As I mentioned in my last posting, the American “faith” of the 1950s ran smack dab into the turbulence of the 60s and 70s fully unprepared, a sleeping giant awakened in a reactionary and contrary mood.
For a decade starting sometime around 1974, I was in a spiritual turmoil of my own. It is something that most children who’ve grown up in the faith experience – or should experience in order for the faith of their fathers and mothers to become their own faith. What they accepted as a child they must wrestle with as adults. If they do not wrestle, they will either lose that faith or be left with an impotent second-hand faith that makes them little more than loyal church attenders, certainly nothing that will scare off any devils.
What was the outcome of my own faith wrestling? To make a very long story fit this blog, I came to the point where either I had to take my faith very, very seriously or give it up completely as not worth taking at all. A Christianity that only produces church-goers does little more than inoculate people to the true and radical claims of the gospel. An honest nonbeliever is less of a threat to the future of the church than a dishonest believer.
I can’t say I’ve been perfect in taking my faith as seriously as I set out to do as a Twenty-something. But in the past three years, I’ve come to a fresh conclusion that the choices I made back then were the right ones, choices that are still worth pursuing, perhaps now more than ever before.
Among the things I’ve been reaffirming is that God hasn’t called us to preserve some pseudo-faith notion of a Christian nation. God has called us to declare and demonstrate the Good News of Jesus Christ to all nations. The Kingdom of God is not found in a particular country or political party or a so-called “Christian” social agenda. Instead, we are to pursue the unique agenda of the Kingdom of God in all arenas of life, including the political and the social.
I submit that until we truly fess up about our immorality as Believers in the first half of the Twentieth Century we will not be able to confront the societal decay we are facing today. I speak particularly of the way we as Christians participated in or ignored the overt and violent racial oppression in our midst and then refused to involve ourselves in its dismantling, at first fighting racial healing, then embracing it only after that healing had become the accepted norm among the heathen around us.
More than any single sin, this collective racial injustice has muted our prophetic voice, making it almost impossible for the world to hear what we have to say. How can we speak to others about preserving the lives of those yet unborn when we have not done our utmost to preserve the lives of the already born?
In the end, the worst thing we can do is obsess over our declining percentage figure. What difference does it make whether 86% or 16% of us call ourselves Christians if the world goes to hell in a hand basket while we bemoan our fading figure in the mirror? Time to stop counting heads and start pursuing God’s righteousness and justice on all fronts. Time to be honest with God, our neighbors and ourselves. Authentic faith demands no less.
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