I thought of my theology nerd friends here reading this essay.
It’s a very informed disscussion of Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart’s assessment of American Evangelical Christianity in this quote from Commonweal:
“Contrary to conventional wisdom, Christianity has never really taken deep root in America or had any success in forming American consciousness; in its place, we have invented a kind of Orphic mystery religion of personal liberation, fecundated and sustained by a cult of Mammon.”
The author of the Substack essay, Shawn Patrick Connelly, draws some interesting parallels and throguh lines between the Orphic cult of ancient Greece, Christian Gnosticism, Augustine, and modern American Evangelicalism in order to understand a little better how we got where we are with Christian nationalism and authoritarian megachurch pastors enforcing extreme patriarchy.
It was pretty informative and interesting and I recommend it to all of you who like discussing the East/West divide in Christian history, the anti-intellectual, anti-scholarship bent of mainstream Evangelicalism, and the negative influence of Greek dualism in Christian eschatology.
Here’s a pull quote:
The body and the world are problems. Mainstream evangelical eschatology, particularly in its dispensational form, teaches that the world is not going to be renewed. It is winding down. The Rapture is, without exaggeration, the most Orphic idea in American Christianity: souls of the initiated extracted from corrupt matter before final destruction. Creation is not redeemed. It is discarded. The world is a burning building and the point is to get out before the roof falls.
And then there is Hart’s “cult of Mammon,” which is not incidental but structural. When salvation is organized entirely around individual benefit, when the whole religious enterprise reduces to securing your personal escape and optimizing your standing before God, spiritual and material prosperity become logically equivalent. Both are individual goods. Both are what you receive for being in right standing with the cosmic order. The prosperity gospel is not a corruption of American evangelicalism. It is precisely how American evangelicalism was designed.
That makes me think of how a Lutheran pastor/priest from the U.K. who’d settled in Missouri went to the National Association of Evangelicals and afterwards commented that they weren’t very evangelical.
Interesting parallel here… because it has often struck me as odd that a religion that follows a man who emphasized “storing up treasure in heaven” instead of on earth would be such fertile ground for teachings involving financial and material prosperity. But the “individual benefit” narrative does help that make sense. It’s also a formula that other aspects of evangelicalism follow without it being obvious. I saw someone describe Joshua Harris’s “I Kissed Dating Goodbye” philosophy as the “sexual prosperity gospel” and now I can’t unsee it. And yet many who aligned with that would have called out Joel Osteen-style financial prosperity as “unbiblical,” but the thread of that idea moves through more than just money.
I don’t know–in a measure, we all hope that doing the right thing will be healthy for us. One of the warps of democratic society seems to be that in order to get us to do the right thing, we have to be convinced that it’s the best thing for us. That’s a bit in contradiction to the scene in the Garden of Eden–the placement of a “tree of knowledge of good and evil,” with out a clear selfish reason to follow the rules about whether or not to eat that fruit. Whether it’s allegory/myth or not, there is a lot to muse about there, I think.
In contrast, I enjoyed David Platt’s book, “Radical,” which he noted was the opposite of the Constitution, that we should not be chasing our own happiness as the ultimate goal.
Yes, that came to mind too. And for a lot of these things, the authors assured readers that they would experience benefits from “following the program” but a lot of those were way down the road. So many people went years without holding the teachings up to any real-world measuring sticks because results were supposedly not going to come until well after certain milestones had been hit. And some financial prosperity gospel schemes were similar… results were always “right around the corner" if you followed the system correctly. Sounds very similar to the “pie in the sky” view of heaven too. You have to suffer first, then you’ll get a reward. But if people begin to expect renewal in the here and now, the teachings will be forced to meet some kind of reality-based metric that many of them actively tried to avoid confronting.
Thanks for sharing that. I’m in danger of continued revelry of confirmation bias here as I took it in. I was glad the substack author took the time to acknowledge her (our) own potential roles as keepers (free disseminators, really) of elite, dispensed knowledge around this stuff, and her answer to that that, then, which makes a distinction between educated scholarship freely sharing of itself, vs. cult leaders building a controllable power structure for themselves.
To me the question isn’t “Is this true” of American religion, but rather “how could it not be true?!” Given what we see of where it’s gone today, it’s pretty hard to argue against this as we all see and smell the rotten fruit all around us.
The essay was interesting to read. I look USA from outside (North Europe), so I can only evaluate what is ‘broadcast’ to outside. The essay is polemic and targeted against a particular group (some American evangelical churches, practices and thinking) but inadvertently, it also hits against trends and practices that can be seen widely in Western Christianity and partly also in the Eastern Christianity.
The essay criticized the Hellenistic/Platonic thinking in Western Christianity, the thinking of Augustine and “a priestly class with enormous authority over access to saving knowledge … the religious specialist controls access to the truth, and the community’s access to God runs through him“.
It also tells “The logic is identical to what the Orphic priests were selling: a specific transaction, correctly performed, secures your status and changes your eternal destination.“ The criticism is targeted against the evangelical practices, like the ‘Sinner’s Prayer’, and the revivalist use of the term ‘born-again’ but the same logic applies as well to the baptism as done by the old churches - a specific transaction, correctly performed, etc…
The essay is polemic but it hopefully inspires thinking about the tension between the teachings of Jesus and the practices in our religious environment. Not everything we have heard and are experiencing in our church is what Jesus and his apostles were teaching.
I appreciated how it was clear the author had read and studied a lot, but he managed to present eveerything in a pretty concise and accessible way. I think the observations on the roots of the physical/spiritual divide are really useful for thinking about many issues that are currently hurting people in churches and that we talk about here; climate change denial, vaccine hesitancy, science defunding, abuse coverups, even current events like Christians supporting revoking USAID and building concentration camps. A lot of it comes down to thinking prayer and “spiritual warfare” are more effective solutions than medicine and all that matters is saving souls so people can go to heaven when they die.
You’re right to smell a rat. Its name is capitalism. Jesus shows us a better way.
I’ve felt that way for years, starting with realizing that Adam Smith had no confidence in capitalism because it is inherently inimical to free markets and to freedom.
I’ve noticed this sort of thinking a lot as I’ve tried to rethink faith. There are so many important things we want to focus on outside of ourselves, but because of the individualistic, self-preserving “center” that Shawn Connelly identified in popular Christianity, so many people are going to battle the fears and habits they’ve been given for many years. When you’ve been trained to seek individual salvation for yourself (or, at least, pursue an individual relationship with God), it’s not easy to reorient your mindset off of your own preservation.
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“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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