You Have to Fight

“If you give them an inch, they’ll take a mile. You have to fight.”

Photo by David Guliciuc on Unsplash

I was listening to a church discussion of how we relate to culture, and this perspective was expressed by one of the participants. The specific example that prompted it, chosen more or less at random, was Starbucks’ choice to not put “Merry Christmas” on their holiday cups.

There were - and are - lots of good arguments on both sides, but I’m more interested in the implication that we haven’t fought, that we have somehow given inches, that we need to do more or do different if we don’t want to continue to lose miles. In my lifetime, I’ve seen the American evangelical church fight abortion, LGBTQ rights, music with explicit lyrics, music with unintelligible lyrics, Democratic presidents, drinking, gambling, playing cards because of their association with gambling, drugs, smoking, Dungeons & Dragons, Pokémon, Harry Potter, sex in video games, violence in video games, blasphemous art, R-rated movies, movies that fail to promote “family values,” the theory of evolution, saying “happy holidays” instead of “merry Christmas,” universalism, theological liberalism, political correctness, Satanism, tattoos, child pornography, communism, socialism, critical race theory, and K-Mart selling Playboy.

And this is nothing new. In the early 20th century, for example, evangelist Billy Sunday preached his famous “booze” sermon in Boston, Massachusetts:

It is my opinion that the saloonkeeper is worse than a thief and a murderer. The ordinary thief steals only your money, but the saloonkeeper steals your honor and your character. The ordinary murderer takes your life, but the saloonkeeper murders your soul.

The saloon is an infidel. It has no faith in God; has no religion. It would close every church in the land. It would hang its beer signs on the abandoned altars. It would close every public school. It respects the thief, and it esteems the blasphemer; it fills the prisons and penitentiaries. It despises heaven, hates love, and scorns virtue. It tempts the passions. Its music is the song of a siren. Its sermons are a collection of lewd, vile stories. It wraps a mantle about the hope of this world to come.

It is the moral clearinghouse for rot, and damnation, and poverty, and insanity, and it wrecks homes and blights lives today. The saloon is a liar. It promises health and causes disease. It promises prosperity and sends adversity. It promises happiness and sends misery.

His preaching was a significant factor in the adoption of the Eighteenth Amendment, prohibiting alcohol in the United States, in 1917.

In the 1960s, to our shame, we fought against civil rights. Philip Yancey writes in Soul Survivor of growing up in Atlanta:

[Martin Luther King, Jr.] was our number-one public enemy, a native of my own Atlanta, whom the Atlanta Journal regularly accused of “inciting riot in the name of justice.” Folks in my church had their own name for him: Martin Lucifer Coon. (p. 17)

During my adolescence I attended two different churches. The first, a Baptist church with more than a thousand members, took pride in its identity as a “Bible-loving church where the folks are friendly,” and in its support of 105 foreign missionaries, whose prayer cards were pinned to a wall-sized map of the world at the rear of the sanctuary. That church was one of the main watering holes for famous evangelical speakers. I learned the Bible there. It had a loose affiliation with the Southern Baptist Convention, a denomination founded in 1845 when Northern abolitionists decided that slave owners were unfit to be missionaries and the Southerners separated in protest. Even Southern Baptists were too liberal for most of us, though, which is why we maintained only a loose affiliation…

After the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, our church founded a private school as a haven for whites, expressly banning all black students…

The next church I attended was smaller, more fundamentalist, and more overtly racist… There I learned the theological basis for racism. The pastor taught that the Hebrew word Ham meant “burnt black,” making Noah’s son Ham the father of Negro races, and that in a curse Noah had consigned him to life as a lowly servant (Genesis 9)…

If anyone questioned such racist doctrine, pastors pulled out the trump card of miscegenation, or mixing of the races, which some speculated was the sin that had prompted God to destroy the world in Noah’s day. A single question, “Do you want your daughter bringing home a black boyfriend?” silenced all arguments about race (p. 21-23).

Many years later, Yancey attended the “burial” of this second church (“After moving to escape a changing neighborhood, the church found itself once again surrounded by African-Americans, and attendance had dwindled. In a sweet irony, it was now selling its building to an African-American congregation” (p. 4)) and reflected on the poisonous legacy of the church and how people such as Yancey’s brother turned away from the faith as a result.

Looking back over this history, it’s hard for me to imagine what “If you give an inch, they’ll take a mile; you have to fight” should even look like, because it seems to me that we’ve been fighting non-stop, with very mixed results.

Sometimes these fights are successful. Crime rates, for example, are significantly lower than they used to be — 60% lower in 2020 than in 1980. (However, the fact that this decline in crime rates can be credibly attributed to the removal of lead paint, rather than moral renewal led by the church, may shake our confidence in the church’s ability to bring moral change to the broader culture.)

Sometimes these fights are still ongoing. The June 2022 Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization removed federal protections around abortion rights, a decades-long goal of pro-life activists, but pro-life activists would be the first to say that we still have a very long way to go in creating a culture where abortion is unwanted, where life is consistently valued, where unborn babies and expectant mothers are protected and provided for.

Sometimes, in hindsight, these fights seem to have been misguided. I don’t hear anyone too concerned about Pokémon or playing cards nowadays, and church youth groups enjoy the occasional game of Dungeons & Dragons.

Sometimes, we may realize, like Philip Yancey, that the fight was simply wrong, that reading the Bible and professing to follow Christ is no proof against sin, and that great evil can be rationalized in the name of following God.

And sometimes, perhaps, we stop fighting too easily. Liquor usage doesn’t appear to be a front-and-center concern for many contemporary Christians, as it was in Billy Sunday’s day, but too many people can still testify to the devastation that alcoholism can cause - over 140,000 deaths in the U.S. per year, not to mention the damage done to relationships, families, jobs, finance, and health.

What would it mean to not give an inch? Looking over that list, can we say we haven’t fought enough? Did we somehow fail to let secular Americans know that we disapprove of what they’re doing? Was there some tactic or measure that we failed to employ that could have compelled culture to go our way?

Despite how it may sound, it’s not my intention to criticize these combatants. We are all, I trust, trying to faithfully follow God in a world with many temptations and snares; for me to say that “I, unlike these others, know exactly what this should look like” would be the height of arrogance. Following God sometimes means speaking out against immorality or error and standing up for the victims of injustice - in other words, fighting. The issues that we fight over often come out of a commendable and correct desire to see Christ as Lord over every aspect of our lives, to leave no activity or item unexamined. God may call believers to different battlefronts and give them passion about different causes, and I believe that God can use even misguided zeal of someone who truly seeks to follow him. Conflicts that seem unnecessary or even silly from the perspective of our current time period or setting may be more important than we realize in another. (Paul wrote that idols are nothing while also recognizing that, in the setting of the Corinthian church, eating meat offered to idols could cause Corinthian Christians real spiritual harm.)

But fighting can become a substitute for following - maybe because we become so convinced of our own rightness that we decide we can judge others, or maybe because straightforward standards of right and wrong are easier to understand and control than pursuing an infinite God whose holiness we can never live up to, or maybe because fighting obvious immorality that we personally don’t struggle with is easier than facing our own sin. Or maybe it’s simply that we’re afraid - afraid to see a society that’s changing and falling away from religion, afraid of hostility and harassment and losing cultural clout, afraid of whether our own churches and families and children will be able to remain faithful - and so we fight in the only way we know how, instead of trusting Jesus’ promise that the gates of hell will never prevail.

Because, ultimately, we do have to fight - but it’s a fight against our own sinfulness, vigorously training our own bodies rather than merely shadow-boxing (1 Cor 9:27), a struggle against spiritual forces (Eph. 6:12), an assault against the gates of hell (Mt 16:18), a battle to “snatch others from the fire” (Jude 23), as we’re watched by angels (Eph. 3:10) and cheered on by those who’ve gone before us (Heb. 12:1).

Not just an argument over Starbucks Christmas cups.

Bible Stories

Why do we study Bible stories? We touched on recently in looking at the lives of David, Saul, and Solomon, but it’s worth a closer look.

There are a few reasons. First is simply that they’re history, and (as high school students toiling through AP US History can attest), we’ve concluded as a society that history is worth studying. It lets us know the causes and effects that brought us to our current state of affairs; it gives us understanding and precedent to guide our future actions (“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” - George Santayana); it helps us understand and appreciate our own culture and traditions; it broadens our perspectives, giving us a window into the lives and cultures and perspectives of people, times, and cultures different than our own; it offers good stories, and as humans, we enjoy and draw value from good human stories.

Bible stories aren’t just history, but they are history, and they can help fulfill all of these roles.

Second, we can learn moral lessons from them. There’s biblical precedent for this; for example, in 1 Cor 10:11, Paul talks about the Israelites’ rebellion in the desert and writes, “These things happened to them as examples and were written for our instruction.” In Psalm 95:8, God gives the Israelites in the desert as a negative example. Heb 11 lists numerous biblical characters and holds them up as examples of faith.

This is where many of our modern Bible studies spend their time. However, it’s possible to overdo this. In Joseph and the Gospel of Many Colors, Voddie Bauchum talks about delivering a sermon series on Genesis and, afterwards, receiving a letter from a Jewish visitor to his church thanking him for his sermon. He writes,

As I read her letter, my eyes filled with tears. However, these were not tears of joy because the Lord had used my sermon in the life of a Jew. On the contrary, these were tears of horror and shame! As I read her words, all I could think of were Paul’s words: “But we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:23-24). So why wasn’t my message a “stumbling block” to this Jew? Was it because she was “being saved”? No. It was because I had not preached Christ! (p. 16)

He goes on to argue that viewing stories through the lens of moralism misses the gospel - the good news that Christ offers salvation apart from our moral acts. If we read Bible stories only for moral lessons, we risk reducing them to the level of one of Aesop’s fables or moral-of-the-episode pop culture, rather than pointing us to Christ.

Third, and deeper, the stories tell us who we are. Let me illustrate with an example from the workplace. When I joined a previous company, a software development consultancy, my knowledge of them was limited to what I read from their website and a few conversations with them over the interview and hiring process. And, since it was a fully remote position, my interactions with them were limited. However, I quickly heard the story from before I joined of how they had lined up a major contract, only to have it canceled at the last minute, and how they navigated the resulting challenges. This was a major event in the life of the company and became a part of their identity and DNA. This story told me such a wealth about who they were - the inherent uncertainties of their line of work, how they sacrificed to take care of their contractors during this trying time, the frugality and caution with which they approached finances and negotiations as a result. And, as a new member of the team, it told me a wealth about who I was expected to be - and it instilled those values in me far more effectively than any corporate onboarding training or employee handbook could.

This dynamic applies in personal relationships as well as corporate. Russell Moore writes,

New friendships are often made from stories. Whenever you meet someone new, that person may ask you, “So what’s your story?” Even when it’s not directly said, it’s an unspoken question. We tell pieces of our life stories to each other and are often happy to find those stories overlap… When you tell something of your story to a new friend, you are saying something akin to “Here’s who I am. What about you?”

Children grow up hearing stories of their parents and grandparents and learn about their family, what their family values, where they came from, and how they fit in. Growing up in a small town lets you hear stories of the town’s colorful characters and memorable events, filling this same role at the level of the community; the stories that we tell in civics and history classes serve the same role at the national level. Someone meeting their boyfriend’s or girlfriend’s parents for the first time likely hears stories from their childhood, learning more about the person who they’ve chosen to give their affections to.

Bible stories do this for us within the community of faith, because God isn’t merely saving us individually and honing our individual moral characters. He’s working throughout history to form a people for himself, and so the stories help us to see how we fit into this broader purpose of God, and the stories of God’s people in the past tells us what it means to be a part of God’s people now, and we recognize that part of the purpose of the stories of the past is so that we can be a part of God’s people now.

Or, as Rich Mullins put it more poetically in “Sometimes by Step,”

Sometimes I think of Abraham
How one star he saw had been lit for me

Fourth, and deeper still, the stories help us better know God himself. In Searching for God Knows What, Donald Miller describes teaching a Bible college class.

This year I asked the students to list the precepts a person would need to understand in order to become a Christian. I stood at the white board and they called out ideas: Man was sinful by nature; sin separates us from God; Jesus died for our sins; we could accept Jesus into our hearts… and so on. Then, looking at the board, I began to ask some questions about these almost universally accepted ideas. I asked if a person could believe all these ideas were true and yet not be a Christian… The students conceded that, in fact, a person could know and even believe all the concepts on the board and yet not be a Christian. “Then there is something missing, isn’t there?” I said to the class. “It isn’t watertight just yet. There must be some idea we are leaving out, some full-proof thing a person has to agree with in order to have a relationship with Christ.”

We sat together and looked at the board for several minutes until we conceded that we weren’t going to come up with the missing element. I then erased the board and asked the class a different question: “What ideas would a guy need to agree with or what steps would a guy need to take in order to fall in love with a girl?” The class chuckled a bit, but I continued, going so far as to begin a list.

1. A guy would have to get to know her.

I stood back from the board and wondered out loud what the next step might be. “Any suggestions?” I asked the class. We thought about it for a second, and then one of the students spoke up and said, “It isn’t exactly a scientific process.” (p. 153-154)

To fall in love with God, we have to get to know him. And, to get to know someone, we can spend time with him, and we can listen to him talk, and we listen to stories about him, because stories tell us what the person did and what kind of person he is and what’s important to him - through both the stories themselves and the choice of which sequences of events were selected and organized and retold. The stories of the Bible help us fall in love with God by showing us his love, his faithfulness to his people, his willingness to act on their behalf, his desire to relate to them, and his anger at sin - at anything that interferes with this relationship.

This may help explain why so much of the Bible is story, rather than theology treatise. Because I believe that God, in his omnipotence and wisdom, and in his inspiration of Scripture, isn’t merely relaying a sequence of events; he has chosen those events and how they’re told in order for us to better know him. And, because we’re relational, story-telling creatures, this may teach us more than a theology treatise would, just as my coworkers’ story of their canceled contract taught me more than any corporate training could.

And the stories themselves become a way of spending time with God - much the same as a family or old friends spend time swapping stories. Russell Moore, again:

When we spend time with old friends and tell remembered stories… we aren’t communicating information; we’re reliving our experiences. We’re saying things like “Can you believe we got to see that?” or “Can you believe we survived that?” or “Don’t you miss that?” or “Aren’t you glad that’s over?”

It’s just another way of knowing one another—and of being known.

And the stories become a way of praising God. By re-reading and retelling the stories of God’s actions on behalf of his people in the past, we’re communicating God’s power, his faithful promise-keeping on behalf of his people, his mercy, and his love.

Stating the Obvious

At the risk of stating the obvious, Nero was not a nice man.

The fifth emperor of Rome, Nero reigned from AD 54 to AD 68. He had a widespread reputation for being “tyrannical, self-indulgent, and debauched” (Wikipedia). He killed his mother and has been suspected or accused of killing his first wife, second wife (although this is questioned by modern historians), and step-brother. After his second wife’s death in AD 65, he had a young man who resembled his second wife castrated, married him, and started treating him as a woman. He was believed to have started the Great Fire of Rome in AD 64; after the fire, he rebuilt Rome, including a new palace complex, the Domus Aurea (“Golden House”), funded by heavy taxation and devaluing the Roman currency. After the fire, he was said to have tortured and killed Christians, perhaps blaming them for the fire, and had some early Christians burned alive. Later tradition said that Peter was crucified and Paul beheaded during Nero’s persecutions. When political winds finally turned against Nero (due in part to a rebellion against his taxation), he fled to a villa outside of Rome. He planned to commit suicide, lamenting, “What an artist dies in me.” He ultimately could not go through with the deed and instead forced his secretary to kill him.

Nero remained infamous after his death; a legend soon arose that he had survived and would return to conquer his enemies and lead Rome. At least three impostors, claiming to be Nero, organized rebellions, and the belief in Nero’s return, called the Nero Revividus legend, persisted in some places for centuries. Some scholars believe that Revelation’s beast from the sea, which received a lethal wound but was healed (Rev. 13:3), is an allusion to Nero Revividus. (John, or the Spirit through John, could have easily chosen imagery and metaphors that would be familiar and vivid to John’s first leaders.)

This forms the backdrop for 1 Peter, which evangelical scholars believe was perhaps written sometime around AD 62-64. In 1 Pe 2:13-17, Peter writes:

Be subject to every human institution for the Lord’s sake, whether to a king as supreme or to governors as those he commissions to punish wrongdoers and praise those who do good. For God wants you to silence the ignorance of foolish people by doing good. Live as free people, not using your freedom as a pretext for evil, but as God’s slaves. Honor all people, love the family of believers, fear God, honor the king.

Notice what Peter does not say: “Honor the king, as long as he isn’t tyrannical, self-indulgent, or debauched.” “Be subject to the king, unless he starts fires and blames you for it.” “Honor the king under normal circumstances, but if he starts killing family members or burning people alive, feel free to verbally attack him.” 1 Peter may have been written before Nero’s persecutions started, but even then, Nero’s character wasn’t the sort that an observant Jewish Christian would approve of. And, if Nero’s persecutions would have changed things, it’s hard to imagine Peter’s inspired instruction not including that caveat.

I think of this sometimes when I see a “Let’s go, Brandon!” sign or dip my toes in the constant stream of political jokes, memes, and insults on Facebook or Twitter. Because, if Peter didn’t write, “Be subject to and honor the king, unless he’s a self-indulgent, debauched tyrant,” he certainly didn’t write, “Be subject to and honor the ruler, unless he’s a senile socialist” - or an orange-skinned grifter, or a closeted Muslim from Kenya, or an American idiot, to cover a sampling of the insults from the last twenty years of American presidential politics.

This doesn’t mean that we automatically obey those in power. Peter earlier said that, if forced to choose between God and humanity, he would obey God (Acts 5:29). And this doesn’t mean that we can never criticize those in power. Even in this passage, Peter speaks of “the ignorance of foolish people,” and John the Baptist and Jesus both have pointed criticism for political leaders (Mt 14:4, Lk 13:32). And there may even be a place for vivid or even inflammatory language; both Jesus and Paul did that if the issues they were addressing are important enough (e.g., Mt 23:27, Gal 5:12). But I’m not nearly as wise or mature as Jesus or Paul. And I also notice that the New Testament speakers’ most pointed criticisms are reserved for people claiming to be members of the religious community - those who claim to share with us a higher standard, whose actions are causing genuine spiritual danger to fellow believers. I’m afraid that many of our political memes, jokes, commentary, and slogans aren’t about offering a moral challenge or applying God’s standards or protecting fellow believers. They too often feel like just complaining, venting our spleen about situations we have limited ability to change, bonding with those who share our views by tearing down those who don’t.

Does this mean that there’s never a place for political humor? I’m not sure. Satire is a powerful tool. Humor can be healthy (especially if we’re poking fun at ourselves or those in our faction), and it can be a useful coping mechanism. And I certainly have laughed and shared the occasional critical joke. But, even if it’s not inherently wrong, I’m not sure that our constant stream of negative political humor and commentary is spiritually or psychologically healthy. If our fundamental mentality is to be one of honoring and respecting those in authority, it’s hard to reconcile that with some of the attitudes I see on Facebook and Twitter. And I’m reminded of C.S. Lewis’s warning in Mere Christianity about loving our enemies:

The real test is this. Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, “Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,” or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally, we shall insist on seeing everything - God and our friends and ourselves included - as bad, and not be able to stop doing it; we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred. (p. 91)

I’m not a fan of Joe Biden. I have from time to time complained about him. But this message from him happened to pop up in my Twitter feed sometime around Easter last year:

As we reflect today on Christ’s Resurrection, we are reminded that with faith, hope, and love — even death can be defeated. From our family to yours, we wish you hope, health, joy, and the peace of God, which passes all understanding. Happy Easter and may God bless and keep you.

This was an important reminder to me - regardless of what I think of the leadership and policies of Biden (or Trump, or Obama, or Bush), what’s far more important is whether they and I are following Christ. Paul writes about this in 2 Cor 5:15, in talking about what it means to live for Christ as ambassadors of reconciliation: “From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh” (ESV). Regarding our political leaders as partisan allies or enemies, as the butts of our jokes or as a means to the end of punishing our foes, is regarding them according to the flesh. Instead, let’s give them the same honor and respect that Peter gave Nero, while continuing to live as ambassadors of Christ.