The Reasonable Christian

Imagine for a moment that you’re in a lifeboat on the open sea. You’ve escaped a giant sinking ship, and there’s still plenty of room in that lifeboat for everyone on the ship. You’re trying desperately to talk the people in that ship into leaving it and getting in the lifeboat, but they’re not convinced they’re sinking. They think you’re foolish for leaving the ship, and they have nothing but contempt for you. Because you are a reasonable and decent human being, you decide to spend the time that you have left before the giant ship sinks doing everything in your power to rescue the people on it.

That’s the best analogy I can think of for the state of affairs in the world. Christians know that the ship of Man is no good—it’s destined to slip beneath the waters of justice and all who are aboard will perish. Christians have been rescued, and are desperately trying to get others into the lifeboat provided by Christ, as well. But the unsaved—the people on the sinking ship—have nothing but contempt for us. As a result, the Sisyphean task of the Christian is to continue to come up with ways of getting people off that ship and into the lifeboat. Occasionally, they come up with good ones. More often than not, they are faced with the terrifying prospect that Christ was actually right when He said “all men will hate you because of Me” (Mt 10.22). Nothing Christians ever do can change that—and yet we try with all of our might.

Typically, the person trying the hardest is Reasonable Christian. You know Reasonable Christian—he’s “different” from typical Christians. He doesn’t engage in all of that hateful judging and fear-mongering. He talks about love and grace as if he alone has discovered the theological significance of these concepts. Reasonable Christian bends himself into all kinds of calisthenic pretzels to appeal to the people on the sinking ship. When the topic of gay marriage comes up, for example, he can’t wait to chime in with what he believes is a novel and thought-provoking original sentiment: “Why are evangelicals so obsessed with gay marriage and social issues?” He blogs about how Christians need to rediscover love and grace, and he frequently says things such as “love wins.” He sees himself as forward-thinking because of his enthusiasm for Left-leaning causes—never stopping to think about the danger of considering the Left and Right to be moral equivalents of one another. Reasonable Christian’s entire self-image is modeled on the implication that other believers are Unreasonable Christians—they don’t really believe in love and grace, and they are full of hate and anger.

The truth about Reasonable Christian would be hilariously annoying if it weren’t so dangerously naïve.

Have you ever had a long conversation with someone about an issue that is dear to you? Let’s say the conversation took several hours, and there has been a respectful back-and-forth between the two of you. Perhaps you table your discussion after four or five hours, and come back to it again the following day—then the next, and the next, until you are several weeks into the discourse. Suddenly, along comes a young acquaintance who overhears 13 seconds of your conversation one day—and immediately jumps in and begins contributing, despite the fact that he has no context for his place in the discourse. Quick—without overthinking it—what is your initial emotional reaction to that young acquaintance?

That’s Reasonable Christian, in a nutshell.

He thinks he knows whereof he speaks, but is really only jumping in late to a conversation that’s been going on for decades and even longer. What he thinks is an evangelical “obsession” with the so-called “culture war” is really just a response. The people in the lifeboat didn’t start this assault on marriage, family and Christianity: the people in the sinking ship did. He doesn’t even bother to educate himself on the particulars of the conversation—all he knows is that if he can dress, talk and act like the people in that sinking ship, he can save them all by himself, and he’ll be the hero instead of the Unreasonable Christians who are “obsessed” with stuff that’s not important. He’s as ignorant as a child, but is also ignorant of that fact, too. This makes him dangerous.

Unfortunately for Reasonable Christian, his entire existence as “reasonable” is based on two faulty assumptions: (1) that the unbelievers on that sinking ship—particularly those on the Left—are imminently reasonable people who’ve just been turned off by some other people in the lifeboat; and (2) no matter who wins this election or that debate, life will continue to go on as it always has, and no one needs to get too excited about these things. Let’s deal with these assumptive fallacies one at a time.

The first assumption is that unbelievers—especially those on the Left—are simply reasonable people who are just sitting around and waiting on a Reasonable Christian to “get” them. They’ve had their feelings hurt by others in the lifeboat—like that terrible fuddy-duddy Falwell, or that other fuddy-duddy Dobson—and if they can just see what a nice, trendy, chest-shaving, Tom’s-wearing, hipster glasses-having, Mac-using, chai latte-drinking person Reasonable Christian is, they’ll come to the gospel faster than you can whisper “arugula!” Based on this fallacious assumption, Reasonable Christian listens to what he thinks are valid criticisms of people on the sinking ship and tries to respond to them directly. He hears them say that they don’t like Falwell or Dobson, so Reasonable Christian goes right over to Falwell and Dobson and tosses them over the side of the lifeboat. He then looks back at the sinking ship and says, “see? We’re reasonable after all. You can get in and enjoy a soy burrito with me now!” Reasonable Christian thinks that he’d rather be Andy Stanley than Jerry Falwell, because the former is hip, trendy and reasonable—and the latter is just full of hate. But what Reasonable Christian never seems to understand is the REAL reason the people on the sinking ship rarely get off of it. It’s because of the profoundly offensive propositional truth of the gospel:

Man is fallen, and can’t redeem himself. Ergo, he can only obtain redemption from outside himself—specifically, from the Son of God, Jesus Christ.

That’s the REAL problem with the sinking people—and they’ll never consider Reasonable Christian reasonable as long as he affirms that truth. Reasonable Christian does everything he can to quickly move past that terrible propositional truth and get right back to talking about wind tunnels and soccer and how terrible Republicans are. What he doesn’t yet realize—it typically comes with having lived long enough to actually contextualize your place in the conversation—is that sooner or later, every evangelical conversation comes back around to that proposition truth. And when it does, Andy Stanley looks just like Jerry Falwell to the sinking people—and so does Reasonable Christian.

The other bad assumption is that life will continue as it always has. Reasonable Christian is in for a rude awakening on this one, too—but by the time he realizes it, he will have dragged all of Western civilization down into this morass of ignorance with him. He is spoiled, decoupled from the extended conversation, and self-serving—as a result, he doesn’t see how Christians fare in EVERY part of the world except America. He doesn’t realize that basic fact that even our Founding Fathers—the old dead white dudes that Reasonable Christian wants to distance himself from—understood: that government is a necessary evil, and if left unchecked will always devolve in totalitarianism. He doesn’t know that Keynesian economics has never worked. He doesn’t know that the Left-leaning “care for the poor” rhetoric only perpetuates a permanent poor underclass, forever dependent on others. Reasonable Christian has never stopped to think about the loss of dignity that government paternalism has inflicted on entire subcultures in American life. Reasonable Christian conveniently forgot about the 56 million unborn children that the Left has enthusiastically murdered in the last four decades, and he gladly lends his voice to this murderous crowd because he doesn’t see any moral difference between them and anyone else. Reasonable Christian isn’t mature enough to think of the sobering ramifications of a political culture that considers the slaughter of 56 million children convenient—and labels any opposition to it as a “war on women”—and he doesn’t realize that if they will kill those 56 million children, sooner or later they’ll come for him, too.

No, Reasonable Christian can’t be bothered to think about those matters. He’s too busy being reasonable to understand that the marriage issue in front of the Supreme Court this week isn’t about “rights” (he doesn’t even know the Constitutional definition of that anyhow) or “gays” or “marriage” or “traditional culture.” Reasonable Christian doesn’t realize that the issue that’s really at stake is one that he cares even less about: freedom. If the people of a state elect representatives to write laws for them—or if nine people in robes issue an edict--it’s all the same to him. He’s not real big on the Constitution anyhow. He never heard Andy Stanley or Brian McLaren or Rob Bell or any other of the host of trendy preachers he follows on Twitter speak about it. Reasonable Christian just wishes that everyone everywhere could have whatever they want when they want it and could just smile and hold hands and sing the Lollipop Song together.

It short-circuits Reasonable Christian to have to think about what’s happening in Greece today as having anything to do with him. Believe me when I tell you that Reasonable Christian’s vote was not cast with monetary policy in mind; he voted strictly about changing the culture—after throwing other Christians over the side of the lifeboat that he deemed were too “obsessed” with culture. Reasonable Christian isn’t aware that wealth redistributionist schemes tried in Russia and China resulted in the deaths of more than 100 million people in the 20^th century; and because he didn’t learn about any of this in school, the rest of us in the lifeboat get to relive that history.

Reasonable Christian will wake up one day, of course. No one can be 22 forever, after all. But by the time that day comes around, Reasonable Christian will live in a remarkably different world: he will live in a world that looks much like every other country except the United States. He will wake up one day to a world in which it is illegal to believe in that propositional truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ. He will open his eyes, one day, to a world in which he and his sons will be imprisoned and executed for the gospel—even WITH that Obama bumper sticker on his Volvo. In that day, he will understand what the fuddy-duddies meant when they spoke of “American exceptionalism”—he will know that they meant there has been one exception in the history of mankind to the list of governments that end up killing their own to solidify power.

And by then, Reasonable Christian will have helped to hasten the demise of that one exception in world history by having lent his voice to the freedom tramplers. In his imminent Reasonable-ness, he will have aided immensely in the destruction of a society in which Christians are free to live out their theology without being killed for it. Reasonable Christian will have inadvertently lent his voice to the cause of totalitarian slaughter and global poverty--all because he didn't deem "freedom" to be important enough to understand or defend. Maybe in that dark moment, he'll look back in time and remember those of us who tried to warn him of history's inexorable march in that direction--and he'll recall that he dismissed us as irrelevant because we weren't Reasonable like him.

In the end, no Christian is reasonable to the world. The propositional truth of the gospel is so offensive that the people on that sinking ship want to blast the whole lifeboat out of the water. Reasonable Christian thinks no one is confusing him with Falwell or Dobson, but he’s wrong. We’re all the same to those folks. I know because I used to be one of them. This doesn’t mean that we’re to stop trying—but Reasonable Christian could get himself off to a fantastic start by just not tossing fellow Christians overboard. The sinking people are never going to invite Reasonable Christian to their cocktail parties. They’re never going to join his church or follow his podcasts. They’re never going to agree with him. He's as ridiculous, culturally, as the 50-year-old high school teacher who tries too hard to look 21 and be "cool." In the end, Reasonable Christian will have to satisfy himself with a smug pat on his own back that many of his Facebook friends are sinking people with whom he can occasionally communicate without shouting. That is, until they come for him next.

Then he’ll finally find out just how Unreasonable he always was.