Moral Formation in Country Music—Or, What’s Really Wrong With “Try That In a Small Town”

I must confess something here at the outset: I love Country Music. I love the twang, the history, the storytelling, and even the celebration of Americana. (I even love it when it comes from Canadians!) Of course, this wasn’t always the case. I used to hate Country like most people claim to do, but once you marry a girl from Texas, little bits of country just start to creep in all over your life. As my wife says, “You can take the girl out of Texas, but you can’t take the Texas out of the girl.” I say, “Bring it on.” Other times, I say “Y’all.” 

So, when I heard that there was controversy around a new country song, Jason Aldean’s “Try That In a Small Town,” I had to give it a listen—not as a hater of Country, but as someone who was mildly interested in both the kerfuffle and the genre. What I found, when I listened to the song, disturbed me. But it was not, as far as I can tell, what disturbed most people.

The song is standard enough—even sub-par, as far as Country songs go. Aldean croons about a variety of disquieting things that are happening in the world, shows footage of various “liberal” protests, and then returns to the refrain “try that in a small town.” The message is simple enough—liberal antics won’t work in middle America. A simplistic, even ham-fisted message; but then again, so is a lot of Country messaging, so we won’t hold that against it.

On the surface, the message of the song is a manifestation of an old and somewhat tired cliché: that the rural is superior to the urban. Cities are crowded, crime-infested, welfare driven places of wicked dehumanization, while the country is an idyllic, spacious, safe place bolstered by simple values, good people, and honest work. Half of my family comes from one of those small towns where everybody knows everybody, and Aunt Maudine keeps watch over the neighbourhood from the comfort of her rocking chair, sipping sweet tea and shucking corn while locusts screech in the background. Nothing gets past her. 

The chief controversy surrounding the song—and the reason the video has been “banned”—isn’t because of this clichéd message. It’s because, in one of the cuts of footage, the video features the Maury County Courthouse, in front of which 18-year-old Henry Choate was lynched in 1927. This is a terribly dark association. Here we are, singing about “trying those antics in a small town,” looking at an image of a courthouse famous for fostering exactly that kind of vigilante justice, in a county where some 20 black men were murdered on the basis of a very similar sentiment. If inclusion of the Maury County Courthouse footage is intentional, then the video is truly a thing of wickedness and should be condemned by all people of good heart and conscience. If it is unintentional… well, this is still a serious gaffe that should warrant, at the least, an apology, and at best should probably be re-edited. 

The lynching association is pretty horrific, but it’s not the concern I want to write about today. My concern has more to do with the moral formation for which the song appears to advocate. Allow me to explain what I mean. Songs can do lots of things for us. They can help us escape, or make sense of love, make us feel peppy, help us focus, or be an occasion for creating memories with our friends. Country Music is especially known for its focus on the value of hard work, love, loss, simple faith, and even a kind of warm patriotism. Some of the best of Country makes you want to love your wife more, work harder, hang out with your friends, go to church, and be grateful for your freedom. When we listen to songs about these ‘virtues’, we find that these virtues are being planted, reinforced, and encouraged within us. This is one of the ways that music facilitates moral formation.

Aldean’s song is right in the vein of this kind of formation—but I think it’s still critical to stop and ask, “What is the emotion being formed in me?” On my accounting there are a few. Aldean is, at the outset, sympathizing with the feelings of incredulity—and even outrage—at the way the world is going. In this, he has a sympathetic ear to many in America today. This sentiment is then contrasted with the pride that many Americans feel with regard to their home-town values (whether perceived or actual). These two emotions—outrage and pride—set the stage for the hook of the song. And what is critically important to know that the sung sentiment “Try that in a small town” is punctuated by images of “good” Americans carrying firearms. In other words, the takeaway message of the song is, “Try that here and we’ll shoot you.” Outrage, pride, violent justice. 

Pause and reflect more closely on this sentiment for a moment, because it’s actually very strange. The city is wicked, the countryside is virtuous. My nation should be protected. When the wickedness of the city creeps into the countryside, I should be prepared to defend it—violently, if necessary. In defense of American Values, I am prepared to do grievous bodily harm to others—even my fellow Americans. Perhaps you read those sentences and nothing stands out to you as strange about them. In your heart, there is only a straightforward, “Amen! We’ve got to stop the bad guys, no matter what!” Maybe there’s even a form of that statement that “The only thing stopping a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun!” But what I would like you to see is that a song like this fuels a fantasy of justified violence under the guise of patriotism. I will purchase a firearm, and carry it with me, so that if needed I can protect someone, save the day, even be a hero. It’s my duty as an American.  

In Country, more than any other genre of music, there is a profound overlap between America’s Patriotic and her Christian values. Standing for the flag and kneeling for the cross beats close to the heart of what Country Music (ostensibly) cares about. But here in Aldean’s song we are witnesses to, and participants in, a sentiment that is profoundly un-Christian. Christians should not fantasize about scenarios in which they might commit acts of violence. And I can go on to say, on the same theme, that Christians should not fantasize about scenarios in which they might commit acts of sexual intercourse, or theft, or deceit. And if a song is inviting me to fantasize about such thing, if a song lionizes activities which stand opposed to the tenets of my Christian faith, then I ought to put that song aside. 

If anything, Christians should fantasize about peacemaking. What would it mean to wake up in the morning and prayerfully consider how you might end conflict, restore harmony between men and women, or even perform acts of radical forgiveness? Years ago, there was the faddish trend of “paying it forward,” where Christians committed to performing “radical acts of kindness,” usually by purchasing someone else’s coffee or MacDonald’s order. Personally, I thought that the fad was better at making you feel good than doing any actual good, but it was still better than starting your day by imagining shooting someone. Let me be explicit: carrying a firearm as a civilian in the anticipation that you might need to use it against other civilians in defense of various civic ideals is not anywhere part of Christian moral formation.

For now, Aldean will have his moment in the spotlight. In the power of the outrage machine, criticisms of the song—and its video—will fall on largely deaf ears. In time—hopefully a short one—this song will be forgotten while other, better, Country songs will come along and encourage people to be more faithful, hardworking, and attentive to life. What won’t go away so easily are those fantasies of violence—certainly not until we are forming properly Christian sentiments in their place. And while the Christian sentiments overlap so seamlessly with the Patriotic ones… let’s just say that the battle for true peace will be long and difficult. 

Progressivism’s Powerless Jesus

I float around a lot of online groups—some of them funny, some of them wholesome, some of them so I can maintain professional connections. But some of the groups I follow are wretched, and I continue to follow the wretched ones because they give me insight into how people very different from me like to think. Several years ago—quite by accident, I assure you!—I joined what turned out to be a group of nationalist white supremacists, located in Australia. I was able to observe, as a fly on the wall, what things got people fired up and motivated. On the opposite end of the political spectrum, and at about the same time, I also joined a group of highly progressive ‘Christians.’ I put the word Christian in scare-quotes because it is not at all clear that any of the members, although they claim church affiliation, retain any real semblance to Christianity. Again, a fly on the wall, I have been able to observe the radically ‘woke’ church from within. 

It is often the case, in my group of progressive Christians, that individual members bemoan the fact that there are inadequate resources for their belief structures. They seem honestly surprised, having bucked the trend of 2000 years of biblical and ecclesiological history, that their replacements are inadequate, underdeveloped, and even unsatisfying. One such moment happened after Easter, when a moderator asked how members had spent their Easter season. This request—made with all the requisite nods to trigger warnings and the need to respect various theological perspectives—led to a discussion of the real meaning of Easter. The following quote, taken from Feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether and correcting distortions from the ‘real’ meaning of Easter, was gratefully posted and received: 

This Jesus did not come to suffer and die, to masochistically offer his blood to a sadistic God to pay for our sins, but to liberate us into a new community of joyful life. 

Jesus died on the cross because the mighty of religion and state did not accept his call to repentance and solidarity with the poor, but sought to shore up their system of power and its ideological justifications by silencing the voice of the prophet. His resurrection means that they did not succeed in silencing him. He rose and continues to rise wherever prophets rise, breaking through the system of lies and offering a glimpse of the true God of life who stands against the systems of worldly power. The cross is not a payment for sin or a required sacrifice of our well-being, but the risk Jesus and all people take when they unmask the idols and announce the good news that God is with those who struggle for justice and communicate loving life.

Rosemary Radford Ruether, Women and Redemption (2012)

Ostensibly, Ruether is redressing perceived errors in theories of substitutionary atonement—and, to her credit, there are frequently gross distortions in how that atonement model is presented. The Jesus she presents in contrast to this more traditional model bears the hallmarks of a revolutionary. He is a “liberator,” opposing the “mighty of religion,” those who rejected his summons to “solidarity with the poor,” because they wanted to defend their own “power.” His revolutionary spirit continues to rise whenever “prophets” (like Ruether?) rise up to stand with Christ—or at least with Christ’s God—against “systems of worldly power.” In summary, the cross has not to do with personal sin but with standing for God against earthly injustice. From my experience, Ruether’s account reads as par for the course in progressive atonement theology. 

It was a few days after reading Ruether’s quote that I had occasion to reread one of Malcolm Muggeridge’s lectures from Christ and the Media. In that lecture, Muggeridge presents a thought-experiment. What if archaeologists, a thousand years from now, uncover a massive cache of our current media? From the evidence of our media and consumption habits, what would they conclude about our society? Of the Christian story and its distortions, Muggeridge surmises the following: 

If any of the archaeologists were interested enough, they could trace the adjustments and distortions of the original Christian texts—always, it goes without saying, ostensibly in the interests of clarification—to conform with the concept of Jesus as a revolutionary leader and reformer, a superior Barabbas or Che Guevara, whose kingdom indubitably was of this world, finding in this textual and doctrinal adjustment an example of the infinite ingenuity of the human mind in shaping everlasting truths to conform with temporal exigencies.

Malcolm Muggeridge, Christ and the Media, 55.

To me it is fascinating that Muggeridge, writing in 1976, perceived the trend toward crafting Jesus as a theological revolutionary which bears such evident fruit in the thinking of someone like Ruether. But that middle sentence, almost a throwaway comment, bears further reflection and attention—Jesus as “a superior Barabbas or Che Guevara, whose kingdom indubitably was of this world.” In the Q&A that followed the original lecture, Muggeridge expands on this idea. There he says, 

If you make Christ a revolutionary, then you associate him with power, and there is nothing I can find in the Gospels, that has ever been attributed to him, or that any of the Christian mystics have ever conveyed, which conceivably suggests that his Kingdom could be brought to pass through the exercise of power.

Malcolm Muggeridge, Christ and the Media, 91.

The logic may appear opaque at first glance, but this is actually a quite simple—and I believe compelling—claim that Muggeridge is making: if you remove Christ’s spiritual work, you are left with a purely earthly gospel. If you excise Christ’s work to resolve the spiritual problem of sin that stands between humanity and God, then what remains is for Christ to become a merely human revolutionary whose targets are not the redemption of human persons, but the condemnation of earthly injustice alone. If you remove spiritual power, you are left only with categories of earthly power. 

There is no doubt that a critique of power is contained within the Christian narrative; but the witness of our tradition is that the critique of human power is sourced in the supernatural wisdom of God—in the cross that is foolishness to Greeks and an offence to Jews. If we criticize power (and we do, and should, and must!), we critique it from the perspective of the Kingdom of God, that reality inaugurated by the resurrection power of Christ through which He has saved a people for Himself. 

The spiritually neutered gospel of progressive Christians reveals itself to be overly concerned with earthly power. This is the best it can offer humanity, since it has distanced itself from the gospel’s own critique of power. In this way, it trades a greater power for a lesser one; the real, for a shadow of the real. As a result, the best that progressive theology can offer is a critique of earthly power that itself relies on earthly power. Far from escaping the cycle of power and oppression and offering a genuine critique of the world from the perspective of an Eternal Kingdom, progressivism is forced to make use of the inadequate and corrupted tools of earthly power to advance its agenda. In my experience, the most reliable and frequently utilized tool in its kit is that of shame. Note how progressivism’s targeted sting of traditional theology focuses on the shame you ought to feel for believing such outmoded, harmful things. How dare you think religious thoughts that make God a masochist! How dare you espouse a theology that might harm people! How dare you perpetuate corrupted systems of power in your thinking and actions! In so many cases, a simple outrage at traditionalism becomes a surrogate for good arguments. But the deeper criticism remains, because progressivism’s strongest arguments are not birthed from the supernatural love of God, but from the condemning voice of earthly power. 

Karl Popper, in his 1944 critique of Totalitarianism, The Open Society, writes that “The attempt to make heaven on earth invariably produces hell.” Popper is speaking of the utopianism created by following figures like Marx and Hegel, but beneath his insight lies the truth to which we are speaking now: that human power is inadequate for the creation of a just society, a heaven on earth. Not only is it inadequate, human power will actively poison the effort. The only power capable of creating just conditions, of bringing the Kingdom of Heaven down to earth, is that power rooted in the cross and resurrection of Christ—foolish, scandalous, otherworldly—which demands an accounting for personal sin. We require supernatural power for our supernatural problems. Without it, there can be no hope for change. 

Why I Am Still Blogging: An Essay About Essays

With a mixture of astonishment and shame, I note that it has been seven months since my last blog post. Amazingly (or unfortunately, depending on your perspective), it is not the case that I have simply run out of things to say. Instead, I have been Busy. Only this last year I’ve finished my PhD, a consuming piece of writing on its own. On top of that, my family has moved internationally not once but twice in the last six months. I’ve lately been settling in to the routines of a new job. On top of all this, I’m suffering from a new form of anxiety that I’d like to call “publication anxiety.” It works like this: now that I’ve had some pieces published in magazines and journals, every time I get an idea I think, “I should blog this.” Then I start to work on it and think, “Maybe I should shop this around to get it published somewhere else…” The result is an anxiety that has kept me from writing anything at all. Or, rather, I’ve written some things, but now I’m trying to get them published. 

At any rate, here I am. Writing once again. What is more, I’m writing about writing, and I suspect that the now is as good a moment as any—coming back to blogging after such a long hiatus—to ask what I’m doing here. Why am I still blogging? What do I hope to get out of it? To this question, I believe I’ve got two answers. Allow me to share them with you, today. 

First, I want to blog because I still believe in the essay. That may sound like crazy talk, especially if your primary experience of the essay was writing them for school. I remember those days well, being taught in my English classes to prepare “The Five Paragraph Essay.” An introduction should outline the subject and schematize your three primary points, followed by one paragraph for each of those points, and a concluding paragraph to round out the whole. We wrote countless numbers of these essays during my years in school—the process became rote, and ritualized, and largely lifeless. Structure was not the only instruction in this formative essay-writing season. I recall other stylistic tics that were drilled into us with the fervor of a medieval religious catechism: You shall not use the first person! You shall not use the passive voice! You shall not under any circumstances use the word ‘got’! Imagine my sense of rebellion when, writing an exam in Seminary, I dared to produce a four paragraph essay! Put yourself in my shoes, if you will, when I discovered the freedom of the first person—of saying exactly what I thought and why I thought it. Or imagine my feeling of relieved kinship when I encountered G. K. Chesterton’s assessment of Greek accents—and with it of stodgy grammarians as well—noting that because the accents had been added to the text by later authors, not using them rendered Chesterton “as ignorant as Plato and Thucydides.” So many fictional rules! And regarding the passive voice and various awkward elocutions? Those can be made use of whenever I damn well please. 

I’ve described many reasons why I should by all accounts hate the essay, but I don’t, and school, although it tried persistently so to do, was never quite successful in killing off the essay for me. Why is it, then, that I still love the essay? I suppose I should offer the historic answer first: I love the essay because it was through writing the essay that I developed the skill of articulation, of clarity. More than any other academic discipline, writing has forced me to reason my way from A, to B, to C, and to examine the linkages between those steps. The past twelve years of writing has had a wonderfully honing effect on my thinking

I have also grown to love the sense in which an essay is always a journey. The word “essay” has its roots in the Latin word exigere—meaning to test, ascertain, or weigh. In a lovely sense, it comes to be linked with a kind of wild anticipation: knights from a medieval keep may “essay forth,” anticipating an adventure in the forest of Broceliande, a place where they will attempt great things, be weighed against the code of chivalry, and ultimately return with stories of adventure to retell. The essay banks on your willingness to ‘go with’ an author on whatever journey he or she wishes to lead you, to whatever humorous, insightful, or surprising anecdotes that emerge from the fabric of that venture. All essays are travelogues—whether they document a journey of ideas or a holiday to the shore. In this respect, they’re a lot of fun. 

But I have other, more subversive reasons for loving the essay. If the writing of essays demands clarity, the reading of essays demands attention. With alarm I have watched minds—my own included—suffer a seizure in their capacity to attend to any long argument. The tweet, the hot take, blazes across our news feeds and slowly, inevitably, our brains have lost the capacity to pay attention to anything longer than an image macro. Sometimes I fear that the essay is the only thing standing between the inane tweet and the utter degradation of the human mind in the digital age. Baron Friedrich von Hügel once advised his niece, Gwendolyn Green, to “Beware of the first clarity; press on to the second clarity.” In a world that has reduced almost all information intake to a rapid-fire succession of first clarities, how on earth are we to find that second clarity? The answer will be by learning once again to read, and in the systolic and diastolic pulses of clear articulation and careful reading lie the heartbeat of a crucial kind of educational formation: if we will not attend, we will be stupid. 

Lastly, writing essays—extended studies of a subject, journeys through ideas, clear reflections upon or articulation of a concept—stands me in what I regard to be a noble tradition of journalism. I don’t mean journalism as pure reporting, but I mean the latent, and often forgotten, power of the journal: that is, a collection of writings that forms a community of readers. Writers are convicted of the need to speak the truth, and they articulate those truths for a growing community of readers who feel a “Yes.” “Yes. This articulates what I have felt. These words, in some small way, resonate with the ambitions and desires of my heart.” Consider for a moment the pedigree of this tradition and I think you’ll see what I mean: without publication and community, there would have been no Reformation, no Gandhi, no Martin Luther King, Jr., and no Inklings. Communities are not formed around tweets; they gather around ideas, clearly articulated, written words that speak to the condition of our states, our souls, and our ambitions. If there is any hope for bringing our world out of the morass of inept thinking and contemptuous hot-takes, then that hope lies in the recovery of the essay as a way of intellectual formation.

That’s why I still love the essay—because despite the crushing conformity of a school system, I’ve found a joy in clarity that the essay is unparalleled in promoting, a clarity I believe we desperately require if we are to stem a tide of stupidity, and a clarity and attention that might just provide a bright glimmer of hope for gathering together a community around something good, beautiful, and true. 

I said at the outset that there were two reasons why I still blog, and the second is this: I continue to blog because I have a sense of responsibility. I have been a pastor now since 2007, and have been blogging since 2010. Writing for me has always been first and foremost an activity of obedience—I felt quite strongly that the Lord told me to write in 2010. I have been trying to obey that command ever since. But as I watched my communities, and took stock of the information they were receiving online, I realized early on that if I didn’t speak some clarity into the sea of information, confusion would uncontestedly win the day. To speak has since become an act of pastoral responsibility. I must do all in my power to model clarity of thought and reflection for the sake of my people, my communities of faith. In the interim, and over the years, many people have subsequently asked me to write about various subjects. I now have a responsibility to them, as well. 

So, I try, and hold up my flickering candle of analog essays against the megawatt digital flash of the modern information highway. Like Dylan Thomas, I shall refuse to “go gentle into that good night,” instead I will “rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Doubtless, I’m far too insignificant to make any real difference—and you can comfortably detect and dismiss me on the grounds of my obvious delusions of journalistic grandeur. But perhaps—and to mix my metaphors with glee—my tiny and obedient candle, faithfully lit, may act as a mustard seed for light, truth, and faith among a few. 

Joshua Harris’s Fall and Christian Higher Education

If you, like me, were a kid who was a teenager in church in the 90s, then you know the name Joshua Harris. He wrote THE book on dating, I Kissed Dating Goodbye. I confess that I’ve never read the book, but then again, I didn’t need to. We all knew what was in it. Dating was bad. Courtship was good. Romance was dead. Christians should retrieve romance and courtship in their relationships, and all this should be done with a commitment to purity. At the time, it all made perfect sense. In many ways, it still does.

However, there were unforeseen problems. When Harris wrote the book he was only 21 years old—hardly experienced enough to opine about all dating and all relationships. The book also contributed to a broader movement that is sometimes called “purity culture”—a movement which prioritizes sexual purity in the ethics of the young, with the unfortunate effect of both minimizing other aspects of formation (character, charity, mercy, peacemaking, etc.), while idolizing sex and marriage. In some people, it appears—and especially in certain young women of the time—sexual purity came to be seen as a bargaining chip for a good marriage. Save sex for marriage, the logic goes, and God will bless you with both a great marriage AND great sex. Christian teaching undoubtedly holds that sexual purity matters, but to turn it into a kind of bargaining chip for God’s work in your future relationships is to try to leverage God. In this respect, it’s a kind of prosperity gospel: if I do this action in faith, God will bless me.

Like I said, I knew the basics of Harris’s thinking without having read the book, and if the prosperity exchange of purity for future pleasure was taught, I didn’t hear it.

The book, like the 90s, faded into memory, until once again Joshua Harris’s name came across my newsfeed. This time it was 2015, and Harris had announced he was leaving his church to get some formal theological education—something he’d never had, despite serving as a pastor for more than a decade. The reason it was of interest to me was because he would be attending Regent College, the seminary I had attended. I remember thinking, at the time, that this was a great thing. I’m always happy when Pastors get educated.

In the intervening years, Harris’s name popped up again—this time as he began to distance himself from the claims of his famous book. He helped to produce a documentary, called “I survived I Kissed Dating Goodbye,” and eventually formally recanted the teaching of the book and asked the publisher to stop selling it. I read through the information at the time, and felt then that these seemed very much like the moves of someone coming into maturity. Harris was growing up, theologically speaking, and we should all rejoice about this.

These changes weren’t without concern, however. A growing reaction against what had been “purity culture” was growing in the church. Women (it seems to me especially) from the 90s who had grown up on Harris’s logic were frustrated with how it had idolized sex and marriage, and how the realities of those institutions didn’t match up. Perhaps no greater image of the rejection of purity culture can be found that that of Nadia Bolz-Weber, gathering purity rings from her female members and (without any apparent awareness of Aaronic irony) causing them to be melted into he shape of a giant vulva. Those who had sacrificed themselves to purity would redeem the image of the vagina.

Harris emerged again last week, of course, with two subsequent bombshell announcements. The first (through Instagram) that he and his wife would be separating (apparently amicably? a kind of Gwyneth Paltrowian ‘conscious uncoupling’?), the second (also through Instagram) that he had left the Christian faith. Harris’s journey of ‘deconstruction’ (his own word) appears complete.

This was the (cheerful?) picture posted along with the instagram announcement of their divorce.

The news was met with grief (from Christians) as well as joy (from atheists and other former Christians). Naturally, the circumstances invite speculation, as well as unfortunate puns. What happened to Harris? Why did he kiss Christianity (and his wife) goodbye? I don’t intend to answer either of those questions, especially since the answers lie in Harris’s heart, to be discerned between him and God alone. But there are two things I want to point out as frames for thinking about his trajectory—both publicly known. The first is the nature of the church he came from, the second is the nature of Christian Higher Education.

First, Harris’s church home. Harris had been trained, and nurtured, under the direct tutelage of C.J. Mahaney, once powerful and respected megachurch pastor. Harris was, to my understanding, Mahaney’s chosen successor. Over the past several years, Mahaney’s Sovereign Grace Ministries has come under serious fire. There was a series of accusations from former members and leadership about Mahaney’s abuse of power and controlling nature, then a series of members (11, I believe) who accused the church of covering up child sexual abuse. The church has denied these allegations, but the fallout has still been immense—Sovereign Grace has lost a number of its member churches, a number of its members, and Mahaney has lost much of his influence (Al Mohler publicly severed ties with him). It was about this time that Harris left his ministry church to pursue education, declaring in a sermon that now he sees there were “flaws in the system.”

C.J. Mahaney

(As a fascinating, if tragic aside, when Rachael Denhollander, the Olympic gymnast, began to speak up about the abuse she had experienced, her church wanted her silenced, and she and her husband were eventually asked to leave their fellowship. That church was one of the churches which worked to restore Mahaney to leadership.)

It seems to me that the Sovereign Grace story is a key component to the trajectory of Harris’s faith journey. He was raised (homeschooled as well) in a very conservative, apparently controlling environment. Tutored under a controlling, apparently power-hungry leader. Educated on the job in a self-protecting institution which hurt its members. Neither Mahaney nor Harris were seminary educated, and it appears (from Harris’s own account) that Christian Higher Education was something actively dismissed by them.

The point is this: we might look at Harris’s story and conclude that he’s left our Christianity, but it seems far more likely to me that he’s left Mahaney’s Christianity. He’s left a Christianity of control, of fear, of rules, of power, of hurt, and of a lack of grace. If this is accurate, then Harris’s honesty (about his faith) is something that should genuinely be applauded. In his public statements he displays a remarkable self-awareness and honesty. Of course, that honesty is marred by two things—one of them being his divorce, which is fundamentally dishonest, the other being the snazzy marketing means of the announcements. Instagram is a weird place to cheerfully declare the destruction of all you publicly held important.

Harris was pastor at CLC, a Sovereign Grace Ministries Church.

This leaves us with the question of Christian Higher Education. Mahaney and Harris are not alone in their belief that seminary—and with it education—is dangerous to faith. In this, they tap into a longstanding trend in American thinking: that intelligence is dangerous. John Erskine, famous American educator, wrote the following over 100 years ago:

Here is the casual assumption that a choice must be made between goodness and intelligence; that stupidity is first cousin to moral conduct, and cleverness the first step into mischief; that reason and God are not on good terms with each other; that the mind and the heart are rival buckets in the well of truth, inexorably balanced—full mind, starved heart—stout heart, weak head.

A certain kind of Christian piety continues to hold today that an increase in intelligence is cause for suspicion, that blind obedience is to be preferred to carefully thought-out action. To those pious reasoners, Harris’s loss of faith is easily accounted for: he went to school. If he hadn’t gotten that seminary education, he would have stayed in the faith.

Curiously parallel to this is recent data from the Pew Research Center. In one study last year, they showed that there had been a significant uptick in those who identify themselves as religious “nones”—that is, people who claim no religion at all. “Nones,” Pew astonishingly found, account for as many Americans as Evangelicals. In a more recent study, from just a few weeks ago, Pew showed that Jews, Atheists, and Agnostics outperformed all Christians on tests of basic religious knowledge. One way to tell the story is to claim that education is linked to lack of, or loss of, faith.

While some read these data with alarm, I find it encouraging and challenging news. First, it is encouraging that if more people identify as religious ‘nones,’ then we are equipped with a better understanding of the evangelistic task. If these are the same people who previously identified as “Christian,” but now identify as not, then there is an increase in honesty of reporting. Too long has a kind of cultural Christianity swayed American self-perception. Honest answers frame an honest mission. Second, the gap between education and faith presents itself as a challenge. It appears that Christian education is sorely lacking in American faith. It suggests that, in the command to be wise as serpents and harmless as doves, we’ve opted instead for the wisdom of doves (and therefore the harm of serpents!).

But with education does come danger. And here we might return to Harris. I remember my own time at Regent, and the laments of my peers about the nature of their own deconstructions—learning that the Church was bigger than expected, learning that the text must be carefully interpreted, learning that the history of the church was more fraught than anticipated (and, in some cases, that it began before 1906). Through it all, the faculty wouldn’t tell you what to believe—that wasn’t the methodology—but would present, and leave the work in your hands. For many students, this new knowledge, combined with the freedom to think for yourself, was simply too much. In this respect, I don’t think the problem was completely Regent’s—I think the problem is the educational state of American Christianity. (And, for what it’s worth, I think Regent could have done a better job of shepherding people through this process.) Once again, I don’t think it’s right to speculate on the shifts in Harris’s heart, but it would not surprise me if he discovered, while educating himself about the Christian faith, that the faith he’d publicly believed in wasn’t quite the Christianity he was learning about. And if that’s the case—in fact, either way—it presents us with a mandate to pray.

Eight (8) Myths of Popular Piety in Good Omens

Last night I finished watching through the Amazon Prime show, Good Omens. I was already familiar with the story, having read the Pratchett/Gaiman book several years ago. The show itself was reasonably entertaining, theologically absurd, sometimes hilarious, often dumb, but through it all David Tennant and Michael Sheen really shone as a pair of 6000-year-long friends haplessly trying to prevent the end of the world.

Good Omens isn’t really about Christianity. What it’s about is, well, itself, and part of that self is to parody the 1976 film The Omen, in which the antichrist is born, placed in the care of an American diplomat, and through those channels brings about the imminent end of the world. Good Omens is that story, but gone screwy, partly because of the actions of Aziraphale, a compassionate but somewhat dimwitted angel, and Crowley, a clever but only accidental demon, who together happen to have struck up an unlikely friendship over the past millennia. Things go wrong, some things go right, some things are silly, and if you like those sorts of things, then Good Omens is definitely worth a few nights of your life. But if your knickers get into a twist over any irreverence associated with Christianity, then this show ain’t for you.

In fact, criticizing Good Omens (as some have been doing), is a pretty clear Proverbs 26:4 moment—that in answering the fool according to his folly, we become fools like him. The show is absurdism, and critiquing it makes the self-styled critic absurd. Much like getting upset about satire, raging about Good Omens proves that the joke’s on you.

In the next paragraphs I’m about to offer a critique of eight religious myths present, and prominent, in Good Omens. But let’s be clear that I’m not really talking about Good Omens. I’m talking about these myths of popular piety that are so common, and so prevalent, that they become part of the fabric of Good Omens without our batting an eye. Let’s dig in.

1. There’s no mention of an apple in the Adam and Eve story.

I think this is still a surprise to many people. The Genesis text mentions two trees—the tree of life, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The serpent tempts Eve to take fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, but we’re never told what the fruit is. It could have been an apple, yes, but it also could have been a pear, peach, plum, or pomegranate. Come to think of it, since none of us has ever seen a tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we’ve no idea what its fruit looks like anyway. All we know is that it looked good to eat.

2. Few people in the early history of Judaism/Christianity thought the world was 6000 years old.

The earliest authoritative interpreters we have for the Genesis text (Origen and Augustine) explicitly urge caution in reading the Genesis 1-2 story literally. Much of church history followed their lead, and yet the passion for maths + scripture (which always = confusion) was irresistible for some. It appears that many of the more modern numbers (i.e., 4004BC as creation date) are, in fact, more modern, stemming from new understandings of dating and the sciences. Many early Christians, following Augustine, believed the earth was created instantly, out of nothing, at an unspecified time. All that to say, there is both no consensus in the Church about the age of the earth, and most people in history haven’t lost any sleep over it. I suggest we join them in that practice.

3. Satan is, in fact, just another angel.

In popular piety, Satan is considered a superbeing, coequal with Christ and God’s chief opponent—as the embodiment of evil—in the universe. But the truth of the matter is that Satan (we believe) is nothing more than a fallen angel. He’s more like Crowley and Aziraphale than like Christ. In fact, some have speculated, his chief opponent in heaven is Michael the Archangel, rather than anyone else. What is more, as many angels appear to have specific functions (see the Angel of Death in the Exodus narrative), Satan also seems to have a specific function—he is the accuser (that’s what ha satan means in Hebrew). He shows up in Job and, well, accuses. He shows up in the Garden and, well, accuses (that God is deceptive). That’s his function. Furthermore, as a (former) angel he has no corporality. That’s what it means to be an angelic being. He also doesn’t have the power to create anything, so the idea that Satan is going to cause a child to be born—his own son—after the pattern of God and Christ is, again, absurd. He doesn’t have that power. He can’t create. He’s just a spirit.

4. Hell belongs to Jesus.

I grimace a little whenever I hear people claim they want to go to hell because that’s where all the party people are. The thing they don’t realize is that Jesus descended into hell, released from there its captives, took Satan himself captive, and now reigns as lord of Heaven, Earth, and Hell itself. Hell isn’t the domain of evil, it’s the place of the dead. The domain of the evil is, for the moment, the earth. At the end, Satan and all his followers will be cast into hell, but they aren’t there yet. When they do go there, they’ll be under the command of Jesus. (That’s right, in Christian theology there’s nowhere to go from Jesus at the end.)

5. The “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” serve Jesus.

No image of the apocalypse has been more evocative than the four horsemen—war, famine, plague, and death, who come to the earth bringing stages of destruction. In Good Omens, the four horsemen are the friends of the antichrist, his servants to bring about the end of the world. But the truth of the matter is that these four horsemen are agents of God. He summons them, they do His bidding, and they serve a function—that is, to remove our capacity to trust in politics (war), wealth (famine), health (plague), and life itself (death). Later in John’s Revelation, another horseman shows up—this time on a white horse, with the words, “King of Kings and Lord of Lords” written on his clothes. I wonder, who could this white horseman be?

If you really want to get your brain in a pickle, there’s a good chance all the horsemen are angelic powers as well. Death looks a lot like, well, the Angel of Death. War looks a lot like, well, the Angel of War—Michael the Archangel. Plague and Famine are less easy to place, but the plot remains suspiciously similar: functionaries, they serve the functions of the Almighty.

6. Antichrist is a way of being, not an individual.

Popular piety seems to love the idea of antichrist being a specific person, a kind of anti-Jesus who is the incarnated son of the devil—someone we can look for, and check our news sources to find. But (per myth 3), if we remember that Satan is merely another angel with no creative power, then we’re already in trouble. If we also remember that Satan isn’t even remotely God’s equal, things get more troubling still. And even more worrying is the warning in 1 John 2:18, “Children, it is the last hour; and just as you heard that antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have appeared; from this we know that it is the last hour.” Wait, what? Many antichrists? And they’ve already appeared? What’s going on?

The solution to the puzzle is to realize that antichrist is a way of being, not a specific person. If we can discern what it is to be in the way of Christ, then we can work out by deduction what it means to live anti that way. What is the way of Christ? Self-sacrifice, power surrendered in service, kingship by means of a cross. When Satan tempts Jesus in Matthew’s gospel, he offers him all the kingdoms of the world in exchange for worship. Jesus refuses, and while the temptation may seem bald and obvious (why worship Satan?) the real sting of it was in the opportunity to skip the cross. Come along, Satan may have whispered, you can have all that is yours without the costly suffering and shame. Just bend a knee! To be in the way of Christ is to embrace a difficult suffering after the pattern of Christ. It follows, by deduction, that to be in the way of anti-Christ is to reject self-sacrifice, to cling to power in the service of what we think is right, and to take kingship without a cross. This is how there can be, and have been, and are at this very moment, many antichrists.

If you really need evidence for why we’ve got to be informed readers, and competent interpreters of difficult imagery, just look at the stuff created by people reading John’s Revelation too literally.

7. The world doesn’t end in the Bible, it’s made new.

The whole idea of the world ending is a little odd, especially since our religious text makes it more than explicit that no such thing happens. Revelation 21:1-2 is quite clear, “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth passed away, and there is no longer any sea. ² And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, made ready as a bride adorned for her husband.” The end of the world is, well, a new world. It isn’t the end, it’s a renewal. And not only is it a renewal, if you look closely you’ll realize that nobody goes to heaven at the end of the story. Instead, heaven comes down. That, in point of fact, is what the book of John’s Revelation is all about—not the end of the world, but the arrival of heaven.

8. John’s Revelation is not about the future, but the present.

The most pervasive and unfortunate myth of popular piety is that John’s Revelation is about the future. It isn’t. Or, at least, most of it isn’t. Most of it is about the present. There’s a bit of confusion about the language of “end times.” They aren’t coming in the future, they’ve been going on since Christ rose from the dead. The end times are now, and have been now for the past 2000 years. Take the four horsemen again. They systematically strip away all human hopes for change—through power, wealth, health, or the imagination of immortality. When have war, famine, plague, and death not been part of our human story? The horsemen aren’t coming in the future, they’re here now—and they are challenging you to place your hope in something else. Something more powerful, lasting, and eternal. The four horsemen disrupt our false confidences so that we can place our confidence in a more lasting place—on the fifth horseman.

I’m certain that these myths aren’t going away. They’re too deeply entrenched in our religious and cultural subconscious. They also make for such entertaining stories! Of these, Good Omens is good fun, but that’s all it is. If you don’t go to it for your eschatology, you’ll be fine. But you shouldn’t have been doing that anyway.