For three years in high school I sang with “Up with People”. We performed in front of large and enthusiastic audiences all across the New York metropolitan area. ‘Sing Out Stamford’ (Connecticut) was a local cast; there were three national traveling casts that offered upbeat music with important themes –“Freedom Isn’t Free”; “What Color is God’s Skin”; “Which Way America” ;“Up With People”. I thoroughly enjoyed singing on stage (not to mention having several solos), but perhaps what I most appreciated was being among a religiously and racially diverse group of young people, which was in stark contrast to the high school I attended.
Undergirding ”Up With People” was a developing movement called Moral Re-Armament. Founded in the 1930’s, MRA called for absolute honesty, purity, unselfishness, and love. Some of us ‘Sing Out Stamford’ members would occasionally gather outside of rehearsals to talk over the four absolutes. I cared about values, and conversations about them, but began to get wary when some members of the group began inferring, if not accusing, others of not living up to them. There was an underlying aggressiveness to it all that I found unsettling, and I eventually quit the cast. Moral re-armament cannot be mandated or coerced.
Which is what is happening, albeit in a different way, by the Trump campaign. Most of the attention is given to the vulgarity, viciousness and vile nature of Trump’s pronouncements and rants, which has the effect of sending me – and so many others I talk to – into dens of despair. Much is made about his challenge to democracy, his barely disguised racist attacks, and his unwillingness, if not inability, to refrain from telling lies.
Undergirding the Trump campaign is a growing Christian movement called the New Apostolic Reformation, which is expertly exposed in Matthew D. Taylor’s recently published book, The Violent Take it By Force. Taylor cites the history of the NAR, and provides background on some of its key leaders. (Matthew Taylor is a guest on my “Reconciliation Roundtable” podcast, and you can listen to our recent episode here).
Like many of us, I knew nothing of the NAR, its publishing prowess, its leaders, or the number of churches across the world that are affiliated in some way with NAR prophesy – which seeks to dominate seven mountains: family, education, religion, government, media, arts, and entertainment. With their hoped for election of Donald Trump, the NAR will have succeeded in having dominion over the government and media mountains, which will then make it even easier to achieve summiting the other five. It is a highly aggressive strategy; and resistance or opposition to it is routinely categorized by their leaders as being satanic. A much more organized and vengeful campaign than what I experienced during my latter Up with People days.
And it won’t work. At least not over the long haul, but in the short term the NAR and its followers can do endless damage and generate unspeakable trauma. Buoyed by certainty and self-righteousness, the NAR is a developing juggernaut that seeks to bull its way to the top of their identified mountains, and banish those who get in the way.
It will eventually crumble. Movements that seek to mandate and dominate always do. Eventually.
That has happened, in a much more subtle way, with another religious institution. A little over one hundred years ago, the Episcopal Church (which I have served as priest and bishop for 45 years), engaged in a gradual development to build its power base and establish itself as a key foundation of the “establishment”. It built and reinforced its relationship to the business community. Unlike the NAR which is relentlessly aggressive, the Episcopal Church was opportunistic. It created a church headquarters in New York City, and intentionally sought to be aligned with, if not a part of a corporate model. In 1907, The Episcopal Church began constructing a Cathedral in Washington D.C. and when part of it was opened in 1912 it named itself the National Cathedral – which has been the site of significant national events ever since. In the 1930s, during the height of the Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt, a lifelong Episcopalian, and his Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins also an Episcopalian, began to develop the Social Security program for the country, based on the Episcopal Church Pension Fund, which was established in 1917, largely through the efforts of JP Morgan, another Episcopalian.
The Episcopal Church tied itself to wealth, and wealthy leaders. While the church was engaged in many endeavors to care for others –building hospitals and schools, and seeking to care for people who were pushed out to the margins – it often succumbed to the seduction of power and privilege. And while it didn’t achieve domination, the Episcopal Church wielded enormous influence in the national business community. In the popular book at the time, The Hidden Persuaders, published in 1957, author Vance Packard remarked that the best way to advance oneself in society was to join the Episcopal Church.
No longer. That hegemony is gone. And has been for a long time. The arrogance that accompanied the oversized influence of the Episcopal Church is being replaced by a wounded church, yes, but one that is re-discovering its New Testament roots and redesigning its mission
Several times during his ministry Jesus said the goal is not to be first – or on top, but to be a servant. His was not an invitation to aggression or mandate, but a challenge to compassion. Servanthood, compassion, humility, vulnerability are antidotes to domination. They have a different sort of power. Jesus trusted it. Jesus used it. So should we.
