Full Contact Christianity

Two Traps

6 August 2024

Every three-month-old is totally honest and nonjudgmental about their feelings. As we grow up, we start to lie to ourselves about our feelings. We try to deny what’s actually happening and make ourselves feel what we “should” be feeling. That’s an adolescent trap, and most of us fall into it.

It’s easy to escape the trap by regressing to babyhood. That way lies our modern cult of “authenticity,” and it is yet another trap. Revolting against maturation doesn’t help. We have to find a way to be honest and face what’s really happening, but there’s more to adulthood than blabbing whatever you’re feeling.

Why is that? Because your feelings are not trustworthy. Feelings do not arise from some magically unsullied place within us. Just like we can say something we have no right to say or think something that’s totally wrong, we can be angry without just cause, hugely and self-indulgently sad about trivialities, jealous of something to which we have no right, detached and unfeeling about someone that we owe better than that.

“Trust your feelings” worked out ok for Luke Skywalker (except for that bit where he kissed his sister), but we ain’t fictional characters. Our feelings are as fallible as the rest of us.

So honesty is important, but it’s just the beginning. Then we discriminate: is this legitimate? How we proceed from there depends on the answer to that question. If the feeling is based on misbeliefs, magical thinking, poor boundaries, etc. — in other words, on my own toxic habits of mind — then I need prayer, therapy, exercise, maybe all of the above. On the other hand, if I’m having a sane reaction to an insane world, more therapy isn’t the answer; that’s not where the problem is.

Discernment matters. It’s what keeps you from going to war with society when the problem is inside you, and it’s what keeps you from anesthetizing yourself with more therapy when you’re being called to change the world.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Cooking Up Excuses

30 July 2024

In order to join the church I grew up in, you had to sign off on the statement of faith in its entirety. That statement of faith was pages and pages long, very detailed. It got down to the level of things like the pre-trib rapture. I recall one family who faithfully attended the church–in fact, the wife ran our nursery for two decades or so–but could never officially become members, on account of holding a different view of prophecy. Too often, doctrinally conservative churches wear such nit-picky particularity like a badge of honor, touting how we “care about truth” and “take doctrine seriously.”

That’s a lie. (I say that advisedly, and I mean it.) Allow me to demonstrate: if we cared deeply about the truth, then what about the truth that “by one Spirit we were all baptized into one Body”? How do we present that truth to a watching world? When we allow such nit-picky details to define the boundaries of our membership, cooperation, or fellowship, we are–to borrow Paul’s words from Galatians–“not straightforward about the truth of the gospel.”

What does that mean? In the immediate context, Peter and Barnabas and the rest of the Jews in the Galatian church had been freely mixing with Gentiles until certain folks came down from Jerusalem who wouldn’t approve. Then they all withdrew, and wouldn’t eat with the Gentiles at the church potluck anymore. Paul calls it hypocrisy, and with good reason: if the Gentiles belong to Christ, and Christ has cleansed them, then they are as clean as it gets! There’s no reason to divide the body into slighly-more-clean and slightly-less-clean factions, which is what Peter and Barnabas were doing.

And that’s exactly what we are doing, when we make that degree of doctrinal specification the boundaries of our membership, fellowship, or cooperation. We are dividing the Body into the people who really get it, over here with us, and those people over there. We admit that those people really belong to Jesus, and we know we’ll be sharing heaven with them…but that’s soon enough, eh? Let’s not over-realize our eschatology.

If you can’t smell the reek of brimstone coming off that line of thought, get your sniffer checked.

You should care about the truth, right down into the details. In a teaching ministry (church or otherwise), there’s nothing wrong with clarifying what you’re going to teach. It’s nice to have a label on the package that tells everybody what’s in it, you know? But requiring that level of agreement for membership, fellowship, or cooperation is asinine. You do that, you’re just cooking up excuses to break the unity the Spirit made. Don’t do that.

In the ministries I’m part of, the doctrinal boundaries of our fellowship and cooperation are ordinarily defined by the ancient creeds (Apostles’ Creed, the 325/381 Nicene Creed, the Definition of Chalcedon) and a broadly Protestant grasp of salvation by grace through faith, not of works. That’s about it; we work out everything else as we go.

That makes people panicky. “What if [fill in whatever imagined disaster here]?” Well, first of all, as Mark Twain said, “I’m an old man and have known a great many troubles, most of which never happened.” In four years of church services with an open floor for reflection on the week’s Scripture readings, we’ve only ever had two people bring up a doctrinal error that called for specific correction. It’s not the case that we just never have to solve a problem, but it’s pretty rare. Is it worth foregoing four years of fellowship with our brothers and sisters in order to avoid difficult conversations with two people? Don’t be silly.

So we approach the situation differently: we look at how much we need to have in common for what we’re actually doing. Do we have enough in common to pray, say, the Lord’s Prayer together? Cool–let’s do that. Do we have enough in common to feed the hungry? Cool–let’s do that together. The mayor and the city council are struggling with a difficult situation; do we have enough in common to pray for God’s wisdom for our civil authorities? Cool–let’s do that together. I’m sure there are a dozen solid reasons why the timing of the Rapture is theologically important, but let’s not be using it as an excuse to stop us from what we can and should be doing together.

So many theological conservatives think unity is based on doctrine. If that were true, then certain key misbeliefs follow from it: the more doctrinal uniformity, the greater the unity; doctrinal disagreement means we can’t really be united; cooperating despite doctrinal disagreement means we really don’t care about truth; etc. But none of that is true.

Unity is not based on doctrine. “By one Spirit we were all baptized into one Body.” Our unity is a spiritual reality gifted to us by the Holy Spirit. Through the Spirit, we are all united to Christ and therefore to each other. We should live like it.

3 Comments | Ecclesiology, New Fundamentals, Unity and Community of Christ's Body | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Wreckage In All Directions

23 July 2024

I think most of us are clear on the fact that Jesus wasn’t a Republican. But there seems to be some confusion about His credentials as some sort of espresso-swilling progressive.

And you know, I see why people get confused. Jesus was witty, sarcastic, frequently at odds with the religious and political power structures, a homeless public intellectual who wasn’t averse to couch-surfing with rich friends, or a little freegan grazing, and it seems that He once told a story wherein some gay people go to heaven.

But then, He took the Old Testament creation story literally (and wasn’t afraid to build doctrine on it), took a very hard line on marriage and divorce, told people to pay their taxes to the predatory imperial power, said more about hell than the Apostle Paul (not ironically), talked about sin a lot (also not ironically), defended an extravagance that cost a year’s wages and could have been used to feed the poor, and was so unapologetically ableist that healing blind, deaf, and crippled people was a mainstay of His ministry.

In other words, His perspective and way of living make a wreckage of our modern political and social positions in all directions.

No matter who you are, Jesus is gonna mess with you. And that’s a good thing.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Ruined in the Kitchen

16 July 2024

I saw a meme the other day:

Once upon a time, there was a chef named Burk. Burk absolutely refused to cook with anything less than the very finest ingredients. Thing is, Burk sucked at cooking. He would buy perfectly ripe, beautiful, crisp peas and boil them into tasteless grey mash. His chicken cutlets were raw on the inside, and his pies were burned black. Obviously, the feedback Burk got was less than stellar.

So Burk did the obvious thing: he took to the internet to complain. “Chefs who use the best ingredients will be rated poorly only by people who are seeking something besides the best ingredients,” his meme read. Lots of other chefs liked Burk’s meme, and Burk never got any better at cooking.

Is there a subset of the Christian public that the meme accurately describes? Sure, and it’s not a small group, either. But that “only” in the meme transforms what could have been a penetrating observation about the Christian public into a steaming pile of pastoral cope. They will only call you boring if they’re not interested in faithful preaching? Really? It’s just not possible that you’re, well, actually boring?

Don’t be ridiculous. Nothing you can buy at the farmer’s market is so good you can’t ruin it in the kitchen. In the same way, the Word is living and powerful and profitable, but YOU can still ruin it with bad presentation. You might get called boring because you’re hard to follow and never get to the point. You might get called boring because you make your point in the first five minutes, and then repeat that same five minutes relentlessly for an hour before mercifully closing in prayer. You might get called boring because your voice is a flat monotone and it puts people to sleep no matter how good your content is. Or for any one of a hundred other reasons. Preaching isn’t entertainment, but it is public speaking, and it’s a skill, and it’s entirely possible to be terrible at it. If you’re patting yourself on the back purely because people call you boring, you’re an idiot.

There’s a subset of conservative pastors who are absolutely terrible teachers, and genuinely proud of it. They preach long, impenetrable sermons, use Greek and Hebrew grammatical terms that are meaningless to the congregation they’re preaching to, adorn their preaching with unnecessary theological neologisms, wander off on rabbit trails that are at best diagonally related to the point they’re making. Their congregants tend to be proud of it too, to the point of dismissing other skilled teachers as “not serious enough” if they don’t also do these same things.

Among these folks, there’s a group that maintains, in all seriousness, that if you’re walking with the Holy Spirit, the Spirit will teach you through your pastor’s sermons, no matter how bad they are. Therefore, they reason, if you didn’t get anything from your pastor’s sermon this week, it must be that you had some unconfessed sin gumming up your relationship with the Spirit, and were unable to grasp what the Spirit was teaching you. (I am not making this up — I’ve heard this taught from the pulpit, and I’ve heard it invoked self-condemningly from people who were struggling to understand a poorly constructed sermon.) That’s all rot. Pastors are not inerrant; sometimes we just preach a bad sermon.

Do not be like the hypocrites. There’s no excuse for sucking at your craft, and slagging the audience instead of finding ways to improve yourself is a really lame approach to ministry. Don’t do that.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

An Update

12 July 2024

I had a chance recently to chat with Chris Morrison about the continuing “Content of Saving Faith” debate.

2 Comments | Bare Minimum Gospel Foolishness, Controversies, News, The Free Grace Food Fight | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Got That List From Demons

9 July 2024

I recently found myself once again in a conversation about yoga. We’ve discussed that (and yoga’s history) here before, but in this case, the question specifically centered on the postures involved in modern yoga practice. “Isn’t it true,” the questioner wanted to know, “that certain postures are worshipping a particular Hindu god (i.e., a demon)?”

It’s a good question to raise, and the answer is no. Some Hindus say that particular poses mean you’re worshipping some specific god. Silly Christians believe the false prophets of the demons rather than their own Scriptures, which tell us that “the earth is the Lord’s, and all its fullness” and “the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.” I can’t believe I need to say this, but I heartily recommend believing the Bible, not the demons!*

Certainly some demon — let’s take Hanuman for example — might proclaim dominion over some posture or another. As it happens there is a posture in yoga called “Hanuman’s posture” (Sanskrit hanumanasana). It’s essentially a front split with the arms reaching straight up. Is it the case that every gymnast who’s ever done a front split is unknowingly worshipping Hanuman? Don’t be ridiculous.

“But it’s not just a front split,” says the suspicious Christian. “See the arms reaching up? Is that praying hands I see?”

Let me tell you why the arms are reaching up: the fascial network. Specifically, in this case, reaching up helps open the superficial and deep front lines. Better yet, let me show you. You don’t even need to do a split for this. Get into a deep lunge, with the right leg back. As deep as you can reasonably manage. Now, look straight up, and reach straight up (or maybe even slightly back) with both arms. Feel that additional stretch and opening through your right front ribs, abdominals, hip, and quads? That’s why.

Now, can someone use this posture to worship Hanuman? Of course! Might it even be standard practice among Hanuman-worshippers? I suppose it could. Is it therefore true that everyone who adopts this posture into their exercise is worshipping Hanuman? Of course not. Hanuman might claim that is the case, of course, but Hanuman is a liar just like all the other demons. There’s no reason why we–indwelt by the Holy Spirit as we are–ought to take them seriously. Certainly you can sin with your body (stealing, committing adultery, and the like), but we know those things are sins because God told us so. You will search the Scriptures in vain for some divinely sanctioned list of postures that irrevocably belong to demons and are off-limits to Christians. Yoga’s Christian despisers claim to have such a list, but they got that list from demons. The truth is that if it’s healthy for your body, it’s fair game, to the glory of God. “Glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God’s.”

*This recommendation would fuel a variety of inflammatory statements if I cared to make them. Can you imagine if I took to Twitter to say, “The problem with Dave Hunt is that he trafficks in demonic revelation rather than Scripture”??? But in this case, it’s true, isn’t it?

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Posted by Tim Nichols

“Shouldn’t we at least have…?”

2 July 2024

When it comes to programs and services in the church, the answer to all questions that begin with the phrase, “Well, shouldn’t we at least have…?” is a hearty “Heck, no!”

Of course it seems unreasonable to answer the question without knowing what specific “improvement” is in view, but stick with me for a minute. I concede that a good case can generally be made for any single improvement of this kind. Considered in the abstract, the proposed improvement is a good thing, and would perhaps take relatively little effort. It’s hard to see what harm could come of it, and so it’s very hard to make a case against it—but this is a failure to see the big picture. The problem is threefold.

First, humans have notoriously low sales resistance to anything that involves other people’s work. It’s very easy to sell the idea that we “ought to have” something, but it’s quite another matter to assemble the wherewithal to actually do it—and it’s usually substantially more work than it sounds like, because everything is. In a church with a professional staff governed by a board, a few zealous congregants can often persuade the board to their way of thinking, thereby foisting the necessary work onto the staff. In our church, there’s additional resistance because no one is making a living tending to the needs of the church. All of us have jobs that support our families, and aren’t looking for ways to make our ministry more labor-intensive, especially not for secondary things that “would be nice.” If it’s not primary to our mission, we’re not touching it.

Second, this sort of task tends to travel in packs. First there will be one, which is harmless enough, but then there’s another, then a third, and before you know it, there’s a mountain of such obligations, all of which have to be maintained. Proponents will argue that we can always stop doing a given task, if it becomes onerous, but in reality they always oppose efforts to prune back whatever is presently being done (by other people—see #1!) The net result of these two tendencies is a ratcheting effect: it’s easy enough to start a church bulletin, or newsletter, or phone tree, or nursery, or whatever, but it takes an extraordinary effort of leadership to stop doing those things once you start them. It’s much easier and faster to kill it before it starts.

Finally, this burden of (theoretically low-level) tasks has a way of compromising church leadership. The tasks themselves can usually be handled by some sort of administrative assistant, even a volunteer one. However, once ensconced in the position, the administrative assistant often ends up being a de facto elder simply by virtue of being willing to do a bunch of tasks that, while nonessential to start with, nobody can now imagine living without (see #2)—which is to say that this person has accrued power out of all proportion to his/her qualifications. In the church, directional leadership is reserved to a select group of men meeting specific biblical qualifications. The elders may not abdicate their core functions to a third party who doesn’t meet the qualifications God assigned for those functions, and therefore it’s best not to create perverse incentives that encourage such abdication.

The bottom line is simple. We have work enough and to spare just doing what Jesus gave us to do: make disciples. Things that “would be nice” are a distraction we simply can’t afford, and tend over time to choke out the work Jesus told us to focus on. If you need a demonstration of this fact, you need look no further than the five churches nearest you. I promise you, if you look around, you’ll swiftly find a church that does a dozen such “nice” tasks with real excellence, and hasn’t a clue how to make disciples.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Ruin it for Them

25 June 2024

Last week, we looked at matters of politics, class, and Pentecostalism discussed in Dr. Miles Smith’s summary of exvangelical memoirs. In addition, Dr. Smith also spoke of a type of clericalism, in which “the leaders of those churches could speak with near ex cathedra authority on any issue they deemed important.” In some of the churches Smith has in mind, this is because the church is effectively a cult of personality; the pastor’s opinion is effectively law on everything from the Trinity to parenting philosophy to the merits of the Chicago Bears.

While there’s undoubtedly a problem there, Dr. Smith represents an unhelpful form of backlash: an implicit contention that pastors exceed their mandate when they speak to this-worldly concerns. So it is that Smith opines one of his exvangelical writers “can be forgiven for retroactively wincing at the graphic depictions of copulation in a book written by Tim Lahaye and his wife Beverly.” He goes on to say that pastoral advice on sex is clear “evidence of a clericalist culture run amok.” The book in question would have to be The Act of Marriage; I read it years ago, along with a whole generation of evangelicals older than me. For what my opinion is worth, I don’t recall it leaving any scars.

Whatever the shortcomings of a particular book, one has to ask: as opposed to what? Should we have no books on sex written by pastors? If an accurate depiction of copulation offends Smith’s sensibilities, one wonders what he thinks of the act itself — or of the God who designed it! Would Smith have pastors remain silent about sex, or speak in tasteful generalities that offer no actionable advice? For two suburban virgins on their wedding night, a few “graphic depictions of copulation” are helpful. Where would Smith suggest that ordinary Christian people get practical advice on the details of sex? Pornhub?

Which raises a point: I can tell you that while some exvangelicals “checked all the boxes” while they were in the church, others very much did not. Some exvangelicals I know hated the discussions of sex at church because they were already daily porn users, even if they weren’t actually sleeping around themselves. They didn’t need to hear a “graphic depiction of copulation” from a pastor because they were watching it for entertainment already, and they didn’t want to hear about chastity, because they were already in high rebellion. They still recall those conversations with guilt and loathing, and nobody should be concerned about that.

Meanwhile, a number of the exvanglicals of my acquaintance complain of the opposite problem: their churches seemed preoccupied with the details of internecine doctrinal squabbles, and unable to offer substantive help for important matters of everyday life like dating, sex, and child-rearing. When we’re damned for speaking to sex, and damned for refusing to, one begins to suspect that talking about sex is not really the problem. “We played the harp for you, and you did not dance; we played the flute for you, and you did not mourn.”

But returning to the matter of pastoral advice: there’s a “great gulf fixed” between the earthy preachers who get into the details on one hand, and upscale ministry professionals who keep things at the level of luncheon conversation on the other. This cultural divide has been a feature of Western ecclesiastical life for centuries. The internet hasn’t really changed that, but it has made the divide easier to see, since anybody with access to Youtube can see plenty of both types, and the wide gulf between them. (See the last 10 or so paragraphs of Nathanael Devlin’s excellent essay on the Moscow Mood for a discussion of one such divide within the Reformed community.) What are we to do?

Obviously, not every pastor is well-equipped to offer advice on every subject, nor is the pool of people with helpful counsel about sexuality (or anything else) confined to pastors alone. The relevant command from Christ is to make disciples, and it applies to all of us! Where we’re able to offer a disciple-making influence to our brothers and sisters, we should, and we it makes little sense to confine ourselves to unhelpful generalities. In a culture where The Experts (all rise!) are wildly unlikely to honor God’s design for anything at all, God’s people dare not leave one another at the mercy of the secular wolves. On anything.

We are not gnostics; we proclaim Christ in all places and for all things, right down into the earthy details that don’t make for polite country-club conversation. Of course, not everyone will agree on everything, and we should relish the opportunity to foster robust discussion and debate on everything from sleep-training your kids to making fluffy biscuits to sexually satisfying your spouse. Nobody should be embarrassed to get into the details as required to offer one another meaningful help; loving your neighbor requires it. God made us of dust and breath, after all. There’s no shame in being material, nor in talking like you are.

Pastors above all have this responsibility; it’s our job to equip the saints for the work of the ministry. Ministers who stand aloof from such “peripheral” matters are betraying their office, no matter how “gospel-centered” it makes them feel. “The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed” — a very old problem, but no less pressing for its distinguished pedigree. Many ministers want to hold back, and many of the sheep want their ministers to hold back. They have acquired a taste for the sweetmeats of the secular wolves, and they’re not overly interested in having a pastor intrude “outside his area of expertise” and ruin it for them.

Let’s go ruin it for them! Jesus did; how can we do any less?

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Seven Laws of (Magical) Reality

22 June 2024

One of the major projects before us as a church in the 21st-century WEIRD (Western, Educated, Individualistic, Rich, Democratic) world is repenting of our concessions to modernism, and returning to the worldview of the Bible. I know you’re thinking “We’ve been on top of this Christian worldview thing since Francis Schaeffer,” but no, we haven’t. Schaeffer made a great start. Ministries like Summit have done wonders for us. But we have a long way to go yet to recover a truly biblical grasp of the world and our place in it. I have something that will help: a “sort-of-manifesto” for Bnonn and Smokey Tennant’s podcast True Magic, laying out their founding principles, which (spoiler alert) are as follows:

Physical things participate in spiritual patterns.
Physical things therefore have meaning.
We participate in the same spiritual patterns at different levels.
There is an order of being that flows down from God.
Heaven and earth participate together in Man.
Therefore, Man must live liturgically.
To live liturgically, we must study both Man and Scripture.

I’ll let you read their elaboration on each of the principles for yourself. Suffice to say, this is the kind of thinking we need to be doing more of.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

People Like You

18 June 2024

Miles Smith of Mere Orthodoxy was kind enough to read a stack of exvangelical memoirs for us. For those of you who are blessedly unfamiliar with the trend, this is now a whole subgenre of personal memoir. You, too, can be applauded as courageously speaking truth to power, if only you will very publicly break up with the church, preferably on Instagram. You might even get a book deal out of it. Mr. Smith has done us all a service, plowing through a number of such books in order to discuss some of the common elements. He writes:

“Fundamentally, exvangelicals seemed to have been told that a specific type of church was the true church, that true faith probably didn’t exist outside of it, and that the leaders of those churches could speak with near ex cathedra authority on any issue they deemed important. The specifics may change from church to church–some tended to be vaguely charismatic, others strict dispensationalists, and still others a kind of independent folk Calvinist. But all shared a certain exclusivity and clericalism that defined their existence. These churches and this culture were governed ostensibly by the Bible, but ultimately it was a faith defined primarily by individual pastors….Enough of these churches led by enough of this clericalist type of minister popped up between 1970 and 2000 to build an entire subculture.”

Just a Subculture?

Speaking from my experience ministering to people who’ve abandoned their faith, I agree that a number of them fit Smith’s profile, which is to say that (in rough generalities) they come from churches that mix generic doctrinal orthodoxy with cult-of-personality sociology. I’ve been at war with that defective ecclesiology my entire adult life. I cut my teeth in ministry doing counter-cult work with the victims of exactly that sort of ministry. Upon hearing their stories, I’ve surprised quite a number of exvangelicals from such churches by responding, “Well, you can’t go back to that!” (And they shouldn’t, either. There are plenty of faithful-if-flawed churches to fellowship with; no need to get tangled up in a cult.) But look, while we all agree that cults of personality are a bad idea, that’s hardly the whole story with exvangelicals.

Plenty of these folks don’t fit that profile, and Smith himself mentions one of them when he wonders aloud why so many people listened to Bill Gothard and Joshua Harris. It’s a good question (which I’ve discussed elsewhere), but the point for the moment is that he’s aware of Joshua Harris, himself now an exvangelical. Harris didn’t grow up the downtrodden follower of some clericalist mini-pope out in the swamps, thinking his church was The Only True Church. He grew up speaking all over the country in churches and at conferences, and attended seminary at Regent College in Vancouver before abandoning his faith. The exvangelical phenomenon is not confined to the isolated backwaters.

Politics and Pentecostals…

Smith’s article focuses quite a bit on both recent politics and the charismatic movement with regard to his exvangelical interlocutors. Bethel Church gets a mention, as does Greg Locke’s Global Vision Church, and the word “Trumpist” also comes up a surprising number of times for a short article. The overall effect is to give the impression that you’re seeing a wave of these “I used to be a Christian, but…” books because independent churches with no historical roots got themselves tangled up with Trump and Pentecostalism, and people understandably fled. (If only we’d all remained mainline, cessationist, and respectably centrist, how faithful we would be!) In keeping with that, there’s a definite class-oriented vibe in Smith’s piece. Trump’s appeal is populist, Pentecostalism is famously working-class, particularly in the South, and there’s a certain looking-down-the-nose, “Isn’t this a bit regrettable” tone in the article, especially in its conclusion: “We sometimes accuse exvangelicals of leaving ‘Protestant churches.’ I’m not so sure they did.” I began to wonder about Smith’s background: I made a bet with myself that he was a southern Episcopalian.

Upon a little research, I discovered that Dr. Miles Smith IV (Ph.D. in history, 2013) is Anglican (ACNA), “a native Carolinian,” and a Citadel M.A. graduate who, in addition to his serious work, “sometimes writes for popular outlets like Mere Orthodoxy, The Gospel Coalition, Public Discourse, The Federalist, and The University Bookman.” Call me crazy, but my Appalachian fundie-trained nose could smell the clubby, upper-crusty Southern Anglican aspirations coming off Smith’s article. As you might have guessed by now, Gentle Reader, I do not find this an endearing trait, but that’s fine; Jesus transcends all our tribal affinities. Miles Smith and I both belong to Christ, and therefore to one another, and anything that stands in the way of our unity is future ash in the Kingdom of God. For today, the point is that you should not be lulled by Dr. Smith’s complacent sense that exvangelicals don’t come from the same places that we real Protestants do.

…and you

I do appreciate Dr. Smith’s sacrificial act, slogging through a stack of self-justifying exvangelical accounts so the rest of us don’t have to. Speaking as a pastor who actively works with such people on a regular basis, I think Smith’s treatment tells some truths, but falls woefully short of really capturing the exvangelical phenomenon. The whole truth is a good bit less comfortable: while some of the folks who abandon the faith come from insular, low-caste swamps on the working-class side of the tracks, rather a lot of them are more like Joshua Harris: well-resourced, experienced, and connected to multiple institutions. (And not all of them admit to having abandoned the faith, but that’s a subject for another time.)

It would be comforting to believe that people like us (“real” Protestants, or whatever) know too much to fall for the temptation to abandon the faith, but it’s just not true. We’re not just losing people from the margins; we’re losing people like you–and your kids. Cool-shaming can work on anybody, and seems to work particularly well on people who aspire to respectability–or as C. S. Lewis put it, a place in the Inner Ring. The antidote is as simple as it is painful:

“Therefore Jesus also, that He might sanctify the people with His own blood, suffered outside the gate. Therefore let us go forth to Him, outside the camp, bearing His reproach, for here we have no continuing city, but we seek the one to come. Therefore by Him let us continually offer the sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of our lips, giving thanks to His name; but do not forget to do good and to share, for with such sacrifices God is well pleased.” (Heb. 13:12-16)

UPDATE: Dr. Smith recently discussed his article with Aaron Renn.

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Posted by Tim Nichols