Instead, Joy

I greeted the primary contributions with a certain amount of impatience and frustration—accompanied with shame, since I know how deeply experienced the contributors are (compared to myself) in evaluating the position of Evangelicalism. But the cause of my feelings may actually be encouraging to these thinkers. I don’t want them to be oppressed with categories, qualifications, and cautious optimism, but rather to realize that even to an outsider like me, they can seem indispensable in saving the world.

While I was a visiting scholar at Yale Divinity School, I expressed to Jon Bonk, director of the Overseas Ministries Study Center across the road, a politely skeptical interest in his evangelism course for the divinity students. What would an “evangelism” curriculum include? I wanted to know. Jon replied that he first took the class up to the immigration court at Harford to listen to a whole day of hearings, many without lawyers or translators on hand to assist the prospective deportees, some of whom were headed back to political prisons and torture. Jon’s students, he felt, had to be aware of this before they considered their role in spreading the Gospel.

Jon’s pedagogy contained a stunning logic that I had never perceived at childhood church camps stressing friendship with Jesus or in my adult life as a Quaker. The problem Judaeo-Christianity is supposed to address is human shortcomings, the cost of which becomes more horrifying by the decade. But how can a privileged, self-satisfied American (say, a Yale professional student—or, um, me, writing books for publishers in Manhattan, New Haven, and Boston), without special intervention, grasp the life-giving idea of sin, in a modern culture designed to hide even basic cause and effect? Isn’t the task, then, to shock that person out of his complacency, not with stories of hell (which he’ll sneer at as mere stories), but just by inducing him to look around and persuading him that he, like everyone else, is a sinner, but could bear to acknowledge it because he also has hope? That’s the basic evangelical mission.

This realization is, to me anyway, a source of great joy: I think our new Great Awakening will be from a deep and deadening sleep. Technology makes previously laborious, choice-heavy acts quick and easy and concentrates our minds simply on doing more of them. Highly automated, super-convoluted marketplaces hide what goods and services cost, in every sense of that word. The media’s presentation of things going wrong normally stimulates no responses but Schadenfreude and the impression that experts are fixing whatever fragmentary, temporary difficulties—and these must comprise all difficulties, right?—they notice between commercials. Politicians and pundits fast-talk past how our functionaries actually do things like “securing our borders”—and past every other big question. And work is so complex and rushed and competitive that a pompous busy-ness fights against any curiosity about the generality of current sin, which is that other people’s distant, disregarded agony gives us huge benefits, so that we can effortlessly do evil and yet feel good. To my mind, the fundamentally alarming thing isn’t that someone trained to face the suggestion of his own and his society’s sinfulness with disbelief or indignation doesn’t understand or accept a metaphysical principle. It’s that he doesn’t even have a grip on physical reality.

Outward-looking Christianity, whether it embraces the descriptor Evangelical or not, and whichever of the Biblical assertions of the urgent need for God it prefers, can reintroduce reality of all kinds. I find particular encouragement in Evangelicalism’s powerful counterweight to our main other means of explanation, the social sciences.

I came across a typical article in The New York Times Sunday Magazine of May 5. I say typical, because in the secular media the parameters of thought are set by two purposes: to make the authors, readers, and favored subjects look and feel good or at least conveniently helpless; and to make others look bad. This article was actually two media productions and one and a quarter purposes folded into one. Jim Yong Kim, the president of the World Bank, had held a news conference to announce the elimination of “extreme poverty” in a large percentage of the world population; and Annie Lowrey, an economics reporter for the Times, reported the news for the most part uncritically, expressing a few qualifications and quoting Lant Pritchett of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, who disputes the narrowness of the World Bank’s goal; but if he had had more to say on this occasion, it wasn’t in the article.

Reading to the end, I wanted to bang my head against a wall. The breakdown of thinking necessary for secular pundits to avoid obvious conclusions amounts almost to a coma. Considered as homines sapientes—children of God like ourselves, who deserve the attention we’re used to claiming—and not numbers, poor people are a great deal more troublesome when they have incomes rising over $1.25 a day (the World Bank threshold below which they are supposed to be extremely poor) due to the opportunities of urbanization, than when they live in mud-hut rural destitution—where, however, they can of course by no means be induced to stay. Considered as human nature and not the premise for highly profitable, self-congratulatory interventions, people’s needs include the assurance that someone with power actually cares about the mammoth gaps in well-being, the ludicrous corruption, and the fearsome environmental collapses in their cities. Otherwise, what is their rationale for holding back from mass violence and the destabilization of their governments?  Take a wild guess as to whether that assurance is coming from the World Bank.

The truth—as opposed to the ultimate lie that the world’s physical resources will stretch indefinitely with the help of technology and make and keep seven billion or more people middle-class by American standards—is that to save the world we will have to sacrifice ourselves. What retrograde, suspicious language, and what a grisly threat to our “dreams” of entitlement. But really, the only viable ideas about the future start with those of Biblical Christianity and sketch as close an imitation of Christ as mortals can achieve. All familiarly formulated questions of Biblical inerrancy aside, this stuff is reality because we can open our eyes and see it; it’s empirical. This is why, as I figure it, the Evangelical movement doesn’t need to explain itself; it just needs to be itself.