To Only Regain Control

A fringe benefit of Timon Cline's (click here for a brief bio) article, Is Cultural Christianity Enough?  (click  here for the article) is that it helps us see the different levels in which some Christians are seeking control over society and the state. This is important so that we look at such believers, fellow believers for me, as forming a monolithic group.

Cline starts the article with a positive attribution to the Trump Presidency. According to Cline, one of the fringe benefits of the Trump Presidency was that it reintroduced the issue of the role of religion in American society. From here, while briefly mentioning establishmentarianism, which in this case would be state church  of 17th century, Cline talks about how the Great Awakening of the 1740s with its voluntary Cultural Christianity became the model that is more-less followed today. The Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s saw an enthusiastic renewal of interest in the Protestant Christian religion. 

Though Cline later on expresses fondness for a certain kind of Cultural Christianity, he attributes intolerance and oppression to the Cultural Christianity that accompanied the then revival in Christianity. Cultural Christianity is where culture values, some of which are codified into law, are used to encourage or enforce conformity to Christian standards. That means that Cline seems to have ignored the intolerance and oppression that came with the establishmentarianism of the Puritans. 

But  the problem with Cline's logic here is one of facts. The Puritans required strict adherence to their understanding of the Christian faith. That was demonstrated with their expulsion of Roger Williams and their treatment of the Quakers, which included that of martyring 4 of them. And that doesn't include the taking of land from Native Americans and participating in slave trading using captured Native Americans as their merchandise.

And while Cline has good and bad things to say about Cultural Christianity, he makes another important distinction between a Cultural Christianity that relies on some laws for enforcement and a 'mere' Cultural Christianity that insists on not using laws to promote Christian values. 

Of course the goal of each of these approaches is to build a 'Christian civilization.' With that civilization comes rules for what can be tolerated. In considering what should be tolerated outside of Christianity are two questions according to Cline. First, can Christians prosper and bear fruit in a society where there is an absence of an adequate standard of morality? Second, can a society itself survive without an adequate standard for morality? For Cline questions whether an adequate standard for morality can be established without a significant Christian influence.

What can we say about Cline's article? The contribution he makes is that he provides some distinctions in the levels of control some Christians want to have over the state and society. There is establishmentarianism where we have a state church. Then there are two different approaches to Cultural Christianity with each having multiple levels of Christian control over culture. The goal of each level of Christian control is to built a Christian Civilization.

But one really has to wonder about the need for a Christian Civilization. Certainly such a civilization would make life here easier and more comfortable for many of us Christians. On the other hand, the New Testament tells us not to build our treasure here on earth and that we have no home here on earth. Rather, we are to live as exiles, as perhaps those Hebrews who wandered in the desert or those Israelites who were taken captive and sent to Babylon.

The first few centuries of the Church's existence challenge Cline's question of Christians needing society to have basic Christian moral standards for the Church to not just survive, but to thrive as well.

As for society's need for a Christian influence, here we need to review Church history and correct, again, Cline's claim that oppression from the Church only occurred during the time of Cultural Christianity. Then again, Cline does not consider certain kinds of intolerance exercised by the Church over society to be oppression. He does not offer specifics here, but he states that we need Christian standards to determine what society should tolerate. 

Also, we need to ask what we saw in this nation regarding the time when Christianity had a dominant voice. From the beginning of this nation we have seen centuries of white supremacy exercised against Native Americans in the form of ethnic cleansing and against Blacks in the form of regarding them as property and inferiors. We've seen  the oppression of women for centuries. We have seen violent labor struggles. For centuries we have seen the oppression of the LGBT community. We have also seen American imperialism and hubris abroad. And that doesn't count how the American way of life is threatening future generations by size of its carbon footprint. 

When we look at Church history and the history of our nation, is it any wonder why we have seen the emergence of Marxism, Critical Theory, Post Modernism, and Critical Race Theory. The basis for these criticisms of Western Civilization offered by each of these schools of thought are based on observation. And what has been observed are gross failures of what the West's Christian Civilization has wrought. Here we should note that America is not the only Western nation with gross moral failures.

Finally, the place that Cline wants Christianity to obtain in society flies in the face of what Democracy provides and demands. What democracy demands is equality for certain groups that many Christians who favor either a Christian state or culture oppose. And here we should note that when we Christians pursue a Christian civilization, state, or even culture we align Christianity with being an enemy of democracy.

So in the end, what Cline fails to see is that the kind of influence he wants Christianity to have over the state and society has damaged the reputation of the Gospel in the eyes of many people, especially those who are not social and political conservatives.