'What Is the Meaning of Christian In This American Life?'

In my early years, I was much more focused on seeing how others experienced Jesus than how I experienced him. Much of my childhood was an immersion in global Christianity. At times this meant spending time with missionary friends in the States on furlough, at other times sitting around a table listening to stories so captivating their tellers had already recounted them for books and film. 

One such book involved my experience from the perspective of a biographer. She recounted the life and death of our close family friends: Roni, 35, and Charity, seven months. Both shot and killed in a small Cessna, a casualty of our CIA’s counter-narcotic operation. Roni’s husband Jim and their six-year-old son, my best friend Cory, survived the crash.    

“I have long dreaded the thought of getting to the end of life and regretting that I allowed my own timidity or other people’s expectations to determine the course of my life. I had decided at a much younger age that several of my beliefs should determine the course of my life,” wrote Steve Saint in End of the Spear.

Thus, they did for Roni. And while Jim would be the first to tell you Roni was not a martyr for Christ, her death was my first glimpse of what I thought a Christian was: someone willing to give up their life for their beliefs. 

Not all my early years were this upending. One night, my friends and I crowded into their van and rode the long, bumpy streets to a small, impoverished town in South America. Here, the streets were so dark the wild dogs looked like shadows and the air so calm time felt irrelevant. 

We crowded into the first floor of a concrete building full of white, dirty plastic chairs. This was church. A decade and a half later, I can still remember how the people’s voices swelled in that room, as if angels were singing. I’d never heard a love for Jesus sung with that kind of power, not even in the States where our services were full of amplifiers, soundboards, and mics. 

Here, loving Jesus meant loving the person. None of the westernized spirituality of bad coffee and good donuts mattered, or whether we sang the latest hits in CCM. The focus was Jesus. Somehow because of this, culture came alongside, not as a hindrance to their worship, but in a way that enabled its perpetuity into Monday morning.  

I stood there between the dirty plastic chairs, viscerally aware that the people in this low-ceilinged room loved Jesus for the God he is, not for the trends we sometimes tie him to. This was Christianity. The God I claimed to follow was not restricted to fifty states thousands of miles north, tied to the odd blue carpet and wooden pews of my grandparent’s church, or restrained to the high-ceiling, multi-million dollar building I was used to. No, as much as he was God of Heaven, he was God of earth. All of it. Even a church whose best was dirty plastic chairs. These are the things I learned as an adolescent about what it meant to be Christian, about what Christianity was.

“May we all have grace to maintain in our own proper way the purity of the Church, as being an assembly of believers, and not a nation,” wrote Charles Spurgeon in an 1896 book. I have sometimes wondered how he wrote such apropos statements more than a century before I would read them. 

But for as wide-eyed and open-hearted as my introduction to Christianity had been, it took a swift turn before I even entered my teenage years. By the time I was a grown adult, I’d experienced, several times over, the underbelly of the church: power influenced by desires and church influenced by culture in ways Jesus never prescribed. I was awakened to a different sort of Christianity, one that felt in direct opposition to the Great Awakening spurred by George Whitefield.

“Let the name of Whitefield perish, but Christ be glorified,” said Whitefield, unaware that his name would go down in history or that his biography would require multiple volumes. 

But where Mr. Whitefield preached the name of Jesus Christ under the hot sun, I heard pastors preach their own names under stage lights. Where Whitefield reiterated the need to read the Bible for ourselves, I heard the same Scriptures twisted and matched to personal agendas. 

At eleven or twelve, I sat in a row of black chairs spanning a huge sanctuary, quietly reading my imitation-leather Bible because I was tired of listening to the pastor avoid it. Perhaps I was too young to determine what a grown man should say, or perhaps I was simply eager to hear what the true Christ had to say. Either way, my view of Christianity narrowed that day. 

“Let my name die everywhere, let even my friends forget me, if by that means the cause of the blessed Jesus may be promoted,” preached Whitefield. 

Let’s build a bigger building, preached my pastor. Let’s raise money. I want people to know who we are from across the highway. Do you see the vision? 

The clarity with which I’d seen Christianity in the smoke of my friends’ deaths clouded under his vision. Here, it appeared others experienced Jesus as a brand to promote, not a God to give one’s life to. If Christianity was a brand, I would not die for it.

We left that building in search of another church, and with it I left the memories of childhood: first-time best friends, crushes, and the terribly awkward but mandatory middle school years. It would be easy to view my time within those walls through the lens of sentimentalism. Overall, I loved my experience there. I didn’t want to leave it. 

But as Karen Swallow Prior shares in The Evangelical Imagination,

Sentimentalism is ‘the name of the mood in which we make a luxury of grief, and regard sympathetic emotions as an end rather than a means.’

At the time, I did not realize the adolescent grief of a child leaving her friends was not the end itself, but an ironic twist that would become the means to a very different beginning. Perhaps I had been wrong about Christianity all along. Was Roni an outlier, a good person in the wrong place at the wrong time, who also happened to love Jesus? Were the suited men, and later the ones clad in skinny jeans, who gripped power as hard as they did their microphones, a true representation of Christianity? I could not reconcile a religion encompassing both ends of this dichotomy. 

Midwest evangelicals could say my worldview was being challenged. Therapists might have said my schema, or mental model, was changing and I was now disillusioned. Others might recount these experiences as a coming-of-age moment. Perhaps it was all three, or maybe it was none of them, but I’d grown up with the ideal that Christians will die for Jesus. It was seared into my mind as much as the flames that seared the Cessna. Now I saw a new angle of Christianity, one where those in authority appear willing to do anything for power. 

Power has many facets. By many, and in one of its harmful forms, it’s viewed as something to wield, a means by which to force others to succumb to their embodiment of its strengths and weaknesses. But it is also something that we yield to. That commands. When we give something power over us, we surrender to its rule. 

In his Meditations, Marcus Aurelius famously wrote,

If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.

I had seen the face of power on stage, and as my brain developed in those malleable years, without thinking the words to describe it, I wondered if I’d given church a little too much power in my life. Maybe I’d estimated it too highly. This external display of Jesus was causing pain. To revoke that pain, I could revoke my regard for what Paul defines as the bride of Christ. 

Through a winding path, over the coming years I managed to go from critic to participant. I found myself on stages and under lights with Christians who were award-winning or celebrities or well on their way. I loved that I could use my inborn talents for this westernized version of Christian life. 

And yet again, the more diverse my interactions grew, the smaller my view of Christianity became. It seemed that everywhere, the Bible was a great marketing tool, filled with good news for those in need, and a free incentive to subscribe to its ideology. Packaged by neutral-colored clothing, emotional music, and pathos-laden sermons, seats filled. 

Cultural imperialism, broadly speaking, is the extension or imposition of power, authority, or influence on a less-dominant group. Whatever our intentions, it seemed a good number of Christians making up America were pulling the influence of our western culture right into the pews, intricately tying it up with Christianity. Christianity was not being dominated, but in a sense, imperializing itself.

It is acculturation that would make William Bradford and William Brewster shift, if not turn over, in their graves. So this was the gospel? 

“Let my name die everywhere, let even my friends forget me, if by that means the cause of the blessed Jesus may be promoted,” Whitefield had preached. But when I scrolled social media, I saw the names most broadly speaking the cause of Christ were the ones most well-known, powerful, and often, most harmful. Supporting church began to feel like supporting a different gospel, one where the love of self, not Christ, was centric. Something was wrong.

Lew Wallace, in Ben-Hur, wrote, “Riches take wings, comforts vanish, hope withers away, but love stays with us. Love is God.” Riches take wings, yet I saw pastors landing in the news and on streaming platforms for building lives of material comfort off the hopelessness of humankind. Love stays with us. Love is God. Yet love, Christian love, began to feel like it had withered, smothered by branding. This was not Christianity. To support it would be conscious complicity in acts opposing the gospel. 

“We’re all complicit in the things we may be trying to oppose. I’m complicit in the things that I’m trying to oppose,” wrote Wendell Berry. I’d joined a version of Christianity that included aspects other than the gospel, and thus, the opposite of Christianity. For the gospel is only enough by itself. 

Purposefully leaping before I looked too closely at the consequences, afraidfearing I wouldn’t be brave enough to jump if I did, I walked out of the church walls for the first time in my life. 

The dirty plastic chairs of that low-ceilinged room in South America seemed so long ago. The childhood version of Christianity I’d witnessed in my friends’ deaths seemed to have died with the international news that once covered them. Now, Christianity felt too entwined with our cultural assumptions to be real without it. In South America, I’d watched people take Jesus into their culture. But now I had spent thousands of hours serving at nonprofit organizations that seemed to layer culture right into the gospel. 

“The medium doesn’t just transmit a message; it changes the message,” writes Katelyn Beaty. Without the cultural trappings of western Christianity, what exactly was the meaning of being Christian? Had I been living my life for Jesus Christ during my years within the church walls, or supporting the slow twisting of a message that is only enough by itself?  

Before he passed, the last words Wendell Berry spoke to a few of my friends were, “Take care of yourselves. Take care of what you know.” Wendell’s words have been texted to me during difficult times of life. His writing stirs feelings within his readers few writers can. It’s inspiring that the English language, organized in an unfamiliar way, can have such impact. But in choosing to cease my complicity, taking care of what I knew meant undoing everything else. 

“Humility is . . . knowing what we know, as well as what we don’t,” writes Daryl Van Tongeren. “Humility is the only reasonable response to being alive.” Thus began a painstaking attempt into humility. 

Some would call this opening my eyes. Others may try to shove my response under the term deconstruction. A few might say I was on track to leave the faith. After all, I’d walked out of church, packed away my custom in-ear monitors and violin, cut CCM from my Spotify, and plunged into unknowing the American Christianity I’d poured my life into. 

One pastor ignored all of the above. I’d walked out of his sermons more times than I can remember, for no reason related to him, but the cacophony of church experiences I’d had since I sat within its walls for my friends’ funeral. 

“We do not see things as they are. We see them as we are,” goes the saying, attributed to far too many well-known names to quote it correctly. Much of what made my experience with Christianity so hard was its entwinement with Americanism, particularly the celebrity and power with which we build much of our culture. 

Was Christianity just power plays and tiered in-groups? Or was it welcoming the needy? And was I still who I claimed to be without the culturalisms so closely associated with it? Because I was no longer the violinist on stage. I wasn’t even in the building. 

In a small city in a big coffee shop, this pastor let me read my laundry list of questions off the Notes in my phone, graciously talking through each one . . . even though my seat in his church was always empty. Was this Christianity, void of cultural attachments? 

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled,” wrote a tax collector who made his riches off the backs of the poor until Jesus’s love overcame him. “You’re blessed. You keep asking these questions,” the pastor said. Perhaps the emptiness in my spirit was from a hunger to be filled. I chose to stay hungry a little longer. This was, after all, an aspect of American Christianity I deeply resonated with: the fact it kept me coming back to God, questioning always. 

“Coming to you ‘cause I’m confused / coming to you ’cause I feel used,” writes singer-songwriter Jon Guerra. “How can we call ourselves Christians / saying that love is a tension / between the call of the cross and / between the old party line?”

It is not sacrilegious to question the religion that is often associated with Christianity. In many, often well-intentioned churches, there is a religion of volunteer hours served, conferences and concerts attended, church events booked, and time spent in church groups. But this is not Christianity. It is an iteration of Christianity in a particular, often privileged, context. I had to untangle Christianity from the cultural additions I’d found myself engrained in to realize Christianity is not a subculture.

An artist once asked the question, “What is the meaning of Christianity in this American life?” Thousands of years ago, along the Orontes River in what is modern-day Turkey, those who shared the gospel were first called “Christian,” or little christs. But in this American life? Some of the American Christians I most respect live varying lifestyles and differ politically, but each of them believes the gospel: God is a holy and loving and just God. We are sinners. And he wants relationship with us, despite us. I’ll subscribe to that. 

Despite stepping back from the cultural additions to American Christian life, I had never stepped back from Christ. Or more accurately, Jesus had never stepped back from me. The reason I made it here was because all along, I’d experienced him myself, so close I didn’t realize it. Closer than my breath. Christ in me. Christianity.