Keep The Faith Unperverted

A short and testy intrafaith dialogue with a politicized pastor

As a card-carrying member of the lukewarm Christian community, I’m well aware of the injunction against setting ourselves up as the judge of others. It says so right in the Sermon on the Mount: “Judge not, that ye be not judged.”  Still, I can’t help but volunteering to serve as God’s prosecuting attorney on occasion, just to pitch in and do my part, since I assume he’s busy with the really big stuff, like punishing Vladimir Putin, cryptocurrency hustlers, and (fingers crossed) whoever thought up those Doug-and-LiMu Emu Liberty Mutual commercials.

The other day, I played such a role while writing this piece, “Dropping Christ from Christianity,” an indictment of the politicized evangelical church, which I’ve belonged to since childhood. In too many churches, though by no means all, politics seem to have supplanted religion.  The piece appears to have had some carry. Benefitting from the additional rocket fuel of being picked up by the Drudge Report, it was viewed well over 100,000 times, becoming the second-most-viewed piece since I launched Slack Tide last October.  It finished slightly ahead of my meditation on fishing hats, though came nowhere near the lofty heights of my exploration of the highchair fight at the Golden Corral. Fistfights at all-you-can-eat buffets, apparently, really speak to Americans where they live.

As push-off, the politicized-church column piggybacked off the stellar reporting of Tim Alberta, himself a believer and the son of a minister, who wrote an opus on the subject for The Atlantic. You can read it here if you have a spare afternoon. (It’s very long, but well worth it.)  In my column, I discussed one of the characters who was driving Alberta’s piece, Pastor Bill Bolin, who shepherds the FloodGate church in Brighton, Michigan. My descriptions of him weren’t overly charitable. I called him the “carny-barker-in-chief,” as Bolin thundered from the pulpit on everything from the pseudo-scientific glories of Ivermectin as a COVID treatment, to spouting crackpot Trumpy election-fraud theories. Bolin conducted what he called “diatribes,” and his congregants referred to them as “Headline News.”  Whatever your politics (in the interest of transparency to new readers, I personally consider myself a disillusioned conservative, though by now, I’m about as independent as they come),  I was essentially making the case that it’s tantamount to sacrilege to nudge God off the throne to put Orange Julius Caesar (or pick your political idol of the moment) in his place.

Scores of readers – not just atheists, agnostics, and Catholics, but evangelical Christians themselves – concurred with me. One of them strongly dissented.  His name? Bill Bolin.  After my piece had been up a couple days, I received a paid subscription notice from him. Shortly thereafter, he showed up in my comments section, where I often mix things up with paid subscribers, and often even unpaid ones, depending on whether I let them in that day.  (Become a paid subscriber now, and you never have to worry about being shut out.)

In any case, Bolin went to town on me.  And fair’s fair, since I’d thrown a few shots to his solar plexus in public.  While our comments section here is usually robust, thoughtful, and civilized, only a small fraction of our total readership regularly bothers with it. And since Bolin composed his rebuttal to my column well after even most commenters would have seen it,  I figured I’d reprint our exchange here - an intrafaith dialogue of sorts, albeit, a somewhat testy one.  I can’t speak for Bolin, but my counter was composed  late at night in the fog of holy war.  So I’ve cleaned up very minor things, like punctuation errors or misspellings.  But I’ve left any broken syntax or logic intact on both sides, so I don’t get accused of revisionism.  Here’s the exchange, and I’ll weigh in again briefly on the other side.

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Pastor Bill Bolin:

Hello Matt. I’m the carny-barker-in-chief Dr. Bill Bolin. I’m surprised that you didn’t call me a money-grubbing sort, as you would have put me in the same category that you occupy. After all, I had to pay for one of your subscriptions to respond to your false allegations and distortions taken from Tim Alberta’s article that articulates his angst growing up evangelical.

I’m assuming that you didn’t read the entire article. I also assume that you have never visited FloodGate, the church I pastor, as you don’t seem to have a clue about our approach to the faith. My other guess is that you have never watched an online service of our church.

I know you didn’t do your own research or you would have known that we didn’t just hold service on Resurrection Sunday 2020. We actually never shut down. Not a single Sunday during the entire pandemic. Not one.

If you had conducted proper research you would have found out that our refusal to shut down actually led to a revision in the executive orders that were issued with the first order including churches and ministries in the fine, penalty and possible imprisonment as a non-essential into an exempted status from fine, penalty or imprisonment. {Editor’s note: I couldn’t untangle this sentence for fear of injuring myself, so I left it.}

You would also have found out that I am not just a pastor. I am also an appointed Commissioner with MetroParks. That’s right. I actually serve our community of Detroit and its environment in a meaningful political post.

And if you had conducted just the slightest modicum of research, you would have known that each Sunday’s sermon is devoted to Scriptural exposition.

The sermon is not called a “diatribe.”

What you are addressing is an address I have made on a fairly regular basis for over two years that has focused on sars-COV-2 research, implications of government enforced lockdowns, government overreach, dealing with fear and other assorted social issues that are concerns for most Americans.

I have called the 5-10 minute discussion or diatribe Headline News Now. The headlines are taken from assorted news agencies and address current trends and issues. Sometimes I call that a personal diatribe, or a rant, or a discussion. It is somewhat akin to what you are attempting to do with a major exception: I read the articles and don’t lazily look for an inflammatory statement to illicit a tingle of vacuous proportions that are similar to a Black Hole, empty and void of substance.

Why don’t you try attending FloodGate or at least watching a service or two, something Tim actually did before commenting on his convoluted feelings about what he perceives as dangerous trends in Evangelical Christianity? If you were to do so, I would happily engage with you in a rigorous debate about faith, politics, evangelism or whatever.

I don’t have the same hangups about evangelicalism as either you or Tim, as I didn’t grow up in the church. My perspective is different than either of you as my conversion to Christianity eventually led to a much more conservative approach to life and faith.

Matt, know that I will be praying for you and your disassociation from your faith. Peace out, Pastor Bill.

Pastor Bill Bolin

Matt Labash:

Rev. Bill!

Thanks so much for writing in. And you didn’t have to pay to respond, you could’ve just written me an email for free, and I would’ve been right back to you. But you wanted to do so publicly. So you paid the toll. Paid subscriptions are how we make a living around here. You do understand, as a populist man of the cloth, that we all have to make a living. We’re not all the beneficiaries of socialism, having our parishioners kicking us ten percent of their salaries. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that – I’ve tithed most of my life.)

You assume correctly that I’ve never visited FloodGate. I didn’t know you from a knot on a log before Tim Alberta wrote about you. And generally speaking, when I’m commenting on other people’s articles, I don’t re-report their pieces. I spent nearly a quarter of a century writing long, in-depth profiles as Tim just did, and rest assured, if I was writing a profile of you, I’d have attended your church, hung out with you, gone to your house, interviewed your family and household pets, and would have saturation-reported you up and down. That’s the way I do it. You’d have been sick of me. (Even more than you are now!) The difference here is, I was merely writing a column, pushing off of Tim’s reported piece. So if you have factual concerns, I suggest taking it up with The Atlantic, because their article was where I got all of my information on you. And I never pretended otherwise.

I apologize if I garbled the detail of your diatribe and your sermon being distinct entities, which wasn’t entirely clear in my reading of the piece. Though you were doing The Diatribe from the pulpit on Sunday mornings, I take it? So……same difference. Sounds like you’re having a hard time deciding if you’re Reverend Bill Bolin, or Reverend Sean Hannity. I’ve belonged to a ton of churches in my life – since I was a kid. Everything from Southern Baptist to Evangelical Free to non-denominational Bible churches (basically Baptists who drink). I’ve sat under some really good preachers. And I don’t recall ever having any of them doing regular diatribes about headline news. But….to each his own.

You do understand, however, that you’re proving all the points I was making?

But while I have you, here are some things I left out about you that Tim reported in his Atlantic story:

* You boasted to your congregation about insulting Governor Gretchen Whitmer, chuckling that “I did do a Nazi salute and called her ‘Whitler.”

* You defended the January 6 insurrection – Trump and his mob’s attempt to overturn an election that he lost handily – calling it “not a big deal.” (I guess an angry mob trashing the Capitol, beating up officers – 150 or so of them were injured, one of them died a day later – and threatening to hang Mike Pence is no big whoop in your world? And you’re okay with overturning democracy?)

* This was Tim’s characterization of all the time he spent in your presence: “In the time I spent listening to Bolin preach, sitting with him for interviews, and following his Facebook page, I recorded dozens of political statements that were either recklessly misleading or flat-out wrong. When I would challenge him, asking for a source, Bolin would either cite ‘multiple articles’ he had read or send me a link to a website like Headline USA or Conservative Fighters. Then he would concede that the claims were in dispute, and insist that he didn’t necessarily believe everything he said or posted.”

* Another Tim-reported boo-boo on your end: “At one point, I show Bolin a Facebook post he wrote months earlier: ‘I’m still wondering how 154,000,000 votes were counted in a country where there are only 133,000,000 registered voters.’ This was written, I tell him, well after the Census Bureau had published data showing that more than 168 million Americans were registered to vote in 2020. A quick Google search would have given Bolin the accurate numbers.’Yeah, that’s one I regret,’ he tells me, explaining that he subsequently learned that the numbers he’d posted were incorrect. (The post was still active. Bolin texted me the following day saying he’d deleted it.)”

So, you know, thanks for your prayers and all on my “disassociation from my faith.” But it’s not really necessary. Because my faith is just fine. In God. My faith in guys like you, who pervert his message with angry, moronic politics…….well, that indeed has been shaken a bit. Here’s one for your suggestion box: evangelical Christianity, as I’ve always understood it – and I know a lot of people who practice it honorably, more honorably than I do - is supposed to be about multiplication, not division. Try attracting people to God, instead of repelling them. See how that goes for a while…….

In Christ,
ML

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Okay, so I got a little shirty with Pastor Bill. Am still working on this whole turn-the-other-cheek business.  It’s not in the scripture, but sometimes, when a guy barges into your house, drinks all your beer, and blows snot rockets all over your walls, you gotta box his ears and teach him some manners.  But I don’t hate Pastor Bill, and I’m guessing he doesn’t hate me. (I could be wrong.)  We’re all God’s children, and sometimes, while playing in the sandbox, children hit each other in the heads with shovels. It happens.

But I’m glad he wrote in. And Pastor Bill is right, I’ve never heard one of his sermons.  Here’s hoping, for the benefit of his flock, that his theology is more sound than his conspiracy theories. But it is a mistake to think you’ve taken the full measure of any person, based simply on their political views. Thank God we all tend to be more complicated than that. Which is why we welcome all kinds here, from confused but righteous Trumpsters like my father, who I wrote about here, to the most cloying Bernie Bros (just try to stay out of the comments section so I don’t have to read you).  From God’s chosen people (fly fishermen), to unclean heathens (bait fishermen).

And though I haven’t listened to any of Pastor Bill’s sermons, I did visit his church’s website. On it is a verse of the day, Ephesians  4:2:  Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love.

It’s good advice, for both me and Pastor Bill. I freely admit I don’t have the hang of that yet. I might be a New Testament guy in theory, but I still like to go Old Testament plenty, smiting a Philistine or Amalekite here or there, just to stay in game shape.  So while I’m working it out, here’s my bonus track of the day, from one of my favorite Old Testament prophets, Johnny Cash, singing “God’s Gonna Cut You Down.”