I think the movement is making an idol out of smallness and slowness. Small and slow can be beautiful, but making an idol of them is wrong because big and fast can be just as beautiful and just as central to living as a follower of Jesus. By ruling out big, unified, global political organizing, the movement is tragically limiting the Christian imagination at a time of great opportunity. Jesus didn’t limit himself to the small or slow, and I can’t find anything in the Bible to make me think he’s calling us to limit ourselves now.

But maybe I’m missing something. So I’m going to ask you guys in the movement a bunch of questions here. I’ll treat Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw as the movement’s spokespeople on this small+slow+local dogma through their new book Jesus for President.

I’ll tell you where I’m going with this up front: I think what’s happened to the rising Christian radical movement is that we’ve applied deep-down, empire-bred instincts to our politics…and to the gospel. It’s the same kind of thing that happened so often to Roman citizens who converted to Christianity. It wasn’t long before they were ruling by the sword in Jesus’ name, because ruling by the sward was all they knew. Our empire doesn’t rule over (white, middle-class, Christian) people with violence. It rules over us with a different kind of idea. This idea shapes our every thought, but we are barely aware of it. It was the same for the Romans: if you asked them, “Does Rome rule by the sword?” they wouldn’t know what you were talking about.

Our empire enforces hopelessness by raising us to believe that humanity is unfit to work collectively, on a large scale, to redeem creation. It says the only way to change the world is through decentralized efforts by individuals and private groups. And then it does everything in its power to make sure those efforts never add up to anything that can threaten empire. That idea is vital for the survival of empire today because modern empire has been forced by centuries of resistance and subversion (mostly by Christians) to put down the sword in governing most citizens. We citizens of empire are now free to dismantle empire non-violently (I realize that’s a big case to make; I’ll try to make it below). That’s why so many young Christians who want to be martyrs have to go across the world to Iraq or Sudan. I don’t want to demean those efforts, but that is theater at the margins of the empire. Empire today has learned that, when it kills its “own” people as martyrs, they spring up one thousandfold. And so it won’t dare touch us. It will instead bog us down in absolutely unglamorous political machinations. Most of us mock that work as being futile, just as revolutionaries in Jesus’ day rejected his work on the cross as futile. But that is the cross that we have to bear in our time. We have to bear it like Jesus: not as a messy, self-serving compromise; but as a messy, beautiful, selfless triumph over death.

OK…so I’ve written about 50 pages in an attempt to get the rest of this post right over the last week…and then I realized that this is just a blog. So I’m just going to put it up in little, very imperfect pieces. Stay tuned.

Here, Tony Jones locates the roots of the clean hands syndrome that plagues Christian radicals these days in a “Hauerwasian Mafia” of theologians that has grown up over the last half century.

So the question becomes, what relationship should a follower of Jesus have with public life? Should Christians be involved with politics?

The HM advocates an ecclesiological solution: the church should be a counter-polis, a self-enclosed system that can serve as a model to secular systems (governments, corporations, etc.). In reading the HM literature, you’ll run across many references to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, especially the part about being a “city on a hill.” The church, the HM claims, is just such a city, shining the light of its moral rectitude for all the degenerate world to see and emulate. And you’ll find HM book titles like, Resident Aliens and A Peculiar People, promulgating this tendency, a tendency that has been dissed by critics as “sectarianism” and “Christian enclave theory.”

…

Instead of watering down their distinctives to the point of meaninglessness, the church should close ranks and develop an internal coherency that would serve as an example to the world.

Read the whole article.

There is one big problem, though: These revolutionary Christians have adopted a theory of social change that is just as narrow and unimaginative as the old theology they just left behind.

Revolutionary Christians are throwing themselves into direct, person-to-person anti-poverty projects at home and around the world—sometimes with reckless abandon, sometimes with careful planning, but always with passion and love. And it’s a beautiful thing. It’s helping a lot of people, and it’s teaching wealthy Americans a lot about the world. (In this context, middle class Americans are wealthy.)

Even the Christians who are doing the most see that what they’re currently doing is not enough to really fix this broken world. And so they feel God’s call to do more. But most think that means only more of the same: dig more wells, fund more micro loans, build more schools and orphanages, etc… And for sure, God is calling us to do as much of that as we possibly can.

But a certain dogma regarding social change has taken hold of the Christian imagination, and limited it to only projects that are small, local, “relational” and that they can personally witness themselves. Those who have been bitten by this dogma go on the faith that, if we all just live as followers of Christ in our neighborhoods, churches and workplaces, then God will work out the rest. They believe it’s wrong to work for social change at the level of the whole society because that requires political power, and therefore leads to all kinds of messy compromises, unintended consequences and, ultimately, corruption.

For me, this selective limitation of imagination is heartbreaking because these are the only people I can find with an otherwise boundless imagination and faith that we can make the impossible possible. And it’s totally unnecessary.

This dogma, which is strangling the radical Christian imagination, has nothing to do with the Bible or any Christian tradition, but is actually just old-fashioned laissez-faire economic doctrine recast in a new role. We’ve been fed this doctrine all our lives in many forms, so it’s understandable that it should shape our instincts, usually without us even knowing it. (Those of us who went to college have been especially dumbed down by this doctrine.)

Radical Christians are dreaming of big, deep social transformations—such as reshaping a whole economy to make sure everyone has the means of making a living, and cleaning up the environment while we’re at it. Laissez-faire says that only families, small communities or individual companies can plan collectively, inside themselves, for goals like that. If you want any higher-level organization, then what you can do is form a “community of communities,” a trade association, or something like that, where no one member can be coerced by the larger body. The minute you try to plan on a social level, let alone a global level, then your on the road to serfdom with Stalin, Mao or…Caesar.

If you’ve read radical Christian writers like Shane Claiborne or Greg Boyd, that all sounds pretty familiar, doesn’t it? How did it happen that the global capitalists who party at Davos share the same fundamental ideology about society’s role in economics as the people camping out at Christian anarchist festivals?

Well, the doctrine of Laissez-fair is so alluring because it is so beautiful in its simplicity: Every individual, family, community and company only needs to take care of itself and act responsibly towards others*; if we would all just do that, then the big picture would take care of itself. It all goes back to Adam Smith (and a bunch of other classical economists) who created these ideas when feudalism was breaking down in order to justify the rising economic system that would eventually be called Capitalism. Nowadays, laissez-faire economists (also called neo-liberal, neo-classical and conservative) have math equations and charts to show how it works. But Smith said the “invisible hand” of God was the driver. In a way, laissez-faire is the big brother in economics of biology’s theory of “Intelligent Design.”

But is it biblical? Obviously, my answer is no. But before I get into that, let’s dig a little deeper into what exactly we’re talking about here.

Laissez-faire doctrine says that whenever society tries to organize and plan big solutions, it always fails. But for clarity’s sake, it’s important to understand that laissez-faire is OK with some types of organizing and planning. Most liberals and progressives believe in strong use of regulation and tax incentives to coax the economy in the right direction. And they believe in heavy investment in infrastructure (roads, research, etc…) and public services (schools, healthcare, etc…). All that is perfectly consistent with the laissez-faire doctrine, at least in it’s most honest form. If that sounds odd, just go to Frederick Hayek. He was the 20th century’s Godfather of laissez-faire who inspired and popularized the revival of the dogma after it had almost died out forever. Check out his book The Road to Serfdom in which he supports strong regulation, taxation for social services, socialized medicine, universal public education and more.

So, because of our upbringing/brainwashing in the laissez-faire ideology, we are OK with the society doing public services, regulation and tax incentives. But also because of that upbringing, we are terrified of the idea of we, as society, intentionally retooling our for-profit industries to make their impact on the environment sustainable, or to reduce the work week to give people more time with their families, or for any other non-accidental (a.k.a. “market-driven”) purpose.

The only way to do that kind of big transformation is with political power. And the rising generation of radical Christians are against anything that has to do with political power.

But, once again, is that biblical? I’ll have to get into that in the next installment.

Do you know what Jesus’ criteria will be for who gets to stick around in paradise and who burns forever? Just look, the Bible is perfectly clear. Jesus, after separating all humanity into two groups…

“…will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

“[Jesus] will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.’

“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’

“They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’

“He will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

“Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.” (Matthew 25:31-46)

For most of the 20th century, fundamentalist Christians took the hell and heaven part of that and other passages literally; but they they took Jesus’ constant focus on social justice as figurative or ancillary.

Many of the Christians I’ve been writing about on this blog have retained their belief in the heaven and hell stuff. But they’ve taken off the blinders about what what Jesus was actually talking about: i.e. that “the meek shall inherit [a redeemed] world.”

And that has turned millions of Christians into fanatics behind the cause of ending world poverty. What is so exciting is that they have gone beyond charity and are seeking ways to change the fundamental structure of the world economy. They do not believe profit should be the primary organizing principle of the relationships between people and communities, but rather—as corny as it sounds—that love should be.

And they’re serious about this. They’re giving up Christmas to build wells in Africa. They’re selling they’re suburban homes to move to broken neighborhoods of the city. They’re sending teams to buy back land for the landless in Central America.

For me, this “conversion” of millions of Christians, has all been the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

In Part 1 of this series, I teed up a challenge to these social-justice oriented Christians over the means by which they’ll actually change the world. In Part II, I’m going to try to spell out my critique and suggestions for a way forward.

By the way, I have been having this same conversation (without the brimstone) with the progressive mainstream. Interestingly, they/we have absorbed the same obsessive focus on small-scale, piecemeal changes as the Christians. Hmm…I wonder how that happened. If you ask me, it’s obvious: we’ve absorbed the official ideology of the current economic system so deeply that we’re simply unable to think in terms of any alternative.

But my purpose wasn’t to help people, it was to “help them help themselves.” I wasn’t a social worker. In fact, as hard-nosed organizers, we were taught disdain for social workers who ministered directly to people’s short term needs. We were even advised by many of our mentors not to socialize with the people we were organizing, “because it could complicate things.”

When I met her, my wife Elizabeth became a new mentor to me. As a Christian who had always led a “missional” life, there had never been a time in her life when she wasn’t personally intertwined with a whole bunch of troubled lives. When we were first dating, she was visiting several times a week an old disabled man in one of the poorest sections of DC. Though he was confined to a wheelchair, he had no ramp to get in or out of his house. He was also half blind, and yet somehow was (barely) taking care of his two adult mentally retarded children. The man’s house was a disaster of filth and decay. Elizabeth was organizing a group of her coworkers to clean and fix it up. A few times she tried to get me to go visit with her. I resisted, saying things like, “I think we often just mess things up worse when we get involved in lives so different from our own,” and, “I choose to make a different kind of contribution.”

It’s a few years later now and, thanks to Elizabeth, I have finally gotten out side of my own “four walls” and into other people’s lives as a participant, not just an observer/organizer. It’s been a life-altering experience, even though I’ve only just dipped my toe in the water.

I remember, in college, during one building take-over protest (I can’t even remember what the cause was), when we angrily read/barked Franz Fanon’s “Wretched of the Earth” (a great book) at passers by through a mega phone. The Christians I’ve been hanging out with lately, spend their lives trying to live with and directly aid the “wretched” of their neighborhoods and towns. So I’m incredibly grateful to Christians for what they’ve taught me over the last few years.

And now I want to give something back.

Too many Christians these days are rejecting the paradigm of “organizing” (intentional, structural social change) just as dogmatically as I used to reject “service” (individual, sacrificial social change).

These days, Christians are asking really enormous questions. They’re asking, “How can we eliminate poverty completely?” and “How can we stop harming the environment altogether.” What’s so great about them is that their faith in Christ leads them to believe that total redemption is possible. That is the miracle that makes their world irresistible to me.

But they’re attempting to answer these questions almost in complete ignorance of humanity’s long history of tackling problems of that scale and scope at the social level, at the level of whole societies. In other words, they’re approaching big social problems just as cluelessly as I have always approached “little” individual problems.

Today I attended Brian McLaren’s Deep Shift conference. One of the agendas of the conference was to get Christians engaged in social problems such as poverty. Both Brian and local pastor Tim Keel told some horrifying stories about what life was like in the slums of some African cities. And through Bible teaching, they left no doubt that Jesus called us to do something about it.

But when it came to, “HOW?” they could only offer the political economy of the personal: Be a good-hearted business person. And consume less.

Brian said something remarkable (if you’re able to place it in historical context): “Capitalism is our only option. So we have to figure out how to practice good capitalism instead of bad capitalism.”

Tim Keel said something equally remarkable (if you place it in the context of Brian’s statement, and have spent some time thinking through how capitalism actually works): “When we consume less here, we can build up prosperity and security over there.”

Those statements represent the two pillars of today’s pop economic thought. And all alone, they’re really harmful. They are the equivalent in political economy of Joel Osteen’s pop theology. “Think good thoughts, make good choices, and all will be well.”

[I should add here that Brian, Tim and so many other Christians are participating in and seeing with their own eyes a lot of *real* efforts where consuming less to give to development projects is working, and where practicing “socially responsible Capitalism” is working. My point isn’t that Christians should stop participating in those kinds of things, it’s that those kinds of personal efforts will unfortunately never be enough to even scratch the surface of world poverty. That kind of personal/relational work does form the foundation of any sincere big picture transformation…but only if we go beyond the personal to the (yes, I know, it’s horrible) political in a really big way.]

I’m not getting down on Brian, Tim or any other Christians—or, for that matter, non-religious lefties, who share the same economic thinking. In the present day, when it comes to economic thought, we’re all starting at zero. For a couple hundred years up to the early 20th century, there was a long tradition of deep, experiential and theoretical work done in economics by passionate people who had the exact same goals as today’s Christians who are saying, “Everything must change.”

But twists and turns of history have hidden all that experience and knowledge from current generations. In some ways starting from zero is a good thing, because so much baggage had accumulated around those old traditions. But it’s wrong for us to simply repeat those two hundred years of trial and error, making every mistake they made, and ending up inevitably crushed by that same old debilitating baggage in the end.

OK…so in the next installment I’ll get into the economics itself. This post is way too long already!

Close to 100 churches participated, led jointly by Jim Wallis’ Sojourners and pastor Rich Nathan’s Columbus Vineyard church. Jim Wallis is an evangelical lefty progressive with a background in radical politics. Rich Nathan is an evangelical conservative who voted for Bush. The event is a tipping point in the decay of 20th century political categories.

As the church was filling up, a Vineyard church member sitting to my right told me: “They’ve been saying on the [Christian] radio that Jim Wallis is a communist.”

“What does that even mean?” I asked?

“I think…that he’s against…well…capitalism,” she said.

Then another Vineyard member sat down to my left. He’s away in grad school at a Christian university in Florida now.

“Why did you come all the way back for this?” I asked.

“The more I learn, the more I believe our economic system just isn’t sustainable,” he said, “I’ve really begun to question capitalism.”

He has been meeting with a group of other Christians to read about economics and environmentalism. They watch a lot of documentary films too—his favorite was The Corporation.

The vast majority of the audience attending this “Social Justice Revival” were conservative Republicans. Especially after the controversy raised in the local Christian media, people must have had some misgivings about participating. Nevertheless, the massive sanctuary was completely full, with the crowd pouring into two giant overflow spaces as well.

Asking these folks to listen to Jim Wallis with an open mind is a little bit like asking the lefty Take Back America conference to do the same for John Hagee.

But with a little help from Jesus, they did exactly that. Listen here how that works:

Rich Nathan would give Jesus all the credit, but he is doing something incredible with his church and this Justice Revival. He is saying (if I might translate): “Enough of these silly divisions. We stand for justice and there’s nothing wrong with that. Our faith calls us to act for justice in ways that we’re just not doing now. We’re doing a great job of helping people 1-on-1 in our city. Jesus calls us to do that, and it’s also what keeps us honest and in touch with reality. But we can only help so many people 1-on-1. Do we want to limit ourselves to be a little oasis in the desert for a few, or do we want to be leaders in our broader community who use our numbers and our love to change all of society?”

Over a year ago, the first time I talked to Jim Wallis, back when I was just starting to learn about all this stuff, he told me about Rich Nathan’s church. He said, “It’s absolutely incredible all the things they are doing for their community.”

And I asked, “But why won’t any of these amazing churches speak on policy when it comes to economic issues?”

He related the conversation he has about policy with many church leaders about that very question of whether the church is called to be an oasis, or force that salvages the whole desert. Apparently, some of those conversations are bearing fruit.

Here are four more short audio clips to give you a sense of the terms in which this is all unfolding:

• It’s not enough to be an oasis in a desert:
• We need to make three great commitments of Jesus:
• #1 Commit to Jesus:
• #2 Commit to each other
• #3 Commit to the cause of Christ…

I did an interview with one of the Vineyard pastors about the incredible service work they’re doing in Columbus. Hopefully I’ll have that edited down early next week for you to listen to.

But here’s proof.

My favorite is #68 (of 109 blog reactions so far):

Bible Geek Gone Wild: “Although I love my current ESV, I may be tempted to upgrade. Well, in as much as you can be tempted to buy a Bible.”

Here’s one example of a tour that would be great for anyone to check out—and they’re going through a ton of cities and towns:

From their site:

The Concept

Three authors/friends/public speakers hit the road for a summer, barnstorming churches around the country in a cross between an old time tent revival and the Blue Collar Comedy Tour. Speaking at churches large and small, Tony, Doug, and Mark will present a 90-minute show (including a 20-minute intermission) that will combine humor and passion, speaking and video, preaching and dialogue. Audiences will be entertained, to be sure, but, more importantly, they will be given a vision of an alternative Christianity, one that it woefully lacking in today’s world—this alternative is a Christianity of adventurous theology, passionate faithfulness, postmodern wit, and unrelenting concern for the justice and peace that God offers.