Stealing Jesus: how fundamentalism betrays Christianity

by Bruce Bawer

  Mighty is our God Mighty is our King Mighty is our Lord Ruler of everything

  Glory to our God Glory to our King Glory to our Lord Ruler of everything.

  The music, simple and banal, seesaws between the tonic and subdominant, sounding like a cross between a TV-commercial jingle, a tune from the Barney TV show, and supermarket Muzak. Yet the people sing it with, yes, at least a modicum of enthusiasm, waving their hands above them—in some cases one hand, in some cases both. This is charismatic worship, or a tepid and pro forma version thereof. When the song ends, the band and the congregation proceed straight into another one, and then another and another. Musically and lyrically, the songs are interchangeable; there is no variation whatsoever in theme or musical style. I am shocked when the band moves into a fifth song: How can the congregation bear it? But this is only the beginning. The song count continues to rise—ten songs, fifteen, twenty:

  Lord I lift your name on high Lord I love to sing your praises I'm so glad you're in my life I'm so glad you came to save us

  The music continues for a full forty minutes. Plainly the point of this long stretch of music is to whip the people up into a frenzy and to drive home three basic themes: God's power, Christ's sacrifice, the Spirit's presence. And, of course, the obligation to praise. The emotional temperature in the room doesn't quite rise to the level of frenzy, but most of the people do seem to be getting into the intended spirit— or at least pretending to. When the music is finally over, the pastor says a prayer, which concludes, "... and God's people agreed when they said—"

  The congregation yells back, "Amen!"

  Time for the sermon. Again the people haul out their Bibles. The text is the epistle to Titus, whom Paul left in charge of the church in Crete. Though traditionally attributed to Paul, the letter is now thought by biblical scholars to have been written after Paul's time. Titus is one of the Bible's shortest books, only two or three pages long in most editions, but is frequently quoted in legalistic circles because it is jam-packed with strict directives on how to run a church. To be sure, Titus contains not only some of the more legalistic moments of the books attributed to Paul but also some of the more loving ones. The letter tells Titus, for example, to remind the Christians in Crete "to slander no one, to avoid quarrels, and always to show forbearance and a gentle disposition to all." On the other hand, it orders Titus to remind church members "to be submissive to the government and the authorities and to obey them" and enjoins him to "rebuke . . . sharply" those members who are "undisciplined"; it forbids him to appoint as an elder anyone whose children are not believers; and it slurs Cretans as "liars, vicious brutes, and lazy gluttons."

  Nineteenth-century Southern Baptists found in Titus a scriptural warrant for their peculiar institution: "Slaves are to respect their masters' authority in everything and to give them satisfaction; they are not to answer back, nor to pilfer, but are to show themselves absolutely trustworthy. In all this they will add lustre to the doctrine of God our Saviour."

  The epistle also sets forth a method by which members can be expelled from the church community. "If someone is contentious, he should be allowed a second warning; after that, have nothing more to do with him, recognizing that anyone like that has a distorted mind and stands self-condemned in his sin." This verse (Titus 3:10—11) is a favorite in legalistic churches today, in which it is often dragged out to justify expulsion—"disfellowship"—from congregations of people who have asked too many questions, violated sexual taboos, shown insufficient subservience, or professed the wrong doctrine. As it happens, this particular church in Georgia belongs to a chain of churches (it doesn't call itself a denomination) that is said to expel members who don't believe in the Rapture or who affirm the Calvinist doctrine of "once saved, always saved" rather than the Arminian view that one can fall from grace. (This chain of churches is, incidentally, one of the distinctive phenomena of today's legalistic Protestantism: The idea of a large church body in which power is centered, as in a privately held corporation, in a single entrepreneurial leader rather than in bishops or clergy or lay members seems characteristically American.)

  Like the epistle to Titus, the pastor's sermon proves to be a mixture of Church of Love and Church of Law. He begins by mentioning the TV show Rescue 911. It's exciting, he says, to see real-life rescues. And sometimes it's especially exciting because people who are rescued can then rescue someone else. I'm a bit surprised at the obviousness of where he's going with this: Plainly this is the beginning of an evangelism sermon. Sure enough, he goes on to say that evangelism can be very much like Rescue 911. Some of us are rescued for Christ, and others aren't: "There's not an in-between place." But there is a category of the rescued who don't use their lives properly afterward to rescue others. "They are divisive, they are actually hinderers.... Some of them think that they are saved but in fact they are not." He says that the chief question facing Christians is, "How can God use me to contribute to the process of rescuing other people?" This is what it's all about: not Rescue 911 but "Rescue one-on-one." God, the pastor tells us, "died in Christ for you. Put your name there. God died in Christ for Nancy." He points to a woman seated near the front. "He died in Christ for Joe." He points to a man a few seats away. The pastor continues to repeat the line over and over, each time inserting the name of a different member of the congregation whom he looks at and points to.

  This grammar-school spelling-drill approach is anything but unique in the world of legalistic Protestantism. In a novel titled Piercing the Darkness by the popular fundamentalist writer Frank E. Peretti, a Christian woman named Bernice Krueger evangelizes a troubled atheist who identifies herself as Betty. First Bernice outlines the atonement:

  "Jesus satisfied divine justice on that Cross. He bore the punishment in full, and God never had to bend the rules. That's why we call Jesus our Savior." Betty doesn't inquire into the logic of this divine transaction; she doesn't ask what would have been so awful about God bending the rules, or even what the rules were, exactly. What she does ask is, "Did . . . Did Jesus die for me?" Bernice replies: "Yes, He died for you." Betty presses her: "For me, for . . . For Betty Smith?" Bernice replies: "He died for Betty Smith just like he died for Bernice Krueger." Like the pastor in Georgia, Peretti is telling his readers: Jesus died for you, too. Getting that idea firmly fixed in people's heads and keeping it there is perhaps the most important part of a legalistic pastor's job.

  After quoting the passage from Titus about submission to government, the pastor explains that this means "Christians are to be exemplary citizens." He provides some historical background: "Rome had gotten so pagan and so blinded by Satan" that its leaders couldn't see that the Christians were their best citizens. Gotten so pagan? He makes it sound as if the Romans had been something other than pagan. As for the part about Christians being exemplary citizens, the pastor has, I note, failed to tell the full story: Once the Christians took over the Roman Empire, they became extremely intolerant citizens, carrying out, as the theologian Hans Kung has described it, "a persecution of heretics unique in the history of religion." Does anyone in the congregation know this? Guess not.

  "It's time," the pastor goes on to say, "for us to take another look at the way the church views the world around us. The world," he states emphatically, "needs your influence." His is the New Evangelical message of involvement in the world, not the strict fundamentalist principle of separation from it. "The world," the pastor declares, "can be very cruel in the way it treats Christians." But we mustn't, he insists, be cruel in return. Paraphrasing the letter to Titus, he tells his congregation, "Don't slander and hurl insults. Don't stir quarrels and conflicts. . . . Take a stand in a godly way, mature, faithful. Don't be offensive. . . . We've had enough offense on the part of Christians."

  Am I imagining a slight restiveness around me at the sound of this Church of Love rhetoric? Are some members of the congregation actually resisting what their pastor is saying? But no matter: The moment passes. The pastor stops lecturing about
the need for inoffensiveness and returns to his emphasis on confronting the world. "Let's take a stand against Satan!" he suggests. "There's a better country than the one we're in and that's Heaven." The exact relationship of this last comment to the preceding is unclear, but the congregation doesn't seem to notice. "Amen!" they shout lustily, pleased to hear what is plainly a familiar formula. (At the Christian Coalition convention in Washington in September 1996, the Reverend Daniel de Leon proclaimed, "We are all aliens in this world." And William Bennett told the audience, "Don't worry, this is not your city. Your city is the one that lasts forever!")

  The pastor then proceeds to leave the Church of Love talk in the dust. In Paul's time, as in our own, he pronounces darkly, there have been people who "followed false guides." These guides were awash in "hedonism . . . malice . . . envy"; they were "foolish" and "disobedient"; they were, in short, "unsaved." He reads a few sentences from Titus as the people follow along in their Bibles, many of them running their fingers along the page. "When we're dealing with the unsaved," he tells them, we need to exhibit "patience, forbearance." Saved and unsaved, saved and unsaved: The sermon has now come to rest on this all-important black-and-white dichotomy. The alternation is as simple and relentless as that between the tonic and subdominant in the praise songs. Looking around, I feel that a calm has settled over the church. This is the only message these people have come here for, the only one they want to hear—that they are destined for heaven and others are destined for hell.

  Out of the blue, the pastor mentions Christ's atoning sacrifice, and says, "It is what?"

  The people shout back, "A gift!" Plainly this is a routine in which they have been drilled.

  When you accept Christ as your savior, the pastor proclaims, you "kill the old thing and replace it with something new!"

  The fortyish man behind me says softly, "Amen."

  None of this, of course, has any particular relevance to the sermon text; what the pastor is doing, I realize, is carrying out a weekly attempt to keep the basic tenets of legalistic Christianity set firmly in these people's minds. His method: sheer numbing repetition. I remember the grammar-school teacher who made us write every new vocabulary word a hundred times. And the college German instructor who began every class by drawing on the blackboard the same chart showing the declension of the definite article. Der, des, den, dem. Die, der, die, den.

  The drill continues. "When a person's been saved," the pastor says, "he is what?"

  The people shout back, "A new creation!"

  "If you're out of Christ," says the pastor, "you're condemned. If you're in Christ, you're justified. . . . Christ is the hope of eternal life." Pausing, he looks out over his flock. "What would you do," he asks the congregation, "if I walked up to you after the service and told you I'd been in touch with a lawyer, and this lawyer had told me that you have an elderly relative that you've never heard of who lives in a faraway place, and that that relative is a millionaire, and that as soon as that relative died, you'd get it all? Would you be interested in the state of health of that relative?"

  There is scattered laughter.

  "Sure you would! Well, I'm here to tell you that we already have that relative and he's already died for you and left you a treasure that's much, much greater than millions of dollars—and do you know who that relative is?"

  "Jesus," murmurs the man behind me.

  "Jesus!" other people shout.

  "That's right," the pastor proclaims. "That relative is Jesus Christ!"

  "Amen!"

  The theology is chilling. As if the idea of substitutionary atonement weren't brutal enough, the pastor has managed to make the whole business even more monstrous by comparing Jesus to a rich stranger whose death we look forward to with glee because he has left us money. It is a conception of Jesus from which love has been entirely excluded and in which naked self-interest is everything. I look around for any indication that someone is disturbed or offended by the pastor's analogy. Nope.

  The pastor closes his sermon by asking his flock if they are "among those who have already been rescued" by Christ. "If so," he says, "you have every reason to be filled with zeal" to rescue others. If not, "I don't care how comfortable you are. ... If you are not inside Jesus Christ, you are outside Jesus Christ.... You need to be rescued, because you are standing on the precipice of an eternal hell" when instead "you could be standing as an inheritor of glory."

  So ends the sermon. The lights go down. The people take Communion. There is another bad song. The pastor ends the service by saying, "May the love of Christ fill you through this week. That's provided we have a week! He may be back before we get to the parking lot. I wouldn't be sorry, would you?"

  "No!" the people shout back.

  After the service, a stout fiftyish man walks up to me in the aisle, shakes my hand firmly, and barks out his name. I identify myself, and he suddenly drops what, by all indications, was going to be an effort at proselytizing. What was it that changed his mind? My non-southern accent? A certain resistance that he read in my voice? Or was one spoken word enough for him to tell that I'm gay?

  Outside the air is a bit nippy, but the sun warms my face. Walking to my car, I reflect on the service. Though the pastor connected Christianity and love more than once, his emphasis in addressing his congregation was on the fact that God loves them and on their need to love one another; absent from his remarks was the idea that they should love people outside the congregation too. One rescues others for Jesus not out of love for them but in order to confirm one's own salvation.

  On the surface, I muse, the church service I've just witnessed might seem pretty harmless, especially to someone unaccustomed to any other form of worship. But the whole tone of the proceedings was so strikingly different from what Christian worship can and should be. A successful church service—which may range from the austere to the magisterial—gives worshippers the feeling of having come closer to God, to one another, and to all creation; of having shed at least some degree of self-concern and anxiety about death; and of having been filled, at least to some extent, with gratitude, love for all humankind, and a desire to serve. This service I've just attended has done almost exactly the opposite: It's sought to appeal to the congregation's most selfish instincts, likening heaven to a killing in the lottery.

  To say this is not to criticize the people in the congregation. These are people brought up on TV and country music, not on books and complex ideas. The descendants of no-nonsense pioneers, they were not raised with a vocabulary for the spiritual or a habit of reflecting on ultimate meanings. That they attend a church like this is an indictment less of them than of the culture in which they have spent their lives—one in which it is possible to be rich in material goods but to starve culturally, intellectually, and spiritually without even realizing it. Many of them have doubtless been driven here by difficult circumstances, by empty lives that they need to believe have value and meaning. The theology of resentment works on them as effectively as does the politics of resentment. Certainly none of them are sufficiently well educated to recognize how M«-traditional their "traditional Christianity" is, or to know how much their pastor and their favorite televangelists distort everything from biblical scholarship to the views of the founding fathers. These are, in short, people who have been hurt; the problem is that churches like this one make it their business not to heal their pain but to exploit it, to turn it into a potentially lethal weapon against others, outsiders, the "unsaved."

  By the time I get to my car, members of the congregation are already starting their engines around me, pulling out of the lot, turning toward home. It's an ordinary Sunday in Georgia; no Rapture this morning.

  "The God that holds you over a pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: His wrath toward you burns like fire; He looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire; He is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in His sight; you are ten tho
usand times more abominable in His eyes than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended Him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet it is nothing but His hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment. .. . O sinner! Consider the fearful danger you are in."

  On July 8, 1741, Jonathan Edwards spoke these words from a pulpit in Enfield, Connecticut. Many years ago, when I first read "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" in a school textbook, I was glad that I lived in late-twentieth-century America, when such beliefs and preaching were a thing of the past. What I didn't realize was that many ministers in my own time, while less gifted than Edwards at conjuring up vivid images of eternal punishment, subscribed to a very similar theology. "Those of you who are hung up on love stories," the Pentecostal evangelist Stephen Hill roared in a 1997 sermon at his Pensacola megachurch, sounding very much like a latter-day Edwards, "need to hear the wrath of God! Don't live on Twinkies."

  Few legalistic pastors today, however, specialize in this kind of sermon, notwithstanding the occasional one-line reminder of the sort offered up by the pastor in Georgia ("You need to be rescued, because you are standing on the precipice of an eternal hell"). Edwards preached hellfire because his congregation contained people who had not declared themselves saved by Jesus and who, he believed, needed to be urged to "fly from the wrath to come" and sin no more. Edwards believed this so passionately, in fact, that he went too far for most of his flock: When, in a 1750 sermon, he named as "backsliders" the close relatives of some of his more powerful Northampton parishioners, he was voted out of his pulpit by a 10—1 majority.

  The situation in today's legalistic churches is very different. Most legalistic Protestants consider themselves saved. If an Edwards showed up and preached a sermon like "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," they would be baffled. "But we don't need to hear this," they would say. "Our salvation is assured. It's those others who are going to hell." Yes, legalistic pastors do preach on sin. But when they do, they almost invariably focus on sexual acts, especially those committed by other people, such as homosexuals. "Hell is other people," wrote Sartre; one might observe that in the view of legalistic Protestants today, hell is for other people.