I spent the summer of 2017 as a research assistant for Kristin Du Mez’s project on evangelical masculinity and militarism, Jesus and John Wayne ( available now! ). I thought the real golden rule of Christianity was “everything in moderation.” I thought the church needed a healthy dialogue between progressives and Piper types. My idea of the Bible as a theology textbook didn’t survive Ken Pomykala’s “Introduction to Biblical Literature.” And my certainty about Calvinist theology came to an abrupt end in Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung’s intro philosophy class, when I suggested that God had planned the greatest evils in history and she responded with something like, “Would you say that to someone who is suffering?”īut even though I had moved away from his theology, I still respected and admired John Piper and others like him. My skepticism about female clergy was shattered by Calvin’s chaplain, Pastor Mary Hulst. Then, in my first year at Calvin, pastors and professors began to show me that I did not, in fact, have an answer to everything. I felt more at home in Piper’s tradition than I ever had in my own. Piper affirmed that intellectual study was a valid way to worship God and that evangelism was not a Christian’s only job. Thanks in part to John Piper, however, I met a God who loved me unconditionally, who was more powerful than human failures, and who did not keep a constant count of my sins. One visiting evangelist referred to our church on the north side of Holland, MI, as a “stronghold in this bastion of Reformed theology.” I’d been taught my whole life at church that Calvinism prevented people from getting saved by lulling them into a false sense of soteriological security. In one of those bizarre ironies that convince some people of providence and others of chance, my first ticket out came from John Piper’s Calvinism. Not to mention some sometimes-subtle, sometimes-not racism.īut it wasn’t any of these things that first seemed wrong to me. This red-blooded patriotism was part of a religious culture that also included six-day creationism, climate skepticism, complementarianism, and an evangelistic tunnel vision that saw people as nothing more than immortal souls. On these sacred days, we sang the national anthem out of our hymnals, hung star-spangled banners in the sanctuary, and turned away from the cross and toward the flag to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. I grew up in a church that celebrated the Fourth of July (not to mention Memorial and Veterans’ Days) with more gusto than Easter.
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