Stories from the Knife's Edge

This article appears in the February 2018 issue of Sojourners magazine. To subscribe, click here .

“THERE IS SOMETHING off-putting about a nonfiction story in which the I is infinitely more sinned against than sinning,” opines Phillip Lopate, the dean of nonfiction literature.

David Gushee’s autobiographical Still Christian may fall short in chronicling his own “sinning,” but this is ultimately redeemed by his self-reflective amusement at surviving the “skin of my teeth” narrative. After all, he notes that he is an ethicist who has “flexibility about convictions,” which is confession enough. As with many good books, the title masks a more accurate if less marketable headline. In Gushee’s case, it might be: “Still Baptist: A Southerner grapples with his diary.”

Gushee is an ethics professor at Mercer University, a church pastor, and the recently elected president of the American Academy of Religion. Reading this worthy extended essay on a Baptist life, I felt we were traveling together in an action movie where the hero barely escapes from an exploding planet. In Gushee’s story, those religious flames pushed us forward toward safety, merely scorching our heels, rather than pulling us backward into the lava-like funnels of religious fervor.

This was not Hollywood, however, but real life for Gushee and millions of us left orphaned by an originally capacious Southern Baptist planet that had, by 1993, imploded of its own weight. This ecclesial destruction revealed that the often-quoted Baptist ideal of “sole competency to interpret the scriptures” did not make room for the institutional continuity that “moderates” sought, but did allow for a fundamentalist (even neo-Calvinist) takeover.

For the tens of thousands of scholars, activists, and pastors who were forced into the vortex of the conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist world in the 1970s and ’80s, this book is a page-turner. The memoir includes many of the characters we loved, and some we learned to despise. When you ask a Southern Baptist of this era where they stood on the fundamentalist vs. moderate denominational divorce, you get the sense that shame falls on nearly everyone and victory on very few, and them unreflectively. Some of Gushee’s chapters, though, are filled with shame when sometimes less is needed and victory when perhaps shame is called for.

At that time, for some moderate Baptists, it seemed Gushee enabled and fueled the theological fires that created harm, or at least did little to extinguish them. Which side was he really on? some wondered. Through his diary, full of deep reflection and some self-loathing, we learn that Gushee had the same question about himself.

Yet for others, Gushee’s life is a story of public redemption exactly because he helped retrieve from that shameful fire thousands who needed a path out of a narrow fundamentalist Christianity. This story is not merely a Baptist one. Many who try to balance on a knife’s edge of who is in and who is out of any religious group are often cut badly. Few survive the wound; Gushee shows us his scars up close, as a cautionary tale.

One can quibble with some nuances of Gushee’s account. For instance, while it might be defendable from a fundamentalist perspective, describing Ron Sider, co-founder of Evangelicals for Social Action, as left leaning and anti-Christian-Right, even though Sider signed the Manhattan Declaration, a socially conservative theological manifesto, would be hard for many activists to swallow.

A cynic’s summary of Gushee’s travails could be “I was young. I needed the money. Academic jobs were scarce. I was merely a convert to this Baptist mess and just a professor. My mentors were better than my bosses. My diary reveals I’m better than my public stances. I did the right thing eventually.” The realist’s retort to such graceless accusations after reading Still Christian: “Welcome to the human condition, with which we all struggle. And thank you for telling us the truth about our lives.” That’s what good ethicists do.

Where would Baptist ethics be had David Gushee sided with conservative Baptist leader Albert Mohler instead of moderates Glen Stassen, James McClendon Jr., Molly Marshall, and Diana Garland? Thankfully, we will never have to know. Gushee emerged to walk a different path.