Well, my Luddite writing accoutrement came in, and it’s really a dream. I’ve already completed chapter one, section one of the new book, Analog Anchorite (Or, The Pursuit of Personal Holiness in the Digital Age), with the expectation of spending roughly two weeks on every chapter. I even found a Linux terminal program that allows me to transfer data to and from the device. In the spirit of the book, I will be sending a physical copy of each chapter, as it’s finished, to the first thirty people to sign up, free of charge—I have a nice laser printer and what’s the cost of a stamp, anyway?
Here’s the opening, as a teaser. The rest will be offline only, until the full book is completed, edited, formatted and published.
When was the last time you heard an evangelical media personality speak to the prime Christian imperative to cultivate a personal holiness that permeates every aspect of one’s life? I don’t mean simply arguing for adherence to a short list of hot-button social mores, but advocating for the inward pursuit of impassibility, the emulation of God’s own immovable character. When was the last time you witnessed an evangelical personality dedicate his “media ministry” to forming in his audience the desire for a consistently serene, faith-fueled manner of living so conspicuous in its benevolence towards one’s neighbors that non-Christians find it wholly bizarre, yet irresistibly attractive?
As I write this, the top ten Christian books on Amazon can be bucketed into four categories: inspirational fiction, self-help, apologetics... and first-hand descriptions of heaven, often from people who claim to visit regularly. The first three can be very edifying—C.S. Lewis is in that list—but, scrolling through, the first full-fledged discipleship book (i.e., exposition on conforming to the image of Christ) was at number forty-seven. What does it say about the spiritual state of modern American Christians that material resembling real spiritual meat (1 Corinthians 3:1-4) cannot, on average, be found anywhere near the top of the best-sellers list? Roughly forty percent of Americans claim to be Protestant; many of them have been regular church-goers their entire lives. If America is such an innately Christian country, where is the media content to prove it? Why does American Protestant discipleship mainly consist of multi-book/video, entry-level onboarding programs for new converts, the principles of which many lifelong believers, if pressed, could not explicate? Why are those onboarding programs near-universally followed by a life of light content for “study groups,” geared for those who have accepted the lie that their hectic lives leave room for no more than a few pages of a trade paperback, or thirty minutes of a video, per week, containing youth-group-level information on the Creator of all things visible and invisible. When these “learners” hope to spend eternity glorifying and enjoying God, why is it acceptable to give such meager attention to Him, here and now? Why is our religion marketed like a hobby?
This isn’t merely an anecdotal observation; there are hard numbers showing the effects decades of an ubiquitous for-profit Christian media industry have had on the American Christian mind and spirit. Increasing numbers of professing Christians, sometimes a majority, cannot communicate core concepts of the faith; alarming numbers of them hold to wholly heretical notions. One in seven evangelicals believe the Holy Spirit can tell them to disobey Scripture. Over half subscribe to some form of the heresy of Pelagianism and/or believe there are some sins God overlooks. Half deny the Holy Spirit is a Person of the Trinity. A third even deny the divinity of Christ.1
There are several highly-regarded books chronicling what could be termed “the degradation of the Western Christian mind,” including Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind and Os Guinness’ Fit Bodies Fat Minds. Both were heavily influenced by Harry Blamires’ 1963 book, The Christian Mind, in which readers are repeatedly challenged to “think Christianly.” Yet, while these books have very valuable insights, thinking Christianly can only happen when one knows what “Christianly” is. The average American Christian male, especially if he belongs to a middle-aged or younger demographic receiving a majority of their information from online sources, is daily inundated with an endless feed of self-styled podcasting pastor-pundits selling a mentally- and spiritually-crippling obsession with political grievances as the purpose and pinnacle of Christian thought. There’s a good chance his pastor is drinking from the same poisoned well. American Christian women, if not bombarded with the same political priorities (from both ends of the spectrum), are given a steady diet of secular-styled self-help books containing a sprinkling of culturally-Christian truisms.
One could spend an entire book attempting to convince the average evangelical of the direness of the mental and spiritual state of the 21st-century American church, but I have found such efforts produce little to no fruit. Those who need convincing are usually nominal practitioners and/or hyperconsumers of the product, uninterested in anything more than having their current mode of religion validated and receiving a continuing list of suppressive persons threatening that mode of religion. I would rather write a book for a niche demographic of Christians: narrow gate seekers who read the above and need no more convincing. I won’t write for those who reflexively like and share a social media or blog post on how media personalities in their theological corner of the church behave reprehensively, only to go right back to consuming their content, or, even worse, reviling those personalities. I want to provide a resource to Christians who see such abuse of the gospel and ask themselves, “What can I change about my own doctrine and praxis, so others see the true light of Christ in me?”
I will not mince words. This is the key differentiator between a true disciple and one in name only. It’s the difference between wrongly making the religion about seeking outward results rather than an entirely inward endeavor to seek God, which then subconsciously overflows from the practitioner into His desired outward results. Missing this mark was my own failing for most of my time as a believer; I accepted the low bar of personal holiness set by the evangelical ecosystem, driven by a media industry dominated by attention-seeking narcissists, profiteers and scandal merchants. Hence, while having a strong distaste for megachurch aesthetics, I accepted the mode of “Christian living” born of the rather novel invention of the business of Christianity.
My conclusions and repentance are the result of several years of deliberate reevaluation of what “discipleship” means, born of my first-hand experience with evangelical media personalities, after writing my first book, and began with a commitment to read the first two-hundred years of orthodox Christian writing, from Ignatius of Antioch to Clement of Alexandria. It has led to many new personal viewpoints on matters of doctrine and religion, including a rejection of Baptist congregationalism in favor of Anglicanism, with its episcopal polity and respect for how tradition informs interpretation of Holy Scripture, but these are secondary matters. After the first-order doctrine laid out in the three Ecumenical Creeds, the individual disciple’s pursuit of personal holiness is what matters. The early church fathers, through the fifth century, all but scream this at the reader. I cannot find their mindset, their consummate dedication to holy living, among those synchronizing their lifestyle to the evangelical media complex’s main message of, “Hey, you’re justified. You verbally assent to the propositions, raise your hands to the Sunday morning rock band playing the latest contemporary hits, don’t engage in our short list of culture-war sins and vote for the right candidates. You’re good-to-go, as is, unlike... those people.”
I hope, if you haven’t already thrown this book away in incredulity or disgust, you feel, at least somewhat, the weight of what I’m communicating. Perhaps you feel a nagging sense you could be giving more in what little time you have before eternity, or maybe you have a strong sense the way you’ve been presented the faith is wrong on innumerable, but hard to define, levels. I’m sorry, I don’t have the answers. I am a miserable sinner, like you, battling every day to not be a dog returning to his own vomit (Proverbs 26:11). What I can offer, though, is insight into how we got here, via a roughly three-hundred year process that formed a particularly American version of Christianity, centered around bombastic personalities offering immediate emotional gratification—a version of Christianity that, over the last century and a half, has become a multi-billion-dollar industry. I can offer what was said of the Christian life by those who lived during a time when to be a famous teacher did not come with mansions and private jets, but with being thrown to the beasts. I can speak to the mindset of those who, a few hundred years later, and in an early Christian empire, sought an “ascesis” and “perfection” of life in the deserts of Egypt. Most today would rightly find their praxis far too extreme for our place and time, but, within the explanation of their aims and goals, is a wisdom that can inform our personal application of the commandments of Christ.
“The State of Theology,” Ligonier Ministries, https://thestateoftheology.com.