Chisels and Chestfeeding
What is the difference between an ancient man calling a piece of wood a god and a modern man calling a biological man a woman? They are both a fabrication. The ancient may have been able to work out a pulley system to move the arms or head of his wooden idol but how different is that from injecting a hormone into a male breast so that it will lactate? Both are a fiction. Both are manipulations of reality.
Whatever we may think about an idol, foolish as it may be, we must not be in doubt about the infatuation that these chunks of metal and blocks of wood inspire in their worshipers. idols are precious to idolaters. What is more, idolaters are often witnesses for their idols, even though their witness proves their folly. In fact, idolatry is the epitome of sin lacking sense. We see that in the Scriptures. Just think about the description in Isaiah 44:12-17. The prophet tells us that a man plants a tree, he prunes it, cares for it and when it is tall enough, he cuts it down and cuts it in half. With one half he builds a fire. He cooks his food and warms himself with it. And he says, “Ah, I am warm; all is well!”
But with the other half of the log, he takes a chisel and shapes it. He measures it and uses a chalk like to make sure the lines are straight. He labors long like this even going without food and water using his strength to craft the wood and in the end the piece of wood looks like an image. The man sets up the image and then does the oddest thing, he bows down to the wood in worship and even prays to it saying, “Deliver me, for you are my god!
Now, anyone who hears that story from Isaiah is going to laugh because it sounds so utterly foolish. In fact, people are wont to disparage the ancients for being primitive, underdeveloped, and lacking in understanding. But let’s wait just a minute. What if we were to ask one of those ancients about this story. What might they say?
Well, we might be surprised at the sophistication of their answer. Take Psalm 135 as an example. There, in verses 16 and 17, the Psalmist explains the psychology of idolatry. He writes that idols have “mouths but cannot talk…eyes but cannot see…ears but cannot hear…noses but cannot smell, throats but cannot make a sound.” All very obvious observations. But notice verse 18, “Those who make them become like them, so do all who trust in them.” What’s the point? Simply this, idolaters make their idols in their own image. The idolater has no instincts for God. He has no eyes with which to see him, no ears with which to hear him, and no mouth that he might praise him. Idolatry illustrates ignorance. Certainly, that is an answer steeped in reflection.
Now, what’s my point in bringing this to your notice?
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Learning from The Exvangelicals
Contextualization and winsomeness are about presenting the gospel and biblical message in the language and forms that are intelligible and compelling to people in our cultural moment. But successful and faithful presentations do not mean that arguments understood will be accepted. Sometimes they will be rejected, not out of intellectual ignorance or obstinance, but reasoned disagreement. It is a disservice to exvangelicals like McCammon to conclude that if we simply cleaned up our presentation and behavior that they would be persuaded of the gospel. In our cultural moment the simple truth is that many evangelical doctrines, no matter how they are shared, will be barriers to conversion to outsiders and sources of embarrassment for some of our kids.
I grew up in a subculture that was evangelical and fundamentalist. Many of my childhood friends have deconstructed, dechurched, and deconverted. So it was with great interest that I read Sarah McCammon’s The Exvangalicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church. McCammon, now a correspondent for NPR, grew up evangelical, with all the right bona fides. Exvangelicals is one-part reporting on why some evangelicals dechurch, one-part memoir of McCammon’s own process of leaving evangelicalism.
I come from the same world as McCammon, although her background had a Charismatic inflection absent from my own, and I even knew some of the people she interviewed. Her experience of and insight into evangelicalism from the late 80s to the early 2000s rang true. I could quibble with some of her descriptions and emphases (she takes some extreme examples from her own experience and makes them normative for all evangelicalism; does she have a non-patronizing explanation for the tens of millions of kids who grew up like her and stayed evangelical?), but on the whole I found her work valuable in providing deeper insight into the experience of my friends. Every generation of evangelicals has a group that moves on; rather than dismiss the exvangelical narrative as the same tedious story, those of us who stayed behind should listen with a sympathetic ear. As an evangelical pastor, McCammon’s work gave me better tools to compassionately understand my exvangelical friends and how to think about the posture and expectations of gospel communication.
Salvation Under Duress
“Yeah, I grew up with God. He’s a douchebag, alright? Did he tell you that you were broken and that you need him? Yeah, that’s his move.”
This line from exvangelical, Millennial comedian Taylor Tomlinson’s (crude) stand-up routine encapsulates the flavor of McCammon’s experience with the evangelical church. While full of sincere, if misguided believers, the church expressed a manipulative understanding of God that left people traumatized. And it is explicitly trauma, not ideology or exegetical differences, that forms the matrix of McCammon’s ex-evangelical account.
She opens by recounting an Easter reenactment of the crucifixion she attended as a child. She observes that the evangelical story of the crucifixion “was meant to illustrate a deeper reality: that lurking beneath the veneer of our comfortable, suburban, midwestern American lives was a threat so severe that God had to send his only son to brutally suffer and die to save us from it. The blood might be fake, but the danger was not. That threat informed every aspect of my life.” Her portrayal of evangelicalism is a life policed by fear: fear of hell, fear of the world, fear of transgressing boundaries.
Her experience, like so many other Millennial evangelicals, is one where the church blended the law and gospel, the indicative and imperative of the Christian life. Ethics did not flow out of gratitude to Christ in communion with him, but the motivation for obedience and good works was fear. Making our calling and election sure was done through conformist, good behavior, not faith in the gloriously unmerited grace of Jesus. Instead, fear of going to hell, of losing our purity, of being hoodwinked by a crafty world, of God’s anger, was normative.
The misery of this is not insignificant; religious trauma occupies a whole chapter of the book. Perfect love is supposed to drive out fear, but for many exvangelicals the “fear of falling out of favor with God” terrified them, lest a forgotten sin keep them from salvation. McCammon describes still waking up in the middle of night in a panic about God’s (damning?) purpose for her.
Karl Barth once attended a Billy Graham rally in Switzerland, and described Graham’s preaching as
the gospel at gun-point…He preached the law, not a message to make one happy. He wanted to terrify people. Threats–they always make an impression. People would much rather be terrified than be pleased. The more one heats up hell for them, the more they come running.”
Fair or not to Graham, this description of “gospel” preaching summarizes what was heard by McCammon and millions of other exvangelicals: a gospel at the end point of a hellish pitch fork held by Jesus, as salvation is received under duress.
This leads to an evangelical culture that might preach love, but really is more about boundary-policing, especially with purity culture. This posture of fear leads to an overemphasis on how the world outside the church’s doors is terrible. I often have conversations with high school students confused since their secular, non-Christian friends are genuinely nice and well-adjusted people. “We were told how ‘the world’ is an evil place, and you have to stay out of it…I found the opposite to be true. I found that ‘the world’ was a much more loving place, and much more comfortable to be part of than a strict religious bubble.” McCammon quotes her friend Daniel here, and this stands as a representative perspective of the exvangelicals. When the church is supposed to be the good guys and shouldn’t cross the line into the terrible world, but the “terrible” world is pleasant and much nicer than the church, it seems like the church was wrong about all kinds of things, including God and the gospel.
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Worshipping and Evaluating
Some of the most attractive Christians can lack discernment, and some of the most discerning could use some spiritual and moral attractiveness. Spurgeon was warning us to be aware of the spiritual state of others, and beware of an overly-critical spirit. Test everything (1 Thess.5:20) but do not quench the Spirit (1 Thess.5:19). A lop-sided keeping of one command can adversely affect the keeping of the other – and it works both ways.
Maintaining a spirit of worship and evaluating all things is well-nigh impossible, even for regenerate Christians. In a sermon on 2 Samuel 5:24, delivered on 31 May 1857, Charles Spurgeon told a story which was meant as a warning to all who profess the name of Christ:
I’ll tell you, many of you Christians do a deal of mischief, by what you say when going home. A man once said that when he was a lad he heard a certain sermon from a minister, and felt deeply impressed under it. Tears stole down his cheeks, and he thought within himself: “I will go home to pray.’ On the road home he fell into the company of two member of the church. One of them began saying: ‘Well, how did you enjoy the sermon?’ The other said: ‘I did not think he was quite sound on such a point. ‘Well,’ said the other, ‘I thought he was rather off his guard,’ or something of that sort; and one pulled one part of the minister’s sermon to pieces, and another the other, until, said the young man, before I had gone many yards with them, I had forgotten all about it; and all the good I thought I had received seemed swept away by those two men, who seemed afraid lest I should get any hope, for they were just pulling that sermon to pieces which would have brought me to my knees. How often have we done the same! People will say: ‘What did you think of that sermon?’ I gently tell them nothing at all, and if there is any fault in it – and very likely there is, it is better not to speak of it, for some may get good from it.
The one who is without sin in this regard can cast the first stone.
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Your Faith Is Demonstrated in How You Respond to Problems
It is not for us to know why we face what we face. The ‘why’ question often leads nowhere. Yes, there were times in 1 and 2 Kings when a famine or event happened directly due to God’s judgement. Most of the time we won’t know why our lives are how they are. Perhaps we have issues due to our own sinful decisions; maybe it is part of a bigger plan of God we have not been told about. Seeking to know why is not the main focus of what we should be thinking and doing.
In some circles, Christians are directly taught that if they are faithful to God, they will be blessed with an abundant, happy and healthy life. It is a compelling message. We’d love it to be true. A neat life where faithfulness directly leads to an easy life right now sounds fantastic!
And this is not only an issue for Christians who have been taught this kind of prosperity theology. All of us will, at times, think along these lines. We will wonder if the problems we are currently facing are some sort of judgement from God. We will be upset if our plans don’t come about, assuming that God should give us what we want.
Yet the ease of your life is a bad indicator of your faith in God. Even a cursory look at the Bible will demonstrate that. The men who wrote Psalms 37 and 73 both noted that those who care nothing for God often seem to have happy, successful lives while believers struggle. Evil kings like Ahab and Manasseh reigned for a long time. The prophets and apostles all had difficult lives facing all kinds of problems. Life is not as simple as the faithful getting blessed now and the wicked facing immediate judgement.
Looking through the many kings described in 1 and 2 Kings, both good and bad, is instructive for us here. The vast majority of them faced major problems in their lives. The difference between the good kings and the wicked kings was not the circumstances they lived through; it was how they reacted to those circumstances.
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