Stealing Jesus: how fundamentalism betrays Christianity

by Bruce Bawer

  There is plenty of talk in many legalistic churches about God's love, but it is a love that is not often truly experienced as love. The Georgia pastor's comparison of Jesus to a millionaire whose death one eagerly awaits is typical of the way in which many legalists think about the God whom they claim to love and whom they describe as loving them. In a two-page "Statement of Faith" issued by First Baptist Church of Atlanta—which is one of the nation's most important legalistic churches and whose pastor, Charles Stanley, is a leading Southern Baptist—several doctrines are cataloged, including "Atonement for Sin," "Salvation," and "The Great Commission." There is no mention of the Great Commandment; nor does the word love appear anywhere in the document. The word lust does make an appearance, though, under the heading of "The Christian Walk": "We are called with a holy calling, to walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit, and so to live in the power of the indwelling Spirit that we will not fulfill the lust of the flesh." Though Jesus excoriated wealth, violence, and inhumanity while going out of his way to affirm his fellowship with prostitutes and adulterers, "the lust of the flesh" is the only sin cited by name in First Baptist's "Statement of Faith." Churches like First Baptist would do well to heed the words of the distinguished theologian E. P. Sanders: "Jesus was not given to censure but to encouragement; he was not judgemental but compassionate and lenient; he was not puritanical but joyous and celebratory."

  "How these Christians love one another!" exclaimed observers of the early followers of Jesus. Nowadays many self-styled Christians are more notable for whom they hate. For many, the doctrine of eternal punishment for unbelievers is not a stumbling block to faith but one of its attractions. What, after all, is the good of being saved unless others are damned? Why go to church and put money in the plate unless you're guaranteed a payoff that others are denied? A line from the second letter to the Corinthians—"Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness?"—represents one of Saint Paul's uglier moments, and is a favorite of legalistic Protestants, quoted frequently in both churches and homes. Legalists are taught to view strangers not as fellow children of God but as possible agents of Satan. As an ex-fundamentalist told the writer Stefan Ulstein in an interview for his book Growing Up Fundamentalist, "When you go to school you're 'behind enemy lines.' Your teachers, your classmates, are all potential enemies, and you have to be on guard all the time."

  Indeed, to be a committed legalistic Protestant is to have a powerful, black-and-white sense of the conflict of good and evil. A former fundamentalist described the mind-set to me as follows: "There's no more gray. You're separated from this world and at the same time inhabiting an unseen world, in which you're fighting an unseen battle against the unseen Enemy. That's what fundamentalism is about: the Enemy."

  For legalistic Protestants, Satan is a constant, overwhelming presence, the same yesterday, today, and forever. "It's a whole different mentality," the ex-fundamentalist explained. "You not only think about God all the time, you think about the Devil all the time. Everywhere you go, in every encounter with other people, you ask yourself whether this is of the Devil. He's under every bush." One thing the charismatic revival brought to fundamentalists and evangelicals, she added, was a heightened sense that they were able to detect such demonic activity. "We believed we had entered into this spiritual realm that other people just aren't tuned in to."

  This aspect of the legalistic sensibility is vividly illuminated by two novels entitled This Present Darkness (1986) and Piercing the Darkness (1989). Written by Frank E. Peretti, these books, as the theologian Mark A. Noll has written, "set the tone for evangelical assessment of cause-and-effect connection in the world." In addition to enjoying a huge readership among legalistic Christians—the cover of the paperback edition of This Present Darkness boasts that over two million copies of it are currently in print—they have served as the models for a whole genre of legalistic fiction.

  As both novels are extremely similar in story and theme, I will focus here only on the earlier novel, This Present Darkness. It is set in Ash-ton, a small town that "for generations . . . had taken pride in its grassroots warmth and dignity and had striven to be a good place for its children to grow up." But things have changed. Now Ashton is beset by "inner turmoils, anxieties, fears, as if some kind of cancer was eating away at the town and invisibly destroying it." What with crime and a loss of neighborliness, "life here was gradually losing its joy and simplicity, and no one seemed to know why or how." Summed up neatly here is the way legalistic Christians of every generation feel about the changes they're living through. Their modest knowledge of history enables them to believe that the past was simple, virtuous, and changeless; their undereducation makes it easy for them to be confused and daunted by what they see happening around them.

  Peretti's story centers on a David-and-Goliath face-off between good and evil. The story's David is a slight young man named Hank Busche, the newly hired fundamentalist pastor of the town's "little dinky" house of worship, Ashton Community Church. As the story begins, Hank has just disfellowshipped a member, Lou, for committing adultery. As he tells his wife, Mary, "We did just what the Bible says: I went to Lou, then John and I went to Lou, and then we brought it before the rest of the church, and then we, well, we removed him from fellowship." Yet some members of the church, led by police chief Alf Brummel, are angry: "They started giving me all this stuff about judging not lest I be judged." Replies Mary (who, in good legalistic fashion, is consistently meek and supportive of her husband): "Well, what on earth is wrong with Alf Brummel? Has he got something against the Bible or the truth or what?" Thus does Peretti make it clear at the outset that, from a legalistic point of view, Hank and Mary are the good guys, obeying Saint Paul's strict, legalistic guidelines for church leadership and dismissing out of hand Jesus' injunction to "judge not, lest ye be judged."

  Hank and Mary face formidable odds. First there's the local college, which Peretti depicts as a hotbed of pretentious elitism and dangerous anti-Christian ideas. Early in the novel, Marshall Hogan, the editor of Ashton's newspaper, drops by the campus and hears part of a lecture as he passes a classroom. "Yeah," he reflects, "here was more of that college stuff, that funny conglomeration of sixty-four-dollar words which impress people with your academic prowess but can't get you a paying job." When he enters his daughter Sandy's class and sees her professor, a woman named Juleen Langstrat, Marshall senses something powerful and negative in the air; he later learns that Langstrat has all kinds of ideas about "the Source, the Universal Mind," that she has derived "from the Eastern religions, the old mystic cults and writings." All these terms are designed to set off legalistic Christians' alarm bells: paganism!

  Another danger zone is the town's major house of worship, Ashton United Christian Church, which is directly across the street from Hank's little church. Peretti describes it at some length: "one of the large, stately-looking edifices around town, constructed in the traditional style with heavy stone, stained glass, towering lines, majestic steeple. ... It was a respected establishment, Young was a respected minister, the people who attended the church were respected members of the community." The average legalistic Protestant reader will immediately get the point: Peretti is depicting the typical mainline church, the kind that such readers regard as apostate. Legalistic Protestant readers will also know what to think of Pastor Young. When Marshall, a member of his parish, comes to discuss Sandy, who has left home and hasn't called, Young replies as follows:

  Marshall, it sounds like she's just exploring, just trying to find out about the world, about the universe she lives in. . . . I'm sure she would feel much more free to call if she could find understanding hearts at home. It's not for us to determine what another person must do with himself, or think about his place in the cosmos. Each person must find his own way, his own truth. If we're ever going to get along like any kind of civilized family on this earth, we're going
to have to learn to respect the other man's right to have his own views. . . . All the questions you're struggling with, the matters of right and wrong, or what truth is, or our different views of these issues . . . so many of these things are unknowable, save in the heart. We all feel the truth, like a common heartbeat in each of us. Every human has the natural capacity for good, for love, for expecting and striving for the best interests of himself and his neighbor. . . . Your God is where you find Him, and to find Him, we need only to open our eyes and realize that He is truly within all of us. We've never been without Him at all, Marshall; it's just that we've been blinded by our ignorance, and that has kept us from the love, security, and meaning that we all desire.

  People like Peretti have taught legalistic Protestants how to react when they hear speeches of this sort from people claiming to speak for God—they should pull back reflexively, for such pap is the work of Satan, who is trying to sucker them in. In the real world, of course, many nonlegalistic Christians do speak in such terms to legalists (even Ralph Reed talks like this when he's trying to make his movement seem mainstream) and don't realize that their words are falling on deaf ears because these people have been trained how to process them. Indeed, the scene between Young and Marshall is very effectively designed to reflect legalistic notions of family and church relationships out of control. In the legalistic view, the husband should be the unquestioned leader of his home, and the pastor the unquestioned leader of his flock. From a legalistic perspective, the truth of Sandy's situation is clear-cut: She is a rebellious daughter whom Marshall should have been more careful to protect from her professors' anti-Christian lies and to whom he should now lay down the law in no uncertain terms; Young, as his pastor, should be commanding him to do so. Instead Young serves up rhetoric about the need to tolerate and understand, to find one's "own way" and "own truth," and to view other people as family—all of which is precisely the sort of stuff that legalists have been taught to dismiss as modernist claptrap. Even Marshall is coming to feel this way. "Kate," he asks his wife, "don't you ever get the feeling that God's got to be, you know, a little . . . bigger? Tougher? The God we get at that church, I feel like He isn't even a real person, and if He is, He's dumber than we are."

  Peretti's God turns out to be tough indeed—but then so does his Devil. In this novel angels and demons are ever-present, often in great numbers, but usually invisible. The angels travel with Hank, Mary, and other good people, watching over them protectively, while the demons hover around the bad people and seek out occasions to turn the good people toward sin. As far as one can tell, all the humans in this book are white, as is the most prominent angel, who is tall, blond, Nordic, and handsome; the demons, however, are invariably described as black and hideously ugly. (Peretti mentions their blackness repeatedly.) They have names like Complacency and Deception, the latter of whom brags to a fellow demon that "his weapon ... was always a compelling, persuasive argument with lies ever so subtly woven in." There is, Peretti makes clear, one guaranteed way for a human to overcome a demon's attempt to influence his thoughts: to say (as Hank and Mary do at various points), "I rebuke you in Jesus' name!" This makes the demons scatter. Jesus' name, then, serves as a magic word, an abracadabra; in This Present Darkness, it is repeated in this manner so often that, like a mantra, it is eventually robbed of all meaning.

  The plot of This Present Darkness is the stuff of paranoiac fantasy. After picking up various hints and following up a few leads, Marshall establishes that Brummel, Langstrat, and Young, along with several people who have lately moved to Ashton from other places, are part of an evil conspiracy involving a satanic entity called the Universal Consciousness Society; this organization (which seeks to take over not only the souls of Ashton's townsfolk but also their real estate) later holds a dinner in New York "for its many cohorts and members in the United Nations." This cluster of details is designed to push several buttons at once: For legalistic Protestants, New York is (to quote one of Peretti's demons) "Babylon the Great," "The Great Harlot"; the United Nations is a tool designed to subordinate God's Country to the power of non-Christian foreign countries; and terms like "Universal Consciousness" suggest pagan forms of spirituality that, again, are of the Devil. As one of Peretti's demons puts it, "Universal Consciousness" is "the world religion, the doctrine of demons spreading among all the nations. Babylon revived right before the end of the age."

  Tensions mount in Ashton, and soon Hank, his saints, and God's angels are hard at work combating the evil conspirators and demons. Figuring in this struggle is Sandy's college friend Shawn, who sounds like Pastor Young when he tells her that "God is big enough for everybody and in everybody. Nobody can put Him in a jar and keep Him all to themselves, according to their own whims and ideas." This is also, of course, satanic thinking. Telling the story of the blind men who touch different parts of an elephant and thus come away with different images of what an elephant is, Shawn uses it to explain how different religions, which offer different understandings of the same God, can all be true at once. Shooting down this analogy is so routine among legalistic Christians that Peretti doesn't even bother to have anyone in the novel counter it: He knows that his legalistic readers have been taught to recognize the analogy on sight as a satanic lie. (The legalistic answer, by the way, is that all religions aren't different parts of one animal; since their truth claims, if understood in an absolute, literal sense, contradict one another, one has to be true and the others false.) Yet Sandy hasn't been taught how to respond to this analogy; little does she know that while Shawn is speaking to her about how "everything is fitted together, interwoven, interlocked," the demon Deception is standing behind her, "stroking her red hair and speaking sweet words of comfort to her mind."

  Such is the real world as seen through many legalistic Protestants' eyes. It cannot be stressed too strongly, indeed, that a book like This Present Darkness is intended not as a fantasy but as a picture of the way the world actually is. It's a world in which the immensely human Jesus who preached and lived a gospel of love is replaced entirely by a fantasy Jesus who stands at the head of an army of beings with names like Triskal and Krioni who seem to have dropped in from some Norse myth. And it's a world in which everything and everyone divides up neatly into two categories—black and white, satanic and godly. As Noll observes, it depicts a world "where the line between good and evil runs not, as Solzhenitsyn once wrote, through the heart of every individual, but between the secular forces of darkness on one side and the sanctified forces of light on the other."

  One function of books like This Present Darkness is to establish and reinforce for legalistic Christian readers how those two categories divide up—to teach some and to remind others, that is, which kinds of thoughts and feelings and behaviors are of God, and which are of the Devil. Peretti makes it clear throughout who the enemies are— among them, churches that preach the oneness of humanity and universities that fill your children's heads with ideas that challenge the things you've taught them. Indeed, Peretti does a very fine job of exploiting his audience's resentments, fears, and prejudices—their sense of intimidation by higher education, their desire for a "tougher" God with black-and-white answers, and their wish to believe that evil is out there and that they are the saints of God. "To the extent that Peretti's book reflects evangelical perceptions more generally," writes Noll, "it shows an evangelical community unwilling to sift the wheat from the chaff in the wisdom of the world, unprepared to countenance the complexity of mixed motives in human action, and uninterested in focusing seriously on the natural forces that influence human behavior."

  Peretti shares legalistic Protestants' notions about what churches are for—and the answer is decidedly not loving thy neighbor. More than once in this novel we are told that Hank, unlike other pastors in Ash-ton, "preaches the gospel"; this, in the novel's view, is plainly his primary role. Yet the one time we see him at the pulpit, he is preaching not on a Gospel lesson but on a passage from the fourth chapter of 2 Timothy
that is a favorite of legalistic Protestants: "Reprove, rebuke, exhort, with great patience and instruction," Timothy is told. "For the time will come when they [the Christians in Timothy's care] will not endure sound doctrine, but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires; and will turn away their ears from the truth, and will turn aside to myths." After preaching on this passage, Hank mentions his absorption in "the gospel," as if 2 Timothy were a Gospel. This detail is in fact realistic—for legalistic Christians sometimes do act as if "the gospel" consisted of every part of the New Testament but the Gospels.

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  12

  "A LIE STRAIGHT FROM THE DEVIL"

  In fundamentalism, notes Charles Strozier, "nonbelievers are rejected by God and thus in some inexplicable way are only tentatively human. As such, nonbelievers are dispensable. If they intrude in the believers' world, the psychological conditions exist to make it possible for believers to accommodate violence toward nonbelievers."

  This is true not just of fundamentalism but of legalistic Protestantism generally. And the failure to focus on the Gospels that enables legalists to view other people as only "tentatively human" also makes it possible for them to hold chilling attitudes toward biblical morality. The Bible contains more than a few passages that pose grave ethical questions to anyone who reads it literally. For instance, the Book of Joshua records in horrific, repetitive detail how God "delivered" thirty-one Canaanite cities, one after the other, "into the hands of the Israelites," and how, at his direction, they "put every living thing" in these cities to the sword "and left no survivor there." "It was the Lord's purpose," we are told, that the Canaanite cities "should offer stubborn resistance to the Israelites, and thus be annihilated and utterly destroyed without mercy" (Jos. 8—11). In God: A Biography, Jack Miles quite properly describes this campaign as "genocidal slaughter." In a similar vein, the second book of Kings records an occasion when "some small boys" jeered at the prophet Elisha, saying to him, "Get along with you, bald head, get along." In a response that is clearly meant to be seen as admirable, Elisha "cursed them in the name of the Lord; and two she-bears came out of a wood and mauled forty-two of them" (2 Kings 2:23-24).