Fear of the culture has driven the church in a lot of ways over the last two or three centuries. The first part of the story is the birth and rise of modern liberal theology. (Note, I said liberal theology, not liberal politics; this isn’t about whether one voted for John Kerry, or supports Barack Obama. Though it can be related, it’s a different set of issues, as can be seen from the number of prominent evangelical leaders who are quite liberal politically, such as Ron Sider and Tony Campolo.) Liberal Protestantism, though its roots may go back further, began in earnest in 1799 when Friedrich Schleiermacher published his book On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers. Schleiermacher, who was only 29 when he began writing this book, was part of a group of young upper-class German intellectuals who met weekly to discuss the ideas of the day. Though the others in the group respected and admired him for his intelligence and wit, though he became quite good friends with most of them, and though he shared most of their beliefs, in one key respect they could not understand him at all. You see, most of those in Schleiermacher’s circle were convinced and passionate atheists, people who despised religion, while Schleiermacher was a minister, a chaplain at the Charity Hospital in Berlin; how could he share so many of their beliefs and yet be a Christian? His closest friends in the group decided to resolve the issue: at Schleiermacher’s birthday party, they badgered him into writing a book.Though he initially tried to avoid writing it, Schleiermacher took the task quite seriously. His purpose as he set pen to paper was not to challenge his friends’ beliefs, nor to bring them to an encounter with the transcendent, personal, holy God of the Bible; rather, his aim was to present them with a conception of religion, and particularly of Christianity, that they could accept on their own terms. He sought, in other words, to produce a version of religion that fit with what the educated culture already believed, to accommodate religion to that culture. Given the beliefs and expectations of that culture, he produced an interpretation of Christian faith that sounds closer to Buddhism than to historic Christianity, in which religion is “to be one with the Infinite and in every moment to be eternal”; and while those who followed after him argued with one aspect or another of the picture he painted, producing their own pictures of religion to fit their own cultural situations, they accepted his approach to theology, seeking to conform their faith not to Scripture but to the demands of their culture. Thus, we had a later German scholar, Rudolf Bultmann, “demythologize” the New Testament, removing all miracles and other supernatural elements; after all, the educated people of his time didn’t believe in miracles, so there couldn’t have been any.Around the same time as Bultmann was beginning his career, a backlash was beginning in America. Between 1910 and 1915 a series of twelve booklets were published, titled “The Fundamentals,” which set out five fundamental doctrines of orthodox Christianity. These were: the doctrine of the Trinity; the doctrine of the two natures of Christ, that Jesus was fully human and also fully God; the doctrine of the literal physical Second Coming of Christ; the doctrine that salvation is by grace alone through faith alone, by Christ alone; and the doctrine that Scripture is the inerrant word of God. In 1920 the term “fundamentalism” was coined to describe the beliefs of those who held to these five fundamentals, as over against those who didn’t, and for a couple of decades, that’s all it meant. In the 1940s, however, there was a split among those who held to these fundamentals, resulting in a new group which came to be known as “evangelicals.”The cause of the split was, once again, fear of the culture. The fundamentalist movement had fought liberal theology on detail after detail for years, but it had absorbed the belief that the gospel cannot address the dominant culture without changing; so, refusing (rightly) to conform the gospel to the culture, fundamentalism moved to wall out the culture. When some leaders in the fundamentalist movement—most notably a radio preacher named Charles Fuller, who would give his name to Fuller Seminary—sought to go in a different direction, it was that which provoked the split and launched the modern American evangelical movement.There was good reason for that, as the cultural separatism of fundamentalism is problematic on a number of levels. Though it has been a pretty effective way to ensure doctrinal purity, it has severely restricted the witness of that part of the American church. What is more, far too many kids who grow up in that subculture go off to college and see their faith melt on their first real encounter with people of other beliefs; sadly, the result of such encounters tends to be people who don’t believe in much of anything anymore.Unfortunately, while fundamentalism represents the most obvious expression of, and response to, fear of the culture, it continues to be a problem as well for both liberals and evangelicals, if in subtler ways. Specifically, I think many among both liberals and evangelicals are at some level afraid to challenge the assumptions of the culture to which they belong, and so choose to conform their preaching and ministry to fit their culture; the only difference, really, is which section of American culture they’re conforming to. Thus in evangelical circles it seems that most pastors aspire to lead megachurches, and the whole idea of the church as a business and the pastor as its CEO has become very powerful in the last decade or two; thus we have influential pastors of evangelical churches openly measuring their success by their market share. Effectively, then, you can measure how good your ministry is by how good you are at giving your “customers” what they want, whether that be in the music selection on Sunday mornings, in the range of programs you offer, or whatever. The result, too often, is the baptism of American consumer culture, and the Jesus who once overturned the tables of the moneychangers is used to sell coffee mugs, T-shirts and figurines.The flip side to that is the liberal wing of the American church, which is tuned into a very different strain of American culture. Among liberal pastors, it seems to be an article of faith that our culture—by which they mean the culture of our elites—must correct the Scriptures, rather than the other way around. The Bible, on this view, is a rather outdated book produced by cultures that didn’t know as much as we do about biology, psychology, physics, and any number of other things; therefore, if the Scriptures contradict what our culture believes it knows, we are justified in concluding that it is the Bible that is wrong and must be brought into line. Thus orthodoxy is dismissed as old-fashioned and outdated, as if the truth of a statement could be determined by its age, and by whether or not our culture finds it amenable.What we need—and it isn’t easy—is to get free of that fear of what the culture thinks of us, and what it might do to us, and to learn to speak the truth whether it’s what people want to hear from us or not. Democracy is the greatest form of government this world has yet invented (which, as Winston Churchill noted, isn’t saying much), but it has the unfortunate tendency to give us the mindset that truth is determined by majority vote; we need to shake ourselves free of that mindset and learn to recognize, and challenge, the unexamined assumptions in our culture that conflict with the character and will of God. We need to learn to look for the unasked questions, and ask them, knowing that we will be challenged if we do, and then stand up to that challenge. If our brothers and sisters in other parts of the world can stand up to persecution when it might cost them their lives, the least we can do in America (and in the West as a whole) is take a little verbal abuse.
