Wouldn't Jesus Wear Tom's Shoes?

It’s trendy right now to engage in a bunch of self-flagellation over being Christian. Oh, we’ve been so prejudiced! Oh, woe is us…we’re turned so many people off! Oh, how could we have been so narrow-minded! Oh, why can’t we all just give up on the Culture Wars and buy Tom’s Shoes already?

Really, Christians? 

Are we still wringing our hands over the Crusades (which were started by the other side, by the way….go back and read your history)? Are we still upset that the Founders of America weren’t explicitly Christian? Are we still upset with ourselves for not abolishing slavery in 1776 instead of 1863? Or is our self-loathing attached to more recent causes, like the Great Cultural Divide of the 1960’s—you know, where we staid, formal, stuffy old Christians condemned hippies to hell because they didn’t wear ties to church? Every time I turn around, I see another Christian—tellingly, it’s usually a Millennial like Tim King—doing a mea culpa for the horrific cultural transgressions of earlier Christians. The unspoken message seems to be, “I’m sorry for the older Christians who talked about things that embarrassed me. But look at me….I’ve got the same stupid haircut that you have, and wear the Tom’s shoes, and use a Mac, and *gasp* vote for Democrats! So you see? You can still join the Christian Club!”

Enough already. If you’re going to add your voice to the conversation that’s been going on for 2,000 years, it would be helpful for you to add something pertinent, relevant, edifying, and maybe even new. But Mr. King, it is evident that you are history-challenged, as well as doctrinally infantile. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone noticing that you posted on CNN (The Communist News Network), or that you are a Millennial. Millennials are famous for not knowing what the heck they’re talking about but still giving themselves mad props for saying it anyway.

If I understand your beef correctly, your biggest problem with “certain” Christians is they seem “obsessed” with the Culture Wars. In fact, your criticism leaves absolutely no doubt whatsoever who you think are the real offenders: “The Jesus I read about in Scriptures taught love, acceptance, peace and concern for the poor, but the Christian leaders on TV and radio always seemed to be pro-rich, pro-white, pro-America and anti-gay.”  Elsewhere, in case your audience missed it, you clarified the Bad Guys even further: “When Franklin Graham sets up double standards of faith for Republicans and Democrats, when Pat Robertson intones about a coming “secular atheist dictatorship,” when the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins goes off about the dangers of repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and other “anti-family, anti-religious, anti-Christian policies,” when the great test for the next President of our country is who has “real” theology and who has “phony” theology, it might make for good sound bites.”

So your real problem is with Christians who take their Christianity seriously. Christians who read the Bible seriously. Worse yet….Christians who happen to be conservative. And you are blaming THEM for young people leaving the Church? Let me help you out with the facts.

As a Millennial, you naturally don’t believe that anything that happened before you were born (or the invention of the iPad, whichever came first) bears any societal relevance. But, as usual, you are wrong. Let me remind you that these same “Culture Wars” that you so eloquently (and in a similar sheep-like fashion to everyone else) decry were started by the Left. It wasn’t a bloated, tie-wearing, Scripture-quoting conservative Christian that sued to remove prayer from the public school. It wasn’t a conservative who pushed a synthetically-engineered social engineering paradigm on a culture that resulted in a 52% divorce rate, a generation of latchkey kids raised on television, and the bloated welfare state. It wasn’t a conservative who did an end-around to avoid the vote of the majority in order to get 9 people in robes to write law for the rest of us. It wasn’t a preacher who sued to have the Ten Commandments removed. The Left started this, and in response, a generation of Christians finally rose up in the 1970’s and 1980’s because they were alarmed that their faith was being quickly removed from the public square. Before the Left declared war on Christianity, Jerry Falwell was just a Baptist preacher who tended his own flock. Pat Robertson was just a Pentecostal preacher who tended his own flock. What drove these guys to prominence was that they felt called to stand up for the faith that was under direct and legal assault from the “free” country that promised to guarantee those same liberties. They’ve both become bywords for religious intolerance—which is a stunningly Orwellian irony, since the only reason they became prominent in the first place was to combat religious intolerance. And what's really ironic is that NONE OF THESE GUYS EVER ADVOCATED BEING INTOLERANT TO SOMEONE ELSE. That's just the non-sequitur that YOU slapped them with.

Now see if you can follow along with me logically: why is it not ok for Christians to make their voice heard in the public square? You seem to think it’s just fine when Saul Alinsky does it. When followers of his proto-Marxist rhetoric make placards and march on city squares and raise their tiny minority-voice to be heard above the din of the majority, you hail them as heroes. You name streets after them. You name schools after them. As a Millennial, you were definitely raised in a time and a place in which such citizen-activists (previously known as ne’er-do-wells who couldn’t find a job if you pointed them to one) were held up as models of behavior that you should emulate. Why is it ok for Barack Obama to be a grievance-stoking “community organizer,” but it’s somehow wrong and hypocritical and a big turn-off for a Christian to do the same thing? The hypocrisy, sir, is all on your side.

Now I would like to broadly agree with one principle that you stated—your biggest point in your essay was to state that not all Christians are Republicans. Of course, you also implied that as long as many Christians ARE Republicans, you Millennials will keep leaving the Church—and this says more about your maturity than it does Republican Christians—but I’ll come back to this in a moment. For now, I’d like to agree with your central premise: that you don’t have to vote Republican to be Christian. Congratulations on accidentally landing on a kernel of truth….a kernel of truth that was well-known among Christians long before you fancied yourself a Hobbs-esque philosopher with that Captain Obvious Observation. No one has ever taught this. Falwell never said this, Robertson never said this, Tony Perkins doesn’t believe this. In fact, the only people who preach that your religion is always a function of your politics are YOUR people…you know, the ones on the Left.

I will state it for the record: a Christian does NOT have to vote Republican, but accepting the mythological narrative that centralized wealth redistribution is something Jesus favors is every bit as nonsensical as you accuse Franklin Graham of being. What makes you think that “love, acceptance, peace, and concern for the poor” is the territory of the Left? Your Great Society—voted on and foisted on the American people in 1965 (again, before your time) with actual Scriptural proof-texts—actually had the opposite effect. It produced hate, rejection, intolerance, and a broader underclass of unemployable citizens than has ever existed since the inception of this great country. We have enough history now to guide us to the only correct conclusion: if you truly have any concern for the poor, then you will reject the same tired ideas of increased taxation and government redistribution.  

So let’s put Christianity and politics in perspective—not a Millennial strong suit, but you have to try if you want to be in a grown-up conversation—by reminding you of history once again. There are, broadly speaking, two political ideologies battling for world supremacy at this moment: egalitarianism and libertinism.

You can be a follower of Jesus Christ and be either. Period.

If a libertarian says you have to be libertarian to be Christian, he is being prejudiced. If an egalitarian says you have to be egalitarian to be Christian, he is also being prejudiced. I don’t see what’s so difficult to understand about this—but then again, I hail from a generation in which we were required to read Orwell, and could recognize political doublespeak when we hear it.

You can follow Christ and be either one, but your best chance of staying alive for the longest amount of time and being able to live out your theology successfully is in libertinism. That’s just an observation; not a dogmatic pronouncement. When you live in a society in which “everybody is free,” you will have to live with inequality. The only perfect government will exist when Christ returns and brings it with Him. Conversely, when you live in a society in which “making everyone equal” is the overarching value, you will see individual liberties get stripped away in order to enforce that. Eventually, your liberty to believe in Jesus Christ WILL get stripped. Not MAY—but WILL. That’s history. When you get so offended by that observation that you leave the church in a huff, you display your own immaturity. But until Christ returns, you on the Left will wonder how Christians on the Right can vote against wealth redistribution. And Christians on the Right will wonder how Christians on the Left can vote for a man who actually supported an infanticide bill on the floor of the Illinois State Senate. And both sides will still be Christians, assuming that both still confess the central creeds of orthodoxy that have existed since Chalcedon (A.D. 451…I know….it’s before your time).

If you’re leaving the Church because you associate it with conservatism, then you demonstrate that you know precious little about the mission and nature of the Church—AND conservatism. So while you’re on your Mac tablet, read up on your history. When you decide to add your voice to the ongoing conversation, make sure you’re adding something that is worthwhile—not just a retread of an argument made by Jonathan Alter at Newsweek years ago (I know…it’s  a magazine. How very quaint.)

Mr. King, you were right about one thing: if 62% of college-age young people are leaving the Church, it’s the Church’s fault, not college’s. I couldn’t agree more. I’ve long argued that we’ve spent too much time ripping out our pews, creating Christian rock bands, changing our hairstyles, and generally trying to ape the people around us. We’ve ceased to be effective ministers of the gospel to a hostile culture because we no longer have faith in our own message. Perhaps if we’d spent less time lighting candles and having frank discussions about sex in youth group, and actually teaching these kids what we believe and why we believe it, they wouldn’t be so quick to toss their faith overboard when they get into Dr. Leftoflenin’s class. An unexamined faith is a weak faith, and we’ve done a terrible job at teaching and strengthening our young people’s faith. The bigger problem, from our vantage point, is that we’ve basically withdrawn from the culture entirely. Our kids go to home schools or Christian schools or youth groups, then go to Bible colleges, then work in churches, and never have to rub elbows with the world.  We have our own music, art, schools, political structures, and even neighborhoods. It’s completely unscriptural. Perhaps it would be better for them if we spent their youth group years inculcating them with real doctrine and apologetics and logic—then sent them to secular university to live out that faith. Then it would become real to them.

But you cannot throw the baby out with the bathwater. You cannot toss the Falwells and Robertsons under the bus because you’re embarrassed by their conservatism. The Church is bigger than liberal or conservative. You are espousing one side of that—liberal—and out of the other side of your mouth you are excoriating the other side, conservatives. When people leave the Church, they leave for their own reasons. When you elevate the Equalizers over the Freedom-lovers, you are committing the same blasphemy you thundered about in your essay.

Grow up and stop it.