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 about where I am personally with faith and church life. I should probably share about that more often considering the topics I explore. Honestly though, I find it difficult to talk 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.
While I’m grateful murderous computer programs aren’t hunting me down, 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 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, flirtation with conspiracy…Life outside this church environment can be just as difficult, as white evangelical legislators reign in 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 outside 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 still 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 a little too culturally evangelical for my taste. 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 some overlap. One of the easiest ways to see this is that many evangelical churches have a brutally 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 interest 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 is way too formulaic, selfish, 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
I think it’s fair to say we are 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 not being very biblical either. 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. 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 much or little 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 our ability to know.
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 about 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 still not sure what all this means. Maybe it means the Bible is simply humanity’s best attempt at understanding who God is and what meaning we have. Maybe we glimpse it 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. When we stop doing that, when we think we can claim absolute certainty, that seems to be when we get into a lot of trouble. Maybe abuse isnʼt the result of sin, but is merely 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 much I cannot know.
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 laughable. 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 had the church culture I’m surrounded by in mind. We care about what we think Scripture teaches cloven 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 follow Jesus, even if they acknowledge this is a difficult issue.
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 that come with this system tend to blind men to its hazards. The past several years I’ve come to see complementarianism or whatever word you want to use as sinful and wrong. Silence half the human race and telling women they can’t be leaders because they don’t have a penis is just dumb.
I suppose in some extreme cultural circumstances, giving the illusion of patriarchy 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 his views 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 was a wise move given their circumstances.
The problem this poses to us is obvious: we don’t face those circumstances today. U.S. army troops aren’t going to raid your church and jail or execute parishioners if a woman is preaching or serving as an official elder. Paul, then, should be the most conservative that Christians ever go when it comes to gender. 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 are no biblical reasons for doing so. Not only are we not being biblical, we’re embracing the Curse as righteous. N.T. Wright is, well, right. We ignore the Resurrection and what that great gift means to our own peril.
At its best, patriarchy can keep a church functioning. That’s not the same thing as a church being holy or thriving though. 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.
I feel that this framework is severely outdated though. 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, simply because we know it isn’t. 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 church culture I’m surrounded by is how effortlessly it creates cardboard cutouts of enemies. This may keep congregants on the beach towel, but it’s absolutely useless when it comes to the objectives of the Kingdom of God. Reading Genesis as allegory does not 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. Or maybe certain aspects of the fight have receded while others have become louder, enough so that things are actually different 100 years on. Sure, there are still plenty of fundamentalists who believe Christianity is only about belief and culture. There are also a handful of progressives who believe faith is only about action and culture. There are also a ton of folks in between, ranging from conservative to progressive, who think all of it matters. 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 fail to provide a clear view of reality and make it impossible to find common paths forward. Sadly, white evangelicals seem hellbent on keeping these frameworks in place as a means to protect their own privilege and power. And that brings me to my final point.
5. New churches = new hope
I no longer believe the average 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 be and do better, that’s way too slow to bring love, rest, safety, and healing. That’s way too slow a time to arrive at the feet of Jesus. White evangelicals love being comfortable and detest being challenged. Abuse and harm are still more of an annoyance to the average evangelical than they are a concern. There are a lot of reasons so many people are leaving their churches. This inability to repent and change is one of them.
But few churches have time on their side. The last 15 years have been an interesting moment to live where I live. National trends usually arrive here in Tennessee much later, 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 claiming 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. Ornery churches here 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 being true to the Gospel and being biblical 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 it like wildfire. Salvation is not a math formula that we’ve worked out. Life is too hard for the most important things to be that easy. People leave churches because they were hurt or ignored, yes. People also leave evangelical churches because what those churches 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 though, it is that much easier to abandon.
This all makes for a bitter time to be an institutionalist like I am. 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. They are rotten, and increasingly they are malevolent.
Yet in the wave of church closings upon us, new communities are already being crafted that harken back to older and more mysterious veins 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. Unsurprisingly, they are also younger, more ecumenical, are crafting and using theology that’s relevant to people’s everyday lives, and have their doors thrown open to the world. This is not perfection, but it is a huge step in the direction of holiness and faithfulness.
Change will come in this new generation of churches. Maybe it won’t be everything we want, but perhaps it will be what we need, something that is enough to guide us toward the way 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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