Faith today and hope for tomorrow
“Here is where the role of imagination becomes so important: by sharing his self-certainty with us, God enables us to imagine a truth beyond our ability to know.”
- Garrett Green, Imagining Theology
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A friend recently observed my writings have “taken a darker turn” of late. When I pointed at everything going on in the world, he nodded and then asked “How are you though? Where are you right now?”
I share personal anecdotes for illustrative purposes all the time, but our conversation reminded me it’s been a few years since I’ve shared where I am personally with faith and church life. I should probably talk about that more considering the topics I explore. Honestly though, I find it difficult to share about myself knowing our degrading situation in the United States stems in large part from the evangelical culture I used to be a part of. It can be hard to move forward when the past echoes deafeningly all around me.
The past several months I’ve felt a bit like Neo and Trinity near the end of The Matrix Resurrections. Setting aside the film slapping around reboot culture and its own audience, Resurrections stayed true to the originals insofar as being heavy-handed with deeper messages and metaphors. One message that emerged in the second film fully arrives in Resurrections: we never fully escape the past. Trauma comes back to haunt us, individually and generationally. Neo and Trinity learn just how much their pasts still dominate them as the film progresses. How their traumas still control them. How the unrealistic expectations of others and the fretting of friends and allies leaves them frustrated and exhausted.
Murderous computer programs aren’t hunting me down, but I often feel like I’m running through my own strange repeating loops. These embattled streets, that green-marbled lobby, and this rooftop all look way too familiar. Haven’t I been here before? Why does this culture war never end and why does it feel even more absurd now? Do I really have to have this same argument yet again, with the same kinds of people who refuse to try to do better, or even listen?
Thus is life trying to follow Jesus while living in Tennessee, the geographic HQ of white evangelicalism. Fully escaping this dominant culture is not possible. Even in churches where blatant nationalism is frowned upon, the features of it are often still declared biblical: patriarchy, sadness over the perceived loss of cultural influence, wariness of science, and flirtation with conspiracy. Life outside this church environment can be just as difficult, as white evangelical authoritarians reign in hysteria with baseless wrath from the Tennessee State Capitol.
Still, neither evangelical authoritarians nor their secular allies can control what goes on in people’s minds. While they try to force all of us under a social hierarchy that keeps right-wing men beyond the reach of accountability, they have largely failed to control what happens in people’s homes and relationships. They’re definitely loud in how much that frustrates them, but volume and functional power don’t always go hand in hand.
Having lived here my whole life I’m well-acquainted with the wearisome nature of these strange repeating loops, so I suppose I’m doing okay. Present concerns can be found here, here, and here. Getting back to my friend’s question about where I am with faith and church life is harder to pin down. I’m unsure about a lot of things, but here are five areas I have become settled in.
1. I think I’m a bad Protestant
These days I’m drawn to older, more liturgical traditions such as Anglicanism, Orthodoxy, and Catholicism. For now I remain broadly Protestant though. Our family is in a Presbyterian church that sometimes feels as if it’s halfway to being Anglican. It’s mostly working for me even if it is too culturally and theologically evangelical for my comfort. Again though, that’s hard to escape in my neck of the woods. I prefer being in a church that’s not a monoculture anyways.
Complicating this is that it’s sometimes hard to know what is truly Protestant and what is Evangelical, as in my context those are usually not the same thing despite decreasing overlap. One of the easiest ways to see this is that many evangelical churches have a ruthlessly rigid priesthood that outweighs all other authority, including the Spirit and Scripture. That’s decidedly not Protestant.
Not that I’m a Perfect Protestant™. I’ve lost trust in penal substitutionary atonement, one of the central theologies that came out of the Protestant Reformation. If a lot of evangelicals are bad protestants then I probably am too, just in a different direction. I’m much less reformed in my theology than I used to be. In my neck of the woods reformed theology tends to be way too formulaic, selfish, shallow, and hollow. I do think there’s a lot to love about historic Protestantism though and just read a nice little book about that.
2. Trading in certainty for enchantment
It’s fair to say we are now at least one foot into the postmodern world. While that has manifested in some ugly post-truth subcultures, one silver lining is that people are more comfortable asking questions they’ve always had than they were just a few years ago. This is excellent, especially when hard questions can be asked safely inside of churches.
Unfortunately a lot of churches here are completely unsafe to ask even easy questions in. Brittle certainty stemming from a narrow approach to reformed theology and confusing cultural desires with the Gospel is why. Being biblical trumps being Christlike, and being biblical ends up just being a low view of Scripture. We’ll circle back around to the logical endpoint of this in a moment.
Certainty is the source of so much sin and harm being done today. Yet I’m still not convinced the Christian answer is to run in the opposite direction into pure uncertainty. I think running toward enchantment is better. What does that mean? I’m…not sure. There are two things I feel good about directionally though.
The first is that absolute truth is real, but we humans are not capable of fully accessing or understanding most of it. Indeed, the existence of absolute truth puts certainty to death for humans. The second has to do with the quote from Garrett Green at the top: “Here is where the role of imagination becomes so important: by sharing his self-certainty with us, God enables us to imagine a truth beyond our ability to know.” Only God has certainty; exactly how much I do not know. But what God has given us is imagination, individually and communally, in which we grasp at God’s Truth that is beyond ourselves.
This is not a new idea; in fact, it’s a very ancient one. The best storytellers, Christian or otherwise, embed this grasping for truth and ultimate reality at the heart of their stories. The writers of Genesis understood this. So did Homer. So did J.R.R. Tolkien when he wrote about the primary and secondary worlds. His close friend C.S. Lewis the same when he wrote on myth becoming fact. If you had told me a few years ago this would be spelled out so clearly in a murder mystery movie I would have laughed, but that’s exactly what this scene from Wake Up Dead Man does.
Again, I’m not sure what all this means. Maybe the Bible is humanity’s best attempt at understanding who God is and what meaning we have. Maybe we glimpse both in the Imago Dei. We can see this Truth but we cannot understand most any of it. So we use our imaginations and the power of story flows from there. When we stop doing that, when we claim absolute certainty, that seems to be the moment trouble begins. Maybe abuse isnʼt the result of sin, but is simply the logical end point of self-delusions of omnipotence.
I’ll be writing some more in the coming months as I sift through this. For now I’m just enjoying the strange comfort that comes with knowing there is so much I cannot know. Feeling small used to bother me. It no longer does, if anything I prefer it.
3. Can we be done with patriarchy already?
In the year of our Lord 2026 —and with each passing year, for that matter— the fact so many churches still insist only men can be elders and pastors becomes more and more demoralizing. Jesus went out of his way to affirm the full humanity of women. As one of the world's preeminent New Testament scholars N.T. Wright said years ago, “the scholarship is quite clear” that women were leaders in the early Church. Shortly after he added this insightful bit:
“What are the forces in our culture today —particularly I have to say in America— which are forcing some churches and some people to fasten on to one or two verses from elsewhere to say ‘oh no, no, no we can’t have women doing this, that, or the other’? Because that’s a highly, highly selective reading of Scripture and, as with all other theological answers the best place to start is with the resurrection of Jesus, and then everything flows out from there.”
I’m guessing Wright has my broader church culture in mind. Here, we hone in on what we think Scripture teaches divorced from the story of Jesus, especially the Resurrection, in an environment that already places the Cross in extreme importance over the full story of Jesus. We shouldn’t be surprised that patriarchal institutions and the people inside them struggle to treat women as true equals to men as Jesus did, even if they acknowledge this is a difficult issue. Silencing half the human race and telling women they must ignore their calling because they don’t have a penis is exasperating.
While I’ve never been complementarian, for much of my life patriarchy is something I never thought about, probably because I’m a man and the material benefits of patriarchy tend to blind men to its existence. The past ten years I’ve come to see male-only leadership as sinful and wrong.
I suppose in some extreme cultural circumstances, giving the illusion of patriarchy while not actually doing it would be wise for safety reasons. Indeed, the dangers of not adhering to pater familias in the Roman Empire seems to have weighed heavily on Paul when he gave guidance on the household and church life (Ephesians 5, Colossians 3, 1 Timothy 2). We know Roman authorities already viewed Christians as a problem. Openly defying the interwoven gender and legal demands of the Empire would have been a death warrant for the early churches. Paul saying do patriarchy, but not really seems like a wise move given their circumstances.
The problem this poses to us is obvious: we don’t face such circumstances today. Far from it. The American military isn’t going to raid your church and jail or execute parishioners if a woman is preaching or serving as an elder. Neither is a mob. As such, Paul should be the most conservative that Christians ever go when it comes to gender and culture. Sadly, many churches have sprinted far to the right of Paul by baptizing the silencing and removal of authority from women as being biblical when there is no biblical justification or cultural threat for doing so. This leaves us openly embracing the Curse and Roman hierarchy as righteousness. We ignore the Resurrection and what that great gift means to our own peril. The gifts of women are hamstrung and men become stunted in their own growth because of it.
At its best, patriarchy can only keep a church functioning at a baseline level when times are good. That’s not the same thing as a church being holy or thriving though. Tying one arm behind the back of women means tying one arm behind the back of the local church. And the true measure of a system and a people is how both behave when things go sideways. In those times, in these times, patriarchy virtually always makes things worse.
So can we be done with it already?
4. Fundamentalists vs. modernists…yawn
The fundamentalist-modernist controversy that took off in the 1920s and 1930s still holds sway today. I’ve been called a modernist several times the past few years —despite not being one— and the intolerance of fundamentalism is still chugging along.
And yet, I feel that this framework is severely outdated. Like a lot of Christians I’m neither a fundamentalist nor a modernist. I take the Bible seriously but don’t believe it is always historically or scientifically accurate —as we understand both in this moment— simply because we know it is not. I believe we ignore historic Christian beliefs at our own peril while deeply appreciating advances in modern science. Sometimes they clash; but, more often than not, my sense is the best of faith and science are on parallel tracks and complement each other.
A key function of the broader church culture I’m surrounded by is how effortlessly it creates cardboard cutouts of enemies. This is helpful in keeping congregants on the beach towel, but it’s absolutely useless when it comes to forming people into good ambassadors of the Kingdom of God. Reading Genesis as allegory does not mean it has zero applicability to our lives today. It certainly doesn’t prevent me from following Jesus or loving my neighbors. Neither does saying that atonement is bigger than we can understand, a very Pauline idea (Romans 11:33-36). Most white evangelicals today cannot understand this despite it being true.
The fundamentalist-modernist framework has evolved into something else, with aspects of the fight receding while others grew louder, enough so that things are different 100 years on. Sure, there are still plenty of fundamentalists who are driven by an appallingly low view of Scripture that leads them to using the Bible as a cheap prop for cultural gain. There are a handful of progressives who hardly ever look at their Bible and think faith is only about action. There are also a ton of folks in between, ranging from conservative to progressive, who think faith, Scripture, belief, and action all matter. Yet in too many churches there is still little to no room for people inhabiting this wide space in between.
For these reasons I think we’d all be better off moving beyond seeing churches and Christians through fundamentalist-modernist or conservative-progressive frameworks. Both prevent us from having a clearer view of reality and make it impossible to find common paths forward. Sadly, white evangelicals seem hellbent on keeping such frameworks in place as a means to protect their own privilege and power. And that brings me to my final point.
5. New churches and older traditions = new hope
I no longer believe the average white evangelical church is capable of changing for the better. Maybe they can over several decades; however, for the vast majority of people who need their church to change, that’s way too slow to bring love, safety, and healing. That’s way too slow to arrive at the feet of Jesus. White evangelicals cling to their comforts and detest being challenged. Documented abuse and harm are still more of an annoyance to the average evangelical than they are a source of concern. There are a lot of reasons so many people are leaving their churches. The inability to repent is one of them.
But few of these churches have decades on their side anymore. National trends tend to arrive late in Tennessee, especially Memphis. As endless stories of church shrinkage and closings have poured out of other parts of the country for years, I’ve watched a lot of evangelicals here smirk while exclaiming their churches are doing well because they are true to the Gospel or being biblical. All those mainline and softer evangelical churches on the coasts and elsewhere are failing because they abandoned orthodoxy!
Well, the national trend has now arrived here. Stubborn churches are starting to feel the anxiety that comes with shrinking budgets, aging congregations, or pews being less full. All three will be felt simultaneously soon enough. It turns out their version of being true to the Gospel and being biblical —incredibly problematic beliefs, to be sure— had nothing to do with bucking the national trend for a few years, but everything to do with the culture here just moving more slowly.
This is all the logical conclusion of the second point I made above. Certainty breeds disenchantment, but false certainty that has been unmasked spreads disenchantment like wildfire. Salvation is not a math formula that we’ve worked out. Life is too hard for the most important things to be so easy. People leave churches because they were hurt or let down, yes. People also leave evangelical churches because what many are teaching is useless and out of touch with the realities of daily life.
Theology can be crappy, but even crappy theology has a purpose. When church teaching is worthless; that’s a different story. Worthless theology makes it that much easier to jump off the sinking ship.
This all makes for a bitter time to be an institutionalist. We’re often the first to see these problems and the last to be taken seriously when trying to deal with them. The fruits of the individualist and populist spirits in churches today are abundant, but rotten. Increasingly they are even malevolent.
Yet in the wave of church closings upon us, fresh communities are being crafted that harken back to the more mysterious roots of the Christian faith. Many newer faith communities neither fit into the fundamentalist-modernist framework, nor do they have a hyper-narrow view of atonement. They are younger, more ecumenical, are leaning into theology that’s relevant to everyday life, and have their doors open to the world. Others are finding rest and renewal in the liturgy and tradition of older denominations. None of this is perfection, but it is all a tangible step in the direction of holiness for the average person who is exhausted by the historically and theologically unmoored culture that is evangelicalism.
Change will come as more people seek out these new churches and the wisdom found in older traditions. Maybe it won’t be everything we want, but perhaps it will be what we need, something that is enough to guide us to the ways of Jesus.
About Me
I explore faith, church culture, and formation in the American South from my hometown of Memphis, TN. I’m an institutionalist who believes the means are just as important as the ends. Everything on this site is an expression of my faith and love for the Church.
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