They Know We are Christians … but Not by Our Love

“And they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love, / Yes, they’ll know we are Christians by our love.” If you’re a Catholic of a certain age, “We Are One in the Spirit” by the late Peter Scholtes may cause you to shudder. I think it’s the song that caused the traditionalist movement. Written in a natural minor key, it’s dreary and unimaginative. Who knew agápē could be so bloody boring? There’s just not much you can do to make it interesting, though For King and Country and Jars of Clay tried.

Here’s the question, though: Do non-Christians know us by our love?

If you’re socially aware and honest about the matter, you have to answer “No.” Neither love for one another (John 13:34-35) nor for our neighbor (Matthew 22:36-40) have been distinguishing features of Christianity among non-Christians for centuries. Whatever the song’s aesthetic demerits, it captures the distinction between the Christian ideal contained in the gospel message and the reality of the Western confessional Christianity that’s now losing adherents and social influence. If conservative or traditional Christianity has an ugly reputation among non- and post-Christians, it’s by no means undeserved or purely the product of misunderstanding.

Cruel, Ignorant, Greedy, and Hypocritical

Optics matter. If it looks bad, it probably is bad. A pastor of a large Pacific Coast evangelical congregation told Peter Wehner of The Atlantic that, from his perspective, conservative Christian support for Pres. Donald Trump had accelerated American disaffiliation from confessional Christianity. “For decades Hollywood has portrayed conservative Christians as cruel, ignorant, greedy, and hypocritical. … Yes, Hollywood and the media created a decidedly unattractive stereotype of Christians. And Donald Trump fits it perfectly. Made it all seem true. And sadly, I now realize that stereotype is more true than I ever knew. It breaks my heart.”

Cruel, ignorant, greedy, and hypocritical. Hollywood and the media couldn’t have created that stereotype if we hadn’t given them so many examples of Christians Behaving Badly to work with, whether intentionally or unintentionally. True, some of the appearances of ignorance is due to rejecting agenda-oriented falsehoods dressed up as science. And by no means do all faithful Christians who lean right fit the stereotype. But anti-Christian outlets like Patheos’  “Friendly Atheist” can subsist on nut-picking—See, they’re all like that!—only because so many Christian nuts are available for the harvest.

Yes, there is a liberal or “progressive” Christianity that’s now almost indistinguishable from the secular political left; it will eventually cease to be Christian even in name. But that there are different “flavors” of Christianity known by their secular political orientation is itself a condemnation of Western Christianity. To paraphrase St. Paul: Is Christ divided? Was Trump crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes? (cf. 1 Corinthians 1:13) If Christ hasn’t been divided, certainly the gospel message has been, with different factions emphasizing select elements at the expense of others.

In fact, you could say that the two darksome powers now struggling ineffectively for control of American destiny are the twin heads of a corrupt Christianity—the real anti-Christianity—eating itself alive. Yes, corrupt. If you’re in Stage 2 or 3, you don’t say, “I have a little cancer;” you say “I have cancer.”

A (Brief) History of Christians Behaving Badly

The most significant symbol of Christianity’s corruption is the burning cross of the Ku Klux Klan. Yet we can wonder how much different it is from the “white Christ” that followed the plundering Spanish conquistadors into the West Indies and Mexico, the Christ to whom English colonists built churches as they imported African slaves to work fields taken from their aboriginal inhabitants. Yes, some popes and preachers inveighed against the oppression and enslavement of other peoples. And other Christians ignored them, often quoting Scripture in their defense or grumbling that said evangelists were ignorant of certain overriding realities.

The Christianity they spread was corrupted even before Columbus’ ships left Castile in August 1492. Centuries of European dominance had made Western Christians relatively wealthy, powerful, and arrogant. We hadn’t invented slavery, exploitation, or oppression. However, we had made advances in technology and economics that gave us the power to leverage our sins beyond those of the people we conquered. The questioning of human authority and tradition had already begun. It would explode into the Reformation and Enlightenment, and collapse into denying not only God but human reason and reality itself.

Western Christianity succeeded in making disciples of other nations, not because of our strengths but despite our glaring faults. The gospel message was nearly trampled to death as economic, cultural, and ideological imperialism followed political imperialism. We had left off working out our salvation “with fear and trembling” (cf. Philippians 2:12) to work out other peoples’ salvation with guns and money. It shows as much in Western exports of communism and contraception as it does in our exports of clothes and fast-food chains. For the gospel’s spread throughout the world, give glory to God, not to the white man.

The Evanescence of Temporal Power

Ayn Rand despised Christianity because it criticizes the wealthy. Karl Marx called religion “the opiate of the people” because it keeps the proletariat from overthrowing their capitalist masters. They hated Christ because he understood what they didn’t: that the things this world prizes—especially power, whether financial, political, or social—are all evanescent, as fleeting as time. The rich and the poor, the ruler and the ruled, the famous and the obscure all come to the same end. Gather all the laurels you will; they all eventually wither. The one who dies with the most toys is still dead.

Do not put your trust in princes,

in mortals, in whom there is no help.

When their breath departs, they return to the earth;

on that very day their plans perish. (Psalm 146:3-4)

“Power tends to corrupt,” wrote the Catholic historian Lord Acton, “and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Against this, Jesus preached humility, service to others, and radical dependence on God. Against the pride of self-righteous judgmentalism, Jesus preached forgiveness and mercy as essential components of agápē. He taught his disciples, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all” (Mark 9:35) and to “take up their crosses” (Matthew 16:24; Mark 8:34), as one who foreknew that the crowds would welcome him to Jerusalem with “Hosanna!” and later send him to Golgotha with “Crucify him!”

Christ had real, unimaginable power. Yet he taught that the greatest power we could aspire to was the power to do good for each other. The servant model of leadership he advocated against traditional authoritarian models has recently found new validation in business. Change individual hearts and minds, and the culture will eventually change; change the culture and the laws will inevitably change to suit. The real task of changing the world begins not in legislatures or executive offices but in that piece of the world where our homes and daily lives are. It begins with love for one another.

Re-conversion and Reparations

At this point, I’m no longer concerned with “saving” the United States, in the sense of returning to some nostalgia-painted Golden Age (“Make America Great Again”). I would rather that we focus on making Americans disciples. Nations are abstractions. People, on the other hand, are concrete realities. We are no longer in a world where converting the local rulers is sufficient to gain adherents among the ruled. To convert nations, you must convert their peoples. The new evangelization was always about re-converting ourselves first in preparation for re-proposing the gospel to “post-Christian” nations.

To re-evangelize ourselves, we must first recover the humility at the core of the gospel message. You can teach a parrot to say, “I am a sinner”; we must go beyond the parrot-talk to “hug the cactus” of our vices and flaws. (Note to self: If you can go to therapy once every two weeks, you can go to Confession just as often.) Until we take ownership of our sins, our talk of our salvation is merely self-congratulation. Ignoring and rationalizing our sins are not at all the same as forgiving ourselves or being forgiven by others.

We white Christians can’t build on anything positive or valuable of our cultural legacy without first taking ownership of the harm our ancestors did in the past and asking forgiveness in their name. Granted, many “woke” people of color may choose not to forgive us and instead demand that we suffer some “de-privileging” for our “whiteness.” Others, however, look for our asking forgiveness as a sign that we have truly repented. To pretend those sins have nothing to do with us would show we haven’t changed: “Fill up, then, the measure of your ancestors” (Matthew 23:29-32).

Conclusion

Today, we Christians are known for anything but our love for one another. I suggest it’s because white European Christians and their non-Christian descendants lost the Christian virtue of humilitas that lies near the center of Christ’s teachings. To renew ourselves in Christ’s message and undo our evil reputation, we must first rediscover humility. We must also realize that, beyond exercising our obligation to vote, American politics present a near occasion of sin, an opportunity for vicarious power to corrupt us. Our mandate is to teach new disciples to obey Christ’s commandments, not to compel obedience by law.

I’ve written before that we shouldn’t mourn the loss of our political power. If anything, we should regret that we ever had it, for we’ve misused it. Instead, let’s seek to repair the broken relationships between ourselves and with our fellow Americans of all classes, especially those who suffered because of our hubris. Let’s learn to lead through the example of service to others, building networks of love and solidarity that lead to stronger, healthier, more stable communities, converting from the bottom up rather than top-down. Then, perhaps, one day they’ll again know we’re Christians by our love.