"I didn't cheat," my less than favorite Evangelical student told me.
"Really?" I asked. "Because you have entire paragraphs lifted from this website with no quotation marks, no citation, and no attribution."
"That's because I was so busy I forgot," she said.
"Let me see if I understand. You were so busy that you forgot to type in an open and close quote? Because that would at least have saved you from the zero I'm giving you."
"It's only a 3-week, class," she wailed. "I had so much to read and write."
"All of which you knew when you signed up."
"Can't I get credit for my hard work?"
I'll just let the irony hang there, if you don't mind. The point of the illustration is to introduce Chapter 4 of Fitch's book The End of Evangelicalism? This is part two of a multipart series that began here. If you haven't read it, some of this won't make sense.
Fitch introduces his second master (empty) signifier in chapter 4: the Decision for Christ. Most of us know what that means, or we think we do. Fitch again rightly points out that by its very nature a master signifier is empty of a denotative definition, although connotative ones seem to abound. This is certainly the case with tDfC (forgive me shortening it). After a pretty clear discussion of the history of the tDfC's development in evangelicalism, Fitch uses a few examples to illustrate that tDfC "calls us into a political existence with others who have made the very same decision, but means little for the actual shaping of Christian living," (Fitch, 88).
You'll need to hear "political" the way Yoder and Hauerwas use it, not Richard (Dickie) Land. Politics is simply the science of getting along with others. That's as stripped down a denotative definition as I can manage. Via Yoder and Hauerwas, to live in a political existence with others implies certain responsibilities and ethics. Those are the obvious connotative definitions. Fitch's concern, and he's completely correct, is that tDfC has allowed Evangelicals to embrace justification in the forensic sense (I'm saved and forgiven), but to have no clue what it actually means for human bodies. It is Delmar's declaration from O, Brother, Where Art Thou?:
"Well that's it, boys. I've been redeemed. The preacher's done warshed away all my sins and transmissions. It's the straight and narrow from here on out, and heaven everlasting's my reward."
Unfortunately, Delmar has no idea how to stop sinning. Nor do Evangelicals. Fitch uses former Ms. California Carrie Prejean and Ted Haggard as examples of the Evangelical inability to recognize the folly of tDfC in terms of its ability to actually do anything in an actual human body. Prejean famously defended heterosexual marriage and traditional sexual ethics on national television, right before some scandalous material showed up from her own past. Fitch uses the illustration—a sexualized object in a bikini lecturing LGBT folks on traditional marriage with skeletons in her own closet—not to denigrate Ms. Prejean, but to show that Evangelicals are capable of amazing duplicity (as with Haggard). In the same manner, Christian colleges and denominations enact holiness/character/lifestyle codes for students, professors, and pastors because they lack confidence in the ability of tDfC to bring about any change at all. Evangelicals are:
"...caught up within the fantasy of 'the decision'—forced to believe it makes a difference and enacting a compensating structure to make sure it does," (Fitch, 91).
Haggard's case is an even better example, because Haggard famously told Larry King that reading the Bible, prayer, fasting, and all the other discipleship "tools" new "believers" are given didn't help him resist his desires in the least. Nor did tDfC. A caller phones the show and tells Haggard he's recently come out as a gay man and asks Haggard if he can still be a Christian in light of that. Haggard, with stunning aplomb, tells the young man to pray, read his Bible, and seek guidance from the Holy Spirit. With clear-eyed honesty, Fitch points out that these are exactly the techniques that did not work for Haggard himself (Fitch, 96-7). Part of the explanation is in Haggard's insistence that Christianity is "a belief system." (It's also the primary weakness of tDfC. It assumes salvation is cognitive in nature before it's ontologically realized. Right thinking equals salvation.)
"Haggard called evangelicalism a 'belief system' as he explained how he could both preach against it and 'enjoy' it perversely at the same time," (Fitch, 96).
Back to my student. The duplicity created by belief in tDfC has had startling implications for Christian ethics. Fitch talks about this early in the chapter:
"It allows for Christianities to emerge that remain complicit with social systems of self-fulfillment, consumerism, or for that matter excessive sexual desire. It becomes the means for Christians to bypass the malformation of their own desires and instead keep their existing desires under the banner of being a Christian," (Fitch, 85).It is what allows a pastor to write a book about his "weird" lifestyle while making more money than 95% of his congregation, and living in a house large enough to house four families in an affluent neighborhood in a cracker wonderland (yeah, that's sooo countercultural). It allows a student to cheat on a paper, lie about it, and then ask forgiveness later (a reenactment of tDfC in current evangelicalism, an escape hatch, if you will). It allows evangelicals to practice pre-marital sex so long as they feel guilty about it, and so long as they can identify an "other" in the form of people who are worse and without guilt for their desires (LGBT community). It allows a pastor to speak out against gay sex from the pulpit, boast about the sexual appetites of his congregation, and enjoy gay sex anonymously, as long as he feels guilty about it.
The greatest flaw of tDfC is that it has prevented evangelicals from living a fully embodied Christianity. Christianity, if such a thing is real in any meaningful sense, must surely be located somewhere in a human body; it must cause or energize noticeable changes to be real at all. Fitch is right in identifying the duplicity as the current reason Christianity has fallen on hard times. Whatever the numbers they tout, things are not good. One million decisions does not equal one millions less douchebags, asshats, perverts, addicts, or Heat fans. And it certainly, according to this theological critique, doesn't equal one million Christians.
