Credit where credit is due: thanks to Rod Dreher, I've discovered the blog of Charles Featherstone.
Charles Featherstone is a graduate of Georgetown and of the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. He has worked (in his own words) “as a newspaper reporter, as an editor, as a blogger, as a preacher, as a songwriter. And now, as a book author.” Rod Dreher admires Featherstone despite their disagreements about, inter alia, the recent disturbances in Baltimore; he describes Featherstone as "a rambunctious holy mess..." and Featherstone proudly accepts that description.
Mr. Featherstone considers himself a conservative Christian; but in my brief (so far) perusal of his blog, his understanding of what that means may surprise you. In a recent post, “Why the Biblical Story Matters More Than the Law,” Mr. Featherstone bids “good riddance” to traditional Christendom with its rules and its authority; he also categorizes Catholics’ reliance on natural law as “trying to have the fruits of revelation without actually resorting to the revelation itself, and that has always struck me as somewhere between hypocrisy and outright fraud.” 1
Those are fighting words (say, for the folks at First Things), but Mr. Featherstone has not yet begun to provoke. Enlisting the biblical language (and interpretation) of Israel’s persecution, and casting modern Christians as the equivalent of ancient Israel under Babylon and Assyria, Featherstone emphasizes the need to “remind the church as Babylon besieges us that this fate is a result of our sins — and not the world’s — the way Jeremiah did, and counsel each other the way Christ did in the Sermon on the Mount as to how to most faithfully and lovingly live under the violence of conquest and occupation.” 2
Let me pause to make sure that’s clear: Charles Featherstone says that the travail in which Christianity finds itself is a result of Christianity’s own failings and not of the world’s. While Rod Dreher would like to blame Christianity’s plight on secularism, atheism, free-thinkers, medieval nominalists, and Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, Featherstone takes his cue from the Bible: like Israel of old, Christians have brought this on themselves.
And then the clincher, to my mind at least; Featherstone writes “If a gay couple compels you to bake them a wedding cake, bake them two.” This formulation, of course, is intended to recall the words of Jesus: "If anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, let him have your coat also. Whoever forces you to go one mile, go with him two.” It is also bound, if not intended, to induce apoplexy among Mr. Featherstone’s conservative Christian compatriots, who have decided that their immortal souls and their God-given freedom alike are at stake in the same-sex marriage/wedding cake kerfuffle.
All of which is to say, Charles Featherstone seems to have some interesting things to say. His appeal to the biblical narrative of redemption offers (for those persuaded by that narrative) hope and solace while placing the current struggle in context: there is nothing new under the sun and God’s people are always either in bondage in Egypt or in exile in Babylon, because the Promised Land is always somewhere else and never here.3 Rules and righteousness, suggests Featherstone, are for those tired of wandering, dispirited by the exile, and no longer confident (strident rhetoric to the contrary aside) that God is with them:
“We want to avoid the consequences of our sin, and we think we can do that by following the rules. The story of Israel in scripture tells us we cannot, however, and that even trying is a fool’s errand. It’s not about our virtue or our sinlessness. It’s about God’s redeeming acts. For us. For lost, miserable, sinful us. We need the story to remind us who and whose we are. And who really fights for us.”
As always, these things are matters of taste and temperament; but I’ll take Featherstone’s straightforward profession of Biblical faith over Rod Dreher’s constant whining and victim-pleading any day.
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1 http://charlesfeatherstone.com/wp/?p=1116#more-1116
2 I have always suspected that Jeremiah was, as some of his fellow Israelites alleged, a fifth-columnist--that is, an agent of the Assyrians doing his best to undermine Israel's resistance.
3 I'm paraphrasing here from Michael Walzer's superb book EXODUS AND REVOLUTION.
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