The Last Christian on Earth

by Os Guinness

  In terms of the Church’s previous public influence, there are only two significant exceptions to this general evacuation. But once you examine them, both prove empty. The first is “ceremonial religion,” a term to describe the remaining role of the previously powerful state churches in Europe. The second exception, which we looked at in the previous memo, is “civil religion,” where an indirect and diluted Christian influence on public affairs is still possible despite the deliberate rejection of a state Church.

  These are certainly exceptions. Such as they are, they still weakly limp into the public world. Religion stops at the boardroom door, the factory gate and the laboratory bench—that is taken for granted. But it is also still taken for granted that you do not solemnize a royal marriage, declare a foreign war, swear an oath in court or inaugurate a president without some traditional religious references.3 As I write, the American airwaves are crackling with controversy over the conservative and liberal pastors asked to pray at the beginning and the end of the imminent presidential inauguration.

  Such religion plays a part in public life, like icing on a cake or parsley on a steak. But who is kidding whom? European ceremonial religion is the Christian faith at its emptiest and most occasional, a pageantry machine rolled out for state occasions, an archaic, Gothic ornament-inspiring rhetoric and nostalgia in a prosaic and hard-bitten age. In England, ceremonial religion has almost lost its spiritual authority altogether. It now alternates between the lofty detachment of its national role as “the imposing west front of civic religion”4 and its more engaged, day-to-day stance as the moral footnote of a Guardian editorial (with bishops conspicuous for their vagueness about the Apostles’ Creed seemingly compensating with near god-like certainty in their political pronouncements).

  Sweden, with even stronger secularization, has taken the process further still. There ceremonial religion keeps alive a flicker of historic nostalgia but serves mainly as a social service station—state-subsidized to see to the “hatching, matching and dispatching” of a population that otherwise lives in scant regard of its claims.

  In much the same way, American civil religion is the Christian faith at its vaguest and most general, a spiritual Muzak that has become regulation accompaniment to certain public occasions. For American politicians, “Under God” carries little theological content. They are merely emphasis words to underscore seriousness, just as “God bless America” is a crescendo phrase to lift the last line of their speeches and save them the trouble of thinking of an original closing line.

  Neither ceremonial religion nor civil religion is entirely valueless to Christians, but in terms of any spiritual power each is a devotional intrusion rather than a decisive influence on public affairs. Neither is a true exception to the picture of a general evacuation.

  Who can take seriously a faith that claims to speak to all of life but has tamely withdrawn from the areas that are central in modern society? “Jesus is Lord,” Christians say, but what do they show? He does not appear to be lord here … or there … or anywhere much where it matters. This almost total evacuation represents a rout of the first order, effectively giving the lie to Christian claims of sovereignty and lordship. Ritual and formality have a see-through flimsiness today, and certain people are falling over themselves in their eagerness to play the small boy who pronounces the emperor naked. In short, whatever is left of the Christian faith in public we can either manipulate or mock.

  Restriction to the Private Sphere

  There have been two broad responses to the general evacuation of the Christian faith from public life. The first is the majority response, mostly comprising Christian movements at a popular level but including many individuals from higher levels too. This response has been to accept the restriction of religion to the private sphere.

  We have already examined the trend of privatization and seen its decisive damage to the Christian faith. Secularization has been the major force behind the evacuation of faith from public life; privatization has been the principal reason why the extent and significance of the evacuation has not been noticed. Not only is the Christian faith restricted to the private sphere, most Christians like it that way.

  A natural result is that forms of faith that have flourished are those best suited to the private sphere. Thus they have been tailor-made for manipulation. In America in the ’50s, for example, there was a religious revival that turned out to be little more than a suburban family boom. Spiritual indicators such as church membership, giving and education all soared, but social influence soon sagged.

  Membership often turned out to be temporary, superficial and hypocritical. Why? Because parents were more committed to the idea of their children being “churched” (or better still, “Sunday-Schooled”) than to the church itself. They went on their own terms, not the Adversary’s. In addition, most of the churches’ booming activities related to the private life rather than the public, so that the church, apart from catering to the family, was socially irrelevant—and shown to be so by the subsequent events of the ’60s.

  One enemy expert warned clearly that so naive and family-oriented a revival was virtually “the second Children’s Crusade.”5 Fortunately, he was ignored, but the ’60s proved his point. Members of the baby boom graduated from their Sunday Schools and their faith at the same time. When they took their stand in the streets of Berkeley, Columbia and Kent State, their earlier naive Christian faith had become their opponent, not their inspiration.

  Decades after the 1950s boom, privatized religion is still as useful to us, though the forms have changed. It has come a long way from the innocence and intactness of the world of Eisenhower. Not only are new technologies available to it, new factors, such as the preoccupation with survival, are influencing its mood.6 Unlike their predecessors, today’s privatized parents are likely to feel increasingly under siege. Yet they are still glued to the television that simultaneously thrusts in the hostile outside world and offers the best escape from it. For some tips in catering to this present mood, listen to the televangelists. Electronic church-manship lacks nothing in market research.

  I am sure you can appreciate the invidious choice now facing modern Christians. They can opt for a faith that is a matter of public rhetoric or one of private religiosity. The choice is between embracing a faith that has wider relevance, or a faith that is personally real. To the extent that faith goes public and achieves wider relevance, it lacks reality; to the extent that faith remains private, it achieves reality but lacks public bite or social consequence. The Christian faith has lost its footing in the public square and is on the horns of a vicious dilemma.

  The restriction of religion to the private sphere is so widespread that many people overlook a second response to loss of public influence: a reduplication of the spirit of the public sphere. In other words, Christians attempt to re-enter the public sphere by uncritically reduplicating the stances and styles of the public sphere itself. At first sight this response might appear to threaten our work, but in the long run it does not. To use their jargon, it does “the Lord’s work in the world’s way.” It uses the tools of the public world, and does so on the public world’s terms, so it ends up compromised and captive yet again.

  Following the Star

  A clear example of reduplicating the public sphere is commercialization, the Church’s deliberate attempt to re-enter the public sphere by copying the principles and practices of the capitalist market. As we saw, this is how consumer religion develops and becomes an effective counterfeit. Its uncritical reduplication of the marketplace leaves it sold out to its culture. Undeniably, consumer religion is religion that has re-entered the public world—colorfully, successfully and profitably. Undeniably, too, it has done so only by working in the public world’s way.

  Another example is the way in which Christians are duplicating the public world’s celebrity system. When Adlai Stevenson was running for the U.S. presidency in the 1950s, he was asked whether the public adulation was doing him any harm.
“It’s all right,” Stevenson replied, “so long as you don’t inhale.” Today that attitude would be thought of as humility to a fault. Publicity rivals money as the mother’s milk of politics. Politicians, it is now said, no longer run for office—they pose. But Christians too have become hooked, inhaling publicity like chain smokers, quite oblivious to the warning on the packet.

  The context speaks for itself. Modern media offer a novel power for manufacturing fame. They create an instant fabricated famousness with none of the sweat and cost of true greatness or heroism. And in a highly anonymous society, one that is obsessed with image and impermanence, who can calmly wait for recognition? Fame is the highest of all highs, and publicity—even bad publicity—is the instant fame that by-passes the need for accomplishment or worth. As Oscar Wilde said, “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”

  Hence the celebrity, the person who in Daniel Boorstin’s phrase is “well known for his well-knownness,” the “personality” for whom television is not for watching but for appearing on.7 As you can see, publishing and the celebrity system overlap here. A “best seller” is becoming the celebrity among books, one that is bought more than read, yet one that sells well partly because it sells well, the essence of the successful hype.

  You might think Christians would be held back by that rather awkward saying of Jesus, “Woe to you when all men speak well of you.”8 Conveniently they seem to have forgotten it, particularly in America where the access to the media is greatest. Hence the celebrity system, Christian-style (“A Star Is Born-Again”). Titans from the worlds of politics, sports, music, television and religion stride the Christian stage and screen with an authority born, not of their faith and character or their missionary exploits, but of their mass appeal. “Following the star” has become the exact opposite of what it was for the three wise men. Today it leads away from Jesus, not toward him.

  As a young preacher in Indianapolis, Jim Jones (of People’s Temple fame) is reported to have thrown his Bible on the floor and yelled at his associates, “Too many people are looking at this instead of looking at me!” Christian celebrities might not go that far. They would not need to. More importantly, they would not do the reverse. By definition, celebrities are to be celebrated. Therein lies our chance.

  If consumer religion transforms congregations into clientele, their idolizing of celebrities produces a series of fateful switches in focus: from private identity to public image (devaluing inner life and character), from saints to stars (devaluing models of spiritual growth), from followers to fans (devaluing patterns of discipleship), from being gifted to being glamorous (devaluing leadership and spiritual authority), and from wisdom, understanding and experience to endorsements, personal glimpses and slogans (devaluing faith).

  Modern men and women do not live by bread alone, but by every catchword and revelation that comes from the lips and private lives of their heroes. But since such fame is largely based on famousness, these celebrities are living tautologies and the emptiest of heroes. Thus for ordinary people, the consumption of celebrities is like psychological fast food. For Christians, it is not only non-nourishing but also a slow and deadly poison. Those who live by the image die by it too. And those who worship them are like them.

  The contrast here with the Old Fool is plain, and you can see why his one-man war against fantasy would be dangerous if his lead were followed. Look back at the transcript of your interview, and you will see examples of the sort of subversive impudence I mentioned to you when you first went down to see him.

  “If you imagine yourself as a pure sojourner in a world in which a great many people—some of the most influential and perhaps even gifted people—assume that this world is the full story, and you know it isn’t, you can’t but find their circumstances and behavior and state of mind rather ridiculous.”

  Even for the celebrity worshiper, such a perspective might be hard to disagree with when stated like that. This sense of incongruity and discrepancy spoils the image for good, and the celebrity can never be seen in the same light again. The small boy has cried out once more, and another embarrassed emperor must hurry home for some clothes.

  Fortunately, though, the Old Fool’s way of seeing is too rare to trouble us. I have pointed out before that effective subversion requires at least two things: the passive acceptance of the masses, and the positive allegiance of a ruling counter-elite. Christian reduplication of the current celebrity system makes this area an obvious tool for achieving the former.

  What’s Good for Microsoft…

  If commercialization is what occurs when the Church uncritically employs the principles and practices of the market, the result of the Church’s uncritical emulation of the public world’s form of thinking and management is rationalization—the way everything in the modern world is reduced to reason, method, calculation, “measurable outcomes” and “best practices.”

  Bureaucracy was an early form of this rationalization, and fortunately for us, it has given the process a bad name. Just think of Franz Kafka’s The Castle. That, however, is old-fashioned rationalization, which lumbered along until the swelling army of management experts and behavioral engineers moved in to streamline and update the notion. In its advanced modern form, no form of organization and administration is more rational, efficient and characteristic of the twenty-first century. Business, military affairs, science, education, and even government itself all reflect these newer rationalized ways of doing things. And now so does religion.

  It goes without saying that nothing could be further from the needs and aspirations of privatized religion. But rationalization caters to a different group of Christians. It therefore complements rather than contradicts the former because it operates at a different level. Privatized religion is mostly, though not exclusively, found at the grassroots level, whereas rationalized religion is the result of the reduplication of the modern world at the level of leadership, management and organization.

  Rationalization is nothing new for the Church. The hierarchy of the medieval Church was a rationally organized administrative system modeled on that of the Roman Empire. An early modern example of our success in spreading rationalized structures is the denomination. Indeed, we have made such strides that only a fool or a true believer still thinks that denominations differ from one another for decisive theological reasons. For all their different traditions, most denominations now resemble each other remarkably closely in structure.9 They are all cast in the same organizational mold, run by the same organizational logic and confronted by the same organizational imperatives, such as public relations, fundraising and lobbying. Watch their day-to-day operations, their hierarchical chains of authority, their external dealings, and what do you see—the “Body of Christ” or a pale ecclesiastical version of a multinational corporation?

  In the last generation we have helped spread the virus to a new area: the so-called parachurch ministries, those independent ministries that operate alongside the Church. Here you can see the element of reduplication with particular freshness, since many of these groups have risen only in the last generation and among people who previously had a wary suspicion for the ways of the world.

  Make no mistake. The parachurch movement is a menace to us. That was why the Director singled it out for attention. He anticipated that the contemporary Church would be at its most enterprising and energetic at this point. Here can be found the Church’s most potent blend of vision, enterprise, initiative and dedication. Movements such as Evangelicalism, which had lost control of the denominational institutions to the liberals and revisionists, would be weak and diffuse without the strong networks and cross-fertilization of the thousands of parachurch ministries. (There are more than 10,000 in the U.S. alone.) Today, these organizations have their people everywhere. You name it, they have a ministry for it—the Third World and the student world, sportsmen and film stars, down-and-outs and “up-and-outs.”

  Despite t
hat energy, we can be confident because of the effects of rationalization. In their eagerness to break away from stale and ineffective ways of doing things, they are rushing breathlessly and mindlessly after the latest management theories, the top experts and consultants and the most effective modern insights and tools. Hang the Bible. That has nothing to say. But is there a recent insight from the American Management Association or from McKinsey & Company? A new case study from the Harvard Business School? New statistics from a public opinion survey? Fresh “innovative” methods from a fast-growing ministry we had not heard of before? The doors are open, and the rush is on. Like dollar-happy bargain hunters, they are out to streamline their organizations with the best rationalized methods and structures that money can buy.

  As this trend continues, we can trap them at two places. The first is where rationalization fails. As the current Wall Street crisis shows, human calculation is never as wise as it thinks. Often the best and brightest prove badly wrong, and usually it is because they leave out the most crucial factor of all: the reality of human nature. So goals tend to be displaced as means and procedures become ends in themselves; relationships become depersonalized as they flatten out into roles; certain cookie-cutter personality types develop because certain characteristics such as security, loyalty and dependency are emphasized unduly; and there are always the unintended consequences. Each of these developments represents a snag for efficiency of any kind; for “the Body of Christ” they can become a denial of its truth altogether.

  The second place we can trap them is where rationalization succeeds, but where its success will be on its own terms—terms that will militate against the Church. I have just mentioned how rationally organized structures override distinctive theological differences, such as between congregational-style government and government through bishops. We want the same thing to happen to parachurch ministries. This is our variant on the old adage that “In matters of the spirit, nothing fails like success.”