Fight-or-Flight Christianity--Denkverbot

I blaze no new trails by noting that fear can make people do ugly things, especially when the fear in question relates to matters of life and death. Think of news stories about panicked stampedes in cases of fire or other emergencies, where a significant number of casualties occur not from the direct cause of the panic but from the mob reaction--people trampled, crushed, and pushed down in the mad rush to escape.

Fight-or-flight mode doesn't really lend itself to acts of thoughtful generosity or self-sacrifice. I think it odd, then, that conservative evangelicalism so often seeks to win people to Christ by appealing to their sense of afterlife self-preservation, activating a kind of eternal fight-or-flight mode--and then expects those won-through-fear converts to live lives of holy servanthood.

Fight-or-flight evangelism--come to Jesus or burn in hell--can too often foster a fight-or-flight Christianity. Like the biological reaction, spiritual fight-or-flightiness encourages certain patterns of thought and behavior while shutting down others. I suggest that particular elements of fight-or-flight mentalities (I'll discuss three) do active harm to the witness of Christ in the world

The first element of FoF Christianity I call Denkverbot, which is German (and German is best for generating vocabulary mashups) for "thought-forbid" or stopthought (I get the term from the work of Slavoj Zizek, who uses it somewhat differently than I do here).

Basically, people in fight-or-flight mode aren't thinking as deeply or as carefully about themselves and their environment as they might otherwise. Obviously, this makes sense in certain situations. If you encounter a threat--an enraged grizzly bear in your path, a rabid raccoon in your driveway, an irritated wasp buzzing in your car as you drive--your body helps you focus on those mental reactions most likely to help you meet or flee that threat. You aren't likely to pause in front of, say, the roaring grizzly to ponder the deeper ecological ramifications of a man-eating bear. You'll be running. Or screaming. Or something.

Similarly, a fight-or-flight Christianity short-circuits higher thinking functions, especially when those higher thinking functions threaten to throw a harsh light on the foundations of fear-driven faith. What if it turns out that hell is not a literal place for the unsaved? What if heaven is a metaphor for the kingdom of Christ we are to create here on earth? What if Christ's resurrection didn't literally happen?

Now, I don't necessarily endorse any of these possibilities. I bring them up to reflect on the fact that, as a youngster, I found questions like these not just intriguing or difficult but actively threatening. They threatened the foundations on which my life-faith, my world view (from another German mash-up, weltanschauung) was built. Rather than taking on the challenge of thinking through such difficult questions, fight-or-flight Christianity can too often simply censor them.

I see this Denkverbot at work when I encounter variations of the belief that faith is best when faith is simple. For example, I sometimes hear evangelical pastors boast about how they've never gone to seminary, never learned Greek or Hebrew or theology--they just read the Bible. Indeed, I've noticed a weird love-hate relationship between evangelicals and higher education more generally.

On the one hand, evangelicals are often happy to tout the intellectual accomplishments (books, degrees, academic positions) of many of their spokespeople (it's Doctor Dobson to you). But this respect for education co-exists with a widespread suspicion about college and university experiences. Colleges, universities, and even seminaries often get portrayed as brainwashing centers intent upon purging young Christians of any sense of faith or commitment.

You can even find a cottage industry of Christian college prep materials and meetings (see here, for instance). These are aimed not at helping students succeed in college but at giving them intellectual inoculations against the non-Christian (or, they would say, anti-Christian) worldviews they are likely to encounter. They can get Biblical certainties to shield them against, say, Biology (evolution!), Geology (billions-of-years-old-earth!), or--well--practically any humanities course (multiculturalism! postmodernism! feminism! homosexuality!). These and other college subjects, such Christian-prep courses warn, are threatening. They can create thought-quakes that introduce doubt into That Which Is Not To Be Doubted.

What's sad about this evangelical Denkverbot is that Christianity historically (and presently) can boast a rich, varied, and challenging intellectual existence. I mentioned in a previous post Mark Noll's 1994 book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. In that work, which he frames as a friendly critique (he identifies as an evangelical), he notes the all-too-common tendency for evangelicalism to valorize not thinking in deep, critical, or systematic ways about matters of faith and culture. It's not that evangelicals are constitutionally dimwitted. But the triumph of a simple-is-best Bible-only-ism has drastically narrowed the range of questions that evangelicals may legitimately ask, the realms of inquiry that evangelicals may legitimately explore.

It's like an artist deciding that she may only paint daisies with watercolors. There's nothing wrong with watercolor daisy paintings, but "daisies-only" is an awfully limited idea of what art has been and can be.

More on other facets of Fight-or-Flight Christianity tomorrow.

JF