In the time Sam Brownback was our senator, and later governor, I’ve been to dozens of his speeches. But I never saw him deliver a sermon before.
I did Friday, at the Wichita Pachyderm Club.
Brownback’s a bit older, grayer and more contemplative (so am I, so I don’t hold that against him) than he was the last time I saw him, while he was still entangled in the hurly-burly of state politics.
He left Kansas in 2018 to serve in the Trump administration as ambassador at large for international religious freedom, and last year formed a religious/political organization called the National Committee for Religious Freedom.
His theme Friday was that western civilization is at a crisis of confidence in itself, and that we need to recover our Judeo-Christian mojo or something bad is going to happen to the whole world.
You’ll get no significant argument from me there, although I would include other faiths in the solution.
And he said that loss of confidence can go one of three ways: a revival of the spirit on which this country was founded, replacement of that spirit with a new and equally powerful paradigm, or our decline as a world power.
Again, so far, so good.
And he said there’s an “axis of evil” at work to bring us down, led by the Chinese Communist Party, the government of Iran and their client terrorists in Hamas, Hezbollah and the Taliban.
Yep, those are some bad dudes.
And he said that Christians and Jews need to come together and provide leadership in the western world, as they have for hundreds of years, not always perfectly, but at least faithfully.
Again, I’d agree.
But the message veered hard off the rails when Brownback offered fighting transgenderism as his first concrete example of what to do to re-energize religion and our country.
“We’re now confusing what a man and a woman is?” Brownback asked, to scattered laughs from the Pachyderms. “How many sermons have you heard on that topic?”
“Not a lot,” remarked a woman sitting near me.
“I can’t think of a one I’ve heard,” Brownback continued. “I’m hopeful and I’m sure someone has spoken on it, but you’ve got a culture that’s debating what a man and a woman is and the church is silent on it?”
For someone who’s been an international ambassador on this subject, I’d respectfully suggest that Brownback maybe needs to get out a little more often.
Who’s silent? Whether to fully include LGBTQ people in the life of the church is probably the most explosive issue in Christendom and has been discussed and sermonized about ad nauseum across denominations.
The denomination to which I belong, the United Methodist Church, was literally torn in two last year over the issue of human sexuality. People of faith can and did read the Scripture, prayerfully consider it and came to completely different conclusions.
As a result, where there was one denomination, there are now two: the remaining United Methodist Church, which is moving toward full LGBTQ inclusion, and a new and completely separate Global Methodist Church, moving the opposite direction.
