This morning we all slept in and therefore went to the reformed (ie Grace) Presbyterian: a group who are relentlessly Evangelical (read Calvinist) in their theology and practice. The sermon was on Philippians 3: that all the good things that we have done are but dung in God’s sight. The preacher was trying to explain that the word meant ordure, faecal material and was slightly rude.

He would have been more accurate in his translation if he said that Paul considered all the qualifications he had as a Jew and as a righteous person to be shit.

I flip between this congregation and my main one: which is far more polite, far more emergent, far more establishment, and equally fervent. I have good friends in my main congregation. But they tend to think that we can be nice, and it will all be good.

It will not be so.

It all stemmed from a diarist here at RedState who took the position that gay marriage did not affect him, he did not care about it, and he would never care about. But, of course, you will be made to care. It is a larger issue than just gay marriage and many comfortably naive, living at the margins of faith, Christians, think they have a comfortable path through life in the United States.

Put bluntly: if you do have a comfortable path through life with no fears at all of persecution, you probably are not a Christian. Islam may be about submission, but Christianity is about suffering.¹ The suffering may not be major. It may be an accumulation of small sleights over time. It may be the loss of a friend or just the expulsion of your Christian group from your private school. But Christianity is a religion of suffering and persecution.

You will be made to care. You’ll be made to care about gay marriage. You’ll be made to care about killing kids. You’ll be made to care about the influence of a secular culture on your children as they grow. You’ll be made to care about a host of issues.

A lot of Christians have long thought they could sit on the sidelines. Only the icky evangelicals they don’t much care for and the creepily committed Catholics would have to deal with these issues and the people who hate those deeply committed to their faith. They, on the other hand, could sit on the sidelines, roll their eyes, and tell everyone that they didn’t think it was that big a deal.
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There is no ambiguity in that statement. You may think you can sit on the sidelines. You may think you can opt-out of the culture war. You may think you can hide behind your trendy naked Leena Dunham t-shirt while you sip trendy drinks talking about trendy shows and writing columns demanding Christians be forced by the state to bake cakes, provide flowers and farms, and offer up photographs of gay weddings. But not only will you one day be called to account to your God for how you advanced his kingdom, but on this Earth you will be made to care. That does not mean you have license to be bitter or angry or hateful. You should love others and help others. Just do not expect anything in return.

And this is the fun, weird, odd bit of it — the world will make you choose your side and force you to care, not God. God will call you to account, but the world will force you to pick your tribe.

Your tribe will be chosen for you. You will be forced to kneel before a false God — and the secularists are becoming more overtly religious by the day — or a true God. Being a Christian will get you shunned. It will stop you getting promoted. So be it.

Being respectable is probably an error, anyway.

Many of the most hopeful and best parts of evangelicalism the past fifteen years have been encompassed by an incipient desire for respectability. The resurgent apologetics-evangelicals have sought to demonstrate the faith’s intellectual credibility, while the artistic evangelicals have made it quite clear you can still love Jesus and watch House of Cards, thank you very much. The politically-reformist evangelicals have put a hole in the “not like those Republicans” drum, while the social justice evangelicals have made everyone forget about the Four Spiritual Laws. And some of us—ahem—have pounded on about how we can read the old stuff, too, which can be its own form of “not like them folks there” attitude.

Those movements for reform and expansion of the evangelical footprint are worthy enough in their own right, maybe. But Reform has often been laced with the promise of Respectability, and many of us—me included—have swallowed the poison. I have a vague, half-articulated notion that those King James only communities who have been the butt of so many evangelical jokes will be, when it’s all said and done, some of the only Protestant communities still standing: they gave up their respectability a long time ago and don’t seem to have missed it since.

Harrison Warren, indeed, mentions the Amish as one plausible path forward for “cultural engagement.” Few young evangelicals will seriously take that path, though perhaps many more should. But the vast majority of us will, I suspect, continue to fight and plead for a kind of respectability out of the earnest, good-hearted desire to see our neighbors convinced of our ideas—or if not of our ideas, at the very least of our sanity. Arguments for ‘civility’ and ‘tolerance’ and ‘pluralism’ and ‘respect’ are coming fast and furious these days, after all, even though they are fifteen years (at least) too late.

I have had another general impression—and the reader will rightly accuse me at this point of having far too many of those in this post—that what evangelicals, young and old, most desperately need is a political manifestation of joy. Harrison Warren sounds the martyrs note, without overstriking it: “Throughout history and even now, Christians in many parts of the world face not only rejection but violent brutality. What they face is incomparably worse than anything we experience on U.S. college campuses, yet they tutor us in compassion, courage, and subversive faithfulness.” Yet if we do not grasp the joy of the martyrs, we do not understand them at all.

I was accused recently, in talking about these sorts of things with students, of being something of a pessimist. “We ought to keep fighting,” the argument went, “because the world we’re handing down to our children matters.” Fair enough, and Lord knows that I am not yet perfected in my joy. But Christians need a flagrant disregard for the coming wave of disrepute, a disregard which quickly turns the pathetic instruments of stigmatization into jewelry and art. Without that, and without Jove’s presence among us, whatever “argument” we have will come to no effect. Pessimism and the joy of the martyr may look almost the same, but as Chesterton noted, the one dies for the sake of dying while the other for the sake of living.

I am fallen, and I don’t care about what my secular brothers and sisters do as much as I ought. I should care more, for the sake of their souls. But the elite of our society call those of faith judgmental.

Let them. For our trust is not in this nation, or our laws, or in whatever has been defined as a human right, a human contract. All those can be broken.

Our trust must be in God. For in him there is life, in all others perdition.