A reader who asks for anonymity gives me permission to post this letter below. Given its length, I’m publishing it as a separate post instead of as an update to the previous Trevin Wax/Live Not By Lies post:

I found your response to Trevin Wax’s critique of your book interesting, because as a long-time reader of your blog and fan of the Benedict Option, as well as a raised-devoutly-Catholic-turned-Evangelical, it brought to mind a lot of similar things I’ve experienced when discussing your work with Evangelical Christian friends of mine. I haven’t discussed much ‘Live Not By Lies’ (for simple reason that I don’t yet have a copy—very much looking forward to that), but I think the overarching themes are similar enough to Benedict Option that what I have to say applies in both cases.

I have recommended BenOp to scores of people and purchased many copies for others to ensure they read it, always looking forward to their thoughts and fruitful discussion. Almost universally amongst my Evangelical kin, they recognize the cultural challenges BenOp surfaces, and sympathize with your view of these developments, but they do so in a kind of dismissive, “Yeah, it’s frustrating, isn’t it?” manner, and tend to figuratively roll their eyes at the need to create intentionally Christian communities with the physical space and outward trappings of such a community in order to protect and preserve it. The first person I ever had read the book summed it up to me thusly: “So, we should go start a cult in Montana?” Most other responses have been within striking range of that sentiment. They see the cultural morass of the moment as a passing thunderstorm: it looks and sounds scary, but with a few exceptional lightning strikes, it’ll pass and everything will be just fine when the sun comes out again. They are happy to acknowledge alongside you that a storm exists—but where you see Category 5 hurricanes and F6 tornadoes, they see weather-as-usual.

I’m going to generalize here, because of course there are always exceptions, but it has struck me that my Catholic family is much more receptive to the full message of the BenOp. I’ve been frustrated by these differences in reception; I confess that like you, I think that this time it may be different: this might be the Cat 5 storm and not just a passing thundercloud. I want those I care about to take it seriously, but I get the “What are you worried about, just trust in God” response. All of this has led me to consider why the American response to these times, especially amongst Evangelicals, is what it is. I fully concede I can’t predict the future any better than Trevin Wax, and he might be right and you (we) might be wrong. But of what value is it to speculate that perhaps some unforeseen threat will come from the far-right? Perhaps a miracle cure for coronavirus will be discovered, too, or perhaps another virus with truly apocalypse-level impact will come on its heels. None of what is unknown justifies us ignoring what is known, which is what I think you are trying to do with BenOp and LNBL.

I think there are (at least) 3 big reasons Evangelical response to both of your books has been somewhat tepid, at least relative to the more traditional strands of the Christian faith, and these reasons are all inextricably intertwined with one another.

First is the history of Protestantism in the west, and in America in particular, and the hold of Calvinism on the American Evangelical Church (I cannot speak to other places for lack of personal knowledge) that specifically gave rise to the notion of the Protestant Work Ethic. The PWE binds hard work at one’s trade as a sign of devotion to God, and thus as an external sign of one’s salvation. I’m a big fan of working hard, but you can see how easily this can be corrupted from “Work hard as a tribute to God’s glory” to “The fruits of hard work are a tribute to God’s glory” (the prosperity gospel follows in short order).

In the American Industrial Revolution this gave rise to ideas along the lines of “work harder, make more money, and then you can give back more”, as exemplified by Titans of Industry/Evangelical Christians like John D. Rockefeller, and PWE can be fairly considered the genesis of the “American Dream”. Max Weber even goes so far as to say it is the PWE that gave rise to capitalism, though this is disputed. But what is not in dispute is that the idea of working hard, and of the fruits of that work being a sign that you are “doing it right”, certainly has lent itself to American capitalist values, and I believe has made it hard today for many Evangelical Christians to disentangle their faith from their economic system.

When in your writing you suggest that capitalism may be in some ways at fault for the precipice we find ourselves on, this (along with other status quo issues you challenge) is almost unthinkable and leads to an instinctive rejection of the rest of your message. Consumerism, buying the bigger house, traveling and taking photos for Instagram…these fruits of our labor cannot possibly be part of the problem, and you can’t possibly be suggesting we give these up! To do so is to be over the top, an alarmist. “It’s just a photo on social media. It’s just a car. It’s just a movie.” Taken in isolation, all is harmless. Taken together…we shall see.

One place where I see this most evident is in the adoption of capitalism’s “growth as its own end” mentality, applied to churches, which I believe is the second reason Evangelicals struggle with your work. I have helped Evangelical churches in a consulting capacity in the past, and without fail the pastors and elders say they want to be run “more like a business”. There are numerous books and resources on how to run church like a business (coffee shop in the front!), but I have not seen any that target the Catholic Church or mainline protestant churches, which is interesting. It has been my experience ever since converting to Evangelical Christianity that churches around the country all prioritize growth—butts in seats, if you will—in much the same way a social network prioritizes number of users (as opposed to, say, quality of interaction). Outreach events, marketing, messaging—it’s all coordinated to that one end. Many of these churches are—and wish to be—run like successful American corporations. I wager most pastors will admit that discipleship of existing Christians is a significant weakness amongst their congregation, because 80% of their energies are spent on attracting new members.

So why does this matter as regards BenOp and LNBL? When you tell people wholly oriented toward Evangelicalism and bringing more people through the doors of the church each week (never mind retaining them) that now is a season where the church needs to look internally and figure out how to strengthen what it has, because it might not be able to put on ‘Trunk or Treat’ in the church parking lot or the neighborhood showing of ‘Frozen’ in a culture that despises it, that’s not something growth-oriented people want to hear. In fact, it is anathema. (I must add both of those are real things churches I’ve attended have done for the sake of ‘outreach’.) They’ve been told all their lives that they need to put flyers on their neighbors’ doors inviting them to Christmas and Easter service (which are hands-down the most Christian-Lite sermons of the year, which strikes me as kind of ironic), or invite their friends to the concert at the church where we guarantee they won’t hear anything that might challenge them on a moral level, and now you are telling them they need to be weirdos who stand out from and even outright reject the culture and perhaps alienate the same people they’ve been trained to look and speak like (for the sake of outreach and relating to the culture)? They will readily quote the words of St. Paul: “All things to all”, or St. Ambrose (via Augustine): “when in Rome”. Perhaps while being in the world, we have become a little too of it.

Your message of “preservation” of the church is almost diametrically opposed to “get butts in seats even if you are virtually tricking people and obscuring the harder truths of the Gospel to do it” that we Evangelicals are used to hearing. No, I get it, it doesn’t have to be that way, but most of us can scarcely hold two near-identical ideas in mind at the same time, much less two ideas that may contextually conflict with each other.

This ties into my next and final point, which is that as a fundamentally middle-class endeavor in America, Evangelical Christianity has adopted the look and feel of what the typical middle-class American experiences. Branding, marketing, messaging, even the way the pastor dresses and the music played in services looks nearly identical to (or is a poor simulacrum of) what we experience every time we turn on the football game and see the Pepsi commercial. Church is one more version of TV programming for the Evangelical—now, more than ever since many of our services are online (and especially during this coronavirus thing). It is another middle-class therapeutic comfort.

When any creature is comfortable and expending minimal energy, the last thing it wants to do is move from that state. So why would the average comfortable middle-class American Evangelical Christian, for whom the “culture wars” are viewed through the jeremiad blog posts of Rod Dreher or the breathless hyperbole of CNN, want to move a muscle unless absolutely forced to do so? I’m convinced that’s why most Evangelicals I talk to don’t think this election will matter all that much. It certainly won’t be as bad as Rod says…right? I mean, totalitarianism? Here? That’s what the right wing nut jobs said about Obama and Clinton.

This will be just like that; perhaps the church will emerge slightly worse for wear, but it will always endure. And they’ll always be right, until they aren’t. The church will endure, but I haven’t found the “in America” part of that passage in my Bible just yet.

The problem here is the problem all people have in uncomfortable situations: hope. This isn’t hope in Christ or eternal salvation that I’m talking about. It’s just baseless hope as one’s only strategy. Hopefully this is going to be just like all the other moral panics, and it won’t be as bad as everyone says. Hopefully the forest fires have nothing to do with climate change and this is another doomsayer false alarm. Hopefully Biden won’t actually implement the Green New Deal and mandatory Wokeness and will just return to center.

Have you ever wondered why people who knew they were going to be killed by other people, perhaps because of a plane hijacking or even watching the person in line next to them get executed, just stood there and let it happen instead of fighting back with everything they had? Jihadis have coerced false confessions out of people moments before sawing their heads off on camera; the person would be just as dead had they spat in the jihadi’s face, refused to play along, and cursed Muhammad instead, but they didn’t. They said the confession. Hope. Hope that at the last minute some divine intervention would pluck them out of the situation, even when any rational person could see there is no hope. And I think that is where American Evangelical Christianity largely stands on the issues you write about today. The comfortable middle class is hoping they will be left alone, that it won’t be that bad. Some even ‘say the words’ in the hopes that their captor will release them and welcome them into the fold.

I’ve focused on Evangelicalism here, but it does make me wonder, why (again, generalizing greatly) do other strands of Christianity seem to take the warnings of LNBL and BenOp a little more seriously? Or at least don’t reject them out of hand quite as instinctively? My other experience is with the Catholic Church, so I speak largely from that perspective, but perhaps it is because the CC’s worldview is not so modern and new as American Evangelicalism. The Catholic Church wasn’t born and raised in American middle-class capitalism, and it’s been around for a long time and in a lot of places that have seen literal authoritarianism, totalitarianism, and everything in between. Perhaps there is some kind of institutional memory or wisdom from this long-tenured, global experience that makes American soft totalitarianism not seem like such a long shot.

And while the typical Evangelical Protestant church (in my experience) is still fueled by the rewards of the Protestant Work Ethic and (increasingly) non-controversial, uplifting, therapeutic messages, the Catholic Church has always been more focused on guilt, sin and blood in its day-to-day language. I recently listened to a Catholic sermon and blood (of Christ) was mentioned so many times and so graphically that I found myself thinking, “This would be very off-putting to someone not accustomed to the language of Catholics.” Uplifting, positive messages around self-help tools for day-to-day living…or constant reminding of the debased creature you once were pre-salvation, salvaged only by the bloody, violent, brutal execution of a blameless victim. Which group do you think will have an easier time swallowing the idea that the world can turn really evil, really fast?

Anyway, forgive my long-winded exposition. I appreciate your blog posts, especially the ones that I have a hard time agreeing with or that are challenging for me, and I appreciate that you jot my thinking in terms of crystallizing things on this issue that I haven’t had a chance to verbalize. Maybe none of the above will ring true to you or anyone else, but having spent enough time to see both modes of thinking (Evangelical vs. Catholic) I do think maybe there is a shred of truth in it.

What a letter! Thank you, reader. I really look forward to the comments from other readers.

I don’t know that most American Christians of non-Evangelical churches are a whole lot more receptive to the message. Maybe they are — I just don’t know. I think all the time of Prof. Christian Smith’s sociological work on Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, and his finding that it is the de facto religion of the great majority of American Christians. Catholicism and Orthodoxy should both be more theologically and historically imbued with a tragic sense, and with an awareness of the connection of suffering to sanctity. But MTD might well have destroyed that. We will see.

Say, readers, if you are moved to pre-order a copy of Live Not By Lies, would you please consider doing it via Eighth Day Books, the independent Christian bookseller in Wichita? Here is the link to do so. 

Its owner, Warren Farha, is a friend of mine, and I have said many times that Eighth Day Books is one of the happiest places on earth. You can order a signed (via book plate) copy of Live Not By Lies  exclusively through Eighth Day. I just checked, and Warren has 107 left, for shipping on 9/29, the publication date.