Some thoughts on Christian discourse

Written By Mark Hackett

There’s nothing more refreshing than a real conversation in the real world, right?

That thought popped into my head a lot in 2022, the first full year since the pandemic began that life kind of felt normal again. I went to church, restaurants, bars, and coffee shops. I saw old friends. Public speaking returned to my work calendar. I met people I connected with online in 2020 and early 2021 in person. I didn’t wear a mask (thanks vaccines). Our family took a vacation.

But the words kind of are doing a lot of work here. As health restrictions fully subsided, I discovered a rash of surprising new cultural restrictions. Some people I considered friends wanted nothing to do with me. People I once thought to be principled Christians turned out not to be. Rumors of gossip approached as I bumped into acquaintances. I heard this…I heard that…about you… Most of it was outlandishly untrue, so much so that I laughed more than a few times.

Many fellow Christians reading this have had similar experiences. The dual crises of Trumpism and COVID-19 revealed the rot in the institutions and communities we once cherished. Crisis showed us what we really believe. The socioeconomic, cultural, and political roots that were barely hidden in many churches became fully exposed. We discovered upon further excavation that those rotten roots were buried shallow in poor soil.

Oh death, where is your sting

There have been countless casualties in American churches since 2016. Most haunting for me have been people leaving the faith altogether. If you listen to deconverted folks —and I have— it’s hard to blame them for walking away. I often find myself angry for them because of what they were put through. Because of how people who claim the name of Jesus purposefully failed them.

But the causalities don’t end with the individuals who have walked away from the faith. A majority of institutional churches —as in groups of people in buildings— are aging and shrinking. Pastors are quitting or considering quitting in record numbers. Many seminaries are seeing declining enrollment. And the state of private and public discourse in and between Christian spaces and people is more abysmal now than at any other point in my lifetime, as countless people worship their cultural bubble instead of living into the Gospel.

Most of this damage will not be undone, at least anytime soon. The disagreements surrounding a host of identity issues and approaches (racial attitudes, political partisanship, ideas of gender, social beliefs, how to engage broader American culture, etc.) are simply not reconcilable in our current cultural moment. Bringing people who take harsh stances on such issues together with those who have a softer touch is still only causing more damage. But that’s a topic for another day. I want to explore some of the reasons why parts of our discourse as Christians feels so broken in our current cultural moment.

The New Shape of Christian Public Discourse?

I started writing down jumbled thoughts about Christian discourse in the American context a little over a year ago. Returning to them from time to time and adding more didn’t move much forward in my mind. Then, an example came along that was so perfectly illustrative it brought clarity.

Several weeks ago, a strange essay was posted to the Current commentary website, which hosts writings on contemporary culture, politics, and ideas from a largely centrist-center right American evangelical worldview that can come off as a bit smug. More on that in a bit. The New Shape of Christian Public Discourse was written by Jay Green, Professor of History at Covenant College. He presents a 2x2 grid and states he is attempting to analyze the landscape of Christian public discourse with it. Goals of discourse are plotted on an x-axis and the means along a y-axis. You can see his essay at the link above, but here is the grid and a few brief definitions for reference:

Green’s stated hope is “to help us make sense of the shifts in ideological identities—and even instincts—that have so convulsed our recent history.” Here’s a brief rundown of each suggested group from Green:

“Civilizational Minimalists see the goal of Christian engagement in public life as supporting policies that will allow the nation to develop its underlying Christian values within the framework of the liberal constitutional system.”

“Emancipatory Minimalists hold comparable views, though with decidedly different emphases. They believe that the goal of Christian action in public life is to preserve the freedom and equality of every person regardless of race, ethnicity, religious persuasion, or gender.”

“Emancipatory Maximalists are known most widely by their critics as the Woke. Their convictions seem rooted in many of the features of traditional liberalism, with its emphasis on civil liberties, personal rights, and cultural diversity. But they have largely abandoned the procedural niceties of liberalism in exchange for a hardened vision of identity politics; think Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ advocacy, and radical feminism.”

“Civilizational Maximalists: those who believe that Christians involved in public life must do ‘whatever it takes’ to turn American society into a thick civilization marked by Christian virtue—or at least to assure that Christian Civilizationists are the ones calling the shots. Like the Emancipatory Maximalists, they have lost faith in the value of liberal procedures and principles.”

I think trying to make sense of our current moment is good instinct; just return to the beginning of this piece about hostile new cultural restrictions, lost relationships and community, and crushed faith. Trying to make sense of the destruction so we can better navigate our cultural moment is necessary work.

But what Green presents isn’t helpful. Indeed, he has been met with justified blowback, some of which apparently came from his own peers before his essay was even published. I’m using Green’s work and the response as an illustration of some of the real problems in various parts of Christian public discourse -we’ll get to that in a moment— and don’t want to get bogged down in critiquing Green’s work; however, we must examine a few of the many issues with Green’s approach for illustrative purposes. Let’s look at three of the more obvious ones.

First, perhaps the most glaring problem. Green’s grid and description is very American, almost entirely evangelical, male heavy, mostly white, highly elite, and feels very Twittery. Most Christians in the world don’t live in the United States and aren’t on Twitter. Many are neither physically nor culturally white in the American context. A majority are female. The vast majority are definitely not elite in any sense of the word. My point is this: Green’s essay isn’t really about Christian public discourse. It’s framed around elevating centrist-center right elite idealism in a white Christian context within a larger fractured American cultural setting. And mapping oneself into the idealized quadrant as Green does is a VERY American evangelical thing to do. It makes accepting critique exceedingly difficult. Just see this poor response from Current’s editor to legitimate critiques about Green’s essay.

Second, Green’s grid and descriptions fail to go beyond the “binary poles” (liberal vs. conservative, right vs. left, etc.) that he correctly feels are unhelpful. He certainly adds the lightest touch of texture in a few ways, but his system props up the very binary thinking that he expresses a desire to push back against. His solution to clunky categories is a few extra clunky categories. Not exactly a breakthrough in understanding our current moment.

The third issue is a logical consequence of the first and second. Green’s most provocative mistake, which he has since partially corrected, was placing names into these arbitrary categories with no evidence for doing so, a common result of those operating on false left vs. right binaries. Unsurprisingly, some truly thoughtful and kind people were thrown into parts of his grid they definitely don’t belong in. Their work, values, and public presence were maligned and severely misrepresented. Bearing false witness has been frowned upon in Christian spaces for...well…pretty much all of Christianity. It isn’t just wrong to do, it also justifiably upsets and angers people, harming our discourse even further.

Tying back to the first problem, the folks listed as Emancipatory Maximalists (Jemar Tisby, Kristin Du Mez, Beth Allison Barr, and others) are mostly women or men who aren’t white. I’ve interviewed two of the women listed. Both are incredibly kind and thoughtfully committed to the highest aspirations of liberalism. Green claiming they are illiberal and authoritarian is one of the worst examples of binary thinking I’ve ever seen. And if your system leads to naming someone like Shane Claiborne —who loves his neighbors and people who disagree with him far better than any of us ever will— as authoritarian, that’s about as good a sign as any that your framework is bankrupt.

Again, I’m using Green’s piece as an illustration of actual problems in Christian discourse. If you are interested in a more helpful effort to understand the current state of lean-white American evangelical discourse, which seems to be what Green is actually trying to do, I encourage you to see the Six Way Fracturing of Evangelicalism framework by Michael Graham and Skyler Flowers. If you want direct critiques of Green’s framework, here are a few good ones:

Peering into the fractured evangelical looking glass

Green has admitted his essay and framework are “long on description and short on analysis” and offered a sincere public apology for misrepresenting several people. He also made the correct decision to remove their names. That’s worth noting on its own, but even more so considering there are many examples in which more centrist evangelical elites akin to Green have made severe mistakes of judgement, refused to apologize, and doubled down instead.

Still, it’s not ironic that a centrist/center-right American evangelical essay aimed at explaining the fractured state of Christian public discourse only worsened the discourse. This is part of a larger pattern of white American evangelical thought leaders of all stripes failing to engage with broader church and secular culture for decades. The reasons vary, but it often has to do with the white American evangelical bubble relentlessly centering itself —not in a theological sense, although that happens— but in an importance and experience sense. Green exhibits this centering tendency throughout his essay and framework, even if his intentions were not malicious.

Many other white evangelical leaders across church, academic, and parachurch organizations don’t have the humility and willingness to apologize and correct some of their mistakes as Green does. Quite a few go beyond centering their experiences and openly engage in idolatry to their own subculture, causing them to misread poor experiences and bad situations they helped cause while maligning those who have different perspectives and legitimate critiques.

These cultural realities cause white American evangelical thinkers and leaders to see the world as if they were looking through a partially broken mirror without knowing the mirror is there. They see just enough of the outside world to know it exists, but most of the view is blocked by a fractured and distorted reflection of themselves. The result is them not seeing the world as it actually is, but as what they consider to be a subpar or wrong version of how they operate. Movements and alliances are made up where there are none and overly broad categories are used to otherize sincere Christians. See this aggressively ignorant and fear-driven essay from Jonathan Leeman with 9Marks, as just one of many illustrative examples.

The picture Green presents may not be convincing, but its approach and posture does show us just how broken the white American evangelical worldview and discourse are at the highest levels. And that brokenness trickles down to local churches through the consumer culture they sit atop of.

How then do we see the state of Christian public discourse in the American context?

Exploring discourse at such a large scale is a very slippery thing, so much so that I don’t believe it is wise to even try without massive institutional resources at your disposal. There are too many traditions, denominations or lack thereof, ideological and theological spectrums, and institutions (church, house church, academic, parachurch, etc.) and styles of those places and the subcultures housed in them that have good and challenging aspects of their discourse. They all have their own successes and issues in communicating with other subcultures and traditions in the Christian faith.

The actual state of Christian discourse in the American context depends a lot on where each of us lives, worships, works, and plays. I’ve seen this in my own life the past few years as our family left one church and joined another. There are stark stated and lived theological and cultural differences between the two institutions. Discourse challenges exist in both, but in divergent ways with very different results, outcomes, and consequences. There are more than 2,000 churches in my city, each with their own denominational history or lack thereof, stories, promises, hopes, and failures. Now try to multiply this picture exponentially to a continent-wide scale. It’s just impossible to wrap one’s mind around all of it.

How do we get to some form of an answer then?

I think our approach is to go smaller and get more localized in every sense of the word: geographically, theologically, denominationally, ideologically, etc. This is one reason why the Six Way Fracturing of Evangelicalism framework I mentioned above is a much better approach: it says it is examining a smaller chunk of institutional Christianity and discourse (American evangelicalism) and then does just that. The categories are much more functional and roughly accomplishes what Green seems to have really been after.

With that said, I do think some common themes emerge when we start looking at the shape of American Christian discourse in more localized ways. For example, my broad context is being a post-white evangelical Christian living in an urban setting in the American South. My day job as a nonprofit professional and this website means I move around in a landscape that has a diversity of churches and Christians still dealing with the vestiges of slavery, Jim Crow, and racism that show up in ways big and small. A majority of churches in my neck of the woods, regardless of where they fall in the Christian faith, are in various forms of decline. I’m also on social media where I interact mostly with a wide and diverse array of other Christians, elites and non-elites, from across the United States and around the world.

All that to say, some of the challenges in Christian discourse I run into will be foreign to people who live elsewhere and in different Christian contexts than I do. But here are five themes I regularly see specific to my context as described. My hope is that this is illustrative of how most of us non-elites out here in the real world can better understand our often confusing environments, which are sometimes being enforced by our own elites.

1. The white evangelical culture vs. rest of American Christianity divide is very real and getting worse. Christians who are not white evangelical (Mainline Protestant, Catholic, Historic Black, etc.) and theologically conservative but more politically moderate evangelical Christians are broadly curious. Their doors are more open than they are closed to discourse with other types of Christians, although there are exceptions. Christians outside of white evangelical culture find my evangelical background and insights riveting —more on that here and here— often bombarding me with questions about white evangelicals because they rarely have the chance to interact with them.

Those who live in the white American evangelical bubble are broadly the opposite. Their doors are largely shut to discourse with most other types of Christians, although there are exceptions, especially at the individual level. Most white evangelicals I bump into never ask me about other types of Christians I come into contact with even though they know I talk to all kinds of folks. Over the past several years, I’ve heard more and more white evangelicals directly attack and talk down about Christians who are not in their spaces. Alarmingly, I am often the most diverse person in their life. Me: a 6’2 white guy recently described as “a theological normie” and mostly center-left politically. Not great.

There are certainly discourse issues in and between non-white evangelical Christians and the spaces they inhabit, but this particular divide is the one that seems to weigh heaviest with most folks I bump into.

2. The rise of post-right wing Christians is accelerating and no one knows where it’s going. I run into more and more sincere Christians every year who are fleeing harsh right-wing church cultures for the wilderness. They don’t know where they fit in and are all over the map theologically and politically, but are united in suspicion of the local church in the American sense of the term (i.e. buildings with people in them). They usually come out of white evangelical and fundamentalist spaces, but I’ve also met some with backgrounds in right-wing Catholicism.

When you listen to their stories —and I have— you learn some interesting things. Almost all of them were sold a bill of goods about their past church, theological framework, cultural views, and the Bible that none could deliver on. Most watched their institutions purposefully choose to live against their own stated beliefs in intentionally sharp ways. Many were treated like crap for merely asking questions or expressing doubt about the cultures of their previous churches. Disturbingly, some were abused or witnessed abuse being covered up.

Because they were told for years that the white evangelical or fundamentalist way was the only way to be a Christian, they are uneasy talking to people who live and move in other forms of Christianity. It’s helpful to think of this experience like a bad hangover. It’s the next morning and the party is over, but the alcohol is still in their system and the headache is nauseating. Whether you believe their suspicion is right or wrong is up to you, but their doubts and distrust are 100% understandable. It also explains why they mostly talk to other people like themselves. These folks need time and space to heal and discover the broad spectrum of traditions in historic Christianity. Because many of them don’t have that yet, no one knows exactly where they’re going to end up.

A metaphor. Photo by Johannes Krupinski on Unsplash

3. Centrist elites are increasingly seen as incompetent, arrogant, out of touch, and ineffective. By centrists I mean people who are usually theologically conservative and center-right to moderate in their politics and cultural views. By elites I mean those with large national platforms all the way down to pastors and elders in local churches.

Centrist elites often describe themselves as exhausted by the culture wars, but many aren’t willing to do anything of substance about the problems in our society that are causing friction in their own institutions. They chafe at critiques from the right, the left, and non-elite centrists beneath them, often expressing annoyance and sometimes rage at the most fact-based and love-centered complaints. For example, they will acknowledge that racism and Christian nationalism exist and damage us all, but won’t do anything of value to move the needle so as to avoid upsetting those associated with the plethora of ideologies on their right flank. Meanwhile, as they try to supposedly make space for Christians to “agree to disagree,” believers who aren’t white are left to wonder why their basic dignity is something that anyone should be able to disagree on. And non-elites who are forced to step up and push back on Christian nationalism on their own are left to wonder why their leaders —who so often speak about the importance of telling the truth— tell them to tone it down even though they are doing what they were taught to do.

For these elites, the “center” is often about maintaining the status quo to keep things from getting worse. Worse usually means any kind of disorder, even if the status quo is harming their own followers, flock, and themselves. An authoritarian streak and victim mindset is increasingly taking hold of some centrist elites, which results in further ineffectiveness that causes them to come across as arrogant and out of touch with reality.

There are some elite centrists who do speak up in healthy ways. I call several friends. The description above though is the viewpoint of quite a few non-elite centrists I know who are throwing their hands up and leaving paralyzed churches and unfollowing the highest elites. I hear various forms of “our leaders just won’t do anything” pretty regularly from most of them. And the evidence they point to is highly persuasive.

4. There’s a lot of anxiety and fear everywhere. We have all been traumatized by institutionalized Trumpism, a global pandemic, the attempted violent overthrow of American democracy, a failure to have a true national reckoning with the racial sins of our past, and ongoing paranoia about a major economic recession that was supposed to have started a few dozen times already. Layered on top of all of this is the simple truth that American culture is changing fast in just about every way imaginable.

How we experience, internalize, and display anxiety and fear stemming from so much disruption has a lot to do with where we live, worship, work, and play. We glean information from our churches, fractured media environment, social media, friends and family, coworkers…we are being spiritually-formed 24/7/365 by everything. Excessive anxiety and fear can be found in many of these sources and rubs off on us. We then rub it off on others. Repeat cycle.

I’m not suggesting fear or anxiety are sins. That’s not an argument any Christian should make considering Jesus expressed anxiety about his own trajectory (Matthew 26:36-39). But some fears and anxieties in our current cultural moment are objectively absurd. Some Christians freak out at the smallest sign of a woman becoming a pastor and then shrug their shoulders in the face of documented rape and sexual assault in their own institutions. Others screech about critical race theory (CRT), feminism, and all the other -isms despite knowing nothing of substance about them. Cultural rejection is wrongfully viewed as persecution and those wailing that they are being persecuted support policies and politicians who try to engage in actual persecution of their perceived enemies. Many have responded to fact-based critiques and questions made in love toward their institutions, beliefs and practices, and worldviews as cataclysmic personal attacks and respond from a posture of mass hysteria.

In these specific examples and others like them, fear and anxiety have usurped the hope Christ offers freely to us all. People fear those who disagree with them over cultural issues despite those issues being of zero consequence to Christ’s authority. There are Christians of all stripes who have rooted their faith in idolatry to their own subcultures, institutions, and beliefs, not the love of Christ. This is perhaps most noticeable on the right-wing, but it also happens in centrist and lefty spaces as well. Cultural and political issues may be the catalyst that is fearfully dividing us, but not understanding who Jesus is seems to be the real source of the anxiety and fear in some Christian spaces.

5. We make assumptions about people who have been harmed by the institutions, people, and beliefs we love and argue with them in our heads instead of talking to them face-to-face. I don’t think this needs further explanation. Just stop reading for a minute and marinate on that as objectively as you possibly can.

Okay, let’s continue. Again, you may see none of this in your Christian context. You may see all of it. Regular readers of this website will likely feel the weight of some of this. These are just reflective of my experiences with Christian private and public discourse, both in the real world and online, as a non-elite who has his foot in the door with many different types of Christians and institutions both online and offline in a specific geographic area.

Photo by Samantha Gades on Unsplash

Some suggested principles to live into

At the beginning I mentioned that I’ve been stewing on various forms of this for a little over a year now. Green’s broken framework and the predictable and justified backlash helped some things click into place. But an even bigger hangup for me has been that I wanted to present some solutions. Certainly they exist, I thought. They just need to be found and presented in a compelling way.

I have since come to understand that there aren’t any solutions.

At least, there aren’t any solutions in the way most of us would like there to be. We all want to do A so we can get to B. We all crave certainty, so we strategize and try to craft the conditions for the results we want. Many of us say we want to change, but we refuse to do so if it means we must change the narrative about our pasts or recognize problems in our theological frameworks and institutions. Most of us used to love being right; but, now that we’ve seen reality for what it is, many of us desperately wish we could be wrong. We must grieve the exposed truth in front of us.

This is all very human; however, in our current cultural moment, it also tends to be incredibly destructive. Regardless of where we fall theologically, politically, and culturally, those of us Christians in this are all American and have been shaped by the curious complexities of American culture, most notably an often invisible and unhealthy obsession with our own individualism. Heck, I was hung up on this for over a year thinking I could find concrete solutions. I have participated in the hollowness of rugged American individualism like everyone else has.

But something has shifted these past several weeks as I took stock of my surroundings. Five principles began to come into focus that I believe are worth living toward more intentionally. They aren’t solutions per se, but I think they can serve some of us well as we try to move in a healthier direction:

1. For the love of God, be real friends with real people you have real disagreements with and do it in the real world. I can always do better, but I’m around people who don’t think, look, believe, or live exactly as I do pretty regularly. And I honestly feel most at home when I am. You may have heard a pastor or talking head on TV say something scary about the culture, the western church, those liberal or those conservative Christians or whatever. Maybe there’s even some truth in what they said, but their posture is wrong. It’s absolutely wrong. Whether they know it or not, they are encouraging Christians not to engage with specific types of people and ideas from a posture of fear. And that’s just not how Jesus lived. At all (Luke 7). Be friends with other Christians and people who aren’t believers who don’t look, think, act, or believe like you do. It’s good for the soul and it’s how you are called to live anyways (John 15:1-17).

2. Assume you have theological and cultural blinders and be open to being shown what they are. We all have blind spots, including me. The Christian faith is a big place in an even larger world. To believe that any of us have the once and for all truth on all things big and small only leads us to trying to impose our views on our culture and each other. We become failed colonizers instead of heralds of the change Christ offers. That’s not great considering that Jesus said we would be known by our love (John 13:31-35). A failure to love drives non-believers away from us and Christians away from each other. Despite the ranting and raving of the theobro class, winsomeness matters even more now in our fractured moment as they try to stoke the flames of fear to benefit themselves.

If someone looks confused or hurt by something you said, it may be because the language you are using is foreign to them or they are not used to hearing it used that way. It may also be because you are wrong. Either way, it is your responsibility to find, learn, and use better language. A healthy dose of humility is not only good for the soul, but also a prerequisite of healthy discourse. And assuming your specific church tradition and experience is representative of most or all of Christianity should be seen as a cardinal error worth avoiding at all costs.

3. Ask questions from the posture of a student instead of making straw man arguments and weaponizing the Bible. Last year, I began to notice the interesting phenomena of some politically conservative Christians beginning to push back on the mass hysteria toward critical race theory (CRT), deconstruction, feminism, and the plethora of other isms that have so often paralyzed large parts of white conservative Christian America with outlandish fear. I doubt they’ll be able to change the resulting authoritarian trajectory that has taken over large parts of the church subcultures found in that vein of American Christianity, but it has been a good reminder that strawman arguments and weaponizing specific interpretations of Scripture inevitably begin to backfire on those doing it. The real world has a remarkable tendency to pop cultural bubbles. All one has to do is casually glance at the the current civil war in American evangelicalism —which has some truly amazing absurdities— and the resulting refugee exodus to see this truth.

If you think or act like this book is a weapon, you should reconsider your position. Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Instead of pushing forward straw man arguments about people and things you dislike or disagree with and attacking those, listen to real experts and people with lived experience on the “other side.” Seek out the best version of the opposing argument. You may budge a tiny bit on a position you hold. You may change your mind entirely. You may even become stronger in your own beliefs. Who knows. But pursue love, learning, and listening instead of fear, ignorance, and the worst excesses of cancel culture. Take a political science or philosophy course at your local college. Learn some history from multiple points of view. Don’t put words in people’s mouths and don’t gossip. Do this all as a servant who is learning (Matthew 23:8-12). Ask yourself: do you believe something is true and go out looking for evidence and bible verses to back it up? Or do you follow Scripture, reason and evidence, broader Christian thought and tradition, and experience to reasonable conclusions?

4. Believe people who tell you that their motivations are bad and that they’re operating in bad faith. A silver lining of the last several years is that the once quiet parts are now being yelled out loud. Some people and institutions once described as racially-insensitive really are just racist. There are complementarian men who really do care about the safety of women and girls, but others are just straight up misogynists. Some who have long said they are “promoting Christian values” in the public square have shown themselves to be full-blown Christian nationalists. Those who rail against deconstructing believers are often one of the reasons people began asking questions and having doubts in the first place. We could go on and on with examples, but you get the point.

Speaking truth into these systemically unhealthy realities is critical…for a season. Some people are going to keep operating in bad faith no matter what you say. Make your case a few times, find others to help you do it and who are open to hearing, and —if there are zero signs of change— walk away when the time comes. Speaking the truth may not lead to the change that is needed, but the process still matters: for them as it may be the first time they’ve heard the truth, for your sanity, and for the benefit of people who listened and heard some of the truth they were looking for. Know that removing a person or an institution from your life is sometimes the greatest act of love you can express.

If you are doing this offline, you may pay a price for walking away from a person or an institution that is behaving in bad faith, but greener pastures can await you. They have been for countless others, including me. If you are doing this online, it could be something that is so egregious it needs to be called out. Principles aren’t rules. The concept of exceptions is built into them. But if you do feel the need to speak truth into a morally bankrupt view or space, always punch up or across, never punch down, be respectful, offer to talk to them via video chat or in person, and know when to walk away if they only keep doubling and tripling down (Matthew 18:15-22).

5. When engaging online, consider who a person’s audience is before you assume they are writing to you. The Christian blogosphere, Twitter, and most all of Facebook can be frustrating places. Like a lot of Christians who explore thorny topics, I get annoyed when other Christians don’t consider who I am and who my audience is and act like I am writing to them alone. It usually leads to them putting words in my mouth that I did not say or centering themselves in an experience that didn’t involve them. All this does is further fracture Christian discourse. For example, I mostly write to and for the following kinds of Christians:

  • Post-white American evangelical Christians who are trying to figure out what they were a part of and what comes next.

  • Christians in multi-ethnic churches who have had some unique challenges the past several years.

  • Believers who are deconstructing from various forms of right-wing Christianity.

  • Ethnic minority Christians who once inhabited American evangelical spaces and have since left.

  • Centrist pastors and evangelicals who are struggling as their culturally white spaces radicalize to the far-right.

That’s about it. Anyone is invited to read and listen to anything here (thanks members!). Quite a few global evangelicals follow this site because they are trying to figure out why their white American evangelical cousins are “crazy” and “insane.” Their words, not mine. Other Christians from different traditions outside of white evangelicalism and fundamentalism who are trying to understand how to help people exiting those subcultures also pop in sometimes, as do people who are not Christians. But I don’t write to or for these types of people, even if they find my explorations beneficial. I don’t write to Catholics or Orthodox Christians because it’s not my place to do so. I definitely don’t write to fundamentalists and culture warring white evangelicals.

All this to say, if you are reading something egregious online by another Christian, there’s a chance it is not written to you and, even if it is, it may not be worth your time to engage with. Keep the principle above this one in mind —you may need to respond because failing to do so would cause further harm to real people— but you also may just need to let out a sigh, move on, and focus on resisting the justifications that prop up such people and places in your own circles and community. It’s not worth letting any abuser of the Christian faith have power over you. It is better to focus on building communities that are good and healthier so more people can leave harmful voices and spaces in the dust where they belong.

Photo by Hannah Busing on Unsplash

Closing Thoughts

If I took seriously all the labels and boxes people tried to place me in these last few years, I would somehow be on the evangelical left and conservative at the same time. A woke Marxist and a right-wing lunatic. A unifying figure and someone who is stoking division. An orthodox Christian and a heretic. A true patriot and a person who is trying to destroy this country. Loyal and a traitor.

Either I have a severe personality disorder (I don’t) or some Christians have become so balkanized by their elitist posture in their own beliefs and by a ridiculous “need” to categorize everything and everyone based on flawed worldviews that they became unfair and ungenerous along the way. Thus is the logical post-truth conclusion of the culture-warring evangelicalism many in my generation inherited, and that many have and will continue to walk away from.

Like most Christians, I’m a walking contradiction. I love Jesus but sometimes fail to follow him well. I have heavily critiqued large parts of white American evangelicalism because I know from deep and painful experience it is a movement that largely sees self-reflection as a weakness, and is harming countless people because of it. I also call a number of diverse evangelicals dear friends. I skew left on public policy and believe some things that get labelled progressive or conservative are just common sense, but I’m neither progressive nor conservative. I think the Republican Party would be a joke if it wasn’t so dangerous, but I am friends with some legitimately thoughtful Christian and secular political conservatives.

And, these days in my neck of the woods, I often feel more comfortable engaging with people who aren’t Christian because they talk about hard things in healthier ways than a lot of people who claim the name of Jesus do.

These are real tensions that I feel, but I don’t cry myself to sleep over any of it. I’ve just embraced the truth that we are messy people living in a messy world. I don’t and can’t know everything, which is why I need humility. Sanctification is a journey, not an event, both for ourselves and our institutions. We all need some grace, but that doesn’t cancel out the need for truth, justice, and accountability. There is freedom and hope to be found in reality. There is only death and despair when we replace reality with make-believe.

So, categorize less and talk more. Read and listen well and widely, including to those you think you may disagree with. Take serious critiques seriously. Spend less time building and trying to enforce rigid worldviews and more time living with real people in the real world. Don’t obsess over pursuing “good teaching” and “correct views.” Love people who see things differently, even if you disagree with them. You know, like Jesus said (John 13:31-35).

Understand that critiquing with facts doesn’t make you illiberal, but that rejecting fact-based critiques and refusing to engage with those making them probably does. Know that pissing people off on “both sides” doesn’t necessarily mean you’re at the center or correct, it could mean you are just a jerk. See that the severe damage from centrist moral high horses and the elitism that stems from them is just as damaging as the worst aspects of fundamentalism, authoritarian conservatism, militant progressivism, and any of the other labels that get overly-applied to Christians who don’t belong in those categories. Believe people when they say how incredibly annoying and intellectually lazy this all is.

If we all want a healthier and more productive Christian discourse, we can have it. But it requires setting the table for others instead of trying to flip it over on top of them.

I explore faith and American church culture from Memphis, TN. Never miss an article by signing up for my free newsletter or becoming a member to keep my site free and open to all. You can also subscribe to my podcast.

Mark Hackett https://markhackett.com
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