Book Review: Testimony

Title: Testimony 

Author: Jon Ward

Date: 2023

Publisher: Brazos/Baker

ISBN: 978-1-5874-3577-5

Length: my advance review copy was an unpaginated e-file

Quote: "The kingdom of God wasn’t just words to me. But what I was seeing from the American church in 2016 was at odds with what I had been taught."

This is a well written book that should interest everyone who is now, or has ever been, identified with any of the following terms: evangelical Christians; charismatic Christians; nondenominational church; storefront church; startup church; Montgomery County, Maryland; Gaithersburg; Rockville; Wheaton; Silver Spring; Takoma Park; church school; homeschool; Montgomery College; University of Maryland; Republican; Democrat; Donald Trump voter; Hillary Clinton voter; Barack Obama voter; Sarah Palin voter; Yahoo News; Fox Channel; Newsmax; Charles Colson; C.S. Lewis; Keith Green; Phil Keaggy, Amy Grant; 1980s.You will enjoy reading what Ward has to say about these things, whoever you are. The rest of my comments are about the religious and political ideas to which Ward testifies. You may want to see how far it's possible to disagree with a book and still thoroughly enjoy it. You may just want to read the book, which is fine. My comments won't be on the test.

In many churches, Jon Ward explains to those who don't know, part of many church services is time for members of the congregation to tell stories or "testimonies"  of their conversions and other spiritual experiences. In the Yahoo News man's life, spiritual experiences and other life experiences led him away from the church in which he grew up, into the idolatry of Big Government that he perceived would be more useful in his job...

No, really. The "social gospel" that prioritizes helping the poor above other aspects of the Faith is a valid and very appealing part of Christianity, and it's not unreasonable for someone who's always lived in and near Washington, D.C., to accept the claim that the most efficient way to help the poor is to give government agencies whatever they say they need for that purpose. And as a writer I know all about how quickly intelligent people burn out on any trace of the cultlike emotional atmosphere churches acquire when they demand what Ward calls "happy-clappy" celebration at all times, even while one is being verbally abused by the alpha verbal bullies of the pack. That much of Ward's story I beieve.

But I suspect him of hamming it up. I've never seriously believed that either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton would have a reporter murdered outright. Both are smart enough and rich enough to have more efficient ways of shutting up the reporter. I have heard credible claims that Vince Foster had some help committing suicide, but I'm more inclined to suspect the co-workers against whom he was starting to throw accusations about more than I do his old school friend Hillary, and by all accounts it sounds as if he had Prozac Dementia, which in 1993 would have looked just like paranoid schizophrenia, which is incurable, in any case. But if, as a reporter, I were seriously afraid of having my career ruined by one of the two, I'd be more afraid of Clinton. Trump generates enough hate to create a backlash of sympathy for anyone he bullies. Clinton's trademark combination of genuine Background, genuine myopia, and the blonde mystique would allow her to twirl a metaphorical knife slowly in your metaphorical wound while everyone thought she was being nice. And I don't believe a grown man ever seriously suffered from physical fear that Trump was going to morph into Hitler and have the grown man machine-gunned, either. Trump comes across as far more likely to use up his angry energy yelling at a reporter he disliked, posting a few mean tweets, and moving on.

Ward's memoirs sound credible enough when he's talking about growing up inside a nondenominational local church in Maryland. He'd be very close to my sisters' age. I heard some of the speakers and read some of the books that he says influenced his father's more charismatic and dominating friend's takeover of what started out to be his father's church. This friend, whose name I think I would have recognized if it hadn't been one of the names Ward mentions having changed, was later accused of abusing other members of the church in several ways that amounted to crimes. 

The situation he describes is pathetic. Ward doesn't claim to have been abused; he says only good things about his parents, who he says were more victims than emotional abusers in a church that gradually grew into a bit of a personality cult around his father's friend. But he was sent to a "Christian" school in Rockville, the Devil's Town, where fears that any exposure to non-church-members' kids might lead him into the Church of Satan were not, in fact, exaggerated. There really was a Church of Satan. Anton LaVey said it was supposed to be about rebellion in a responsible way, not evildoing; that crowd accomplished more than their reasonable share of evildoing, anyway. My heart aches for the poor little stifled-while-endangered boy who was Jon Ward. 

Mr. Ward's story was the one my father refused to live out. A sincere and independent Christian, he launched a "storefront church" that attracted many people who'd turned against one denomination or other. They were charismatic Christians, very sincere in their emotional displays. Jon Ward came to feel that education, and closer ties to historic Christianity, would have improved the emotional experience of having a church that was based on the vagaries of emotion, which of course soon became forced displays of emotion not felt, frantic efforts to manipulate God into keeping the emotions miraculously flowing beyond the normal ninety-second half-life of an emotional mood. Joshua Harris's popular, since retracted, book I Kissed Dating Goodbye generated a new fad in which people who hadn't been doing too well in the dating game anyway decided all their relationships would be either friendship or courtship, which Ward seems to think made his adolescent social life more awkward than average, though he falls short of convincing me that that's possible. (It actually worked for him; he was apparently able to be a virgin bridegroom and have been happily married since.) There was a strange combination, he says, of contempt for jobs other than evangelism, distrust of books other than church material, and real fear of music and pop culture, which he found stultifying to his creative, writerly mind. And also, because the church was too new, small, and underfunded to have much of an active ministry, there was a tendency to blame poor people and very little effort to help them. Mr. Ward loved Jesus and wanted to help his flock, but he didn't have the connections to do all that he wanted to do. He let his flock down, and his more extroverted, less scrupulous friend stepped in to fill in the gaps with cultlike emotional abuse, brainwashing, and exploitation. 

The Ward children got out, Jon Ward says  Could they be blamed? He carefully avoids saying whether all of them got out unscathed by the alleged sexual abuse of some children in the church. He sticks to his own story, telling how he wanted to be a "creative" writer but, when he did not immediately sell a novel, was sent to journalism school instead. There he would have learned about the other storefront churches in Washington that had very active urban missions. There, too, he would have learned that advocating smaller government in Washington is downright un-neighborly. If you want to publish your writing under your own name, in the city, it's prudent to accept an ever-expanding government as a fact of life, like climate change, and all those Republicans whose real religion is racism, and other myths circulated in support of ever-expanding government.

But consider the facts. Ward was not at Yahoo when Yahoo was cheating me out of money, but did his concern for the poor ever lead him to do some investigative reporting on the Associated Content writers to whom Yahoo still owes money? And what's he done about glyphosate, anyway? And does he really suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome in anything like the way he claims? 

I don't know that it's a mortal sin to join the political party to which most of the people with whom you work belong. Certainly it's neither a sin, nor even an unpopular act, to say "I disliked President Trump personally, for good and sufficient reasons well known to everyone in Washington." There were reasons why Trump was able to campaign as a so-called outsider; lack of money or connections were not among them. He could afford to hang out where Washington's leading socialites were, and he did, and he was detested. He ruined Alexandria's waterfront, for mercy's sake. He was blamed for the more-than-a-mile of shame along Route 1 in Baltimore. There's an ancient Washington tradition of stereotyping New York as tacky, and Trump was a walking definition of New York tacky. 

But if you really understand how our government is supposed to work, you understand that it's designed to incorporate people like Trump into the system...to minimize the effect individuals' tackiness can have on the government as a whole. And if you're going to get into situations where shaking someone's hand is expected, a flat refusal to shake hands makes a big bold statement of contempt, and a warm handshake makes a big bold statement of Christian willingness to imagine that the person's professed religious conversion may have been sincere, but saying that at least it was a frigid, grudging handshake sounds flat-out childish.

Ward is correct in saying that some Christians' personal loyalty to Trump goes beyond what is either their Christian duty or Trump's due. Yes, economically a lot of people did benefit from the Trump Administration as a much needed relief in between Obama's economic mess and Biden's economic trainwreck. Yes, some R's do have the fortitude to say that, and some D's should only have the fortitude to hear them. 

And when D's talk about the Trumpist "insurrection," by no means the biggest or deadliest riot Washington has survived while Ward and I were there, it really spoils the whole effect for them to assert, as if able to know, that "the elections were fair and honest." Very likely some of them were, but nobody can possibly say that all of them were. 

How much blame does Ward deserve for hamming up emotions that come straight out of a partisan playbook? Is it possible that he does sincerely feel these emotions, even though some of them are based on outright lies? 

Is it possible that a forty-year-old newsman still believes one party holds any monopoly on outright lies?

I don't know. I enjoyed this book for the nostalgia and gossip, but I think Christian readers should distrust, if not altogether discard, its main political argument. 

Ward found that there are churches (not only in Washington) where it's perfectly acceptable to be a Democrat. Cheers. And now that the left-wingnuts have decided to sacrifice women in favor of the "trans women" and their campaign donations, to try a last-ditch effort to get young women into baby-factory mode in hopes of saving Social Security (as if all those babies would be able to get jobs!) and prioritize getting rid of any acknowledgment of a "right to privacy" even above pampering the men who want to start babies and let women endure abortions, the Religious Right can stop screaming and hissing that anyone who votes for any D is a "baby" killer. In fact I'd agree with Ward that it would be a very good thing if people on both sides reclaimed the art of discussing ideas, with detachment, rather than pitching battles (if only babble-battles) about whose candidate is an angel and whose is the Devil. 

I just don't think it helps when D's go into full crybully mode about how silly it was to be afraid of their candidate and how sensible to be afraid of the R candidate. Even if they genuinely had those emotional reactions, they have to know they were reacting to some combination of party rhetoric and personal memories. And those reactions don't make the rest of their arguments more convincing. We do need the intellectual rigor that makes it possible to understand the rational reasons why people don't agree with us. For example, people in our nation's capital need to understand that people in the rest of the country want to reverse the overgrowth of the federal government for exactly the same kind of reasons that people in Washington want...well...not to make it a main talking point, anyway. Nowhere in his book does Ward acknowledge the existence of fiscal conservatives who, far from being obsessed with abortion, may actually be pro-choice on the grounds that aborting unwanted babies is cheaper than making them wards of the state. It helps to begin by admitting that people on both sides tend to vote for their interests.