Conservative Christians must tell better stories

In a pair of recent columns, I’ve been asking readers to consider the dangers of Christian nationalism and the cultural factors that have contributed to its recent rise. So far, we’ve established two broad ideas: Christian nationalism is a dangerous distortion of democracy and Christianity, and it’s especially appealing to a certain brand of evangelical who is dissatisfied with the cultural consensus about moral and philosophical values in our country.

I have asserted that this is all a product of shifting market share among competing value systems, which I’m calling “social visions.” The Christian flags and Jesus merch that stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, were there because of the cracking cultural hegemony that conservative Christians have been working feverishly to protect since the time of the Puritans.

With the help of some brilliant thinkers like David French, Samuel Perry and Glenn Kreider, I have started to set forward some principles for how conservative Christians can engage in public life in healthier ways. I believe this is a crucially important project for people of faith, especially white evangelicals like me, because of the ways we have failed to think holistically about these things in the past.

These conversations most often default to the political arena, but in this installment, I would like to come at the problem from another angle.

Stories of the sea

Evangelicals used to talk a lot about participating in the “marketplace of ideas.” In the 1990s, there was an explosion of interest in the field of apologetics, that is, defending Christian theology. Doubters-turned-defenders like Lee Strobel and Josh McDowell sold millions of books. There was faith in the reasonableness of Christian teaching, and faith in the reasonableness of fellow Americans that if they only saw the logic of the Gospel, they would embrace the evangelical social vision. That talk has all but died away now.

That may not be a bad thing, because the best way for people of faith to promote their social vision for America likely has nothing to do with debate. It’s really about telling better stories.

A few years ago, I was privileged to meet Erik Lokkesmoe, a Hollywood producer who has worked with the likes of Ewan McGregor, David Arquette and Tye Sheridan. Lokkesmoe was once a congressional staffer on Capitol Hill, but he quit his job and moved to Hollywood when he came to the realization that, as he said, “politics is downstream of culture.”

“I began to get really restless about the fact that by the time something gets to the House floor … it’s been shaped years before by movies and music and magazine stories and poetry and TV,” he told me in 2016. “And I, as a creative person, began to think, ‘OK, I want to be in a place where I’m at the fountainhead of the cultural stream, not the back end of the dam and the sludge that I’m dealing with in politics.’”

If laws led to cultural change, the issue of Christian nationalism would have been solved the moment America amended its Constitution to read “Congress shall make no law regarding the establishment of religion.” America has been an officially pluralist nation since 1791. The reason America is becoming more culturally pluralist is not that our laws are changing. It’s that our stories are changing. We’re listening to new songs; celebrating new heroes.

In Lokkesmoe’s understanding, the real power centers in the marketplace of social visions are not Washington, D.C., or state capitols. They are Hollywood, New York, Nashville and Silicon Valley.

At its source, the question of Christian engagement in the public square is a cultural issue, not a legislative one. In reaching for political solutions, evangelicals are appealing to the wrong court.

There’s an old saying about how to build a navy. Navies require ships, and ships, at least when this adage got started, required lumber. But the best way to build a navy is not to teach men to go into the woods, fell trees and build boats. The best way to build a navy is to tell men stories of the sea. They’ll figure out the carpentry.

That is a lesson American evangelicals have largely failed to learn. In all our apologetics and jeremiads, we’ve forgotten to give our neighbors compelling reasons to want to embrace our social vision. In many cases, they think, “I have a neighbor who says he’s an evangelical. Why would I want a country full of people like him?”

Missed opportunities

We evangelicals who want others to believe like we do should be haunted by the experience of Australian novelist and playwright Patrick White. White, who died in 1990, was an intellectual and a reluctant atheist, a towering figure in Australian arts, and a winner of the Nobel Prize in literature. In his autobiography, White described an experience in which God seemed to speak to him.

One rainy day, he was carrying a tray of food to his dogs in the kennel on his property in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney when, he wrote: “I slipped and fell on my back, dog dishes shooting in all directions. I lay where I had fallen, half blinded by rain, under a pale sky, cursing through watery lips a God in whom I did not believe. I began laughing finally, at my own helplessness and hopelessness, in the mud and the stench from my filthy old oilskin. It was the turning point. My disbelief appeared as farcical as my fall. At that moment I was truly humbled.”

White and his partner started to practice what they called “an exercise in organized humility,” which included church attendance. And there, at an evangelical church in Sydney, they encountered bigotry and a rector condemning those members of his congregation who dared to participate in a game of chance at a local festival. Guessing how many beans were in a jar was gambling, he sermonized, and sinful. White realized that the God who spoke through mud and helplessness was not the voice he heard at church.

I’m afraid that may be a reliable parallel for the religious experience of many Americans. They glimpse a God willing to meet them in their stress and disappointment, in their fractured families and forgotten dreams, or in their own addictions and selfish choices. But then they show up to the nearest evangelical church on Sunday and hear something petty. A campaign speech. Get out the vote. Beans in a jar.

This happens more than we would like to admit.

One of the voices that is helping evangelicals think critically about political engagement is Samuel Perry, whom I introduced in a previous column. Perry is an assistant professor of sociology and religious studies at the University of Oklahoma and co-author of Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States, which he wrote with Andrew L. Whitehead, director of the Association of Religion Data Archives at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.

The book contains a description of a much-advertised “Freedom Sunday” service at First Baptist Dallas, an event that Perry and Whitehead call “a finely woven tapestry of Christian nationalism.”

It included patriotic hymns (“When the Saints Go Marching In” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”), a choral performance of the “Armed Forces Medley,” flags, balloons and military representatives in full dress uniform.

Pastor Robert Jeffress delivered a sermon, “America is a Christian Nation,” which he preceded by reading a letter from then-Vice President Mike Pence.

After reading the letter, Jeffress asked his audience, “Aren’t you glad we have a man like Mike Pence standing behind our great President Donald Trump?” Perry and Whitehead report that the crowd “responded with uproarious applause.”

Instead of political rallies that pass for worship services, what if seekers like Patrick White encountered something otherworldly at church? A story that catches the breath. Grace that interrupts the merciless cycle of our daily karma. Truth and beauty in equal measure.

We evangelicals need to tell better stories.

Fables

Stories have unique power. They open imaginations, foster understanding, engender trust.

Recent news from Ukraine has me remembering a story William Faulkner wrote in 1954 titled A Fable. Set in World War I, it’s the story of a French corporal named Stefan who leads a peaceful revolt against futile trench warfare. Stefan orders 3,000 troops to stand down. In return, the Germans withhold their attack. The war grinds to a halt as soldiers realize it takes two sides to fight.

But it doesn’t last. French and German generals meet to discuss how to restart the war. The French generalissimo meets with Stefan and tries to persuade him that war is the essence of human nature. It can’t be helped. Then he has the corporal executed.

Stefan is meant to be a symbol, or perhaps a reincarnation, of Jesus.

While we watched the atrocious news pour in from Ukraine, I discussed that fable on a long text thread with my family. The final entry summarizes: “The gospel of peace seems naive to someone driving a tank.”

Faulkner was no saint. He wouldn’t qualify to preach in most churches. But his stories and those of other artists can help us imagine biblical truth in imminently relevant ways.

Every preacher need not be a Nobel laureate, but every preacher should understand the value of stories. Jesus certainly did. As an apologist, Jesus was lousy. As a storyteller, he was spellbinding. His parables left their hearers with a thirst for truth and beauty.

In bringing up stories, I don’t mean to suggest that evangelicals should make more sappy, crappy morality plays like God’s Not Dead 4. I mean that evangelicals should be at the forefront of telling profoundly spiritual stories like Spotlight and Calvary. We should be looking for the next Marilynne Robinson, the next Flannery O’Connor.

During his show on Feb. 3, late night host Stephen Colbert presented a beautiful and vulnerable summation of his own social vision, which, he said, involves living “in the light of eternity.” Appropriately for this moment in American Christianity, he quoted the poet Robert Hayden: “We must not be frightened or cajoled into accepting evil as deliverance from evil. We must go on struggling to be human though monsters of abstraction police and threaten us.”

Right away, high-profile conservative evangelicals condemned Colbert because his expression of faith didn’t include their preferred shibboleths. Colbert dared to present an invitation instead of an argument. He favored an open hand over a closed fist, and that was enough to push him beyond the imaginative reach of many evangelicals.

How do you build a navy? Tell men stories of the sea.

There is an ocean of grace in the teachings of Jesus. The American evangelical church is failing to tell its stories.

Disordered loves

Perhaps we’re telling the wrong stories because we love the wrong things. Or, as St. Augustine warned, we love the right things in the wrong ways.

Here, we can find help from the British apologist C.S. Lewis. In a book called The Four Loves, Lewis diagnosed the contagion that has led to American Christian nationalism, decades before it arose.

Lewis, like Augustine before him, warned his contemporaries of disordered loves, and discussed how that may apply to love of country. He quoted the Swiss theorist Denis de Rougemont, “‘love ceases to be a demon only when he ceases to be a god,” meaning that any healthy love, improperly pursued, may become a false god, and then haunt its lover. And then Lewis described a form of patriotism that fits the bill.

“A firm, even prosaic belief that our own nation, in sober fact, has long been, and still is markedly superior to all others. I once ventured to say to an old clergyman who was voicing this sort of patriotism, ‘But, sir, aren’t we told that every people thinks its own men the bravest and its own women the fairest in the world?’ He replied with total gravity … ‘Yes, but in England it’s true.’ To be sure, this conviction had not made my friend … a villain; only an extremely lovable old ass. It can however produce asses that kick and bite. On the lunatic fringe it may shade off into that popular Racialism which Christianity and science equally forbid.”

If you’ve been reading about Christian nationalism, that should sound familiar.

Just as prescient, Lewis described a “poisonous” outcome of this disordered patriotism: “the perfectly serious indoctrination of the young in knowably false or biased history —the heroic legend drably disguised as text-book fact.”

Popular racialism? Lunatic fringe? Biased history? It’s almost hard to believe Lewis wrote The Four Loves in 1960, not in 2021.

Among evangelicals, this kind of disordered love is all too common, sometimes even celebrated. And the more evangelicals bend toward Christian nationalism, the more impervious they become to Lewis’ warnings.

Evangelicals are taught to expect disapproval from those outside their tribe. After all, if we are truly embracing a God-given social vision, our lifestyles should stand apart. This is the logic behind the popular admonition that evangelicals should be “in the world, but not of it,” which tracks with Jesus’ prayer in John 17. So a popular response to criticism is, “If I’m taking flak, I must be over the target.”

The problem with that approach is that it blinds us to our own disordered loves. In reality, there’s nothing countercultural or supernatural about a cocksure political opinion. Those are a dime a dozen. When our non-evangelical neighbors see church services that look exactly like candidate rallies, they don’t see otherworldly grace. They see very common politics. Church-as-political-action-committee doesn’t turn any heads.

The second problem with criticism-as-confirmation is that it excuses all other reasons people might disagree with us. As Perry tweeted just days after our chat for my last column:

Yes, Jesus said ”If you follow me, the world will hate you.”

But he didn’t say, ”If the world hates you, it must be because you’re following me and not because you’re an [expletive].”

Forgetting the silver

I’m not suggesting that evangelicals should not be patriotic; nor that we should simply drop out of politics and write plays. Neither sedition nor disengagement is the answer. But the fact that most Americans understand the word evangelical as a political designation, not a theological one is, itself, a defeat.

At this point it feels a bit credulous to keep insisting that. Those of us who still use the label evangelical to mean something about the authority of the Bible and the offer of divine grace must appear to all the world like that doe-eyed dog in the internet meme whose house is burning down around him while he sips his coffee and insists, “This is fine.”

If the evangelical movement is to survive, it will require reform, particularly in the way it interacts with politics. Perhaps we can take one final lesson from another literary source: the French author Victor Hugo.

Hugo was deeply engaged in political issues of his day, particularly the fight to abolish slavery and the death penalty. Loyal to the French monarchy in his youth, he later became a passionate supporter of republicanism and served in the National Assembly. It was Hugo’s political views that landed him in exile after Napoleon seized power.

But we don’t know Victor Hugo as a politico; we know him as a storyteller. His politics didn’t change the world; his art did.

Hugo’s relationship with his native Catholicism weakened as he aged, but his most enduring works are expressions of Gospel truths. Police Inspector Javert from Les Misérables is an archetype for legalism, while his prey, the ex-con Jean Valjean, is an embodiment of Christian grace.

After Valjean steals a silver set from an old priest who has shown him kindness, he is caught and returned to the priest by gendarmes. But the priest denies the offense and pretends that the silver was a gift. Then he gives Valjean two silver candlesticks to match his contraband, piling grace upon mercy.

“Jean Valjean, my brother, you belong no longer to evil, but to good.” the priest whispers in the ear of the gobsmacked protagonist. “It is your soul that I am buying for you.”

Rather than arguing about politics, evangelicals would do well to emulate Hugo and his fictional priest, call proponents of competing social visions “brother,” and whisper their redemption to them in works of beauty and kindness.

If the evangelical social vision is all it’s cracked up to be, it should be able to capture imaginations, not just votes.

What a waste it would be if Victor Hugo had been content only with politics and had never given the world Jean Valjean. What a waste it will be if American evangelicals do the same.