Open Letter to Derek Webb, 2010

by Frank Turk

UPDATED 25 Feb 2012

Yes: hello.  Before you read this further, this post is, right now, the #2 all-time viewed post in the history of this blog.  It accounts for 1% of all traffic to this blog. And, methinks, a lot of people miss about 2/3rds of what went into the original post because it misses the detailed analysis of the original interview which posted the same day, but gets missed when someone links through to this letter only.


For the sake of that being remedied, I offer a link to the analysis right here.  Don't miss it for the sake of your our righteous indignation.

-- Frank Turk

Dear Derek Webb --

I started my (meager and non-profit) blogging career with an open letter to you about 6 years ago, and it's funny how that has come full circle as you stay on your quest to be come an artist (we'll come back to that) and I stay on my quest to, um, blog.

Over at HuffPo, Chris Stedman's interview of you has made some waves in the week after Christmas. It's really cool that, unlike the rest of us, you can get interviews with secularists and directors of inter-religious dialogue -- and I mean that sincerely even though I know it sounds sarcastic. If more people who were actually Christians could get interviewed by Chris Stedman, Chris himself would probably be better for it -- and his readers would at least be disabused by the stereotype of "Christianity" with which they are abused today.

I have to grant you something: you are right about the problem the church has in addressing the "gay" issue. I blogged about that a few years ago myself, refer to that post frequently as the topic comes up and further notes are required, and I commend that to you for context of my note to you today.

There are three things which bothered me about your talk with Mr. Stedman that I want to pass on as we approach the New Year, and I offer them to you in no particular order:

1. The Gospel

What is the Gospel, Derek? (please forgive the faux familiarity; I address you as one somewhat-public person to another) You seem to have summed it up to Mr. Stedman as, "Jesus says we are to be preemptive about how we love." Yet this is not at all how Jesus prepares people for the Gospel, nor what he seems to put at the first place for the reason God sent him, the Son, into the world.

I know someplace, somehow, you "get" this: the Son of Man was not sent to be served, but to serve, and to lay down his life as a ransom for many. He came to suffer much at the hands of the leaders of Israel and to be put to death. And he did this not as a moral example but as a sacrifice -- as the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.

Yet your interview with HuffPo doesn't really mention that -- and maybe that's Mr. Stedman's editorial hand showing. You instead leapfrog that in this interview and go directly to "love". But this is how we know what Love is: seeing that God did something for us when we were unworthy of it. Christ died for sinners and not merely for morally-neutral people -- or worse, for people who are just moral equivalents of each other who can't see either the log in their own eye or the mote in his brother's eye.

The key note of the Gospel, Derek, is the need for it. I am well-known in this little backwater of the internet for saying that any random sinner is "just like me" -- but can I point out a difference between your approach and mine? Your approach is to say, "I'm not any worse than the least of these," and my approach is to say, "I am no better, and maybe I am worse."

The nuance there is important. From the perspective you have delivered to the readers of HuffPo, it's just a "come as you are" thing to say that men are sinful. Them's the breaks, as they say. It soft-soaps the problem of sin significantly into something you put this way: "One of the hallmarks of following Jesus is to pursue and love people who are different than we are and have different beliefs than we do, and to live our lives loving, understanding and coming into common ground with those people."

The problem with that is that Jesus didn't die to establish common ground, Derek: Jesus died because the wages of sin is death, and that's the common ground of all men of all times and all places. I may actually be worse-off than the homosexual, morally: my sins may be more wide-spread and more deeply-rooted (which is an interesting question, given your position here; again: more on that in a second). But what that does not do is mitigate the fact that the homosexual's sin is actually an offense to God from which he must repent, and not merely recognize as a different expression of self.

2. the Church

To that end, Jesus died to make the believers into the Church, right? Jesus didn't die so that we can make a moral equation up which makes Islam and Hinduism and Judaism and then the social/religious agnostics who come 'round about Him as "believers" into a happy mixed family. Jesus died so that the believers can be called out from death into life, and called out from the world to the household of God, and called out of sin and into salvation.

Readers of this blog know that I am not a perfectionist -- I don't believe that there are any Christians who are perfect morally, least of all me personally. In fact, I think one of the greatest sins in the American Christian life is the inability of so-called theologically-conservative Christians to live in community with other believers. There is a call to repentance needed there which has not yet been sounded or even rightly-framed which we English-speakers have to face up to. It smashes our idols of individuality and intellectual pride. That matter is for another day.

But that said, Christ died to call out the Church. This is an unquestionable fact of the New Testament; it's the key-note point of Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, and also the "book ends" of Paul's letter to the Romans. Somehow, if Christ died for us, we are a new people set apart from the world and it's fallenness. Right? Colossians 3? So when we make the confession that we are sinners, we are also making the confession that we ought not to be sinners. Making allowance for the sins of others so that we can "love them" is unloving because it is spiritually deadly. It completely squashes the actual Gospel in place of a new kind of legalism. Rather than seeking to find out all the ways in which we ought "not to do," we are in fact seeking out all the ways we can allow all the things we ought not to do. It's a legalism of tolerance -- which you exchange in your interview into a legalism of love. It's not love, you might say, if it doesn't include those who mutilate themselves to justify their sexual urges. It's not love, you might say, if we can't bless the sexual union of two people who are sexually identical rather than sexually compatible. It's the legalism of permissiveness, which is merely license raised to a moral imperative.

The Church cannot say such things. When it does -- and I submit to you that the conservative church does this exactly today regarding marriage and sexuality -- it is gone far afield. To have it go far into another false field for the sake of balance (which, as I take it, is your complaint) is not prophetic or artistic: it is blasphemy, and anti-Gospel.

3. The Artist

Which brings me to my final comment. Personally, I grew up in a liberal-arts environment. Then I "got saved" and spent 20 years as a Christian. I have found that there is a singular refuge for people who do not want to be held morally and philosophically culpable for the trash they flatulently expel into the common conversation. In Christian circles, it's the "prophet"; in academic circles, it's "the artist".

Back in the "old days" before you started filing complaints against the local church and Christians in general, you didn't couch yourself behind the conceit of being "an Artist". But today, that's your trip. Are you really more-qualified to make moral, political and social pronouncements than anyone else -- than pastors and qualified teacher of the Bible, for example -- now that you are "an artist"? Is it really at all reasonable let alone generous or spiritually-mature to denigrate pastors as people who don't have enough time to get spiritually informed except through CNN and blogs? I think it's a dodge you can cleverly use to escape scrutiny, and you should frankly know better. You're not some kid floating through college on his father's hard-earned dime; you're not some flattered entertainer who lives in a vacuum protected by publicists and agents and sycophants (I hope). You're in some way a self-made man who has been there, done that -- which makes your daffy diatribes against conservative Christianity, and the disguise of being an "artist", all the more unbelievable.

To say, as you have said here, that your pondering these issues trumps other views because you are an "artist" is simply adolescent. If your moral pronouncement trumps, for example, John Piper (not an artist), what if Charlton Heston says you're wrong? His artistic cred trumps yours for sure: how do you deal with it? And what if Ian McKellen then comes out and proffers yet another moral pronouncement -- does his cred trump Heston? What exactly will we do when the artist community unsurprisingly cannot speak with one voice and cannot come to a moral consensus? What will us poor non-artists do if CNN or FOX does not clear it up for us?

The answer, of course, is to put the artist in his place -- subject to God's revelation. That's the Christian answer, anyway -- settle matters of faith and practice by what God hath said -- and that, done by men of good faith who are elders and leaders in the church. But the way you have, over time, read the Bible, has become shallow and ambiguous -- which is the hallmark of pretentiousness, not artistic depth. To see Jesus as only a lover of the sinful and not a judge or even decent moral counsellor is to misread all of the book of John and all of Revelation and all of Paul's statements which begin "therefore" in the New Testament.

May we all suffer fewer artists of this sort in the future, and may you repent of it as soon as possible.

We all know you want to be a lion -- we all want to pass as cats. You want to be a big, big star; you want to be someone to believe. You want to be Bob Dylan. The problem is that you're not. You're a kid fellow from Texas who has, over 20 years, convinced himself that there is no Old Testament substantiating the New Testament; that Jesus does not fulfill that law so that in his death those who repent and believe are made a people like him. What we therefore ought to be is both enemies of sin and friends of sinners -- but I think you have missed this someplace, publicly and intentionally. My offer to you is to come back to this, which is the Christian faith and not some romantic or secularized stereotype of the actual faith.

While I have been harsh here, I hope this letter finds you well, and in the good graces of God, and with a heart inclined toward him and inclined to repent. You have said that you refuse no invitations for interviews, and I post this as an open invitation to do two things inclusively here together: [1] to post your [unedited] open reply to this letter in this space at your convenience, and [2] to also record a 60-minute interview with me on this subject which would be available here unedited on this subject to correct the record as necessary, correct my view of the interview with Stedman, and to dialog on the question of the church being in the world, on mission to lost people, but not of the world.

You can tweet me @Frank_Turk, or e-mail at frank at i-t-u-r-k dot com.

Awesome Update:

BEFORE YOU POST A COMMENT (and I do mean you personally), ask yourself this question: "Self, if my response to Frank Turk is that he should have first called Derek and had coffee with him to do the Biblical thing and not make this all like this, and I'm going to set him straight, why am I posting a comment on his blog rather than calling him? Am I just like Frank, or am I really following Jesus?"

If you can answer that question in a way that doesn't embarrass yourself, lay on, MacDuff.

--The Neighborhood Bully

Awesome Update #2:

After closing the comments and reflecting on this post, the one very obvious and glaring problem with the discussion has been the actual lack of actual discussion. For example, with the panoply of people pelting me for not contacting Derek directly to make nice with him privately over his public disapprobation (notice I got it right this time) of the church and its moral judgment, only two people have bothered to send me an e-mail about the subject to take their points off-line. TWO. And I bring it up only because I put my e-mail address and Twitter ID in the post. Finding me would have been as hard as blinking.

This describes the kind of objection that concern is -- because it apparently doesn't apply to the people who offer it. It certainly didn't apply to Derek who, rather than respond here, or respond with an e-mail, or even respond with a quick note with any clarifiers, posted drive-by tweets for three days about nameless bloggers and told people via twitter that I was specifically a body part of inglorious use.

File that with this open letter, and keep it between the ditches.

--The Neighborhood Bully

---

Notes: Where I am coming from

by Frank Turk

Most readers will have already read my open letter to Derek Webb, but this post is actually being published prior to the open letter. So I offer it as a post-script or epilogue or prologue (depending on when you read it) based on a phone call I had this week. I had a phone-chat with a reasonably-well-known SBC blogger (name obscured to give him the freedom to be in or out) after I tweeted about Derek's interview (long story, but he called because I didn't want to have a tweet war about the subject), and before the Ozarks canned my cell signal he asked me to at least deal with the interview and what it actually said -- not what I thought it implied.

I think that's a totally-fair request from him, and a totally-fair expectation from Derek Webb, so here is where I'll do that. Consider my letter to be based on what I have here exposited here from the interview.

The right thing to do is to place the interview in context, and the interviewer (Chris Stedman) does exactly that:

Given [Derek Webb's] willingness to reach across dividing lines, I asked Webb about his religious identity and how it relates to his work and his positions on issues relating to LGBT people, Muslims and atheists.

So explicitly, this interview is about Webb's "religious identity", and specifically it is about "his positions on issues", and those issues are specifically regarding "LGBT people", "Muslims" and "atheists". It's interesting to note that this interview offers one question each to the matter of atheism and Islam, and the rest stays in orbit around the question of receiving LGBT people into the church with open arms.

Here's Q1 from the interview:

Tracking the arc of your career, it seems to me that you've become increasingly vocal about your opinions on certain social issues. What's behind that?

So "certain social issues" are at stake here -- not just philosophy of ministry issues, but the actual "social issues" which Webb is speaking of. Here's the first half of his answer:

My wife and I are both artists. Part of the luxury of being an artist is that you not only can but kind of have a responsibility to think long and hard about things on behalf of those who might listen to your music. You can give them a jumping off point for subject matter that might be too tangled for most people in the busyness of their daily lives. I think there are a lot of smart people out there who honestly just don't have the time to think through some of these issues, and it becomes easier to watch CNN, to watch Fox News, to read some random blog and just get your answers and talking points from those kinds of places.

Now, get this: It's the artist, in his own words, who has a responsibility to "give people a jumping-off point for [complicated] subject matter". This is interesting because the second question was "Were you concerns about the risk of taking a stand on such a heated issue?" -- the "issue" being whether "LGBT" is acceptable Christian behavior, because the context is Webb's single "What Matters More" -- and his answer was this:

In terms of my being fearful or not [about the] reaction; I take my job really seriously, and I have tried to make a habit over the years of not listening to people who either criticize me or praise me. Spirituality is a really mysterious thing, and I feel as though I have received various coordinates from God over the years in terms of what I need to be spending my time and my work on, and that's really what I'm listening to. If following faithfully along those coordinates puts me in a season of praise with a certain group of people, that's fine -- but I don't do it to get in those graces, and neither am I upset if that also costs me some people along the road. I would much rather be faithful than successful, and I think that's a real professional difference [from] how some people do it.

So Derek Webb has said this explicitly about himself: [1] he's the deep thinker who is giving people the "jumping-off point" for complicated issues, and [2] if he takes criticism (or praise, as he says -- a point we have to get back to) for those jumping-off points, he doesn't listen. He feels like he has "received various coordinates from God over the years in terms of what I need to be spending my time and my work on, and that's really what I'm listening to".

Personally, I think that's troubling -- because Derek Webb says he's talking with God, and unlike the rest of us who are only invested enough (or maybe only spiritual enough, if I read his first answer correctly) to get our answers from CNN or blogs who ought to listen to him, he's not going to really take on outside analysis of his approach.

Now, that's a pretty clever way to set up one's vocational priorities -- to set the artist literally above criticism. But it seems to me that Derek is not really that disassociated from his critics and fans. Consider the first half of his second answer:

[the feedback] that I didn't really expect was the response from those that are at the business end of the church's judgment, especially around the gay issue. But what was surprising in a good way -- what showed me that I picked the right kind of trouble to get into -- was the response from a lot of people who were really struggling spiritually because they had no language for being who they actually were and believing what they actually believed. For their whole lives they had people telling them they couldn't be a certain kind of person. I was really gratified to be able to provide some small bit of sanity to a handful of people. That was worth whatever judgment or misunderstanding that might've come from the record itself.

There's a second reason to consider this statement, but the first is this: in fact, Derek does consider the voice of his praisers because they are the ones who showed him "he picked the right kind of trouble to get into". The criticisms he got were "predictable" and did not take him off the coordinates God put him on, but the praises: they gratified him.

The second reason to think about what Webb says here is the underlined part. My admission here is that Derek doesn't overtly say, "For their whole lives, LGBT people have had others telling them they couldn't be LGBT, but the church should not judge them for that." But if Derek does not mean my paraphrase by his statement, I'd like to see the paraphrase which will actually fit the context of his comment and still maintain the flow of his thought here.

So we make it to the third question:

How do you think the Christian community can build bridges to the LGBT community?

This is perhaps where the blogger I spoke to needs to take specific note of this conversation -- because as I talked to him, he seemed to think that Derek Webb was talking in abstract terms -- but the question makes the answers rather concrete.

So when Mr. Webb begins his response:

Initially, Christians can stop pretending that they're so different. I think there would be an immediate change in the conversation if we all realized how similar we are and the common language we share.

I find this catastrophically-inverted, but the SBC blogger thinks we should read this generously. We should read it, he has told me, as if Derek Webb was telling Stedman that the church is full of sinners and the LGBT community os full of sinners, and in that we have a common language.

But that's neither the tone of this statement, nor is it the intention of this statement -- and it overlooks the fact that it is not the church which establishes the "difference" necessary to even use the term "LGBT" to describe a demographic.

For the uninformed, "LGBT" means "Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transexual". Now think on this: that is a community which takes its identity from sexual expression and not from, for example, any other sociological accomplishment. The primary designator of one's heritage and people group is sexual practice and orientation -- that's what defines this community. When it is then said that the church is the one making a big deal out of what the "differences" are, it's a little more than a little sly to do so. It's actually accepting the LGBT definitions of how things work -- making others the bad guys for categories the LGBT are actually demanding be taken into account.

Let's be as clear as possible: this is a theme which is overtly stated in the song "What Matters More". Here are the lyrics for the song:

You say always treat people like you'd like to be
I guess you love being hated for your sexuality
You love when people put words in your mouth
About what you believe
Make you sound like a freak

'Cause if you really believed
What you say you believe
You wouldn't be so damned reckless
With the words you speak
You wouldn't silently consent
When the liars speak
Denying all the dying of the remedy

(Chorus)
Tell me, brother what matters more to you
Tell me, sister what matters more to you

If I can see what's in your heart
By what comes out of your mouth
Then it sure looks to me like being straight
Is all it's about
It looks like being hated
For all the wrong things
Like chasing the wind
While the pendulum swings

'Cause we can talk and debate
Till we're blue in the face
About the language and tradition
That He's coming to save
And meanwhile we sit
Just like we don't have give a **** about
Fifty thousand people who are dying today

Webb's point in this song is obvious: the church ought to care more about the sick people in the world than about what kind of sex people will have. In fact, it seem that what kind of sex is only a matter of "tradition", and to say otherwise is "hatred".

For the doubters this is where Derek Webb makes his stand on the issue.

That said, returning to the interview, how the church then "stops pretending they are so different" is an intimation of moral guilt to the church which Webb does not flesh out at all -- and I leave it to him to flesh it out in some way other than to huff at people he disagrees with.

Now I say "other than to huff" because this is the next part of his answer:

Another thing that would really change the conversation between the church and the broader gay community -- and it so desperately needs changing -- is the church's response. The church has spent so many years dealing publicly in the morality of the issue, in a way that misrepresents the response that I believe Jesus would have, that Christians have forgotten, or maybe never really [knew] in the first place, that whether your moral response to the gay issue is that it is perfectly permissible in the eyes of the Bible, or that it is totally reprehensible, your interpersonal response should be absolutely no different to gay people.

The response, by the way, is love. Period. It's love and open arms, regardless of your position on the morality.

I find this disturbing for several reasons. First, if we consider the Sermon on the Mount, Christ is classically judgmental for all manner of sin -- including heterosexual sin, greed, and all the trouble which pours out of the heart of man. Jesus publicly decried immorality -- and not merely the superficial kind of the morally-careless, but the deep kind in which one discovers that one does not love God but one's self and one's pleasure. It's simply biblically illiterate to say Jesus' response to public immorality would have been "love and open arms" -- because Jesus rejected anyone who thought they were morally-clean, anyone who thought their sin was not sin.

Second, the interpersonal response that Christians provide to most people is not stoning, or shunning, or any manner of real moral approbation. It's just apathy. If he wants to get on about that, I'll applaud him -- but to say that most Christians somehow treat LGBT people with anything more-active than simply passing them by is just ignorant of the average Christian. Worse, it plays to anti-Christian stereotypes which do not serve anyone well.

Last, for a fellow trying to creating jumping-off points for Christians into complex issues, it would be useful to define love in a little more nuanced way -- perhaps in a more biblical way -- than to make it group hugs as if fellowship and interpersonal respect looked like a Michelob commercial.

Here's Derek's next answer to the question of whether he is "too Christian" or "not Christian enough":

You can't please everybody, and I don't do this to please everybody. But the job of any artist is to look at the world and tell you what they see. Every artist, whether they acknowledge it or know it, has a grid through which they view the world and make sense of what they see. Even if it's a grid of unbelief -- that you don't think there is anything orchestrating the world and that everything is completely random -- that is a grid through which you make sense of the world.

A lot of "Christian art" is about the lens they're looking through, rather than the world they see through it. I'm not going to criticize anybody for doing that, but I would rather look at the world through the grid of following Jesus and tell you what I see. But that doesn't presume that all the art I'm going to make will be about following Jesus.

The year I made Stockholm Syndrome, there were a lot of triggers that brought issues of race and sexuality to my mind. I have a lot of friends and family that have suffered because of the church's judgment; my best friend in the world is gay. I felt a lot of people around me drawing lines in the sand, and that year I decided: I don't want to draw lines and have to be on one side or the other, but if someone's going to push me to one or the other side of the line, I'm going to stand on the side of those being judged because that's where I feel Jesus meets people. Making Stockholm Syndrome was about that journey. That same lens, this year, brought Feedback to life. They are very different pieces of art, but the exact same ethic brought both of those records out.

That statement is the subtext -- perhaps the presuppositions -- of the rest of this interview for Derek Webb. It tells us explicitly his state of mind and what is driving him to make certain judgments of his own.

And let's make sure this gets clarified: in spite of Webb's explicit beef with the church making "public moral judgments", he is himself making public moral judgments about the church -- and juxtaposing himself against the church on certain issues. How he can justify himself and condemn the church is for him to explain, but I think it is obvious to anyone reading where he comes to this conclusion -- and it stems from his position as an "artist" who is set in some coordinates by God himself.

It's also interesting that he here again stresses that people who are being "judged" are not actually subject to Jesus' approbation. The church or the religious people might judge people, but not Jesus: he's about "meeting people". This is another point which I want to make explicitly to the SBC blogger if he is reading: this riff of Derek Webb in this essay is where I find him most obviously soft-soaping the problem of sin. This is the way Joel Osteen talks about sin; this is the way Oprah talks about sin. This is not the way people who are serious about sin being a problem for mankind which sets them at odds against God speak about sin. Sin is not the fault of the church which drives people away: sin is what comes out of a man by the overflow of his heart (a saying of Jesus, btw; a saying he can use against others but not in a balanced way), and God judges it.

There is more to this interview, and I ask the reader to read it for himself. This post is already twice as long as I intended to make it, but the perspective that we ought to deal specifically with what was said in the interview rather than with what we think was said is a legitimate one. I hope I have done that here, and look forward to other comments on this subject.

---