, who grew up as a Catholic altar boy, denies that the show is anti-Christian or anti-Catholic, saying it merely critiques cultic thinking. Cressler isn’t convinced. He sees in the series a critique of institutional religion—summed up, for instance, in the horrors of the sexual abuse crisis. Cressler particularly notes how the horror here is thought to be good. The vampire is an angel. The cannibalism is the Eucharist, etc.

Overall, I am less persuaded by Cressler that this series is an insightful critique of the abuses of institutional religion, though such critiques are indeed often warranted and needed. When dealing with religion, it becomes overly “preachy” in the way that an anti-religious, vampire-horror version of God’s Not Dead 2 would.

The series makes me sad not because it mischaracterizes what I believe to be the Good News or because it caricatures the church as consisting of only idiotic dupes or predatory frauds. What makes me sad is that many people have experienced this kind of religion. The Scriptures and structures of the people of Christ—meant to embody the kingdom of an infinitely good and wise and just Messiah—have been used in those cases to abuse power, to cover up evil, and to pursue blood lust.

Yet maybe what makes me the saddest is this: Perhaps the scariest horror trope employed in this series is that of the forgiveness of sins. The evil figures here use the concept of absolution almost exactly the way the apostle Paul condemns it as slanderous in Romans 3:5–8. And, at the same time, those desperately seeking forgiveness, the cleansing of guilty consciences, find behind the veil only those who want to devour them.

I winced at this because of how many times over the past several years I have seen this very thing: the greatest truth in the world—that God forgives sins and embraces sinners—used to empower predatory people to prey again and to silence their victims.

In the series, the characters often mention the Serenity Prayer (controversially attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr): “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Like the Scriptures and the sacraments, this too is weaponized to justify vampirism.

But maybe it also contains something we need to hear after this bleak picture of religion.

Discovering that what seems to be an angel is, in fact, a devil is of no surprise to biblical Christianity. Throughout the Bible are warnings that there are spirits who seek to do us harm. And throughout the Bible are warnings that we can view these principalities and powers as liberators rather than what they truly are—enslavers (Gal. 4:8–9). Jesus warned us that those with fangs would seek to go where the blood is and that the church should expose and defeat them (John 10:1, 10–15).

This same Jesus tells us that false, counterfeit kingdoms don’t negate the existence of the true Kingdom. That the existence of antichrists doesn’t mean there is no true Christ. At the same time, we shouldn’t shrug these dark realities away as though using the name of Christ for horrific behavior is “just the way it is” or “a few bad apples.” God forbid.

We should pray for the grace to believe the angels, the courage to fight the devils, and the wisdom to know the difference.

This week’s submission comes from reader Corbey Dukes, who writes that these are the twelve books he would choose to take with him to a desert island:

1. The Longest Silence, by Thomas McGuane. Great writing about fly-fishing. Very funny and insightful.

2. Fly Fishing in Salt Water, by Lefty Kreh. He almost invented the sport of fly-fishing in salt water. Since I seldom travel without a fly rod, there is a good chance I will have some gear with me when I crash on the island. He was a very good writer, and the book is entertaining.

3. City of God, by Augustine. Chosen over Plato’s Republic because it’s Christian and longer. For my “lost-in-thought nights.”

4. The Happy Isles of Oceania, by Paul Theroux. He is the best travel author, and I might as well have a book close to the situation I am in. Funny, insightful, and will give me some clues about anyone I encounter.

5. Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo. If I must explain this to anyone, it is because they have not read it. And with the unabridged edition on an island, I will feel no need to hurry through the chapters on the sewers of Paris.

6. Santa Biblia / Holy Bible. The Bible, of course, and might as well keep my Spanish up.

7. Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad. Should be required reading for all missionaries and will be helpful if I start having ideas of “bringing the light” to the island.

8. The Divine Conspiracy, by Dallas Willard. Complex writing, and I will have time to dig into it. Also, it has enough inner focus that I will not feel guilty for not converting the flora and fauna of the island.

9. Pilgrim’s Progress, by John Bunyan. I love books that hold up over centuries. He exposes our inner struggles and faith journey in a more entertaining way than Mere Christianity (which was hard to leave behind). It’s so on the mark that it could have been written yesterday.

10. The Crossing, by Cormac McCarthy. I thought about cheating and including the whole three-volume Border Series, but honesty compels me to choose. This novel is beautifully written. Boyd’s travel with the wolf is a page-turner, and then searching for his brother—haunting. Wow.

11. Absalom, Absalom!, by William Faulkner. I am from the South, and I love this book.

12. Islands in the Stream, by Ernest Hemingway. I enjoy Hemingway. Although an unfinished book and somewhat choppy, the chapter of Davy fighting the marlin is excellent. And, well … island.

What do you think?

If you could have one bookshelf with you to last the rest of your life, what volumes would you choose? Send me a picture with as much or as little explanation of your Desert Island Bookshelf choices as you would like.

Or send me your Desert Island Playlist of 10 or fewer songs (excluding, for now, hymns or worship songs).

Send either or both to questions@russellmoore.com

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Onward,
Russell Moore