Month: January 2007

Busting Myths About Christianity: Assessing Myths 9-10

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Entering the homestretch of this series on myths believed about the American Church by those outside it, it's hard to avoid the cruel fact that several of these myths aren't myths. At one point, they may not have had one shred of truth to them at all, but something's happened to the Western Church—a very bad something. Sadly for us, those people who hold no pretenses to following Christ have noticed, yet we haven't. 

The myths: 

  1. Christians are more judgmental than non-Christians.
  2. Christians are stingier than non-Christians.
  3. Christians are more intolerant of other people than non-Christians.
  4. Christians are more short-sighted than non-Christians. 
  5. Christians don't know how to have fun. 
  6. Christians despise intellectuals more than non-Christians do.
  7. Christians prefer kitsch over important art.
  8. Christian subculture mimics the world rather than creating anything lasting.
  9. Companies run by Christians are as unethical as secular companies, and perhaps more so.
  10. Christianity causes more problems in the world than any other religion.

Today, we'll look at the final two.

9. Companies run by Christians are as unethical as secular companies, and perhaps more so

One of the most damning newspaper articles I've read in my life arrived in The Wall Street Journal shortly after the Enron and Worldcom scandals rocked the business world. In that article, the author took an in-depth look at the religious backgrounds of all the principal players in all the scandals. In nearly every case, those leaders were Evangelicals deeply involved in their churches as elders, teachers, deacons, and more.

I read that article about five times, attempting to find some way to reject what I was reading, but the truth shouted from the page.

My own personal odyssey dealing with Christian businesspeople is about as bad. When I look back on all the times I hired self-professed Christian professionals to help me resolve a problem, the number of times I got stiffed—and grossly, too, I might add—far, far, far outweighed the number of times the same happened with folks who made no pretenses to being Christians. Like 10:1.

So when I need an electrician to wire my house correctly so that the resulting "fix" doesn't burn it down, an ICHTHUS plastered on a Yellow Pages ad is my sign to hire someone else.

I hate saying that. As a Christian businessman myself, I would go sleepless for months if I knew I didn't turn in my best work. I'm a representative of Jesus Christ. My word and my work mean something deeper than putting food on the table. Doing outstanding work on every job I take is more than just the norm; it's my worship!

Why, then, do so many Christian businesspeople do such shoddy work—and under the guise of Christianity, too? Don't they know that's an anti-witness? Perseus slaying the MinotaurThat kind of carelessness may be the foot that stomps out the Holy Spirit, not only in the life of the businessperson, but in his or her client's life, as well.

Why does this happen? I think it may have something to do with a hyperinflated and mind-bogglingly poor notion of what grace entails. Some Christians must cover their atrocious work ethic with such a thick lacquer of "grace" that they convince themselves it will hide all the flaws. Or they're nothing more than cultural Christians, reflecting no true inner conversion, bereft of the Holy Spirit who would never let them rest for doing such poor work in the name of Christ. I have no other explanation.

At one time in history, Christians could be counted on to provide the best of every service and manufactured product available. I can't muster the historical proof to say that we're far worse now than then, but doesn't it seem like it? Sure, a real mythbuster would have the proof, but all I have is a lopsided series of encounters with Christian businesses that weighs heavily in favor of a negative assessment. That doesn't mean that millions of good Christians who would never lie, cheat, or steal from a client don't exist. But whatever the case, the scoundrels are making it tough on all of us.

So while Hebrew National Hot Dogs claims to answer to "a higher Authority," we Messiah-worshipers better do more than just answer.

Assessment: Plausible, and very likely Confirmed.

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10. Christianity causes more problems in the world than any other religion

Let me make this simple: Bull.

If anything, the heritage of the Christian Church since its founding proves a history of God using believers to fashion every good we enjoy today. Anyone who believes that Christianity is more a problem than a solution long ago turned off the brain cells.

If no Church of Jesus Christ graced this planet, we would kiss goodbye…

…the majority of the world's greatest art, music, and literature.

…large portions of philosophy, science, and invention.

…nearly all charitable organizations that reach out to the least of these.

…virtually all hospitals and medical centers in the world.

…every concept of personal freedom in government.

…the hope of rescue of oppressed people everywhere.

In fact, I would guess that a world with no Church would be so hopelessly grim by now that a traveler through such an alternate Earth, if not already a Christian, would convert on the spot after returning to his Church-filled reality. And that's true of no other religion or thought system. 

For this reason, it's imperative that we Christians assess where we are today and ask if we're still making that kind of difference. If we're not on the forefront in every fruitful endeavor that Mankind enjoys, then we've failed to live as the Lord's fully redeemed people.

Our ancestors understood what Christ bought them by His blood, and they ran with that opportunity. They understood what it meant to live like wise Daniel did among the worldly, that it was more than just being pious. It meant learning! It meant expanding the horizons of what is known and what can be. Those wise men from the East called by God to visit the infant Jesus were the direct result of a godly man like Daniel who saw that serving God wasn't just a set of religious rituals separated from the whole of life.

Those Christians before us got it. Their devotion spawned countless benefits to us in every part of our lives. We can't drop the baton. To those who have been given much, much has been required.

Assessment: Couldn't be more Busted!

*** 

In the end, every single Christian in America should be a mythbuster. Too many of the myths held by unbelievers about Christianity today are shockingly closer to the truth than we care to admit. We can't continue to reinforce those myths.

If our passion for Christ is outweighed by our longing for entertainment, then we shouldn't call ourselves Christians. I'm afraid that in too many cases we're more concerned with our Tivo programming than reversing the mindset of unbelievers about the Church, and Jesus Christ, in particular. By living such worldly, meaningless lives, we only drive the lost away from their only hope.

Those Christians who gave their best to give us the science and arts we enjoy today took risks and God rewarded them. Many sinned boldly, yet loved God more boldly still. That kind of baldfaced living under grace seems foreign to us today. The modern American Church shies away from wrestling with angels. While some small-minded Christians point with pride to the fact they're not limping, it's also why so few of them go on to have their names listed among the heroes and patriarchs of the Faith. And it's why there's so little greatness in the American Church of the 21st century.

Christian, live in such a way that no myth hatched by the world applies to you.

Have a great weekend.

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{Image: Perseus slaying the Minotaur} 

Busting Myths About Christianity: Assessing Myths 7-8

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Odysseus blinding the cyclops PolyphemusOver the last week, we've been looking at commonly heard statements about Christianity that have taken on mythical proportions. It's hard  to be a Christian in the West and not encounter these myths: 

  1. Christians are more judgmental than non-Christians.
  2. Christians are stingier than non-Christians.
  3. Christians are more intolerant of other people than non-Christians.
  4. Christians are more short-sighted than non-Christians. 
  5. Christians don't know how to have fun. 
  6. Christians despise intellectuals more than non-Christians do.
  7. Christians prefer kitsch over important art.
  8. Christian subculture mimics the world rather than creating anything lasting.
  9. Companies run by Christians are as unethical as secular companies, and perhaps more so.
  10. Christianity causes more problems in the world than any other religion.

Today, we'll look at myths #7 & #8:

7. Christians prefer kitsch over important art

As the Church of Jesus Christ grew and expanded, it touched nearly every art form. The Gospel's revelation of the divinity of Christ and His human nature resulted in a synthesis that ultimately broke the back of gnostic religions. This, in turn, created an environment in which art flourished, as God's coming to Earth as Man hallowed imagery.

But while the important artists that forged the backbone of Western art identified as Christians, the 19th century saw an increasing backlash against the realism that undergirded Christian art up until that time. With the coming of German higher criticism in the late 19th century, questions about the veracity of Scripture led to questions about absolute truth. The resulting cultural decline reflected in art that deconstructed itself.

Christian artists, unable to fend off the trend, either stayed true to their art and faded into profitless obscurity, or they pandered to low culture in an attempt keep bread on the table. When modern marketing techniques raised advertising to the level of popular art, the culture rewarded ad icons. Those icons, when mass marketed, led to an even lower form of art now known as kitsch.

I suspect that the rise of fundamentalism on one side and higher criticism on the other, dealt a death blow to Christian art during the Great Depression. Fundamentalists, in an entrenchment move, lumped all contemporary art into the category of "potentially evil," and this spilled over into the Evangelical consciousness. As a reaction against the supposed judgment that fell upon this country for the Roaring Twenties, Fundamentalists pushed hard against all forms of profligacy, and art, as a whole, suffered in that wake. Art, in general, lay damned.

But God built a creative spirit into man, so that desire to create needed a channel. What it got was a version of art that combined advertising imagery with a new sanitized Christian "ideal." And popular art, especially by Christians, has not recovered.

In her seminal book, A Profound Weakness: Christians & Kitsch, Betty Spackman argues from two sides of this issue, at once decrying kitsch as poor art, while acknowledging that it can still carry meaning for Christians. More to the point, she makes a bulletproof case that much of what passes for Christian art today is more kitsch than art, and that recovering a true appreciation by Christians for more masterful art may be difficult given the current state of Christian subculture around the world.

When all of Evangelicalism in the West is considered, it's hard to escape the truth that kitsch dominates our expression. From our "His Pain, Your Gain" t-Shirts to "WWJD" jewelry to modern megachurches, Christian culture perpetuates kitsch over substantive works, the typical Christian bookstore replacing the secular museum. Worse yet, the average Christian today can rack his brain and not come up with the name of a contemporary Christian artist—with the possible exception of Thomas Kinkade.

The problem of Christians and kitsch extends to all parts of the creative life within the Church. As kitsch itself is a derivative form, so too many creative endeavors within the Christian community lack a true defining Christianity, instead adding a Christianized coating to secular forms. What a true Christian expression of the arts might look like in the 21st century is yet to be seen, but we all should hope to live long enough to witness its full blossoming.

Assessment: Confirmed

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8. Christian subculture mimics the world rather than creating anything lasting

Our affinity for kitsch means Christian expression cannot avoid including it at the core of our subculture. As mentioned above, the derivative nature of kitsch means the art itself has come from some other source, itself often derivative. Christians attempting to create out of that limited pool come off as pseudo-sanctified mynah birds, rather than images of the Spirit as dove.

For this reason, contemporary Christian culture in the West lives more off a perverted form of its past than a vital present. When the Reformation is reduced to a derivative t-shirt, it's hard to argue that modern Christians care one iota about leading culture, preferring instead to be culture's dog on a leash.

Appealing to cultural relevance only worsens the problem, pulling the Church down into the world's cultural cesspool. Though not all of modern culture should be viewed at arm's length, sadly, the aspects deemed most usable by the Western Church are the ones most needful of discarding. Sure, it may be possible to erect something intriguing out of rusty tin cans, but is that redeeming the time we've been given by the Lord?

Until the Church in the West abandons its love affair with redeeming the sleaziest parts of our culture, most of what we redeem from it will be garbage. And derivative garbage, at that. Encouraging folks guided by the Lord to create new directions in culture—leading, not following—and backing their gifts wholeheartedly is our only hope.

Assessment: Confirmed 

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Stay tuned, the final two myth assessments still to come… 

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{Image: Odysseus blinding the Cyclops Polyphemus} 

Busting Myths About Christianity: Assessing Myths 4-6

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The other day, we looked at three myths that dog Christianity, particularly the form found in America. Today we'll examine three more.

The ten myths:

  1. Christians are more judgmental than non-Christians.
  2. Christians are stingier than non-Christians.
  3. Christians are more intolerant of other people than non-Christians.
  4. Christians are more short-sighted than non-Christians. 
  5. Christians don't know how to have fun. 
  6. Christians despise intellectuals more than non-Christians do.
  7. Christians prefer kitsch over important art.
  8. Christian subculture mimics the world rather than creating anything lasting.
  9. Companies run by Christians are as unethical as secular companies, and perhaps more so.
  10. Christianity causes more problems in the world than any other religion.

Let's look at numbers four through six…

4. Christians are more short-sighted than non-Christians

You won't find a church with a Fifty Year Plan. Or a Twenty, for that matter. Long-range goals don't figure into much of what we do in American Christianity. In many way, we American Christians resemble a school full of amnesiacs, always learning, but never remembering the past well enough to build toward a future.

Somehow, we've allowed the first half of one passage to subsume the rest of Scripture: 

Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit"– yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.
—James 4:13-14 ESV

While most of us would deem "Live for today for tomorrow you die," to be the ultimate self-centered expression of a culture hellbent on hedonism, we've somehow aligned it with the James passage. We get all dispensational and start talking how "it's all going to burn." Our lives take on "So what?" sheen.

That so many people who call themselves believers fall into this trap should bother us. But it doesn't.

Jesus said this:

"Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."
—Matthew 6:19-21 ESV

We need to look at James in light of Jesus. The Lord tells us that our mist-like life here and now has eternal purpose that will carry over into the afterlife. Singer-Sargent "Hercules and the Hydra"It is one thing to live for the day, but quite another to live for the day so eternity is richer.

You don't hear enough sermons about storing up treasure in heaven. I hear plenty about living the good life now, yet the only correct way to understand "it's all going to burn" is not as an excuse to cover profligacy this side of heaven, but as the means of testing every man's and woman's work after we die.

Who can blame a non-Christian for going for the gusto now? He or she's got nothing else to look forward to. Some will move beyond the "live for the moment" lifestyle that plagues America, opting for the concept of a "legacy." Even that may be wishful thiking, hoping our typical three-month collective memory will somehow stretch out to a century or more.

But when a Christian adopts "grab all the gusto' as a personal motto? That's the most pathetic short-sightedness of all. Yet how much of modern Christianity in the United States lives by that mantra? Better that we all be poor wretches considered the scum of the earth by non-Christians than we build a Camelot now that will only succumb to moths and rust.

Are all Christians that short-sighted? No. But increasingly, our churches fill with folks looking for the good life stamped by the Holy Spirit's seal of approval. When our preaching says nothing of building a true legacy that we will actually play out in eternity based upon what we do now, our short-sightedness damns us to a future as the shoe-shine boys of heaven, buffing the sandals of saints who laid it all down, even unto death.

We know we have an eternal future. What is more short-sighted than living as if that doesn't matter?

Assessment: Confirmed

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5. Christians don't know how to have fun

When it comes to amusing ourselves to death, I think American Christians find as many ways to do it as non-Christians, albeit with fewer F-words and less full-frontal nudity.

We demanded, and seem to have received, more movies geared to Christians. And while the finished products haven't been all that spectacular, our craving for more will ensure they keep coming–with increasing regularity.

I plan on writing more about this topic in the near future, but in many ways, we Christians in the United States traded sanctification for entertainment. When God Himself no longer seems to excite us, we surround Him with our little cultural dog and pony shows, praying someone will pay attention. How else do we explain the entertainment complexes we used to call "churches." At one point in time, we went to see men on fire for God, but now preachers have to literally pour gasoline over themselves and light a match to get anyone to sit up and take notice.

Oddly enough, this fifth myth may be a remnant from the Seventies, before Christians got hip to their entertainment choices. I'm not sure non-Christians today hold the opinion that Christians don't have fun. That's been replaced with the concept that Christians don't really care about the life and death belief system they hold, practicing those beliefs more as a hobby than a way of life. If anything, it's the non-Christian who's grown more serious about life, while too many of us Christians worry that our new 60" TV still isn't big enough to show all the fine detail in the latest Left Behind video game we bought after reading the book and seeing the movie.

It's quite sad that in so many instances the one thing that separates us from non-Christians isn't the amount of entertainment we consume, but the randomly-sterilized nature of the entertainment we spend millions of dollars buying. Sure, their violent video game has swearing, but our violent video game doesn't.

If we think we're fooling God with that kind of subtlety, we're only fooling ourselves.

Assessment: Busted—perhaps too Busted

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6. Christians despise intellectuals more than non-Christians do 

It would be safe to say that I don't personally know any Christian intellectuals. On the other hand, while I do not know any non-Christian intellectuals, either, I know a few who have convinced themselves they are. And as we all know, an audience that only consists of one's self is usually an easy audience to please.

First Things has a couple online articles covering Mark Noll's seminal book on this issue, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (found here and here). Dr. Noll researched that book during my tenure at Wheaton, and though I never took any classes from him, I had a few other profs I'd classify as intellectuals. Unfortunately, like most intellectuals, those profs congregated in very tight circles. The less intellectually rigid of us rarely encountered them "in the wild." And so it is today.

I knew an Old Testament scholar who attended the same church I once did. Sadly, that church never seriously appreciated the kind of study that scholar pursued. Though they trotted him out on occasion as a kind of "please take the witness stand, Doctor" expert, he eventually left the church. I suspect he tired of being a sort of intellectual freakshow amid people who'd rather be watching Fear Factor.

So whither the Christain intellectual? Do any still exist?

Say what we will about history, but it's loaded with Christians (and people who mentally assented to Christianity) who drove the arts, philosophy, literature, and science—and in large numbers.

But what happened to them all? Where did they go? Sure, you see a Plantinga here, and a…uh, hmm. I'm not coming up with any names for contemporary Christian lit authors. Artists? Nope—no one comes to mind. In fact, I suspect that most Christians, even if their lives depended on it, couldn't name one contemporary Christian intellectual or artist.

Are we so bereft today that all we can remember are those great Christian intellectual luminaries of the past? Christianity nurtured Western civilization into being, yet in the 21st century we Christians gave it all away.

Perhaps we missed the point of this verse:

Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?
—1 Corinthians 1:20 ESV

Rather than understanding that cleverly invented myths from the world's wisemen don't trump the eternal truth of God correctly handled God's wise men, we threw all the wisemen—and their wisdom, no matter the source–out.

That this ignores most of the rest of Scripture, and also makes a fine distorted case for tearing all the wisdom books out of the Bible, eludes far too many people. In the end, Christianity never calls anyone to turn off his mind. To insist it does only results in the kind of brain-dead emotionalism that leads to error. Hoisting godly wisdom by it own petard makes the Church look vacant in the cranium.

While the non-Christian may ignore the intellectuals, I suspect precious few of them are hauling out treatises to discredit the life of the mind. We Christians of the 21st century, unlike our predecessors of long ago, seem to be the ones intent on slaying the intellect.

If the few Christian intellects left decry the problem, perhaps there's some truth to the rumor. But then, we don't listen to anything they say anyway.

Assessment: Confirmed

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More myth assessments in days ahead…

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{Image: Hercules and the Hydra by John Singer-Sargent — Simply awesome.}