American Christianity
as Lost in a Fog
By Vikki Randall
California’s San Joaquin valley is famous for Tule fog. Thick, oppressive fog that envelops everything like a thick blanket as if someone had covered every window with grey paint.
One evening I was at a friend’s house near mine. When I left at the end of the evening, the fog had settled in, thicker than usual. I could only see a few feet in front of me. I could follow the yellow line in the road, but I couldn’t see any of my familiar landmarks on either side of the road. (This was before GPS). As I drove, I slowed down to read the street signs and saw the familiar names of streets near my house. So I kept on going, driving into the darkness.
But I didn’t find my house. I was driving and driving, but never saw my street. When I had left my house earlier in daylight it had only taken a few minutes to drive to my friend’s house, but now I had been driving for 20, 30 minutes and still no sign of my street. I was lost in the fog.
It took some time to realize that I had turned the wrong way leaving my friend’s house. That while I was driving down familiar streets, I was driving in the wrong direction—heading East instead of West. The street names were familiar, but in the wrong order—leading me farther and farther from home.
Something like being lost in the fog is at play in American Christianity today. We find such deep divisions in how we see the world and morality that it doesn’t really seem like the same religion– the same God– any more. Those raised in evangelical churches struggle to put together the lessons they heard in Sunday School with the same Christians and pastors easily rationalizing mass death, dehumanization, and callous cruelty. It reminds me of being lost in that fog, where East seems like West, driving far too long in the wrong direction. Lost in a moral fog that we don’t even perceive, because it’s so deeply embedded in our American Christian culture.
Why We’re in a Fog
All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness. -2 Tim. 3:16
Most Christians follow Paul in using the word theopneustos, “inspired,” to describe the Bible. But we don’t all mean the same thing by the word. Some are inerrantists—seeing every word as literally the words of God, dictated by the Holy Spirit. Open theist Greg Boyd writes, “There are an insurmountable number of objections to this perspective, not least of which is that it conflicts with the Bible we have. The Bible we have contains a veritable encyclopedia of errors, contradictions, and inaccuracies. But the problem… is that line of reasoning presupposes that the Spirit dominated the biblical authors to the point of eliminating all their sin and imperfections so that she could produce a text that reflects God’s own perfection” (God Looks Like Jesus, pp. 58-59).
Others feel the Bible is a book written by men a long time ago that is of mainly historical interest. Often, the assumption is these are the only two options: literalism and rejection. That the world is divided between “Bible believers” and “Bible deniers.”
Yet in between those two extremes are a range of more nuanced beliefs—that the Bible is inspired by God in a way that the words of humans are intermingled with a movement of God’s Spirit. What we believe about biblical inspiration influences how we interpret it and live it out. This binary hermeneutic is the root of our moral fog.
Many of the Bible’s contradictions are insignificant: did Jesus tell his disciples to carry a purse (Luke 10:4) or no purse (Luke 22:26)? Is it wise to answer a fool according to his folly (Prov. 26:5) or a mistake to do so (Prov. 26:4)?
Some cut a bit deeper: Why did Jesus tell his disciples to buy a sword (Luke 22:36) if he was going to rebuke them for using it (Matt. 26:52)? Did the women run to tell the disciples Jesus had risen (Luke 24:10) or did they tell no one (Mark 16:8)?
But perhaps most troubling of all are the conquest passages. The command attributed to God in Deut. 7:1-3 and 20:16-18: “When the LORD your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess… and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy.”
While that sort of colonialism and violence was common in the ancient era (and still today) it’s quite hard to reconcile with Jesus’ teaching to love our neighbors and pray for our enemies. The divine command to completely destroy anything that breathes is brutal and imperialistic. It’s hard to square such a callous and violent assertion with the biblical statements that every human life is sacred. It conflicts with our picture of God as good, loving, just, and compassionate. It mirrors the similarly fraught struggles we are experiencing today, as we witness wars in Ukraine, Iran, and Gaza.
Rachel Held Evans writes: “When it comes to processing these troubling stories, there are generally three types of people: (1) those who accept without question that God ordered this military campaign in Canaan and has likely supported others throughout history, (2) those who are so troubled by the notion of God condoning ethnic cleansing that it strains their faith or compels them to abandon it, (3) those who can name all the Kardashian sisters and are probably happier for it” (Inspired, p. 63). The modern-day implications of these options are what we see playing out today.
Some Christians work very hard to make these passages fit with a literal interpretation—with disturbing results. Calvinists in particular will double down on God’s sovereignty, saying (quoting the Gospel Coalition): “As maker of all things and the ruler of all people, God has absolute rights of ownership over all people and places. God is not only the ultimate maker, ruler, and owner, but he is just and righteous in all that he does.”
“God’s ways are not our ways” they will say “and lean not on your own understanding.” Literalism replaces reflection. It is used to discount one’s own moral reasoning, to doubt one’s ability to discern the obvious: that genocide is wrong. It’s used to discount the inevitable cognitive dissonance required to reconcile the conquest passages with the teachings of Jesus. This has real world consequences. The end result is training people to blindly follow, to not notice when something doesn’t fit. Week after week, year after year, training people not to notice, to embrace the fog, until we end up where we are today: with devout Christians cheering on atrocities that offend the most hardened atheist.
Boyd notes that, “when violent depictions of God are found in literature that a people group considers to carry divine authority, it tends to incline these people toward violence, Christians included” (Boyd, p. 52). And so we have conservative Christians preaching about “the sanctity of life”– then looking the other way as children and immigrants are held in deplorable conditions, the evisceration of USAID leads to nearly a million deaths, and warmongering is amplified globally. Eventually they look less like pro-life believers and more like pro-death cultists.
Through the Fog
How do we find our way out of the fog? Anabaptists historically lean on the words of Jesus in John 10:30: “I and the Father are one.” We read Paul’s words in Col. 1:15-19: Jesus is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation… For God was pleased to have all divine fullness dwell in him.
Jesus is the best picture we have of God. Jesus is the revelation that culminates and supersedes all others, the best rubric for reading Scripture.
Boyd connects this pattern for reading Scripture with a key belief of Open and Relational Theology: that God does not coerce or control, but acts in the world through self-sacrificial love. The fact that Deuteronomy and Joshua are infused with the cultural norms of their (and our) times, replaying what Walter Wink calls the “myth of redemptive violence” simply reflects the fact that God works through fallible human actors. Rather than diminishing the beauty of Scripture, Boyd argues that by working in this way, accommodating our weakness, the beauty of God’s non-controlling love is all the more evident.
Boyd writes, “If… we grant that the Spirit’s power is the power of the cross—the power of influential, self-sacrificial love—then we cannot assume that everything we find in Scripture comes directly from the mouth of God. Instead, we can say that, in the process of ‘breathing’ Scripture, the Spirit influenced the authors in the direction of truth as much as possible while accommodating their limitations and sin as much as necessary. Therefore, as we read Scripture, we must discern the degree to which any given biblical material reflects the Spirit breaking through versus the degree to which it reflects the limitations and sin of the biblical author suppressing the Spirit” (Boyd, p. 59).
When we encounter problematic texts like Joshua, we can ask: how does this interpretation square with the picture of Jesus we see in the Gospels? We should reject any interpretation that deviates sharply from that image and picture of God revealed in Jesus Christ.
The landmarks we use to navigate the moral fog matter. It shapes the way we live out our faith in the real world. When we adopt a theological framework disconnected from our innate moral reasoning, it trains us in rote obedience rather than thoughtful, prayerful consideration. It disconnects our heart from our head. It distorts and hides God’s goodness.
But when we adopt a theological framework that allows us to frame our own innate moral assessment in the vision of Jesus, we are able to see what was in the fog before– how God is speaking into and through even our human failings and imperfections. Our faith is connected to the real world, resulting in renewed clarity.
Friends, let us train ourselves not to look away or fall into rote, rigid literalism– but to lean in, wonder, question, debate, and pray. Most of all, let us look for Jesus.
The Bible is full of troubling stories, Lord. And our world is filled with agonizing moral dilemmas. We are uncomfortable with dissonance and ambiguity. We want clear answers and direction, but sometimes the way forward is murky. Thank you for coming to us in the messiness of real life. Help us not to be afraid of the hard questions. Lead us through the fog. Help us, above all else, to see Jesus. Amen.