Related articles and links |  1 of 6

I must confess to mixed feelings about recommendations that we North American Christians see ourselves as a people "in exile." I do not argue with the basic image. I am convinced that exile ought to be a central theme in understanding the calling of the Christian community. My own thinking on this particular point has been strongly influenced by the writings of the late Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder. He convinced me that the most appropriate Old Testament models for political discipleship today are those folks who sought to be faithful to the Lord's will in pagan surroundings: Joseph administering justice in Pharaoh's courts, Daniel pleading the cause of the oppressed before Nebuchadnezzar, Mordecai getting involved in a palace intrigue to save his people from destruction.

But I also know how talk about exile can be an excuse for inaction. In the evangelical environs in which I was raised we made a big deal about being a people in exile, getting ready for the day when we would arrive at our heavenly homeland. This motif was clear in the choruses we sang: "I've got a mansion, just over the hilltop, in that fair land where we'll never grow old"; "Do Lord, O do Lord, O do remember me, way beyond the blue"; "This world is not my home, I'm just a-passing through." None of this provided us with much inspiration to work at social change in the here and now.

In the 1980s, however, as evangelicals assumed a more active role in the public arena, we started to downplay the exile theme. Indeed, when the Ethics and Public Policy Center published a set of scholarly essays in the early 1990s on the significance of evangelical involvement in the Religious New Right, the book bore the title No Longer Exiles. This nicely captured the mood of the new activism. Evangelicals—at least those who were now attempting to influence the patterns of public life—were no longer thinking of themselves as strangers in the land. In fact, one of our most prominent activist organizations had a very non-exilic name: Moral Majority. This mood started to show up in our songs too. Earlier we had been content with the rather modest musical vow that we would not allow our individual lights to be hidden under bushels. Now, suddenly, we were passionately singing "Shine, Jesus, shine, fill this land with the Father's glory."

My cynical side tempts me to think that many evangelicals have gone into a "no longer exiles" mode without much theological reflection. In the 1980s the larger culture was getting completely out of hand with abortion on demand, sexual promiscuity on television, and secularizing trends in public education. We sensed an opportunity to have some influence for the good in public life. In getting more active, we simply abandoned some older metaphors and adopted some new ones.

George Marsden once observed that the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century was for evangelicals something much like an immigration experience. The move wasn't geographical; rather, we were transplanted from a culture that had been quite friendly to evangelical Christianity to a new context dominated by an open hostility to our deepest convictions. This cultural migration forced a theological shift. While past evangelicals had envisioned a glorious Christian future for America as the New Jerusalem, their descendents now attended Bible prophecy conferences in which American culture was interpreted in apocalyptic categories.

After many decades of cultural alienation in the twentieth century, however, many evangelicals in the 1980s seemed to revert to the "holy nation" pattern of thinking, but without much theological rationale for this change of perspective. For decades we had been schooled in a cultural outlook characterized by three features: a remnant view of the church, an ethic of "over and against," and an apocalyptic view of the future. Now suddenly we were building megachurches and talking about moral majorities and strategizing about winning the culture wars—and most of this without serious theological reflection on why we now were seeing things in such different ways.

next page... |  1 of 6

April 24 2000, Vol. 44, No. 5