I recently noticed a statement by leadership guru Seth Goden, who said that one of the things that best prepared children in the late twentieth century for life was “sea monkeys.” Do you remember the old comic books with advertisements for sea monkeys and how the pictures depicted these sea monkeys as majestic-looking characters, with a mom, dad, and kids who all resembled aliens? Children sent in an order because they wanted to get these sea monkeys. But when they opened the package, the “sea monkeys” were brined shrimp and looked absolutely nothing like the creatures in the advertisement. Goden said that this moment, wherever it came, helped children to know an important life lesson: You are going to be sold things that do not in any way live up to what they claim to be. So there is a dose of cynicism that starts at an early age, which can be helpful in some aspects of life and ultimately devastating in other aspects.
While I don’t know that I had my cynical crisis moment with sea monkeys, I did have it within the church. As someone who was an heir and survivor of the Bible Belt, I found myself as a fifteen-year-old thrown into a deep crisis of faith. I looked around and saw Christianity all over the place, but it didn’t look much like the book of Acts. Much of the Christianity I saw seemed to have a kind of cheap grace transactional form of the gospel in which people repeated a few words and then were pronounced to be born again, whether or not they ever followed Christ. I saw a kind of cultural Christianity where a lot was said about profanity, including euphemisms like “gosh darn it,” but nothing about virulent racial slurs, even when they took place in church fellowship halls. I heard a lot about sex and violence on television but a lot of cover-ups about sex and violence within the church.
There came a point when I started to wonder: Was Christianity just another form of Southern honor culture? Was Christianity just something tacked onto the way one is supposed to behave in order to prop up the way things are in order to be normal? If that was the case, it meant that the world I saw in front of me was dark and meaningless and Darwinian. It was a horrible, horrible wrestling.
I found my way out of this through a wardrobe in a spare room in England. Having read the Chronicles of Narnia as a child, I recognized C. S. Lewis’s name on the spine of Mere Christianity in a bookstore and took it home and read it. What was remarkable to me about reading Lewis was not the argument he was making in Mere Christianity. I didn’t need reasons to prop up the faith at that moment. What I needed was somebody who bore an authentic witness to something that was true, someone who was obviously even in the way he spoke—not someone trying to sell me something.
The voice of such a person could not be any more different from this fifteen-year-old Southern Baptist in Mississippi. This smoking, drinking Anglican, long dead by that point, bore witness to something bigger than the Bible Belt—something mighty and awesome as an army with banners. This saved my life and helped me conserve and hold fast to what was good.
I think we are in another moment of crisis today. The very real challenges facing the church might lead it to one of two things, both of which are entirely disastrous and unhelpful. One of those is a sense of denial about the rampant secularization taking place, and a sense of “if only we do a little bit more of what we have always done, everything is going to turn around and be exactly the way it was” in some real or imagined Golden Age. Or, we could be the kind of people who see the cultural shifts and the secularization around us and wring our hands in desperation or clench our fists in anger.
What’s happening around us right now is the shaking that is coming through secularization and with some of the horrific things we see taking place, even on a weekly basis—such as pastors, teachers, or leaders greatly influential in the lives of their congregations announcing to them their own moral failings or that they no longer believe in Jesus Christ.
This is rattling and shaking, but I would argue that the shaking happening in American culture right now is not a sign that God has given up on the church. Instead, I think it is a sign that God is rescuing his church from a captivity we didn’t even know we were in. In order to move forward into the future, there are two things I believe we must reclaim. One of those is a sense of gospel integrity, and the other is a sense of gospel community. This is exactly what I think the apostle Paul is arguing at the beginning of his letter to the church at Galatia.
Gospel Integrity
Paul begins by talking about his apostolic authority and the fact that this authority, this gospel, did not come from man. “I was given this by Jesus,” he says. “This is coming as a revelation from Jesus and, therefore, what I am giving to you is the authority of God himself” (Gal. 1:11–12). He repeatedly testifies to the fact that he’s telling the truth. This is desperately needed in terms of the way we approach the outside world, because our biggest problem is not a growing secularism. The biggest problem we face is a growing cynicism in which people not only mistrust the church or religion but mistrust everything. There is great reason to mistrust everything! Since we are at the point where almost any claim to authority is seen to be a means to an end, what then should be the stance of the church against this sort of culture of not just unbelief but of incredulity toward any claim of belief?
It has to do with exactly what the apostle Paul is talking about at the beginning of Galatians. He takes the stance of one who sees himself in front of the judgment seat of Christ when he says, “Am I now a servant of man, or am I a servant of God? If I wanted to please men, I would not then be a servant of Jesus Christ” (v.10). This is a theme Paul uses in many of his Epistles, such as 1 Corinthians 4:3: “I consider it a small thing to be judged by you.” Why? Because he knows that there is another judgment that is going to take place.
If you say to any group of secularized Americans right now, “Tell me what you think about Christians,” the topic of judgment will probably be one of their first few responses. Sometimes those who don’t know any other passage of Scripture will know the phrase, “Judge not lest you be judged.” In reality, however, the thing we most have for the world is a sense of judgment day—not a censorious moralizing over and against the world, but an understanding that there really is an objective and personal accounting for evil and for sin. This gives meaning to the individual person’s life and frees us from the shackles of cowardice in order to be free to actually bear witness.
Why is it that Paul is able to do this? Why is it that the church throughout the ages has been able to confront everything from fatalism to atheism? It’s because there is a sense of accountability and integrity that is based on a real conviction about the judgment seat of Christ, and where we stand before this judgment seat, that frees us from the judgment of everyone else. Think about the passage in John 12:42–43. At one level, many in the crowds believed the things Jesus was saying, but they wouldn’t commit themselves to him. This is because they were fearful of being thrown out of the synagogues and because they loved the glory that comes from man more than the glory that comes from God.
This is the primary challenge right now, not only for the church of Jesus Christ but for everybody. Why is it that we have skyrocketing levels of depression among adolescents and young adults that can be directly tied to social media? It’s because we’re living in an environment where almost everyone is using social media the way a politician uses daily polling tracking data, except without an election day in sight. Where do I stand in terms of my image? Where do I stand in terms of displaying my success? This leads to a hollowing out of the person, which then leads to a desire to find a herd to belong to or a hive, and to transfer one’s convictions, intuitions, and affections to that herd.
The gospel and the integrity of the gospel free us from this. Because we are people who understand and know who we are in Christ, we have the approval of God and are therefore able to avoid the kind of false gospels that American cultural Christianity can give. We can say, “I am free to pour my life out. I am free to stand confidently in the face of unbelief without being given over to some sort of frantic outrage.” Why? Because the worst thing that can possibly happen to me has already happened. The worst thing is not the disapproval of the culture around me, losing a job, or my spouse walking out. The worst that can happen to me is dying under the wrath of God outside the gates of Jerusalem. In Christ, however, I have already experienced that. When I stand before God, he sees me hidden in Christ (Col. 3) and thinks of me exactly in the same way he thought of Jesus at the waters of the Jordan, pronouncing, “This is my beloved child in whom I am well pleased.”
With a word from that God, who shapes and forms our entire outlook on the world around us, we are then freed from this frantic desire to be found in some protective herd. This means we need to be a people who actually know and are shaped by the text of the Bible.
For many years, I trained some of the best future pastors and missionaries. I noticed that even though the people I was training were deeply theological, they were often people who were deeply theological at the point of specific controversies. They could argue whether or not there should be infant baptism or believer’s baptism. They could argue whether or not complementarianism or egalitarianism is right. They could argue limited atonement and general atonement. But they didn’t know the difference between Josiah and Jehoiakim. They didn’t know the rhythms of the narrative of Scripture itself in a way that would cause them to understand their actual identity, to see through the grid of the eyes of Christ. The sort of integrity of the gospel the world needs from us is a deep and constant attention to the word of God in Scripture.
Gospel Community
In addition to gospel integrity, we need gospel community. Paul says in Galatians that he didn’t go and ask permission. Jesus commissioned him. He didn’t receive this secondhand from the apostles. He went as someone chosen by Jesus Christ to others chosen by Jesus Christ: “I did not yield to the false teachers and false brothers who came in to spy out our freedom in Jesus Christ.” And why not? “We did not yield to them for a moment so that the gospel would be preserved for you” (Gal. 2:4–5).
There is a kind of Christianity that can take the worst of all possible worlds: of simultaneously believing that we are a majority and most people agree with us; and a sense that we are an aggrieved minority constantly under siege and victimized. A secular journalist friend of mine who is not a believer sent me a photograph she took of a bumper sticker. It was obviously a Christian’s car with all sorts of Christian bumper stickers; but one of the stickers said, “If Jesus had had a gun, he would be alive today.” My response was, “Jesus is alive today!” The message being projected on that sticker was not so much a claim about Jesus as a claim about an argument that would be taking place regardless of whether the tomb was empty or full. Jesus is a means to carry that argument to another level. That is not what the gospel of Jesus Christ does to us. The gospel of Jesus Christ does something so strange and distinctive and unnerving, and it happened in his crucifixion and resurrection from the dead.
We are not people who simply attach Bible verses to issues we’re concerned about and debating on social media. We find other matters of far more importance—matters that we tend to suppress through our unrighteousness (Rom. 1), matters we don’t want to acknowledge, even in our own consciences (Rom. 2), and all because we have a sense of fear of judgment (Rom. 3). Those matters can only be answered in the cross of Jesus Christ, and Paul says he would not yield to any who wanted to use the gospel as a means to any end, regardless of what that end is. What he wanted to do was to conserve and to preserve the gospel for us.
What American cultural Christianity often does—and lost secular America can see this and recognize it—is seek to be separated from sinners but remain infected with sin. And so, we turn on its head what the Holy Spirit says to us in 1 Corinthians 5:12: “It is not those on the outside that I judge; it is those who are on the inside.” We turn that on its head, and we speak loudly about whatever sins do not have a voting majority in our church and then are mute about those that do. The outside world can see that. And when they see that, it fuels the kind of cynicism that says, “We understand and know what you have here, and what you have here is just another marketing scheme.”
To paraphrase Paul, he says, “I am a servant of Jesus Christ. I am not bringing this gospel out of a desire for getting a vote from other people. I’m not bringing this gospel to you as a means for something that I want based on other things. I’m not test-marketing this message. I’m bringing you something that is of such critical importance, and with the authority of Jesus himself, that I am willing to stand and stand alone.” That is really difficult to do when we’re living in a culture that is simultaneously consumed with nostalgia for the past while craving novelty. That’s why we have constant reboots of thirty-year-old television shows. And it’s very difficult when we’re dealing with the sort of world where truth has become a means to an end, such that any claim to authority and truth is immediately disbelieved.
The Freakonomics gurus, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, did a piece a couple years ago about those repetitive Nigerian e-mails that say, “I’m a prince in Nigeria; I need you to send me $500.” Levitt and Dubner asked why the e-mails don’t come up with new material. It’s been the same message with the same grammatical and spelling errors, and none of them seems sophisticated enough. These researchers say that this was exactly what the scammers were trying to do. They didn’t want the messages to be sophisticated; they wanted to be able to identify who out there is so gullible that they hadn’t heard about these Nigerian prince e-mails. As they put it, the gullibility is unobservable, so you want to get the gullible people to show themselves; that’s who you want to talk to if you’re running an e-mail scam. Anybody who doesn’t fall off their chair laughing is exactly the right person.
If all we want to do is to build some sort of religious movement, then we can put together a coalition of successful lunatics and heretics who are able to sell books on tying Bible prophecy to every current event; and as soon as those things no longer exist, we can move on to something else. You can have a movement that sells a prosperity gospel and a market for end-times dried food for the imminent apocalypse, sometimes on the same television program. But this is not the gospel.
We need to speak to people with the sort of transcendent authority that comes with the gospel Jesus entrusted to his apostles and handed down through the ages to us—the sort of gospel that creates such disruption so that when Paul says, “They told me to remember the poor, the ones I was very eager to remember in the first place” (Gal. 2:10), he not only sees that in terms of charity but in exactly the way that James does (James 2), with a kind of trillion-year perspective that says the standards of success and power the outside world values are not of the kingdom of God.
We need to speak to people in a way that advances the gospel in a world of unbelief, not by retaining some sort of easy, illusory influence. John the Baptist could have had a lot of influence by saying, “That’s some great dancing, Herod.” Influence is illusory. The marrying parson who marries whoever comes into the room can have influence, but he doesn’t have respect. In the long term, the message we have will reach a secularizing culture not by its sameness but by its distinctiveness—by conserving what is odd and distinctive and strange about the gospel.
A couple years ago, I was on a lesbian talk show in San Francisco. The host said to me, “I’m not going to take callers, because that would be bad for you.” She said, “I just want to talk to somebody I don’t talk to very often.” As we talked, she asked me why Christians think this or do that, and I answered all her questions. Once we were off the air, she said, “I really wanted to have this conversation because I think you’re crazy. I don’t know anybody who thinks the way you people think. When I’m looking at people around me, if somebody has been dating one or two times and they haven’t had sex, I’m not going to conclude that they have some sort of religious or moral framework—I’m just going to conclude that they have some sort of deep psychological problem. And that’s the way everybody I know thinks. So when you’re talking about this Christian understanding of marriage and sexuality, you just need to know that I don’t think you realize just how strange that sounds to me.” I said, “I think I might, because a Christian vision of marriage and sexuality has always been difficult. If you read the New Testament, you’ll have a constant reiteration of why these things matter to people who are tempted to walk away from it. But what I want you to know is that as strange and weird and odd as our views on marriage are, we believe stranger things than that. We believe that a previously dead man is going to show up in the sky on a horse!”
The message we have for the outside world is one that Scripture says comes with its own authority. An appeal (2 Cor. 4) that is an open proclamation of the truth, in which the light and the glory of God are found in the face of Jesus Christ, addresses a person. Regardless of how confident a secularized world seems, and regardless of how confident a de-converting band of ex-evangelicals may seem, we’re dealing with people who—like all of us—are outside of Christ and who are deeply, deeply afraid.
The message we have is one that comes exactly the way in which C. S. Lewis brought to me a reminder of the gospel I had already heard: There is a deeper magic than the stone table. We are the people who ought to have the tranquility and the confidence to patiently bear witness, to wait on the Holy Spirit to move and work, and to march to Zion farther up and farther in.
Russell Moore (PhD, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) is president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention and visiting professor of ethics at Southern, Southeastern, and New Orleans Baptist Seminaries. He is the author of several books, including Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel (B&H, 2015).
