by Bruce Bawer
• Legalistic Protestantism believes that individuals should be wary of trusting their own minds and emotions, for these can be manipulated by Satan, and that questions and doubts are to be resisted as the work of the Devil; nonlegalistic Protestantism believes that the mind is a gift of God and that God wants us to think for ourselves, to follow our consciences, to ask questions, and to listen for his still, small voice.
• Legalistic Protestantism sees "truth" as something established in the Bible and known for sure by true Christians; nonlegalistic Protestantism sees truth as something known wholly only by God toward which the belief statements of religions can only attempt to point the way.
• Legalistic Protestantism reads the Bible literally and considers it the ultimate source of truth; nonlegalistic Protestantism insists that the Bible must be read critically, intelligently, and with an understanding of its historical and cultural contexts.
• Legalistic Protestantism encourages a suspicion of aesthetic values and a literalistic mentality that tends to thwart spiritual experience; nonlegalistic Protestantism encourages a recognition of mystery and beauty as attributes of the holy.
Some legalistic Protestants are fundamentalists, whose emphasis is on keeping themselves apart from the evil mainstream culture and thus pure; others might more accurately be described as conservative evangelicals, whose emphasis is on bringing the word of Jesus to the "unsaved," or as charismatics, who seek to model their worship on early Christians' miraculous experiences with healing, prophecy, and "speaking in tongues"; some may consider themselves to be all three at once. Members of all these groups believe in a wrathful God who rewards "true believers" with an eternity in heaven and condemns all others to an eternity in hell.
More legalistic Protestants belong to the Southern Baptist Convention (the nation's largest Protestant group) than to any other denomination; many others belong to such Pentecostal bodies as the Assemblies of God and the Church of God, which place special emphasis on charismatic manifestations; still others belong to congregations, Baptist or otherwise, that are independent (often fiercely so) of any established denomination and that, in both worship and doctrine, may strike a unique balance among fundamentalist, evangelical, and charismatic features. Many mainline church members are also legalists, though the percentage varies widely: The United Church of Christ contains far fewer legalists, for example, than does the United Methodist Church. As noted, so-called traditionalist Catholics, who in earlier generations would never have been grouped (either by themselves or by others) with Protestant fundamentalists, fall into the legalistic category; so do most Mormons, Seventh-day Adventists, and Jehovah's Witnesses. Though many in this category would not consider many others in it to be genuine Christians at all, they share a propensity for narrow theological views and reactionary social and cultural values, and consequently they tend to function as practical allies in the so-called culture war against "secular humanism."
Fundamentalist, evangelical, and charismatic Christianity cannot easily be discussed and understood without reference to the distinctive characteristics of American culture. Yes, these forms of legalistic Christianity claim adherents on every continent; but it is in America that they have taken root most firmly and borne the most fruit. They barely exist in Western Europe; their success elsewhere owes everything to American missionary work among the poor and undereducated. In their suspicion of the intellect and their categorical assertion that the Bible contains all truth, these kinds of Christianity reflect the American distrust of mind described by Richard Hofstadter in his book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life; indeed, they can be understood as ways of avoiding the obligation to think—and, especially, to think for oneself. As William Ray puts it, "fundamentalism demands believers, not thinkers"; Ray's observation that "no evidence, no logic, no personal experience, nothing can change the fundamentalist's mind about 'revealed truth' "applies equally to conservative evangelicals and charismatic's. "Questioning 'revealed truth' in any way, even hypothetically," notes Ray, "challenges the . . . belief system at its core. . . . The more successfully any 'revealed truth' is challenged, the more vehemently the challenge must be rejected."
Why did this kind of religion develop in America, of all places? Well, first of all, America is the place to which the Puritans came, and their fixation on stark antitheses (God and Satan, saints and sinners), their conviction that you're damned unless you believe exactly the right doctrine, and their tendency to equate immorality with sex all helped lay the foundations for today's legalistic Christianity. So did the pragmatism and materialism of the pioneers, whose respect for "honest work" and suspicion of professors, philosophers, and others who don't produce anything "real" spelled success for faiths that involved quantifiable sacrifice, little or no abstract reflection, and a concrete payoff in the form of a tangible heaven. Those pioneers' individualistic sentiments, moreover, made them distrust ecclesiastical elites and accept the right of every person to interpret the Bible according to his or her own lights; this emphasis on scripture was also fed by the notion of America as a new Eden, which, as the religious historian George M. Marsden has noted, "readily translated into Biblical primitivism," the idea that "the Bible alone should be one's guide." Yet given those pioneers' literal-'mindedness and aversion to abstract interpretation, it was a short—and disastrous—step from the idea of the Bible as guide to a twisted insistence on biblical literalism.
Nonlegalistic Protestants figure far less often in the mainstream media than do legalists. Indeed, they sometimes seem virtually invisible. They worship a God of love, and they envision the church, at its best, as a Church of Love. They tend to belong to mainline Protestant churches or to relatively small bodies such as the Quakers and Unitarians. Some are Catholics; some are even Baptists or Seventh-day Adventists. If the public face of conservative Christians today is that of Pat Robertson and his Christian Coalition, liberal Christians as yet have no public face to speak of. Recently, liberal Christians have formed such national groups as the Interfaith Alliance and Call to Renewal, but so far they have failed to receive even a fraction of the media attention routinely accorded to the Christian Coalition. Few Americans even know they exist.
Nonlegalistic Christianity has its problems. Those who worship a God of love can sometimes appear to reduce the majesty and mystery of the divine to something pat and shallow. While legalists obsess over the presence of evil in the world, nonlegalists can seem naive, even blinkered, about it. How to explain the existence of evil, after all, if God is totally good? If God does love all his children unconditionally, then why do so many people live out their lives feeling worthless, lonely, and unloved? In a world full of heartless brutality, belief in a God of wrath is hardly inexplicable. Karen Armstrong, the distinguished author of A History of God and hardly a legalistic Christian, has written that we must "accept evil in the divine" in order to "accept the evil we encounter in our own hearts." This is certainly one solution to the age-old problem of evil, and it is consistent with much that we read about God in the Old Testament. But it is not the religion of Jesus.
In any event, the problem with legalistic Christianity is not simply that it afErms that God can be evil; it's that it imagines a manifestly evil God and calls that evil good. In effect, as we shall see, it worships evil. In America right now, millions of children are taught by their legalistic Christian parents and ministers to revere a God of wrath and to take a sanguine view of human suffering. They are taught to view their fellow Americans not as having been "created equal," as the Declaration of Independence would have it, but as being saved or unsaved, children of God or creatures of Satan; they are taught not to respect those most different from themselves but to regard them as the enemy, to resist their influence, and to seek to restrict their rights. This is not only morally offensive, it's socially dangerous—and it represents, for obvious reasons, a very real menace to democratic civil society. America's founding fathers, as I shall show, respected religion because they saw it a
s strengthening people's best selves and checking their worst selves; too often, legalistic Christianity—which has deceitfully portrayed the founding fathers as its philosophical allies—does precisely the opposite.
Now, what do I mean by the title Stealing Jesus'?
In recent years, legalistic Christians have organized into a political movement so successful that when many Americans today hear the word Christianity, they think only of the legalistic variety. The mainstream media, in covering the so-called culture wars, generally imply that there are only two sides to choose from: the God-of-wrath Christian Right and the godless secular Left. Many Americans scarcely realize that there is any third alternative. And many, unable to take the Christian Right seriously as a cultural force, view it as a holdover of "traditional Christianity" that has inexplicably lingered into these "secular times" and will gradually fade away.
This notion is dangerously misguided. To be sure, the kind of legalistic Christianity that flourishes in America today does have a long historical background of which Americans need to be more aware—and which I will briefly trace in these pages. Legalism has, then, been a part of the Christian picture from the beginning. Yet today's legalistic Protestantism is very much (to borrow a favorite legalistic term) a "new creation." As new species evolve from old because they are specially equipped to endure a changed environment, so today's legalism—an animal unlike any that had ever existed before—emerged as an adaptation to modern secular democratic society. Far from being a vestige of traditional Christian faith, in short, it is a distinctively modern phenomenon—one that, while making tradition its rallying cry, has at the deepest level betrayed Christianity's most precious traditions. In fact it has, as we shall see, carried out a tripartite betrayal:
• Doctrine. It has replaced the traditional emphases of Christian belief with bizarre doctrinal strictures that have no legitimate basis in scripture, reason, or tradition.
• Authority. It has replaced the foundational Protestant trust in the individual's "soul competency" with a dictatorial system of clerical absolutism.
• Law. It has replaced Christ's gospel message of love, which drew on the noblest parts of the Hebrew Scriptures, with the harshest edicts from the Pentateuch, the epistles of Paul, and the Book of Revelation.
Born out of anger, modern legalistic Christianity has, over the long arc of the twentieth century, become steadily angrier in reaction to spreading secularism. During that period it has also spread like a cancer, winning adherents by the million and posing an increasingly serious threat to other faiths and to democratic freedoms. It has, in the process, warped Christianity into something ugly and hateful that has little or nothing to do with love and everything to do with suspicion, superstition, and sadism. And, quite often, it denies the name of Christianity to followers of Jesus who reject its barbaric theology. In essence, then, it has stolen Jesus—yoked his name and his church to ideas, beliefs, and attitudes that would have appalled him.
Yet to an extraordinary extent, the American media—which are widely denounced as liberal and which tend to be controlled and staffed by secularists and by nonlegalistic Christians—have allowed their own way of using the word Christian to be strongly influenced by legalistic Christian activists. This is especially true, unsurprisingly, of the conservative press. In 1996, the right-wing policy magazine American Enterprise published a special issue on religion in which the word Christian was routinely used to mean only legalists. One article referred to the increasing "involvement of Christians in school boards"; another gauged the "Christian influence" on the media and adverted to "Christian media" and "Christian periodicals." Over and over, in short, the word Christian was used in a narrow way to include only legalistic Christians and to exclude pretty much everybody else. Certainly there aren't "more Christians" on school boards or on Capitol Hill than there used to be; there are simply more legalistic Christians in these places.
Such usage is probably to be expected in a periodical like American Enterprise, whose editors consider legalistic Christians their ideological allies. But it is rather more surprising in the case of the New York Times, which legalistic Christians almost universally despise for what they view as its liberal, anti-Christian slant. Given the fact that legalistic Christians tend to view the Times as their single greatest enemy in the media establishment, and given the Times's history of extremely careful usage, it was remarkable to find Times religion reporter Gustav Niebuhr, in a 1996 article, using the word Christian to mean a legalistic Protestant. Niebuhr refers to "Christian booksellers" whose "Christian bookstores" feature "Christian music videos" by "Christian musicians." That neither Niebuhr nor his editors considered it inappropriate to say "Christian" rather than, say, "conservative evangelical" indicates the extent of the Religious Right's success at getting even some of the most responsible and reflective elements of mainstream America to accept, however unconsciously, the notion that legalists are the only true Christians—or, at the very least, are in some way "more" Christian, or more urgently or authentically or fully Christian, than other Christians.
The increasing tendency to use the word Christian to mean only legalistic Protestants has given the word an unpleasant flavor for many Americans—Christians included. In a 1996 sermon, a friend of mine who is an Episcopal priest recalled that he cringed when, at a social event, he met a man "who rather quickly identified himself as a Christian." When the man said the word Christian, several other words immediately went through my friend's mind: "bigot, arrogant, mindless, intolerant, rigid, mean-spirited." Though the encounter proved pleasant, my friend was struck by his initial reaction to the man's self-identification as a Christian, and by the fact that the word had come to stand for so many bad things that even a devout clergyman could find himself recoiling at the sound of it.
A friend of mine who teaches theology at a Catholic university noted in a 1996 personal letter that at a recent meeting of his academic department, "one of my colleagues pointed out that the administration has found it unwise to use the word 'Christian' in its official statements. . . . Why unwise? Because in the public perception 'Christian' is hitched to 'Coalition.'" Indeed, as the Reverend Canon John L. Peterson, the secretary-general of the Anglican Consultative Council, observed in his opening remarks at an international evangelism meeting in 1995, "in certain parts of the world the word Christian has become an embarrassment because it has been aligned with movements which are contrary to the Loving Christ that is at the heart of our message. I hold my head in shame to hear Jesus' name being affiliated with political movements that isolate, inhibit and breed hate and discontentment between human beings."
Why haven't nonlegalistic Christians made more of an effort to rescue the word Christian from the negative connotations it has acquired in the minds of many Americans? Partly, I think, because nonlegalistic Christians are used to thinking of religion as a private matter; they aren't in the habit of talking about what they believe, let alone organizing politically to do so. Partly because they feel cowed into silence by the aggressive, unapologetic manner in which legalists draw boundaries between "true Christians" (themselves) and false ones. And partly, perhaps, because they have a quite proper attitude of awe and humility about the fact that they are Christians—and an alertness to the danger of seeming smug, strident, and self-congratulatory in their profession of faith.
Yet one unfortunate result of this reticence is that the nonlegalistic Christian point of view has played an almost invisible role in the discussions of religion and "values" issues that have roiled our society in recent years. Instead, those discussions are almost invariably represented in the mainstream media as a clear-cut contest between "Christians" (that is, legalists), who supposedly uphold responsibility, values, and family, and liberal secular humanists, who support rights, tolerance, and separation of church and state. A major problem with this vision of the conflict is that neither side of it, as presented by the media, is speaking for Jesus Christ—for what he was and is really about. In
deed, it often seems that the media, secular liberals, and legalistic Christians alike take for granted that the most prominent legalistic spokespeople—men and women like Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed, Phyllis Schlafly, and James Dobson—do speak for Christianity. Even as many secular media figures privately smirk at legalistic Christians and tilt coverage in favor of secular humanism, they never publicly challenge the legalists' claim to speak on behalf of the Body of Christ— because the Body of Christ is, to them, not something of value.
The time has come for this challenge to be made. For to be a serious nonlegalistic Christian in America today is to recognize that the word Christian—and, more important, the real living Christ—are crying out to be unshackled from the prejudices and precepts to which legalistic Christians have bound them. To be a serious nonlegalistic Christian is to recognize that while legalists present themselves as "true Christians," the narrow doctrines they profess, the authoritarianism they practice, and the laws they uphold represent a damaging distortion and subversion of Jesus' message. And it is to recognize that in recent years, even as serious biblical scholars have answered with increasing clarity the question of who Jesus was and what he was about, legalists have radically redefined Jesus, condemning the principles he really stood for and instead identifying him with their own ugliest tendencies. Meanwhile, secular Americans have looked on blindly or indifferently for the most part either not realizing or not caring what was going on. And most nonlegalistic Christians have held their tongues.
Yet to examine the nearly two thousand years of tension between the Church of Law and the Church of Love—a tension that has mounted at an increasing rate around the world, and in America above all, over the course of this century—is to feel that the present millennial moment in America is a moment of truth for Christianity, a moment when there is an urgent need for the Church of Law to be challenged. This challenge will almost certainly have to come from within the mainline Protestant churches, and it will have to be issued by Christians whose unfamiliarity with the present conflict's historical background I hope to remedy here. I will seek to do this by showing how discontinuous much of today's Christianity is with the teachings of Jesus; by describing how extreme such Christianity has become in twentieth-century America; by demonstrating how fully it has succeeded in usurping the name of Christianity; by explaining why these developments endanger the stability, democracy, and pluralism not only of the United States but also of the world in which it is now the sole superpower; and by emphasizing how necessary it is—for the health of Christianity, of America, and of the world (which legalistic Protestants are at present aggressively evangelizing)—to reverse these developments now.