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In 2006, Books & Culture, along with our sister magazines Christianity Today and Leadership Journal, is posing a single provocative question to an array of creative and influential thinkers: How can followers of Christ be a counterculture for the common good? It is the opening question of the Christian Vision Project, a three-year exploration of next steps in the church's relationship to culture, its role in global mission, and its proclamation of the gospel.
One of the many benefits of this project is the chance to highlight a few individuals who exemplify evangelical Christianity at its best, at a time when mainstream media, abetted by our own foibles and follies to be sure, frequently highlight our vast and variegated movement at its worst. These voices may not shout the loudest, but they often have a great deal indeed to say, not just to fellow believers but to the wider culture.
Happily, Alan Jacobs' voice, familiar to readers of our pages, is being heard more widely recently, thanks to the publication of The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis. A frequent contributor to the Boston Globe, First Things, The Weekly Standard, the Mars Hill audio series, and other outlets, Alan is an eminently readable writer because he is above all a reader, discerning in his choice of texts and unfailingly careful with his subjects, engaging them with what he has called, in his book A Theology of Reading, "the hermeneutics of love." As Booklist put it in their review of his collection Shaming the Devil, Alan is "the most personable of critics." Here it is evangelicalism itself that benefits from his personable critique.
Implicit in the question I have been asked to consider—" How can followers of Christ be a counterculture for the common good?"—is a judgment: that we followers of Christ are not now such a counterculture. It's a sound judgment, I think, and it seems to call for a particular kind of discourse: what that great scholar of early American culture, Perry Miller, called the jeremiad.
Miller tells us that the preachers of colonial New England, in an "unending monotonous wail," in "something of a ritual incantation . . . would take up some verse of Isaiah and Jeremiah with which to berate their congregants." After 1679—thanks to the hard work of a synod of preachers—they could even employ a prefabricated list of the twelve varieties of iniquity characteristic of New Englanders, "merely bringing the list up to date by inserting the new and still more depraved practices an ingenious people kept on devising." Miller was duly impressed by these denunciations: "I suppose that in the whole literature of the world, including the satirists of imperial Rome, there is hardly such another uninhibited and unrelenting documentation of a people's descent into corruption."
Well, don't think I'm not tempted. But it would provide more pleasure for me than edification for my readers. The problem with jeremiads is that they only convince people already in the Jeremiah frame of mind; everybody else is likely to say, "Whoa, it's not that bad, is it?"
And in any case, those who would rectify the weaknesses or errors of any body of people should keep two warnings in mind. First, when a community fails to live up to its own standards, as of course it will, that community will be laboring under some kind of illusion—some distorted or fanciful self-understanding. As Kierkegaard pointed out long ago, "an illusion can never be destroyed directly, and only by indirect means can it be radically removed . . . one must approach from behind the person who is under an illusion." When anyone sees a jeremiad coming, he or she, like the captain of the Enterprise, immediately begins deploying the shields. This is why the prophet Nathan approached that adulterous murderer King David with a little story about sheep.
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