A Pause--Dinner Conversations and Toxic Faith

Just back from a dinner with friends. Our after-dinner conversation ranged over many subjects, including religion. All of us were gay (well, three gay men and two lesbians), and many of us had grown up in conservative evangelical households.

I think I was the only practicing Christian of the bunch. Most of them had fairly harsh things to say about Christianity, particularly about how many of the Christians they had met had presented an ugly, hypocritical witness. At the heart of this negative witness, in the eyes of my friends, was the Christians' "cult-like" insistence on a literal, anti-intellectual, and sharp-edged understanding of the Bible.

Now, some of my friends at the dinner had considerable training in church history; they knew the Bible pretty well. But each of them had a story of how an honest question about scripture or theology had been met with vehement accusations of sacrilege followed by an injunction against questioning or thinking too deeply. "I knew then," said one of my dinner-mates, "this religion was not for me." Others around the table echoed his conclusion, linking that early hostility toward inquiry on the part of Christians to a close-mindedness about a host of other issues (particularly health care).

Was his memory--were the others' memories--of their experiences accurate? Did some pastor really tell him not to ask questions? I have no way of knowing. I'd like to think that there had been a misunderstanding. But regardless of what the Christian witness my friend encountered actually intended to do or say, the impression he left on my friend was permanent: Christians are close-minded, arrogant bullies.

Hearing these stories, I felt an oddly familiar sense--a nudge from my old evangelical days--that somehow I should say something to counter or correct these harmful witnesses. I shared a bit of my own experience--how I saw my faith working, how my parents and family knew their faith, how historically recent the whole plain-sense-Bible-only-ism was and how counter it ran to a grander, greater tradition of Christian intellectual discourse.

But frankly, I think my efforts made little impression. One friend's explanation of his attraction to Buddhism appeared quite appealing in comparison to a damaged evangelicalism that had somehow come to stand for all of Christianity. I wish I could have been a better witness.

It is useful, however, to realize just how damaging recent Christianity, particularly (I must say) evangelicalism driven by hell/conversion/Bible-onlyism, has been to the enterprise of making disciples for Christ--or even of showing love to others. The experience brings to mind a book I've been reading, UnChristian, by Barna Group researcher David Kinnaman (and Gabe Lyons). Kinnaman and Lyons conducted a series of polls to ascertain how younger people who did not identify as Christians ("outsiders" for short) viewed Christianity. Their results mirror the feelings evinced by my friends.

Kinnaman and Lyons find that by far the most common discriptors that outsiders link to present-day Christians are antihomosexual, judgmental, and hypocritical (27). Worse, the authors discover that a good many of these outsiders are not so much the unchurched as the dechurched--people who had early experiences with or training in the church and who subsequently became disenchanted enough to leave the church (74).

My father once preached (in his Baptist days) on this trend. He said that so many people in US culture had been inoculated against the Christian gospel. They had been given just enough of the gospel at some point in their past that they've developed resistances to the gospel as a whole.

Given my friends' experiences and the research done in UnChristian, I wonder if the problem is that the initial injection contains virulent, toxic strain of Christianity against which it is understandable and appropriate to develop antibodies. Such a thought--fully confronted by evangelicals like Kinnaman and Lyons--still seems forbidden in a lot of evangelical discourse. So much of the preaching and evangelism I research devotes time to rationalizing why people find the gospel message so unappealing. Primary among the reasons listed are unsaved people's pride and rebellious nature. They hate God and love themselves, goes this logic, so it's no wonder they are offended by the Holy Truth.

Nothing will ensure evangelicalism a surer, quicker death than embracing this self-justifying rationale. Evangelicals can fade to obscurity patting their backs about how they've not compromised the truth in their outreach or culture-war battles. Kinnaman and Lyons (and they are not alone) represent, I believe, the only possible adaptation to a culture inoculated against Christianity: stop being a disease. Stop harming people. Be honest about how much of the Christian message--more, the Christian manner, its affect, has been toxic. Not just different but awful. Apologize to the world. Repent of poisonous witness.

The advent of viral marketing has encouraged some evangelicals to adopt a disease metaphor to describe themselves (e.g., they want to spread, they want to infect people with the gospel). I would propose instead adopting a different medical metaphor: that of the doctor. It's not a perfect comparison; I certainly don't want to foster a holier-than-thou, we-have-the-cure-for-all-ills attitude among evangelicals. But what appeals to me about the doctor metaphor is element of the Hippocratic Oath that insists that physicians at least do no harm.

It occurred to me this evening that many Christians have missed "doing no harm" in their interactions with others. Selling the message, winning the soul, defending the faith--these all to often crowd out what should be a primary consideration for those following the Great Physician: don't harm people. What would evangelicalism look like if it 1) saw how some of its actions can harm people; and 2) thought about how to mitigate this harm?

More tomorrow,

JF