Four Poisonous Features of Loser Christianity

I published a piece two weeks ago called “How Loser Theology is Poisoning the Church,” which originally ran at Clear Truth Media. That piece “did numbers,” as the kids say.

This is the follow up to that piece. Here, I break down four of the most common features of “Loser Theology.” This piece also ran originally at Clear Truth Media.

Together, these two pieces are the culmination of my observations from over twenty years in ministry where I’ve been attempting to discern what’s happened in evangelicalism that is causing it to fracture and weaken so dramatically.

Here are four key features of neo-pietistic theology that we should mark and avoid in our own lives.

#1: The Denial of Agency

Pietism functionally denies human agency. This usually happens in one of two ways, the first being  a misapplication of the doctrine of justification. Scripture teaches we are saved by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone (Eph 2:8-9). Thus, salvation is passive - it is entirely the work of God. For this reason, asserting our human agency by doing good works can feel anti-gospel. But this is applying the doctrine of justification where it doesn’t belong. The classic “saved by grace through faith” text goes on, in the very next verse, to assert that grace was given so we might perform good works, with Ephesians 2:10, “we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.” In other words, grace does not eliminate human agency; grace unlocks it. God’s free grace empowers us by the Spirit to assert our God given agency in the world for his glory.

Another way we deny our agency is to assume that God prefers to demonstrate his power by doing great works apart from human agency, which would apparently corrupt it. This could be called the “miracle motif” or “let go and let God” theology. According to this mindset, someone might think, “God is more glorified when I step out of the way so he can work in this situation.” But this is a misapplication of the doctrine of God’s sovereignty. Scripture frequently attests that God prefers to work through human agency rather than apart from it.

Take George Mueller, for example. He was famous for running an orphanage without doing any personal fundraising, and his autobiography contains numerous examples of him pleading with God, trusting Him to meet the needs of the orphanage, before marveling as God miraculously provided through extraordinary and unusual circumstances. There’s no question that God may perform miracles, but scripture does not tell us to expect God to miraculously intervene to enable us to avoid exercising agency.

I once knew a man who joined a missionary organization and was expected to raise support. Rather than making calls, sending letters, and doing ministry presentations, he opted to follow Mueller’s lead and do nothing except pray for God’s provision. He never reported to his assignment. He was praying for a miracle instead of trusting God to work through his agency.

The “miracle motif” is a pious way to spiritualize decision avoidance. It is also at work in situations where we face a difficult choice and pray for God to “show me a sign” rather than making a tough decision ourselves. Why do we do this? Because it’s a way of shifting responsibility away from us and onto God, which may feel like the mature, Christian thing to do. “I’m trusting God,” we might say. But actually, we’re not trusting God, we’re avoiding taking responsibility for our own actions.

There’s no super spiritual shortcut for making tough decisions. The normative way God works is for us to apply biblical principles to real world situations, and then pray, count the cost, make a plan, take a risk, step out in faith, and follow through. This glorifies God as his Spirit is acting upon your faithful, courageous, human agency.

#2: The Doormat Doctrine

Pietistic people love to present themselves as ultra meek and humble, but this is often false humility. True humility has God as the reference point, and often cultivates zeal, courage, and boldness. False humility has man as the reference point, cloaking his self-obsession with acts of spiritual theater that appear humble to other people. The Pharisees did this: “I fast twice a week” (Luke 18:12).

One telltale sign of false humility is what I call the “doormat doctrine.” The doormat doctrine is a theology of self-loathing that comes from a cocktail of familiar but misapplied texts, such as self-denial, submission to authority, suffering, persecution, putting others’ needs before our own, Christ emptying himself of his power, the call to be a servant of all, love for one’s enemies, and so on. When these texts are isolated from a whole Bible theology, we end up with a bleak, self-abasing form of Christianity that valorizes misery as the highest expression of Christianity. 

However, the scriptures cited above (and many others like them) do not fully account for all the Bible has to say about the Christian life, and must be held in tension with other doctrines about the absolute Lordship of Christ , the power of the Holy Spirit, the advance of the gospel, the expectation that the Great Commission succeed, and the call for the church to disciple the nations. In other words, the first set of texts mentioned above teach Christians how to behave as the gospel advances in the midst of opposition. They do not teach that we are most Christlike when we are doormats for the world to walk on and wipe their feet on.

When I first read the book “Radical” by David Platt twenty years ago, I remember the distinct feeling of shame that I hadn’t given my life to be a mud-hut missionary in some third world country. I wondered, “Am I being worldly for owning a Honda?” (even though it was a high-mileage beater). The scriptures teach us to cling to God’s truths and promises when hardship comes, and very often they do come. But we are never told to pursue hardship as the objective.

#3: Teenage Girl Theology

Pietistic Christianity tends to be psychologized, emotive and introspective, all of which are tailor made for our therapeutic age. A hyper-focus on one’s inner spirituality can have a paralyzing effect over one’s life. For the pietist, what you feel about God is more important than what you think or do, and the pietist regards passivity, weakness, and emotionalism as the truest expressions of Christian virtue. These happen to be feminine traits. Teenage Girl Theology creates a feminine mold for Christianity that alienates and emasculates men.

I’ve been paying attention to this cultural trend for a long time now. Young men are abandoning Christianity because it does not speak to them as men. Feminine virtues are upheld as the standard of Christian faithfulness while masculine virtues are pathologized and condemned.

One of the clearest places this can be seen is modern worship music. I’m not the first one to notice how emotive and effeminate modern worship music is, and there just aren’t that many worship songs that appeal to manly men. Most seem to be written with teenage girls in mind. Men in these churches feel as though they have to put their manhood in their wife’s purse during the call to worship.

It need not be this way. The fields are white for the harvest among unbelieving, conservative young men. Many of them are fatherless and directionless. They need to know that their masculinity is good and God can use them to make a difference. In my opinion, churches would do well to consider young men an unreached people group in our own communities and intentionally make an effort to reach and disciple them for Christ.

Another example of teenage girl theology is the pathological obsession with idol hunting that has infected the evangelical world. Pietists are drawn to this trend because they have a psychologized faith and tend to be spiritual perfectionists. However a good and right desire to have a pure heart before the Lord can produce morbid introspection. I once led worship at a large conference and asked a young woman I knew with a beautiful voice if she would sing on the worship team with me. She told me “no” because, she said, she was afraid of making it into an idol. God had given her an incredible talent but she resisted using it because she was idol hunting.

Pietists often justify inaction by requiring a pure heart with pure motives before taking action. This has a crippling effect on Christians because it’s impossible to truly know if our hearts and motives are pure. Jeremiah 17:9 says, “the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick. Who can understand it?” Incessant introspection creates a debilitating decision paralysis where the perfect becomes the enemy of the good.

Idol hunting may appear righteous and spiritual to other people, and idol hunters may be praised for their “humility,” but it’s really another excuse for their inaction. According to the parable of the minas, the master is more pleased with courageous-yet-imperfect action than squeaky-clean-idol-hunting inaction.

#4: Missional Masochism

Pietists tend to be image conscious about their spirituality because, deep down, they crave respect from progressives, whom they regard as their primary mission field. They regard people to their left as sophisticated, urbane, and elite, and people to their right as fundamentalist speed bumps whose embarrassing religious fanaticism impedes their mission. Thus, they “contextualize” the gospel by openly signaling alignment with leftist priorities (such as caring for the poor or “climate care”) while nuancing and obscuring their conservative beliefs (such as opposing abortion and homosexuality).

Conservative Christians will rightly see pietists who do this as cowardly chameleons, changing color depending on the audience. Pietists justify their spinelessness as a missional strategy when, in truth, they’re just allergic to confrontation. They’d rather water down the truth and be loved by the world than actually stand for something that matters.

Pietists want to be seen as respectable Christians, which explains the appeal of men like pastor Tim Keller. Keller was the kind of Christian they can be proud of. He doesn’t embarrass them. He makes Christianity look smart to the progressive class they’re so eager to please. Of course, Keller’s propensity to cuddle up to progressives was always justified as a concern for mission. “This is how you reach people for Christ in a modern, urban context,” we were told. 

Joe Rigney describes this aspect of  pietism in terms of the “progressive gaze.” He describes this as  having an “imaginary progressive in your head (or looking over one’s shoulder) who critically evaluates all that you say and do as a Christian and thereby shapes your rhetoric, orientation, and framing of various issues.” Thus the fear of the progressive gaze is simply an excuse for pietistic Christians to distance themselves from embarrassing, cringy-conservatives while feeling superior for doing so because they are motivated by the noble desire to reach the lost. 

A pertinent example of this would be the recent annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), where there was a contentious debate regarding women pastors. One of the platform leaders chided the attendees by saying, “the world is watching,” which meant, “don’t impede our evangelism efforts with divisiveness.”

But this apparent call to unite on the Great Commission rather than divide on secondary matters wasn’t the real message. It was obvious that the real message was intended to separate the high-status Christians in leadership from the low-status, cousin-Eddie kinds of Christians in the assembly. The real message was, “Hey guys, reporters from the NY Times are here. We’re trying to prove to them that we’re not the racist bigot-farm they think we are. We can reach them for Christ if you’ll stop acting weird.” 

Missional masochism makes Christians unwilling to take unpopular stands or  bold actions if doing so would invite scorn from the unbelieving world. Thus, their inaction is justified as a concern for evangelism.

Power is Good, Actually

Thankfully, there is an antidote for the poison of pietism. It’s simple. Trust God, take righteous action, and assert your agency in the power of the Spirit.

The elites don’t want you to know this, but power is good, actually. It’s good for Christians to have power, to be in positions of power, and to assert righteous power for good. In Jesus’ final words to his disciples before he ascended into heaven, he promised them, “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you” (Acts 1:8). The power we receive as Christians is, first and foremost, a spiritual power to obey God and fight sin. But beyond this, the Christian faith is a building faith, and Christian truth itself creates power wherever the truth of God’s word is proclaimed and believed.

The church has power. When Christians gather together, receive Word and sacrament together, and commit to one another in the household of God, those things create power. When these commitments are formalized and structured, it creates institutional power. When Christians raise families and educate children, and the truth of God’s word is manifest in their lives, homes, workplaces, and communities, they create power.

Christianity is powerful because it is the belief system that most aligns with God’s design and purposes for the world. And since the world is in opposition to God’s purposes and people, there will be conflict, suffering and persecution. The scriptures promise these things and the Spirit indwells and empowers his people to faithfully endure and overcome them.

Thus, it is good and right for Christians to acquire power, gain influence, and wield it for good in the world. This includes political power, which is the inevitable result of the advance of the gospel. A Christianized society should be more just and peaceful than any alternative, and if we do not assert our spirit filled agency in the world, are we any different from the worthless servant?

Far too many Christians have settled for a passive, introspective, faith that is too afraid of failure to take a risk. But the kind of society we bequeath to our children and grandchildren will be determined by whether or not we are like the faithful servants who trusted their master, took action, and gained an increase. We need men and women of action, lion-hearted, bold, and gutsy Christians, wielding power in the world for the glory of God. If we do not, our inevitable defeat will lead to a godless, miserable pagan hellscape we can barely imagine.

God has given us his Word, his Spirit, his promises, and a hopeful future. It’s time for men and women to reject pietism, to stop being weak and pathetic, to stop idol hunting, to get the focus off of themselves, to face their fears, and take action.

The future belongs to Christian men and women who live boldly and fearlessly in the freedom and grace of the gospel. These men and women know this is our father’s world. Every square inch of the universe is his, and he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. 

The hour is late, so now is the time to step up, trust God, and exercise our God given agency for his glory and the good of our fellow man. Let’s get to work.