Why Christianity Is Failing in America
November 13, 2009
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Boldness, Christianity in North America, Church Issues, Community, Counterculture, Discernment, Dying to Self, Faith, Godly Character, Humility, Leadership, Maturity, Obedience, Oddities, Persecution, Perseverance, Relevance, Revival, Simplicity Functions : Trackback,
,
Over at First Things, Jared Wilson posts a passionate call by Ray Ortlund Jr. for a recovery of the Gospel in modern America. It’s a needful call I utterly support.
Yet despite the clarion nature of Ortlund’s words, a fundamental problem exists that we Christians in America have been entirely unable to overcome.
I don’t believe that American Evangelicals don’t know what the Gospel is. I admit that no one person seems to grasp the entirety of the Gospel and its implications, but most people who self-label as Christians get the Gospel to some point.
But the messes we’ve made of living out the Gospel in a redemptive way, those many tangents that Ortlund describes so well that distract us from the real Gospel, are what they are because of a fundamental problem with America and American Christians.
The following quote from Kierkegaard captures the problem in a nutshell:
The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world?
The Gospel demands something of us. It also forces us to see with a different set of eyes, God’s.
The person confronted by the truth of the Gospel is like the person in the world of the movie The Matrix who is given the choice to take the red pill and see the world as it is from a different set of eyes or take the blue pill and stay blissfully doped against reality.
And that person, confronted with the truth of the Gospel of Christ, MUST then come to grips with these truths:
The American Dream is a vicious and all-consuming lie.
The way the American economy functions is antithetical to the Gospel.
The way we Americans live socially in our communities denies the Gospel.
The values we American hold dear more often than not war with the Gospel.
The Gospel demands the death of self, while the American ideal demands the exaltation of self.
The American system is cracked to the core and is rapidly failing, yet misguided American Christians spend enormous amounts of time and energy attempting to seal the cracks.
As Kierkegaard so ably said, if we American Christians genuinely lived the Gospel we say we believe, every single aspect of how we live, work, love, commune, and bleed would be radically altered. Almost none of the way we live would resemble the lifestyles we have becomes so enamored of. We wouldn’t recognize our old lives at all. And we would look so profoundly different from the rest of the world that it would have to sit up and take notice.
Ortlund makes the obvious statement:
To a shameful degree, we Christians are morally indistinct from the world. Why? One reason is that we think piecemeal, and our lives show it. We do not perceive reality from God’s perspective. We perceive reality from the perspective of our ungodly culture, and then we try to slap a biblical principle onto the surface of our deep confusion.
We all know this damning final assessment of the rich young ruler:
When Jesus heard this, he said to him, “One thing you still lack. Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” But when he heard these things, he became very sad, for he was extremely rich.
—Luke 18:22-23
Our problem as Christians in America 2009 is not simply that we are more wealthy than 95 percent of the world’s population, but that every single aspect of how we live, work, love, commune, and bleed MUST be “sold” to follow Jesus.
And we are simply unwilling to take that step.
But instead of going away sorrowful, we construct a syncretistic faith that melds the parts of the Gospel we can stomach with the life we cannot leave behind.
What makes this so troubling is that not a single one of us is immune to that syncretism. In fact, we have made it our religious security blanket, the warm, comforting deception that gets us from one day to the next. We marvel at the rich young ruler’s stupidity and yet we ourselves are even more deceived.
More than anyone, I want Ortlund’s call to resonate. But I fear it won’t. If we truly re-examined the Gospel and sought to live it purely, then nothing we experience in America would be free from questioning. In fact, everything that is not the Gospel MUST be questioned.
Yet who today will put up with those people who question the foundational shibboleths of the American Way of Life? We instead remain mute because too few of us are prepared to be martyrs for the cause. Taking the red pill may not only wake one up from the stupor, but it may also mean being attacked—and even from our supposed brothers and sisters in Christ.
If you and I truly stepped out in faith to live the Gospel we say we believe, it may well be that we would have to drop out of the corporate treadmill, suffer a freefall in the company hierarchy, watch our income plummet, and suffer the American indignity of no longer being able to keep up with the Joneses. It may mean we cannot get our children into the fancy private school, the top division sports team, and subsequently fail to send them to Harvard to mint their perfect future. It may mean that we reject consumerism and globalism, returning to a local economy that celebrates community and works to see that no one suffers at the expense of the richer among us, no matter how difficult it will be and what it will cost us. It may mean that we have to let go of long-time friends who suddenly hate our “class descent” and no longer want to be around us. It may mean that we live among the rejected people of the world (as we have become rejected ourselves). It may mean that we rediscover what the Lord meant by “give us this day our daily bread.” It may mean thousands of profound changes to the way we think and live that put us out of the mainstream and make life more chllenging, though in the end we realize the challenge is where Christ Himself dwells.
Believing the Gospel will destroy our American lifestyles. But as long as we are Americans first and Christians second, we have nothing to fear from the Gospel, and we can be thankful we downed the blue pill.
I am not confident that what Ortlund writes will make any difference. When the call for change comes from the very people who are enmeshed in the system and prefer it that way, hope comes hard. I know that every day I struggle to put off the shackles from which Christ has freed me. He unlocked the chains, but their weight upon me has become too comforting, too familiar. I am like a man for whom the entire world is a chain, because that is all I have known—and anything that is not a chain is too difficult and frightening to understand.
Tags: American Church, Bravery, Christianity in America, Christianity in Decline, Community, Counterculture, Culture, Faith, Martyr, Martyrdom, Perseverance, Ray Ortlund Jr., Society, Soren Kierkegaard
Posts
Comments
Dan
“The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand.”
Amen – Quite simple.
Doesn’t Jesus call us to be disciples and make disciples?”
And to be a “Disciple of Christ” it will cost you;
A “Disciple of Christ”
Will;
Forsake all…
Hear His voice…
Love not the world…
Love not their own life…
Just want to know Him…
Count all things but dung…
Always take the lower place…
Do nothing apart from Jesus…
Take on the form of a servant…
Make themselves of no reputation…
Count others better then themselves…
Gives thanks for all things… All things? Yes.
Deny themselves and pick up their cross daily…
Counts all the shame, “joy,” for what lies before them…
Love the Lord their God, love their neighbors, love themselves…
Forsake all honor, glory, praise, power, profit, prestige, recognition, reputation…
A “Disciple of Christ”
Will NOT;
Lord it over…
Exercise authority…
Honor themselves…
Seek their own glory…
Be called rabbi/teacher…
Be called Master/leader…
Receive honor from man…
Peace…
It’s a clash of Kingdoms…
I have been meaning to email you about this, but this post is on the same note. I am going through a free ebook called “The Starfish Vision” with a group and it has really been rocking my life. Really ties together a lot of the Kingdom principles I have been discovering over the last few years.
It’s a quick read. ~80 pages. At least scan the table of contents and see if it is something that catches your eye. After following your blog for the last couple years, I have a feeling it will.
http://en.starfishportal.net/about/
Hey, Dan. I wholeheartedly agree with everything you’ve written. How do we get from we we are, though, to where we ought to be? Have you already abandoned the American Way Of Life and left everything to follow Christ? If so, how did you do it? And how do you recommend the rest of us do it? Those are deeply sincere questions. Thanks.
I’ll echo Barry’s comment above. How do we do that without becoming some sort of Amish Lite?
Also, how do people retrain themselves to work in this non-corporate small-town economy? I’d be more than happy to leave my college teaching job, but have struggled to find anyone to hire me (or even interview me) for anything else due to being overqualified.
“It may mean that we reject consumerism and globalism, returning to a local economy that celebrates community and works to see that no one suffers at the expense of the richer among us, no matter how difficult it will be and what it will cost us.”
Preach it Comrade!
And once we have Soviet Socialist Worker’s Paradise all will be well!
The call is simple; the application is too. However, it may look different for each one of us. That is where it gets complicated and why it is difficult for Dan or anyone else to spell out how any particular individual should apply it.
What is God asking of you? Do it with all your might. He is the Shepherd and we, the sheep, know His voice. Listen to it and obey it fully. Dont’ obey the voices of our culture. Don’t have a divided heart.
I don’t think this is anything new. When the bible mentions people who need to bury their parents, try out the new oxen, or ponder the merits of giving everything they own to the poor, then methinks this is an old issue. Of course we are self-centered, sinful, prideful, misanthropic, despicable…well, the list could go on and on.
So what will I do about it, having reality thrown in my face?
Like someone who visits a therapist, it’s one thing to learn about a problem and admit that there is indeed a problem; quite another to act on it and be transformed.
It’s an individual journey, but one we must all take together as a body. And therein lies the particular failure of American Christianity. We accept the individual responsibility, but reject the corporate responsibility. If a church body holds us accountable, we leave and find a more amenable body. Conversely, if teaching in one church is in error, we leave and find one that does better. We seek that which gratifies us, not that which is Kingdom centered.
I watched 2012 over the weekend, guffawing over the destruction, as that was the purpose of the movie (anyone who takes it seriously needs to consider oxygen treatments) but as any “endtimes” movie does, it got me thinking about the real thing, the one that is coming and will test the hearts of believers like fire tests gold.
I wondered, as always, if I am ready to have my precious “rights” taken away should I persist in this foolish belief in an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, triune God. Suppose my debit card doesn’t work one day because I refused to sign a piece of paper that challenges my beliefs. Or if my driver’s license is revoked because to keep it requires me to approve something that I believe is wrong. Suppose I face jail time because I refuse to pay into an insurance system that kills the unwanted?
One day the choices before me will not be voluntary, or simply something that makes me stand out from the crowd. If I am unable to make simple choices that only affect my comfort today, how can I reasonably expect I will be able to make more complex choices that affect life and death tomorrow?
“Count the cost” Jesus said. Not something we bring up in VBS, is it? Being a Christian for many is a death sentence. For Americans it’s merely something that makes our conscience twinge a little now and then. The way of this world is death. The way of the cross is life. But only to those who can tell the difference.
David,
I struggle immensely in my own life because I am painfully aware that the compromise always starts small. Imagine how the entire world would change for you or me if the driver’s license bureau said those simple words you mentioned, “Sorry, sir. You cannot renew your license.” I think about that all the time and realize there is no fallback because we have not even broached the issue. Even as we talk about the very last last days, we live as if they will never come. Hey, we’re all going to be raptured out of here before that happens, right? So why lose sleep over it? Why think about consequences? Why plan?