Nostalgia Won't Stop Secularism

We need a new strategy for dealing with reality.

I grew up in a Evangelicalish household, my Mom being the first in her family to really even try church, my Dad coming from a long line of Roman Catholics, both of them mavericks who needed to carve their own way through literally everything. Religion included. 

Recent discoveries in the realm of DNA, the decoding of the human genome and all that, have given us a formula for this kind of thing:

A. Mother maverick. 

+

B. Father maverick. 

=

C. Child maverick. 

And so, even though I grew up in a faithful Missouri-Synod-Lutheran household, was the oldest child of seven, “got” homeschooled in 6^th grade and attended Evangelical Worldview Camp in the Summer, I needed to find my own way. 

Here is a brief summary of how that all went:

• Birth - Born on my birthday, 1987.

• Pagan Family - Birth to Mom’s conversion, when she sat on her bed, read the gospel of John, and converted.

• Strident Guitar Playing Lutheran Kid - My nickname was “St Nick”.

• Ardent Worldview Student - I went to Bryan College’s “Worldview Camp”, the same camp that held Rachel Held Evans hostage for a week to indoctrinate the both of us. 

• Hardcore Conservative Evangelical - This lasted for less than a year. 

• Disturbed Missionary - I went to South Africa, saw poverty for the first time, witnessed the death of my brother two weeks later, and decided my Worldview was broke. 

• Exvangelical Film Student - Having previously committed to a Nazarene school, I was stuck at a private Christian university as one of maybe five film majors. I started making easy weekend money at a local gig where I played the improvisational role of “drunk underwear model” to a crowd of paying Murder Mystery patrons which led to a role on the improv team, where I met my future wife Brenna, which thus led promptly fleeing the scene of potential intimacy for:

• Escapee to Oxford University - For two semesters I studied children’s literature, so I naturally encountered C.S. Lewis, considered a pioneer of the genre. It interrupted things. I realized my whole life I’d thought Christianity closed the door to the world. Something about Lewis’s biography told me I was missing something. I stepped back into the church for the first time in years at St. Andrew’s Anglican Church in the winter of 2008. 

• Cult Member - Having recently rejoined the church, and deciding this was the next thing to do for an aspiring writer, I joined the only church who would give me a job. That’s because they were a cult. Here I saw Evangelicalism at its ugliest. Sexual and financial abuse. Flag worship. I don’t think I would have stayed a Christian, except now that’s what I was being paid for.

• Unemployable Misfit. Not having any ideas about theology, but intuiting that an abusive pastor who went by “Dr.” without so much as a master’s degree, who would not allow us to teach anything Jesus taught because he - apparently - did not understand the Pauline gospel, and who decried all attempts at serving the trailer park community surrounding us was suspicious “social gospel” stuff - intuiting, as I said, that I did not align with this sort of theology, I picked up the first book I saw in a used bookstore on the subject: J.I. Packer’s “Knowing God”, for $1.00 (for the record, knowing God was, indeed, worth the dollar). Promptly, I was fired, my wife several months pregnant. 

• Presbyterian - I was hired by a friend a month later as a Presbyterian youth pastor at a 5,000 member church. I did not know anything about Presbyterians, or megachurches, but I did know that if I was going to stay in the church, it was not going to be in the kind of church where the pastor’s personal study is the end-all-be-all of what we believed. I needed a church connected to the historic church, and Presbyterians were, at least, that. They told me to go to seminary. 

• Gordon Conwell Seminary Student - Not wanting to go, I pleaded with God to either let me keep my job, or to pay my entire way through seminary, because I was not interested. Naturally, I was offered a full-ride to seminary, where I met Rick Lints, a mentor of Tim Keller’s whose lectures made me feel like the woman at the well with Jesus: “This man has told me everything I’ve ever done!” He explained the entire American evangelical scene as a strange blip in church history, not a true picture of the global, historic church (though, not critically - he would have, I think, considered himself an evangelical). 

• RUF Campus Minister at the University of Missouri - Here I had to entirely - or at least fully - reshape the way I thought about ministry. I moved here during 2016 election, and had hundreds of conversations with students “deconstructing” their faith in light of Black Lives Matter, Trump’s election, #metoo, etc. I saw myself in their process, but I also saw how much more radical the whole thing was for them. Here’s where I learned the landscape we’re truly living in: a “negative world”. A secular world. Christianity wasn’t an option on the religious smorgasbord but  - at least post 2016 - an increasingly dangerous liability. 

• Redeemer Presbyterian of Indianapolis - Today I serve at a church in downtown Indianapolis for artists and young professionals, where I continue to hone my insights from campus life. 

Why do I tell you all this? 

Because the process I just outlined above - the one I lived through - is essentially a microwaveable version of what just about every young evangelical is going to go through over the next 20 years IF they decide to stay. Keep in mind I was incredibly lucky and I stumbled into wise, world-class scholars to guide me through my journey, to which I was fortunate enough to devote my entire paid career. 

And since most younger evangelicals don’t have that opportunity, here’s what’s much more likely: 

They will leave the church. 

Why?

Because we’re living in a Secular Age.

And the church hasn’t caught up.

The Negative World

Scholars call it a “Secular Age” (Catholic scholar Charles Taylor). Others call it “The Great Flood” or “A Negative World” or the age of the “Buffered Self” or what-have-you, they all mean the same thing: the days of Christianity as a central piece of culture, life and the human psyche are essentially over.

Have been, actually, for quite a bit of time now. 

Most evangelicals (which, by conviction anyway, I am as well) know this intuitively, which is why a slogan like “Make America Great Again” strikes such a loud chord. But the slogan actually points out a glaring weakness in the American evangelical strategy, which is basically that our entire strategy is try to “unmake” secularism, to time-travel to a place that was, once, when everyone held a Bible in one hand and proudly waived the stars and stripes on their front porch. 

It’s a deeply flawed strategy for numerous reasons, one of which being that this particular phase of American Life in the mid 20^th century was in large part a political scheme itself. Any savvy politician knows that if you want to win cheap votes, you can just hold up an American flag, quote a Bible verse, and apocalypticize the political process by making it not a war between one greedy politician and another but between Heaven and Hell, God and Satan, Right and Left.  

One would have the impression reading today’s evangelical pundits that the 1950’s were a kind of golden era, continuing straight from our Christian forefathers who penned the constitution right up until the 1960’s Sexual Revolution, which single-handedly dismantled a centuries-long Christian project. If that narrative itself doesn’t leave you skeptical, fine, though I think it sounds intuitively suspect. I mean just try and picture a “sexual revolution” in medieval Europe…it would be short lived and consummated by many burnings of horny teenagers. So - the quickness of the dismantling of this centuries-long project ought to make us at least bat an eye at the project in the first place.  

But let’s say it’s all true. 

Let’s say that the vast majority of constitutional authors WEREN’T devout deists, that America’s founding WASN’T deeply laden with what has been called by CHRISTIAN political scientists (like Oliver O’Donavan) the very first SECULAR political system created in history. 

Nevermind all that. Let’s ignore it for now and talk strategy. 

What does “Make America Great Again” say to us about our strategy?

It says our main evangelical strategy is to try and turn the tides back to the way things were.

In other words, the strategy is not so much a strategy at all. It’s more of a sentiment. 

Nostalgia. 

And that tells me most evangelical have not come to grips with the world we actually live in. 

Nostalgia

This point was made well last week in an article by Russell Moore, former Southern Baptist Convention poster child, whose head is now, I believe, on bounty by the SBTS Kentucky baptist mafia:

Some evangelical Christians have confused “revival” with a return to a mythical golden age. A generation ago, one evangelical leader said that the goal of the religious right should be 1950s America, just without the sexism and racism…However, the confusion of nostalgia with revival is not simply the terrain of MAGA-right evangelicalism. Many mainstream evangelicals assumed that we were all just waiting out a moment of disorder: If we can just get through the 2016 presidential election, the pandemic, the racial-reckoning protests and backlashes, the 2020 presidential election, and the seemingly constant evangelical-leadership sex-and-abuse scandals, we’ll end up safely back in 2015. That’s clearly not happening.

Someone once told me, probably a counselor or just a good friend, that nostalgia was a very flaccid and embittered version of grief, the kind of grief one has when reality feels like too much to bear. I think that friend - or whoever it was - was exactly right, especially in this sense: I think nostalgia is pointing us to the fact that we’re not properly dealing with reality. 

Secularism is the landscape of the western world, now. Religion had a few fits and starts, most of them palpably flawed. Whatever you think of those, they’re over for the foreseeable future, and any necromantical efforts to try and lurch back in history and snatch them from the grave can only keep us from the work that needs to be done:

Engaging. Resisting. Subverting.

But don’t take my word for it. The author of Ecclesiastes, in his chapter on the merits of wisdom over everything, lists nostalgia as one cheapo perfume version of wisdom, something that masquerades as wise but is really just a fruitless exercise in self-pity:

“Do not say, “Why were the old days better than these?” For it is not wise to ask such questions.” -Ecclesiastes 7:10 

Nostalgia isn’t wisdom. Move along, folks. This is the store-brand Oreos, unworthy of your palette.

There’s loads of reasons why this is true, one being that memory is always deceptive and romanticizing the past is at least as bad as romanticizing anything else in life. The past you’re sentimentalizing wasn’t really that way, and if it had been all perfect like that, you would have crucified it. That, at least, is one thing we know from the four gospels. 

This is a theme in the scriptures. People keep trying to get back to something. God keeps staying them.

The Israelites being led to freedom:

“We remember the fish we ate in Egypt at no cost—also the cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic!” (Numbers 11:5)

Ah yes. Egypt. Where your children were drowned and your husbands died in the sweltering heat from excruciating forced labor. But oh, the cafeteria! 

See also case study 2, Hannaniah’s prophecy to Israel in exile:

Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: I have broken the yoke of the king of Babylon. Within two years I will bring back to this place all the vessels of the Lord's house, which Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon took away from this place and carried to Babylon. I will also bring back to this place Jeconiah the son of Jehoiakim, king of Judah, and all the exiles from Judah who went to Babylon, declares the Lord, for I will break the yoke of the king of Babylon. Jeremiah 28:3-4

Do you like that prophecy? I do. Sounds great. He keeps saying “bring back, bring back, bring back”, like a chant or a mantra. The big message: God wants us to get back to the way things were. Quickly. Say, within an election cycle. 

The only problem is, Hananiah is a false prophet. God literally kills him for saying this. 

Instead, God sends Jeremiah to say, “Look, the exile isn’t going to be over anytime soon. Stop trying to get back to the way things were. Deal with the way they are now. So you’re in exile. Deal with it. Have children. Bless people around you. Plant some rutabaga. Don’t run away, and don’t keep pining for the past.”

Well, that’s my Jeremiah 29 translation anyway. 

In the New Testament the message doesn’t really change, either. Peter writes to the early church in 1 Peter 4:12-13: 

Dear friends, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that has come on you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice inasmuch as you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be overjoyed when his glory is revealed.

In other words, it’s not weird at all to live in a hostile world.

So the world around you is skeptical? Normal. 

So people reject Christian values? Normal. 

So Big _____ is lashing out at evangelicals? Normal. 

Stop acting like it’s weird. That’s the way it’s always been. If it wasn’t for a minute, or didn’t seem to be, THAT was weird. And probably meant something was wrong anyway.

The Flood

Look. I’m not saying we shouldn’t want a nation where Christianity has a privileged place. I’m not sure we really do want that after all, but let’s say maybe we do. Even if we did, it’s the kind of thing where, the harder you go after it, the less likely it gets, like making friends or enjoying a meal or falling in love or something. 

So if we’re going to have that kind of world or country or whatever, I’d say the first big step is just seeing life as it is. We’re in a secular world, and we’re not going back. Not in this lifetime, anyway, so you can forget that. 

And no, it’s not going to help if we all retreat into hidey-holes to “wait out the flood”, as one popular author has said. (I have so many questions. If we’re in hidey-holes, what’s going to change the tide of the flood? Also, why choose this very weird metaphor, given that the entire point of the flood narrative in Genesis 6-9 is that Noah’s pretty decent family, turns out, was as perverted and dysfunctional as anyone else’s, which is why the narrative ends with Noah drunk and passed out with some kind of incestuous stuff going on? The entire point of that story is that you can’t hide from evil because it’s inside all of of us.) 

So stop trying to avoid or run away from secularism. It’s here.

There’s only one way forward. And it’s this:

1. Engage - Engage the world you’re in, as it is. Stop trying to make it something else. Come to terms with it, and grieve what needs to be grieved. You need strategies to understand your world. 

2. Resist - Secularism is like gravity. There needs to be constant resistance, or it’s just going to get imbibed into every single one of your children, congregants, etc. You need resistance strategies. 

3. Subvert - It’s not enough to defend Christianity. That needs to be done, but in a world where Christian faith is one pop-up ad in a million, far more needs to be done. We need strategies for subverting the secular narrative. 

So, that’s my introduction to what I’ll be writing on in the next several weeks:

21 strategies for engaging, resisting and subverting secularism. 

Tally ho,

Nicholas 

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Finds of the Week:

Politics

I found this article in National Affairs incredibly stimulating, speaking to the importance of “mediating institutions” like political parties. Yes, the article admits, the party system is broken. But politics is even more broken without mediating institutions…like all systems:

We know now, however, that simply throwing people into unorganized contestation produces not constructive criticism and debate, but anger and outrage, sectarianism and schism, ad hominem attacks and warring tribal loyalties.

Faith

Derek Radney has a wonderful three-part series on the theology of human sexuality, avoiding the errors of both traditionalism and progressivism. It’s so important that we understand the NARRATIVE behind Christian sexuality, not merely its function or the “gotcha” scripture verses. That’s the work Derek’s endeavoring to do, here:

On Being Human: Sexuality

Culture

This brief interview with Nancy Pearsey on her new book, “The Toxic War on Masculinity” was a fascinating wade into the pool of data that shows conservative evangelical men - despite the Narrative - are actually quite upstanding from a statistical perspective in their relationship to women. The worst group, and the one that gives evangelicals a bad name, are those who are evangelical adjacent: they use evangelical language to justify abuse, but they’re not consistent church-goers or disciples. I found it very encouraging and useful.

Books

I really enjoyed “Unfadeable”, a juvenile fiction book by my friend Maurice Broaddus (currently working with Disney on some new Black Panther material!) It’s a really rich book about Bella, a homeless teenager in central Indianapolis who’s trying to wade through the muck and mire of Indianapolis’s unjust zoning laws with her mentor. It’s not only a riveting story, it’s actually an inspiring book about doing the work, not being naive, and getting to the bottom of the unjust systems in our cities. Great for adults and kids alike. I learned so much!

For Fun:

I just thought this essay in the NY Times about searching for Tom Cruise was hilarious.

Except, upon my arrival at the end of an idyllic woodland stroll, I discovered that Cruise did not live there either. There was, in the front yard of this residence, a garden gnome lugging buckets on a yoke, which didn’t seem like Cruise’s style, and the gnome was overturned, lying on its side — definitely not his style. I righted the gnome and ambled on, in search of another public footpath that would, I hoped, lead me to where Cruise actually lived. Instead, I accidentally wandered into what (I learned through being yelled this information) was not a public right of way but a field privately owned by a woman who berated me until I ran into traffic on a nearby road.