That great defender of the faith, Don Trump, responding in faux outrage to the fact that Trans Visibility Day happened to coincide with Easter this year, declared that Election Day 2024 should be “Christian Visibility Day.”
As if Christians have a visibility problem in America today.
Drive through Simi Valley, the town where the church I serve is located, and you'll find a great deal of Christian visibility. Churches are everywhere—even here in California, the Bible Shoestring of America.
But in Simi Valley, one of the very few places you'll experience trans visibility or LGBTQ+ visibility in general is in front of our church. Except that every time we put up a trans or pride flag, eventually it gets torn down. Also, signage that indicates our full embrace of LGBTQ+ is torn down repeatedly or defaced. In response to Trump’s latest mutterance, we mounted yet another trans flag.
Longer may it wave!
Trump’s cynical declaration played to the grievance that evangelical Christian leaders have cultivated in this country. They whine that Christians are being persecuted in America. And they say it in the same breath as they claim that America is a Christian nation. It's an obvious contradiction. We could ask evangelicals to make up their minds and choose one trope over the other. But of course, we’d be asking in vain. In matters of religious or political identity, logic seldom comes into play.
Christianity in America does not have a visibility problem. Everyone has been subjected to it, whether they like it or not. Nor does Christianity have a persecution problem unless one twists the word into a pretzel and claims that being denied the freedom to deny the freedom of others is a violation of religious freedom.
I suppose that I and my church members could claim that we are being persecuted for our progressive Christian visibility since our signs and flags are being torn down and defaced. I am certain that many of our evangelical counterparts would howl the P-word if the same sort of thing happened to them. We’re annoyed, for sure. But vandalism happens. It hardly counts as persecution. Nobody got hurt, nobody’s religious freedom was denied, no buildings were burned or bulldozed. In worship, we prayerfully lift up hope that the vandals will see the light and have a change of heart. And then, we calmly replace the flags and signs.
Progressive Christian Visibility Day definitely should fall on Election Day 2024.
And every other day, too.
Christianity is hardly invisible. The problem is the type of visibility that it has. Its image is painted overwhelmingly in dogmatic black-and-white when really it should be rendered as a rainbow. When people drive past your church, what most of them think they are seeing is a fundamentalist/evangelical congregation full of people who voted for Trump - unless you make it visibly obvious that you’re different. That means waving the rainbow in front of the building. And putting up signs to show that you are different. And replacing them when they get torn down or defaced. And making obvious who you are and who you aren’t on your websites and social media. And doing provocative programming that gives you “earned media” you could never afford to buy: holding events that stand out and make clear your distinctive witness of full inclusion, non-dogmatic spirituality, and activism for peace and justice.
We need to err on the side of outrageousness. That’s a hard ask for many of our progressive churches, filled as they are with nice folks who don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. Of course, we should be kind in whatever we do—outrageously kind!
A few months ago, in response to the book-banning craze spreading around the country, our church put up a “Little Library of Banned Books” in front of our building, near the street. Anyone can open it up and borrow a book that has been banned somewhere. (Including a Bible, which is banned or limited in access in many countries.) When the congregation gathered outside to dedicate it, a reporter from a local paper covered the story, and we got enthusiastic support from people in our wider community. It was “earned media” that cost us almost nothing since the little library was built from scrap, and the books were donated.
The adherents of Christianity in America are in numerical decline. Not because Christians are being persecuted but because Christians persecute. More and more Americans are disgusted with a religion that denies women equality and reproductive freedom, disparages sexual minorities, demonizes immigrants, and denies the reality of devastating human-caused climate change.
As progressives, we have a responsibility and a golden opportunity to flip the narrative about Christianity in America. The time is right and ripe. As evangelical leaders panic about the decline of their churches, they are looking for a scapegoat. And they’ve found one in progressive Christianity. Scour the internet and you’ll see for yourself just how shrill their condemnations of our movement have become. They used to ignore us as a harmless fringe phenomenon. But now they see us as the “devil’s vanguard.” Of course, their rants are the best publicity we possibly could get! Because with each diatribe against us, they make their own people aware that there is an alternative way to practice and understand the faith - one that many of them are secretly or not-so-secretly seeking.
And indeed, Election Day looms ahead of us, with consequences that could not be more crucial. From now till November, we need to let “perfect love cast out fear” (1 John 4:18) and make ourselves visible in ways we might never have considered before. We don’t need to name candidates. It is IRS-legal and just as effective to name the issues for which we’ll be voting. Start making and posting signs for the front of your church now: WE VOTE TO FIGHT CLIMATE CHANGE. WE VOTE FOR HEALTH CARE FOR ALL. WE VOTE TO WELCOME MIGRANTS. ABORTION RIGHTS = RELIGIOUS FREEDOM.
For a lot of us in progressive churches, such messaging will seem edgy. But outrageous times call for outrageous responses. In our case, for outrageously kind responses that raise our progressive Christian visibility… not just for our own sake, but for the sake of people who really are suffering and being persecuted.