Evangelical Myopia?

Get Some Glasses!

When “W” came out in the 2000 presidential debates touting Jesus Christ as the greatest philosopher in human history, eyebrows raised across the globe, particularly in Europe. Europeans “just don’t get it,” when it comes to understanding American religion. I am often surprised at the degree to which we do “get it” in spite of ourselves. Beside the fact that every hamlet in the U.S. has its own Christian Broadcasting Outlet and television’s evangelists are ubiquitous, we are a culture marinated in one basic religious message, about which we are remarkably uncritical. On this continent, at least, popular culture automatically parrots the assumptions of the evangelical line. (I am astonished at the degree to which American Roman Catholics have adopted this way of thinking.) Where did it come from?

First, a disclaimer. I consider myself an evangelical in the root sense of the Greek word. Euangelion, (lit. Good News from the angels), describes the things angels would say were they talking to you. “Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all the people”. . . that sort of thing. Good News, it says. I wondered how it got to be such bad news in our time. While reading Elizabeth Brown Pryor’s excellent biography of General Robert E. Lee, "Reading the Man," I was surprised to find that the evangelical message of today is rooted in the life of the Old South and its cataclysmic defeat in America's Civil War. Consider the following hallmarks of 21st century American Evangelicalism.

Family Values It is the bread and butter of evangelical morality that “Normal” religion is an ordered household with a place for everything and everything in its place. In fact, family values is rooted in the plantation households of the prewar South. The truth was then that a Plantation was a rather unpleasant, often brutal, place. If there was serenity there, it was at the big house, if it was anywhere. There, you could ignore all that was going on around you. Slaves had constantly to be policed, assigned and watched. Wilderness was a constant threat to successful farming. Isolation was the normal experience of plantation life. Voila, you have the rough shape of what we know as family values. . . a normal existence forged by beating back or ignoring a hostile and encroaching world. It should be no surprise that plantation values came to church with our ancestors. Family Values as we know them today are simply those Plantation Values of yesteryear. There, the message of the angels is not good news. It is most often about suspicion, about threat and about maintaining order. The message of such angels is “Be afraid and Watch Out!”. . . and with good reason.

I’m not OK; You’re not OK. Defeat in the Civil War produced another peculiar quirk of faith. As Pryor writes, “had (Lee) been wrong to believe that God favored the South? If God’s favor lay elsewhere, as Union victory seemed to indicate, had he defied God’s will by defending the Confederacy and all it stood for? . . Evangelical theology had given Southerners a convenient way out of the corner by claiming that God loved best those whom he chastened. Self-blame was limited to small failings of pride and ingratitude rather than a breach of the most sacred commandments.” Today’s persistent evangelical focus on the tiniest of concerns is rooted here, along with an inability convincingly to grasp the bigger picture. Modern evangelicalism scrupulously directs moral concerns, often missing engagement with the greater issues of our time. Examples abound of this micro morality in the midst of some rather glaring social faux pas’. We all recognize this as a ethos peculiar to the religion we find “in the air” in these United States.

Just Me and Jesus Perhaps most memorable about the Rebel army was the degree to which its members were so personal in their approach to war. (It was an army in which the folks in the trenches elected their officers!) So, discipline in the ranks had a different flavor in the Confederate Army. Leaders often relied on and encouraged unorthodox and highly individualized fighting style. Perhaps most memorable were the raiders of J.E.B. Stuart, whose acts of individuality are remembered in the Old Confederacy to this day. Be that as it may, the Rebel armies revered the personal styles of the warriors. It should be no surprise that the ethos of evangicalism reflects those eccentric warriors.

Why don’t those Europeans understand our Evangelicals? The short answer is that they did not live through our Civil War. Maybe it is time to ask, “Are the values of the Old Confederacy suitable to the America of the early 21st century?” Clearly, our Iraq disaster, simply the latest symptom of this peculiar way of looking at the world, dicates a hearty NO! (Lest you think Iraq is an abberation, one of a kind, there are plenty more examples where that came from.) We have a job to do if we are to rebuild the theological foundations in this nation. But, where to start?