What follows here is a brief book review—a favorable one—along with my explanation for why in some ways I’m the wrong person for the job. Or at least, I’m not this author’s ideal reviewer—I think he has quite a number of those. Here’s the background.
Last week I had the pleasure of walking only a few blocks to a bookstore event at which David Brooks (of the New York Times) was interviewing my friend Michael Wear, founder of the Center for Christianity and Public Life and author of The Spirit of Our Politics. The book’s subtitle is “Spiritual Formation and the Renovation of Public Life.”
As someone who was raised quite a few years ago as a smalltown Southern Baptist in Texas, I’ve watched (now from a Dorothy Day-style Catholic perspective) the unedifying spectacle of evangelical Christianity’s gradual descent into what I can only call an aggressively anti-Gospel position. Obviously, this does not apply to all evangelicals.
I’ve always been aware that a few strong evangelical souls retain a faith that Howard Thurman or bell hooks might recognize. Or the folks who take inspiration from Shane Claiborne or Plough Magazine, for example.
In his public life, which included a stint in the Obama White House’s Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, Michael has worked smack in the midst of this immense cultural shift. Despite the pandemic of Trumpism infecting so many churches today, he sees a way forward through the madness and anger now surrounding him and his fellow public-spirited believers by drawing on the ancient practice of spiritual formation,
His new book is a noble, almost a quixotic, argument for disarmament in the culture wars, given their plainly idolatrous nature. Michael draws on the example and teachings of the late Christian philosopher Dallas Willard to sketch out a type of spiritual formation that incorporates several “spiritual disciplines.” As he explains, these tools offer a hope of overcoming our tendencies toward “aversion, othering, and misplaced moralizing through a new focus on fellowship over aversion, service over othering, and confession over moralization.”
As a “street Catholic”—my invented self-description as someone engaged with the Gospel but no longer showing up in the pew—I’m not really familiar with all the internecine battles going on currently within American Evangelicalism. I had scarcely heard of Dallas Willard before reading Michael’s book. Thus my earlier point about not being quite the right reviewer here.
Beyond that, and not to put too fine a point on it, we might ask: can American Evangelicalism be inoculated against Trumpism or is has the disease developed too far? (Recent surveys show perhaps one-third of Americans are Christian nationalists, for example.) How many Christians of good will and open hearts remain within the fold? Of those, do they sense a need for spiritual formation? We can only hope so, as I’m sure Michael does in writing this book.
Personally, I’m at the point where I’m tempted to take pastor Wolfgang Simson’s advice: we should simply give up using the term “Christian”. I’ll end here with his provocative rant on this idea:
JESUS IS NOT A CHRISTIAN. WHY SHOULD YOU BE ONE?
God is not the founder of Judaism and Jesus is not the founder of Christianity. Both are man-made systems. The central idea of God always was the Kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world (Mt 25:34). If Jesus is not a Christian, why should we be?
No where does the Bible ask anyone to become a Christian. God always calls people OUT of man-made religion, not into it. The Bible calls the followers of Christ believers, disciples, saints, those of the way, children of God, citizens, brothers, fellow citizens with God’s people or members of God’s household. The term “Christian” (Greek: christianos) only appears three times in the entire New Testament, and never once in a positive way, let alone indicating we should become one.
In Acts 11:26 it states that the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch. They did not (active tense) call themselves that, they were called (passive tense) by those outside. A “Christian” was a negative label, a swear word, just like the terms Quaker, Baptists or Methodists were later meant to be. Only with time did they become an accepted term. In linguistics this is called reappropriation, where a derogatory term has become acceptable. Why, therefore, would you want to wear a swear word like it is a medal?
In the two other appearances of the word Christian (Acts 26:28.29; 1. Pet 4:13-17) it is used as a derisive term and even as a reason for persecution: If someone suffers because he is (accused to be) a Christian, we should understand this as a judgment, as suffering for Christ, not as an honorary title.
What is therefore the best and most accurate label for followers of Jesus Christ? As we are entering the days where the Gospel of the Kingdom is being proclaimed to all nations (Mt 24:14), the best identifier fitting for our time is: Citizen of the Kingdom!
See you next time—peace.
Why wear a swear word as if it were a medal? Because that is exactly the folly of the Gospel. Why call ourselves Christians? Because disciples of Christ must stand and be counted as members of a universal faith - and we must refuse to validate the oxymoronic term "Christian nationalism" by speaking of it as a conceivably cogent thing, without irony or scare quotes, for the same reason (IOW, nationalism can never be Christian, and the world needs to hear confessing Christians say this).
I can respect the choice to stick with "disciple of Christ" and/or "disciple of Jesus", but we do need to show up to worship him as gathered communities, because we can't do discipleship by ourselves - to presume otherwise is both arrogant and individualistic - and because such worship is itself a subversive rejection of the various idols that make false claims on our loyalty.