The following which appears each week in the liturgy of the Presbyterian Church USA is denominated a prayer of confession… to be said in unison":
O God your call for justice is so clear that we are amazed at how easily we fail to hear you over the din of daily life. We want to cease to do evil. We want to learn to do good. Yet we rarely do all that we can to rescue defend and plead for those in need. As you have sought us out so we seek your pardon. Grant us the courage we pray as persons as communities and as nations to bring about the justice you desire. Amen.Now I stress at once that this prayer (always printed in bold) was obviously a corporate decision: it has little or nothing to do with the will of my tiny rural congregation (numbering about fifty). Nevertheless... Nevertheless as someone who has returned to weekly church-going after about a ten years hiatus (inspired by tasteless Methodist harangues whose gist was always to milk more money from tight wallets) Im dismayed. Where to begin? Gods call to justice? Doesnt God call first to faith forgiveness and humility? Demitte nos debita nostra sicut et nos demittimus debitoribus nostris: isnt there a distinct reciprocity in the formula of the Lords Prayer matching your selfish acts with selfish acts done to you? Isnt the strong implication that in confessing our sins what we forgive (dismiss") in others is the same order of thing as is forgiven in us? Where is there even a hint of charging the Bastille? What precisely is a call to justice" and why is this call so stentorian that it silences every other penitent inclination during the prayer of confession"? It seems that I dont have to worry about my angry outburst last week my tendency to despair over our worldly future or... you know all those out-of-tune deeds and moods whose discord I did not fail to hear over the din of daily life". Maybe such lapses are negligible because they signal mere weakness or error whereas the justice" creed rivets its attention on downright outright evil. We want to cease to do evil...." In the prayers syntax doing evil is equivalent to not doing all that we can to rescue defend and plead for those in need". Thats where our focus should beand its apparently a political focus in the sense that the justice you desire" carries us out into engagement of and with the polis. We are being exhorted to a collective venture; any absolution we receive must flow it seems through communal endeavor. This is why we flail ourselves and wear sackcloth: because we havent gotten involved" as we should have in the crusade to right wrongs round about us. Heigh-ho Silver! Well I cant just hit the off" button on organized religion again... or I could but it would be self-defeating in several ways. Believe me when I say that Ive counted them: a) the church compound is convenient to our home; b) the old chapel itself is beautifuland beauty counts for much in the worshipful frame of mind; c) the congregation is older not crawling with motivated Yuppies who brush folks like us aside while going to and from minivans; d) my wife needs the company of someone besides an old hermit in our joint retirement; e) we only just joinedbailing out at this point would seem to me rather classless; f) individual members of the congregation quite probably have not thought through the code" behind this Social-Justice Warrior swagger and may indeed be quite normal and healthy; g) our minister though donning the SJW ninja sash occasionally also has very sane humble moments; and h) we can by no means be sure that after switching horses in mid-stream we wouldnt find some rabid Bible-thumping torturer of microphones at the reins farther up-river. Methodists and Presbyterians like to change ministers the way the Oakland As change their line-up. (Aside: a conservative literalist" Protestant minister can be the most annoyingly subjective and self-righteous creature on two legs. I represented the type with the Reverend Peacock in my novel Worse By Seven. Of course hes an amalgam of two or three characters Ive knownbut all of them are entirely and painfully real.) Lets be clear. The worst thing about the Prayer of Confession above is that it grossly mischaracterizes God. We human beings are not only unjust every day of our lives; were incapable of perfectly just behavior given what we are in the flesh. God is aware of that and He pardons us our weakness before we ask (but not our evil; for evil is error recognized and willed in its capacity as a chaotic agency). He is merciful. Is it not a mark of His justice that He shows mercy to creatures deficient in understanding? I wont go that far for the formulation appears to compel God to forgive. Indeed my point is precisely that Gods truth transcends legalistic compulsion. The spirit gives the law; the law does not transmit a designers blueprint for the spirit. In making zeal for political activism a prerequisite for Gods forgiveness the authors of this atrocious confession (for it is atrocious) advance their utopian vision of a perfectly administered smoothly humming secular state where nobody complains of anything. They promote their hubristic (i.e. vainly prideful) fantasy by suppressing the fundamental spiritual truth that we must always be victims and perpetrators of injustice in this life both at once. The PCUSA has thus thrust heresy into the weekly order of worship. Frankly the gambit reminds me of socialist Francis Bellamys insinuating his Pledge of Allegiance into schoolrooms over a century ago to wean children away from respecting the Tenth Amendment. (Sorry if I didnt break that one to you gently enough.) Now if you want to toss around the word evil" I should say that appropriating the Christian liturgy to transmit secular-utopian propaganda is a frontrunner in the qualifying round. This pseudo-prayer of confession" thats much closer to a pledge of ideological allegiance quite pisses me off. How I end up dealing with the cognitive dissonance of the sticky situation in which Ive landed myself isnt the intended subject of this piece… and at this point indeed I really dont have an answer to that question. I have a strong feeling that the answer will appear if I simply wait and watch for a few months. For my remaining space here I prefer to emphasize why applying the confessions" crusade-like zeal to headline issueswhich is its all-but-obvious intentactually carries us in a direction opposite to proper Christian practice. I serendipitously heard Jordan Peterson make the point the other day that British Common Law considers criminal the evasion of a committed crimes easy ready discovery. Willful ignorance is connivance complicity. This is my first charge against the arrogant authors of the confession": they foreclose dutiful mature acquisition of relevant information in the interest of promoting an activist mentality. Indeed they virtually criminalize the thorough investigation of likely criminalityof tawdry motive and behind-the-scenes double-dealing. They make it an article of faith that the believer always judge a situation by its superficial qualities. Then if (and usually when) the slapdash assessment proves wrong the result isnt evidence of culpable folly: its a measure of faith. The believer wanted things to be as they appeared. He wanted the no gun zone" signs to warn off homicidal psychopaths rather than attract them. He wanted the wide-open border to draw only starving campesinos with their children not cartel thugs or Al Qaeda scouts. He wanted universal health care to treat everyones ailment instantlynever to create death panels or hand patients over to quacks and tyros. After all how do you get the baskets that produce infinite fish and bread if you protest at the outset But... there are thousands of them and we just have this loaf." You gotta believe brother! You gotta feel the spirit! Isnt it odd how closely this left-wing lunacy comes to approximate the notorious right-wing cultism once so vigorously deplored and persecuted by the Left? Remember Waco and David Koresh? Indeed my second charge against the PCUSAs Social Justice war cabinet is that its formulas go beyond promoting the sin of willful obtuseness; they encourage a quasi-Manichaean us/them" mentality. The believer that is should be scanning his socio-political horizon constantly for signs of injustice that we fail to hear... over the din of daily life." To cleanse himself over the coming week our faithful follower is looking for mountains of outrage disguised as mole-hills of disparity. If he doesnt find an adversary to battle with his gospel of love" he must return to the sanctuary next Sunday and accept the confession" as a rain of keen lashes upon his lukewarm inactivity. One thinks of the old joke about Boy Scouts (now just Scouts thanks to activists like those of the PCUSA) who scour downtown streets looking for an elderly lady to help across the intersection. They need a good deed for their next merit badge! Resisting information that would apprise you of your complicity in a crime (e.g. in enabling child-abusers by promoting the free border pass for anyone with a child) makes the world a darker place. Unsettling your neighborhood by inflating every storm-in-a-teapot to Rosa Parks stature (e.g. demanding the removal of an unnamed Confederates statue that only the pigeons notice) actually disrupts peace in the community. The former is a substantive crime; the latter is a needless sacrifice of decorum at the altar of egotism. The PCUSA leadership is neither making our society a safer nor a more pleasant place. One would be tempted to conclude that the members of this august body in fact detest the quiet middle-American residential lane where sparrows sputter in overgrown mulberries as old Major Suggs rocks on his front porch. They detest that scene yes. Its rife with unexposed injustice. Too complacent; too peaceful. I have little patience with people like that and more than enough experience of them. Their thin cloak of Christian ritual is not a charge I lodge against them but a profanation I see plainly after thirty-five years lived in the corridors of pomp and bombast. I see the Good News is being exploited yet again by fools who are too concerned with their appearance before the world (yet too little concerned with the real-world effects of their posing). My two charges I put before you to weigh how you will; my own conviction of how God in the person of Christ is being fundamentally distorted by this grandstanding is the settled verdict of my heart. Yet Im not a Manichaean. Part of my verdict is not that such tinkering liturgical engineers as these are the origin of all our problemsare devils spawn: are evil. I floated that suggestion... but testily as a sardonic jab more than a charge. Most if not all of them are mere fools; and I was a big fool myself once upon a time and I continue in folly (though of smaller dimensions I hope) as my days on earth turn fewer. Thats what I say to myself now as the rest (or most… or only some?) of the congregation drones the prayer of confession" in unison. In my mind I make my own confession: God forgive me for what I dont know but should know. Forgive my intellectual laziness and my spiritual arrogance in reaching conclusions that are too solid or in reaching them too fast. And forgive me when I add half-wittingly to my prayer Thank you Lord for not making me as that sinning publican over there."