I’ve been wanting to write this article for awhile. There’s something about tea that makes for a really good analogy to explain the wild theological ethics coming out of American evangelicalism over issues likes race, gender, politics, and public health. First things first: Brits like their tea.
The British commitment to tea impacts the way coffee is made here, just like evangelical commitments in the US impact the way we do theology there.
In World War II, Churchill once toyed with the idea of a ration on tea to help the war effort. That was until the British Government asked around and found rationing tea would be devastating to public morale. So they literally went and bought all the tea in the world. Tea helped Great Britain defeat Nazi tyranny.
Everyone’s favorite American-in-the-UK, Ted Lasso, famously said tea tastes like “pigeon sweat”. The thing is, nearly every home here in the UK has an electric kettle for tea. Going back to World War II again, the British government even put kettles in TANKS!
A tea-first culture does coffee differently. Here, instant coffee is way more popular than ground coffee. Seriously. The grocery shelves are proof. Instant coffee works because the omnipresent electric kettle. The British commitment to tea impacts the way coffee is made here, just like evangelical commitments in the US impact the way we do theology there.
Evangelicals have allowed residual cultural commitments to vestiges of white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism to endure in ways that end up affecting the way we do theology today.
Of course, the evangelical thing to say it seems in the States is that all of our ethical conclusions are “biblical” and “objective”. But we seem unable to grapple with the fact that our way of doing ethics is shaped by our commitment to a particular theological “tea” upstream. That “tea” isn’t some pure blend of theology unimpacted by social location or cultural norms.
Evangelicals have allowed residual commitments to vestiges of white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism to endure in ways that end up affecting the way we do theology today. Brandon J. O’Brien surfaces this hermeneutical dynamic in his excellent book “Misreading the Bible With Western Eyes”.
I get that this might seem foreign to many who attend evangelical churches week in and week out. My intent isn’t to shower evangelicals with contempt, but instead offer reparative critique at the level of theology. We can’t repair evangelicalism by descending into the culture war trenches where we slug things out politically. I believe the answer is better theology.
The persistent problem for American evangelicals is that we are doing theology out of commitments that we remain willfully ignorant of.
Jared Stacy 