One
There’s a blog called Coffee & Covid that made the rounds a couple of times on Facebook during the pandemic, so several months ago, while the delta variant was making the news, I took a look at one of the posts. The author, a Christian lawyer, makes the following arguments:
- Covid (and the delta variant in particular) aren’t nearly as bad as they’re made out to be, and the Covid vaccines aren’t as helpful as they’re made out to be.
- Culture is surrendering to a “Spirit of Fear” about Covid. Fear is a spiritual problem, not a medical or scientific or political problem. It’s manifesting itself in anxiety, depression, and more. The Bible teaches is not to fear (Phil. 4:6). The church needs to boldly speak out against this Spirit of Fear.
I could argue with some of his first point, except that I’ve made a policy to not get involved in Covid debates online. I agree with much of his second point: Covid has caused a lot of mental harm, and the Bible does command us not to fear. I think that fear is an “acceptable” sin among Christians - the prevalence of anxiety and stress and worry among Christians (not just around Covid) suggests that we aren’t taking Scripture’s teachings seriously here. If the church can speak to this and can help people with their fears and anxieties, as the Coffee & Covid post argues that it should, then that’s great!
I’m more interested in the relationship between the first and second points. If Covid isn’t nearly as bad as it’s made out to be, and if the dilemma about whether or not to get vaccinated isn’t as high-stakes as it’s made out to be, then fear is an intellectual and emotional error, not a spiritual problem. (In other words, we don’t need to fear because there isn’t really anything to be afraid of.) Saying that fear is a spiritual problem means that, even if whatever we’re afraid of is genuinely terrifying as all get-out, we need to trust God regardless.
Two
Donald Trump’s position on abortion has been the focus of much scrutiny over the last several years. In older interviews, he described himself as pro-choice, but starting in 2011, he said that he was pro-life:
I’m pro-life, but I changed my view a number of years ago. One of the reasons I changed – one of the primary reasons – a friend of mine’s wife was pregnant, in this case married.
She was pregnant and he didn’t really want the baby. And he was telling me the story. He was crying as he was telling me the story. He ends up having the baby and the baby is the apple of his eye. It’s the greatest thing that’s ever happened to him.
He elaborated in a 2015 debate:
“Friends of mine years ago were going to have a child, and it was going to be aborted. And it wasn’t aborted. And that child today is a total superstar, a great, great child. And I saw that. And I saw other instances.”
In another exchange,
he responded to a reporter who wondered if he would have become pro-life had the child been a “loser”: “Probably not, but I’ve never thought of it. I would say no, but in this case it was an easy one because he’s such an outstanding person.”
In some of the ensuing abortion debates, some pro-life advocates pushed back on Trump; they argued that abortion should be opposed because human life is intrinsically valuable, not because the fetus may go on to be a superstar and an outstanding person.
Three
In Joy at Work, Dennis Bakke, a Christian business leader, talks about his philosophy and experiences as the head of AES, a multi-billion-dollar international energy company. When he and cofounder Roger Sant started the company, he adopted the philosophy that enjoyment - joy - at work came from making meaningful, challenging, and rewarding decisions, and companies’ approach of a centralized hierarchy of authority stifled employees’ ability to do this. AES therefore radically decentralized its decision-making; decisions such as HR, salary, and acquisitions were pushed out as far as possible to those most directly affected, while executives merely gave advice. Bakke also made a commitment to operate the business on Christian principles and to consider its impact on society, employees, suppliers, and customers, instead of prioritizing the interests of the shareholders.
When AES went public, they included the following text in their public-offering memo:
Adherence to AES’s Values - Possible Impact on Results of Operations. An important element of AES is its commitment to four major ‘shared’ values: to act with integrity, to be fair, to have fun, and to be socially responsible. See ‘Business - Values and Practices.’ AES believes that earning a fair profit is an important result of providing a quality product to its customers. However, if the Company perceives a conflict between these values and profits, the Company will try to adhere to its values - even though doing so might result in diminished profits or forgone opportunities. Moreover, the Company seeks to adhere to these values not as a means to achieve economic success, but because adherence is a worthwhile goal in and of itself. The Company intends to continue these policies after this offering. (p.39)
Bakke explains that, when they submitted this memo to the SEC, the SEC suggested that they move this paragraph under “Special Risk Factors,” advising potential investors of risks of investing in the company. He writes:
In our case, the SEC thought our values were a hazard… I loved it. I could now say that the U.S. government thought it was very risky to attempt to operate a business with integrity, fairness, social responsibility, and a sense of fun.
AES was very successful. Bakke goes on to write, though, that explaining its values was a constant challenge; the board of directors kept thinking that AES was successful because of its values and its radical approach to decision-making, and Bakke kept trying to explain that AES followed its values because they believed it was the right thing to do, and he would continue to do it even if it wasn’t successful. He ultimately failed; when the energy industry was rocked by the Enron scandal in 2001 and AES’s stock price tumbled, the board decided that its philosophy was no longer working, and they forced Bakke out.
Four
I didn’t watch the 2014 movie God’s Not Dead, but I heard enough about it that I’m familiar with the basic plot. A Christian college student named Josh enrolls in a class taught by an aggressive atheist who challenges the class, “God is dead.” Josh ends up being challenged to a formal debate with the professor. At the end of the movie, Josh is vindicated: he wins the debate, and the professor reveals that his atheism stems from anger with God at some past tragedy in his life.
The movie was very popular within evangelical circles: it cost $2 million to make, grossed $62 million, and spawned three sequels. I felt like the ending was a little bit of wish fulfillment, though; evangelicals feel harassed or looked down upon by broader culture (especially the cultural elites of media and academia), so we wanted to see a movie where the Christian “won.” If Joshua had lost the debate (which, humanly speaking, would be likely, given the professor’s broader learning and experience), flunked out of college, and worked as a Starbucks barista for the rest of his life, it would still be a story of faithful Christian witness; in fact, compared to many historical Christian witnesses (the original meaning of the Greek word “martyr”), he would have gotten off easy.
Why?
What do a pandemic blog post, a president’s pro-life conversion, a billion-dollar energy company, and a possibly kitschy Christian film have in common? All of them confuse means with ends; all of them confuse the value that a thing can bring with the value of the thing itself.
We say that God’s eye is on the sparrow and that we don’t have to fear anything, yet we can’t help but try and argue that our fears are smaller instead of remembering that God is greater. Truly conquering the spirit of fear would mean saying that, even if all of the worst doomsayer predictions of Covid were right, and it killed one of out ten people and could spread through surfaces and even the briefest outdoor contact and required brutal lockdowns and became endemic with unending variants, we can still know that our heavenly Father will provide all the things that we need (Mt. 6:31-33).
If Trump’s friend’s baby really did help Trump realize the value of life, then that’s great. But the reason we’re pro-life is because we believe that human life has inherent value, because it’s made in the image of God, and that life has value and is worth protecting even if Trump’s friend’s baby grew up to be a total scuzzbucket who brought his parents nothing but grief and heartache.
Countless business books, articles, and talks espouse virtues such as leadership, teamwork, trust, communication, and responsibility and talk about how these can promote success in business. Few business leaders are willing to say, like Bakke, that the real reason to talk about these good traits is because they are, in fact, good, and they remain good even if they don’t “pay off“ and even if they hurt a company in the marketplace.
And I appreciate God’s Not Dead’s depiction of a Christian willing to stand firm for his faith. But I can’t help but think that it would not have been nearly as successful if it didn’t also show him winning the debate and succeeding in college as a result of standing firm for his faith. (Case in point: Silence, a movie about the brutal persecution of Christians in 17th century Japan, featuring a Catholic missionary who renounced his faith, earned only $22 million against its $50 million budget, despite critical acclaim and an Academy Award nomination.)
And so forth. So many of the stories, fables, and works of fiction, both for children and adults, show someone doing something good and then being rewarded for it. Good stewardship is encouraged as a means of achieving financial success, instead of simply the right way to treat the finite resources God gives us. Christian purity culture encouraged abstinence before marriage by saying that it would result in better sex within marriage, even though that risks getting further involved in culture’s over-sexualization rather than offering a meaningful alternative. Left-wing writers, in a well-intentioned effort to oppose inequality and discrimination, insist that there are no meaningful differences in skill or aptitude between men and women; maybe so (the topic of gender differences is worth books by itself), but this argument leaves unchallenged the deeper lie that our skills and aptitude determine our worth, that someone who’s smart or a math genius or socially adept is simply better than someone who isn’t. Right-wing writers uphold Christian values as part of what makes Western civilization great; maybe so, and following God’s ways can certainly brings blessings, but we’re better served (and better serve) by quietly living out Christian values (1 Pe 3:15-16) than by getting involved in culture wars over Western civilization.
Most of us within evangelical churches are very aware of the dangers of the prosperity gospel: the “name-it-and-claim-it” idea that God will always reward us with financial success, physical health, and temporal happiness, as long as we approach him with the right kind of prayer and sufficient faith. But the prosperity idea can be much more subtle than that: the idea that it’s better to be smart, sexy, successful, rich, well-respected, independent than not; the idea that goodness and morality and God’s ways are good because they can help us achieve these states; the idea that doing the right thing will produce good results; the idea that, if you didn’t get good results, it’s because you did something wrong. Now, obviously, God does bless those who do the right thing. And following God’s ways will make things go well for you (he did, after all, create the universe in accordance with his ways) - but maybe not right away, and maybe not in this lifetime, and maybe not where we can see it. And, regardless, that isn’t why we do it - the point is our desire to please the One we love, not the benefits that we may or may not get out of it.
When the fig tree does not bud,
—Habakkuk 3:17-19
and there are no grapes on the vines;
when the olive trees do not produce
and the fields yield no crops;
when the sheep disappear from the pen
and there are no cattle in the stalls—
I will rejoice because of the Lord;
I will be happy because of the God who delivers me!
The Sovereign Lord is my source of strength.
He gives me the agility of a deer;
he enables me to negotiate the rugged terrain.
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