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A little over six feet tall, well-muscled and extravagantly tattooed, Nadia Bolz-Weber little resembles the Vicar of Dibley. Also, she recognised the ringtone on my phone, an intricate guitar passage cut from the middle of a 20-minute Grateful Dead improvisation. So of course I liked her. She’s a Lutheran pastor from Denver, Colorado and one of the stars of the younger generation of American evangelicals because she seems to have found a way out of the trenches of the culture wars so she can uphold tradition without being homophobic or nasty.
She has in some respects the classical evangelical salvation story: brought up good, went to the bad, found Jesus once again and turned out – not good, she says, but “so so”. She parodies the hymn Amazing Grace: “It’s not like ‘I once was blind, and now can see’: it’s more like, ‘I once was blind and now I have really bad vision’.” She is an enemy of smugness.
But although she is opposed to the megachurch culture of American evangelical protestantism, she is also scathing about the standard liberal pieties. She has queers and freaks and outcasts of all sorts in her congregation, and her church helps run a day shelter for gay teens, but churches which pride themselves on their “inclusiveness” seem patronising to her: “You do that and you’re just going to get muscle cramps from patting yourself on the back.”
She doesn’t like charity generally: “Americans have a tendency to idolise the non-profit industrial complex,” she says, but that is not how she understands the character of God, who is wasteful and profligate. As a Lutheran she has to believe that God does not reward goodness, and no one reaches heaven by good works alone. So her church work is as much geared to transforming the people who do it as to changing the recipients.
“There are things that we do, but they are just a natural extension of what God has done among us.”
It makes an unusual mixture. The fact of her tattoos, she says, is really not shocking in the States. But they are, when you look at them, extravagantly Christian. It’s not just the four-inch oval belt buckle she wears, with an enamelled icon in the middle of it, and the words: “Jesus loves you” etched around the top. Her left arm is almost like a cathedral window, covered in scenes from the Bible. There’s a creation, surprisingly small; a nativity; Jesus in the desert; the raising of Lazarus; the angel at the empty tomb; and Mary and the disciples at Pentecost. She is having the Annunciation tattooed all over her back.
This is an unusual form of evangelism. But it may be the only kind that can break through the crust of dislike and suspicion which insulates increasing numbers of younger Americans from Christianity.
Even in this country the Evangelical Alliance has dropped the word “evangelical” from its youth website because of its negative connotations.
Yet without some kind of zeal Christianity seems destined to wither and die. Mere habit simply won’t keep it going any more. And this zeal has to be other-worldly: it has to come from a place that politics simply cannot reach.
The rather glorious absurdity of tattooing yourself with religious art suggests the way in which Bolz-Weber is trying to distance her brand of Christianity from both sides in the American culture wars. With her friend Sara Miles, this tendency is more obvious. Miles works with one of the most liberal churches in the Anglican communion, St Gregory of Nyssa in San Francisco. But she insists that they are in fact really orthodox: “We had an evangelical couple from Louisiana join the church and they weren’t shocked that the rector’s gay, or that I’m gay, but they were shocked that we kiss the icons.”
“What we offer is an experience of God, rather than talk about God – a sacramental and liturgical life which is particularly important to a lot of the young people. And participation. They are not coming to watch a show. They are being invited into real work. We feed about four to five hundred people a week, give away five or six tons.”
But “We don’t run the food pantry as a social-service programme. The set up is modelled on worship. The purpose of the pantry is to bring about conversion of life in the people who do it. So I was in Oxford last night, talking with a bunch of people who run food-bank programmes, and wanted to be efficient and fair – I was like, ‘Do you think God is efficient? Mercy seems to be a value over fairness in the Gospels’.”
This is an important distinction. The work is being done for the effect on the workers, not to prop up a failing welfare state. And this suggests one future for liberal Christianity.
The secret of the evangelical churches lies in part in the fact that they are quite narrow and demanding. Only the churches that demand commitment from their members will get large numbers of committed members. The trouble comes when evangelical churches become narrow and demanding in ways that are morally offensive. In their different ways, Bolz-Weber and Miles have nourished liberal churches that demand as much commitment as traditionally evangelical ones. Still, it is only the minister who needs to get tattooed.
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