You’ve probably seen the much-ballyhooed PRRI survey, a segment of which indicates that white evangelical Christians feel that Christians are more discriminated against than Muslims in the United States. (If you haven’t, you have to scroll down for a while to get to this table.) Other groups interviewed for the survey disagree. I was intrigued by a recent article by Rabbi Brad Hirschfield on why white evangelicals might feel this way and how people of other faiths might best respond to these feelings.
Christians do at times face discrimination, but it’s hard to argue that they do so more often than Muslims in the United States. What could be behind these feelings by white evangelicals? I’d like to offer an utterly unscientific theory: they (okay, we) are beginning to feel cultural dissonance as the influence of Christianity has diminished in the West.
Mainline Protestantism is rapidly collapsing. Evangelicalism is on a slower decline, and in some places is looking more like mainline Protestantism, which will likely accelerate the evangelical demise. Values traditionally associated with Christian groups no longer hold the sway they once did. Christians, particularly those of a more conservative bent, are beginning to feel like they no longer belong. Perhaps they never belonged in the first place. More on that below.
I’ve long heard people argue that the United States is a “Christian nation.” I take this to mean that there are values associated with Christianity that found their way into our founding documents and the philosophy that undergirds our system of government. Be that as it may, the United States is not, nor has it ever been, a theocracy. The values of Christians–even when we have been able to agree on what these are–have always stood in tension with the prohibition of a state church, the political influence of people of other faiths, and the values of secularism. Remember that as much as the United States was founded upon Christian ideals, it was also founded upon Enlightenment ideals, and Enlightenment ideals have posed serious intellectual challenges to traditional Christian belief.
The Christian presence in the United States is still quite strong, but it now shares the stage with other worldviews much more obviously than in decades gone by. This is creating a certain discomfort, particularly among more conservative Christians.
Perhaps, however, this discomfort with the ambient culture is not a problem, but a sign of the growing awareness that Christians should think, speak, and act differently than people who do not share their faith. As my friend Joy Moore once put it, maybe the church will once again begin to understand itself as a peculiar people.
Years ago I read Resident Aliens by Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon. Few books have had the kind of effect upon me that this book did. It changed the way I thought about the church quite profoundly, and in a way that I am grateful for to this day.
I suppose that, prior to that time, I had thought about the relationship between Christ and culture along the lines of H. Richard Niebuhr: Christ is the transformer of culture. That seemed quite reasonable to me, even attainable. Reading Hauerwas and Willimon helped me to see the problems with that perspective. Years later, life has shown me many of the problems with that perspective as well.
Christians who hold to traditional views of sin, redemption, and sanctification will most often end up seeing Christ standing against culture rather than seeing him as the transformer of culture. Our doctrine of sin holds that sin affects not only the way we act, but the way we think. Sin distorts our worldview. Put differently, sin has what theologians call “epistemic consequences.” According to Paul, there is a fundamental shift that takes place in the mind of a Christian believer, the “renewal of the mind” of which we read in Romans 12:2. In other words, just as there are epistemic consequences to sin, there are epistemic effects of redemption. It’s as we sing in Amazing grace: “I once was lost, but now I’m found, was blind, but now I see.” Through the redemptive work of Christ on the cross and the power of the Holy Spirit to mediate that work to us, we come to understand our entire lives in a new way.
Now, in light of this perspective, how comfortable should we really be in the world around us? We are aliens and exiles (1 Pet 12:2). No political party, no secular lifestyle, no philosophy can possibly satisfy us if we view the world in this way. We will walk around knowing that we are outsiders, that our true citizenship is in God’s kingdom, and we will try to help other people find their way into the new reality of God’s kingdom as well. That is how people will be transformed–not by living within a culture shaped by the presence of Christians, but by receiving the life-changing power of Jesus Christ given to us through the work of the Holy Spirit.
The dissonance we experience with the world around us can be painful. It is, however, not nearly as acute as that which the first Christians experienced in the Greco-Roman world, nor as that which many Christians around the globe experience today. Comparatively speaking, we still have it really easy.
Let’s bear in mind that if we are too at home in the world around us, then, well, we’re doing it wrong. Perhaps in the United States we have simply been too comfortable, and this has given rise to both complacency and entitlement. Following Jesus will make us a peculiar people, so let’s embrace that identity and get on with the peculiar work to which we are called.
David F. Watson 
Well said, David. I have become convinced that the desire to make this “once again a Christian nation” has overshadowed the real work of the body of Christ–to share and live out the Good News of the Kingdom of God, not the alleged good news of the church. Great insights on the church becoming complacent and feeling entitled.
Dr. Watson,
You really do open things wide open for us in this post.
Thinking about the epistemology of sin and redemption I’m reminded of my life within the recovery community and what we call “stinking thinking.” It takes a long time to break free with it even with a dramatic turning to Christ (one of the reasons we need to return to the Class Meeting and the Bands with a more patient and thorough catechumenate). The congregation to which I am currently appointed holds to the Christendom model of “membership” and the evangelism model of “recruitment” with their purpose to prop up a general moral culture (not even really transforming it).
All that being said, I wonder if we don’t need to keep calling persons to conversion that a new way of seeing the world comes through the agency of the Spirit working through the disciplines and a community held by those disciplines? I see the impact of American (U.S.) consumer culture holding us captive and working to seize control of our children. That in the world of U.S. Christianity we can have a “Christian Right” and a “Christian Left” (I have dear friends in both camps) reveals our captivity to ideology. I don’t think we’ve yet come to embrace and accept the mission of being Diaspora.
A question: what do you perceive are some of the weaknesses in Resident Aliens (Hauerwas and Willimon)? I’d love for you to elaborate a bit on that.
As always, thatn you for sharing your thinking and putting it out there for us!
Thanks for these thoughtful comments, Randy. The basic knock on the Resident Aliens idea is that it leans toward a sectarian mindset. It’s not clear, moreover, that it accounts for the effectiveness of the kind of social engagement by Christians that took place during the Civil Rights Movement. There’s certainly no perfect model of how to do church… most of the time we’re just muddling through.
Dr. Watson,
Thanks again for responding back and sharing a perspective on Resident Aliens. I have to confess that I’ve been in sympathy with Hauerwas and Willimon ever since I first read their book many years ago (I picked up the anniversary edition as soon as it was out). I know that both of them draw on the Anabaptist understanding of the church and that has a danger of leading to sectarianism. Having been raised in a Wesleyan-Holiness branch of Methodism I came of age (college) when that particular group was moving from sectarian to denominational status. I suppose my attraction to the Anabaptist-Holiness way of engagement has that residue as well as agreement with the particular way of life (as discipleship, nonviolence and simplicity of life formed the particular “crisis” in my conversion).
While I keep a deep affection for a Resident Aliens perspective, I find a better “home” in Bonhoeffer when it comes to engagement with the rest of the world which is a more of a confessional than purity approach. I think there are some linkages to Wesley here who did not counsel withdrawal, but particular interaction with the times.
Reblogged this on Talmidimblogging.
A crucial factor is overlooked in this post. The decline and perceived discrimination results from the growing reaction of people to to a peculiar sin. When the witness of self-identified Evangelical Christians of any color is to banish and torture LGBTQ children and youth, and defrock highly effective out-gay clergy, the air goes out of the inspirational balloon. No one is lifted higher by that behavior. To think that White Evangelicals will start winning souls for Christ again without repenting of their sins against LGBTQ humanity is just plain fantasy.
I agree with you, Kevin. The far right wing of the Christian Church is turning young people away, and they turn away those of us who are not at all young, I will be 80 in two weeks, but I am still cogent and cannot attend a church that treats the Bible as “history,” or disrespects people due to their gender orientation or gender identity.
Another way to understand the anxiety felt by white evangelicals, especially white male evangelicals is to move from the meta-narrative of a Christ-culture paradigm, to a colonial paradigm. The former paradigm works well to understand conflict within white society (with modernity, the enlightenment, post-modernity, challenging Christian claims of divine revelation). That Christ-secular paradigm is insufficient to explain current patterns of behavior among white evangelicals.
To be “white” in America is to have descended almost exclusively from European colonists. For example, my father’s line goes back to colonial Virginia, and we have evidence of a 2000 acre land grant given to a cousin by then president Thomas Jefferson. At the same time, nine generations later, my Ancestry DNA indicates that I am 100% European. For me to be 100% European, all 512 ancestors had to be 100% European.
The white evangelical feels distress for the same reason white Christians in other former colonial states felt it. The colonial project is unraveling, and the children of white colonists are becoming outnumbered by the “savage” people colonialism sought to displace, remove, exploit, assimilate, disenfranchise, or enslave. Why else would 80% of white evangelical males support a president who is on every point the antithesis of Christian values? Trump doesn’t line up with “Christ.” The wall, the deportations, the mass incarceration, the police state, the privilege, the impunity, the nepotism, the promise to make America great “again,” all envision a colonial society of unfettered capitalism, white privelege, resource and human exploitation, manifest destiny, and a fortified city surrounded by savages or threatened by a slave revolt.
The colonial paradigm also helps us understand the antipathy toward the non-white “immigrant,” specifically the Hispanic immigrant among these white evangelicals. Hispanics are overwhelmingly Christian, not pagan. Their ancestors have been here tens of thousands of years, so they are neither illegal nor immigrants. Their resurgence is nothing less than the recovery of an indigenous population that was decimated over four centuries (1492-1960) by colonization.
In summary, there are certainly evangelicals who feel the doctrinal dissonance with various modern (and European) philosophical schools, but there are many, many more whose anxiety, whose sense of marginalization, whose sense of becoming victims, emerges from the unraveling of the British colonial project now known as the United States of America.
It is sad because we are nation which has a majority of immigrants. Unless someone is a full blooded Native American, they are either an immigrant of the descendant of immigrants. Each immigrant population has had to fight for a place in our society, in a nation of immigrants one has to ask, “Why?”