The Last Christian on Earth

by Os Guinness

  The second main point of damage is that Christian ideas have lost their former comprehensiveness. Under the impact of the modern world—particularly of secularization and privatization—there has been a distinct miniaturizing of the faith. Its relevance is restricted to the private sphere or to highly limited spheres elsewhere, so faith seems real only when people are dealing with private or partial matters. Elsewhere faith is silent or only a faintly Christianized echo of the views of others.

  There was a time when the comprehensiveness of faith was as important to Christians as its certainty. It was the secret of their mustard-seed growth and their restless expansionism. Christian truth, as they saw it, was total. It was meant to cover everything, or it meant nothing.

  Comprehensiveness was also the sting in their challenge to other faiths. “All truth is God’s truth” was the genial face of their claim to the totality of truth. But there was also a darker side: what the Christian faith disagreed with was simply not true. In other words, truth was total. It not only covered everything for those who believed, it challenged everything for those who did not.

  Old Pharaoh, stubborn fool that he was, found that out to his cost. “Let my people go!” said Moses. And what did he mean? Not just the men, and not just for worship, as Pharaoh was willing to grant. But every last person and everything they possessed, right down to the last of the livestock (“Not a hoof must be left behind”).3

  You cannot negotiate with spiritual totalitarianism like that. Its creeping comprehensiveness is insatiable. Either you beat it at its own game, or you subvert it from within as we have done.

  Many religions would have no problem with such a drastic shrinkage of faith. They are preshrunk anyway, as it were. Religions such as the New Age Movement make no claim to being anything other than privately engaging and socially irrelevant. But the Christian faith is not like that, any more than Judaism, Islam and Marxism are. Each of them demands a holistic integration—Jews under the Torah, Muslims under the Qu’ran and Marxists under the leadership of the Party. In the same way, Christian integration was once “under the lordship of Christ,” and was therefore supposed to cover the whole of life. After all, such claims were said to be a matter of life or death, all or nothing.

  So, for the Christian faith to lose its character and capacity as a comprehensive worldview is highly significant. How are the mighty fallen indeed! No wonder the infamous Muslim radical Sayyid Qutb was so shocked when he encountered mid-Western churches in 1949 (long before the 1960s and the ravages of the decade of “drugs, sex, rock and roll”). Their faith, he wrote in Milestones, the book that inspired Osama bin Laden and many Islamic extremists, was a form of “hideous schizophrenia.” It had accepted a “desolate separation between this Church and society.” “God’s existence is not denied, but his domain is restricted to the heavens, and his rule on earth is suspended.”4 We could not have put it better ourselves.

  This lethal miniaturizing of faith can sometimes be seen best in trivial incidents. An illuminating example from a few years ago was the Reader’s Digest Bible, a svelte new version advertised as “40 percent slimmer” than the more rotund King James Version or Revised Standard Version, with 50 percent shed from around the Old Testament and 25 percent from the New.

  And why not? Isn’t all good preaching a form of abridgment? Isn’t the original 66-book edition a trifle long for the busy reader of single-evening condensed classics? It was only a matter of time before the twentieth-century’s publishing phenomenon would turn its attention to the world’s no. 1 bestseller and extract from it “the nub of the matter.”

  Examine the record of modern digests, and you will see that abridging and digesting are not what they once were, devices to lead readers to an original that would give them what they really wanted.5 In today’s world, with its excess of information and its dearth of time, the digest is all they want. The abridgment is therefore no longer a bridge to the original. The shadow now overshadows the substance.

  The unintended effect of these Holy-but-not-wholly Scriptures was sheer magic. What price biblical authority now that the Bible’s own stern warning against its being cut down has itself been cut out—and by Christians? What old King Jehoiakim got into trouble for doing with his penknife and brazier, what Martin Luther only contemplated doing with the “right strawy” sections, what they have always attacked liberals for doing with their scholarly scissors and paste, certain Christian conservatives are now doing cheerfully and enthusiastically—and all for the sake of better sales and their own convenience.

  There you have it: the triumph of consumerism and convenience over canon, of timesaving over truth. The spirit of the modern reader has spoken, and even the divine author is cut down to size, his “essence” distinguished from his “embellishments” like anyone else’s. A small step for the Reader’s Digest, perhaps, but a revealing step for the Christian community.

  The very notion of “convenient Christianity” would once have been anathema to those old Christians who held the hard wood of the executioner’s cross close to their hearts. Today, however, the reach of faith is shrinking, “convenience” and “relevance” have transformed the cross into a fashion accessory, and all that is awkward and angular in faith is consigned to the realm of the purist, the fanatic, and the crank. Philosophers, theologians, and ethicists can all be declared redundant. Today the condensed Bible and the comic-strip version. Tomorrow the complete Scriptures in a single bumper-sticker slogan.

  Another, more widespread, example is the critical notion of sin, a notion central to the Christian view of human nature. Sin once had a collective dimension. It was never a purely individual matter, and among its wider, practical consequences were those that concerned nature and ecology and justice in the economic order.

  But what does sin now mean to the average conservative believer? Here is a good litmus test. Whenever you hear an evangelist thundering about specific sins, notice what he names. Nine times out of ten, I’ll wager, the sin is a personal one. Adultery? Drunkenness? Drugs? Gambling? Swearing? Those, no doubt, and more, but they are all characteristically personal and individual. Certain conservatives actually seem obsessed with the idea of sin, but their view of it is so shrunken that they are blind to its original significance.

  Try another simple test of this miniaturizing process. Go to your local Christian bookstore (in round-the-clock commercial America, conveniently open on the “Sabbath”) and see which books are stocked and which sell best. The topics will be revealing, as will the titles and blurbs. Most of what you could think of for the devotional life will be there—though not the old classics. Anything you could desire for the people who watch their feelings as they watch the bathroom scales. Everything for the family, too, and all in the how-to, can-do, self-help style pioneered in the secular market.

  But as one Christian leader acknowledges, 90 percent of the books are about “I, myself, and me.” Where are the books to help the scientist in her discipline, the politician in his decisions, business people in their deals? These are conspicuously absent, and for the Christian to be relevant in public life without them is as hopeless a task as brick making without straw.

  Such examples demonstrate how the silken noose of privatization constricts Christian ideas as well as institutions. In fact, the spiritual content of faith sometimes reflects its social context so closely that it is almost farcical. I passed a church in San Francisco last year, and this was the solemn message on its notice board: “There is a place for duty in work, but not in love.” (I confess I couldn’t resist stopping to ask if it was a joke and was met with high indignation, which was my answer.) Sociologically, so thoroughly contextual; theologically, so totally contradictory. No wonder divorce is increasing among Christians. With teaching like that, who needs temptation?

  At the lowest level, this miniaturizing of faith is one of two impulses behind the proliferation of so-called Jesus junk: bumper stickers, buttons and religious trivia of all kinds. As one lapel button s
ummed it up, “Let your Jesus Button so shine before men that they may see your good graphics and glorify your P.R. man who lives on Long Island.” Such trivializing is a direct consequence of the loss of comprehensiveness in faith.

  My favorite recent example of spiritual “mellowspeak” is a belated birthday card I was shown recently by the Director. The greeting ran: “God’s timing is so perfect I cannot feel I’m late, for wishing you God’s best is never out of date.” What pleasure it would give me to show that to Augustine or John Calvin: The once-towering doctrine of divine sovereignty reduced to the salable size of a handy excuse for having forgotten a birthday.

  All these examples are diverting, and they provide a certain comic relief for the Council, but what matters is the principle and its consequence. One of the major consequences is the way these forces interrelate and aggravate each other. Loss of comprehensiveness in the Christian faith is a boon to civil religion and consumer religion, for instance. Many Christians have so personal a theology and so private a morality that they lack the criteria by which to judge society from a Christian perspective. Their miniaturized faith could “never” create any friction with the status quo. In fact, it acts like spiritual lubrication for the smooth running of the social system, the Christian “service with a smile” to assist society.

  A recently converted vice president of NBC who was interviewed in the Washington Post went out of his way to stress that his new Christian outlook would lead to no new moral standards around NBC. “All it does is give me peace of mind in my personal life,” he said. “But whether it will affect my programming, it doesn’t. It just makes me think clearer, but that just means that I probably think more commercially than I did before.”6

  In some fringe circles, there is an obsession today with identifying “antichrists.” But it is worth remembering that in most periods, short of the final conflict, one mini-Christ is worth more to us than a legion of antichrists.

  Loss of Compelling Power

  The third main point of damage is that Christian ideas have lost compelling power. Under the impact of the modern world, there has been a growing drive to market the faith.

  The general thrust should be obvious to you by now. Social context shapes spiritual content. Why the loss of compelling power? Secularization and privatization. Why the new emphasis on marketing? The nearest modern equivalent to the gospel’s dynamic, as they see it, is the sales drive. In other words, the commercialization of Christian institutions has its counterpart in the realm of Christian ideas.

  The theoretical symmetry of the Director’s plan is so exquisite that it is vital not to miss how it has worked in practice. But, first, be sure you appreciate the compelling power the Christian faith once had. It has always had its points of weakness, but that is not the same thing as the condition of settled mediocrity in which it finds itself today.

  Only a simpleton could mistake the modern Western Church for the entity it used to be. At times in history the Christian faith had an almost irresistible attraction. Even more, it was able to command uncoerced obedience. We have never been able to get to the bottom of why this was so. Nor have we ever been able to fully explain the mysterious magnetism of the person of Jesus. But judging from the evidence of those drawn into its orbit, the compelling power of the Christian gospel lay in at least three central points: its stark claim to be absolute truth, the strange drawing power of the cross, and the subversive notion of divine wisdom wrapped up in human folly.

  Explain such compelling power any way you will. Fortunately, the issue is only academic now, since the original dynamic has been replaced by something far easier to explain and exploit. Let me give you an example. A few years ago I was meeting a contact in Madrid during Holy Week. More out of curiosity than anything else, I kept half an eye on the Catholics’ week-long commemoration of the final days of Jesus. Each day had its appropriate services and processions, building up with a heavy accent on suffering and agony to the final Friday. Saturday was dead quiet, and Sunday I expected the usual Easter folderol. But oddly there was almost nothing.

  I was intrigued and made a mental note to do some research. Clearly the cultural climate of medieval Spain, untouched by the Reformation, had shaped the Church, exaggerating the cross and minimizing the resurrection. I suspect there was some late-medieval operation of cultural subversion similar to our own.

  The incident flooded back into my mind a year later by force of contrast with an Easter special that I viewed during some investigations in California. It was Good Friday, and I steeled myself for the inevitable hour-long meditation on the crucifixion. I need not have bothered. It may have been Good Friday, but there were no references to blood, pain, suffering or death. The cross was not even mentioned—not once. Instead, there were images of surf pounding on rocks, lilies bursting up through the ground and the sun breaking through clouds. The dialogue was a kind of Hallmark card theology, spiritual sentiments supplying wings for human dreams.

  I sat through it enchanted. “Lotus-land Christianity, California style.” Never before had I seen a whole program with so skillful a blend of saccharine spirituality and consumer religion. And on such a day.

  Most cases are less ripe than that, but the trend is unmistakable. The old compelling power of Christian truth has diminished, and its dynamic has been taken over by the current drive for relevance and customer satisfaction. As we saw earlier with Christian institutions, so here with ideas. The Christian gospel is being modified to become a consumer product. Its proclamation is becoming a matter of packaging, and its reception a question of consumer preference. Preparation through prayer and study is giving way to market research, opinion surveys, and focus groups. And a new type of minister is emerging, half talk-show host and half salesperson. That little L.A. cathedral actually boasts of being a “22-acre shopping center for Jesus Christ.”

  In a famous description, G. K. Chesterton called America “a nation with the soul of a church.”7 Yes, agreed Alistair Cooke, but also “a nation with the soul of a whorehouse.”8

  Our real triumph, however, is not in the blatant and the bizarre, but in the quiet, ordinary ways this is happening—with the injection of “sale-speak” into the testimony over the garden fence, of “relevance” into the small-town sermon that could never hope to draw a television audience, and of “innovation” into the daily anxiety of the pastor. Equally, our real goal is neither the financial scandals of the Church nor the bitter jokes about Christian rip-offs. Our goal is simply to add link after link after link to the ever-lengthening chain that shackles the gospel.

  What are the practical gains? First, the Christian faith is badly presented. It becomes one product among many, with sales pitches that sound phony at best and crass or fraudulent at worst. You can imagine the panic if a truth-in-religion law were enacted in the U.S. Who believes propaganda in a Communist country? But then who believes commercials in a capitalist society? Let the Church apply marketing attitudes and assumptions uncritically to its communication. Christian claims and Christian experiences will be toothpaste-bright and deodorant-fresh, with all the gravity and depth of a catchy jingle and a 30-second spot.

  Second, the Christian convert is badly prepared. Compare the spiritual training and diet of today with the gospel originally offered. For all our obvious disdain, we have to say that Jesus was a forbidding and unsparing leader. He issued an invitation, but made clear his demands. He supplied needs, but required sacrifice. He made promises, but emphasized costs. He was as offensive as he was appealing. No one who chose to follow him could have done so with their eyes closed.

  Today’s spiritual diet, by contrast, has undergone remarkable improvements. It is refined and processed. All the cost, sacrifice and demand are removed. (One of your more progressive, local megachurch pastors has even dropped the tactless word “sinner” as being too offensive.) Today’s diet is also enriched with a full range of additives from modern psychology. The formidable diet for the great race of faith has now become litt
le more than an easy-to-take supplement for boosting spiritual blood sugar.

  Notice particularly how anything sacrificial, prophetic, controversial or unpopular (but true) is diluted more and more. Stretching further and further for an ever-expanding clientele, Christian salesmen are out-offering everybody, but only by thinning down their truth. Soon, the last traces of truth will be negligible. What was once the “scandal of the cross” is unrecognizable. It has become not only respectable but all the rage, and all the weaker for it—history’s encore to the Palm Sunday crowd scene. Jesus again has multitudes who clamor about his kingdom, but few who carry his cross.

  Stop for a moment and survey the whole breathtaking scene: the three pressures of modernization, the two strategies for follow-up, the damage to Christian institutions and now the damage to Christian ideas. All this with barely a voice that can break into the Church’s final sleep.

  Undoubtedly you were deeply excited by some of the devastating counter-Christian arguments you were working on in Oxford. But even in your most ambitious moments, did you ever dream there could be a strategy of such sweeping scope and utter simplicity? I salute the Director. The plan’s the measure of his genius.

  MEMORANDUM 9

  Fossils and Fanatics

  FROM: DEPUTY DIRECTOR, CENTRAL SECURITY COUNCIL

  TO: DIRECTOR DESIGNATE, LOS ANGELES BUREAU

  CLASSIFICATION: ULTRA SECRET

  A few years ago I heard a prominent and controversial bishop of the Church of England regaling an audience with a story about the demise of an equally prominent and even more controversial Presbyterian minister and Ulster politician.

  The Ulsterman had arrived at the gates of heaven only to be stiffly redirected to “lower regions.” Later, in the middle of the night, there was an enormous commotion and banging at the gates.