Stealing Jesus: how fundamentalism betrays Christianity

by Bruce Bawer

  If the Bakkers and their followers were "people that love," what they seemed to love more than anything else was money, fame, and worldly amusements, and the Jesus they worshipped was one who rewarded his followers with these things. It can be said in their favor that the Bakkers, unlike most of their legalistic colleagues, engaged in relatively little hate rhetoric; this seems, however, to have been a function not of principle but of a total aversion to anything remotely conceptual. If the program didn't represent legalistic Christianity at its most legally and doctrinally obsessed, it was certainly an extreme example of legalistic Christianity's retreat from the vertical dimension and its utter capitulation to such horizontal phenomena as rampant materialism, showbiz glitz, and the cult of celebrity. Far from holding fast to any tradition, The PTL Club was a classic case of legalistic Christianity embracing all the most trite, shallow aspects of contemporary culture—and affixing the name of Jesus to the whole shebang.

  It is illuminating to examine in a legalistic Christian context the more recent daytime TV talk shows hosted by such people as Ricki Lake and Sally Jessy Raphael. These programs cater to middle Americans by setting before them people like themselves who are willing to bare their lives on camera. These shows have been said to derive from Donahue, and in fact many elements of the format do owe something to Phil Donahue's program. But the substance doesn't. Donahue started out many years ago by focusing on serious issues of the day; his format was geared to secular and nonlegalistic Christian viewers. The newer talk shows, by contrast, emphasize personal confession. The guests are everyday Americans who candidly discuss their private problems, family conflicts, and marital crises, and audience members offer blunt comments and suggestions. These spectacles plainly derive from the legalistic Christian tradition of offering "testimony" to one's fellow churchgoers about how one erred before finding one's way to Christ. Mainstream media commentators, because they tend to be ignorant of that tradition, have entirely missed this connection, which helps to explain the extraordinary appeal of such shows in middle America.

  Over the course of the twentieth century, Americans—the vast majority of whom identify themselves as Christians—have grown used to a secular mainstream culture in which religion has little or no place. This marginalization of religion has greatly redounded to the benefit of the Church of Law—for a culture in which religion is not a regular subject of serious, free public meditation and discussion is one in which constricting, unreflective legalistic faith has a much more powerful sway over people's minds than it would otherwise have. When religion does enter into today's secular culture, moreover, it is almost invariably treated with kid gloves—and a culture in which questioning of irrational and morally offensive metaphysical propositions is discouraged is, again, one in which legalistic faith will enjoy an unnatural advantage.

  Indeed, all the elements of secular mainstream culture in America today—high and low, left and right—have come together to reinforce in the public mind the view that anything calling itself Christianity thereby places itself above criticism, or at the very least establishes itself as something that must be handled with particular delicacy. As a result religion has, in this century, rarely been examined in the public square in the kind of open, honest way that would almost certainly have made Americans more well-informed and contemplative than they are in matters of religion—and that would accordingly have kept millions of Americans from considering legalistic Christianity (to the extent that they consider it at all) as the serious, traditional, and moral entity that it represents itself as being.

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  16

  ABIDING MESSAGES, TRANSIENT SETTINGS

  If the Christian right has won millions of allies who don't share Pat Robertson's bizarre theology or extreme politics, but who respond to his message of alienation from the current cultural and political mainstream, one factor in this development is that in the second half of the twentieth century, secularism became so dominant in certain sectors of society that many of us who were brought up during the baby-boom years were raised in settings utterly devoid of spirituality, settings that didn't acknowledge anything that might go by the name of religion. Our parents were "Depression Children"; we were "Prosperity Children." Many of us were middle-class kids whose parents had been members of the working class or the lower middle class. Many of our fathers had served in World War II or Korea and attended college on the G.I. Bill; many were the first members of their families to attend college. Many of them prospered, married, reproduced, moved from the cities to the suburbs, and proceeded to supply their children—us—with things. Not to use the word pejoratively, they were materialists—at least on our behalf. Many felt uncomfortable buying expensive things for themselves, or taking expensive vacations or retiring early. But they were devoted to their children. They bought us plenty of toys. They planned for us to attend college. They wanted us to have things they hadn't had, things they would feel uncomfortable having themselves. They brought us up to be materialists.

  And, whether they meant to or not, they brought us up as secularists. Chances are they'd been taken to church as kids, but many of us weren't. Yet every Christmas we had a tree, and the floor under it was crowded with presents. We grew up accustomed to the idea that we lived in the most powerful, affluent nation in human history. Thanks largely to our own comfort, and to the wealth and power and security of the nation we lived in, we didn't feel drawn, as earlier generations might have been, to spiritual pursuits. Religion seemed something that might have served a purpose in other times and places, but that we couldn't see as having any purpose in our own lives. Death? Most of us had grandparents, even great-grandparents, who were living longer than earlier generations had done. When they grew ill or senile or came to require constant care, they went into hospitals or nursing homes instead of being nursed at home. Illness and old age and death were kept out of view to an unprecedented degree.

  Given this sheltered upbringing, the Vietnam War came for many of us as a great shock, an introduction to the frightening reality of death, chaos, and pointless destruction that existed beyond our highly controlled, materially affluent daily lives. Though the war had much more of a reality for middle-American legalistic Christians, who sent their sons to war, the antiwar movement was a secular phenomenon, because secular culture as opposed to legalistic Christian culture recognized citizens' right—indeed, their obligation—to challenge their government on the morality of its conduct of a war. The hippie phenomenon represented something more than antiwar protest—namely a reaction by kids belonging to the older half of the baby boom, kids who recognized that something was missing in the worldview that they'd been brought up on.

  Most, to be sure, didn't quite get what was missing and didn't know how to go about supplying it in their lives. They'd been spoiled, brought up to think of themselves as the center of the universe. That itself was a big part of what was wrong. But they didn't realize it. While changing their lives in often very dramatic ways, they continued to put themselves at the center. Their new ways of thinking were as selfish and solipsistic as the ways they'd been brought up on. They made a show of rejecting consumerism, capitalism, and democracy, and of embracing communalism, Communism, and various Eastern religions. Yet in most cases their dedication to these things was shallow and narcissistic. What else, however, could one expect? They had been shielded so efficiently from serious awareness of any higher or deeper reality that when they began to get glimmers of such a reality, they didn't explore it humbly, patiently, and selflessly, but rather believed that they had discovered it, maybe even invented it, and behaved accordingly.

  Most of them didn't discover it in the religions on which they had (at least nominally) been brought up. To them, those religions were part of the phony materialistic world that they were rejecting. Many, of course, while dismissing the institutional church, were drawn to the figure of Jesus, the radical teacher whose preaching against war and avarice they recognized as having been brutally distorted by
the church.

  As the seventies wore on into the eighties, some baby boomers continued to live as social rebels, as "aging hippies." Some pursued New Age spirituality. But most turned their backs on youthful rebellion and embraced their parents' material values, and then some. They were yuppies, the very personification of materialism. And they lived, increasingly, in a culture of irony—a culture marked by a chic postmodern suspicion of the reality of objective truth and a deep cynicism about the possibility of such things as honor, integrity, and ultimate meaning.

  Yet as they entered the 1990s, many yuppies found themselves in or approaching middle age; many had children nearing adulthood. Many had achieved, early on, the material goals they'd set for themselves. Unlike their parents, they had no qualms about buying things for themselves and taking expensive vacations and even, in some cases, retiring early and enjoying the fruits of their labors. As they did these things, however, they came to realize that these material pursuits didn't fulfill them as they had expected. The older they got, the emptier mere material success seemed to be; the older they got, the more they found themselves thinking of death and God, those subjects they'd been brought up not to think about at all. Their grandparents died, and perhaps their parents as well; and their own children reached an age at which they, a generation earlier, had perhaps been confirmed or bar mitzvahed. Something important, something vital, seemed missing in their lives. So it is that in the 1990s, many baby boomers found themselves attending worship services for the first time in decades—and, alas, in most cases, swelling the ranks of the heavily evangelizing Church of Law, which promised not mystery but unambiguous answers, not a radical vision of common humanity but individual salvation and a material heaven.

  In these times when the Church of Law dominates the picture of organized Christianity in the United States, we can do worse than to look to Harry Emerson Fosdick for some pointers toward shaping a vibrant and appealing Church of Love. In The Modem Use of the Bible, published in 1925 at the height of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, Fosdick made some observations that are as true now as they were then. Seeking to explain to ministers how, at a time when "the new knowledge" had altered many people's understanding of biblical truth, they could continue to "preach Biblically," Fosdick wrote that "the first essential of intelligent Biblical preaching in our day" was this: "a man must be able to recognize the abiding messages of the Book, and sometimes he must recognize them in a transient setting." Modern Christians should not feel obliged to take literally the biblical descriptions of hell and angels, which are grounded in the worldview of another time and place and culture; angels, for example, should be understood not as actual beings but as tokens of the presence of God. In any event, belief in the reality of angels or in hell as an actual place is not central to the Christian faith, and should not be central to Christian preaching—which, Fosdick maintained, "primarily consists in the presentation of the personality, the spirit, purpose, principles, life, faith, and saviorhood of Jesus." For Jesus, he wrote, "has given the world its most significant idea of God."

  Fosdick knew that behind the fundamentalists' strident assertions of certitude was, in most cases, a grievous spiritual emptiness; that stridency, he recognized, often masked a desperate fear and insecurity. If the church as a whole "looks very God-conscious," he wrote, its individual members "often are not God-conscious at all. . . . One by one they too often lack vital personal religion." Why? Largely because they think that in order to remain "believers," they must cling to doctrines that they recognize on some psychological level as untrue and must do everything they can to resist the voice of reason in their heads that tells them so. They call this act of clinging to resistance "faith," and they identify that voice of reason with the Devil. Such dogged adherence to traditional doctrines is not a strength but a handicap to true, vital Christianity. For Christians, Fosdick said, the whole point of opening one's mind up to the new thinking about the Bible and about "the obvious changes in mental categories between Biblical times and our own" is to

  liberate our minds from handicaps and summon our souls the more dearly to the spiritual adventures for which the Scriptures stand! Being a "Bible Christian" in this sense is a great matter. Too often it is made a small matter. To be a Bible Christian must we think, as some seem to suppose, that a fish swallowed a man, or that sun and moon stood still at Joshua's command, or that God sent she-bears to eat up children who were rude to a prophet, or that saints long dead arose and appeared in Jerusalem when our Lord was crucified? Is that what it means to be a Bible Christian?

  Rather, to be a Bible Christian is a more significant affair than such bald literalism suggests. To believe in "the God and Father of the Lord Jesus," creator, character, comforter, consummator,—that is to be a Bible Christian. To know moral need which our wit and will could not meet, and inward salvation from it through the power of the Spirit, and to live now in undying gratitude that overflows in service,—that is to be a Bible Christian. To have found in Christ, revealer of God and ideal of man, one who calls out our admiration, captivates our love, centralizes our ambition, and crowns our hopes,—that is to be a Bible Christian.

  Fosdick emphasized that doctrinal formulations are only ways of trying to convey divine and mystical truths in ultimately inadequate human and earthly terms. For Jesus' disciples, "the divinity of Jesus was not primarily a doctrine; it was an experience. The disciples felt in him something not of this world. They were sure about his manhood, but it was manhood suffused and irradiated. It subdued them, awed them, fascinated, and mastered them. The glory of their lives came to be that they had known him, loved him, believed in him. They did not start by believing in opinions about him, doctrines concerning him; they started by believing in him. The objective of their faith was not a theory; it was his personality, his life." Jesus opened up for them a truth about the universe, revealed to them "a universal force everywhere available and belonging to the substance of creation." Those followers of Jesus "were not primarily philosophers, metaphysicians, theologians" but "men of profound religious life endeavoring to get their vital experiences conveyed to others in such terms as were at hand." For us today, similarly, the important thing is to "take Jesus in earnest"—a task that Fosdick described as "the most searching ethical enterprise ever undertaken on earth" and as one that involves recognizing that the Bible's heart lies not in its theological formulations but in "its reproducible experiences." This, he stressed, must be the primary element in defining what it means to be a Bible Christian. "Whatever else loyalty to the Book may mean, one element must be put first: the spirit and quality of Jesus were meant to be reproduced in his followers. Nothing is Christian which leaves that out or makes that secondary." Jesus, after all, "did not think first of usages, institutions, traditions; primarily he thought about people who were missing an abundant life."

  Fosdick contrasted Jesus' teachings to the religious orthodoxy of Jesus' day, a time when many of those around him were preoccupied with such questions as "whether Gerizim or Jerusalem was the proper place to worship" or "how ceremonially one should cleanse the pots and pans." From such concerns, Fosdick wrote, "one turns to Jesus. It is another world. He never taught anything in religion except the great matters that make for a richer life." Fosdick cited several theological traditions—among them those of Luther, Calvin, Anglicanism, and the Baptist movement—and asked what Jesus would say about the differences among them. "Surely, it is not hard to guess: Nothing matters in all this except the things that lead men into more abundant life." And what, Fosdick asked, does it mean to be led to a more abundant life? His answer:

  There are just a few things in religion that lead to a more abundant life. To have your sins forgiven, to have the burden of your guilt roll from you as from Bunyan's Pilgrim at the Cross—that does it. To know God in your heart, and as you draw from the physical world the sustenance by which you live so to draw from the eternal Spirit the power by which you live indeed— that does it. To know Christ, the
revelation of the Eternal and the ideal of man, and in a deepening discipleship with him to behold as in a mirror the glory of the Lord and to be transformed into the same image from glory to glory—that does it. To be led up by him into the expanded life of service and the dignity of helpfulness to man, to share his hopes of God's triumph on this earth and the assurance of the everlasting privilege of going on hereafter—that does it. What horizons lift, what deeps unfold, what heights allure through such a faith! These are the things that make life rich and full.

  Toward the beginning of the twentieth century, Harry Emerson Fosdick set a goal for modern Christianity which, near the end of the century, it has hardly begun to try to meet. Fosdick wrote The Modern Use of the Bible over seventy years ago, and nonlegalistic Christianity has since then taken only random stabs at building up the "new orthodoxy" he called for. Indeed, it is only very recently that some nonlegalistic Christians have begun to suggest that legalists should not speak as if they have an exclusive right to the name of "Bible-believing Christian." Few nonlegalistic Christian ministers, moreover, have set forth the faith as forthrightly and articulately as Fosdick did. In his 1995 book Heretics, the German theologian Gerd Liidemann writes of the modern "splitting apart of piety and scholarship which amounts to schizophrenia"; what Liidemann means is that nonlegalistic clergy whose understanding of Christianity is essentially the same as Fosdick's nonetheless maintain a discreet silence about such matters as biblical literalism when speaking to their congregations. At Christmas they preach sentimental sermons about the birth of the Christ child at Bethlehem, even though they know that Jesus was almost certainly born in Nazareth; at other times they preach earnestly on, say, the Epistles to Titus and Timothy, speaking as if they were written by Paul even though they really believe otherwise. Why do they do this? Presumably because they're reluctant to rock the boat and fear the consequences of preaching on the Bible with total candor. They may legitimately worry, Will I lose my job? Will people in the pews lose their faith? Too often, such clergy choose to placate the most insecure and literal-minded in their congregations rather than to edify the most inquisitive and spiritually fervent.