The Problem with Christians

There is an age-old disease ravaging Christianity, and though the cause was long ago identified and the cure discovered, Christians willfully continue to bear the affliction as if immune to its deleterious effects. Worse, they seem to rejoice upon sight of the symptoms. The disease, of course, is what Mark Noll so famously described as the anti-intellectual current running through modern American Christianity. Though many besides Noll have stressed the dangers of anti-intellectualism, few have heeded the warnings or taken the prescription necessary for eradication. Instead, like organic-loving, earth-worshiping, naturalist hippies, they have applied their own homegrown remedies to the sores and duped themselves into believing that a stinky, oily salve both cures the disease and remains unnauseating to those around them. Rather than further deepening their faith through rigorous biblical, theological, and historical explorations into why they believe what they believe and determining how their discoveries might impact the ways in which they live their faith, they have chosen to simply adopt the appearance of a serious Christian intellectual in their haste to engage culture and win souls. In short, they, like many Christians and non-Christians alike, have become intellectualists, not intellectuals. As a result, they may be losing more souls than they are winning.

Young Christian intellectualists are no more common than young non-Christian intellectualists. The view of Biola philosophy professor John Mark Reynolds that young evangelicals are "lightly educated, but take their thoughts very seriously"¹ seems to hold true for almost every self-absorbed blowhard that makes frequent use of Facebook or Twitter, whether Christian, Muslim, or atheist. But Christian intellectualists are more offensive because what they propose to have all figured out--namely, what it means to be a Christian--not only smacks of arrogance to both Christians and non-Christians alike, but also frequently harms the spiritual well-being of almost everyone they touch, including themselves.

Before proceeding, it would be helpful to describe what is meant by "intellectualist," illuminating key traits along the way. An intellectualist is nothing more than an exceedingly good poser. He fakes intelligence, though not entirely on purpose. Again, we turn to Reynolds for a tidy description of the intellectualist:

It is confusing intellectual activity with the attitudes, beliefs, and social characteristics of one's peers.... The intellectualist is socialized into a peer group, but confuses his choices in music, clothes, and beverages with intelligence. He or she reads the right books and knows how to talk about them properly, to feed the proper perceptions.²

While the evangelical pursues the life of the mind and is, in turn, noticeably formed by such journeys, the intellectualist seeks only to don the mental, spiritual, and, yes, even physical clothes worn by the intellectual upon completion of his journey. To the intellectualist, the name of the game is perception, not reality; image rather than substance.

Only they fail to realize it. As Reynolds points out, it is a genuine confusion. So the intellectualist assumes that drinking wine, babbling unceasingly about the right movie or novel, condemning the latest policy as too progressive or conservative, or frequenting the right restaurants, really does make him an intellectual, despite a glaring inability to articulate why they think one way or another. This is dangerous, of course, because without well-reasoned personal moorings they are carried off by the first waves of secular or religious whimsy they encounter.

This lack of intellect is damaging to secular souls as it reduces the likelihood that they will even consider pursuing any kind of truth, religious or not. It can be downright fatal for the Christian soul, as it leads him to question and compromise based on what the secular culture tells him, rather than on what genuine and often hard-to-swallow truths might be found during an intellectual quest. Because of this, the growing ranks of intellectualists have produced two types of Christians: the feeble-minded, soft-bellied compromiser and the hard-headed, in-your-face culture warrior. While separated by clear differences in their understandings of faith and approaches to culture, the compromisers and warriors are united by one quite obvious trait: the commodification of the Savior, something I once saw aptly described as "Jesus junkification." Let us take both the compromiser and the warrior on his own terms to better understand their inherent problems.

As he is the least ineffectual, we will quickly examine and dismiss the compromiser and move to the more dangerous warrior. Like the warrior, the compromiser is image-driven, but this grows out of their belief that all one needs to do to win more souls is to make Christianity more appealing. Thus they feel an ever-present urge to make church, Jesus, and themselves as socially acceptable as possible. Thus, churches are stripped of their deep symbolism in favor of a more modern, sleek look. Music is made hipper by the addition of drums, guitars, keyboards, and vocalists who, in their attempts to look edgy, often end up looking like, well, a semi-talented rockstar who has been forced to take a bath, trim his goatee, throw a corduroy blazer over his athletic-fit t-shirt, and go to church. And let us not forget the ridiculous ways in which Christ has been marketed--action figures, the Christianized version of the Staples "easy button", and the tacky "What Would Jesus Drive" campaign, to name a few.

This is all part of a well-intentioned effort to make Jesus more accessible to the modern unchurched (and, I suppose, to some modern churched). Everyone, says the compromiser, can find Jesus if we just take him out of the Bible and those archaic hymns and market him a bit better. What the compromisers soon realize, however, is that people have problems not with the way that Jesus looks, but with what Jesus says. All those condemnations of immoral living can be real conversation killers, you know. So the compromiser rightly tries to emphasize God's love. But in doing so, his feeble understanding of God's love changes him, rather than those he wants to reach. Too often, the compromiser mistakes harmony with love.

What do I mean by this? The compromiser, by focusing solely on God's love removes all context surrounding that love. The non-Christian target hears only that God loves all and sent his Son to die for even the thieves and whores. The compromiser, wishing to cultivate this, decides to end conversation there, figuring that the subject of sin and necessary lifestyle transformation that God's love demands can be kicked down the road. Worse, the compromiser himself begins to downplay sin in his own life, imbibing tired secular cliches. After all, nobody's perfect. Love has no gender. And on and on. In the end, we all live together under the loving eyes of one big, harmless Jesus.

Yet the compromiser has succeeded as an intellectualist. He has caved to secular demands that he become an "enlightened" Christian (i.e. a Christian with no moral backbone). His target has become a Christ-follower, albeit of the simplified, harmony-above-truth, market-friendly version. Together the compromiser, content in his ignorance of the fact that he sacrificed himself in a failed effort to save another, and the newly-converted lover of love, sing along with glee to the pitifully shallow lyrics of Christian intellectualist rockstars:

Love is on the move, revealing heaven's truth.
Love is on the way and it will find you.
And anyone can run into the arms of God.
Love is on the way and it will find you.
(Leeland, "Love is on the move")

If anyone can run into God's arms, then anyone can run out. The compromiser intellectualist has determined that saving souls is the Christian's endgame. He has given no serious thought as to why he believes this, nor has he given thought as to how this should direct his daily interactions with the culture. Thus, he chooses to make Christ accessible by diluting the truth. Because he is so hypnotized by image, he is easily manipulated and soft, red meat for the unbelieving world. In the end he gains nothing and loses everything.

While the compromiser intellectualist persuades himself away from Christ, the warrior intellectualist remains in the fold, but drives away hordes of potential Christians through his hard-headed, vociferous assaults on culture. Like the compromiser, the warrior is image-conscious as well, though for a different purpose. The warrior, uncertain if his faith alone sets him apart, must physically distinguish himself as a Christian destined for something greater than this world. He listens to the same shallow Christian bands, enjoys the same Jesus junk, and rails against the Church's failure to join the modern age, but he does not do so out of a desire to make Jesus more accessible. He uses his Christianity to assault culture to win those souls looking for religion to give them a cause. As Matthew Lee Anderson has put it, warriors "have made the dualism between Church and culture fundamental. They are two separate worlds that may or may not overlap."³The warrior wants to make it clear that he is not of this world, but was sent to redeem it.

To express this the warrior goes beyond the images taken up by the compromiser. He wears politically-charged ties, stages protests, circulates petitions against this or that, etc. He must be seen fighting valiantly for God; otherwise, he is no Christian at all. "Stop thinking and start acting," as it was put to me once. I have no problem with Christians taking cultural stands, but I often question their motivation. While our call to be "salt and light" goes beyond loving our neighbor, telling the truth, and remaining faithful to our husbands or wives and extends to all aspects of life including law, economics, education, science, politics, etc., we must be cautious in our response to that call. This means taking time to understand why Christians have biblically, historically, or theologically been in favor of or opposed to one thing or another and finding the most effective ways to offer a Christian response rather than ineffective shotgun blasts of Bible passages. When secular America sees the typical warrior Christians, they see thick-skulled obstructionists to progress. Unfortunately, the warrior too often takes refuge under his carefully constructed intellectualist Christian shelter, emboldened by the mild persecutions of offended co-workers and bystanders. If they deserve praise for being unafraid to stand athwart culture, they deserve scorn for failing to appreciate the effects of their activism.

If Christianity is to positively effect culture and even save souls, to expand on Francis Beckwith's observation of Evangelicalism, "it has to grow up."⁴ It must learn to take itself and the secular world in which it exists seriously. This requires a greater appreciation of where Christianity has been and careful thought as to where it should go. We too often ignore the gap between Paul's journeys and the present day. Nearly every trial we face has been faced before in one way or another. Why do we refuse to learn from our own history? Until we embrace the intellectual pursuits necessary to sustain a deep faith, we will continue to hack at our own moorings until we, too, are adrift in an unfamiliar sea that sweeps us farther from God by the day.

1. John Mark Reynolds, "The Evangelical Intellect." The City: Summer 2009, 22.
2. Ibid., 24.
3. Matthew Lee Anderson, "The Next Generation." The City: Summer 2009, 38.
4. Francis Beckwith, "Evangelical Catholicity." The City: Summer 2009, 33.