THE PERILS OF BEING TALKED ABOUT

It was an introductory Bible and Theology class at a small Christian college—a required course at the time. The students, mostly freshmen, many with Christian school educations, were bored before they arrived in class. I remembered taking the same class when I was a freshman and finding it almost unendurable. But now I was teaching the class and trying hard to catch the interest of the students. I wanted them to think. Not just to take notes. Not to ask me what would be on the exam. Not to sit silent in their seats. To think and talk. Engage the material. Engage the faith, perhaps for the first time, asking what’s true and what’s not true. And so I tried to get them to sort out what mattered in all that dusty theology. What makes one a Christian?

I asked them what one needed to believe. In retrospect, it’s not a good question. It frames faith as belief, and biblical faith is not primarily belief. Faith in the biblical sense is trust and obedience. It’s personal, an affiliation, not something abstract and theological. But I hadn’t yet sorted that out. I still thought of faith the way I had been taught: as a set of theological claims. What I wanted my class to think about were those claims: which of them is crucial for the faith? Could you, I asked, as an example, be a Christian and not believe in the virgin birth? 

I might have chosen my example better. Perhaps I should have asked whether you could be a Christian and not believe that Jesus descended into hell. Or to make this stronger, not believe in the existence of hell at all. The virgin birth tends to get people going. It fell wrongly on the ears of one of my students. Perhaps she was drifting off and was startled awake when she heard the question. In any case, she heard it incorrectly. What she heard was me denying the virgin birth. Disturbed by this, she went to a member of the college administration. This well respected man might have called me in and asked, “Clay, did you really say that?” But no, he went to another member of the college administration higher up in the administrative chain. This higher up administrator—a vice president—also could have summoned me into his office and asked me whether I had said it. But, again, no, he went to my department chair. It was my department chair who finally came to me but without much in the way of specifics, just the hint that somehow I had screwed up.

What I remember about this incident is the dawning awareness that I had “been talked about.” If you were an instructor, especially an instructor in the Bible and Theology Department, being “talked about” was professionally fatal. You were supposed to keep your head down, affirm the faith as it had always been affirmed, teach what you had been taught, and above all else not get the college in trouble with its constituency. 

In the grand scheme of things, it was a minor incident. I was probably unsuited to academia in any case. I concluded early in my professional life that I preferred short deadlines, writing a sermon every week, say, rather than working on a long research project ending in a book. The pulpit suited me better than the lectern. But still, the incident stung. I had been falsely accused, and the administration had done nothing but cover its collective butt. 

THOUGHT POLICE

What brought this incident to mind was an essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones in the New York Times Magazine: “What the Public Memory of Charlie Kirk Revealed.” Her essay is not about the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Nor is this essay. Charlie Kirk’s death is another in a long history of political (and non-political) violence in America. We have become inured to the violence of our culture. Just yesterday, as I write this, four people were killed and at least eight others injured in an attack on a Latter-day Saints church in Grand Blanc, Michigan. All acts of violence should grieve us deeply. Hannah-Jones says as much. But her essay is not about the assassination of Charlie Kirk; it’s about the aftermath of Kirk’s death, about the use being made of Charlie Kirk’s death by powerful people to silence their opponents.

It’s not only the death of Charlie Kirk that is being used in this cynical way. The same is true of the accusation of antisemitism against those who have criticized Israel for its actions in Gaza (and before Gaza, with respect to the settlements in the West Bank). As the Jewish writer, Peter Beinart points out in a recent book (Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning), you can oppose the Gaza war for antisemitic reasons, but you can also oppose it for reasons that are not antisemitic, reasons that in fact are pro-Israel. It should not be forgotten that the people who throw around the accusation of antisemitism against the critics of the actions of the Netanyahu administration are those who praised the white nationalists who marched in Charlottesville chanting, “Jews will not replace us.” Scratch some of these supporters of Israel, and you will find an antisemite. Antisemitism is the oldest trope of fascism. 

The accusations, whether about Charlie Kirk or about Israel, are not really about Charlie Kirk or Israel but rather attempts at thought control. Instead of trying to win the argument for their policies, the current administration is working to suppress dissent. The thought police rule not by law but by fear. In 1984, George Orwell describes how the thought police work:

In Oceania [insert Putin’s Russia, Orban’s Hungary, or, if he succeeds, Donald Trump’s US] there is no law. Thoughts and actions which, when detected, mean certain death are not formally forbidden, and the endless purges, arrests, tortures, imprisonments, and vaporizations are not inflicted as punishment for crimes that have actually been committed, but are merely the wiping-out of persons who might perhaps commit a crime at some time in the future. A Party member is required to have not only the right opinions but the right instincts.

In suppressing dissent, laws are inconvenient. Laws involve courts, argument, procedure, and due process. Better, from the point of view of those who wish to suppress dissent, to unleash the mob. Since the death of Charlie Kirk, scores of people have been fired for making remarks that are considered insufficiently deferential to Kirk’s memory. But it’s not just getting fired. These people have been verbally attacked and threatened with violence. Fear is the point. Increasingly, people are afraid to say what they think. You might lose your job or worse. Don’t dare draw attention to yourself. Don’t become one of those who are talked about.

ORTHODOXY

I could go on—there is much more to be said—but political commentary is not what I do. My arena is the church. It may seem that concern about church is too small for these times. I have sometimes thought so myself. With the events of the day threatening the foundations of our democracy, the church seems, well, small potatoes. But perhaps that is not entirely the case. Perhaps the church shapes us in ways that make us susceptible to authoritarianism or resistant to it. Perhaps what we learn in the church forms who we are outside of the church. Or should.

In making my case for the continuing importance of church and theology, I will need to make two points that may seem at first to be contradictory. The first is the importance of orthodoxy, our need for a kind of orthodoxy; the second is the need for the free exchange of ideas. We need both, inside the church and outside of it.

Begin with orthodoxy. Orthodoxy—the word means “right thinking”—is much misunderstood in the church. It’s not a fixed set of ideas, something that has been stated once and for all, say, five hundred years ago. It’s, rather, a centered conversation, a conversation that is ongoing and continuous. In this conversation, there have been framing moments, aha moments in which something has been said in a way that we keep on saying it. The early councils were such a moment, and for this reason in the church I attend we weekly recite the Nicene Creed. For Reformed churches, the 16^th century was another such moment, and every Sunday Reformed churches try to hold up the centrality of the scriptures. We honor these moments of clarity, but they do not and should end the conversation. We live in the expectation of new moments of clarity, new points in the conversation that future generations will honor.

This now two-thousand-year-old conversation (older, if we include, as we should, the Old Testament) has a flow to it. It’s anchored in scripture, which is a record of this conversation from earliest times. It’s centered around the story of Israel and the story of Jesus. It has a distinctive shape. You can situate yourself inside this conversation or outside of it. To situate yourself inside the conversation is to own both its history and its shape. It’s the requirement that you own the history and shape of the conversation that makes it an orthodoxy. 

But many churches in America have cut themselves off from this conversation. Part of the legacy of Protestantism is that it has split the church into smaller and smaller pieces. Now the largest and most influential churches in America are entities to themselves. Their theology—I’m tempted to say, their marketing strategy—is whatever their pastor thinks. The music is of the moment; the old hymns have been abandoned. They read only snatches of scripture, and then often in the course of the sermon, not letting scripture stand on its own. There is little sense of engagement with the broad Christian conversation that has shaped the faith over the years.

It’s little wonder that such churches and the people who attend them are susceptible to a huckster like Donald Trump. Trump makes no attempt to hide his contempt for Christian values. At the Charlie Kirk memorial, after Laura Kirk said that she forgives the man who shot her husband, Trump said that forgiveness was not for him. Against the teaching of Jesus, he said that he hates his enemies.

It’s sometime suggested that politically conversative Christians have made a pact with Trump. They will forgive his deep ignorance of the faith and his lack of Christian virtues to achieve their agenda. But I doubt this explanation for the popularity of Trump among evangelicals. I suspect that Trump’s values are their values. What he affirms is what they affirm. Much of the American church has lost the thread of the conversation that stretches back to the scriptures. Without a sense of what the church stands for, Christianity becomes simply a convenient label, a synonym for “white nationalism.”

A NATIONAL CONVERSATION

This is where the idea of orthodoxy extends from church to nation. It’s not the same orthodoxy—the role of the government is not to enforce Christianity—but an orthodoxy nevertheless, a long conversation in the same direction. At the core of this conversation is the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Like orthodoxy in the church, there are moments when the nation achieved a new clarity about what America is or should be about. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address comes to mind, as does Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” There have been many such moments. 

But we have lost touch with this conversation. Instead of pulling us together to rediscover who we are as Americans, the current administration works to split us apart, to create winners and losers, the better to seize and hold power. We need to grasp again an American orthodoxy—a sense of who we are and where we are in the historical conversation that undergirds our life as a nation.

FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION

So we need a sense of orthodoxy both for church and nation, but we also need freedom, a certain latitude to dissent, to express new ideas, to stretch the conversation in new directions. The church has a long history of trying to suppress dissent. Some questions are regarded not just as inconvenient—my question about the virgin birth serving as an example—but as outside the pale. The denomination of which I was long a part, the Christian Reformed Church, is currently engaged in a systematic program to require people to believe theirway about human sexuality. Dissent will get you expelled from church office.

And this is increasingly true also in our national life. In the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk assassination, dissent will get you fired. Or worse. A presidential memorandum dated September 25, 2025 attempts to bring the whole power of the federal government against groups designated by the administration as fostering “domestic terrorism.” “Domestic terrorism” is not a term of law; it’s a way of labelling critics of the administration as enemies of the state. This does not honor the American conversation; it violates it.

In a strange way, freedom of expression requires owning what the church or the nation has long stood for. Freedom of expression requires a sense of us, and a sense of us is the core of what orthodoxy means. But orthodoxy dies without freedom of expression. It’s in the conversation with each other that we create and clarify what we stand for.

Here’s to the conversations that hold us together and allow us to be ourselves. Here’s to a supple orthodoxy and to freedom of expression. Here’s to finding our way back to the values that ground us and the possibilities that excite us. Here’s to finding our way home through this dark woods.

Clay