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Modern Evangelicalism: An MAO Inhibitor?

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A pharmacological cornucopia!I rarely watch more than two hours of TV a month, so I’m no expert on ads or what’s happening in the TV scene. No matter how little TV you may consume, it’s darned near impossible not to encounter a plethora of Big Pharma ads hawking this prescription drug or that. See enough of those ads and its clear that every single drug on the market comes contraindicated whenever the prospective user’s downing MAO inhibitors, a type of antidepressant that comes with some serious side effects and warnings.

MAO is monoamine oxidase, an enzyme in the body critical for proper neurological functioning, hence the use of MAO inhibiting drugs for treating nervous system diseases. Are you yawning yet? Ready for the tangential slide?

Okay, here it comes…

The Godblogosphere’s been bloated with enough posts on “returning to Rome” to gag the Pope and all his Cardinals. A few noted Evangelical leaders jumped the Reformation Ship and the handwringing, fingerpointing, and accusations flew. In other words, typical Evangelical Sturm und Drang.

Amid the voluminous posting on this leap from Evangelicalism into the Roman Catholic Church (heck, one post I read even had Elisabeth Elliot pining for the papacy), plenty of volcanic theological discourse erupted, but I heard very little about MAO—the other MAO, that is.

The MAO I speak of is Mystery, Awe, and Otherness. You know, the stuff modern Evangelicals jettisoned on their way to a bookshelf full of systematic theologies, dusty pages of do’s and dont’s, and three-points-and-a-conclusion sermons. In their rush to be real and down to earth, Evangelicals found a way to make God dull. In short, modern Evangelicalism has become a theological MAO inhibitor.

I can’t help but think that most of these “un-converts” who fled to Rome did so in part because of the radical vivisection Evangelicalism got away with concerning the Body of Christ. I happen to believe that God placed in each one of us a yearning for mystery, awe, and otherness. That desire drives us to God as the source for all meaning, even if that meaning can never be fully grasped. This isn’t postmodernism’s vacuous “There can be no absolute truth” stupidity, but a genuine recognition that God is wholly other and therefore contains an element of mystery that generates awe in those who encounter Him.

How so? Remember when you basked in the throes of the first ache of passionate love? The object of your affection seemed like some strange creature from another planet that you’d walk across burning coals to know, even if that knowledge was little more than a favorite book he or she loved. Remember that first kiss? The electricity! That mystery, awe, and otherness found in the kiss of your beloved! (Song of Solomon explodes with mystery, awe, and otherness, doesn’t it?)

Now imagine kissing your sister. (Or your brother, as the case may be.) Where’d all that passion go? Now imagine Evangelicalism turning every day supposedly devoted to passion into just another day of kissing your sister. Now who can blame anyone for bolting that dry familiarity for a place that still kindles mystery, awe, and otherness?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m solidly in the Reformation camp. I see the RCC as a dead-end and always have. I feel sorry for anyone so seduced by a need for mystery, awe, and otherness that they’ll abandon truth for it.

Yet I still understand why they do it.

So plenty of Evangelicals go slack-jawed at these bolters who make for the Seven Hills. They’ll go on and on with analyses—psychological, theological, and otherwise—in their attempts to understand why they couldn’t keep ’em down on the Reformation farm. But sadly, they’ll never ask “What did we do wrong?” See, that question begs an answer and the answer gets a bit too close to the heart of the problem. Evangelicals today are loathe to put the words we and wrong in the same sentence, so they affix blame anywhere they can so long as that anywhere doesn’t involve looking in a mirror.

In the end, it does little more than make me tired. The false either/or propositions about what we should do and believe. The tired arguments against emotion. The constant sniping about mystery. If Evangelicals want to drive it all out, then they shouldn’t be surprised that people go elsewhere looking to fill that God-given need for mystery, awe, and otherness. Folks will go to the RCC, to the Orthodox, to whatever source fills that vital need. They’ll look for a way to stop taking the MAO inhibitors the self-appointed “doctors” of the Evangelical Church prescribed.

And someday Evangelicals will scratch their heads and wonder where all their adherents went.

So Why Does It Matter?

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This week, we’ve looked at the problem of the frantic, overscheduled, overworked lives we Americans face (“When the Truth Strikes Out” and “It’s Never Enough Until Your Heart Stops Beating“). I’ve blogged on this issue many times in the past (see the end of this post for related posts), but I don’t see it getting any better. If anything, the Church and parachurch organizations act as if nothing has changed. Yet we now…

…spend more time away from home performing our jobs.

…spend record amounts of time commuting or shuttling our kids here and there.

…have more time-pressed, dual-income families than ever before.

…work harder for less money, often necessitating multiple jobs.

…have no time for social groups that help maintain the fabric of our society.

…feel more guilty than ever that we can’t mirror the perfect family that well-meaning Christians tell us we must be.

Why should any of this matter, though? Why should Christians address the underlying causes for these problems?

As someone keenly aware of the state of disciplemaking in this country, I believe it matters because all these things work to undermine the Great Commission. Dude, it's like moving! Whoa!I believe these trends and changes in our society actively work against the Gospel.

I don’t know how far we must sink before Christian leaders in America wake up to the fact that most of their charges are one exhale away from spiritual death. Our collective hypnosis must end.

With so many distractions and so much rushing to and fro, how can any of us expect to develop a truly deep walk with Christ? When dad spends twelve hours a day away from home, how can he be expected to be a true spiritual leader in his home? By the time he eats dinner and tosses a ball with Junior for fifteen minutes, the day’s over. The weekend consists of doing all the things that didn’t get done during the weeknights. Sometimes prayer goes out the window. Bible study? Forget about it. Developing a rich community of faith with others? How? Who has the time?

Folks, these are serious problems that strike at the very health and mission of Christ’s Church in this country. Yes, many of them are of our own making from long past, but now they’re entrenched in our culture, and like ticks embedded in the skin, they’re not easy to remove without an infection resulting.

Jan at The View From Her asked why Christians are demanding more and more Christian movies and TV shows. Isn’t it all just preaching to the choir?

That question fits here because I feel that our discipleship in this country is so poor we’re failing to create disciples who can stand on their own two spiritual feet. They need constant propping up in order to walk the path of Christ. So instead of developing an inner life filled with the Spirit, they surround themselves with pleasant Christian messages they believe will strengthen them.

Unfortunately, that misguided belief resembles going into battle clad in pillows rather than armor. Yet in a frenzied environment packed to the gills with this activity and that, we flop to the couch with nothing left and turn on our sweet little Christian movie before we doze off.

Folks, it ain’t workin’.

The American Church won’t shake the censers of heaven with our prayers if we toss off prayer between bites of doughnut and sips of coffee listening to Christian radio during morning rush hour. We’re not going to build strong communities if we pull in from work at 7 PM, change clothes, and wolf down dinner, only to realize it’s 8 PM already and we missed yet another church-related event. Delusional people think they can pull that off.

Perhaps that’s our problem: we’ve lost touch with reality. Or perhaps we’ve got too much reality and have lost touch with the Lord, instead. Either way, we’re in trouble if we blithely soldier on without question.

Call your pastor up some night and ask him about this. Ask him what he thinks all this bustle and overwork might be doing to his flock. Then ask why it is that no one questions it all.

If all of us do this, then some outside chance exists that some leaders will start thinking beyond the rathole issues that distract us from true discipleship. Perhaps then we’ll see important Christian voices confronting these problems.

Previous posts on these issues:

When the Truth Strikes Out

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Once again, they’re doubling the size of the local daycare facility. They doubled it just a couple years ago. In a town of about 3,000.

The latest statistics show that the average American is rapidly approaching working a ten hour work day. Couple this with a daily commute of close to an hour, and you have a country in which people just aren’t home.

Five years ago, the majority of families we knew were single-wage-earner households. Now, almost none are.

Into these statistics wade several parachurch organizations that tell us exactly how Christian families should look:

  1. The father works outside the home.
  2. The father is the spiritual leader of the family.
  3. The mother stays home with the children and, preferably, does not work.
  4. If she must work, she works from home.
  5. The father must always be the primary breadwinner.
  6. Unless parents wish to abandon their children to the spirit of the age, they best homeschool.

Hmm.

On the surface, those are all nice ideas. The problem comes when the parachurch organization uses them to gauge the spiritual health of a family, or to tell certain families they aren’t cutting it. They’ll use Bible verses in their accusations, often in a haphazard manner, to prop up their assessments.

I’m troubled by the “you’re in, you’re out” nature of some of these diktats. When I examine these standards, I have to ask how they reflect most people’s realities. If they don’t, then I would hope that, like a good change-agent, the parachurch organization would address the problems and seek solutions.

I would hope.

Let’s look at one issue above and see how it works in the real world.

I’m all for paternal leadership in the home. I think that’s as God intends, but with an understanding that a godly wife can often hear the Lord as well or better than her husband from time to time. (I’m sort of a wishy-washy complementarian with a few select egalitarian leanings. )

But I simply must ask this: what kind of leadership can we expect of any man if he’s out of the home most of the waking day? Where's Dad?With the growing amount of time spent at work and in the car during the commute, should we be surprised that a father’s authority at home gets taxed by the very lack of his presence most of the day?

Now, you would think that an organization whose whole reason for existing is to uphold paternal leadership at home would be doing something–anything–to combat this trend that takes men out of the home all day. You would think.

But then you’d be wrong.

Last year, I wrote several e-mails to a well-known parachurch organization about this very issue. I asked them what practical means they were taking to help families keep their men at home. They wrote a reply reiterating their standard, but ignored my question concerning their plan to help Christian men meet that standard. When I followed-up with an e-mail asking if the organization was meeting with corporate leaders across the nation in order to advocate for shorter work weeks so that employees could spend more time at home helping their families, I got a rather terse response saying they weren’t doing anything like that.

In the end, they still had a standard, but no way to make it practical in the lives of men struggling against the business world’s expectation of increasing hours (and with no increasing pay to compensate, either).

I asked that same organization about the tendency for businesses today to hire women over men because they can pay women less (and because government quotas with money behind them abet this plan, especially when it concerns minority women). This puts men out of work, and subsequently, many men find themselves having to take jobs that pay less than their wives. The second fallout of this is now both spouses have to work in order to make what the man made before he got RIF’ed. What was the organization’s solution? Silence. The practical steps they were taking to combat this? Nothing.

After a while, one can go through every single standard an organization like that upholds and find that, while they love upholding it, they possess no means to help anyone else meet that standard. How tragic!

Imagine that NASA discovers a planet just beyond Pluto whose surface contains an unusual liquid that bubbles up from within that planet’s core. NASA scientists have almost conclusive proof that a few drops of this liquid, if harnessed, would forever power every energy-using device on Earth. Then NASA issues a press-release stating it has no intentions of sending any craft to that planet to retrieve this precious liquid. They’ve already told their scientists not to pursue further spectral analysis. Nor will they let any other scientists examine the data on the liquid so that it might be synthesized on Earth.

Do you think folks would be furious?

Where’s the fury then when Christian organizations demand a certain way of living, yet offer no means or help to make that living possible?

Truth is never meant to be used as a cudgel, but as a means to help others live life more abundantly. If the guardians and wielders of truth only use truth to shame others and make them live in a perpetual state of guilt with no possible escape, hasn’t the truth struck out?

Christians MUST offer truth to the world. But to do so in such a way that it becomes another set of shackles isn’t New Testament Christianity.

I believe that one of the reasons people today don’t consider Christianity a viable truth comes from our perpetual offering of that truth with no practical expression. For you or me to understand truth, it must intersect our lives. It can only transform us when it indwells us. And to indwell us, it must have a way for us to live it.

I keep wondering who the Christian leader will be who holds out a standard and then helps everyone meet it. I hope that Christian leaders interested in godly families will speak out against the economic forces threatening to destroy us.

And so I keep wondering and hoping…