Imagine a friend of yours got involved in a commune, one of the really crunchy ones that does their own farming and such along with poetry nights and music and art. They’re pretty good at all this, actually. They’re using some really interesting permaculture practices at the communal farm, the poetry is actually half-decent, and they make the absolute best goat-cheese pizza you’ve ever tasted. As you ask a few more questions, it turns out that come next March 21, they’re all planning to drink cyanide in order to liberate their spirits to join the alien spacecraft that’s coming to take them away. Upon further investigation, this is the third such cult the charismatic leader has founded. He contends that the suicides of the two previous groups have indeed gone on to be with the aliens, while he selflessly remained behind to spread the good news.
How fast would you want to get your friend out of there?
I have some bad news for you. Large swathes of Western culture are that commune. We’re doing it in slow-motion, but look at the birth rates. What we are seeing is a cultural suicide pact.
In Aaron Renn’s much-cited framework, the “neutral world” is the recent period (roughly 1994–2014) when being a Christian was neither a social positive nor a negative, but a bit like being a serious model airplane enthusiast—harmless enough, if you’re into that sort of thing. Against that backdrop, neutral-world church planting frequently focused on making Christianity approachable. In a post that’s worth your time to read, Michael Clary observes that one of the major objectives of neutral-world church strategy was “drawing left-leaning urban millennials, the most coveted demographic of the neutral world church planting boom.” In the interests of drawing the left-leaning urban crowd into church, we were all counseled to be “gospel centered” and “major on the majors,” setting “secondary matters” aside as “distractions.” Why were we given that counsel? Is it because our church growth experts were so taken with the gospel that for them, everything else just paled in comparison? Pretty to think so, but no, as I’ll demonstrate about four paragraphs down. Our experts knew that the left-leaning urbanites we were courting despised everything we love: backyard barbecues, fireworks on the 4th, “World’s Greatest Mom” mugs from Walmart, funnel cakes and corndogs at the county fair, all of it. They told us to “major on the majors” because our corn dogs offend their target audience.
Who is that target audience? They’re not all fourth-generation New Yorkers; they can’t be. The urban elite have way fewer kids than the rest of us. It’s “grill Americans” who have the kids; the ranks of the urban elite are fed by a steady stream of young adults emigrating from flyover country. The rank-and-file of left-leaning urbanites came from “grill American” culture and left it behind on purpose in order to fit into the elite leftist culture of their colleges. (You can tell this by their social media feeds over the holidays: they’re constantly reposting supportive tips for getting through a holiday dinner with your conservative relatives. Natives of the urban elite don’t have dinner with conservative relatives.) As young adults, these cultural emigres look back on heartland American culture with the white-hot disgust of the newly converted. In part, that performative disgust is driven by vulnerability: if you grew up slinging fries at McDonalds, you can’t afford for anybody at your art gallery job to even suspect you of plebian tastes—the accusation alone could ruin you.
These are the people that the neutral-world church sought to recruit. Now, to give our church-growth consultants their due, you really can’t make your initial approach to these folks in greasy Walmart jeans with a Modelo in your hand (unless they’re struggling to change a tire). When it comes to the logistics of winning that demographic, our neutral-world coaches were not wrong about the things they would find off-putting. But this is one of the major problems with managerial culture: it gets preoccupied with logistics at the expense of values.
Our church-growth coaches didn’t just steer us away from tailgating at the high school football game; they also told us to expunge all references to the sin of abortion from our church services. In fact, they told us not to talk about politics at all (as if the Bible doesn’t speak to such issues!). They upbraided us for big celebrations of Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. They wrote long think pieces about the dangers of what they called “idolatry of the family,” a sneer at those who have the audacity to think growing up, getting married, and raising kids is normal. “Major on the majors; keep it about Jesus,” they said. “All things to all men,” they said. Too many of us listened.
Here’s what actually happened: our advisers were not counseling us to “avoid secondary issues” because they cared so much about the gospel; it was because they wanted to muzzle the conservatives. Conservative values embarrassed them, and so as long as the voice of the church on “secondary issues” was conservative, no excuse was good enough for bringing those issues up. Now that left-leaning urbanites occupy positions of influence in the church, the very same advisers have suddenly discovered that there’s nothing more gospel-centered than a left-leaning take on…well, everything.
That joke about global warming on a record-setting snowy day? Total distraction. Come on, let’s keep it about Jesus, okay? But Greta Thunberg on climate change, that’s gospel-centered. Christians of all people should care about the world God made.
What are we to do with this situation? We can gather in twos and threes in desolate places and grind our teeth about the injustice of it all, but let’s not. I suggest we rethink the situation from the ground up. Let’s go back to that admonition to keep things gospel-centered and have another look. I’m going to say something a bit controversial, and I welcome pushback, but I think I can make it stick.
I contend that we had a gospel-centered culture. Imperfect, to be sure, and in need of much repentance and improvement. But we dated events in B.C. and A.D., had Christmas Break off school, grew up going to church (at least for Christmas and Easter). When we got married, or had kids, or nearly died in a welding accident—whatever life event forced us to get serious about meaning and mortality—we went back to church to figure things out. Pietistic evangelicals will want to dismiss all that as dead formalism, as Christ-haunted more than actually Christian. They might be right, but they’re wrong to denigrate it. A culture that’s not default-Christian is a far worse place to live, as we are now discovering.
In order to appeal to the coveted neutral-world demographic (left-leaning urban Millennials), we were urged to surrender our gospel-centered culture in favor of a different culture entirely. A culture that dates events in C.E. and B.C.E., has “holiday parties,” and is as likely to face mortality by visiting an ashram as a church. A culture, not to put too fine a point on it, that is committing suicide in slow motion. Remember the low birth rates? These are the people driving those statistics. Left-leaning urban Millennials are the cultural equivalent of that commune with the suicide pact.
Was existing grill-American culture perfect? By no means! But the Christian version of it loved children, honored mothers and celebrated fathers, valued and incentivized intact families, loved our country, made quilts and fluffy biscuits and plumbing that worked and sturdy front porches for the kids to play on, and had kids to play on them.
Left-leaning urbanite tastemakers don’t have kids. In that great cultural switcheroo, “growing” churches traded young adults who got married and raised families for young adults who shack up, get cats, travel the world, and “don’t feel called to have children.” We traded women who knew all Grandma’s best recipes for women who can’t make anything but a cocktail, men who could build a retaining wall in a weekend for inexplicably bearded men who can’t change a tire (a friend of mine asserts that today, a conspicuous beard is “the push-up bra of masculinity.” I’m afraid she may have a point.) We need to win these folks to Jesus, but as we do, we aren’t going to adopt their suicidal culture; we’re going to challenge them to grow into godly culture. They don’t have to dress like us or talk like us or eat what we eat, but genuine discipleship consists in obeying the Lordship of Christ in every area of life and culture. They’ll grow into it; meanwhile, here’s my modest proposal: let’s keep doing what we’re doing rather than imitating them. The gospel is indeed the center, but it is meant to be the center of something true, good, and beautiful. Where we genuinely fall short, let’s repent, and having repented of the evil, let’s not be embarrassed by the good things that remain. Let’s be a little loud about the beauty of marriage, the joys of having a gaggle of kids, the pleasure and difficulty of physical work, and the glories of a good corn dog. We have plenty of room to grow, but let’s not surrender the good we already have for bland, HR-approved substitutes.
Tim Nichols is a pastor-at-large with Headwaters Christian Resources and coauthor with Joe Anderson of the Victorious Bible curriculum and the forthcoming book Boniface in the Front Yard. He lives, ministers, and operates a massage therapy practice in Englewood, Colorado.