Can I Decide Later?, or Why Evangelicals Aren't Really Saved

"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.

Comments

[April]

beautiful.
My friend Jim Henderson and I have been talking about writing a book called "The Myth of the Transformed Life" for years. Collecting material for the book has not been difficult!

[Michael Laprarie]

I'd love to read your book, April. And now I've got to get a copy of Fitch's. The main reason I walked away from fundagelicalism (and almost away from the church itself) was its utter failure to help the people that I knew intimately.

A small group of us that meet for a monthly book study have had a number of discussions about the fruitlessness of "making a decision", particularly in the fundagelical community context of peer pressure and political conformity, specifically through the guilt and fear mechanisms (where would you spend eternity if you died tonight?) so often employed by fundagelical churches. Our conclusion is that no one ever meaningfully transforms their own life if their primary motivation is fear.

It's not just Christianity of course. Just in the past 2 weeks we've witnessed Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the socialist who enjoys $3000 hotel rooms, $20,000 luxury suits, and abusing the domestic help; social justice champion Bono who scoffs at paying his own fair share of taxes even when his Ireland is in dire financial straits; and now the repulsive hypocrisy of Weinergate.

I think the fundagelical tradition lost its way when it made salvation into a magic act performed by God in some far away spiritual dimension, any time a mortal human said the correct words. If God saves us, then there is no need for us to "work out our salvation with fear and trembling". In other words there is no need for us to be transformed in order to be truly saved. The holistic process of community-oriented justification and sanctification vanished, because God did all the work, and all we had to do was 'accept his free gift.'

And of course if you were raised in a 'second blessing' tradition you were taught that through the 'second blessing' God would magically give you 'abundant life' by erasing all the imperfections from your mortal life. Funny how that never works out in real life - just ask my 'saved and sanctified' Dad, who emotionally, verbally, and physically abused my mother until the day he died.

[Leighton]

When I read the story at the start of the piece, I wasn't thinking evangelical, so much as childish. Not that the two are mutually exclusive at all, as many evangelical churches appear to have taken scissors to 1 Cor 13:11. But her reasoning is something you would expect out of an elementary school student. What is it about evangelical faith that stunts people's emotional development?

I'm really wishing I hadn't picked the 5-9 business day free shipping option. Does Fitch goes into any detail on the psychology of tDfC, or is it mostly political? I'm wondering whether this utter failure to engage with reality on an individual level is sufficiently explained by the following factors:

1) Belief in God's protection or covering, which may lead to an expectation that unpleasant things won't happen, or will magically disappear with enough wishing and begging;

2) Giving God the glory for all things, where "glory" is interpreted in practice as "credit" and "responsibility," with an attendant inability to accept responsibility for one's own actions.

I want to say that these, combined with a dysfunctional church environment's strong reinforcement of Axis II personality disorders, would be enough to lead adults to reason consistently like spoiled children.

[Trevor Palen]

Leighton,

I think it may also have to do with EV understanding of the "spiritual" realm and the "physical" realm. It seems that EV culture promotes an understanding where the spiritual and the physical are separable. It's very "Pauline", Flesh vs. Spirit kind of thinking. So events, "growth", etc. can occur in the "spiritual" realm that don't immediately affect the "physical" realm. Couple this with the teaching that we are to "fix our minds on the (spiritual) world to come" and there is a departing that likely takes place in the mind of the EV that leads them to care less about the physical world than they otherwise would.

[Leighton]

Yeah, adding a third conceptual category like "focusing on heaven as an escapist fantasy instead of a goal to be worked for" might help flesh out that list. I do think if someone is viewing petulance as spiritual growth, and abdication of responsibility as storing up treasure where moth and rust do not destroy, there has to be some pathology going on besides just that dualism. Though the dualism just by itself probably does inform many evangelicals' approaches (or non-approaches) to social issues and politics.

[Eric]

I'm not sure what's being advocated here; whether some form of works-salvation, or that religion is a farce altogether. (Both views will denounce the claims of "tDfC" salvation).

Still, the point of the Gospel is Grace; that we're not saved by our efforts. Good works are to be done in love towards God, not to be saved.

Though it is true that evangelicals have taken this "changed life" concept WAY beyond reality; to an extent no one can or does live up to.
It's based on a misunderstanding of the pertinent scriptures, plus the removal of the context of the New Testament, where their sin was paid for (and they received a "downpayment" of salvation), but they were still under the Law (whose "age" was ended in AD70), and special revelation was continuing for the time. (To whom much is given, much is expected). So people had to choose either the Law/The flesh, or Christ, and persevere in the faith, to make it to the end of the "race".

What seems to have shaped this modern doctrine is a methodistic theology known as the Keswick "Higher Life" movement.