A billboard I recently saw in my city
Lately I've been reminiscing about my years in the abusive church known as the Assembly, and some of the strange teachings and practices which were pushed by this church. The church I was involved in was modeled in many ways after the Plymouth Brethren pattern, although our head honcho denied that we were an exact copy but he insisted that we were a new and improved model. (Note to any rabid PB's out there: A. Don't sue me. You won't get much out of me beside two middle-aged neutered cats. B. Don't sue me. There's already plenty of scathing criticism of you all - including the criticisms voiced by Garrison Keillor, former host of A Prairie Home Companion. C. Don't sue me. If you do, the angels of God will put a massive hurt on you on the Day of Judgment!)
In retrospect, one of the weirder elements of our doctrine and practice had to do with our attitude toward instrumental music in our Assembly meetings. You see, we firmly believed that in our worship, Bible study, and prayer meetings, any and all hymns sung were to be sung a cappella. That is, they were to be sung with voices only - with no other instruments allowed. This was because of a rigid (and frankly erroneous) interpretation of Ephesians 5:19 pushed by one of the granddaddies of Brethrenism, a certain John Nelson Darby, who believed that the presence and use of musical instruments during group worship was a sign of "worldliness". However, we did believe in the use of musical instruments as a tool of "Gospel outreach" - that is, our attempts to evangelize (or proselytize?) the lost, also known as the "unchurched" in modern evangelical-speak.
Here things get interesting. Before I met this group, I had been in the military, and had attended a number of live band performances at various bars near my post. Thus I had acquired a taste for live music. So when I encountered one of the "outreach bands" of the Assembly at a college campus, I was intrigued. That bloody band was one of the means by which the Assembly hooked me. But after a while in the Assembly, I discovered that although the use of instrumental music as a tool of outreach was allowed and encouraged, there was a bit of contention among the leaders and wanna-be leaders about the styles of music that were allowable in our "outreach." So the Assembly band which I first encountered evolved gradually from 70's acoustic-tinged folk rock (think CSNY, Joni Mitchell, the Eagles before Joe Walsh, or some of the lighter offerings of Jackson Browne or James Taylor), eventually settling on what can only be described as a form of soft country rock. The countrified phase lasted until some teens from one of the Assemblies in the Midwest formed their own hard-driving high-energy rock group. (Think of Creed as an example of what these teens sounded like.) They managed to achieve something that our band had lost the ability to do - namely, that they were able to get passers-by to actually stop and listen to them. This threatened the narcissism of the long-time leader of the outreach band in my home Assembly, so he responded by amping up his band's performances and pushing his teenage kids to form their own hard-rocking outreach band. Naturally he made his son the leader of our teen band - an example of living vicariously through one's kids - and talked of them as if they were in the same league as such well-known CCM (Contemporary Christian music) bands as Jars of Clay.
Our music-making for heathen audiences largely came to an end when the Assemblies fell apart in 2003 after the revelations of the criminal activity of our head honcho and his family. But it is interesting to consider the message we sought to communicate through our outreach, as well as the strategic assumptions behind that message and our delivery of it. For that message and its strategic assumptions have a parallel among many of the thought leaders in the larger realm of American evangelicalism.
The Message:
The message we ostensibly sought to communicate was the message of the claims of Christ, namely that He is the eternal Son of God and that God gave Him on the Cross as a sacrifice for our sins so that everyone who believes in Him might be justified from sin and receive eternal life. We preached that this justification was to be obtained by faith alone, and not by any attempts of our own to do good works. We preached that this message demanded a response from those who heard it, and that an acceptable response had the following two elements: repentance from sin and receiving Christ as Lord. Now I must say that although I have said strong things against white American evangelicalism, I am yet a Christian. Moreover, I would categorize myself largely (but not entirely) as a fundamentalist. So I have no problem with the Gospel message as I have just now summarized it. However, I must say that that Gospel has mutated over the last few decades in American society. (The message has always seemed to suffer from certain distortions as it passed through the lens of American culture.) For repentance has been confined to merely giving up certain fleshly indulgences, and not to changing the way we relate to each other on a societal level, or the way we relate to money and earthly power. And actually receiving Christ as Lord - as Someone whose words we actually intend to obey - has been replaced by mere assent to "Judeo-Christian (or American) values" as defined by mainstream evangelical preachers.
Now there are many motives for preaching this message, but in the United States, the motive among evangelicals in recent decades has been threefold, namely, to "reclaim America for God", to "reclaim Christian cultural values", and to "re-establish America as a Christian nation." This shifting of motive from spiritual transformation to the building of secular, earthly political and cultural power for a certain privileged group is one of the prime causes of the mutation of the Gospel message over time.
The strategy of delivery:
One of the key strategic assumptions behind our delivery of the message was first and foremost that the Word of God has intrinsic power in itself, apart from any human input. Therefore, it is necessary only to proclaim the Word in order to fulfill the duty of preaching the Gospel, for the Word is able to do its work all by itself. Bible verses such as Jeremiah 23:29 ("Is not My word like fire?" declares the LORD ...) and Hebrews 4:12 were used as proof texts for this point of view. (However, one danger of such a viewpoint is that it neglects those parts of the New Testament which speak of the power of a good example and proclaim that preachers of the Word need to practice what they preach!)
The outcome of this strategic assumption can be seen in the multitude of inventive means which evangelicals, fundamentalists, and similarly-minded Protestants devised for the proclamation of their message. These means have included preaching (obviously), in churches, Gospel halls, city parks, street corners, circus tents, and other places where people congregate. But they have also included Gospel tracts and other printed matter, bumper stickers, billboards, T-shirts, movies, music CD's (and later, MP3's), live musical performances, "inspirational" or "faith-based" fiction, and other examples of artistic expression. The arts have especially attracted the interest of those who have sought to inject "Christian" or "Judeo-Christian" cultural values into our society, as exemplified by a book written in the 1990's by Bob Briner titled Roaring Lambs. Briner's book challenged those who call themselves Christians in the U.S. to make their mark in the arenas of moviemaking, television, other visual arts, and literature. (Indeed, I seem to remember reading somewhere that his book was one of the inspiring influences that led to the formation of the band Jars of Clay. But I can't find the exact reference to this, so don't quote me.) Thus the "Christian culture industry" has received a massive boost over the years because of this focus.
Another key strategic assumption has concerned the response of the hearers of the message. It has been assumed that if these hearers reject the message delivered, it is because of a spiritual or intellectual defect. The assumption of a spiritual defect is too frequently made by those evangelicals or fundamentalists who are too lazy to actually get to know and understand their audience. Thus their knee-jerk reaction is to automatically say that those who reject their message do so because "they are in spiritual darkness!" Those who assume that the rejection is due to an intellectual failure on the part of their hearers assume that the hearers are held captive by deeply formulated philosophies such as secularism, Marxism, post-modernism, or similar doctrines. Evangelicals who assume such motives in those of their hearers who reject the evangelical message fail to realize that most people don't usually have time to think hard about various secular philosophies in detail. (After all, most of us are too busy working like dogs! We don't have time to read books ;) )
Such assumptions have not adequately equipped the mainstream white American evangelical/Protestant church for the present times, in which many, many people are abandoning evangelicalism and church attendance, and some are even abandoning faith altogether - a time which has seen the birth of a new term, namely, exvangelical - a time in which the ranks of these exvangelicals are swelling. (For an example of this, please listen to a recent podcast interview of one of the former members of the Assemblies I used to belong to.) So let's close with a brief consideration of these times and the reasons for the people who are rejecting evangelicalism in these times.
Flattening, Breakdown and Failure
As I mentioned earlier in this post, the Gospel message has undergone a certain "flattening" in American culture. This is seen in the things that the Bible put into the message that modern conservative evangelical/fundamentalist preachers have chosen to leave out. For instance, there's the fact that the fear of God is seen in the way we treat each other - Job 22:6-9; Job 31:16-28. And that the love of God is seen in the way we treat each other - 1 John 3:16-20; 1 John 4:20-21. And that racism is sin, because it is an act of murder - 1 John 3:14-15 ("Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer; and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him.") And that God is opposed to the rich - James 5:1-6; Luke 6:24 ("Woe to you who are rich ..."). These are the things which God put into His message which people like Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell Jr. and John MacArthur and other ecclesiastical sycophant followers of Trump have left out. Meanwhile they have condemned things which God never condemned - things such as critical race theory, "woke-ism", social justice, and every other admonition to them that they should treat other people the same way they themselves want to be treated.
This has led to a certain unpalatability of both these messengers and their message. Indeed, from 2016 onward, these messengers have become not only unpalatable but downright nauseating. I mentioned earlier in this post the need for the messenger of the Gospel to practice what he preaches. This reminds me of a certain part of the third book in Liu Cixin's Three Body (三体, "San Ti") trilogy in which the people of Earth were tasked with configuring their society in such a way that any alien observers from outer space would be able to see that Earth humans posed no threat to the rest of the universe. The nature of the problem was such that this message (a "cosmic safety notice") could not be delivered by words, but only by actions. (That part of his third book was where I first encountered the term "performance art", by the way. Also, I'm not going to tell you how things worked out for the humans. You'll have to read the books.) This plot twist was a clever way of pointing out that one can learn much more about what kind of people one is dealing with by looking at what they do than by listening to what they say.
This point is amplified by another book to which I was recently exposed, namely Haruki Murakami's Novelist As A Vocation. In his description of the violence which ultimately ruined the student protests in Japan in the 1960's, Murakami wrote, “Uplifting slogans and beautiful messages might stir the soul, but if they weren't accompanied by moral power, they amounted to no more than a litany of empty words... Words have power. Yet that power must be rooted in truth and justice. Words must never stand apart from those principles.” This is obviously true not only of secular social movements, but of white American evangelicalism and Protestantism over the last several decades.
That the words of American evangelicals have largely proven to be empty can be seen in the racism of the white American evangelical church, its misogyny as seen by the staggering levels of spousal abuse (see this, this, and this for instance), its staggering levels of child abuse, its hypocrisy (as seen in its promotion of religious leaders and political candidates who claim to stand for morality yet wind up getting caught with their pants down), its violence (as seen in the "Christian nationalists" armed to the teeth who stormed state capitols during the COVID lockdowns in 2020 and who participated in the U.S. Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021), and its greed.
Indeed, if we look at what evangelicals actually do instead of what they say, we see that white American evangelicals (and the sons of Gehenna whom they have spawned in places like Brazil and Australia) care only about amassing secular earthly power to themselves. The only thing they want is dominion, domination, and control. Their religious profession is merely a tool to achieve this goal. Their lust for power over others is seen in the ways they treat everyone who falls into their clutches. It is seen in their treatment of their own women and children.
And this is what will lead eventually to their downfall and eventual loss of all earthly power. I am thinking of the power of shared stories to illuminate the true character and nature of abuse. I am thinking of the power of sunlight to disinfect dirty laundry. I am thinking especially of the power of exposes, of scandals revealed, of things like the Shiny Happy People documentary of the abuse that took place in the family of Rethuglicans Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar even as they paraded their family on national TV as an example of the perfect American family. Truly, "...there is nothing covered up that will not be revealed, and hidden that will not be known." (Luke 12:2)
It will be interesting to see how evangelical power-holders react and respond to the dwindling of their power in the years to come. Suffice it to say that I expect that their response will complicate our attempts as a society to deal with issues of encroaching limits and the erosion of economic, political and military power in general.
