A Mormon television star stands in front of the Lincoln Memorial and calls American Christians to revival. He assembles some evangelical celebrities to give testimonies, and then preaches a God and country revivalism that leaves the evangelicals cheering that they’ve heard the gospel, right there in the nation’s capital.
The news media pronounces him the new leader of America’s Christian conservative movement, and a flock of America’s Christian conservatives have no problem with that.
That’s Russell Moore’s brief summary of the rally Glenn Beck pulled together on the Mall in Washington, D.C. last Saturday (HT: Jared Wilson), and it seems to me to be more or less fair. It’s certainly generated a lot of praise and positive commentary for Beck from people in the American church; but it troubles me. Indeed—though I’m not one for theological purity tests in politics, like this guy seems to me to be advocating, as a precondition for working together for the common good—I have to agree with Dr. Moore: this is a scandal.
In order to be this gullible, American Christians have had to endure years of vacuous talk about undefined “revival” and “turning America back to God” that was less about anything uniquely Christian than about, at best, a generically theistic civil religion and, at worst, some partisan political movement.
Rather than cultivating a Christian vision of justice and the common good (which would have, by necessity, been nuanced enough to put us sometimes at odds with our political allies), we’ve relied on populist God-and-country sloganeering and outrage-generating talking heads. We’ve tolerated heresy and buffoonery in our leadership as long as with it there is sufficient political “conservatism” and a sufficient commercial venue to sell our books and products.
Too often, and for too long, American “Christianity” has been a political agenda in search of a gospel useful enough to accommodate it. There is a liberation theology of the Left, and there is also a liberation theology of the Right, and both are at heart mammon worship. The liberation theology of the Left often wants a Barabbas, to fight off the oppressors as though our ultimate problem were the reign of Rome and not the reign of death. The liberation theology of the Right wants a golden calf, to represent religion and to remind us of all the economic security we had in Egypt. Both want a Caesar or a Pharaoh, not a Messiah.
This points us to the heart of the problem here, which is thinking that “religion” as such is a good thing that should be encouraged. (Actually, I’ve been starting to think lately that there might be a deeper epistemological error here, that of thinking that “religion” as such is even a thing at all, rather than merely a category for organizing our thinking . . . but that’s a post for another time.) From a biblical point of view, this is pure tripe. Religion is simply an inevitable part of human existence, because we are created for worship and wired for belief. It’s not a matter of whether we have a religion or not—it’s whether our religion is true or not, whether we’re worshiping the one true and living God or a false and dead god of our own preference and design.
Nor is it a matter of whether our religion produces moral behavior. Even if one were to begin by assuming that all the values and standards and virtues that conservatives defend are in fact right, that would not in the least mean that a religion which produced such morality must necessarily be right and good. As Michael Horton tells the story,
Over a half-century ago, Donald Grey Barnhouse, pastor of Philadelphia’s Tenth Presbyterian Church, gave his CBS radio audience a different picture of what it would look like if Satan took control of a town in America. He said that all of the bars and pool halls would be closed, pornography banished, pristine streets and sidewalks would be occupied by tidy pedestrians who smiled at each other. There would be no swearing. The kids would answer “Yes, sir,” “No, ma’am,” and the churches would be full on Sunday . . . where Christ is not preached.
Satan’s main goal isn’t to make us immoral, it’s to turn us away from God in whatever direction works best. All else being equal, I would imagine Satan would prefer it if we were all engaged in making each other as miserable as inhumanly possible, but all else never is equal, and those sorts of situations have this one major drawback for the infernal one: they make the reality and gravity of human sin eye-blastingly clear, creating a desire for change. If human damnation is the goal, there are more effective and efficient ways.
The scenario the Rev. Dr. Barnhouse painted is one of them, in which the form of godliness is used to keep people from realizing the absence of its reality. In such a community, people could feel themselves perfectly good Christians without feeling in any way their need for Christ—no need for a Savior, because no apparent reason to need salvation. Such a city would be perfectly religious, in a way that would satisfy everything last Saturday’s rally seemed to be about; it would be full of the sort of religion that President Eisenhower famously declared is necessary for the American system of government to make sense. And doesn’t it look an awful lot like the vision Beck held out to his audience? And yet, it would be profoundly wrong.
This is the kind of religion that Satan loves: religion that’s all about us, that exists and is defended primarily because of its utility for human goals and purposes . . . and thus can be the means of enslaving us to those goals and purposes. That sort of religious revival would no doubt create many happy and self-satisfied churches, in the short run; but in the long run, it would bring the destruction of everything it promised. If I’m reading Beck right, this is the kind of religious revival he wants to see, and the kind of revival he’s trying to promote, because it’s a revival designed to do what he values. But it’s nothing I can get behind.
Do I want to see revival? Yes, but not of “religion” generally, or “faith” in some abstract sense. There is no value to “religion” if it’s a human religion or directed toward human purposes, and no value in faith that’s directed to anyone or anything other than Jesus Christ. Indeed, there’s no value to faith in God if we don’t immediately follow that up by saying that we mean God as revealed in Jesus. I don’t want to see anything that looks like revival if it isn’t all about Jesus as Jesus points us to the Father; I don’t want to see any kind of revival that can be created by scheduling and rallies and speakers and programs. And I most certainly don’t want any proclaimed revival that comes with, or on, a political platform. That kind of revival has the religion, but it doesn’t have the life.
The only kind of revival I want to see is one that can only be created by the Holy Spirit, who lives and breathes to talk about Jesus and the Father: the revival of the injudicious and incendiary proclamation of the radical gospel of grace, of the infinite love and unfathomable grace of God in Jesus Christ, capturing the hearts and minds of the people of God. That kind of revival—yes!—will have profound political and social consequences, should it come; but it will never be about those consequences, never be for those consequences. It won’t be about America, about restoring our honor or rebuilding our character. It will only ever be about and for glorifying and praising and giving thanks to God the Father for his Son Jesus Christ, who is ours by the work of his Holy Spirit. It will be for God and God alone.
