the age of the Jesus nerd

At this point, it has been around a few years and, of course, picked apart in scholarly circles. But anyone with even a passing interest in what’s going on in our church or, for that matter, our culture right now should familiarize themselves with Phyllis Tickle’s The Great Emergence.

My very simplistic summary is this: approximately every 500 years, throughout its history, Christianity has had to radically reinvent itself in order for its “Good News” not to turn into bad news. Ways of thinking and doing the Christian faith, which were once believed to be permanently valid, eventually fail to hold water as the world changes around them, and new ones need to be adopted. In each case, there is a moment of cultural crisis where the church either needs to adapt or lose all relevance.

These “cycles of history” actually begin in the context of an intra-Jewish dispute, with Jesus himself totally turning the idea of covenant faithfulness on its head, seeking out the unclean and the sinners rather than avoiding them in order to preserve his own ritual purity. A little less than five centuries later, the whole western world is nominally Christian, but with the fall of Rome, after which the “Gospel” can no longer be synonymous with the growth and triumph of the empire, a handful of oddball mystics smuggle it out into the desert. Five centuries later the schism between Eastern and Western church shattered any notion that the one universal church might be visible across all particular geographies and cultures, each with their own limited hierarchies and thought patterns. Five centuries more bring us to the Great Reformation, which, on the surface, was a grievance against corrupt men in power but, at its core, signified the breakdown of the medieval way of doing Christianity. And that brings us up to today. 

I don’t think you need to buy the almost Asimovian prophesying of her 500 year schema, and I question how much she has left out in order to tidy up a bit (e.g. the rise and then re-encounter with Islam, Copernicus, Darwin, etc.). But it’s hard to deny that she is basically onto something. Christianity changes.  And it’s changing fast right now. What each of Tickle’s 500 year crises have in common is that they all result from a breakdown in authority of some sort, and when authority breaks down, the church tends to move from visible unification to fragmentation.

Now, whether the imperial church of the 4^th century was actually more unified than the protestant church of the 20^th century on the ground is a much more complicated question, but the decreasing centralization of money, authority, and influence is undeniable. This is a byproduct of the increased spread of information, which enables people to think for themselves. The more people feel authorized to think for themselves, the more difficult it is to get a whole lot of them to lend you authority. The Gutenberg printing press skyrocketed the number of Bibles and the writings of the reformers in circulation. For everyday smiths and cobblers (who likely couldn’t read, themselves, but knew a parish pastor who could), this unlocked the previously inconceivable notion that the Pope might be wrong about something. How much more now that a live tweet of an American political debate can be read by a kid in San Salvador?

We call this postmodernity. In philosophy-speak this means the breakdown of any overarching “meta-narrative.” In normal-speak, it means that we’re not all on the same page.

As the church grapples with what postmodernity means for us, the culture is having to figure it out too. One of the most interesting manifestations of this is the rise of the nerds. If you still assume a jock-centric hierarchy in popular culture, you probably haven’t talked to a high school kid in quite some time. 

The geeks have inherited the Earth. By “geek,” I don’t necessarily mean someone who is academically inclined, though it could be that. Geeks are any persons who both exercise their individuality and find community through the shared love of anything that is not general interest. Whether it be theater performance, the Harry Potter series, or expensive barbecue sauce. The particular object of affection doesn’t matter so long as it can act as a conduit, connecting small pockets of community in a wearyingly massive and pluralistic world. In my life this looks like “Blazer-Con,” a convention for American fans of English Premier League Soccer who wear tweed and listen to the “Men in Blazers” podcast. My wife and I will be traveling to the next convention in Brooklyn late this year.

I wouldn’t suggest that people are merely feigning interest in Battlestar Galactica or designer cheeses in order to meet people. I think the enthusiasts of these things really like them. But in a world without one overarching cultural narrative where almost no commonality with a random passerby can be assumed, people are building sub-communities through the things that they like.

This has relevance for the church. In a weird way, we have the opportunity to be Jesus nerds in a way that we have not been able to replicate for 17 centuries. When 4^th century Emperor Theodosius I made Christianity the official religion of the Roman world, in one day, the word “Christian” went from describing about 5 to 10 percent of the population to 100 percent. Only one of two things could result: either everyone in the empire would start actively seeking to reflect Jesus in their lives—forgiving each other’s faults, protecting the vulnerable, renouncing violence, etc.—or the meaning of the term “Christian” would become diluted. I don’t need to tell you which one ended up happening.

It’s the paradox of church history that if everyone is a Christian, then no one is a Christian. Christians who fear that the faith is dying because smaller numbers of people are showing up to church on Sundays, or we don’t have the ten commandments posted in public schools, or we use of the term “holiday” rather than “Christmas” have likely not thought much about what it would really mean to embody Christ’s way of being in the world. In the US, the data is clear: there were way more people sitting in pews on Sunday mornings in the 40s and 50s. It’s not at all clear that the country was more Christ-like back then.

The decline of Christendom is a huge loss, if your goal is to get a large collection of warm bodies together once a week. But it’s so much the better for the more discerning Christian. Suddenly, we are entering a time where “Jesus nerd” might actually mean something.

Battlestar Galactica appreciation groups have a clear commitment to something and there is no ambiguity as to who they are. Finally, we are nearing a time where Christians can say no less than that. Perhaps we can even say more.  

what the bible says about refugees

Since we'll be celebrating someone, in a few days, who was born a refugee, I thought it might be interesting to see what the Bible says about hospitality to such persons.

If you’re not interested in providing hospitality to refugees, this doesn’t apply to you. I’m only writing for other Christians (with thanks to the Jews to whose tradition we’re indebted).

The command on God’s people to provide hospitality to refugees is constant and consistent throughout the Hebrew and Christian testaments. I’ll just write about one example.

Zephaniah spends much of his short book (ch. 2) doing something that the rulers in his society might have actually appreciated under other circumstances: he calls out all the sins of surrounding nations. The nations of the Cherethites and Philistines are bound for destruction. The incessant taunting of the Moabites and the Ammonites will be their downfall. The lands of Cush and Assyria won’t fair any better, and so on and so forth. 

Now this should all be music to the ears of Judah’s leaders, met with nods of approval. But Zephaniah keeps talking. He is not interested in simply buttering them up. His bigger concern is the plank in Judah’s own eye (ch. 3).

There is something going around in the attitude and spirit of his society, which Zephaniah sees as completely toxic and repugnant to God. Here, “officials” and “judges” are corrupt and incorrigible. Powerful men prey on the fears of the people like lions and wolves, manipulating weak minds with circuitous and self-serving rhetoric, all the while devouring the society’s resources for personal gain.  Where their cynicism isn’t total, their arrogance makes up the difference, and they are impervious to correction (vv. 1-3).

While this goes on, the prophets and priests of the establishment are fickle and spineless, undoubtedly preaching safe religious doctrines while they live off the earnest piety of the poor. Fat, dumb, and happy, nothing could be further from their minds than voicing the true state of the society and holding its politicians accountable. In that failure they “profane what is holy” and “do violence to the law” (v. 4).

“If that ship has sailed, and this nation can no longer avoid some severe material consequences, there is still a chance, a chance, for them to find their soul.  And true to form, God will use the unlikeliest of outsiders to help them find it.”

With its leadership willfully asleep at the wheel, you’d think the impending downfall would be so apparent that they would be forced to change, but instead, they double down, eager to cash in a few more dividends before the whole thing falls apart (v. 7). And, of course, it’s lost on them how their insular little system of personal gain might look from the outside—how it might cut them off from other nations and cause a deep-seated resentment, which will finally be their downfall.

Will they ever learn? Likely not before the moral and cultural degradation of the society has run its course.

BUT if that ship has sailed, and this nation can no longer avoid some severe material consequences, there is still a chance, a chance, for them to find their soul.  And true to form, God will use the unlikeliest of outsiders to help them find it.

The people whom God will use to restore this nation’s soul to them will be of such little worldly significance that God will have to stack diminutives, one on top of the other, to even identify them: “the daughter of my dispersed ones…a people humble and lowly” (vv. 10, 12). That these men, women, and children can’t be identified any more precisely than this, speaks volumes about who they are.

These people don’t strictly belong to any particular jurisdiction. And it would be misleading to put them under the heading of any particular nation state. Their religion and ethnicity are of little consequence as it concerns God. What matters is that, in the clash and friction of national tectonic plates, these are the people who fell through the cracks. These are the lost ones. The best we can do is say that they come from somewhere “beyond the rivers of Cush” (v. 10). They are the refuse that no one will claim.

No one, that is, except for God. While politicians angle for seats of power and priests congratulate themselves in religious high places, God has been paying special attention to what goes on in the dead zones, the lands “beyond the rivers,” the places that Haitians refer to as the peyi andeyo—the “country behind the countries”—where neither vote is cast nor decision made but one can only be tossed about by the feuds and ambitions of the vain.

Are these humble ones merely a charitable concern for God? Absolutely not. It will be through them that Judah will find its redemption. These daughters of the “dispersed ones,” central to nothing and nowhere, will turn out to be the beating heart of God’s plan for the world.

“Both refugee from without and exile from within will rediscover their humanity in the embrace of one another.”

“They shall seek refuge in the name of the Lord” (v. 12), right here in one of the many societies that had forgotten them. And when they do, that society will be reminded of what it is supposed to be.

When this people remembers what it is, the “proudly exultant” and the “haughty” will make themselves scarce in the midst of the humble. But for “those who are left,” who are not too far gone, and who still have eyes to see, God is not interested in rubbing their noses in past shame (vv. 11-13). God is interested in reconciliation. In a nation that had lost its way, both refugee from without and exile from within will rediscover their humanity in the embrace of one another.    

Then maybe this will be a nation worthy of the name. For a nation to only have concern for its own interests is to cease being a nation in God’s eyes. The difference between a nation and a mere collection of animals is the ideal that God handed on to Abraham long ago: it’s a people whom God has blessed “so that you will be a blessing” (Gen. 12:2) to others.

freedom from fear? how are we doing?

If an alien from outer space were dropped down in our society one day, having not been briefed with any kind of backstory or cultural shading, what would she think about things? 

For instance, if the alien saw a quadruped creature leading a biped around by a rope and forcing the latter to pick up its excrement, which species would she have to assume was in charge of things?

If she saw one group of said bipeds on a trading floor on Wall Street jumping up and down and yelling at numbers on a screen, how might they compare to another group that was conversing and laughing around a table covered in playing cards and glass bottles? Which group would she assume was high on a more destructive intoxicant?

She would find herself backwards and confused on a range of such ironies running from the fun and quirky to the sad and horrific.

She might discover that

2,977 was the number of American civilian deaths resulting from the attacks of 9/11/01.

Then she might find out that

210,000 is a conservative estimate of the number of Afghani and Iraqi civilian casualties resulting from the back and forth aggressions between American, Afghani, Iraqi, and extremist forces since 2001.[1]

How is our alien friend to figure out which of these totals will barely get a newspaper blurb, let alone a memorial, and which is the perpetual justification for over a decade of calculated drone strikes, the deaths and psychological devastation of some of our own society’s most precious young people, a standing foreign military presence in a sovereign nation, torture tactics, and numerous other breaches of constitutional and international law?

If our alien friend wants to pick a side, then there may have been a short window of time, following 9/11, where she may have easily picked out which side was the victim and which side the aggressor. God help her, sorting them out at this point.

If one is having trouble stepping outside of the narrow set of platitudes and biases given by one’s culture and imagining an outsider’s perspective, there are little linguistic tricks that we can use to help get ourselves inside the mind of an alien.

For instance, lets imagine a seedily clad guy told you that he’d invented a device in his basement called a Death Dealer 100. He can’t get into the details of how the DD1 works, but the long and short of it is, he can walk into a room filled with people and at the push of a button fire 100 death rays in less than a minute, each one capable of killing a full grown adult. You might be quick to say to him, “Oh, God help us, no, I must alert the authorities. Such a thing must never be found in a lawful civilization.”

But upon a moment’s reflection, you’ll remember that an almost identical invention very much exists in society, quite affordably too, and the authorities aren’t concerned. And unlike so many of our compatriots, our alien friend may not have a subtle enough mind to distinguish why a “DD1” should never be allowed to exist in polite society whereas a “rifle” can be grandfathered in with constitutional impunity because it shares a name with another invention from centuries ago.

It’s a good exercise to try to see our society through the eyes of an alien from time to time, because an alien isn’t susceptible to kind of cultural drift that not only shifts individuals along the continuum of a given debate but can shift the entire continuum itself. For instance, an alien would see objectively that even our liberal presidents today would’ve looked like war mongers to a conservative living in the pre-World War I United States, when non-interventionism was the mood of the day.

Through alien eyes, we can see that there has been a tectonic shift not only in the sides of the debate but in the ground beneath it. What brought this shift on is simple: fear. We have allowed ourselves to become a culture of fear. And you don’t need to get sucked into a conversation on guns or foreign policy in order to sense it.

One day, an older man told me how, when he was a kid, he and his friends used to run around the neighborhood completely unsupervised, and the only rule was that they each had to be home for dinner. Then he made a statement, which one hears from all angles, today—a statement which is regarded as so self-evident that the speaker never puts it forward as a controversial assertion but simply assumes that any other sentient being would agree: “You would never let your kid run around like that in this day and age. Too dangerous.”

When I politely pressed him for some kind of evidence that the world had, in fact, grown more dangerous since he was a kid, he looked at me like I was asking him to prove that fire is hot. He took a moment to recover and then stumbled through a predictable litany: a couple high profile abductions in far away states, a local convenience store hold up and a recent murder (over a drug deal gone awry)—basically, the bread and butter of local TV news.

To his credit, at one point, he was thoughtful enough to say, “Well, maybe we just know about these things today in a way that we didn’t back then.” But it was too late. He had already shaped his parenting practices, his political views, and his blood pressure around a worldview of fear.  

Why force an otherwise kindly older man to justify what everyone is supposed to know is common knowledge? Because I no longer believe that such throwaway comments are as harmless as they seem. I believe that that kind of unchecked anxiety, spread across an entire society, is capable of producing evils far more powerful than those that brought it on in the first place. Even a casual student of history can confirm this. The Nazis didn’t come into power on a “Let’s all be evil” platform. They came into power by promising that they could rid their society of evil and keep everyone else safe.

And in a society where even suggesting that maybe we should resist a drone strike on a key target if there is going to be “collateral damage,” or that we should kill and incarcerate fewer criminals, or that we should limit the ways in which you can “stand your ground” is considered unpatriotic bordering on treasonous, someone needs to stand up and act as a fear circuit breaker. Doing this in a chronically fearful society will take independent thinking, integrity and confidence in oneself, and a deep-seated hope. 

I even tend to think that, long before sentimentalized baptism ceremonies and altar calls, a “Christian” was someone who did precisely this—someone under the leadership of Christ, who refused to concede to the chronic anxiety of the age and the greed, the violence, and the scapegoating that always comes with it.

Doesn't "Christian" mean, at the very least, in this jittery time, someone who hopes in the life-giving promises of God? Does God offer us nothing more to place our trust in besides a large magazine clip and a beefed up military?

Would an alien from outer space ever think that we are a “Christian nation?”

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[1] I’m assuming, of course, that the second Iraq war would not have happened, had our leaders not been able to focus the emotional reactivity of the post 9/11 political climate into an invasion of an otherwise unrelated country. Anyone who would like to argue this point might have a hard time citing a reason for invasion that doesn’t make the whole thing look like even more of a debacle.

how are we doing on the freedom from want?

Freedom.

For a word that has become almost synonymous with the United States of America, the more worldly among us are gradually becoming savvy to the fact that freedom can only be spoken of as a goal, not an achieved reality. There is a huge splotch of grey that exists between free and not free. We should never just toss the word out there unqualified but should always speak of degrees of freedom. A child whose one parent is lacking a high school diploma and who is trying to learn to read in an inner city class size of 45 is quite a bit less free than the child of a cardiologist and a CPA who is learning in a private classroom of 16. A family in a safe neighborhood is more free than a family in a dangerous one, and so on.

As his own country (Germany in the 1930s) was trying to achieve a certain version of freedom at a great cost to its cultural soul, Dietrich Bonhoeffer pointed out that the idea of freedom, if it is only defined in the negative (freedom from), can achieve nothing more than a paranoid hysteria as a society tries to eliminate anything that could be perceived as a threat. Any freedom that is worthy of the name, needs to be defined positively (freedom for), because only after discovering something to live for outside of ourselves, can we escape our enslavement to obsessive self-concern.

In this blog and the next one, I’d like to take the last two parts of FDR’s famous “Four Freedoms” speech—“freedom from want” and “freedom from fear”—and ask the question: how are we doing?

In a not-so-recent Ted Talk, psychologist Barry Schwartz laid out what he calls “the paradox of choice.” The long and short of it says that if you give someone three different kinds of vehicles to choose from at the dealership, she will be a little happier than if you only give her one choice; but if you give her 50 choices, she will be much less happy than if you had only given her three.  That is, our conventional assumption that more freedom to choose is better is true to a point, but that point comes fast and hard. And once that threshold is passed, the happiness graph can plunge downward as far as you like.

Most of us probably know this from experience. At the grocery store, where they give me three brands of cheddar cheese, I can be reasonably confident that I’m walking away with the one that I like best. But when I come away from the golf shop with one of 50 drivers, I’ll always wonder if one of the others wouldn’t have added 20 yards off the tee or reduced my slice. And it’s best for my mental health, if I don’t even consider the possibilities of switching to Romano or Fontina cheese.

Obviously, golf clubs and cheese are fairly trivial issues. But think about what this means for our larger aspirations. I’ve read of a study where people rated their own happiness more and more highly up to a household income of  $75,000 (gallup.com/businessjournal), after which there is a hard cutoff. There may even be some drop-off as added income isolates people and eliminates any impetus for them to build a strong social network. The study depended on self-reporting, which has its limitations, but the findings certainly ring true to my experience, growing up in a part of town where many households would’ve considered $75,000 unlivable but where happiness was scarce.    

It is an old, old insight from a myriad of philosophical and theological traditions that wanting what we don’t have leads to unhappiness. And even modern pop culture is aware of it. The nineties band Sublime’s words, “Life is short, so love the one ya got,” were ubiquitous in the dorm rooms of my generation of young scholars, and the sentiment is just an echo of an older generation’s “Money can’t buy you happiness.” But a few chart toppers and homespun sayings notwithstanding, the modern western world has created an economic and political belief system that is more or less designed to keep raising the happiness high jump bar just beyond our reach, even as, deceptively, it encourages the invention of mechanisms that help us to jump higher. We have colluded with the free market and the advertising industry to make the satiation of our own appetites impossible. Like a child trying to grasp a floating dandelion seed, the prize gets further and further away the faster we fling our limbs at it.

I don’t want to be misheard. Our system does a better job of incentivizing innovation than perhaps any other before it, and this has resulted in creature comforts, convenience, entertainment, and consumer options that I benefit from everyday. I’m definitely not ready to undo all of that just yet. But all great thought traditions have recognized that it’s not easy to discern just what causes happiness. And comfort, convenience, entertainment, and consumer options are regularly given more credit than they deserve by the popular mind.  

As a society, we are forever deceived into speaking, purchasing, and voting as though the stated goal of our society is to “create wealth,” something that we’ve succeeded at indisputably over the last century. But if we think that the wealth we’ve created should be put in the service of happiness and not the other way around, our successes are much more ambiguous.

This is why church leaders should never be afraid to ask people to give up their money.  The primary reason to press this issue in faith communities is not to cover staff salaries, renovate buildings, or pay the electric bill, nor, fellow well-meaning liberals, is it primarily to do good projects in the world (but by all means, let’s, if we have the cash, and we can be intelligent about it). The primary reason to press this is in order to smash idols.

The acquire-wealth-in-order-to-obtain-freedom-from-want experiment failed. We acquired the wealth. We have more money now than any generation before us. I read once that the average middle class home has more different kinds of consumer goods than King Henry the VIII had in his palace. But the “want” remains. It could even be argued that we have more want now than previous societies, which never stated “freedom from want” as a goal in the first place and so never thought to provide so many choices.

The word for something that promises you happiness but doesn’t deliver is an idol.

It’s not “greedy” for church leaders to ask for money (assuming it’s not going into their back pockets, which, if you’ve ever seen the financial statement, is not how it works in your typical neighborhood church). It’s a decision not to enable. It’s the refusal to give in to a lie.