Filling the Space
I know a guy who would consider himself an evangelical Christian. At the end of the day, he is a good guy. While conservative, he's not a flame-thrower.
But, here's the thing about this guy, this evangelical Christian. He lives his life on the basis of the principle that the goal of this life is to make as much money as one possibly can. He has said so on numerous occasions, in both private and quasi-public settings. Sure, he cares about his family and about his religion, but the primary,day-to-day objective of his life is maximizing his personal wealth. He spends a great deal of time thinking and strategizing about how to make the most money in his current situation.
More specifically, he recognizes that the best way to make money is to put yourself in the same environment as other people that have money and/or are in a position to make money come your way. So, he makes a point of being around those people, openly sucking up to them and trying as hard as he can to ingratiate himself into their world. I've watched him in those situations, and you can see the effort he is putting in--he laughs a little too loud and too long at the jokes of the people he is trying to impress. It's a little embarrassing, frankly, but he sees it as effort well spent toward to singular overriding goal.
What has become clear to me, and this is the thing that I want to talk about, is that he sees absolutely no conflict between the unvarnished pursuit of wealth for wealth's sake and his Christian faith. He doesn't try to justify it in terms of using wealth for some other good or Christian virtue. He doesn't acknowledge that his faith would pull him in a different direction, but instead is going this way. No, one gets the sense that his understanding of the Christian faith makes no claims and provides no commentary on his pursuit of wealth. If you ask him about his Christianity and what it does require him to do, you will get two categories of answers. First, you will get a set of abstract propositions that you are supposed to assent to in some manner. Second, you will get a discussion about the need to maintain an identification with other people how assent to those same principles (he mentioned how important it was for his son to "marry a Christian," for example). You must believe things, and you must have tribal identification.
When people talk about the dysfunction of American Christianity, the examples provided are generally either Taliban-like fundamentalists like Roy Moore or Prosperity Gospel types like Joel Osteen. But, to paraphrase Jesus, fanatics and charlatans have and will always be with us. No, the real problem, it seems to me, is people like this guy. And the problem is structural and institutional. This guy grew up and was formed in a Christian environment that cleanly excised a significant portion of Jesus's message, and did it so cleanly that he doesn't realize it is not there. He doesn't know what he doesn't know.
Lest there be any confusion, a life in which making money is the primary focus is absolutely and unambiguously inconsistent with the message of Jesus Christ. Few things Jesus says are clearer than what he has to say about wealth and the pursuit thereof. When Jesus says, "it is harder for a camel to pass through an eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven," (Matthew 19:24), there is no indication that Jesus was kidding. Jesus tells us that chasing wealth, as my co-worker is unambiguously and unapologetically doing, takes you away from the life that Jesus is modeling for us.
But it's not simply that large sections of the Gospel message have been excised, though obviously that's bad. The real problem is that it creates a void inside of Christianity, an empty conceptual space. Because it can't really be the case that Christianity doesn't actually require you to do anything, and everyone deep down knows that. There must be some sort of affirmative moral commitment at the heart of being a Christian, but if you excise the economic dimension (and also the non-violent dimension), you really aren't left with much else.
But, as they say, nature abhors a vacuum. That space will get filled one way or the other. And, as I think anyone with eyes to see can see, the space that should be filled with economics and social justice has been filled with sex. In a way, it is kind of inevitable--if we take economics off the table, and we take politics off the table, we either must go all in on sex or be left with a set of lowest common denominator moral principles (i.e. "don't murder people") that you really don't need any particular religious framework to adopt of favor.
The solution to fixing Christianity is to be found, in significant part, in "plugging back in" the economic dimensions of Jesus's message. This is what Rev. Barber is trying to tell us; this is what Jem Bloomfield discussed in talking to his students. This is also what Pope Francis is trying to do, except he's hedging his bets by trying to hold on to the content of this sex-focused Christianity while pivoting back toward the economic and political message (and, to be fair, Roman Catholicism isn't nearly as far the way down the road of excising those elements of Jesus message as the evangelicals did). That's not the whole story, but it is a big part of the story. A church that never challenges my co-worker on his priorities is not a church that is following the message of Jesus and is almost guaranteed to be a church that is super-concerned with the sex lives of people, particularly people who are not actually part of that church (and thus a comfortable abstraction that can be demonized).
And we better get to work fixing this. Because this sex-focused Christianity is really starting to show the cracks in the foundation. Which is not surprising, since it is ultimately incoherent and only tangentially related to anything we see in, you know, the life of Jesus or the New Testament text. People are fleeing churches because the thing that is being given them by those churches doesn't really make any sense. Unless of course you happen to find yourself in the privileged group for whom the current program amounts to "the stuff other people do is bad, while the stuff I am doing is totally fine, and I am not super concerned about or empathetic for the other folks in any event." People like, for example, the guy in question. In that case, Christianity is less incoherent and more farcical--a system for affirming you in stuff you were going to do anyway, and a platform for taking the moral high-ground with regard to others.
This guy I know is not a bad guy. But his Christianity is bullshit. It's not his fault, at least not totally--it's what he was given, and what he has been empowered to do by the debased Christian culture of 20th and early 21st Century America. But it's still bullshit, and he's the real problem.
And there are a ton of folks like my co-worker.
But, here's the thing about this guy, this evangelical Christian. He lives his life on the basis of the principle that the goal of this life is to make as much money as one possibly can. He has said so on numerous occasions, in both private and quasi-public settings. Sure, he cares about his family and about his religion, but the primary,day-to-day objective of his life is maximizing his personal wealth. He spends a great deal of time thinking and strategizing about how to make the most money in his current situation.
More specifically, he recognizes that the best way to make money is to put yourself in the same environment as other people that have money and/or are in a position to make money come your way. So, he makes a point of being around those people, openly sucking up to them and trying as hard as he can to ingratiate himself into their world. I've watched him in those situations, and you can see the effort he is putting in--he laughs a little too loud and too long at the jokes of the people he is trying to impress. It's a little embarrassing, frankly, but he sees it as effort well spent toward to singular overriding goal.
What has become clear to me, and this is the thing that I want to talk about, is that he sees absolutely no conflict between the unvarnished pursuit of wealth for wealth's sake and his Christian faith. He doesn't try to justify it in terms of using wealth for some other good or Christian virtue. He doesn't acknowledge that his faith would pull him in a different direction, but instead is going this way. No, one gets the sense that his understanding of the Christian faith makes no claims and provides no commentary on his pursuit of wealth. If you ask him about his Christianity and what it does require him to do, you will get two categories of answers. First, you will get a set of abstract propositions that you are supposed to assent to in some manner. Second, you will get a discussion about the need to maintain an identification with other people how assent to those same principles (he mentioned how important it was for his son to "marry a Christian," for example). You must believe things, and you must have tribal identification.
When people talk about the dysfunction of American Christianity, the examples provided are generally either Taliban-like fundamentalists like Roy Moore or Prosperity Gospel types like Joel Osteen. But, to paraphrase Jesus, fanatics and charlatans have and will always be with us. No, the real problem, it seems to me, is people like this guy. And the problem is structural and institutional. This guy grew up and was formed in a Christian environment that cleanly excised a significant portion of Jesus's message, and did it so cleanly that he doesn't realize it is not there. He doesn't know what he doesn't know.
Lest there be any confusion, a life in which making money is the primary focus is absolutely and unambiguously inconsistent with the message of Jesus Christ. Few things Jesus says are clearer than what he has to say about wealth and the pursuit thereof. When Jesus says, "it is harder for a camel to pass through an eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven," (Matthew 19:24), there is no indication that Jesus was kidding. Jesus tells us that chasing wealth, as my co-worker is unambiguously and unapologetically doing, takes you away from the life that Jesus is modeling for us.
But it's not simply that large sections of the Gospel message have been excised, though obviously that's bad. The real problem is that it creates a void inside of Christianity, an empty conceptual space. Because it can't really be the case that Christianity doesn't actually require you to do anything, and everyone deep down knows that. There must be some sort of affirmative moral commitment at the heart of being a Christian, but if you excise the economic dimension (and also the non-violent dimension), you really aren't left with much else.
But, as they say, nature abhors a vacuum. That space will get filled one way or the other. And, as I think anyone with eyes to see can see, the space that should be filled with economics and social justice has been filled with sex. In a way, it is kind of inevitable--if we take economics off the table, and we take politics off the table, we either must go all in on sex or be left with a set of lowest common denominator moral principles (i.e. "don't murder people") that you really don't need any particular religious framework to adopt of favor.
The solution to fixing Christianity is to be found, in significant part, in "plugging back in" the economic dimensions of Jesus's message. This is what Rev. Barber is trying to tell us; this is what Jem Bloomfield discussed in talking to his students. This is also what Pope Francis is trying to do, except he's hedging his bets by trying to hold on to the content of this sex-focused Christianity while pivoting back toward the economic and political message (and, to be fair, Roman Catholicism isn't nearly as far the way down the road of excising those elements of Jesus message as the evangelicals did). That's not the whole story, but it is a big part of the story. A church that never challenges my co-worker on his priorities is not a church that is following the message of Jesus and is almost guaranteed to be a church that is super-concerned with the sex lives of people, particularly people who are not actually part of that church (and thus a comfortable abstraction that can be demonized).
And we better get to work fixing this. Because this sex-focused Christianity is really starting to show the cracks in the foundation. Which is not surprising, since it is ultimately incoherent and only tangentially related to anything we see in, you know, the life of Jesus or the New Testament text. People are fleeing churches because the thing that is being given them by those churches doesn't really make any sense. Unless of course you happen to find yourself in the privileged group for whom the current program amounts to "the stuff other people do is bad, while the stuff I am doing is totally fine, and I am not super concerned about or empathetic for the other folks in any event." People like, for example, the guy in question. In that case, Christianity is less incoherent and more farcical--a system for affirming you in stuff you were going to do anyway, and a platform for taking the moral high-ground with regard to others.
This guy I know is not a bad guy. But his Christianity is bullshit. It's not his fault, at least not totally--it's what he was given, and what he has been empowered to do by the debased Christian culture of 20th and early 21st Century America. But it's still bullshit, and he's the real problem.
And there are a ton of folks like my co-worker.
Comments
1. I agree that the Christianity you are describing is tribal. The point of tribal Christianity is to exclude, not to include. Jesus was inclusive: lepers, prostitutes, etc. If Jesus came today in the flesh (or whatever), he would hang out with people on the registered sex offender list, Nazis, etc. And we'd all be like, "WTF?"
2. However, I think it's important not to completely demonize tribal Christianity and its adherents: http://carlroberts.us/?p=883 Because if we do, then we are excluding people, just as tribal Christianity does.
3. Ken Wilber says that evolution "transcends and includes." The evolution of spirituality in North America requires us to show tribal Christians a way forward that includes the things that they REALLY value.
4. Speaking of what we value, people who worship money aren't actually seeking money. I think they are seeking belonging, running from fear, etc. Your friend wants to be part of something that our larger culture values. Ironically, Jesus showed us a way to be part of something larger than ourselves: the ongoing creation of the universe. But your friend thinks he is worshiping Jesus, but he is really worshiping a mirror. I know because I have worshiped the same mirror.
5. Your friend may never take the next step in his evolution. He might die as a tribal Christian. We still are to love him and to encourage any signs of growth that we see. People did that for me.
I love your thoughts on this stuff. Thanks for sharing.