The neo-Babylonian captivity of (some) evangelicals

Around September 1520, Matin Luther published a tract. Along with his other writings, he would be invited to repudiate it at the Diet of Worms in 1521. When Erasmus read this particular tract he is reported to have blurted out “The breach is irreparable” for it was seen by Luther’s contemporaries as his most incendiary writing to date. It attacked the sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church, which Luther maintained had actually held the Church in a kind of servitude. His aim was to set the Church free. The tract was called “The Babylonian Captivity of the Church”. It seems that today part of the contemporary church may have fallen prey to its own modern version of captivity. We all run the risk of being held captive by the culture which surrounds us. It configures us to think in certain ways, and not think in others. It has an ability to weave a spell that for the most part we are unaware of. It is always a challenge to break free.

For the Christian (in the Biblical sense) culture is particularly problematic where it is suffused with ideas and values opposed to the way the Creator would have us think. That there is such a thing as “the way the Creator would have us think” is of course highly contested in modern culture. Some maintain there is no Creator. Others maintain that even if there is He/She/It is unknowable (at least in any practically important way); one can therefore live as a practical, if not a philosophical, atheist. Then there are those who are happy to wander around in an agnostic fog, probably because it frees them to live as they see fit. This will have the added advantage of allowing them to fit in with the culture that surrounds them, of which they will be largely unaware. For my part, I am convinced that there is a Creator to whom I owe my existence. I am also convinced that He has revealed Himself in the Bible, not as the remote watchmaker of the deist, but the loving Father who goes to inordinate lengths precisely so that the He might know me, and I Him. As this is a minority view (and always has been) there is a potential clash between ways of thinking and behaving taught in the Bible (properly understood and applied), and those taught or even mandated in the surrounding, non-Christian, culture.

Such a clash is exactly the state of affairs that prevailed when the first Christians began to preach the Gospel, the good news of Jesus’ rescue mission (the one we’ll be celebrating in a few weeks). The Gospel was so counter-cultural in their time that living it and preaching it cost many of those first believers their liberty and their lives. That doesn’t of itself constitute evidence that the Gospel is true. Men and women in history have given their lives for all sorts of causes. But it does indicate that Biblical thinking and living has and can be costly. There are areas in the world where this is true today. But because broadly Biblical ideas and values came to predominate in the “West”, while there have been periods of difficulty, it would be hard to argue that, at least in recent times, we have experienced having to pay a high, let alone the ultimate, cost for following Jesus. And there have even been places where it has been reasonably comfortable for “evangelicals”. 

I mean of course the U.S. where historically it has not only been relatively easy to be a Christian believer, but in recent decades one could argue it has been desirable. Evangelicals in the US have had a political presence in the US since the 19^th century. However in the second half of the 20^th century, they emerged across the Protestant denominations to form a more clearly defined block, albeit with fuzzy edges. In the 1970’s moreover, they began to form a coherent voting bloc, coalescing around a number of political issues, particularly abortion. As a bloc they were of course actively courted by one Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, and as a bloc they apparently supported him. This was always a transactional relationship. Trump promised to put conservative justices on the US Supreme Court and announced himself to be an ardent “pro-lifer”; the evangelicals voted for him in large numbers, even if some of them held their noses as they did so. Back in 2016 there were those who pointed out that Trump did not pass some fairly basic tests that evangelicals should have been interested in. For Max Lucado he didn’t pass the “decency” test that he would apply to someone who wanted to take his daughters out for an evening, let alone run the most powerful country in the World. Russell Moore elicited a Twitter rebuke from Trump, when among other things he called him one of "two immoral options". For Al Mohler too, Trump didn’t pass the smell test, although the other candidate was at least equally unpalatable. Mohler is a smart man, who made a ton of cogent points at the time. That he has now changed his tune has led some to question his motivation. Other evangelicals are reported to be heading in the opposite direction, experiencing what sounds like frustration and a degree of buyer’s remorse. But the fact is that in their support for Trump they were prepared to prioritize the political over the theological. They got what many of them wanted. But they got a lot more besides.

There has always been an anti-intellectual strain in US evangelicalism (and perhaps evangelicalism in general). By that I don’t just mean a dislike for intellectual endeavours outside of the Scriptures some of which like philology, history and science, were used to attack orthodox Christian belief. Thinking hard about that very belief has sometimes seemed too much like hard work for some evangelicals. There is something simple in the Gospel that is attractive (“Jesus loves me, this I know”), but the New Testament is clear that we should progress from milk to meat (1 Corinthians 3:1-3; Hebrews 5:11-14). Where teaching, training and thought are lacking, churches become vulnerable to being captured by influences and teachings other than those found in the Scriptures (Eph 4:14). It was the this sort of thing that Mark Noll diagnosed in the 1990’s:

“The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind. An extraordinary range of virtues is found among the sprawling throngs of evangelical Protestants in North America….. Notwithstanding all their other virtues, however, American evangelicals are not exemplary for their thinking, and they have not been so for several generations.” (Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind).

Just over 25 years later, that hollowing out of evangelical thinking, intellectual, apologetic and theological, has led in some churches to partisan politics trumping (pardon the pun) Scripture. Those churches have entered a new Babylonian captivity. We shall see whether they return, and in what state.

Meanwhile, on this side of the Atlantic we have no reason to be complacent. We either hear and appropriately respond to the warnings of Scripture and grow up in our faith, or we too run the risk of entering some or other captivity.