Mass Conversion

May 18, 2008 by Pastor Dan.

What I know about Viking history would not fill up a 3×5 card. But thanks to Google and Wikipedia, I am able to locate the mass conversion of the Vikings to Christianity to the 9^th and 10^th centuries.

The first big event for this was a peace treaty in 878 after King Alfred defeated Guthrum’s Great Viking Army at Edington, and made conversion to Christianity one of the requirements in the peace treaty. King Alfred served directly as Guthrum’s sponsor for baptism.

St. Olaf, Viking navigator, who had much to do with bringing Christianity to Scandinavia

Then, in the Reformation, Sweden became Lutheran virtually by the declaration of the Riksdag, the parliament, in 1527. There were minor skirmishes, and overtones of nationalism and rebellions, but basically the nation of Sweden went the way of Lutheranism in one sweeping change. Two years later, a royal decree in Denmark accomplished the same thing.

A Viking cross, 10th century 

Faith is a strange thing when it insists on its own way. I like to think that true Christians would never force anybody to accept the Christian faith. We know that Christ wins us over, one heart at a time, not entire countries at a time. That seems more like the forced conversions in the other direction, where entire populations were coerced by the armies of Mohammed to accept Islam or accept death.

And yet we have this passage appointed for Holy Trinity where Jesus gives the Great Commission: Go to all nations, teach them to obey, and baptize them. So for those who take the Bible literally, what part of all nations don’t we get? Pick out a nation, any nation, march in there, or bomb your way in—in the modern technology of war—and force them through sheer intimidation to accept your teachings and become Christian.

What Alfred did to Guthrum, or Gustavus Vasa did for Lutheranism, is not entirely different from what George W. might like to see happen in Iraq.

We live in a nation where nobody has this power, even though the “mass media” at times seems to be converting the masses to a neo-pagan materialism. Instead of baptizing the masses, we give them credit cards with high credit limits and march them into shopping malls advertized on TV.

There is however something called a “tipping point” where something that was previously accepted by a culture or society suddenly changes. [Cf. Malcolm Gladwell’s best-seller, “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.” Good becomes evil, or evil becomes good at the tipping point when the social mass suddenly changes its mind. The late Yale scholar John Boswell described this point in medieval Europe when in less than 100 years society went from being rather open and accepting about gay people to turning on them, rejecting them legally and religiously, and instituting the death penalty.

Tipping points are moments when the momentum for change becomes unstoppable. We may have just passed the tipping point for climate change, for example, and so watch out! But I bring this all up because we may at last be at the tipping-back point, about 900 years later, when social attitudes about gay people are suddenly flipping back the other direction. In a relative short period of time, less than 25 years, a culture that shamed homosexuals into silence and threatened them with blackmail, has come to the point where everybody seems to have friends who are homosexual, even now the Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court. On the legal side, it was only 17 years from the 1986 Bowers v. Hardwick that sent a gay man to prison for sodomy in Georgia, to the favorable 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas that decriminalized consensual sex between persons of the same gender. In 2004 Massachusetts legalized gay marriage because the court demanded the redress of injustice. and in 2008, now the California Supreme Court has swept aside Proposition 22 as unjust, and included in their decision any law which discriminates on the basis of sexual orientation. We are now a “protected class” for any California law.

I am glad for it, of course, because I want to be married—or more accurately, to have my lifetime partnership with Carl recognized with respect by society and its legal system. We will indeed “get married” in California as soon after June 16 as we can grab a marriage license.

The symbolic “tipping point” may be 60%. Only eight years ago, over 60% of California voters said yes to the Knight Initiative, Prop 22, to close marriage to gay or lesbian couples. And (according to Steve Chapman in the Chicago Tribune today) last year, a CBS News/New York Times Poll found that 60 percent of Americans favor allowing gay or lesbian couples to enter a civil union or marriage.

But I keep thinking about that Great Commission to baptized and teach entire nations and expect them to obey. If Jesus bluntly commanded us to love our neighbor and our enemies, even homosexual ones, even homophobic ones, would we do because it has been commanded?

Or do we and everybody else really have to be won over, one heart at a time?

I would rather have it that the overwhelming majority of Californians concurred with the Court and said, “Of course! We know that everyone is entitled to the fundamental right to marry the person of his or her own choice. We didn’t need a court of law to demand that.” I would rather have every American, every world citizen, come to the conclusion independently that the homosexual is my neighbor, not my enemy.

But this will only happen if enough people believe that they are commissioned to go and teach, and win over, one heart at a time, to the justice and charity and compassion and impartiality before God which the Gospel proclaims. How do you playa role? How do you teach? By coming out, telling your story, and keeping the faith that is really is good news more than authority by which Jesus’ message spreads.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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