ON BEING A HILLBILLY LIBERAL CHRISTIAN [W, 11-4-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter—ON BEING A HILLBILLY LIBERAL CHRISTIAN [W, 11-4-26]

 

Yesterday was the election, so I am thinking about being…

…an HLC [Hillbilly Liberal Christian]. Don’t be misled by the middle word. HLCs are very conservative. Personally.

I grew up on a hardscrabble, primitive five-acre Southern Indiana farm. My father had lost his sight in an industrial accident when I was five. He was the hardest working man I ever knew, but he couldn’t get a job because of his eyesight. We had to go on welfare. The day the social worker came to sign us up, he went to the barn and cried. I’m legitimately a hillbilly.

I am also legitimately a Christian. I’m not particularly good at following the ways of Christ, but doing so is my intention, my identity. I grew up in a hillbilly liberal church--very conservative personally and very liberal socially, except we just called both of them being Christian.

HLCs are personally conservative. We are against all forms of personal immorality--greed and lust and lying and smoking and cheating and booze and dope and gambling and promiscuity... Because those are sins.

A sin is something that breaks relationship—with God, with others, with the world, with your own true self. HLCs are against those things because they ruin people and they ruin families and they ruin society. Surprisingly to me, many people today who identify themselves as conservative either engage in those activities, or ignore them, or actively promote them.

But HLCs do not think that people who commit sins of personal immorality should be punished. Accountability, yes, but that is different from punishment. We know that everyone, even committed Christians, are prone to sin. “Let the one who is without sin cast the first stone.” “Forgive us our sins as we forgive the sins of others.”

We figure that sinners are to be helped and forgiven and loved back into the fold of righteousness, because we are under a mandate to “…treat others the way you want to be treated.”

Hillbilly liberal Christians are socially liberal. We believe in equal rights and opportunities for all, regardless of race or other ways we distinguish ourselves from others.

We want to keep people out of slavery of all types, including addictions that take away your humanity and your personhood and your wholeness and your soul.

We believe in personal independence and responsibility but we know you can’t be independent and responsible if you have no tools. You need others to help you get the tools—education, opportunity. So, we also believe in being good neighbors, both individually and socially, governmentally.

We believe in trusting people to make their own choices. Our tolerance isn’t letting people go to hell by their own route, but respect for them as children of God, and also humility that says we might be wrong.

That means we are evangelists, not legislators. We want people to behave because they belong, not because they believe. We don’t dream of systems so perfect that no one has to be good. Being a good neighbor means walking with your neighbor even if they go down the wrong road and got lost.

We know the difference between the kingdom of this world and the kingdom of God, between patriotism and Christian faith, between nationalism and following Jesus. Even though we are country music fans and devoutly patriotic Americans, we would have been horrified at the stage for Marty Stuart’s Easter Show—red and white bunting all over, with two huge American flags dwarfing a tiny cross.

HLCs want to go to heaven instead of hell, but we know that even if there is no afterlife, the best and most fulfilling way to live in this life is “the way.”

Hillbilly liberal Christians believe there is only one gospel. Adjective gospels, like social gospel, or personal gospel, or holiness gospel, develop when one aspect of Christianity is emphasized so much that the others get lost, and that one aspect is considered to be all there is to the faith. Personally conservative—holding self to the highest standards of morality and responsibility--and socially liberal—treating others with the highest standards of compassion and inclusion--that is one gospel of good news.

It's a bit disingenuous for me now to claim to be a hillbilly. I no longer plow behind a horse, walk dirt roads in high-top shoes, listen to The Opry on the radio. Indeed, hillbillys don’t use words like disingenuous.

But I’m pleased that I’ve never departed from the hillbilly liberal Gospel. It may not be the only personally and socially fulfilling way to live, but I’m glad it was the way those good folks at the little open-country Forsythe Methodist Church lived and taught. They took me in, and I still belong with them.

John Robert McFarland

“Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game, and dumb enough to think it’s important.” Eugene McCarthy, via The Writer’s Almanack.