Are We David or Goliath?

The story of David and Goliath is one of the most popular stories in the Bible. I can remember being very heartened by it as a young child. I went to a religious school for most of my pre-college experiences. Even though I am 6’ 2” today, I was a year or more younger than most of my classmates, so I was always smaller, slower, and less athletic until I got to high school. The story of the young boy David taking Goliath down against all odds is exactly the kind of story a small, young Christian child wants to hear.

America loves the underdog. I can’t think of any popular stories, myths, or movies, where the audiences are rooting against the underdog. We believe in the underdog, our national mythos starting with the revolutionary war and beyond is composed of underdog stories, so it is natural for us to think that we are David in the story and not Goliath.

Certainly there is a lot about our relationship to Christ, Christ’s church, and the broken world around us, where we need stories of the underdog overcoming the insurmountable. Christ overcame the ultimate Goliath: death. Yet, when I see the actions that much of the American Christian population is taking specifically standing against immigrants or supporting Christian nationalism, it starts to seem like the church has become more Goliath than David.

One cannot argue from an underdog position while maintaining so much institutional power and influence. Since Constantine, the Christian church has wielded significant political and social power. So, I am at times bemused and at times existentially depressed that so many Christians carry around a persecution complex. If you don’t like gay marriage, then don’t get gay married, but don’t tell us what to do. No one who supports the wall between church and state is attacking Christianity. And if you examine the pale and inane arguments made by today’s atheists, you will have to conclude there have been no sound attacks against Christianity since the era of Nietzsche. What I do see happening, quite to the contrary, is that the Christian Church is using its power for the marginalization of other people and other faiths. With groups petitioning to post the 10 Commandments on our school walls, you wouldn’t be far wrong to think that Christians are Goliath in the story and the Satanic Temple is David. Please can we all just try to do better than the Satanists?

Then you have issues of material wealth and greed. No human can serve both God and Mammon. But there are a perilous number of Christians looking at a handful of billionaires as their real saviors. Almost every American, Christian or otherwise, has an accumulation of wealth and resources that would make most other citizens on our planet envious. That’s not even getting to the wealth and resources being accumulated by Christian institutions. Add in the ubiquity of messages surrounding the so-called prosperity gospel, and this raises many concerns about the real focus of American Christianity.

David beat Goliath because the young boy was nimble. Our church struggles with 2,000 years of institutionalization. It is difficult to have a nimble and spiritually vital practice if we remain married to very narrow interpretations of our faith instead of seeking interpretations that are healthy for our own culture and time. Doctors would no longer prescribe leeches for therapy, yet there are many elements of medieval theology we continue to cling to. When the Davids of our congregations seek new practices and ideas in the spirit of fostering genuine faith and community, the Goliaths among us so often slap us down. Resistance to change in theological hierarchy make it difficult for our faith to adapt to the fastest changing world our history has ever experienced.

I hesitate here to give in to my temptation to catalog the many hypocrisies and ethical lapses, not to mention outright scandal and sin committed by our clergy, sometimes in the name of our church. From sexual abuse to financial crime, one can easily make an argument that we’ve lost our moral authority. Wherever you stand on issues such as LGBTQ+ rights, marriage, drag queen story hour, book banning, the color of your favorite Disney princess, I don’t think Christians even deserve a say anymore. We’ve lost our privileges to the public square. Many of us are obviously applying a stricter moral standard to others outside our church than to our members. Atheism and TikTok are not killing the church, we’re doing it through our own hypocrisy. We are carrying our heavy armor and swords into battle where they don’t belong, and we deserve to be taken down by five small stones in a sling.

It’s hard to be the underdog when we have lost our prophetic voice. I would like to think it is a small minority, but it does seem like many Christian churches in America are too closely aligned with the dominant cultural values and economic concerns of certain Texas politicians. We’ve lost our will to challenge injustice and speak out against wrongdoing. Goliath does not want to battle another Goliath.
It is also hard to maintain an underdog status when we post exclusionary practices on our statements of belief. Obviously, this isn’t true of every church. There are many churches that are joining the Open and Affirming movement, the Reconciling in Christ movement, or many other inclusive groups. My own church is a mainline congregation with a very inclusive welcoming statement, but 30 other churches in my area explicitly exclude LGBTQ+ people or call their marriages a sin. Exclusionary theologies lead to exclusionary beliefs, which — surprise! — lead to exclusion. How dare we exclude that which God has created and called good?

I want to be clear; these are not universal criticisms. There are many scholarly denominations such as the UCC, the Disciples of Christ, the UMC, ELCA, and handfuls of independent congregations. I deliberately refer to them as scholarly because scholarship leads to reformation and vibrancy while many other churches are clinging to ideas that are hundreds of years old, disproven by science, disproven by our own loving eyes and serve us no better than a medicinal leech. Thankfully, there are congregations for you out there who continue to address the real issues of our day and maintain a commitment to serving God in the way Jesus modeled for us. It is up to us to pick up our slings as we are called.