ARE NOMINAL CHRISTIANS DANGEROUS IN EDUCATION?

Mere Christianity for Teachers, Part 14

“Seek, and you shall find.” (Matthew 7:7) Perhaps one of the best representations of this is in CS Lewis’ The Final Battle (the last book in the Narnia series). A young man called Emeth [i] is a sincere seeker of the good, and thus faithfully worships the god of his land, called Tash. At the point of death, he still earnestly seeks Tash, whom he was led to believe was the source of all that was good and noble. However, instead of finding himself in the land of Tash, he found himself in the land of Aslan, the Lion King of Narnia (and for those who have not read the books, Aslan is the ‘image’ of Jesus Christ).

This is how Emeth explains what happened when he came upon Aslan in the New Narnia:

Then I fell at his feet and thought, Surely this is the hour of death, for the Lion (who is worthy of all honour) will know that I have served Tash all my days, and not him. Nevertheless, it is better to see the Lion and die than to be Tisroc [ruler] of the world and live and not to have seen him. But the Glorious One bent down his golden head and touched my forehead with his tongue and said, Son, thou art welcome. But I said, Alas, Lord, I am no son of thine but a servant of Tash. He answered, Child, all the service thou has done to Tash, I account as service done to me. … But I said also, Yet I have been seeking Tash all my days. Beloved, said the Glorious One, unless thy desire had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek.

Lewis explains his thinking about this in his Mere Christianity:

There are people (a great many of them) who are slowly ceasing to be Christians but who still call themselves by that name: some of them are clergymen… There are people in other religions who are being led by God’s secret influence to concentrate on those parts of their religion which are in agreement with Christianity, and who thus belong to Christ without knowing it. (Mere Christianity, p. 174)

I suggest the former type of people are what we know as ‘nominal’ Christians. The latter are those whose hearts are truly seeking the Way, Truth and Life, but do not know that truth has a name, and that is Jesus. Sadly, the pattern of communities moving from being sincere in faith to being nominal has been, and is still, regular. Many formally fervent Christian schools have drifted to being nominal. They started with hearts seeking the Way, Truth and Life, but ended up accepting the pretend version. This pretence becomes a shallow facsimile of Christ, and it becomes a path of ways, truths and hopelessness.

This kind of drift is dangerous in so many ways. Nancey Pearcey [ii] describes the disturbing pattern of nominal Christian men in marriages:

Compared to secular men, devout Christian family men who attend church regularly are more loving husbands and more engaged fathers. They have the lowest rates of divorce. And astonishingly, they have the lowest rates of domestic violence of any major group in America. … [but] nominal Christian men have the highest rates of divorce and domestic violence… (p. 15) … … nominal Christian family men do fit the negative stereotypes – shockingly so.  … they hear the language of headship and submission but not enough to lean the biblical meaning of those terms. (p. 37) 

Pearcey explains much later in the book that these kind of oppressive husbands and fathers seem to “distort Scripture to justify it.” (p. 230). I suggest that many (or most?) of us have seen this kind of manipulation in Christian communities, including in our Christian schools. As Pearcey notes above, the converse side of this coin is that sincere Christian men do better on all indicators than any other ‘category’ of men. [iii] This kind of report highlights how devasting it must be when the good is expected, and the opposite is experienced.

This pathway, from pretend righteousness to actual self-aggrandising while manipulating others, is also seen institutionally. As Greer and Horst describe it in their informative book Mission Drift, organisations can label themselves as Christian but live within ‘functional atheism’. God is used in comfortable ways (e.g. running chapels, having a Chaplain), but He is left out of the daily functioning of the community. They describe what the opposite looks like in ‘mission true’ communities – for example, boldly proclaiming their Christian heart, focus and rituals.

Similarly, Benne’s study of six colleges / universities outlines similar practices that are essential if we are to be collectively more than nominal. [iv] Without such practices, Benne describes that increased secularisation is almost guaranteed. One shift he clearly describes when colleges shift is that leaders move to more generic ‘value statements’ that dilute their references to Jesus Christ. This leads to people thinking that they are Christian (the generic values sound close enough), but they are not. See Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters if you want to read the eternally damaging consequences of such mistaken practices.

In his review of the role of Christian colleges in our post-Christian era, Eaton [v] uses the work of Denton and Smith to explain the distorted religion that our young people learn when we are nominal:

Teens believe that: “individuals must freely choose their own religions; that the individual is the authority over religions and not vice versa; that religion need not be practiced in and by a community; that no person may exercise judgement about or attempt to change the faith of other people; and that religious beliefs are ultimately interchangeable insofar as what matters is not the integrity of a belief system but the comfortability [sic] of the individual holding specific religious beliefs”. (p. 158)

Eaton reviews what Christian educational communities can do to inhibit such nominal faith. It involves communal spiritual formation, while inviting individual spiritual formation. Commitment to spiritual formation (which is another way of saying having a commitment to being more human, or Christ-like), is another form of being explicitly bold in declaring we are ‘the people called’ under God – and not in with a stance of superiority, but with its opposite – demonstrating our calling with deep devotion to service to others. Eaton reminds us of these practices when they were done well in the Middle Ages:

They studied the scriptures trustingly, and then they looked at the world hopefully.  Theirs was an “optimism [that] consists in thinking that everything true or good or simply beautiful that was said, even by pagans, belongs to the Christians.” (p. 164)

Does all truth and beauty belong to Christ in our minds? Is every thought ‘captive to Christ’, as Paul suggested? [vi] We must remind ourselves that knowing about truth is not enough, even if we instruct about that truth. Why? Jesus described it clearly to the crowds and disciples:

1-3 Now Jesus turned to address his disciples, along with the crowd that had gathered with them. “The religion scholars and Pharisees are competent teachers in God’s Law. You won’t go wrong in following their teachings on Moses. But be careful about following them. They talk a good line, but they don’t live it. They don’t take it into their hearts and live it out in their behavior [sic]. It’s all spit-and-polish veneer. (Matthew 23:1-3, The Message).

So yes, nominal Christians are dangerous. Instead of being nominal, let’s hear the words of Jesus and put them into practice, [vii] all the way into the halls, corridors, offices and rooms of our schools.

Grace and peace,

Stephen

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[i] The name is a clue – ‘emet’ is Hebrew for truth… Emeth is a truth-seeker

[ii] Nancy R Pearcey The Toxic War on Masculinity: How Christianity reconciles the sexes. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 2023

[iii] Note also the report on last week’s Substack about the positive contribution of sincere faith (‘abiding’) for all ‘categories’ of students – the good news is good when it happens; the bad news, from the nominals, is horrible when it happens.

[iv] Benne, R (2001) Quality with Soul: How six premier colleges and universities keep faith with their religious traditions. William B Eerdmans Publishing Company

[v] P W Eaton, Engaging the Culture Changing the World: The Christian University in a Post-Christian World. IVP Academic 2011

[vi] 2 Cor. 10:3-5

[vii] Matthew 7:24-27