The Last Christian on Earth

by Os Guinness

  This pitfall has become invaluable to us as the desire to create alternatives has grown more fashionable. “Alternative” is the adjective in vogue—alternative communities, alternative lifestyles, alternative education, and so on. The list is endless and the idea sounds radical enough. But “alternative” is often merely the term by which small communities parade their distinctiveness and aspire to be a counter-culture rather than the subculture they really are.

  Rhetoric and reality must part company in the end, of course. Without any effective opposition to the dominant system, conservative communities may be different, but they are also domesticated. They form a bastion against the world, rather than a bridgehead into it. You can test this social tameness by examining conservative preaching. In particular, listen for any prophetic diagnosis of culture in their sermons and, therefore, for any sign of tension between their Christian faith and their cultural fortunes. The gospel, so conservatives assure themselves, is “the power of God.” If preached, they claim, it will be a force for revolutionary change. Like an old ad for Heineken beer, Christian “salt and light” are supposed to refresh society where other reforms cannot reach.

  But in fact, even when the gospel Christians preach is orthodox and has strong personal impact, it often makes little social impact. The short circuit is this: However orthodox and forceful Christian doctrine is, if it is preached in a cultural vacuum it will eventually come to rationalize the status quo.

  You can see this effect in the burgeoning Christian rock festivals, in the gap between the explosive terminology of their language and the essential tameness of their lives. Talk of “dangerous discipleship” and “Jesus the true revolutionary” usually amounts to that—talk. It does for some young Christians what drugs do for their secular peers or the portraits of gurus do for devotees in the ashrams. And when the weekend high is over, they all troop tamely back to the same “real world.” Even the most revolutionary spiritual principles are quite harmless unless they are consciously brought into tension with social pressures. Therefore, so long as we can keep correct doctrine insulated from cultural diagnosis, our interests are secure.

  Pitfall 4: Infiltration

  The fourth pitfall is a favorite of mine. It has the elements of surprise and irony and can apply equally to conservatives who seek to withdraw and to those who seek to engage more offensively. It concerns the tendency of conservatism to be so preoccupied with its defense at certain points that it becomes wide open to infiltration at other points.

  Modern conservatism, like a top that needs to keep on spinning, is a movement in need of a cause. Traditional conservatism was self-assured, with almost everything on its side. Modern conservatism is ever-anxious, with almost everything against it. But give it a cause to concentrate its mind and absorb its energies, and its insecurities will be forgotten in a flash. If they can just rally to where the “real battle” is, conservatives think, all may yet be saved. With such “single-issue” concerns comes single-minded determination.

  That determination, you might think, would lead to feats of heroism. Occasionally it does. But in the long-term struggle, it invariably means that, being so well defended at one point, conservatives are carelessly undefended at others. They arm themselves to the teeth at the front door while we slip in at the back.

  Even if all-round vigilance were possible in the modern world, it is beyond most people, so the risk of contamination from modernization is always high. But for the conservatives, with their floating anxiety and their constant need for a cause, all-round vigilance is virtually out of the question from the start. Do an end-run around “the cause,” and you’ll be amazed at the unguarded flank.

  A current example of this is the American Evangelical alarm over “secular humanism” and their touching blindness to their own secularization. It is true to say that science, technology, politics, wealth and all the great secularizing forces are doing their work behind this generation’s back.

  This openness to infiltration sometimes results in absurd situations. Certain Christian colleges in the U.S., for example, require a student to sign a pledge not to attend films, while allowing television sets in every dormitory. If you examine this kind of mentality at a deeper level, you will discover how we turn the world-denying into the worldly.

  Take a typical fundamentalist. He has a sharper nose for certain things than a hunting hound, and can pick up the scent of heresy or modernism a mile away. Yet you will not find anyone more insensible to back-door worldliness of all kinds, which has crept in under his nose. Thus, safely ensconced in their untainted orthodoxy, many conservative Christians have distinguished themselves in this century by a catalog of profane virtues—racism, class-consciousness, materialism and nationalism, to name a few.

  As a Baptist leader put it to some fellow-ministers in a flash of rare perceptiveness, “If a man is drunk on wine, you’ll throw him out. But if he’s drunk on money, you’ll make him a deacon.”

  The result we are after as always is a damning disparity between what the conservatives preach and what they practice. Kipling once remarked about King James I, “He wrote that monarchs were divine, and left a son who proved they weren’t.” Conservatives today are much the same. Take their support for authority of the Bible, for example. Beliefs about it have rarely been stricter; behavior under it has rarely been looser.

  Conservatives claim to be a massive movement of resistance to the culture of today. But as we have seen from their uncritical use of modern methods (such as television and political action committees), and their unquestioning adherence to current values (such as personal peace and prosperity), no one is more modern. Not even the much-despised liberal is more liberal.

  Our most shining success is with fundamentalism. When the movement started, its concern was a “return to the fundamentals,” a laudable aim that no self-respecting sports coach could disagree with. But as fundamentalism spread throughout the twentieth century, it morphed into something different: fundamentalism has become a modern reaction to the modern world. Today, there are fundamentalist variations in all the world’s religions, mostly obviously in Islam. There is even a secularist strain—the New Atheists are rightly called “fundamentalist secularists” even by their own side.

  Needless to say, our prime target is Christian fundamentalism, and this is how we proceed. When fundamentalists get all fired up to fight the “real battle” that their leaders identify, they slip easily into a “what-ever it takes” mentality. The evil they fight is so awful, and its triumph so unthinkable, that their ends can justify any and all means. That was easy with Islamic, Hindu, and Buddhist terrorists, who passionately justify the slaughter of the innocents. But don’t overlook the Christian right. The Adversary’s strict injunction to his side to “love your enemies” has routinely been thrown out the window. Certain pro-life campaigners even became so inflamed by the righteousness of their own cause that they trashed the Ten Commandments and justified the murder of an abortionist. Back to the fundamentals? Hardly.

  Pitfall 5: Oscillation

  The fifth pitfall is fascinating. It mostly ensnares those conservatives who attempt to resist the surrounding culture actively. This pitfall concerns the tendency of conservatism to produce individuals who swing violently from one extreme to another.4

  “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” runs the familiar maxim, and this pitfall is its religious equivalent. Do I need to name names? You must have seen its effects. Yesterday’s conservative fundamentalist suddenly becomes the Pied Piper for today’s Emergent doubters, yesterday’s Bible College student the leading skeptic about the Bible’s authority, yesterday’s student Christian group leader today’s radical theological revisionist, yesterday’s conservative Catholic today’s revolutionary Marxist, yesterday’s advocate of “theistic proofs” today’s enthusiast for encounter groups, yesterday’s son of a Christian leader today’s sharpest tongued attacker of his father’s faith—and so on. Modern conservatives are oscillation-prone—and
having swung from one side to the other, the rest of his or her life is spent in a series of compulsive attempts to purge a new-found liberal soul of its immature conservative past.

  Again it is the permanent precariousness of conservatism in today’s world that sets the swing in motion. Conducting a ceaseless defense is intellectually and psychologically demanding, which puts it beyond the capacity of most. This paves the way for the old secret service technique of turning and playing back an enemy’s agents, which is called “coat-trailing.” We simply apply consistent pressure until the inherent insecurity of extreme conservatism shows through. The sheer attrition of the modern scene is often enough to do it, and the temptation then is to join the other side. As you will discover, it is not that even enthusiasts are defection prone, but that enthusiasts are especially.

  This susceptibility reaches its height at times when the icebergs of traditional certainty begin to melt and break up, particularly among those who speak out for the faith. More exposed, they are more aware of the precariousness of their position and therefore more tempted to jump.

  In the eighteenth century, it was the iceberg of mainstream Protestant orthodoxy that broke up first. Now, following the second Vatican Council it is the Catholics’ turn, and the air is blue with the radical rhetoric of ex-priests, former nuns and one-time altar boys scrambling for the safety of new causes. Evangelicalism has been touched by this susceptibility in the past, although sporadically and in random ways. Soon we will make it the focus of a concentrated campaign.

  Pitfall 6: Assimilation

  The sixth pitfall has snared conservatism for centuries, but now comes in a distinctive modern form. It concerns the tendency of conservatism to be absorbed into a culture until its Christian identity is lost complelety.5

  This danger was obviously greater in the past when traditional society and conservative religion were natural allies. When those two joined hands you could barely tell one from the other. Together they had the power to block all processes of change and stifle any channels of dissent, creating a monolithic Christian civilization. In short, Christendom and the Constantinian solution.

  We invariably gained from such a liaison because the fruit of the union was the secularization of the Church rather than the sanctification of the culture. This assimilation occurred through the mixing of the bloodlines. Gradually the culture absorbed the Church until identification became equation. The Church then doubled for culture. Eventually it was the culture with almost nothing left over.

  You may think this is impossible for us to repeat today. Modern conservatism, after all, now defines itself in terms of its resistance to mainstream modern culture. How then can it be assimilated?

  The answer is that conservatism can still be assimilated, although less easily, because modern culture is neither uniform nor monolithic. Because of choice and change, diversity is the essence of modern culture. It is therefore quite possible that conservatism may stoutly resist what it perceives as the central drive and danger of the modern world and be oblivious to assimilation at other points. In this sense, the pitfall of assimilation lies in line with the pitfall of infiltration, but just a little further on.

  One clear example occurs where conservative religion is used to bolster cultures that are under stress in the modern world (as we saw earlier in apartheid South Africa and in hyper-Protestant Ulster, and to a lesser extent in the South of the United States). Such conservatives are clear about the dangers they are fighting (“Communism,” “popery” and “secular humanism,” or whatever). But the force of their attacks blinds them to the extent of their own assimilation to their own cultures or subcultures. The fact that these cultures at times show an evil face is a bonus to us, but our gains begin much earlier, just as soon as the assimilation begins.

  Pitfall 7: Exploitation and/or Rejection

  This last pitfall is a logical extension of the sixth, and it is another that has existed for centuries. It concerns the tendency of conservatism to be exploited because of its usefulness and—sooner or later—to be rejected because of this exploitation.

  Exploitation is merely putting the process of assimilation to work. To get along with the culture, the Church must go along with what the culture wants. Becoming one with the culture is what qualifies the Church for bonding the culture. Acting as spiritual halo and as social glue are two parts of the same role.

  Don’t always expect a nation’s leaders to exploit the Christian faith consciously and deliberately. Machiavellianism of that sort is rare, though certainly present today. It happened, for example, in several recent U.S. presidential elections, when the attitudes of many conservative Christians made them an obvious target. Confusing Christian principles and conservative politics, romanticizing American history and relying on single-issue politics, they were ripe for the designs of skillful manipulators. Our experience, however, is that conservative religion is best exploited when used unconsciously. Each attack on the national or tribal interest it serves is then perceived—and answered—as an attack on the faith itself. The truth and the tribe are one.

  This turns conservative Christian faith into ideology in its purest religious form—that is, spiritual ideas that serve as weapons for social interests. (It also turns the Adversary into judge.)

  You can see why we prefer to keep the exploitation unconscious. The Christian faith turned into ideology involves self-deception, which is a very different thing from a lie. Both lies and ideologies are concerned with untruth, but while the liar knows he is lying, the ideologist believes he is telling the truth. The ideologist misleads others, but does so unknowingly, a victim of his own propaganda.6

  Our first gain is this: In deceiving themselves without knowing it, conservatives bring to their ideology a passion of sincerity that even a brazen and experienced liar could never match. Our second gain is more obvious. Ideology is a dirty word today (and far worse to many people than lying). It therefore springs readily to the lips of the critics of conservatism, and when it sinks into the minds of conservatives themselves, it either devastates them or makes them twice as mad as they might have been.

  As a counter-apologist, you know that criticism of an opponent’s position as “only an ideology” is much abused today. Any argument can be dismissed as ideology—the “moral rhetoric” being distinguished from the “real motives”—once an alternative standard of judgment is imposed. The trouble is that such criticism is itself double-edged. If Communists can accuse capitalists of being victims of their ideology (judged from the Communist perspective), capitalists can return the compliment. The one possibility includes the other. The boomerang can always return.

  Christians, however, cannot escape the charge of ideology so easily. Their ideology can be exposed as such without having to go any further than applying their own Christian criteria. Which are the spiritual ideas? Which are the social interests? Was the Christian faith being exploited, wittingly or unwittingly, in, say, South Africa or Ulster or the American South, or, more recently, by the Republican Party (and soon, perhaps, by the Democrats)?

  The answer is manifestly yes. Any serious discussion in which Christian principles were distinguished from cultural practices would reveal that. But is this likely to be recognized? The answer, I am equally certain, is no. Assimilation, you see, occurs prior to exploitation. Thus, once it is confused with a culture, the Christian faith can be used by the culture. Exploitation is the price of equation.

  In addition, this movement toward assimilation and exploitation builds up powerful pressures that can be channeled toward the rejection of the Christian faith. “Who among us would be a free thinker,” asked Nietzsche, “were it not for the Church?”7 But is not the same often true today of the African guerilla raging against Christians-gone-racist? Or of the I.R.A. supporter hardened by Protestantism-turned-intolerant? Or of the cultured agnostic disdaining the crassness of knee-jerk Christian opinions? “Christianity-turned-anything” is like meat that has turned bad. At its worst, the stench of
Christian worldliness is intolerable.

  Usually, the more worldly and corrupt the Christian faith becomes, the stronger the backlash against it. Yet Christians caught in the backlash often do not examine its significance. (Is this persecution because of faithfulness, or rejection because of worldliness?) Even if they do try to detect worldliness, they tend to measure it solely by the yardstick of Christian origins (judging it as a decline from, or distortion of, the original faith). What they fail to do is measure it also in terms of its outcome, the sort of backlash it is producing.

  We can almost always count on this backlash. Some reaction is likely, if in a limited way, even at the preliminary state of assimilation. By the final stages of exploitation, the reaction is virtually inevitable and probably widespread. The trick is to ensure that cultural assimilation is a long slow process of fermentation. With the elapse of enough time it will be impossible for the Church to disengage from the culture without being disillusioned itself. Its strength of will and independence of mind will have long since gone.

  Look at the collusion of the Church and the political right in France after 1789 (the so-called alliance of saber and font), or at Anglican political conservatism in nineteenth-century England—that old jibe about the Church of England being “the Tory party on its knees” (today it’s the liberal conscience piously reflecting).8 How accurate these pictures are doesn’t concern us. What matters is that they were felt to be the situation, and that is a key to understanding the anti-Christian forces in both periods. At the heart of some of the most militant and effective anti-Christian attacks in history is disappointed faith. Worldly Christian faith, especially in its conservative form, brings about its own rejection.