R.W. Glenn packs his small book on the Beatitudes full of grace-filled, gospel-centered wisdom. I posted my brief review of Crucifying Morality: The Gospel of the Beatitudes (Shepherd Press, 2013) earlier this week. Today I want to provide an excerpt where Glenn confronts a problem that is prevalent among conservative evangelical Christians.
“Reducing the Christian faith to a lifestyle” — Independent Fundamentalist Baptists are perhaps most famous for this trait, but a number of other evangelical groups have this tendency as well. In our zeal for protecting children from the evils of this world, and in our desire to live holy lives we sometimes turn faith into a religion, and the gospel into a sub-culture replete with its own rules and customs. Nostalgia for the good old days when sinful lifestyles weren’t on full display in public, and a fondness for large families and wholesome fun — these can be good things, but they can also define us. The problem comes when our familiar way of life, holy as it may be, becomes what we live for and what is most important to us. It takes the place of the gospel and the role of Christian doctrine, and this lifestyle-orientation can keep our kids from true Christianity. But don’t hear just my word for it. Listen to R.W. Glenn as he bemoans this same tendency, which we all should be on guard against.
In a post-Christian culture like ours where many regard moderate religiosity as a good thing, the danger for the church is to reduce the Christian faith to a lifestyle — a subculture complete with its own music and literature and fashions and jargon. This is especially dangerous for those who grow up in the church. Christian parents sometimes worry about their kids being influenced by worldly evils in our oversexed, violent, materialistic culture. They worry that their kids will be negatively influenced by the literature they read, the movies and television shows they watch, the video games they play, and the music they listen to.
Although these things are certainly not benign and do have the capacity to negatively influence children, they are not half as dangerous as reducing Christianity to moralistic religion. These kinds of Christian parents focus on relatively small matters and ignore the possibility of a much more terrible reality. Because it seems so likely that our churched children and teens would remain loyal to the church all their days and live very moral lives, we tend not to worry about them, but their very religiosity makes them even more susceptible to get crushed by the hurricanes of their own sin and the schemes of Satan than a bare house in the path of a Category 5 hurricane….
…if churched children remain unaffected by and inoculated to the gospel — wholesale consumers of just enough gospel lingo and institutional Christianity to look the part — they will completely miss the heart of Christianity. They will miss out on purity of heart. (Kindle Loc. 1359-1372)
I’m interested to hear what you think. Is this tendency a problem? Can you see how it subtly leads us from a gospel-centered Christianity?
Learn more about R.W. Glenn’s new book by reading my review or perusing the product page at Amazon.com or Shepherd Press.
[…] Crucifying Morality: The Gospel of the Beatitudes by R.W. Glenn – “Reducing the Christian faith to a lifestyle” — Independent Fundamentalist Baptists are perhaps most famous for this trait, but a number of other evangelical groups have this tendency as well. In our zeal for protecting children from the evils of this world, and in our desire to live holy lives we sometimes turn faith into a religion, and the gospel into a sub-culture replete with its own rules and customs. Nostalgia for the good old days when sinful lifestyles weren’t on full display in public, and a fondness for large families and wholesome fun — these can be good things, but they can also define us. The problem comes when our familiar way of life, holy as it may be, becomes what we live for and what is most important to us. It takes the place of the gospel and the role of Christian doctrine, and this lifestyle-orientation can keep our kids from true Christianity. But don’t hear just my word for it. – Bob Hayton […]
This writer brings up a very good point. I believe that all of Evangelicalism struggles with this idea that moralism = Christianity. American Evangelicalism is influenced historically by many views – Puritanism, Pietism (Methodists, Jonathan Edwards, George Whitfield, Charles Wesley), and Presbyterians. Pietism was the biggest influence and the crux of the Great Awakening. To me, there is very little difference between pietism and moralism. Both emphasize that how we live and what we do is what matters as we live our Christian lives, as we strive above all for Christian perfection. It was all about a new standard of morality. I have to live a vigorous Christian life. I have to embrace the Puritan work ethic. It is more about doing to please God than living to please Him.
With this history, is it any wonder that Evangelicalism struggles with this idea that morality equals Christianity? It has been going on in this country for almost 300 years.
I like what the Apostle Paul said – “imitate me as I imitate Christ.” I am a long way from telling anyone to imitate me.