I still remember the phone call which launched one of the key changepoints of my life. It was October 2002 and I was sitting along mom’s bedside in a Wisconsin intensive care facility. Dad was next door, still in intensive care but doing much better. At least his alarms were quiet unlike moms. Both had contracted Legionnaire’s disease and if it hadn’t been for an improbable but minor car accident, neither of them would have made it. Following the accident, they had been taken to a nearby hospital just to be checked out and within a few hours that initial check-out turned into a month-long life or death ordeal.
This chapter in their life’s story had a mostly happy ending although mom, known for her singing, lost her vocal timbre. My folks eventually made it back home and I did too, now in a new position as the deputy director of a medium-sized governmental fishery science laboratory.
I hadn’t sought the position. In fact, I hadn’t even applied until the third time it was offered. I knew it meant a change in responsibilities, from a practicing scientist to the administration of science, from a player to a coach. I had much to learn but the learning curve had already started. I had previously dealt with administration responsibilities as a science project and task leader. I knew my past experience in construction would prepare me well for the challenges of facilities oversight.
Being a manager, however brought new challenges and learning opportunities. With limited leadership training or supervisory guidance, the ball was in my court. But those challenges became a blessing as it brought me to Kouzes and Posner’s book The Leadership Challenge and their five-step framework for exemplary leadership.
Something clicked after reading their first step called Model the Way. I had been wrestling with how to incorporate my faith into this new position. I had seen how some choose to openly display their allegiance to Christianity. Whether a t-shirt with a message or a Bible strategically placed, those options neither fit my style nor something I observed to be productive.
Years ago, Kuyper’s famous statement “There’s not a square inch in the whole domain of human existence over which Christ, who is Lord over all, does not exclaim, ‘Mine’!” had also “clicked.” Kuyper was pushing back against the natural tendency to compartmentalize our lives. He saw every aspect of a person’s life as interconnected, under the teachings and lordship of Christ. Hence, every part of our lives, to paraphrase the apostle Paul, was like a living letter from Christ. Written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, known and read by everyone.
The text of our living letter is in the language of the fruits of the spirit, the outward evidence of an inward work of the Spirit. The apostle John says it this way: “let’s not just talk about love; let’s practice real love. This is the only way we’ll know we’re living, truly living in God’s reality.”
Modeling the Way means finding your voice as a leader – to know what you stand for, what motivates you and what you value. I immediately saw the development of core values as a vehicle to connect my faith to the workplace. To embed virtues, Christian virtues such as the fruits of the spirit, into the work environment.
I recognized back then the necessity of virtue, a message David Brooks later articulated in his book the Road to Character. And how such virtue not only informs a leader’s actions and behavior, but also affects the atmosphere of the organization. Leaders may exert less influence within an organization than one would think. But in the area of organizational culture and climate, leaders have a profound influence.
The Culture Debate
Fast forward 20 years where there’s a fascinating debate occurring on the center right about the proper role of faith in a pluralistic society. At the center of this debate is the notion of “winsomeness,” a set of virtue driven practices seen by many on the right as outdated, no longer relevant or useful for today’s “war.” The debate is respectful and each article worth reading.
It starts with James Wood’s article on “How I Evolved on Tim Keller.” Wood expresses a loss in confidence “that the evangelistic framework I had gleaned from Keller would provide sufficient guidance for the cultural and political moment.” Wood relies upon Renn’s breakdown of the present century into three stages of secularization – positive, neutral and negative with respect to Christianity – as a foundation for his analysis.
David French responds to Wood’s critique by asserting Keller’s winsome, missional, and gospel-centered’ approach is still relevant to the society we live today. French concludes by saying: “We live in an age of negative polarization, when the cardinal characteristic of partisanship is personal animosity. In these circumstances, a Christian community characterized by the fruit of the spirit should be a burst of cultural light, a counterculture that utterly contradicts the fury of the times.”
Rod Dreher of “The Benedict Option” then weighs in twice, affirming Renn and Wood’s critique. When you live in the negative world where “Christian morality is expressly repudiated,” says Dreher, so that Christians cannot “close one’s eyes to the fact that there are enemies, and wish to do us serious harm.” He believes the moment of winsomeness has past, leaving Keller and by association French “yesterday’s man, fighting yesterday’s war.”
Renn’s Three Stages of Secularization
Renn’s analysis has two general themes: how the standing of Christianity has changed in recent years and the right strategies of public engagement given those changes. Here is his central thesis:
Within the story of American secularization, there have been three distinct stages:
- Positive World (Pre-1994): Society at large retains a mostly positive view of Christianity. To be known as a good, churchgoing man remains part of being an upstanding citizen. Publicly being a Christian is a status-enhancer. Christian moral norms are the basic moral norms of society and violating them can bring negative consequences.
- Neutral World (1994–2014): Society takes a neutral stance toward Christianity. Christianity no longer has privileged status but is not disfavored. Being publicly known as a Christian has neither a positive nor a negative impact on one’s social status. Christianity is a valid option within a pluralistic public square. Christian moral norms retain some residual effect.
- Negative World (2014–Present): Society has come to have a negative view of Christianity. Being known as a Christian is a social negative, particularly in the elite domains of society. Christian morality is expressly repudiated and seen as a threat to the public good and the new public moral order. Subscribing to Christian moral views or violating the secular moral order brings negative consequences.
Many readers are likely nodding their head, at least for part of Renn’s analysis. Yes, they say, secularization is on the rise. American adult church membership is now below 50%. About half of U.S. adults believe Christianity’s influence on American life is decreasing (53%) with this sense of decline greatest among white evangelicals.
But does society have a negative view of Christianity, as Renn asserts? Is Christian morality expressly repudiated in today’s society as both Renn and Dreher lament? And will those who subscribe to Christian moral views face negative consequences in today’s so called negative world?
Let’s take their first question. Most Americans hold to a positive view of religion, believing it does “more good than harm” than “more harm than good,” a finding that transcends all age groups. But do these positive views still hold up if the word “religion” is exchanged with “Christianity?”
Renn says “no,” asserting without evidence that the prevailing view towards Christians is now negative. Most white evangelicals would likely agree with 66% of them believing that their religious beliefs are in conflict with mainstream culture. They further believe there is “a lot of discrimination against them,” even exceeding levels historically faced by marginalized communities. To wit: most Americans believe blacks and women face a great deal of discrimination whereas most white evangelicals disagree; most white evangelicals believe Christians face a lot of discrimination whereas most Americans disagree.
But what if this gap in social perceptions really measures a gap in understandings about Christianity? What if Renn et al. are correct for at least a specific type of culturally infused Christianity but wrong for a Christ-likeness infused faith? And because of an in-group perspective which, in the words of Haidt, “binds and blinds,” all they can see is the former?
Which Christianity?
You see, there’s a bigger issue in play. Those questions Renn, Dreher, Wood (RDW) and others are asking – such as what are Christian moral views or will subscribing to Christian moral views necessarily bring negative consequences in today’s so called negative world – depend upon a more fundamental question: What does being a Christian really mean? To wit: when DRW assert that the culture’s view of Christianity has changed in the past three decades that being known as a Christian is a social negative, what do they mean by Christianity?
The study of religiosity in general and Christianity in particular have long faced similar questions. The scope and practice of Christianity is enormously broad with differences that are real, extensive and consequential in terms of beliefs, behavior, and outcomes.
In the 1950’s sociologist Gordon Allport tackled this question by parsing religiousness into two orientations. The first, intrinsic orientation, is where one’s internalized religious devotion becomes the central guiding motivator of life. The second, extrinsic orientation, is where religious motivation arises from social acceptance, security or status within a community or from fulfilling personal needs through achieving comfort or protection from personal troubles.
But even this breakdown of religiosity was too simplistic. In 1991, Batson and Schoenrade created a third orientation called quest to describe people who treat religion as a search for truth, not as a means or end. Others measures soon followed, such as religious fundamentalism and doctrinal orthodoxy, each showing a different “brand” of Christianity as witnessed by a differing range of belief, attitudes and behaviors of “Christian” people.
RDW’s Brand of Christianity
When RDW say “Christian,” however, they are not referring to an intrinsic Christian orientation. Their “orthodox Christians” are “those who hold to traditional Christian teaching on homosexuality and the nature of marriage.” Any who are “winsomely teaching Biblical principles” instead of speaking about gender ideology are cowards. All who “tend to downplay flashpoint social issues such as abortion or homosexuality” but instead emphasize “priorities such as helping the poor and select forms of social activism” practice an “evangelicalism that takes its cues from the secular elite consensus.”
Core gospel teachings or admonitions of Christlikeness rarely show up in RDW’s arguments. Dreher briefly espouses a love your enemies gospel mandate and, at least for Dreher, I believe that avowal is genuine. But like a flywheel returning to its original course, he quickly puts the spotlight back on “Christian enemies.” We cannot hate our enemies, he says, but being “winsome world Christians” is a failing strategy for the world that exists today. We have enemies and “winsomeness is not going to prepare the churches for what is fast coming to us.” We “must read the signs of the times and act,” because “you’d have to be crazy to look around our country today and not be afraid of what’s happening.”
Here’s The Problem: A Focus on Enemies Changes our Hearts
Again and again, Dreher returns to his notion of “Christian” enemies. “The idea they will embrace us,” he says, “or even tolerate us, if we just be sweet is no longer viable. I don’t advocate at all hating our enemies. Neither did MLK. But King also recognized that he and the movement he led really did have enemies, and those enemies were willing to do violence to them.”
Yes, King had many enemies. But unlike RDW, he didn’t dwell on the threat they posed. King viewed his enemies through the lens of the gospel, not through fear. “And when you come to the point that you look in the face of every man and see deep down within him what religion calls “the image of God,” you begin to love him in spite of. No matter what he does, you see God’s image there. There is an element of goodness that he can never sluff off. Discover the element of good in your enemy. And as you seek to hate him, find the center of goodness and place your attention there and you will take a new attitude.”
When we become fixated upon our enemies, something within us changes – as King understood and Allport’s research has shown. In-group/outgroup dynamics organically develop and organize our social perceptions. The Pauline perspective of “neither Jew nor Greek” gets exchanged for a them versus us mindset. We then sort our affections around “us”-minded communities with religious dogmas amplifying this divide through creating an innate sense of moral superiority.
We become “principled theologians” where we instinctively protect sacred values. In the words of William James, “it turns us into intuitive prosecutors, on the lookout for norm violators as we set boundaries of acceptable thinking. We easily assign blame and assess penalties, seeing such prosecution as a virtuous upholding of the “social order.”
A Focus on Enemies Changes our Identity
To his credit, Dreher repeatedly warns against “capitulating to apostasy or to hatred” in the fight against Christian’s cultural enemies. Society needs virtuous Christian communities in exile he says to prepare for coming persecution. According to his much-discussed book “The Benedict Option, “if they are not to be conquered, [Christians] must learn how to fight on culture war battlefields like none the West has seen for fifteen hundred years.”
But in our drive to force change – to fight in defense of our “faith,” the outcome is different than we expect. Although we seize the levers of power in support of righteous causes, we find those levers work both ways. The change is insidious as our loves misalign, away from the heart of the kingdom. It’s because our loves are informed by what we are devoted to and our devotions are drawn to the battle.
The battle within the culture war is perhaps the biggest hinderance to the gospel. And once the dogs of war have been unleashed, it’s hard to call them back. The battle pulls us towards our sociopolitical allies, like a tractor beam in a Star Wars movie. Our values change as our identity transforms through an assimilation process that “binds and blinds.” We become citizens of a different kingdom with a syncretistic identity we now defend. We are what we love and our loves tell a new story of a devotion no longer solely focused on Jesus.
A Focus on Enemies Changes our Faith
Gordon Allport’s most famous and lasting research finding was that Christianity both “makes” and “unmakes” prejudice. This paradoxical finding seems counterintuitive when considering the teachings of Jesus. After all, as I wrote above, doesn’t pure religion, or an intrinsic orientation of Christianity, do good and oppose harm?
Nonetheless his paradox endures when faith becomes mixed with fundamentalist or authoritarian sensibilities. Such individuals, at least within the evangelical tradition, are the most statistically likely of all ethnoreligious groups in America to discount stories of both domestic violence and rape and in doing so rationalize men’s violence against women, to exhibit a hostility towards members of groups different than them, and to exhibit prejudicial views towards racial and ethnic out-groups, Muslims, and those with alternative sexual orientations.
Yet the same scientific studies show the opposite to be true when our faith is pure. When you account for the influence of fundamentalism and/or rightwing authoritarianism in people’s responses, leaving an intrinsic religiosity that’s pure – “filled to the measure of all the fullness of God” – those same studies then show Christians truly loving their neighbor, even when those neighbors differ greatly from them.
So how does this happen? What is it about fundamentalism and authoritarianism which changes the outward witness of Christianity so profoundly?
Fundamentalists are those who adhere to a rigid belief in inerrant truth. Policing those beliefs creates a focus on threats to those beliefs, leading to amplified ingroup/outgroup distinctions. Authoritarianism is a personality type known for its rigid moralizing of society and is manifested three different ways: by submission to authority, opposition to value-violating actions in society, and intolerance of out-groups. And here’s the problem: both fundamentalism and authoritarianism are prevalent within those highly orthodox in their faith.
Now threats and enemies are part of everyone’s life but how we respond to them is a tell-all story. We need the shield of faith and the clothing of love to keep our human nature in check. But we sink in our faith when our gaze is consumed by the angry seas the culture war brings. Galatians 5 tells the tale of the tape, about the battle within us between “flesh” and “fruit” and how the culture war sides with the flesh.
Conflict and hate are two works of the flesh born of culture war’s outrage and fear. Fighting, competitive opposition, conflict, and group rivalry are four works of the flesh arising from an ingroup/outgroup mindset. With the rise of these “works” comes the loss of spiritual fruit as scripture says you can’t have it both ways. It changes our worship through distorting our loves, even corrupting our faith so that “anyone living that sort of life will not inherit the Kingdom of God.”
The proof of the pudding comes through hundreds of studies showing the consequences of an enemy-driven focus. Including the rise of the non-religious (from a baseline of roughly 5% to the current level of nearly 30%), due in part to a backlash from the fight-forward religious right.
Christianity is a Fruit Forward Faith
Yet those same hundreds of studies show an opposite result for a fruit-forward Christianity centered on love. Our spiritual fruit is a “show and tell” testimony to the extent in which we have “put on” Christ. It opens a window into the heart for “out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. Yet as critical as fruit is to the church’s outward witness (re: Keller’s “winsomeness”), it’s just as essential to the spiritual formation of an ekklesia called to reflect Christ.
Spiritual fruit acts like an indicator, an observable yardstick assessing the formation of Christ’s followers. On the one end is the Spirit and the other end is the flesh with godliness at stake and “we are His workmanship” on the line. It serves as a guardrail, an external feedback mechanism, to keep us from going astray. And like a canary in a coal mine when the works of the flesh displace the works of the spirit, we know we’re in deep trouble. Because an absence of fruit emits an unmistakable signal about an urgent need for change.
The purpose of fruit is to spread a plant’s seed by its attractiveness to birds and other animals. Hence the metaphor of fruit as applied Christ’s followers gives us insight into God’s plan for the church. Our spiritual fruit is an external witness to “This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit.” It bears witness to the “Christ within us, the hope of glory” as “Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit.” It’s a witness to our spiritual health as “every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit.”
Penultimate Thoughts
A fight-forward Christianity is a deficient Christianity delivering an upside-down “Christian” witness marked by works of the flesh. But the worst of its features is the opportunity cost for an “alive in Christ” Christianity to bring about change.
You see there’s a different type of Christianity arising from those with gaze affixed, to the One in whom “we live, and move, and have our being.” Such an unencumbered focus, free and clear of the cultural fight, yields a Christianity reflective of His nature. That “reflective of His nature” serves as a welcoming beacon to a fallen world without hope.
The early church faced the same type of choice in a world more broken than ours. They chose a fruit-forward message that became unsurprisingly winsome culminating with Julian the Apostate’s, the last pagan emperor of Rome, dying words in AD 363 “vicisti Galilaee” (You Galileans [Christians] have conquered!).
Tim Keller’s Jesus-Centric message follows their historic path through a faithfulness to a fruit-forward gospel. It’s a gospel applicable across all ages, cultures, and walks of life without any negative downside. To wit: in all my years of working within a secular culture, I have never been chastised for a faithfulness to Colossians 3:12 “cloth yourself with compassion, kindness, lowliness, meekness, and patience.” Or for a Colossians 3:14 injunction to “put on love,” or a Micah 6:8 “Do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with God,” or a Good Samaritan orientation of Luke 10’s injunction to “love your neighbor.” There are just no societal negatives to “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”
A Better Perspective
Two different Christianity’s, delivering two different outcomes, yielding two different worldviews. Translating this into the language of Renn, it means America is simultaneously positive and negative in how it views Christianity, differentiated by the nature of that Christianity:
- Positive World: Society at large has a mostly positive view of a fruit-forward Christianity. To be known as a Christ-like person is to be known for a practice of virtue, born of Christ’s nature. Publicly being a fruit-forward Christian is widely seen as a positive breath of fresh air within a dark and hate-filled world.
- Negative World: Society at large has a negative view of fight-forward Christianity. Being known as a fight-forward Christian is to be known for a privileging of power through an end-justifies-the-means weighted moral compass. Publicly being a fight-forward Christian is widely seen through polarized lens, an ally to one tribe and an enemy to the other.
So you want to change the world?
And Jesus said: “let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven,” Jesus didn’t limit such glorification, as declared by a watching world, to a Renn style “Positive World.” He saw such acclaim from others as a natural outcome of His followers being “salt and light,” a fruit-forward witness of the Jesus within them irrespective of society and circumstance. Being known as “His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works.” Establishing, using French’s language, a Christian community characterized by the fruit of the spirit [and] a counterculture that utterly contradicts the fury of the times.
Postscript: I’ll be addressing Renn’s second declaration “Christian morality is expressly repudiated and seen as a threat to the public good” within today’s so-called “negative” world” in my next several blog posts along with a conclusion to this topic. The answers, once again, will depend upon what Renn means by “Christian” as well as his definition of “moral norms.”