Opinion

QUAY: Nancy Mace Shows How America’s Churches Are Failing Us

OPINION
Nancy Mace Speaks To Tim Scott's 13th Annual Prayer Breakfast

[ScreenShot/Twitter/Greg Price]

Grayson Quay News & Opinion Editor
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Nancy Mace’s sultry comments at Thursday’s prayer breakfast drew the ire of many Christian conservatives.

“I woke up this morning at seven.” Mace said at the breakfast. “I was getting picked up at 7:45. Patrick, my fiancé, tried to pull me by my waist over this morning in bed, and I was like, ‘No baby. We ain’t got time for that this morning. I gotta get to the prayer breakfast, and I gotta be on time.'”

Premarital sex is a common sin, even among Christians. Those who go to their wedding beds as virgins deserve admiration. Most of us fall short. But there’s a big difference between merely committing fornication and bragging about it in front of a room full of Christians. (RELATED: Rep. Nancy Mace Tells Frisky Story: ‘My Fiancé Tried To Pull Me By My Waist Over This Morning In Bed’)

It’s long been fashionable to point out that Christians are hypocrites. They preach a high moral standard, fail to live up to it, hide their own shortcomings and stigmatize sinners who fall short in more visible ways. This is a fair critique, but the solution is not to get rid of the standard altogether. A society in which some people conceal their sins is infinitely preferable to one in which no one cares enough to try.

Look at the contrast between Mace and Sen. Tim Scott, her spiritual mentor and fellow member of South Carolina’s Seacoast Church. Scott, who remains unmarried, was a proud virgin into his 30s. By the time he was 46, he admitted to having broken his abstinence pledge. What he didn’t do is boast about it. “The Bible’s right,” he told a reporter in 2012. “You’re better off to wait. I just wish we all had more patience.” He was honest about his struggles without flaunting or justifying his shortcomings.

Mace, on the other hand, is openly living with her fiancé and even hinted that she planned to have sex with him when she got home that night. (RELATED: Republican Rep. Nancy Mace Says Biden FDA Should Ignore Texas Judge’s Abortion Pill Ruling)

The rest of the speech was actually quite moving, as Mace tearfully shared her story of coming to the church as a twice-divorced single mother and learning there was a place for her. This vulnerability and sincerity led some Christians to leap to Mace’s defense. 

“So basically, this woman is a baby Christian who … doesn’t have all the answers yet–and all the Christians on this platform seem intent on chasing her back out,” wrote Babylon Bee editor Joel Berry. “Good job, everyone.”

New converts certainly require guidance. Paul had to urge the young Corinthian church to do something about a member who was openly schtupping his own step-mother.

But a few years before 1 Corinthians was written, the Council of Jerusalem declared that all Gentile converts must abstain from sexual immorality, and the decree was immediately distributed and read in all the churches. The incestuous Corinthian had no excuse. 

Neither does Mace. Two thousand years of Church teaching has maintained that sex outside marriage is sinful, and for the past four years, she’s been a direct recipient of that teaching. Hardly a “baby Christian” — you wouldn’t call an actual four-year-old a baby, would you?

The problem in Corinth wasn’t that they thought incest was ok. It’s that they tolerated it anyway and then congratulated themselves for doing so. “And you are proud! Shouldn’t you rather have gone into mourning and have put out of your fellowship the man who has been doing this?” Paul wrote. By failing to discipline the sinner, the members of that congregation were putting his soul at risk. I suspect Mace’s church has failed her in the same way. (RELATED: Should Priests Deny Biden Communion? Theologians Weigh In)

Five hundred years ago, Paul’s teachings on the unmerited grace of Jesus Christ inflamed the heart of Martin Luther and touched off the Protestant Reformation. Over the centuries, however, the idea of God’s love as a free gift has degenerated into something like, “I’ll just keep sinning because Jesus loves me no matter what,” a view theologians call “antinomianism.”

This wasn’t what the reformers taught, of course. Luther would’ve thrown a tankard at your head if you even suggested such a thing. John Calvin nearly turned Geneva into a police state trying to enforce godly living. But over the centuries, the blithe antinomian attitude Paul condemned in Corinth (and elsewhere) has reemerged in American evangelicalism.

“I go to church because I’m a sinner not a saint!” Mace proclaimed on Twitter in response to the backlash. She knows premarital sex is wrong. She just doesn’t think it’s a big deal.

The “sinner not a saint” bit is a good reminder of one’s own fallibility. It is not an invitation to sin. Some sins, like wrath or envy, are closely entwined with an individual’s personality and require lifelong struggle. Others are fairly easy to stop doing. If your job is producing pornographic films, becoming a Christian means you’ll have to quit. If you’re in a sexual relationship with a person to whom you’re not married, one of you needs to sleep on the couch until you tie the knot. 

“Glad those in attendance, including @SenatorTimScott and my pastor, took this joke in stride. Pastor Greg and I will have extra to talk about on Sunday,” Mace tweeted, adding a laughing/crying emoji, just to make sure we know this is all a big joke to her. (RELATED: Tim Scott-Aligned Super PAC Makes $40 Million Ad Buy)

I wonder what Pastor Greg will say. The proper response would be to urge her to live celibately with her fiancé and, if she refuses, to threaten her with excommunication — which brings us to another major problem with the American church.

In medieval Europe, the only Christianity on offer was Roman Catholicism, and that church’s sacraments were the only path to salvation. Excommunication had real teeth in those days. 

Today, though, denominations abound. We’re consumers, and we want options. Most Protestants now believe that the Church is bigger than any one denomination. No Southern Baptist would claim that a member who moved to a new city and started attending a Presbyterian church had cut himself from salvation. This belief may be admirable in some ways. It may even be unavoidable in our pluralistic society. But it makes church discipline meaningless. 

If my Anglican church excommunicates me for unrepentant sexual sin, I can just go to the nondenom church down the block. The end result is that Christianity becomes purely personal.

Church discipline once humbled kings and emperors. In the fourth century, Bishop Ambrose of Milan forced the Roman Emperor Theodosius to publicly repent after he massacred 7,000 civilians. In the 11th century, Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV waited barefoot in a blizzard for three days to beg the pope’s forgiveness. In the 12th century, King Henry II of England agreed to be whipped as penance for the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket. (It’s the ideal model of church-state relations, if you ask me.)

Today, most clergy don’t bother with discipline at all, for politicians or for anyone else.

If you’re wondering why Nancy Mace felt comfortable making light of her fornication in front of a Christian audience, the combination of antinomianism and lack of church discipline is to blame. And until churches start preaching real repentance and enforcing real consequences for the lack of it, we’ll be seeing a lot more incidents like the one at Thursday’s prayer breakfast.

Grayson Quay is an editor at the Daily Caller.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.