You Can Stick Up for Fundamentalists Without Repeating Their Mistakes

What you’re looking at is a brochure for a newish evangelical church plant. This image was sent to me and has been going around on social media a bit. As best I can tell, the pastor(s) of this church didn’t intend for their brochure to go viral, so it’s unfair to talk about what church, which location, who is the pastor, etc. Besides, that’s not terribly relevant. This could be a brochure for a lot of churches. And therein lay a point I’d like to make.

The writer Scott Alexander has talked about “scissors.” A scissor event is a controversial something that seems designed to push one end of an ideological spectrum further from the other. Scissors may be socially or politically significant, or they may be nothing more than a viral Twitter post. The point of a scissor is that opposing sides are going to react to it in a way that confirms their position and fortifies against the opposition.

Such a brochure is a kind of a scissor. Your initial reaction to it reveals what side you’re on. If you like it, are attracted to it, and are instinctively sympathetic to the church, you (probably) feel more at home among old fashioned or "dissident Right” evangelical communities. If you don’t like it, find it off putting, and start wondering with dread what this church is like, you (probably) feel more at home among “cultural engagement,” cosmopolitan evangelicalism.

Which is a little funny, because there’s really not any information about the church on this brochure. This list tells you absolutely nothing about what the church thinks (even the last two items are vague and many cults say as much). Rather, the list seems to be aimed at helping the reader sort themselves into some preeixsting category. If what you want from a church is obedient children with good manners, you’re the kind of person the church is trying to reach.

And there are many such people! They’re called fundamentalists. This is not a pejorative for me. I descend from a rather lengthy line of fundamentalists. My parents met one another at a Baptist Bible college in Kentucky. My homeschooling education was provided by independent Baptists in Florida, who made sure my studies included KJV-onlyism and how to read the letters of Revelation as different periods of American church history. I know fundamentalists. I’ve served with fundamentalists. Fundamentalists are friends of mine.

This brochure is a very transparent appeal to disaffected fundamentalists who feel like their kind of church has disappeared. It’s meant to be taken seriously but not literally; no church can promise “obedient children” or “strong handshakes” anymore than they can promise sunny weather (besides, wherever you have young marriages, you’re going to have some small, unruly children, too!). That’s not the point. The point is that the list conjures up an image of a particular kind of church that has apparently been lost, one that modern day Christians seem not to care about anymore.

They’re not wrong, either. Fundamentalists deserve their flowers. For example, several things on this list evoke images of a church where people really know you. The wives are smiling at you. The handshakes are offered to you. This a subtle but powerful critique of the modern evangelical megachurch, where a one-note emphasis on authenticity can be used as an excuse for people to claim introvert status, sit in the back row, and arrive late and leave early. Never mind that you probably wouldn’t be able to hear much singing over the electic guitar solo or drum kit.

Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash

The kind of church that fundamentalists want is not that different than the life that single men and women tell pollsters they want but don’t have. Marriages with men of character and wives of contentment, raising children whose wills are pliant but mental health is strong. Fundamentalists desire a church were technology is distrusted, efficiency is overlooked, and Sunday and Wednesday are for worship, prayer meeting, and youth group instead of travel sports.

Fundamentalists’ great virtue is that they take the world seriously—seriously enough to know that when you touch darkness, it tends to touch you back. This brochure is for those who feel like the walls of the church have thinned to the point where the darkness is seeping in without challenge. It’s an affirmation that some Christians still know that there’s darkness outside, and want to do something about it—not just to go out and light a candle, but to make a fire with walls enough to keep in the heat.

Yet, the besetting flaw of fundamentalism is that, ultimately, it tends to believe in the walls more than it believes in the fire.

The order of the list is not an accident. There are eight items, and the first six of them describe the kind of people you will find at this church. It is not until the final two that the brochure mentions that kind of truth you will find (and as I mentioned, these are uselessly vague descriptions). This list is a vision of a church that is built and maintained primarily by people who are just really good people. I don’t know why the makers of the brochure declined to mention Jesus or the gospel, but my guess is that they believe very much in both. So much so, in fact, that they assume it. Smiling wives and good manners and obedient children—and Jesus, of course.

Here is where I part ways with my fundamentalist ancestors, teachers, and friends. I cannot bring myself to assume Jesus, to expect him and his promises and his presence in any place where good people can share good manners and happy homes. Part of that is my own testimony. I’m the child of a smiling wife, the (generally) obedient son of a Bible preacher with a strong handshake. But I was lost, and the gospel I had assumed for two decades had to become real in a single moment of grace. The walls can be strong, but they are not the fire; and when those obedient children find themselves wandering in the dark, they have to be led home by the light, not brick and mortar.

There’s a lot going on in the raging debates around “big eva,” Christian nationalism, etc. Much of it is digital brain slop. But I think part of what’s real in this whole disputation is the way people’s experience of both grace and darkness conditions what they admire in a church. There are Christians who found Jesus in a Bible-thumping church that told them the truth about their sin and their Savior when nobody else would say that. There are Christians who found Jesus in a gospel-centered auditorium that told them their sin couldn’t stop their Savior, when nobody else wanted to say that. Both these experiences summarize not just a big part of evangelical life, but Jesus’ ministry. There are two prodigal sons, after all, and neither the faraway country nor the father’s farm are foolproof places.

My advice? Stick up for fundamentalists without repeating their mistakes. Take old time religion seriously, especially in the post-Christian malaise. Work on that handshake, parent those kids, and marry that woman. But when you do that, don’t forget it was all of grace—grace you still need.