When I was young, growing up in a Fundamentalist/Evangelical household, I was very explicitly indoctrinated into the faith from birth. This is typical of most religious families, Evangelical or no, Christian or no; parents tend to seek to replicate their own beliefs into their children, and not just in matters of religion. So, fair enough.
For me, however, the experience was more intense than it was for most kids my age, even among Evangelicals: my father was a pastor, and so my religious training was more intense still. And among Evangelicals – at that time, the population of Christians in thrall with Billy Graham’s call for personal evangelism as the central feature of Christian faith – this included our witness.
Witnessing – sharing one’s personal testimony, or story of faith – was not just included in the Evangelical model of Christian living; it was central to it. As a young Christian attending Sunday School, youth groups, summer Bible camp, and other doctrinaire rituals, I was constantly reminded of and coached in my responsibility to cultivate my witness. It was made clear to me, over and over, that my responsibility to the Lord was to bring more souls to him – specifically, my friends, but really anyone I could corner long enough to get through my testimony.
Mind you, I didn’t have a personal testimony; I was never in a position to sit down with a sinner, look them in the eye, and proclaim, “I was lost in existential despair; without hope, tormented as I struggled to come to terms with the angst of this age; and then, light dawned: heaven came down, and glory filled my soul.” Nope. That never happened, for me or anyone else of my generation that I’d ever met.
I became a Christian in my youth for the same reason almost all my peers did: it was expected of me, by everyone around me, and along came some highly emotional, no-pressure moment at the end of some service with an impassioned altar call and 16 rounds of “Just as I Am”, and, well – end of story.
Still, even though I had no witness, I was steadily urged to make it the defining feature of my day-to-day life. Once I became a teenager, it finally grew some legs: I was told my all my youth leaders that as I became a social creature, my witness amounted to Just Saying No: No to alcohol; No to smoking; No to drugs; No to PG-movies; No to cursing; and especially, above all, No to sex.
Clearly, in hindsight, this had nothing at all to do with actual evangelism or persuading my peers to surrender to Jesus; this was subcultural indoctrination, a massive coparenting program that bolstered the mores of the tribe – and gave all the parents a little breathing room. All us Evangelical kids, it seems, could now keep an eye on each other. Or something like that.
When I hit college, still part of the fold, witnessing took on yet another layer. Now that we’d been socialized in the core behavioral pieties of the faith, we were gentled into deeper displays of Christian witness – the ones that really mattered. We were told that our witness included kindness; gentleness; forbearance; the soft answer that turneth away wrath. Honest-to-goodness, bona fide Christ-like stuff. This made more sense than what had come before. It didn’t seem like anything resembling a testimony, however; you could pull the Jesus out of it, and it amounted to good old-fashioned decency. But, hey, I could get behind this: witnessing it was!
And through the years, into my early adulthood, I remember times in some services when the pastor would call upon congregants to “testify” - to stand up or come forward and speak of their faith experience. These testimonies were invariably overwrought, as expected, and that’s fine; it made that person feel better, and it brought some kind of comfort to the group.
I left for good around the birth of my youngest child, but even by that time, talk of “witnessing” and “personal testimony” had been left on the side of the road, discarded in favor of more urgent imperatives. The mission of the church – the Evangelical church, anyway, which had been carrying out Billy Graham’s mission – was no longer about winning the world to the cause of Christ through personal evangelism; the “one heart at a time” cause was quietly abandoned, as the Fundamentalist cause took up a different mission.
Graham’s successors – men like Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, R.J. Rushdoony, Tim LaHaye, James Dobson – came to believe that the world, starting with the United States, needed to not only be Christianized, but ruled by Christians. Throughout the Seventies and Eighties, Graham’s agenda of winning the world for Christ by demonstrating the value of the Christian life through the example of those living it was steadily deprioritized; in its place, an alliance of power was being crafted between America’s Evangelical leadership and the political right.
We’ve seen, of course, how that worked out; it’s a breathtaking mess, and the Evangelical church has suffered greatly for it, in terms of the hit to its credibility. By the time all of this had come to pass, I was out, anyway; so it wasn’t so much a loss to me as it was to Christendom in general.
Christians aligning themselves with power has, of course, been a constant since Constantine; it’s not as if Falwell and Rushdoony and Dobson and their ilk were doing anything other than reinventing an already well-worn wheel. But to take Graham’s concept of evangelism – in essence, simply taking Matthew 28:19-20, the so-called ‘Great Commission’ - and set it aside amounted to a subversion of evangelism itself.
“Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you – and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen.”
That’s Graham – and the Evangelical Movement as it was in the beginning – right there in a paragraph.
But the political right’s revision of it, in the hands of the Falwells and Robertsons and LaHayes, became something more akin to
“Go ye therefore, and vote America First, teaching all liberals, immigrants, and queers whatsoever I have commanded you, chastizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, unto the end of the world. Amen.”
All talk of winning the world for Christ through personal witness and Christ-like example, one heart at a time, has faded. In its place, we have the Religious Right – as vitriolic and domineering, as vicious and angry as any political movement has ever been. The world will be won for Christ by Christians taking over and leading it, imposing their will – God's will – through force. Piety can be set aside; the only example the sinners of the world understand is power.
The Christian sociologist Tony Campolo, arguing against this thinking two decades before it all came to pass, pointed out that Christ sought to change the world, not through seeking and acquiring power, but by giving it up. He went on to argue that the Christian leaders who have brought about change in the world in recent decades – Martin Luther King, Jr., in particular – inspired that change, not by adopting the ways of those who obstructed it, but through the expression of social justice by peaceful, forbearing means.
This won’t do any more for the Evangelical Movement. Russell Moore, an Evangelical pastor who still conforms to Graham’s model of living a Christ-like life, reported on what he himself has seen lately in Evangelical circles. In an interview with NPR, he reflected on all that has happened since. In particular, he expressed alarm that his fellow pastors have reported that their parishioners are now upset by those Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount that enfolds them; they don’t want to hear about forgiveness and mercy anymore, Moore said.
“Multiple pastors tell me, essentially, the same story about quoting the Sermon on the Mount, parenthetically, in their preaching - ‘turn the other cheek’ - [and] to have someone come up after to say, ‘Where did you get those liberal talking points?’” Moore told NPR. “And what was alarming to me is that in most of these scenarios, when the pastor would say, ‘I’m literally quoting Jesus Christ,’ the response would not be, ‘I apologize.’ The response would be, ‘Yes, but that doesn’t work anymore. That’s weak.’”
Hearing this, Moore says he now believes the Evangelical church is “now in crisis.”
“When we get to the point where the teachings of Jesus himself are seen as subversive to us, then we’re in a crisis,” he said.
All of the above aside, the truth is that the only way for Evangelical Christians to get the world they want is by taking political power, and forcing their minority will on the majority. The United States will never be a “Christian” nation otherwise – but not because witnessing, winning the world over to the ways of Christ through example, “doesn’t work anymore.” The reason is more damning: witnessing never worked because almost no Christians ever bothered to do it.
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