I want to talk for a few minutes about how we decide between conflicting ideas of how to live a righteous life, and I’m going to do it by addressing a metaphor that Jesus and the writers of the Epistles used to describe our spiritual lives: buildings.
Jesus often spoke about houses, and in particular referenced the stability of the house’s foundations as a metaphor for one’s spiritual life. Later in the New Testament, the Epistles go on to describe the community of faith as a house or building, again frequently referring to foundations of the structure, and discussing how the stability of the house depends on its foundations.
So why is this important?
Looking back on my experiences growing up in the evangelical community, one constant that I can see was the theme that we were under attack. In that telling, the spiritual forces of darkness were constantly probing us, looking for weaknesses, trying to destroy the work that God was doing on earth, by trying to destroy us our our mission. And everywhere we looked, we saw evidence of corruption of the world, and we saw it as our duty to push back on the forces of darkness and take a stand for righteousness. Having since walked away from evangelical thinking, I believe there was a lot of fearmongering going on: preachers and religious institutions find it very useful to keep people focused on danger, because it keeps them huddling together for safety, and gives them a common purpose. So the evangelicals arrive at a lot of ideas about how to fix these problems: things like purity culture, the culture war, taking back America for God, kicking out the foreigners who are importing evil ideas, and so forth. They specifically blame liberal and progressive influences for everything that’s wrong.
Now, looking in the other direction from evangelicalism, it’s perhaps unsurprising that liberal and progressive Christians blame conservatives and especially evangelicals for everything that’s wrong. In their mind, the evangelical obsession with power and their colonialist ideas are the real problem. It’s not demons or spiritual forces that are the problem, it’s the very people who believe in those forces that are destroying our culture and harming the Kingdom on earth.
So we have two sharply different interpretations of what is going on in America right now. Two different Christian groups look at the same data and arrive at diametrically-opposed conclusions.
They can’t both be right.
So how do we differentiate between these ideas, and reach some rational and reasonable conclusions about which side to take – or better stated, which approach is the best one for American Christians to support?
For the last few years, as I’ve slowly but extensively excavated the foundations of my inherited faith, I’ve continued to come up against one inescapable challenge: a very beautiful, carefully-constructed edifice may actually be unstable or based on bad foundations.
And in this season, given this metaphor, I think we’re seeing the spiritual house being tested as its foundations are being shaken, and its walls and beams carefully probed for rot. And the differentiation between good and bad is what results from a given teaching or methodology.
I was speaking with a friend the other day, and describing how I’d been forced to rethink my prior support for purity culture. On the surface, it has a lot to recommend it: a focus on following teachings in the Bible about avoiding sexual sins, avoiding lust, preserving oneself for a future spouse, or staying faithful to the spouse after marriage, and so on. But then I started learning about the numerous ways in which purity culture actually harms people. For example, it produces a long-lasting sexual shame and guilt that persists well into marriage and actually impairs sexual function. Women raised in purity culture teachings experience significantly higher sexual dysfunction, pain during intercourse, and lower sexual satisfaction even within the bounds of a healthy faithful marriage. It makes women responsible for men’s sexual behavior, and takes away their agency by teaching them that his sexual needs override her preferences. It interferes with the recognition and reporting of sexual abuse, by convincing women that her appearance authorized his behavior. It leads victims of sexual abuse to feel shamed for being victimized, even though their abuser is entirely the one at fault. It teaches women to objectify their own bodies because of how men objectify them, teaching them to obsess over their own bodies as objects to be monitored. It tangibly harms anyone who doesn’t fit the cisgender heterosexual norm. These findings are reproduced across numerous studies of psychology, sociology, and sexology. And it isn’t confined to Christian expressions of purity culture; the same holds true for other high-control religions.
As another example, I was raised spiritually with an emphasis on the power of positive confession – that if we believe what we’re praying for, and if we speak in faith as if it already exists, it will be granted. I was even taught – explicitly – that if we admitted bad things, they would actually happen; we needed to shape our language to avoid giving the demonic realm permission to attack us. There are certainly verses that give these kinds of readings. But I’ve come to believe that this doctrine has measurable bad fruit. People delay medical care for themselves or those under their care, because they claim a hoped-for healing that is faith instead of fact. There are adverse psychological effects when prayers are not answered; grief is not allowed to run its course. People take poor financial risks and pour money into bad investments promoted by “seed faith” preachers, harming their own financial health. During the 2008 subprime crisis, researchers noted a correlation between foreclosure hotspots and megachurches that taught the prosperity gospel. And the overall idea of “name it, claim it” and prosperity gospel teaches its adherents that their own personal prosperity and health are God’s focus – which has an adverse effect on how they treat those around them, by teaching them that their wealth is to be hoarded to glorify God, which runs directly contrary to Jesus’ teachings.
And perhaps the clearest example to me, today, is what we were taught about politics, how the absolute focus of our voting ought to be taking America back for God. It sounds great; we hope to see righteousness arise in fresh new ways in our nation; we hope to see leaders connected with God ruling in our nation. But what I see happening in evangelical Christianity in America today shows the seedy underbelly of this teaching, where grasping for political power at all costs becomes the focus, where the ends justify the means, where the vast majority of evangelicals have continued to support a truly and deeply immoral regime that is measurably harming literally everything that they preached about for my entire life until 2016. The difference in the evangelical response from the 1998 Bill Clinton sex scandal to the same community’s response to Trump’s “grab ’em” statement about abusing women, and the court finding that he sexually violated a woman, upheld all the way to the Supreme Court, is perhaps the clearest proof of this change. There simply must be something truly broken that underlies the evangelical teachings, to have allowed such a dramatic swing away from every stated principle of righteousness in such a short time. And more to the point, there must be something really rotten to allow so many evangelicals to wholeheartedly believe that this switch is godly and appropriate.
These are just a few examples of what I’ve observed, where the structure that looks healthy proves to be rotten once you inspect it carefully. I’ve observed that the furnishings of a thing hide the structure of the thing. Normally that’s okay, but the furnishings can also hide the flaws of the thing.
About a year ago, I renovated a house for a local homeless prevention ministry. When we started the process, it looked like it was going to be relatively straightforward. I saw one small area where there was some water damage, but I figured it would be easy to fix. But once we got into the project, and started removing the stuff in the house, and pulling back the surface finishes, the extent of the rot became visible. The entire bathroom floor was rotted soft, and I discovered the floor of the kitchen was nearly ready to collapse in a couple places. Pulling down some drywall revealed that the kitchen had suffered a fire, and it had been covered over with fresh drywall rather than repair it properly. I had to completely rebuild three rooms and repair extensive damage to the very structure of the house. Some clean paint and well-placed furnishings had hidden the extent of the problems for many years, long enough to allow the problems to metastasize. I probably should have noticed, when I walked in the door for the first time, that smell of decay. If you’ve ever worked with rotted wood, you’ll know what I mean. It’s got a damp, pungent, moldy, earthy smell, and it’s unmistakable, now that I’ve spent a hundred hours ripping it out and replacing it with fresh lumber.
In our community of faith – the building of which Jesus and the apostles were speaking – we tend to fill up the structure with a lot of belongings and decoration. Paintings go on the walls, memorializing our history. Carpet is unrolled on the floor, bringing comfort to the feet. Chairs and sofas beds and tables and dressers fill the rooms, providing wonderful space for storing things that matter to us and giving us comfortable places to rest and relax. Soon, the faith community is a well-decorated, comfortable, inviting system.
But all those things hide the structure, and too often, the rotten and decayed spots. The paintings and framed photos might be masking a large paint spot on the wall. The carpet might be covering up water damage. The sofa conceals the gaping hole in the drywall. The fresh paint covers the mold without fixing its cause. You can put very nice furnishings in a pretty decrepit building, and someone coming to visit will never see how bad a shape that the building is in.
If you hide those problems long enough, however, the damage starts to accumulate. And just like my renovation project, it can start to cause serious structural issues within the faith community. Like the parable of the house built on the sand, the house can be in perfect shape, but if the foundation is flawed, it won’t matter once the shaking and the floods arise. But a good foundation isn’t all you need, either. You can have a house built on the rock, that looks really pretty to a casual observer, but that eventually collapses simply because you’ve hidden the decay and neglected the repairs for too long. And in both cases, those who enter the house have no idea anything is wrong until it’s too late.
And that is exactly what I see happening today in evangelicalism: the structure is collapsing, and it no longer bears any resemblance to the House of God that Jesus talked about. It’s why I left evangelicalism.
So this is how we start to decide which view of the world is the correct one: it takes stepping back from a thing, separating yourself from a personal investment in its appearance, and truly inspecting it with a careful eye. You’ve got to be more invested in its structure and its suitability for growing the Kingdom than how good it looks, how beautifully it’s furnished. It takes a rigorous evaluation by someone who’s not invested in the appearance, who doesn’t have a conflict of intere st.
What I discovered, in stepping back from evangelicalism after over 40 years being deeply invested in it, and caring deeply about how it looked to the world, was that there was something deeply rotten. It stunk. Like that rotted structure I had to repair, its structure is decaying, the mold and mildew are starting to poison its inhabitants, and it is close to outright collapsing on them.
Back in 2018, my spiritual mentor observed that the American church was entering a season where the Lord seemed to be withdrawing the Spirit from structures that were not fruitful. He also pointed out that the institutions would continue on, even without the Spirit. Humans are like that: we build things that become self-sustaining, even if the original fire goes out. People hang onto the familiar. At the time, my mentor’s words were hard to believe. But now I see the truth in what he was saying: the structure truly is decaying now, faster and faster.
Here’s what I’m getting at: it took me several years of stepping back from my investment in the evangelical culture to finally feel like I’ve got some real clarity about its problems. Some of them were obvious very quickly, but others took quite a while to see. But now that I’ve seen them, they’re impossible to miss. And they’re impossible to ignore, also. Some have appealed to me to return to my evangelical roots (I’d refer you to my previous post and video). But I simply cannot: I have to agree with my mentor that the Spirit has lifted from that particular spiritual structure. As he said, God may have winked at its immaturity and flaws for many years, but no longer.
There’s another metaphor that Jesus used frequently: he spoke of fruit trees and grapevines and fields of grain, which is quite natural in an agricultural society where many of his listeners would instantly understand the metaphors. Many of his illustrations specifically addressed the fruit, or lack of fruit, as a metaphor for the effectiveness of a spiritual life.
Here’s something that really concerns me: Jesus’ response, when he walked up to the fig tree and found no good fruit, was to command it to wither and die. And elsewhere he pointedly said that branches that fail to bear fruit will be cut off, and that a tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and burned. A tree may be covered with beautiful green leaves, yet produce no fruit, or even worse, a lot of unhealthy fruit. Sometimes, the best solution is to chop down a dying or fruitless tree, and plant a new one with good roots and that will bear good fruit.
And similarly, sometimes, the best solution is to tear down a failed structure, and start over, building the right thing in its place.
Now, it’s not my job to tear things down. And I’m not attempting to do that. That job is the Lord’s, not mine. But instead, I think my role, if I do have one, is to say to whoever will listen, “come out of her” (Revelation 18:4) “so that you do not take part in her sins and so that you do not share in her plagues.” That sounds harsh, but when I watch what’s going on politically in America, and the harm that is being done to “the least of these,” and when I consider Matthew 25:31-46 and Jesus’ response to those who harm the oppressed, I really do believe that there are a lot of evangelical Christians in America right now who literally are sharing in the sins of Babylon. And just as much as I would end that harm, I would also see my fellow believers saved from what they’re doing to themselves by continuing to partake in that harlotry.
In my last post, I described the letter I’d gotten from a concerned family member. One thing they specifically challenged me on is the arrogance of believing that it’s my role to critique the church. I cannot accept that criticism; it strikes me that any believer who sees error arising in the church, who sees the rottenness growing, the walls and foundation beginning to collapse, is absolutely called to speak up. I expect this family member would respond “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” Fine – I already found myself judged for my part in it; I’ve been regretting and repenting of that for six years now. My unhappy and painful response was leaving that culture at the cost of my entire social support system and my respected and honored place in it. I left because I was so completely convicted that it was wrong, and I could not remain a part of it. The fruit was toxic; the structure was collapsing. I was unwilling to participate in the ongoing harm for another moment.
I want to address one more thing before I wrap up here.
How do we know who’s more correct about their assertions about the harms? Obviously, in this case, both sides of the American debate over proper Christianity assert their rightness. And obviously, they cannot both be right. Who’s to decide? The flippant answer would be that the Holy Spirit will tell us. That’s nonsense; both sides claim the Holy Spirit is on their side, telling them that they’re correct. Obviously that’s not the right answer.
I’ve concluded that the best answer is this: listen to the ones being harmed. One of the blessings of this social media age, for all its toxicity, is that voices can be heard that were never heard before. Everyone has a chance to speak.
And on the evangelical side, I hear a lot of voices complaining that their privileged way of life is at risk, that their finances are being harmed, that their jobs are less secure because of immigrants, that their children have to listen to ungodly viewpoints.
Balance that against those who speak on the other side. The women who are objectified and assaulted and abused. Women told they are inferior to men. Blacks and other people of color unsafe in their own houses and jobs due to rank discrimination and police oppression. The immigrants ripped from their homes and sent to a county they’ve never seen. Tens of thousands of people in concentration camps around the country with ICE boots on their neck. Non cisgender individuals despairing to the point of ending their lives. Women dying because of pregnancy treatments refused in conservative states. Homeless people now starving because of government grants drying up and welfare cards cancelled, or freezing to death because shelters are closed.
I don’t think there’s any comparison. I think it’s shockingly easy to see where the harm is happening. And no amount of posturing about the dangers of empathy can undo what Jesus said in Matthew 25, that those who failed to care for such as these did it to Jesus himself.
So let’s bring this home.
While my first sense a few years ago was that it was hard to discern who was right, when both sides fired volleys against each other’s beliefs and practices in this difficult season in American Christianity, it’s become quite clear to me now. The fruit on the evangelical side is rotten. The foundation is misshapen. The structure is nearing collapse. I will not be silent, because tangible harm is happening and is increasing. It would be easier and more comfortable to stand by and let it happen, but I don’t sense any grace for that. The hard thing – and the necessary thing – is to speak to whoever will listen.
This isn’t a fun season, and I don’t think that in my remaining lifetime it will resolve. The easy time that I enjoyed for decades is probably over. I don’t like that, but it’s what is allotted to us today. The right thing to do is to set myself for the task, and ask God’s help to get through it.
And I encourage you to think hard about taking action. This isn’t about how you vote. It’s about how you choose to live in the world, and who you serve, and how.
Thanks for spending some time with me today. This isn’t an easy topic, and I hope you have found something useful to take away. I really value each and every follower, and I hope you’ll take a moment to leave a comment or drop a like or to share this with someone who needs to hear it. If you want notifications of when I post, join my email list on my blog site.
Also, I wanted to take a moment and share that I’ve written a book. Its working title is “Perfect Love,Perfect Fear: How the Religion of Love Gave Me Fear as Its Tool.” I wrote it because I started to see how fear has been the driving force in religion, and how toxic it is. I think it’s fair to say that the underlying operating system of most religious institutions, its primary tool, is actually fear.
In 2020 I watched the American church utterly fail its major test: would it uphold the things it had taught for many decades? The resulting fallout only accelerated a trend of “nones” walking away from institutional religion. But far more Christians, despite expressing significant discomfort at what they saw clearly, still chose to stay. Scandal after scandal have plagued churches and denominations and popular leaders across the faith, yet many millions of Christians choose not to speak out, but instead defend their institutions. Why is this? How do so many people stay inside religious institutions that wound them or violate their deepest convictions, but cannot voice why leaving feels impossible?
The answer is fear. In institutional religion, fear is not a side effect. It is the operating system. The religion of love turns out to have a fear-based economy.
“Perfect Love, Perfect Fear” traces how religion manufactures and maintains fear from three directions, then shows what can happen when fear finally fails.
Fear From Above is the cosmic threat: hell, the Rapture, chronic uncertainty about one’s own salvation, and the altar call that Charles Finney engineered and that a British psychiatrist later described in the same terms as brainwashing.
Fear From Without is social: scapegoating, certainty used as a weapon, the church protecting its brand, and the boundary markers that sort insiders from outsiders.
Fear From Within is what the first two install in a person: scrupulosity, purity-culture self-surveillance, shame that attaches to identity rather than behavior, and a life organized around never being fully seen.
Each section moves between theology, psychology, sociology, documented church history, and autoethnography – my own nearly fifty years inside evangelicalism, including the parts I am not proud of.
The final section, Fear Losing its Grip, is the much-needed release. I hope that you will finish this book able to name the specific mechanism operating on you, which is the moment fear starts to lose its grip. And you will have been handed a picture of God whose patience and love outlast every reason you were ever given to be afraid.
If you want updates on the book, then please sign up for the mailing list.
Again, thanks for reading. Be blessed, and we’ll talk again soon.
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