In a recent interview, Richard Werner, the noted economist who, among other things, coined the term “quantitative easing,” tells the story of how Deng Xiaoping, shortly after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, went to Japan hoping to learn from their economists how to fix China’s then moribund economy.
According to Werner, Deng was asked if he wanted the “official” version of the truth or the “real” one. Having spent considerable time in Japan, Werner notes that the Japanese as a people are remarkably honest and eager to speak the unvarnished truth. Yet their culture, curiously, demands two separate versions of the truth.
Werner goes on to suggest that one of the reasons Japanese businesspeople spend so much time together after work, often in bars and restaurants, is that the “real” truth can be spoken, rather than the “official” version required at the office.
So what was the “real” truth in the case of China? Decentralize the banking system.
In college, I majored in American history, a subject I’ve continued to study closely. And with each passing year, it’s become increasingly clear that this same duality exists here in the United States as well.
Which is to say, there is the “official” version of the truth we routinely encounter in academia, media, government, and business. Virtually every institution seems either incapable or unwilling to express the truth, the “real” truth.
Instead, we’re fed curated talking points that fit the “official” narrative, which also reinforce (or exploit) what psychologists call “normalcy bias,” that phenomenon whereby we ignore or deny anything that does not comport with past experience. We’re conditioned, in other words, to interpret life within a fixed pattern and will fight mightily against anything that runs counter to settled opinion.
As it is, our modern cultural institutions tend to mirror the status quo and/or dance to the tune of their moneyed overlords. It’s as if we live in a psychological matrix that reinforces at every turn the same message over and over again. It’s virtually inescapable.
Then again, we Christians shouldn’t be surprised by any of this. For the Bible continually warns of the dangers implicit in secular culture, or the “world,” in contrast to the life-affirming ministrations of God’s holy kingdom.
And yet, our “mainline” churches, for well over 100 years, have chosen to ignore its sober caution and have embarked on a different path altogether. It began in earnest with the “Social Gospel,” a novel reimagining of the church’s historic mission that emerged within certain mainline circles toward the end of the 19th century and became all but mainstream by the early decades of the 20th.
Amid the social convulsions wrought by the industrial revolution, particularly in America’s urban centers, the idea was to solve the problems of overcrowded slums, inhumane working conditions, mass immigration, child labor, alcoholism, etc.
Mainline leaders, inspired by the overheated idealism of turn-of-the-century Progressivism, came to believe that the way to solve these and other problems was by replacing the gospel’s “narrow” focus on the church with a new emphasis on the “world” and its agencies. This admittedly well-intentioned crusade sought to take the success of the gospel and transfer it to the wider world, to “Christianize” an erstwhile secular culture and its institutions.
In so doing, the historic task of the church, that of making disciples, was deemphasized and replaced by the all-consuming effort to transform the external structural forms that regulate human behavior – politics, law, science, education, etc.
Critics at the time warned that were the church to get overly involved in the world, it eventually would become inseparable from it. Such proved to be prophetic. For since at least the 1920s, there has been a decided shift in the mainline church’s doctrinal slant as secular culture is employed routinely to interpret the gospel, rather than the other way around. The “social,’ in effect, has all but superseded the “gospel.”
Over time the mainline churches had become a part of the “Establishment.”
The church’s mission was now focused on “fixing” the world by means of social and political “action,” rather than the far more critical challenge of changing hearts and minds. Traditionally, the latter was understood to be the only truly reliable means of empowering people to become better human beings, and thus better friends, better neighbors, better citizens, etc. And, in so doing, making the world a better place.
The role of a spiritually alive church, then, was to strengthen and extend God’s kingdom in the world, not through managerialism, but the godly use of human agency, one soul at a time.
As predicted, as the Social Gospel came to wholly dominate mainline church life, it became increasingly difficult to determine where the secular culture ended and the church began. As the late sociologist Peter Berger once famously quipped, the church had become the caboose at the end of the cultural train.
Yet a funny thing happened on the way to the Social Gospel’s heaven-on-earth project. The Sixties. American culture fractured. The “system” failed. Institutional faith was lost.
It was also at this time that the cultural elites (that part of American culture with which the mainline church has always identified) split off and began to pursue a new, radicalized agenda. To the surprise of absolutely no one, the mainline church followed suit.
Enter Critical Theory/Cultural Marxism/Neo-Marxism. Now, instead of supporting the “Establishment,” cultural elites became its fiercest critics, all the while maintaining their elite status – no mean trick! No longer was reforming the system from within the preferred means of effecting change, but a new, fashionable, self-styled “revolutionary” radicalism took its place, if only, if truth be told, in a mostly performative sense.
Again, the mainline churches went with the flow and changed direction as seamlessly as the weathervanes atop many of our New England steeples (as a friend once wryly observed). Critical Theory soon came to dominate its theological schools and, in turn, filtered down into its pulpits. Now on offer was an updated Social Gospel, albeit in a trendy, Marxist key.
In sum, regardless of whether the Social Gospel 1.0 was centrist, as in its heyday, or became the more radical 2.0 version of today, the same basic error remains: an obsessive focus on the “world.”
Years ago, while attended a gathering of United Church of Christ (UCC) pastors, a colleague stood up and said, “When I read the Bible, I’m continually surprised. When I hear what the UCC has to say, I’m never surprised.”
And this, I think, gets at the nub of it. The “official” version of the truth, that found in secular culture (i.e., the “world”) and, unfortunately, now in our churches, is sanitized and ideological. It has a stale predictability to it. It’s timid and conformist. Shallow, brittle. It has no soul.
The gospel, on the other hand, is wily and unpredictable. It both challenges and comforts in equal measure. It offers that version of the truth which wrestles honestly with the timeless, ongoing struggles of the human heart.
Its aims are, paradoxically, both more modest and more demanding. For it does not presume complete mastery over the self, much less the human ability to “fix” the vast brokenness of the “world” around us. Rather, its natural milieu is the exploration and examination of the complexities and depths of the human soul, by daring us to draw near to the holy, inscrutable mysteries of God.
The mainline church, in short, is overdue for correction. For after well over a century of secular Progressivism, it’s simply run out of gas. It has nothing new to say. It appears as a cut flower, shriveled up, no longer nourished by its theological roots. Its foundations have crumbled. And a spiritually hungering public has noticed.
The fact is, the truth, the real truth, is both far better and far worse than we typically assume. As the old adage goes, it comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable. It now seems well past the time for the mainline church to face its looming and inevitable discomforture, that it might open itself up once again to the genuinely transformative power of the gospel.
It gives me no pleasure in saying any of this. It pains me. So I pray for a spiritual revitalization, a new reformation, one that truthfully honors the God of whom we all are forever in desperate need.