Category Archives: Evangelical History

Is the United States Secularizing?

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There has been a fair amount of press about a study released in October by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.  That study has found that the number of people who are religiously unaffiliated in the United States is almost 20%, up from 16% just five years ago and up from 7% in 1972.

Does this mean that the United States is get more secular?

Maybe, maybe not.  It depends on what you mean by “secular.”  And we still need more data.  (Academics talk this way sometimes.  I’m an academic.  Sorry about that).

At first glance, the poll seems to be a straight-forward indicate that the percentage of non-religious Americans is steadily growing, and with that trend, Christians are shrinking in size.

But we have to qualify this assessment.

It is important to note that the poll is based on how Americans identify themselves.  This is important because all through American history, there have been sizeable numbers of Americans who identified themselves as Christians, but actually did not behave in any way that would indicate they were people of regular religious commitments.  In the 1950s, for instance, a decade that many consider to be a religious era, many Americans identified themselves as Christians but never or rarely attended church.    In one poll from the 1950s, six out of seven Americans said they believed the Bible was divinely inspired word of God, but over half could not name even one of the four gospels of the New Testament. So it goes for every other era in American history, all the way back to the colonial era.  I can give you evidence from every decade since 1610 showing have a sizable number of Americans who rarely, if ever, attended church.  Regular church attendance may never have exceeded 40% in American history and probably was at about 30% in the years before the Civil War, a level that is pretty close to what it is today.

This should not surprise evangelicals who reflect on this matter.  Evangelicals (as well as many other Christian groups) historically have understood Christianity to involve much more than simply declaring that one is a Christian.  Commitment, discipleship, and a transforming encounter with Christ matter.  That is why American evangelicals have always evangelized other Americans who call themselves Christian.

The Pew study, then, may simply indicate that Americans who never attend church or display any other sort of faith commitment are much more likely to call themselves religiously unaffiliated.  They used to call themselves Christian.  So the recent trend may simply be a more honest assessment of a dynamic that has always existed.

There is one part of the poll that requires more careful consideration, though.  The percentage of religiously unaffiliated is highest (32%) among those who are under the age of thirty.

This might mean that we will have a higher number of Americans who are secular in upcoming years.  What we do know is that younger people today (including those who profess Christianity) have much weaker to institutions of any kind.  They are far more individualistic than older Americans and are much less likely to make long-term commitments.  They pose a very real challenge to the church.

And yet, we also don’t know exactly how these trends will play out as these young adults get older.  Just because they are religiously unaffiliated now does not necessarily mean they will be religiously unaffiliated in the future, though it might.  Marriages among Americans in their 20s are dropping (another indication of their individualism and reluctance to commit to institutions) but many of these young people fully intend to get married (and do get married) as they get older and “settle down.”   Will they also be more likely to make commitments to religious institutions?

We will have to see.

Revivals, Idolatry and Politics

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I went to a good, old-fashioned revival last week.  I found it interesting that in this age of mega-churches and coffee bars in the foyer and big-screen HD technology, this meeting still had many things that I had seen before in revival meetings.

Consider the following features: it drew a big crowd and opened up with music.  We were told to go out and go door to door to spread the faith in our neighborhoods.  We were told that we shouldn’t be shy to talk to our co-workers and neighbors and friends.  We were told we lived in a broken society and we were part of the solution to set things back down the right path. Then we hit a musical interlude in which a quartet sang “Amazing Grace.”  And finally the main preacher got up and stirred the crowd with an impassioned message, reminding us that we were part of something bigger than ourselves.  Right before the final music, he told us that the greatest hope for earth was….

Wait a minute.  I’m sorry, I got confused.

This wasn’t an evangelical revival.  It was a political rally for Mitt Romney.  (Four blocks away from my house, actually, at the local high school baseball field).

The similarities of the Romney rally to evangelical religious revivals are not merely interesting coincidences.  (And let me just annoy both the die-hard Democrats and die-hard Republicans among you by saying that Obama rallies and Romney rallies are pretty much structured the same way.)

There is a historic connection between political campaigns and revivals.  As early as the 1740s, George Whitefield and other evangelical revivalists pioneered techniques for preaching to large audiences – often outdoors.  By the early 19th century Baptist and Methodist revivalists (like the circuit-riding guy on the horse on my blog masthead) had perfected these methods.  They became so widespread and so effective that politicians picked them up for their own campaigning purposes.  These rallies have been a part of our political culture ever since.

I wonder if this is more than a historic curiosity, though.  This past Sunday, while speaking on a totally different topic, my pastor pointed out that we make idols out of all sorts of things, and we aren’t even aware that we do it.

In the passion of a political campaign, we can make politics and the United States itself into an idol.  It seems to me that the subtle similarities to evangelical revivals can stoke hopes and desires that this candidate, this political party, this policy, this nation will save us from the woes that beset us.

Ponder this:  at the close of his rally the other night (right before the fireworks), Mitt Romney declared that America is the hope for the world.

No.

Jesus Christ is the hope for the world.

Wise political leaders, well-crafted policies and effective governments can bring order to society and limit evils and sins that we humans inflict on one another.  We need to do the best we can to work for good government, which has an important role in this world.  That role, however, is not that of savior.  Politicians, policies and the nation cannot eliminate those evils or sins, nor can they truly save us from them.

American political leaders have long had a habit of slipping into over-the-top rhetoric because it gets American audiences fired up.   We hear it and we don’t even realize that we are asking the United States to take on the role that only Christ can fulfill.  In 2008 Barack Obama declared that “the United States is the last great hope for humanity.”  Sarah Palin proclaimed that “America is the greatest earthly force for good the world has known.” Abraham Lincoln, that kindly, avuncular, home-spun Midwesterner on our penny said “My dream is of a place and a time where America will once again be seen as the last best hope of earth.”

How do you like your idolatry?  It comes in tasty Democrat, Republican and historic flavors.

For those of you who want a sophisticated and challenging theological discussion of these things, I would recommend Theopolitical Imagination by William T. Cavanaugh, particularly his essay, “The Myth of the State as Savior.”

Otherwise, ponder (and pray about) this question this election season:  when, where and how do we slip into this kind of idolatry?  And what kind of citizen is Christ calling me to be?

James Bond vs. Samuel Sharpe: Missionaries and World Christianity

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James Bond, missionaries, and world Christianity?

You may be thinking that I have a topic that really does not fit in my contest about which individual we should be more interested in.  You may be thinking that because I have written a book about missionaries and world Christianity, I am looking for a cheap way to turn the topic back to my interests. You may be thinking that I am playing a literary bait and switch here, using James Bond to hook your interest in something totally different.

You may be right.

But then, again, you may not be.

Granted, the nature of James Bond films compels me to shift the point a bit.  I can’t have a sensible contest based on the question of how world Christianity plays out in these thoroughly secular films.  There is, however, a closely related topic to world Christianity.  What happens when the Bond films cross cultural boundaries?  What does cross-cultural engagement look like?

Let’s just say, not great.  Bond films exude an aura of British superiority.  This ethnocentrism, apparently, was even stronger in the Ian Fleming books.  In fact, the whiff of British exceptionalism was so strong that some storylines had to be revised when the books were made into movies for American audiences.  I guess American audiences don’t like to be depicted as inferior.  Who knew?

It gets worse, however, when dealing with non-Anglos, particularly in the books and early films.  The villains are often nonwhites and they are often deformed.  Furthermore, nonwhites just don’t have the brains, the sensibility, the skills, or the enlightened rationality of the Brits (or the Americans, for the film versions).  In “Dr. No,” Bond enlists the help of a Jamaican assistant to investigate Dr. No’s hideout, but this black guy, like the other

The dragon: ha, ha, it’s just clever technology, folks.

Jamaicans, is deathly afraid of the rumors he has heard about a dragon that inhabits the island.  The “dragon” turns out to be a flame-throwing tractor with big teeth painted on the front.  The foolish, superstitious and cowardly Jamaican assistant gets killed in the ensuing battle, but the film viewers are not supposed to care because, like the villains, his life doesn’t seem to matter much.  (It should be noted that even though they are evil, none of Dr. No’s scientific assistants are black.  His hideout displays a level of intelligence that blacks do not seem capable of achieving.)

The Jamaican assistant’s fear of the “dragon” emerges from a common depiction of race and religion that comes straight from the 18thcentury Enlightenment thinker (and Brit) David Hume.  According to Hume, less rational people, particularly those who have not been blessed with civilization, believe in irrational religious beliefs that express themselves in superstitious behaviors.  Enlightened and rational people, on the other hand, build sophisticated, morally superior civilizations that progress beyond the ignorance of previous

Build your own “Dr. No” Lego dragon! Pretend you are intimidating inferior people!

ages.  “I am apt to suspect the Negroes, and in general all other species of men, to be naturally inferior to the whites,” Hume wrote in Essays, Moral and Political.  “No ingenious manufactures among them, no arts, no sciences.”  Most people easily spot the racism in Hume’s thinking.  However, his claims about religious faith, which masquerade as rational truth, still infect much of the western world today

Samuel Sharpe, who lived half a century after Hume’s death and more than a century before the first James Bond film, would seem to qualify as a superstitious and naturally inferior “species of men.”

But here is where world Christianity helps expose fallacies in Hume’s and Fleming’s brand of Enlightenment thinking.  Sharpe’s relationship with the missionaries brings out point.  The leaders of this 1831 Jamaican rebellion (as well as a similar rebellion eight years earlier in Demerara, on the north coast of South America) were deacons and evangelists.  Baptist, Methodist and Presbyterian missionaries from Britain had been ministering among the slaves for the previous decades.  Slaveowners, in fact, complained bitterly that the missionaries were spreading radical and subversive ideas about equality and abolition among the slaves.  (Hume, who believed that evangelical religion led to social disorder, political radicalism, emotional derangement and psychological delusion, would have agreed).

The missionaries, however, did not promote, plan or lead the rebellion.  In fact, they warned the slaves not to plan any resistance, they downplayed the possibility of emancipation getting passed in Parliament, and they did not even know of Sharpe’s rebellion until right before it occurred.

In other words, this movement took off without missionary leadership, in ways they did not expect and could not control.  That is usually what has happened when a movement of Christianity emerged and grew after it had crossed cultural boundaries.

There is also a theological point here about cultural blind spots.  Although they were generally favorable to antislavery ideas, British missionaries preached a simple evangelistic message and stayed away from topics of abolition.  The slaves who had converted to Christianity, however, saw implications in the gospel that white Christians were slow to recognize:  the Exodus story indicates that slavery is not God’s plan for the world.  The same held true for Christian slaves in the American South.  On Sunday mornings they might hear a white minister preach on the text, “slaves obey your masters,” but on Sunday nights, in the privacy of their separate worship, they heard slave preachers draw conclusions about freedom from the Gospel.  And they wrote and sang scores of spirituals with themes of being released from bondage in Egypt and entering in the Promised Land.

These slave spirituals could get emotional, a point that Hume would have looked on with distaste.  The slaves could not boast of “ingenious manufactures” or cool Bondian technology.  They did not display the marks of a “civilized” people.  But they understood truths unknown by rational philosophers like Hume and clever writers like Fleming.

That’s interesting.

 

Score:

James Bond      2

Samuel Sharpe  3

Strangers on Your Doorstep, Part 3b

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This post, which is a follow-up to my previous post, starts with a stolen anecdote.  (Like preachers, I take my best anecdotes from others.)

Celia King, the Service-Learning Director at Malone, spoke in chapel the other day and explained how she once came across a big pile of clothes at an orphanage in China.  And when I say big, I don’t mean big, as in 5-loads-of-laundry big.  I mean big, as in somewhere between the size of a Ford Econoline Van and a fire truck.  And speaking of fires, one of the orphans, under the instructions of the orphanage leaders, was busy torching this emergency-vehicle-sized-pile of clothes.

So, what was going on here?

It seems that a good number of kind-hearted folks had decided to help out the orphanage, so they organized a pretty efficient system for getting clothes to this orphanage.

The problem was that they were so efficient that the orphanage was soon flooded with far more clothes than they needed.  The clothes piled up.  Did I mention it was a big pile?  The big pile drew rats.  Rats, as I understand, are not good for orphanages.  So they periodically had to torch the delivery-truck-sized piles of clothes that piled up.

Celia pointed out that it is great to try to help out when we see a problem, but sometimes we jump in without fully knowing the situation.

I would also point out that Americans are particularly susceptible to this problem, because we are shaped by a culture that is task-oriented.  Since the colonial era, Americans like to fix things and accomplish tasks.  We have built train systems, we have put a man on the moon, we have invented the Post-It Note, and we do more piles of laundry per capita than anyone in the world.  Even the Dutch.  (Or at least this was true in 1937).  Millions of American schoolchildren have been inspired by Abraham Lincoln, who famously told the nation, “Git ‘er Done!” (OK, that wasn’t really from Abraham Lincoln, who was much more eloquent in his public speeches, but I still think it could have been Abraham Lincoln at the age of 19 as he hauled flatboats down the Mississippi River).

For instance, if Karen refugees suddenly arrived on the doorstep of our church, like they did in that Baptist church in upstate New York, (see my previous post) I imagine that many kind-hearted church members would jump right in to find them clothes, arrange transportation, set up English classes and get them to driving instructors.  That would demonstrate a great level of compassion.

But would our churches know the best way to deliver these services to them?  Would our churches know whether the Karen needed Bible instruction?  Would our churches need to give them tips on reaching out to their unchurched Karen neighbors? Would our churches know what spiritual issues are most pressing to their community?

Maybe, maybe not.  Actually, probably not.

In addition to the desire to help, then, it is critical that we slow down, engage in conversation and listen.  Especially in cross-cultural situations.  For instance, if we were working with Karen refugees in our churches and wondering if they needed Bible instruction, we might learn through a discussion with a Karen leader that their great-great-great-great grandparents became Christians in the 1840s.  We might also learn that their family had been reading the Bible, in the Karen language, since that time.  So do they need Bible instruction?  They might, they might not.  They might want some theological education.  But they might not.  They might want English language instruction.  But maybe only some of them.  We would have to listen to them to find out.

The best missionaries and missionary thinkers in history understood this.  Do our churches?  Is listening built into the way we do our ministries?  I hope so.

Strangers on Your Doorstep, Part 3a: Upstate New York

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Most of you who are regular attenders at evangelical churches probably have a Sunday morning routine that is similar to many others.  You go to Sunday school, you drink coffee, and you catch up on the week with fellow congregants.  You go to worship and sing praise choruses or hymns. You scan the bulletin for other activities you may be involved in:  small groups, outreach projects, the choir practice.  You listen to a decent sermon and hope the pastor is done by noon so you can beat the Presbyterians to the Olive Garden.

It is a pattern that carries its own joys and frustrations.  Over the years, a few people leave and enter the picture.  The worship and church projects may change somewhat.  But you see God at work and there may be a certain comfort in the familiarity of the overall pattern.

So let us suppose that one Sunday morning, 75-100 Asians walk into your church, unannounced.  Most of them cannot speak English.  They are of all ages and they do not look to have much income.  Their leader tells you that they are from Myanmar.  They are refugees who have just been moved to the United States.  And they want to start attending your church (attendance of about 150-200) because your church is Baptist and they, too, are Baptists.

What do you do?  Well, you know, you’d have to try to accommodate them, wouldn’t you?  I mean, it’s a church and you have all those Bible admonitions to deal with.  You can’t really ignore 75 new people standing around in your foyer, can you?

Karen youth in upstate New York at a baptismal ceremony

But how would you accommodate them?  Just let them sit in church?  Do you stick their children into your Sunday Schools?  And what happens in the weeks ahead?  Do you teach them all English?  Do they need assistance with clothes, transportation, or finding jobs?  How much do they need to know about Christianity?  Will you have to set up separate classes for the adults?  Separate worship?  The deeper you go, the more questions that arise.

I love this story.

I love this story for a couple of reasons.  First, it is not hypothetical.  It happened a few years ago to a Baptist church in upstate New York.  (I got the story second-hand, so some of the details may not be exactly accurate, but I believe the fundamental points are sound).

I also love this story because it shows an unanticipated way that God is at work.  Sometimes, He pushes people out of their comfort zone.   I’m OK with that.  Especially if I’m not the one who is made uncomfortable.

I also love this story because it repeats the George Boardman story in a different form.  These refugees were from the Karen people of Myanmar, which is sometimes also known as Burma.  Their ancestors became Christians about 170 years ago after a small delegation of Karen arrived on Boardman’s doorstep.

This New York church, collectively, faced similar sort of challenges that George Boardman did.  They suddenly had a ministry on their hands that they did not seek or anticipate.  They weren’t asked to go out and preach in a jungle, but they were asked to adjust their patterns of ministry.  Sunday mornings would not be the same.  Their plans for the future had to change.  Those adjustments aren’t usually easy to make.

Most evangelical Christians have not been hit with anything quite like this in their church.  And you may feel pretty comfortable in thinking that it is pretty rare.

Don’t be so sure.

Broadly speaking, this story results from a powerful trend that has swept the world in the last several decades.  This trend is the remarkable growth of world Christianity, which is the embodiment of Christianity among diverse culture groups around the world.

World Christianity is not only growing.  It is coming to the United States.  Thousands of churches have already found themselves reacting to the arrival of Christian immigrants who have, in some way, forged connections to their ministries. Your church might be confronted with something very similar someday.   How will evangelical churches respond?   It is, I think, an important question.

Strangers on Your Doorstep, Part 2b: George Boardman and the Problem of Complexity

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George Boardman dying while watching Karen Christians getting baptized. That makes him an evangelical hero doesn’t it? Or does it?

And now it is time to address the question I posed in my previous post.  Was George Boardman a jerk?

Not any more than I am.

Of course, that doesn’t really answer the question, because I just might be a pretty big jerk myself.  Or I might not be.  Or I might be a jerk sometimes but not at other times.  You can ask my wife and kids about that, but I’d prefer you not.

The reality is that missionaries, including “Boardman of Burma” were actually a lot like the rest of us.  They may have been faithful Christians and deeply dedicated to their ministry, but they also had their flaws and blindspots.  They should not be divided into simplistic categories of heroes and jerks.

Why didn’t Boardman respond immediately to the Karen inquirers?  The real answer requires a more complicated consideration of his personality and the cultural situation he was in. This kind of explanation, quite frankly, doesn’t fit well into the limited space of the typical blog.  If I could accurately categorize him as either a jerk or a hero, I’d be able to explain it all right here.  But I can’t. He and his situation were more complex than that.   So you’ll have to read my book for a more complete exploration of those issues.

And since you may not like that answer, I’ll give you a shorter one:  Boardman could not predict the future.  He had invested himself in the Buddhist Burman people in the city, not this uncivilized nomadic group of Karen people in the jungle.  It was a big step for him to let go of his plans.  To do so would mean he would have to stop trying to control things according to terms he had laid out for his ministry.  He would have to go off to the jungle to operate by the terms of Karen culture.  That would not be easy for any of us to do.

Or how about this:  an even shorter answer, and one that is probably better because it has depths of meaning to it, comes from Randall Forbes’ great comment on my previous post.  Boardman sounds like Jonah.  Ponder what that means.  There are a lot of layers to that short book of the Bible.

Now, if you are an evangelical Christian, you are probably drawing a spiritual lesson from this story.  And if you are an American, you are individualistic, which means you are applying the lesson to your own personal situation.  You probably recognize that there have been times in your life when you had plans laid out a certain way and God came along and presented something different to you, which was difficult in the short run, but much better in the long run.  Great.  I’m glad you drew that lesson without me even having to point it out to you.  Well done.

But if you are an evangelical Christian and an American and individualistic, it is also quite possible that you did not naturally respond to a story like this by thinking about the larger social structures and cultural influences that influence our thinking.  So here, free of charge, is a larger point that deals with social structures and cultural influences that influence our thinking:  the very question that I posed, “Was Boardman a hero or a jerk,” reflects a common and pervasive way of thinking in American culture that runs into tension with good biblical theology.

And what does this common and pervasive way of thinking have to do with Disney princesses, you may ask.  Then again, you may not ask that question.  But I’m bringing it up in my next post this weekend.

 

Strangers on Your Doorstep — Part 2a: Was George Boardman a hero or a jerk?

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It’s time to insert a little evangelical history into the doorstep theme.  The question for today is whether George Boardman was a hero or a jerk.

OK, I admit that as far as historical controversies go, it’s not quite as engrossing as “Did slavery cause the Civil War?” or “What if Spartacus had a Piper Cub?”  In fact, I’m pretty sure that most of the readers of this blog don’t even know who George Boardman was.

If you are part of the small population that is familiar with old evangelical missionary stories (a group I estimate it to be about as big as the fan base of the Fort Wayne Tin Caps) you might remember “Boardman of Burma” as a Baptist missionary who brought the Gospel to the Karen people of Burma in 1828.  Several decades ago, within this American evangelical subculture, Boardman was a hero.

Here’s how people sometimes write about missionary heroes.  The man who wrote a biography of Boardman in 1940 said he was “the human instrument used of God to initiate (the) transformation” of “the Karen people from a despised, down-trodden, backward race to a people with a prominent and honorable position in Burma.”  (“Backward race?”  Ouch.  But I’ll save the subject of paternalism in missionary histories for another time.)

But there is another side.  When I was working on my book, I had students in my missions history class read drafts of my chapters.  George Boardman appears quite a bit in my first chapter.  I remember one student read my account of Boardman and got rather annoyed.  She thought he was a “jerk.”

So here’s the story, at least how I tell it (sort of) in my book.  George and Sarah Boardman had arrived in the city of Tavoy in Burma in 1828 to work among the Buddhist Burman people.  One day, several individuals from a people group called the Karen showed up on their doorstep, asking about Christianity.  They had an oral tradition that said that one day foreigners would arrive in their land with a book, from which they would learn about God.  Would George Boardman come with them back to their village to teach them about Christianity?  Boardman said that this was very interesting and yes, he’d probably have to do that sometime.

(Actually, I don’t know what his exact words were to the Karen, because nobody was there with a video camera.  Plus, they had to translate the Karen questions into Burmese, which were then translated into English.  Boardman’s reply in English was then translated back into Burmese, which was then translated back into Karen.  Missionary conversations took a lot longer back in the Olden Times).

Anyway, the Karen delegation left and came back a few weeks later asking if he could come preach in the jungle.  Boardman said something to the effect that this was very interesting and yes, he’d probably have to do that sometime.  They left and another group of Karen came a few days later and asked if he would come bring the Gospel to their people.  Boardman said that this was very interesting and yes, he’d probably have to do that sometime.  After another group came, Boardman said that sometime he would have to go with them into the jungle because, yes, this was very interesting.

You get the idea.   At least twelve different delegations of Karen arrived at George Boardman’s doorstep at different times.  At least eight different times they asked if Boardman would come out to evangelize their villages.  Boardman finally did his evangelical duty and went off to the jungle only after he had been badgered all of these times – nine months after the first group had arrived.  And here we see why my student was annoyed.  What was his deal, anyway?  Here are these people literally on the doorstep of this missionary, asking Boardman if he would come to preach to them.  And he doesn’t respond.

Some people would say the question is irrelevant because they believe the attempt to convert somebody to another religious faith involves coercion or imposition that violates some sort of ethical principle.  Evangelicals and many other kinds of Christians, however, believe that God’s mission to redeem the world involves the spread of the Gospel.  And so, if a missionary has a group of people at his doorstep begging him to come preach to them, that missionary really ought to jump at this opportunity.  Boardman didn’t jump so much as he was dragged, rather reluctantly, into the jungle.

So, from the evangelical way of thinking, we have the question:  hero or jerk?

I’ll give my response on Thursday.