Stealing Jesus: how fundamentalism betrays Christianity

by Bruce Bawer

  What to make of such passages? Nonlegalistic Christian readers, recognizing them as the artifacts of a culture with an understanding of God and morality that differs dramatically from our own, dismiss the idea that the God they worship could sanction the slaughter of children or the mauling of little boys by she-bears. Biblical inerrantists, however, put themselves in the position of having to defend such actions as the perfectly moral acts of a loving deity. To this end, Harold Lindsell, a former president of Fuller Theological Seminary, editor of Christianity Today, and author of Battle for the Bible, has made the scripturally unwarranted suggestion that the Canaanite children must all have been so evil that they deserved to die; as for Elisha's taunters, some inerrantists have contended (without, again, any scriptural justification) that the word used to describe them should be understood to mean not children but "teenage punks" (as if this made their slaughter so much less horrible).

  In their desperation to maintain the doctrine of inerrancy, then, legalistic Christians compel themselves to be dishonest about the very words that are on the page before them and to defend the morality of patently horrible acts. The Southern Baptist writer and former seminarian Joe E. Barnhardt has not pulled any punches in writing about this. Pointing out bluntly that the picture of God presented in Joshua "is that of a marauding sociopathic killer," Barnhardt writes that "many of the same fundamentalists who take seriously the golden rule and practice deeply moving acts of kindness toward their own children and their neighbor's can at the same time weave intricate webs of nightmarish rationalizations to justify Joshua's atrocities." Inerrantists maintain that while an individual's reason and conscience are suspect, the Bible can always be relied on as a firm source of knowledge about the nature of virtue; they believe, as Barnhardt puts it, "that individuals cannot know what goodness is unless they go to the Bible to learn it." Yet any Christian who seriously turns to the above-cited passages about Joshua and Elisha to learn about the nature of goodness is a potential danger to civil society.

  Of course, the willingness of legalistic Protestants to believe that a loving God would support genocide is of a piece with their violent, bloodthirsty End Times theology. After all, if they gladly worship a God who plans to subject most human beings to eternal torment, why not a God who would engineer the mass slaughter of children? Many legalistic Christians have claimed that the atrocities of the twentieth century teach us that we need to retreat from the secularism that is supposedly responsible for these happenings and return to religion— by which they mean, needless to say, their own brand of Christianity. Yet their religion is altogether too close for comfort to modern totalitarianism. The evils of two world wars, of the Stalinist gulags and Mao's Cultural Revolution, and of genocide in Nazi Europe, Armenia, Cambodia, and Rwanda—none of these is any more horrible than legalistic Protestantism's vision of the fate of nonbelievers. As James Sibley, head of the Southern Baptist Convention's mission to the Jews, said in a 1997 interview, "As terrible as the Holocaust was, it will fade into insignificance in comparison to God's future judgment. There will be the Holocaust of all people who don't accept Jesus."

  Many people, including those without any religion whatsoever, insist that this is how all religion works: You believe you've got it right and are saved, and that other people have got it wrong and are damned. But this is not how all religion works. No faith that can equate love with genocide can be ethically defended. And no society that observes such moral depravity in millions of its members and pretends to see it as moral virtue because it calls itself by the name of religion can itself be regarded as moral—or honest.

  The Georgia congregation's presentation to their pastor of framed Washington and Jackson pictures was hardly surprising. Legalistic Protestants in the United States tend to draw a strong connection between their identity as Americans and as Christians; like their Puritan forebears, and in violation of Jesus' preaching against national and tribal self-regard, they view America as the New Israel, God's Country. The phrase New World Order fills many legalists with dread not because it offends some carefully reasoned position on international relations but simply because they resist recognizing the United States as part of a large, diverse planet. Theoretically, legalists understand that some foreigners are Christians—and that a few of them even count as "true Christians" by legalistic standards—but for many legalists, those people's foreignness makes them very much the Other.

  The Other. For many legalistic Protestants, Christianity is almost synonymous with "family values," which, to most of them, means caring for one's own family unit (and, by extension, one's own church family) and taking an indifferent or even adversarial posture toward outsiders, especially those who look different or live differently. "It always seemed to me," a former fundamentalist says in Growing Up Fundamentalist, "that 'family values' was code for looking out for ourselves in this ugly, scary world." In a similar spirit, a conservative Episcopalian once said to me, in all seriousness, "After all, Christianity is about looking out for one's own, isn't it?" When I explained to her that Christianity, in my view, was about exactly the opposite, she was genuinely incredulous.

  Jimmy Allen, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, notes that many Baptist churches "don't minister to those in need because we cannot afford to offend and lose paying members or prospects for membership. . . . We have gotten caught up in a church growth movement that reflects what people are looking for—homogeneous, comfortable, and secure surroundings in which emotional needs and family needs are met." Allen records that "a pastor of one of the largest evangelical churches in the nation" told him that the members of his congregation "don't like wheelchairs in the sanctuary. It just makes them feel uncomfortable." So people in wheelchairs are excluded from services. A church that takes such a position simply doesn't understand what it means to be a church.

  Such an emphasis on giving the people what they want—however much it violates the spirit of Christianity—has been increasingly apparent in legalistic Protestant churches. It is a standard complaint of legalistic Christians that mainline churches compromise too much with the world; yet in fact mainline churches, while attempting to adjust their doctrines to modern learning, have also sought to retain the essence of Jesus and to convey it poetically through liturgical forms that help people transcend their horizontal concerns and experience the vertical. Legalistic churches have, on a huge scale, done precisely the opposite: While retaining old doctrines that cannot be harmonized with contemporary scientific understanding of the universe, they junk traditional forms of worship and model their services on TV talk shows, rock or country-music concerts, and other horizontal entertainments. The pastors at such churches often say that they seek to eliminate traditional elements of worship—such as crosses, pews, and hymns—that make people "uncomfortable"; but the discomfort that people feel when encountering such elements is, in reality, a discomfort over encountering the vertical dimension. Not to experience that discomfort is to domesticate religion—to turn it into something that isn't really spiritual at all. It is to turn it into that ultimate American desideratum—a successful business.

  Indeed, the idea of church as business has never been more prevalent than it is now among America's legalistic churches. "In many churches," complains Jimmy Allen, "the strategy of gathering new members has become a science. We have learned well the techniques of church growth. To thrive in the user-friendly, what's-good-for-me era of modern Christianity, churches are supposed to be homogeneous, well-cared-for, comfortable, and entertaining." Like the authors of The Churching of America, pastors around the country have learned to think of church as a commodity to be tailored to the marketplace. Believing that the bigger a church gets, the better, they have learned to admire and mimic uncritically the methods employed by their most successful colleagues. Citing statistics on the sizes of church congregations around the country, Pat Robertson has written that "Atlanta, Los Angeles, Houston, and Dallas/Fort Worth topped the list of most spiritually dyn
amic cities." One should expect, I suppose, that Robertson would consider spiritual dynamism to be so easily quantified a commodity. What is alarming is that tens of thousands of ministers think the same way.

  For such ministers, the nation's premier ecclesiastical success story is that of Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois, forty miles northwest of Chicago. Founded in 1975 in a small rented theater, Willow Creek is the most famous of the new wave of monster churches in America that are known as megachurches and that serve as models for legalistic churches around the country. The key to Willow Creek's success is that its founder, Bill Hybels, did extensive research to find out what Chicago suburbanites wanted and didn't want in a church and, like any enterprising small businessman designing a product to fill a market niche, carefully tailored his church to those desires. What he ended up with was a church that was, as he put it, "culturally relevant" but "doctrinally pure." On the one hand, it cleaved to standard legalistic dogma ("we embrace historic Christian teaching on all doctrines, emphasizing Jesus Christ's atoning death; salvation through repentance and faith as a work of divine grace; and the authority of the unique, God-inspired Bible"); on the other hand, it threw out virtually every element of traditional liturgy. At Willow Creek there are no crosses, pews, processions; the church staff is called its management team and the whole church experience is called the product. Willow Creek's promotional materials note that the Wednesday- and Thursday-evening services for "believers," as well as the Saturday-evening and Sunday-morning services for "seekers," use "up-to-date language, music and drama to communicate God's Word for today's culture." An article in USA Weekend describes the church's "slick, show-biz service where drama and soft rock are served up on a stage washed in pink and blue spotlights." What people at such megachurches tend to get, then, is an atmosphere from which all those elements are eliminated that, in traditional churches, spell difference, removing the worshipper from ordinary space and time and creating holy space and time. A religious service at such a church seeks not to be a communal activity but a show with a passive audience—more of an entertainment than a spiritual excursion.

  One legalistic church in Ohio that seeks to be "culturally relevant" complains on its Web site that "in the liberal church, even the doctrines of the Bible are allowed to change. But even then, they often continue to refuse change in structural and cultural areas. This is the worst-case scenario—changing the things we should never change, but holding fast to the things we should be willing to change." This is the cry of many a legalistic pastor, and it is 180 degrees off on both counts. Legalistic churches by definition cleave to doctrines that can't hold up, while discarding liturgies designed to create holy space and time. Hans Kung, in his 1996 book Christianity: Essence, History, and Future, traces how "the abiding substance of the faith"—the person of Jesus—has endured through the centuries despite radical changes in the doctrines, values, and laws that make up its context or "paradigm." What legalistic churches do routinely is confuse the form with the essence—which is understandable, because doctrines look like essence, while liturgies look like form. But Christianity isn't about doctrines; it's about an experience that is conveyed largely through liturgy. Doctrines, meanwhile, must continually be adjusted not only to harmonize with scientific knowledge but also to make spiritual truths vivid and comprehensible for people living in a certain time and place. It's not necessarily liturgies, then, but doctrines that must be changed from time to time. Certainly American popular culture today—dominated as it is by colorful, fast-paced entertainments that encourage in viewers a bland passivity— presents a challenge to those who seek to help people remove themselves from such shallow, horizontal distractions and to experience the vertical; but by modeling worship services on such entertainments, churches like Willow Creek fail even to take up the challenge and crush the possibility of fostering true spiritual experience.

  To be sure, religion as popular entertainment is a long-standing American tradition. And in a sense legalistic Christianity is entertainment. Like entertainment, it simplifies. If nonlegalistic Christianity, like true art, recognizes that the world is complex, ambiguous, and full of gray areas, and seeks to engage the world as it is, legalistic Christianity, like entertainment, denies these complexities. Just as the crudest popular novels and movies divide the world into shallowly conceived and easily identified good guys and bad guys, legalistic Christianity divides the world into saints and sinners, the saved and the damned. One reason why legalistic Christianity, in the form of tent-meeting evangelism, succeeded in nineteenth-century America was that rural folk had pretty monotonous lives and were hard up for diversions. In many cases, evangelists were the only show that ever came to town. Today millions of Americans who have access to the Internet and to hundreds of TV channels still don't have much live entertainment available to them locally other than church services; and the habit of experiencing the world through TV may make such people all the more susceptible to the power of live performance (and of mob psychology) that is exploited to the hilt at places like Willow Creek.

  If Willow Creek's services are designed to seem more like entertainments than like liturgies, the big white church building itself is designed to look less like a church than like a shopping mall. Today, Willow Creek is a nondescript 352,000-square-foot modern structure set on a 141-acre campus that looks like a suburban office park, with a fountain and a large pond; in addition to the main auditorium, which seats five thousand (a total of fifteen thousand people attend Willow Creek services every week), the building contains a large food court, a full gym, a bowling alley, and movie theaters. There are over fifty pastors on staff with a variety of specializations, over eleven hundred small Bible groups, and hundreds of different ministries, many of which sound more like shopping-mall specialty stores than like aspects of church mission. Indeed, Willow Creek's promotional materials tend to address "seekers" not as potential congregants but as consumers. Instead of striving to awaken such would-be members' desire to know and serve God, the materials stress the church's ability to serve their perceived needs. The word needs, in fact, is ubiquitous: "Our vision is to see churches better relating God's solutions to the needs of both seekers and believers. . . . Our services are designed to meet your spiritual needs. ... If you are in need, we would like to help you. . . . [Willow Creek's] various programs and ministries can help them [members] fulfill their personal and relational needs." So popular has Willow Creek's formula been that it has led to the formation of the Willow Creek Association, through which Hybels and company market their methods to over a thousand other churches in over fifty denominations, helping them to relate "God's solutions to the needs of both seekers and believers." This is the language of the "church growth movement," which, as Jimmy Allen has written, centers on creating "homogeneous, comfortable, and secure surroundings in which emotional needs and family needs are met." (Such adjectives, of course, point to an atmosphere that is precisely the opposite of what Jesus cultivated: Being a follower of his was most decidedly not about being part of something homogeneous, comfortable, and secure.)

  Though Willow Creek affirms the usual legalistic doctrines about the substitutionary atonement and biblical inerrancy (and is officially "pro-life"), it presents itself to outsiders as being nondenominational, inoffensive, and inclusionary so as not to turn them off. Accordingly it places less public emphasis on its creed than on a list of ten vague "Core Values" that "grew out of multiple discussions between Willow Creek Community Church and Association staff members." This litany, which seems to have been designed in such a way as to sound nonlegalistic and unthreatening to anyone, includes statements that "churches should be led by men and women with leadership gifts," that "anointed teaching is a catalyst for transformation in individuals' life and in the church," that "Christ-followers should manifest authenticity," that "a church should operate as a unified community of servants," and that "loving relationships should permeate every aspect of church life."

 
Far from bearing any resemblance to historic creedal statements, the ten Willow Creek "Core Values" represent an attempt to connect Jesus Christ with ideas about how to "transform" lives within the context of a church community made up largely of conventional middle-class families. Indeed, the culture of a place like Willow Creek suggests that the name of Jesus Christ has been attached to something that is less about the gospel than it is about people's desire to achieve for their families a controlled, safe environment—the ecclesiastical equivalent of a gated community. Observers have noted that Willow Creek members can spend a whole weekend at the church's campus, eating at the food court and enjoying various other services and diversions; members who need, say, an emergency car repair or tooth extraction can call day or night on fellow members who do those things for a living. Yes, Willow Creek does have outreach services to the homeless, the poor, and prisoners, but many large legalistic churches today do not; and even in those megachurches that do, the chief appeal is generally not that the place calls members to involvement in the world but that it allows them to live somewhat apart from the world among families very much like their own.