weak victories

Ross Douthat:

The pro-life movement was an always-marginal and embattled cause, and in [1992] it did seem defeated.
Yet 30 years [after Roe], here we are. And for all the contingency involved, future scholars of mass movements will find in the pro-life cause a remarkable example of sustained activism against substantial odds, of grass-roots mobilization in defiance of elite consensus — of “democratic virtues,” to borrow from the political scientist Jon Shields, that would be much more widely recognized and studied if they had not been exercised in a cause opposed by progressives and the left.
But the story doesn’t end here. While the pro-life movement has won the right to legislate against abortion, it has not yet proven that it can do so in a way that can command durable majority support. Its weaknesses will not disappear in victory. Its foes and critics have been radicalized by its judicial success. And the vicissitudes of politics and its own compromises have linked the anti-abortion cause to various toxic forces on the right — some libertine and hyperindividualist, others simply hostile to synthesis, conciliation and majoritarian politics.

I would at least add that, more significantly, the pro-life movement does not command any sort of durable moral or integrity-filled support, which is far more important than majority support.

But here’s David French:

The culture of political engagement centers around animosity. Church and family life is being transformed, congregation by congregation, household by household, by argument and division. The Dobbs ruling has landed in the midst of a sick culture, and the pro-life right is helping make it sick.
Writing in the New York Times, Ross Douthat rightly cautioned that “the vicissitudes of politics and its own compromises have linked the anti-abortion cause to various toxic forces on the right — some libertine and hyperindividualist, others simply hostile to synthesis, conciliation and majoritarian politics.”
That’s true, but it doesn’t go far enough. The vicissitudes of politics haven’t just linked the anti-abortion cause to various toxic forces on the right, they’ve transformed parts of the anti-abortion movement, making many of its members as toxic as their “libertine and hyperindividualist” allies. […]
…the Republican branch of the American church is adopting the political culture of the secular right. With a few notable exceptions, it not only didn’t resist the hatred and fury of the MAGA movement, it was the MAGA movement. And this is the culture that’s going to lead the effort to heal our nation, love the marginalized, and ask young women to face an uncertain future and endure a physical ordeal for the sake of sacrificial love?

It’s worth emphasizing that French has consistently sought and now celebrates, if cautiously, the undoing of Roe. But, as he points out, that doesn’t mean that the situation on the ground is worth celebrating. As French aptly summarizes that situation, “A movement animated by rage and fear isn’t ready to embrace life and love.”

I think not only is the movement not ready, but, more pointedly, regardless of legal “victories,” that movement cannot offer, foster, or encourage what it does not possess.

burn this house

Wesley Hill, with a needed word:

At various points in my life, I’ve taken up the partisan banner with gusto. Although I planned to vote for Barack Obama for president in 2008, I remember being unsettled by Obama’s then-pastor the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s remarks that emerged during the course of the campaign. “God damn America!” Wright had said, and I had absorbed enough Hauerwas at that point to sympathize with the point. But I still couldn’t look my GOP-voting parents in the eyes and say that I was ready to defend Wright as someone with whom I was in full, unimpaired communion. Then I read this from the “progressive” evangelical Jason Byassee in the “conservative” evangelical magazine Christianity Today:
“Charity requires that evangelicals do business with Wright. He, like them, is part of the body of Christ. Not less than John Hagee or Rod Parsley — extremist ministers aligned with John McCain —Wright’s churchmanship means he is more brother than enemy.”
Did I really believe the bonds I share with fellow Christians like Wright — and my parents — required me in some way to believe that all of us were part of the same dysfunctional kinship network? And what would it mean for my speech and action if I really did believe that? And what would it mean for me to learn from Wright, as a fellow Spirit-filled believer, even when I thought he was wrong? […]
I left the SBC myself, for reasons of conscience and doctrinal considerations, so I can’t very well cast stones on anyone else who does. But I hope that those of us who have left won’t view ourselves as having somehow succeeded where our Southern Baptist siblings have failed, as having escaped unscathed from the judgment that’s coming for us all. I hope we’ll view ourselves as all alike floundering about in the ark of salvation, opposing each other on vital, urgent matters but, for that very reason, occupying the same space and trying, however haphazardly, to listen the same Lord. And I hope we’ll be granted the repentance and amendment of life that these awful days surely call for.

I think Hill could be much more clear about his support for Russell and Maria Moore (et al), but to do that would require him to say something about what he is specifically not saying here: that it might actually be better to leave than to continue making bets in a burning house.

Hill’s advice is, at its core, wise and godly and, in its relational implications, utterly necessary and needed. I myself have much to say and praise in thanks to connections within the SBC. But Hill’s own faith-enabling “second naivety” did not occur by staying in the SBC. It would hardly be fair or even true to think that others couldn’t (or shouldn’t!) find their own faith deepened and widened outside of a house that has been burning for decades.

meaningless thoughts and prayers

David Frum is exactly right. But his opening (and closing) paragraphs could just as easily have been written for David French’s piece yesterday, or Russell Moore’s the day before.

I don’t know enough to say how much I would or wouldn’t agree with Michael Budde, but it is difficult do disagree with his critique here:

Few people inside the churches seem eager to admit it, but in matters of human allegiance, loyalty, and priorities, Christianity is a nearly complete, unabashed failure. It has had little discernible impact in making the Sermon on the Mount remotely relevant in Christian life and lifestyles; it has provided no alternative sense of community capable of withstanding the absolutist claims of state, movement, and market; and it can offer nothing but an awkward embarrassed silence in response to the scandal of Christians slaughtering Christians (not to mention everybody else) in “just” wars blessed by hierarchs on all sides in slavish obedience to presumably more important loyalties.

The failures are so huge, the contradictions with the gospel so enormous, that they don’t even register as subjects of concern in the churches. When forced to confront our hypocrisy and our obedience to other sources of meaning, we wring our hands, lament the sinfulness of the human condition, and pray for a human solidarity that would terrify us if it ever came to pass. And the institutions of death grind on in our world, with good Christians serving them efficiently, responsibly, and in ways indistinguishable from those who reject the premise that Jesus of Nazareth incarnated God’s way for his people on earth.

Budde may focus on murder and “just” wars, but it’s important to see that that silence in the face of scandal exists for Christians faced with scandals of any kind. Exactly what is it that the Christian church has to offer to America or to the world, even on their own biblical or gospel terms?

dim, flickering candles

David Brooks:

Then there is the way partisan politics has swamped what is supposed to be a religious movement. Over the past couple of decades evangelical pastors have found that their 20-minute Sunday sermons could not outshine the hours and hours of Fox News their parishioners were mainlining every week. It wasn’t only that the klieg light of Fox was so bright, but also that the flickering candle of Christian formation was so dim.

Supposed to be a religious movement. Good thing for those accused, “it’s a relationship not a religion,” and, ipso facto, they cannot be guilty as charged.

But seriously, this is a thoroughly insightful article, both encouraging and discouraging to read. However, I’m going to be nit-picky just to make a few points, if only for my own sake and my sake’s clarity.

In 2020, roughly 40 percent of the people who called themselves evangelical attended church once a year or less, according to research by the political scientist Ryan Burge. It’s just a political label for them. This politicization is one reason people have cited to explain why so many are leaving the faith.

I have no idea what point Brooks thinks he’s making here. Politicization at large is a problem, yes. But people are not leaving the “evangelical” church because of the term’s political label for those who don’t attend. Much “ink” is utilized acknowledging the non-churchgoing who identify as evangelical. I 99% do not give a shit about this statistic—or, 99% of the time it’s talked about, at least. One thing I have not seen get much attention (though perhaps I’m not reading widely enough) is the way that churchgoing, praise-Jesus, never-late-for-Sunday-worship white evangelicals are exactly the same as the non churchgoing evangelicals. I don’t think this is what Brooks is doing here—in fact, I think his point throughout the article is the right one—but this particular statistic, while valuable from certain historical and political points of view, makes it seem as though “evangelicals” who don’t go to church are spoiling the name. They are not. And every single time this statistic is brought up in the context of evangelical deconstruction, or whatever, it is a complete distraction from the point. I know it seems relevant, but I have yet to figure out how, at least for anything but election polls or historical uses of the term. People leaving church, if they are anything like me, do not care about either of those. They care, among many other things, to be sure, that the very same people who taught them the faith—who still presume to teach them the faith—told them Bill Clinton was unfit for office and that they were foolish (if not demonically oppressed) for denouncing Donald Trump. The faith that produces that kind of disparity is doomed, or ought to be. Period.

Here’s another somewhat confusing use of statistics:

Roughly 80 percent of white evangelical voters supported Trump in 2020. But it is often a minority of this group who spark bitter conflicts and want their church to be on war footing all the time.

Again, I’m not sure what Brooks is saying with this, since he doesn’t seem to do anything with his own point here. (I love reading him, but much of Brooks’s writing has a certain “stream of thought,” but very readable, flow, making his paragraphs read like excerpts from another piece.) I know these people exist, but I can think of only one person I know who actively advocates for an ecclesial war footing. And again, I don’t think I’m disagreeing with anything Brooks is ultimately saying, but it seems to me that the extremes he calls a “minority,” and whatever disproportionate clout they carry, are not the problem in the hearts of those who are leaving. People can say what they want about a two-party system, but there is a dizzyingly pervasive binary aspect to politics that insists on its own importance. The “church,” by definition, exists outside of this binary—or is supposed to. In other words, there is a political spectrum within the white evangelical church which it is wrong to be anywhere on. The problem is not from a battle-ready group that sparks bitter conflict. It’s that so many have shown a near complete inability to “speak out clearly and to pay up personally.” And at this point, that characteristic inability has attached itself to so many different personality types that it has nearly become the definition of evangelicalism itself.

I would also add—and I could be way off here—that this seems like a time for quiet, steady-state hupomoné, not church planting. I’m a little surprised that that even made Tim Keller’s list for renewal. Again, I could be way off. But a focus on x,000 new church plants per year strikes me as business as usual for the activism of American evangelicalism. Better for now to abide, endure. As Karl Jaspers put it:

The truly real takes place almost unnoticed, and is, to begin with, lonely and dispersed. . . . Those among our young people who, thirty years hence, will do the things that matter are, in all probability, now quietly biding their time; and yet, unseen by others, they are already establishing their existences by means of an unrestricted spiritual discipline.

Personally, I don’t see as much cause for hope as Brooks manages to find, though I hope he is right. And I certainly hope that “in the decades ahead the American church is going to look more like the global church.” In the meantime, I do see a fair amount of quietly-brewing faith under the surface of things. That’s what I’m keeping my eyes and ears open for, anyway. (And nose. The sense of smell is a completely underrated spiritual sense these days.)

crossroads

In the beginning, there was only a speck of dark matter in a universe of light, a floater in the eye of God. It was to floaters that Perry owed his discovery, as a boy, that his vision wasn’t a direct revelation of the world but an artifact of two spherical organs in his head. He’d lain gazing at a bright blue sky and tried to focus on one, tried to determine the particulars of its shape and size, only to lose it and glimpse it again in a different location. To pin it down, he had to train his eyes in concert, but a floater in one eyeball was ipso facto invisible to the other; he was like a dog chasing its tail. And so with the speck of dark matter. The speck was elusive but persistent. He could glimpse it even in the night, because its darkness was of an order deeper than mere optical darkness. The speck was in his mind, and his mind was now lambent with rationality at all hours.

That’s Perry Hildebrandt in Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads. I do love a Franzen novel, and this was no exception. But I don’t recall the last time I read a book that was more enjoyable and more . . . hopeless.

Perry’s thought continues:

On the bunk mattress above him, Larry Cottrell cleared his throat. An advantage of Many Farms was that the group slept in dorm rooms, rather than in a common area, where any of forty people could have noticed Perry leaving. The disadvantage was his roommate. Larry was myopic with adulation, useful to Perry insofar as his company displaced that of people who might have given him shit about his effervescence, but very unsound as a sleeper. The night before, returning to their room at two a.m. and finding him awake, Perry had explained that the frybread at dinner had given him an attack of flatulence, and that he’d crept out to a sofa in the lounge to spare his friend the smell of his slow burners. A similar lie would be available tonight, but first he needed to escape undetected, and Larry, above him, in the dark, kept clearing his throat.

Among Perry’s options were strangling Larry (an idea appealing in the moment but fraught with sequalae); boldly rising to announce that he was gassy again and going to the lounge (here the virtue was consistency of story, the drawback that Larry might insist on keeping him company); and simply waiting for Larry, whose bones a day of scraping paint had surely wearied, to fall asleep. Perry still had an hour to play with, but he resented the hijacking of his mind by trivialities.

It is this—the perpetual chasing of all our moral ontological/epistemological lives in our over- (and yet also under-) conscious brains—that ought to be understood as the focus of Crossroads. Certainly, for almost all of us, it will never be the cocaine-driven godlike forethought and planning that follows this particular one of Perry’s ceaseless moral deliberations, nor the more natural, cocaine-less deliberations of the Hildebrandt’s that make up the 580 pages of the novel. But for anyone honest enough to look, Franzen holds up a mirror to all the self-justification that takes place in any given home or church or on any given street on any given day.

Not having any idea what Franzen’s religious experience is like, it does seem to me that he has managed to describe the moments of religious insight throughout the book with genuine feeling, so much so that I imagine Franzen going over and over removing any hint of narrative sarcasm. This is, I think, quite an achievement.

And yet…as far as I can remember in reading Franzen over the past week, all moments of grace, every last one, if and where they appear, seem most certainly to terminate in the self involved in that grace. It is perhaps true, however—and only really true in hindsight—that what does exist for the reader (at least for this reader) is a grace for certain characters at certain times when those characters are not the mind being narrated—and, equally important, this does not occur in the mind being narrated either; it just sort of slips in. And that seems important.

Christian Wiman, on the complexity of the definition of “joy”:

Joy: that durable, inexhaustible, essential, inadequate word. That something in the soul that makes one able to claim again the word “soul.” That sensation more exalting than happiness, less graspable than hope, though both of these feelings are implicated, challenged, changed. That seed of being that can bud even in our “circumstance of ice,” as Danielle Chapman puts it, so that faith suddenly is not something one need contemplate, struggle for, or even “have,” really, but is simply there, as the world is there. There is no way to plan for, much less conjure, such an experience. One can only, like Lucille Clifton—who in the decade during which I was responsible for awarding the annual Ruth Lilly Prize in Poetry for lifetime achievement was the one person who let out a spontaneous yawp of delight on the phone—try to make oneself fit to feel the moment when it comes, and let it carry you where it will.

Grace may also be something like this. But if grace finds its way into Crossroads at all, it seems to do so without even the sort of preparation for unexpected joy that Wiman refers to. Somehow, it seems to me that grace simply doesn’t exist for most of the characters throughout most of the book. But it most certainly can exist between the reader and those characters. In the middle of all the self-justifying and moralizing, grace, like joy, just sort of slips in from somewhere outside. I could be wrong, but this seems to be almost in spite of Franzen, as it is so often for most of us in spite of ourselves.

As much as I’d like to agree with Ruth Graham’s assessment of the “sincerity” of Christian experience in the book—and I want to see it—I just can’t. In Crossroads, God seems to exist only in the psyches of each character, which might itself be a reality difficult for any of us to disentangle from. But more importantly, with perhaps one exception in the book (and it’s an exception that Franzen has always proven quite good at relating: the hard and painful reconciliation of partners), God or the experience of God or the thought of God never quite rises to a shared experience, is never quite something beyond the self.

I was reading Rowan Williams’s Tokens of Trust just after reading Franzen. It was not quite planned, but for this believer quite helpful for my own psyche.

Only when the last traces of self-serving and self-comforting have been shaken and broken are we free to receive what God wants to give us. Only then shall we have made room for God’s reality by disentangling God from all—or at least some—of the mess within our psyches. Prayer is letting God be himself in and for us. . . . And because the reality is so immeasurably greater than any mind or heart or imagination can take in, we must let go in order to make room. (emphasis added)

No, we probably never achieve a full disentangling (“What then am I, my God? What is my nature? A life various, manifold, and quite immeasurable. . . . I dive down deep as I can, and I can find no end.”), and thankfully we do not have to. But after almost 600 pages of what can only be described as inner turmoil, however alluring the prose, who could not be hungry for this freedom, hungry for a silence that let’s God do something, anything? Somehow, I see Crossroads as both an excellent mirror for all the self-justifying we are all so prone to, and yet also as falling utterly short of the self-forgetfulness that we all experience and (can) know as the grace of God.

arduous goods

Tish Harrison Warren (emphasis added):

Christian ethics call people to ideas of freedom that are not primarily understood as the absence of restraint, but instead as the ability to live well, justly and righteously. In Galatians, after an extended meditation on liberation, Paul says: “You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love. For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’” Freedom, for him, had a purpose and end, a “telos.” We are freed not to do whatever we feel is best for us individually, but instead to love our neighbors.
We therefore have obligations to others, even obligations that we do not willingly choose. Our personal preferences and maximal autonomy must be set aside for the sake of loving our neighbor and for the common good.
It’s rarely admitted aloud but asking someone to seek the good of others is often a call to suffering in one degree or another. When pro-lifers ask a mother to carry a baby to term, they are asking her to take up inconvenience, sorrow, financial strain and pain on behalf of another. […]
How do you call a society committed to personal freedom and happiness to bear the burdens of others? Most of us intuitively grasp that there’s more to life than living for oneself and one’s own happiness or comfort. But we lack a positive vision for the purpose of individual liberty.
Thomas Aquinas, a medieval Catholic theologian, gave us the gorgeous and helpful phrase “arduous good.” “An arduous good is a good that requires struggle,” Ron Belgau wrote in a 2013 article for First Things, “a good that is worth fighting for. And a good that inspires fear and hope and endurance in the face of adversity. ‘Arduous good’ is also a phrase that is seldom spoken in Hollywood, and almost never heard on Madison Avenue. In that silence, the poverty of our culture is laid bare.”
Consumer capitalism is not going to teach us about how to pursue arduous goods, nor is technological progress, nor is either American political party. Theoretically, religious communities are places that train us toward ends other than individual autonomy. They point us to something bigger and higher than ourselves, calling us to love God and our neighbors. However, this is unfortunately not always the case. Many religious communities have lost their ability to articulate an alternative to the sovereignty of personal choice and individual autonomy.
Christian churches have often imbibed the same overarching commitment to personal choice. The dogma of maximal individual freedom often trumps whatever other dogmas we may confess each Sunday.
But as a culture, we desperately need religious communities that do not parrot the predictable ethical arguments of the right or the left. We need a rooted and robust call to love our neighbors, our families and the marginalized, the needy, the weak and the afflicted among us. Individual liberty is not a bad political starting point, but it’s inadequate to orient our lives. We need other stories that teach us how to live justly and wisely in the world, that lend us a vision of positive liberty, that show us what freedom is for.

this fleeting sense

Sara Zarr:

Maybe it’s my particular dysfunction and my poor-kid anxiety leading me to find comfort in the videos and in fantasies of whittling my belongings down to what would fit in a few plastic tubs from Walmart and driving out to a harsh landscape to get away from a certain kind of comfort that (I have this fleeting sense) is hurting me. What I know is that the older I get, the more sadness I feel that what the world asks of us is so narrowly defined, and that what religion requires can be, too. I’m missing the friction that should exist between a faithful life and accepted normalcy. Maybe I miss the weirdness of my poor, Jesusy, hippie childhood when my faith felt uncontained. Fern, in her guest quarters at her sister’s house and, later, at a friend’s, feels that the walls are too far apart, the ceiling too high. There is too much space; existence is static; there’s nothing to move toward or push against. She looks longingly out the window at her van. Another way of life is calling. I’m familiar with that sense of being out of place in this world, and though I’ve long left church, a part of me still believes that for people of sincere faith, that discomfort is how it should be.

pursuing shalom

Matthew Loftus (emphasis added):

Christians must develop and encourage practices of suffering that accompany those in pain, like Simon of Cyrene carrying the cross during Christ’s passion.^[2] The ethical imperatives of the Church are only intelligible to a watching world to the degree that Christians are willing to walk alongside those who suffer and bear their pain with them. Without these practices of accompaniment, Christian moral teaching about issues like abortion or assisted reproductive technology is a cold set of rules enforced by people who have the privilege of not having to bear their cost. It is through these experiences — and not just experiences with those who forsake an accessible but immoral technological intervention, but also accompaniment with the poor, the imprisoned, and those whose suffering cannot be relieved by any human means — that Christians are able to experience growth through suffering and acquire the perspective from below that shapes their advocacy for those who need the work-towards-shalom the most. […]
The first goal of those with power will be to maximize the power of institutions and relationships not specifically governed by any professional authority. The weaker these institutions are, the more that the physical health of the community will suffer, and the more tempted that doctors and bureaucrats will want to step in and replace the social and spiritual pillars of human mutuality with an eclectic and insufficient patchwork of programming, subsidies, and drugs. The natural benefits of meaningful work, intimate friendships, loving family, rich spirituality, and shared spaces are self-evidently critical to human flourishing, but impossible for practitioners and policymakers to produce or purchase. Laws, regulations, and authoritative communications should always consider whether or not they help or hinder these contributors to shalom, and take seriously the possibility that horning in on the territory belonging to these things could do more harm than good, even if there are good intentions in doing so. Since these things cannot be measured or evaluated from afar, such assessments will require those with power (political, administrative, or medical) to spend a significant amount of time in whatever communities they purport to represent or serve. […]
[T]he inevitability of suffering and death in this age should humble those with power in their aspirations to shalom and force us all to constantly consider whether or not we are helping the people we know and love (especially the ones that we find it difficult to love) to do good themselves. The soil-tilling, trellis-building, stake-digging, stem-pruning, weed-pulling work that allows us to cultivate shalom in that smallest unit of health, the community, is ultimately subservient to the bonds of love that hold every thread in our shared tapestry together. Pursuing shalom, especially those with some sort of professional authority, must work with nature, respect the limits of the created order, avoid the trap of making every aspect of human existence a matter of “health”, allow smaller institutions to do what they do best, and be conscientious about what kinds of suffering to try to alleviate. […]
Christians should continue to be more concerned with loving their neighbors than they are about preserving their own lives. I have made the argument before that I think getting vaccinated is an expression of love, and I think that, given the relatively low risk of vaccine side effects even for those who have already had COVID-19, that this judgment still applies in the case of the vaccines which have undergone rigorous testing.^[4] By the same token, allowing any preventive measure to trump other concerns in the name of health runs the risk of letting legitimate concern become paralyzing paranoia. In all seasons, those who follow Christ must not let a concern for an abstract “other” or suspicion of a malevolent “them” promulgate foolishness, grandiosity, hatred, or obtrusiveness.
The official pronouncements about public health we have heard in the last two years are merely one small facet of human health’s contingent nature. We all depend on one another for the flourishing of life, and I hope and trust that most people are willing to acknowledge that dependence and contingency as we deal with the greatest infectious health crisis of our era. In affirming that “conviviality is healing,” as Wendell Berry says, we must be willing to carefully consider about what sorts of sacrifices and risks are worth it for the sake of others — and then, having considered, to act as those who love the goods of creation and are willing to suffer as we proclaim another life to come.

“affirmation [for] antithesis”

From George Hunsinger’s 1980 essay, “Karl Barth and the Politics of Protestant Sectarianism” (emphasis added):

There is an important sense for Barth in which the church is not to be seen as more sanctified than the world, nor the world as less sanctified than the church. The church shares with the world a solidarity in both sin and grace. This inclusive solidarity meant that Barth found what the church had in common with the world to be always more fundamental than any polarity which might arise on the basis of the church’s human response to Jesus Christ.

Or, as Hunsinger quotes it in Barth’s own words:

[The church] manifests a remarkable conformity to the world if concern for its purity and reputation forbid it to compromise itself with it. . . . As distinct from all other circles and groups, the community of Jesus Christ cannot possibly allow itself to exist in this pharisaical conformity to the world. Coming from the table of the Lord, it cannot fail to follow his example and to sit down at the table with the rest, with all sinners.

to change the world

I often ask myself why a “Christian instinct” often draws me more to the religionless people than to the religious, by which I don’t in the least mean with any evangelizing intention, but, I might almost say, “in brotherhood.”
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer –

Something I intend to reread this year is James Davison Hunter’s To Change the World. I was very late in reading it, but few books have more perfectly and fairly summarized—by the second chapter alone—my entire experience of “evangelical” political engagement. And Hunter’s early description of evangelical politics could not have closed with a more simple, accurate critique: “This account is almost wholly mistaken.”

This has been the ever-increasing sense for me over the past 10 years (again, late to the party): that what I have usually been shown/sold as Christian civic duty is almost entirely a sham.

Hunter:

Though the tactics have expanded to include worldview and culture more broadly, the logic at work—that America has been taken over by secularists, causing harm to America and harm to the church, that it is time to “take back the culture” for Christ through a strategy of acquiring and using power is identical to the longstanding approach of the established Christian Right. The leading edge of such initiatives is still one of negation. To use words and phrases like “enemy,” “attack,” “drive out,” “overthrow,” “eradicate the Other,” “reclaim their nations for Christ,” “take back” influence, “compel, “occupying and influencing [spheres] of power in our nations,” “advancing the kingdom of God,” and so on, continues to reflect the same language of loss, disappointment, anger, antipathy, resentment, and desire for conquest. This is because the underlying myth that defines their identity, their goals, and their strategy of action has not changed. The myth continues to shape the language, the logic, and script for their engagement with culture. Circumstances might change as might the players, but if the myth that underwrites the ideal of Christian engagement does not change, then very little has changed at all.

Probably no question than this is more prescient for “evangelicals” right now: How do we change the myth?

For Christian believers, the call to faithfulness is a call to live in fellowship and integrity with the person and witness of Jesus Christ. There is a timeless character to this all that evokes qualities of life and spirit that are recognizable throughout history and across cultural boundaries. But this does not mean that faithfulness is a state of abstract piety floating above the multifaceted and compromising realities of daily life in actual situations. St. Paul, in Acts 13:36, refers King David having “served God’s purposes in his own generation.” This suggests, of course, that faithfulness works itself out in the context of complex social, political, economic, and cultural forces that prevail at a particular time and place.

To that effect, Michael Gerson recently offered a brief analysis, lament, and general way forward, one that seems to me both timeless and, to some extent, specific to our own generation. And it’s one that fits well into what Hunter calls “affirmation and antithesis” (or what I call incarnation and cultivation qua witness):

There is a perfectly good set of Christian tools to deal with situations such as these: remorse, repentance, forgiveness, reformation.
The collapse of one disastrous form of Christian social engagement should be an opportunity for the emergence of a more faithful one. And here there are plenty of potent, hopeful Christian principles lying around unused by most evangelicals: A consistent and comprehensive concern for the weak and vulnerable in our society, including the poor, immigrants and refugees. A passion for racial reconciliation and criminal justice reform, rooted in the nonnegotiable demands of human dignity. A deep commitment to public and global health, reflecting the priorities of Christ’s healing ministry. An embrace of political civility as a civilizing norm. A commitment to the liberty of other people’s religions, not just our own. An insistence on public honesty and a belief in the transforming power of unarmed truth.

This seems quite obviously right to me, and it seems very closely related to Hunter’s “theology of faithful presence.” But there is one problem with it. Hunter points out in his book what Peter Berger calls “plausibility structures”: the social conditions that make certain beliefs credible and intelligible to a person who holds them.

Right now the bulk of the evangelical vox populi, at least among white evangelicals, is dominated by a plausibility structure that bears very little if any resemblance to a Christ-like social/political engagement. Put simply: remorse, repentance, forgiveness, and reformation are not its hallmarks, if they even make the fine print anymore. Shamelessness, self-assurance, retribution, subversion—these seem to make up the new quadrilateral for “evangelicals.”

I truly do not know a way to change this, and if I’m being honest, I’ve given up trying to find it. My own plausibility structure for Christian faith consists, in part, of a small handful of friends, a list of which I could count on one hand. The rest is almost entirely made up of books by authors who, if they’re even still alive, I have never met or spoken with and who almost no one else I know reads. (These include George Hunsinger, Mark Noll, Gilbert Meilaender, Miroslav Volf, Marilynne Robinson, Frederick Buechner, Flannery O’Connor, Christian Wiman, Alan Jacobs, and David French to name a few.)

More than anything, these folks seem to me to see their role as Christians not as promoting some ethic or denouncing another, but as primarily seeking to display God’s faithful presence in Jesus. As Hunter describes it:

Pursuit [of], identification [with], the offer of life through sacrificial love—this is what God’s faithful presence means. It is a quality of commitment that is active, not passive; intentional, not accidental; covenantal, not contractual.

Hunter also points out, in at least a partial echo of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together, that “we must be fully present to each other within the community of faith and fully present to those who are not.” I’m no expert on Bonhoeffer, but it seems like in his later years he was more focused on the second half of that objective.

If the “community of faith” seems more intent on loving itself—while, of course, it fights valiantly against its (often self-created) enemies in the (often self-created) culture war—then are Christians justified in, to some extent, turning their backs on the church—or, less dramatically, turning their attention from it— in order to live among and love those “outside” the community of faith—to “affirm” their neighbors while living out the “antithesis”?

I don’t know the answer to that question, but it’s where I’m at.