4. The Tension We Feel and Why
4
The Tension We Feel and Why
Sensationalists are easily dismissed, and for good reason: there is a lot of unwarranted fear-mongering among Christians.
Yet, in the midst of the hype, we think a very real story is not being told. Just in our two decades of work within the Christian community, things have happened that should cause concern—even if you’re skeptical (like us) about the-sky-is-falling narratives.
The believers we know and work with are feeling significant pressure. This is not just a set of woe-is-me, victim-mentality perceptions that Christians have cooked up for no good reason. The society we live in has not only moved away from a Christian worldview, it has become actively antagonistic toward those who seek to advance faith. The effects are starting to be felt in tangible ways.
Every year, Barna and Q interact with tens of thousands of Christian leaders from all walks of life and from various nonprofit, business, academic, and church sectors. We speak to and consult with leaders from an ecumenical range of groups—mostly evangelical but also mainline and Catholic organizations. With our own eyes, we are seeing the facts on the ground.
We work with business leaders who report experiencing disapproval within their industry about the Christian way of life.
We know educational leaders who have heard from accrediting organizations to tread carefully in the days to come.
We are friends with pastors who are dealing with significant opposition from city and state governments; one was at the center of a case where pastors’ sermons were subpoenaed by a mayor looking for ammunition to advance her agenda.
We have had long conversations with college professors and public officials who constantly have to guard what they say and how they say it, for fear of professional repercussions.
We have listened in on the pain of ministry leaders whose ministries are no longer welcome on college campuses.
We hear from Christian researchers (not us) who are blacklisted if they report findings that don’t align with culturally approved norms.
We know business owners who have made agonizing decisions about how to (or how not to) apply their deeply held principles in order to comply with legislation or public opinion.
We have friends who did not get jobs because of their convictions.
We regularly hear from Christian leaders who are wary of negative news coverage about their work. Even if we acknowledge that good journalism ought to dig into religion’s sins (clergy abuse scandals come to mind), the leaders we serve are telling us that something is different in recent years. Some journalists are like faith-seeking missiles, out to find, report, and destroy.
And of course there is the ever-present threat of a social media or PR disaster. It’s a hyper-transparent world. But it’s also a world that is hypercritical of Christian leaders and organizations.
These are just a few of the slings and arrows directed toward Christians and Christian institutions. This is the tension so many of us are feeling.
Having wielded considerable social power in the past by virtue of our numbers and heritage, many Christians feel tense. When we look at the broadest segment of practicing Christians, a group that includes Catholics, evangelicals, and mainline churchgoers, a majority says they feel “misunderstood” (54 percent) and “persecuted” (52 percent), while millions of others use terms like “marginalized” (44 percent), “sidelined” (40 percent), “silenced” (38 percent), “afraid to speak up” (31 percent), and “afraid to look stupid” (23 percent) to describe living their faith in society today. Evangelicals are even more likely to perceive their experience of faith in culture in these negative terms.
Although we both work with a broad base of Christian traditions, the data and our up-close work within the evangelical community indicate these worries are intensifying. In our lines of work—convening and educating Christian leaders (Gabe) and conducting and analyzing research about faith and culture (David)—we have seen concerns about these matters increase over the last five years.
The Tension of Being a Person of Faith
Thinking about your faith, how do you feel, personally, in society today?
% “very” + “somewhat” accurate
% US Adults
% Evangelicals
% Practicing Christians
% Practicing Christian Millennials
% Other Faiths
Misunderstood
41
65
54
65
57
Persecuted
33
60
52
60
45
Marginalized
31
53
44
48
33
Sidelined
29
48
40
59
36
Silenced
28
50
38
46
34
Afraid to speak up
23
32
31
47
22
Afraid to look stupid
19
21
23
38
19
N
base: people who consider themselves a “person of faith”
Millennial practicing Christians, in particular, are getting hit from all sides. They are more likely than other practicing Christians to feel the negative repercussions of their faith in today’s society. Most feel “persecuted” and “misunderstood,” and many say they feel “afraid to speak up.”
Part of the reason is the negative perceptions of their non-Christian peers, a trend we documented in unChristian. Another pressure point is growing skepticism about the Bible. According to research for American Bible Society, there is an increasing percentage of younger adults who are skeptical about the Bible, compared to older adults—that is, they believe the Bible is just like any other book written by men. One-quarter of non-Christian Millennials believe the Bible is a “dangerous book of religious dogma that has been used for centuries to oppress people.” Thirty-eight percent believe the Bible is “mythology” and 30 percent say it is just a book of “fairy tales.” When young non-Christians see someone reading the Bible, the most common perceptions are that the person is a political conservative, that he or she is old-fashioned, and that they have nothing in common with the reader.
Irrelevant and extreme.
Boomers and Elders, adults who are a little further along life’s journey, are wondering if their children and grandchildren are being “lost” when it comes to faith. They feel the tension of trying to express their faith in a meaningful way when it seems to fall on deaf ears. It almost seems like the whole language has changed.
Pastors are feeling the tension too. They want to help people follow Jesus, but it is hard to disciple with lasting effect when many churchgoers show up only once or twice a month. Furthermore, churchgoers are immersed in a entertainment- and media-saturated culture that shapes their lives and lifestyles in deep, irresistible ways. Pastors tell us they worry about the commitment level of their people and their willingness to be disciples. And they confess they feel inadequate to untangle the complexities of teaching people to follow Christ in today’s culture.
There is also the tension felt by various Christian traditions and institutions. For example, many denominational and parachurch organizations are being pulled apart by questions about how to respond to LGBT issues. Christian schools, colleges, universities, and seminaries are experiencing dramatic demographic, financial, and social changes, which are calling into question the sustainable future of these institutions.
The Catholic community has experienced tension for many years on issues of healthcare (such as birth control and contraception), right to life, adoption, and marriage and family, among others. Our friend Bill, a prominent Catholic leader in Los Angeles, says, “We Catholics have long understood what it means to live as a minority in the country, and how to keep pursuing our convictions in spite of that. It hasn’t been easy. And it’s only getting harder!”
And then there’s the tension that threatens the unity of the church. Sometimes it feels like Christianity is fragmenting into a million little pieces, whether because of outside forces—say, a journalist who describes evangelicals like they are from a distant planet—or from Christians attacking Christians. We know firsthand the pain of someone misperceiving and mischaracterizing our work and motives.
We are all feeling the tension.
But where is it from? What is causing it?
We believe the problem is our culture’s lack of a shared center. The bottom has dropped out. There is no center any longer. There is a giant vacuum in the middle of our moral and spiritual lives.
We do not believe there is a massive anti-Christian conspiracy, but we do recognize a coherent and principled set of secular convictions that runs deeply counter to Christian belief. It may not be a coordinated effort, but let’s not be naïve: those with a different worldview would love to fill the cultural vacuum with their notions of what is true.
This is one reason some Christians are so quick to react to Hollywood, to academia, to media elites, and so on. They have this innate sense, corroborated by what they hear from their leaders and see in the public square, that the Christian community’s voice is being intentionally silenced.1
As Christianity has been ushered out of our social structures and off the cultural main stage, it has left a vacuum in its place. And the broader culture is trying to fill the void.
If you’re not sure we ever had a shared center, join us on a brief tour of history.
On March 4, 1865—about eight generations ago—newly reelected president Abraham Lincoln delivered his Second Inaugural Address. References to both the Old and the New Testament peppered the speech. Lincoln alluded to Genesis 3 in his criticism that slave owners would “ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces.” He repeated Jesus’s warning in Matthew 18: “Woe to that man by whom the offense cometh!” And he affirmed God’s sovereignty over the nationally devastating, not-quite-over Civil War by quoting Psalm 19: “The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”2
The majority of President Lincoln’s listeners, and of the millions across the country who read his address in newspapers, would have instantly recognized these references. There was only one English translation of the Bible at the time—the King James Version—and it was the only book some people had ever read. Its impact and influence on American culture are hard to overestimate; a century and a half ago, the KJV was “a conceptual canopy for the entire English-speaking world.”3
But if Lincoln were to give his iconic speech today, many people would not get it—and not just because there are so many more Bible translations today than in 1865. If Lincoln delivered the Second Inaugural Address today, at least a few people would object to his use of the Bible to make his points. The fact that the entire speech is a meditation on God’s will would raise some eyebrows too.
But not so long ago, using this kind of language in public life was not exceptional. Do a Google search: in just the last few decades, our nation’s leaders frequently acknowledged Christianity as the “shared center.” Even President Eisenhower, who may not have been a committed born-again Christian, spoke about Christianity and referred to Christian symbols with the assumption that most Americans knew what he was talking about.
Recent presidents—and not just George W. Bush, who is famously vocal about his faith—referred to Jesus as “our Savior.” President Bill Clinton affirmed his belief in Jesus’s miracles and resurrection, which he described as “the central event” in the history of salvation. Easter, he said, demonstrates that “good conquered evil, hope overcame despair, and life triumphed over death.” He also declared, “God’s only Son brought the assurance of God’s love and presence in our lives and the promise of salvation.” Jesus is “the true Light that illumines all humankind.”4
Can you imagine a president making these claims today? Religious pluralism makes it difficult to have a shared basis for morality. And thanks in part to values based on the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, the United States may be the most religiously diverse nation on the planet.5 Ironically, that diversity makes public use of those Scriptures problematic.
If we are losing our shared center, what is filling that hole?
The New Code
For a couple centuries of American public life, a soft reliance on the state to endorse Christian values seemed to work just fine. Since most people assumed America was a “Christian nation,” it made sense that federal and state laws tacitly affirmed a biblical worldview and actively promoted Christian morals. From gambling and alcohol prohibition to tax exemptions and modesty laws, nominal Christianity benevolently reigned over the public square. Everyone stayed buttoned up, and, for the most part, we appeared to be a virtuous people, a moral people.
But in the twentieth century, more and more people began to see Christian morality as standing in the way of a new moral code: the morality of self-fulfillment. Throwing off burdensome traditional mores, people began to imagine life without a bothersome God standing watch. John Lennon captured the zeitgeist in his perennial hit: “Imagine there’s no heaven, it’s easy if you try . . .”
New research, as shown in the next table, highlights the extent to which Americans pledge allegiance to the new moral code, summed up in six guiding principles.
The morality of self-fulfillment is everywhere, like the air we breathe. Much of the time we don’t even notice we’re constantly bombarded with messages that reinforce self-fulfillment—in music, movies, video games, apps, commercials, TV shows, and every other kind of media.
Web ads are a perfect (and somewhat creepy) example. You may have noticed ads on Facebook or YouTube for items you recently browsed online. When you visit a retail website, a small piece of data called a cookie stores itself in your browser and sends messages to other sites you visit about what you looked at and clicked on. Based on your browsing history, those sites then show you ads for things you want but haven’t bought yet. And all the time, seeing those tailor-made ads out of the corner of your eye, you get the message “to be fulfilled in life, pursue the things you desire most” and “enjoying yourself is the highest goal of life.”
The New Moral Code
Please indicate whether you agree or disagree with each of the following statements.
% “completely” + “somewhat” agree
% US Adults
% Practicing Christians
The best way to find yourself is by looking within yourself
91
76
People should not criticize someone else’s life choices
89
76
To be fulfilled in life, you should pursue the things you desire most
86
72
The highest goal of life is to enjoy it as much as possible
84
66
People can believe whatever they want, as long as those beliefs don’t affect society
79
61
Any kind of sexual expression between two consenting adults is acceptable
69
40
N
Me-focused morality is all the rage. To see this, one only has to look at two relationships that, according to traditional Christianity, require epic levels of self-sacrifice and others-focus to do them right: marriage and parenting. Personal fulfillment has taken center stage. Culturally, marriage has become about little more than how I feel when I’m with my spouse, how he or she “completes me.” And parenting is similarly me-oriented, as marketing copy from a life coaching website shows: “Parenting struggles are a perfect opportunity for personal growth. Use parenting as your path towards personal fulfillment and creating your best life!”7 Wouldn’t you love to be their kids?
As you can see in the table, the morality of self-fulfillment has even crept into American Christianity. Large percentages of practicing Christians embrace the principles of the new moral code.
Dallas Willard diagnosed this spiritual sickness in his 2009 book Knowing Christ Today, where he writes:
The worldview answers people now live by are provided by feelings. Desire, not reality and not what is good, rules our world. That is even true for the most part within religion. Most of what Americans do in their religion now is done at the behest of feelings. . . . The quest for pleasure takes over the house of God. What is good or what is true is no longer the guide.8
Too many Christians have substituted comfortable living for a life changed by the gospel. The government’s tacit endorsement of vaguely Christian morals has made it difficult, in many ways, to discern what it means to be faithful, beyond showing up.
In recent years, the morality of self-fulfillment has begun to bear its inevitable fruit: people want to fulfill themselves by doing things outside the bounds of cultural Christianity. And they don’t want the law telling them they can’t.
As a result of this shift, we are seeing laws that endorse the broader culture’s replacement of Christian morality with the moral code of self-fulfillment. And according to that moral code, any competing morality—say, a religion—that seeks to constrain someone’s pursuit of personal fulfillment must itself be constrained.
If something or someone stands in the way of my fulfillment, that obstacle must be removed. That person represents the enemy, the embodiment of evil. So keep your beliefs to yourself.
In contrast to the dominant culture’s embrace of self-fulfillment as the highest good, good faith Christians believe living under God’s moral order leads to human and societal flourishing. As Scripture says, physical training is of some benefit, but “training for godliness is much better, promising benefits in this life and in the life to come” (1 Tim. 4:8).
Yet the extent to which the morality of self-fulfillment has taken hold of the hearts and minds of practicing Christians exposes an area of dangerous weakness in today’s church. This grafting of cultural dogma onto Christian theology must stop. In order for us to flourish as God’s people, his moral order must be allowed to rule our lives.
What are the principles of God’s moral order? Contrasting the new moral code are six statements about the way life ought to be, with Jesus at the center.
We’ve purposely expressed these six principles as a response to the six principles of the new moral code. Christians express something truly countercultural when we insist that real morality is rooted in something outside ourselves. Even if it feels uncomfortable at first, we have an obligation, in good faith, to speak as a counterculture to the spirit of the age. Beyond using our voices, we need to do the hard work of being countercultural in our own lives and churches. Only when we are consistent will our lives stir outsiders to rethink their own moral compass.
Living counter to the new morality is an uphill battle. Some days it feels like keeping the wind from blowing. Nearly everything about the broader culture is expertly marketed to appeal to our comfort, well-being, safety, and satisfaction. A delicious meal. Your dream holiday. The perfect house. Great sex. What will fulfill you? For ages, humans have bent toward self-indulgence. In our advertising age, there are countless ways of making people crave.
But then there is the way of Jesus. The Westminster Catechism’s first question asks, “What is the chief end of man?” The answer, as generations of Protestant confirmands could tell you, is “to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” There are profound moral implications here. If the highest goal of life is God’s glory rather than our own enjoyment, then our outward behaviors and inward character will have a drastically different shape.
Conversations about Morality
Regardless of whether it’s popular, and perhaps especially when it is not, we advocate for the biblical and historical Christian view of morality. We believe God’s moral order leads to human flourishing.
Because the new morality is not a better way to live, it inevitably leads to dead ends. When this happens, where will people turn? If we are burning the flame of God’s moral order bright, they will have a beacon to follow out of the darkness. If we aren’t, and we are only trying to keep up with culture’s latest trends, we will have nothing to offer.
You may be thinking, What if the historic Christian faith is on the wrong side of history? What if, by following the trail blazed by earlier generations of believers, we are getting some things wrong?
These are reasonable questions, and we will take a closer look at some answers in chapters ahead. Still, we believe history is a great guide. History helps us gain perspective, especially on the biggest competing ideas of our time. Understanding history helps us set this moment in context, to see that this current competition of ideas is nothing new. It’s actually quite old.
Jesus came on the scene at a time when this same old idea we contend with today was gaining traction.
Roughly one hundred years before Christ’s birth, a Roman philosopher named Lucretius wrote an epic poem called “On the Nature of Things.” Through this stunning work of art, Lucretius made an argument for pleasure as the ultimate purpose of human life. We exist to enjoy life. Nothing more, nothing less. Good living all the time. Avoid pain at all costs and pursue pleasure in any way you can.9
Sound familiar? (See principles 2, 3, and 4 of the new moral code.)
Lucretius is the father of YOLO, “you only live once.” And the last fifty years have made the dominant culture ripe for a revival of his pleasure-centered philosophy.
Now, don’t hear us wrong. Nothing is bad about enjoying God’s good world, but when it becomes the ultimate focus, we’ve become our own god. Ancient as it is, this is the crux of the new morality. This is the reason Christians are on the outs with the dominant culture. To an increasing number of people, our insistence that pleasure and self-fulfillment are destructive isn’t just irrelevant or extreme.
It is evil.
If your friends have bought into the idea that self-fulfillment is the ultimate purpose of life, then you or anyone else who stands in their way is evil. So sit down, shut up, and keep your faith to yourself.
But this isn’t the way of Jesus.
Several decades later, in a glaring yet gentle contrast to Lucretius’s philosophy, came Jesus, who taught that renewal—redemption, restoration, re-creation—is God’s purpose for every human life. Pain, brokenness, and suffering are not to be avoided; they are to be endured because God redeems those experiences in order to renew us and bless others.
We contend that these two vastly different narratives are at war today. Instead of a culture war, we are engaged in a struggle over the human imagination. Two visions of life are playing out before our eyes.
One is a good belief and leads to life.
The other is a bad idea and leads to death.
When we feel the cultural winds blowing against us, let’s be reminded how long the moral ideas of the Christian faith have rolled on—no matter their competition in each successive age. Rest assured, good faith is on the right side of history.
Through the power of the Holy Spirit at work in us, Christians can confront the culture with a better way to live—the way of renewal, not of self-fulfillment. By grace we have been given the center our culture is missing. But good faith Christians must become communicators—translators really—who can effectively challenge the self-fulfillment and pleasure-seeking spirit of the age in written, spoken, artistic, and other forms.
Of course, first we have to love our neighbors enough to offer this better way and believe that Jesus’s narrative truly is the best way to live the human story. And then, in spite of the tension we feel, we must live the way of renewal when we rub shoulders with some of the most urgent moral questions of our day.
Let’s start with a simple (but not easy) formula for good faith: love, believe, live.