I imagine the after-hours activities for new student orientation at most colleges in the mid-1990s included drunken frat parties and breaking into campus rec centers for late-night swims and pickup basketball games. At my small, Christian liberal arts university, it involved simulating persecution and preparing for martyrdom.
The Soviet Union had fallen, but stories of communist crackdowns on religious liberty still shaped our evangelical worldview. We read books like God’s Smuggler, which tells the story of Brother Andrew carrying contraband beyond the Iron Curtain, where owning a Bible was forbidden. We admired those who valued their strongly held Christian convictions over obeying the law.
Stories of missionaries making harrowing choices out of faithfulness to God permeated our lives, even as the global landscape of persecution against Christians was changing. Our leaders, many of whom came of age during Soviet crackdowns on organized Christianity, continually fed us some version of the question, “What would you do if the government demanded you renounce Christ?”
During my orientation week at East Texas Baptist University (ETBU), we were given a chance to practice our answers.
It wasn’t an official event, but word spread that a special time of worship would be happening later that night. At conservative Christian universities like ours, these “spontaneous” gatherings of singing and prayer had a way of emerging from thin air, offering a particular kind of social capital to those who showed up.
I showed up.
We gathered in the dark basement of a historic chapel on campus. The room was lit by votive candles.
An upperclass student began the service by telling us about small, clandestine house churches meeting around the world under threat of harm and even death. He asked us to keep these believers in our hearts as we sang our worship songs.
But it was more than a prayer request. It was a setup.
Somewhere around the ninth round of “Lord, I Lift Your Name on High,” the doors burst open and someone yelled from up the stairs, “What’s going on down there?” The scene played out with masked men discovering our “secret” worship service and demanding we stop, or else.
Now, listen. Most of us knew instantly what was going on. We had grown up in evangelical youth groups and were accustomed to melodramatic scenes staged by earnest young adults who had mistaken their theater dreams for a call to Christian ministry.
Still, some among us took the threat seriously and chose to keep singing. As the room (once again) crescendoed with “You came from heaven to earth, to show the way,” and the faux sign-language interpretation grew ever more intense, the masked intruders entered the room and demanded the leaders stop.
They walked among us, questioning what we were doing, focusing their attention on a skinny, especially fervent kid. “We are worshipping our Lord Jesus Christ and aren’t ashamed,” he shouted. (Confession: I’m only now realizing he may have been in on the act.)
After a back-and-forth about how Christian worship wasn’t allowed—in the basement of a chapel at East Texas Baptist University, mind you—one of the masked men shouted the kid down, shaming him for believing in a myth. As the show escalated, he demanded that we all renounce Jesus.
And then he pulled out a gun.
A water gun, but still. He attempted to mock and douse the skinny kid into apostasy, but the young man stood firm.
And scene.
Show Time
In that basement, we were rehearsing for state-sanctioned oppression against us that never materialized. It is, however, being waged against our immigrant neighbors.
Christians are standing up against the oppressive regime, but it’s not the evangelicals who are well-rehearsed in play-acting persecution. Instead, it is progressive clergy putting their bodies on the line as they demand an end to the Trump administration’s aggressive tactics against immigrants.
For several months, religious leaders have gathered outside the Broadview, Illinois, ICE processing and detention center to demand transparency and justice for the inhumane treatment of their neighbors. On Sept. 19, federal agents fired pepper balls into the crowd, striking David Black, a Presbyterian pastor, in the head. Black told CNN, “We could hear them laughing as they were shooting us from the roof, and it was deeply disturbing.”
Last week, 21 people were arrested protesting at the Broadview facility. They included clergy such as the Rev. Michael Woolf, an American Baptist pastor in the Chicago area. An image of Woolf being shoved to the ground and handcuffed went viral, reigniting the spotlight on ICE activities.
These scenes are playing out across the country as Christian leaders join hands with interfaith and civic partners to spread the liberating gospel Jesus proclaimed in Luke—a gospel that was “good news to the poor,” included “release for prisoners,” and promised that the “oppressed would be set free.”
All this looks a lot like what we were preparing for at ETBU.
A Partial Gospel
In addition to warnings about persecution making its way to our shores, evangelical students in the ’90s were cautioned against faith traditions that minimized or eliminated the miraculous aspects of Scripture. We were taught about Thomas Jefferson taking a literal scalpel to his Bible, removing any content he deemed mythical or beyond reason. According to many of our leaders, such actions were heresy.
What we weren’t told was that many among us would take figurative scalpels to the Bible, spiritualizing all the texts that call God’s people to practice mercy and justice—hyper-localizing them as relevant only to our “hearts.” They have mangled the radical good news of Jesus and ignored the subversive actions of the early church. Meanwhile, they elevate the handful of passages that seem to call us to submit to the governing authorities, no matter how much those authorities terrorize the most vulnerable among us.
So while many of our Christian siblings are standing up to power exactly as we rehearsed, others among us have become chaplains to the empire. They had aspirations to become Jesus Freaks, but are serving as jesters in Caligula’s court. As they preach about the “fires of revival” to large crowds under the glare of stage lights, they practice a gospel of caution and respectability in the public square.
“Buck the culture,” they reason—when it comes to belief. But when it comes to the unjust treatment of immigrants by the authorities, the message is “Obey and be silent.”
There is more than one way to renounce Christ.
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Senior Editor at Good Faith Media.
