In Praise of Religious Populism
Populist Christianity associates piety with hearth and home, nation and place. The lead singer of the Pilgrim Jubilees, a gospel quartet, told an interviewer: “My brothers and I grew up in a little three-room shack in Houston, Mississippi. We didn’t have much back then, church, but we had a family altar.” This pride in a single place, however humble, and in a pious home, however plain, is typical of populist Christianity.
No prejudice so perfectly unites the American overclass as contempt for morally conservative, religiously revivalist, and politically populist protestants. Every day, it seems, a prestige publication prints a new article describing them as sexist, racist, white-nationalist threats to democracy. Far more than the socialists who see themselves as radicals, backwoods Baptists and TV preachers, holy-rolling faith healers and strip-mall seminarians are hated and feared by our ruling class. No other group of comparable size consistently opposes those who run our society. That is why they are denounced so unsparingly, and why they deserve greater praise.
Populist Christianity took form in the early 19th century during the Second Great Awakening. Methodist circuit riders, Baptist preachers, and Mormon seers remade America’s religious landscape, proclaiming a populist creed that was no less revolutionary than the political transformation that had swept through the country in the decades before. As Nathan Hatch notes in his great book, The Democratization of American Christianity, its leaders were “short on social graces, family connections, and literary education.” They often seemed “untutored” and “irregular,” but this only proved their bona fides. Because they preached a creed that “associated virtue with ordinary people,” their lack of refinement vouchsafed their reliability.
The movements that sprang from the Second Great Awakening did not oppose all forms of authority. They instead tended to the elevation of a single leader, who was seen as vindicating the interests of the common man against an unaccountable elite. These men were entrepreneurial figures, adept in the latest methods of mass communication. They understood and frequently shared popular tastes. Unbound by old institutions, they built new ones in which they exercised unquestioned authority. Hatch describes the pattern: “The Methodists under Francis Asbury…used authoritarian means to build a church that would not be a respecter of persons.” Likewise, Mormons “used a virtual religious dictatorship…to return power to illiterate men.” Despite their tight control of their organizations, these men were seen as heralds of freedom, for they gave their followers the “right to think and act for themselves rather than depending upon the mediations of an educated elite.”
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November 2023 BCO Amendments Update
Overture 23 (Item 2) on officers conforming to the biblical requirement for chastity has garnered favorable support from almost all the presbyteries that have considered it. This item is likely the final amendment in response to the Revoice Conference and corresponding movement promoting so-called Side-B Christianity. Of the 40 presbyteries which have voted so far, 39 have affirmed this amendment and only 1 has rejected it. This means that this amendment needs the consent of just 20 of the remaining 48 presbyteries to vote on this item. The raw tally for this item is 1499-81 (95%-5%).
As fall fades to winter, 40 presbyteries have taken up the three proposed amendments to the Book of Church Order (BCO) initially approved and passed down by the 50th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA). Nearly half of the presbyteries have offered advice and consent regarding these three proposed (and recommended) constitutional changes. As a general reminder, for a BCO amendment to be ratified, there is a three-step process:
The General Assembly must approve it by a simple majority.
Then it must pass 2/3rds (currently 59) of the PCA’s 88 presbyteries by a simple majority (in each presbytery).
If an amendment achieves 2/3 of the presbyteries’ support, it must then be approved by the next Assembly for final ratification.Overture 26 (Item 1)
Overture 26 (Item 1) on the usage of officer titles continues to see widespread support throughout the denomination. If approved, this amendment would forbid the improper usage of titles associated with ordained office.
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Spiritually Hungry? The Church Service Is Your Main Meal
The next time you feel discouraged and guilty about not having your personal “quiet time,” do this instead: remember the previous Sunday at church, and then breathe a sigh of relief and praise. You have consumed God’s Word. More than that, you have feasted on its abundance. Through singing it, praying it, reading it, and hearing it preached alongside God’s gathered and beloved people, you have “let the word of Christ dwell in you richly.” Your soul has been truly nourished.
Spiritual Sustenance
What if I told you that your main spiritual meal isn’t meant to be your private devotional time with the Lord?
As individuals swimming in autonomous Western waters, this is a hard concept for us to grasp. After all, reading God’s Word by ourselves and communing with the Lord in private are good and wonderful things! We should absolutely pursue God by opening our Bibles whenever we can, with an eagerness to hear his voice.
But your individual devotional time—or “quiet time,” as we so fondly like to call it—is not meant to be your main source of spiritual nourishment. The church is. Here’s why.
Debunking “Quiet Time”
First, there is no command in the Bible about having a daily quiet time. There are commands about loving the Lord with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength (Mark 12:30). There are commands to keep in step with the Spirit, who teaches us the truth about the gospel through Scripture (Gal. 5:1–26). And there are commands to hold fast to the word of life, to not be deceived by false teaching, and to hold our original confidence firm to the very end (Phil. 2:16; 1 Tim. 4:6–16; Heb. 3:14).
But is there any command like “you shall arise at five in the morning, coffee in hand, and spend time with the Lord alone for two hours”? No.
God isn’t prescriptive about this in his Word. Instead, he commands proper priorities for the growth of our souls in him: “But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and [everything else you need] will be added to you” (Matt. 6:33). He wants us to hunger for the bread of life, not for an idealistic formula. He wants us to pursue Jesus, not a perfect quiet time, as if there were such a thing.
Discovering God’s Intention
Second, Scripture shows us that God’s words have overarchingly been directed to his gathered people, not solely to individuals. For example:
When God spoke the Ten Commandments to Moses on Mount Sinai, he intended them for the Israelites, his redeemed people (Ex. 20). When God spoke to the prophets, bringing them his words of remembrance and warning, he told them to relay these words to his wayward people (Isa. 1:4; Jer. 2:1–13). When God spoke his law through prophets like Joshua (Josh. 24) and kings like Josiah (2 Kings 23:1–2) and priests like Ezra (Ezra 7:10; Neh. 8:1–3), he did so in the hearing of all God’s people.
And what about the New Testament?
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What is the Doctrine of Adoption?
We’re born as sinners, which means that we’ve been separated from God and have become spiritual orphans without God as our Father. But the Father sent His own Son to save us by His life, death, and resurrection, so that we could be brought into His family forever. When we believe in Jesus the Son, we become adopted by God the Father, receive the Holy Spirit, and get lots of new brothers and sisters.
There are hundreds of thousands of orphans in the United States alone and millions around the world. A distinctive feature of Christianity has been caring for these orphans (Ja. 1:27), but this was always expected of God’s people (Isa. 1:17). In the Old Testament, the ethical imperative to care for orphans was grounded in God’s character. He is a Father to the fatherless (Ps. 68:5). However, in the New Testament, we receive a fuller revelation, teaching us that Father is a proper name. God is eternally Father, Son, and Holy Spirit apart from the created order.
The apostle Paul prays to “the Father from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named” (Eph. 3:14). In other words, creaturely fatherhood derives from the eternal Father, who eternally begets His beloved Son. Similarly, all sonship is derivative of the Son. We might be tempted to think that when the Bible speaks of believers being adopted, it is merely a metaphor based on the context of adoption in the ancient Greco-Roman world. But to the contrary, earthly adoption is a metaphor, a shadow, a sign to the reality of salvific adoption, whereby a spiritual orphan becomes a son of God. Fatherhood and Sonship precede all creation, and adoption is nothing less than participation in the life of the Trinity through union with the natural Son of God. In love, the Father predestined us for adoption to Himself as sons through Jesus Christ (Eph. 1:4-5). In Him we have obtained an inheritance—a fitting thing for a son to receive—and the Holy Spirit is our downpayment (Eph. 1:11-14). The distinct missions of the Son and the Spirit are achieved in order for us to become sons and heirs (Gal. 4:4-7). As Fred Sanders has written, “Salvation by adoption is the salvation than which nothing more fitting can be imagined by a triune God.”[1]
Adoption is a much “bigger” doctrine than most recognize. Our predestination, effectual calling, justification, and glorification are centered around adoption (Rom. 8:12-30), containing legal, transformational, and eschatological elements.
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