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“It turns out that when you mix narcissism and nihilism, you create an acid that corrodes every belief system it touches.” This is the assessment my friend David Brooks offers in the latest issue of The Atlantic about the state of a movement he once claimed for himself: American conservatism.
Brooks notes that despite the people-versus-elites messaging, virtually all of the national leaders he sees celebrating cruelty and vice are wealthy Ivy Leaguers. He dubs them “Vineyard Vines nihilists.” Brooks argues that this would be bad enough were it just a political matter, but the nihilism, he argues, has “eaten away at Christianity” too.
Many of these nihilists, Brooks writes, “ostentatiously identify as Christians but don’t talk about Jesus very much; they have crosses on their chest but Nietzsche in their heart—or, to be more precise, a high-school sophomore’s version of Nietzsche.”
“To Nietzsche, all of those Christian pieties about justice, peace, love, and civility are constraints that the weak erect to emasculate the strong,” Brooks continues. “In this view, Nietzscheanism is a morality for winners. It worships the pagan virtues: power, courage, glory, will, self-assertion,” as well as domination over “those sick sentimentalists who practice compassion.”
When it comes to Christianity, at least one thinker did see the embrace of nihilism coming—40 years ago.
In his 1986 book The Seduction of Christianity, French philosopher Jacques Ellul warned that a move of Christianity toward nihilism—literally, the belief in nothing—was already happening in recognizable stages.
Christianity moves toward nihilism, Ellul argued, when we see “the transforming of a living movement of relationship into an achieved and definite situation.” Ellul said that this kind of “freezing” of a relational religion into an artifact was anticipated by the New Testament itself.
“This was the mistake of the disciples when they saw the transfiguration and proposed to set up the tents so that they could remain in the ineffable light in company with Moses and Elijah,” Ellul wrote. “It is the mistake of an attempt to solidify in an arrested comprehensive and explicable system that which is an unforeseeable movement toward some outcome.”
When I first read this passage many years ago, I disagreed with Ellul’s assessment. And in many ways, I still would.
At first glance, Ellul seems to be making the sharp distinction between “doctrine” and “experience” that was characteristic of much of 19th- and 20th-century Protestant liberalism. As a careful student of Karl Barth, Ellul would have known that an experiential Christianity shorn of an objective Word led to its own kind of nihilism—the “natural theology” that evolved into the Volk religion of German blood and soil that led, ultimately, to death camps.
And if what Ellul means by “freezing” is the transformation of the living, relational revelation of Christ into a commitment to a canonical, textual authority that stands outside of and over the person and the church, I would argue that this “freezing” isn’t the source of our present nihilism. If anything, it’s the exact opposite.
Many of those urging evangelicals to “get real”—and, thus, to get over the “losing” mentality of the Sermon on the Mount—speak loudly about the authority of the Bible but strangely say very little about the actual words of the Bible.
In fact, many of those most gleeful in empowering the kind of Nietzscheanism that Brooks describes are far more conversant with natural law than with the biblical text, with a “worldview” abstracted from the text rather than the actual text itself—with its narrative and poetry and calls to sacrifice as well as with its doctrinal systems and moral admonitions.
If I can think of one defining characteristic that I could have—and should have—seen coming, it would be those who love Christology but not Jesus, biblical authority but not the Bible, conservatism but not that which is to be conserved.
That, in fact, is the stage Ellul was most prophetic in seeing from afar—what he calls “dissociation.” He wrote, “It breaks the link between the Word and him who speaks it, between persona and proclamation (e.g., the fact that the word of Jesus is true only because it is he who speaks it).”
Ellul argued that this happens whenever there is, contra to the New Testament, the articulation of a “‘Christian’ morality that is independent of faith” and conversion. He wrote that the perennial temptation of the church is to take up an effort “to achieve objective conduct without reference to the spiritual life, without the knowledge of God in Jesus Christ.” In that sense, the old song is right: “There’s nothin’ cold as ashes / After the fire is gone.”
As Flannery O’Connor put it:
Our response to life is different if we have been taught only a definition of faith than it is if we have trembled with Abraham as he held the knife over Isaac. Both of these kinds of knowledge are necessary, but in the last four or five centuries we in the Church have over-emphasized the abstract and consequently impoverished our imagination and our capacity for prophetic insight.
Christianity is more than just “a personal relationship with Jesus.” That’s true. But it certainly cannot ever be less than that.
When people created to be in communion with God, through Christ, in a living communion, replace that with “the experience of the numinous” generically, they end up with a dead moralism.
But when they replace that living faith with a set of ever-narrowing doctrinal requirements or “worldview propositions,” they end up filling the need for vitality with what seems most alive at the moment. In our moment, that’s politics.
Politics comes ready-made with its own version of revival and lots of heretics to hunt and boundaries to police, all with the added bonus that one need not actually crucify the flesh and can actually celebrate the “utilitarian” purposes of what Jesus said led to death.
The American church has not yielded fully, or even (I think and pray) mostly, to nihilism. But as God warned Cain, it “is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it” (Gen. 4:7, ESV throughout).
The hour, though, is late. The tents are here on the mountaintop, but where’s Moses? Where’s Elijah? Where is the glory? To find that again, we must listen for the voice that once thundered from the cloud: “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him” (Matt. 17:5).
A church that turns from nihilism will be disoriented—just as Peter, James, and John were when the voice spoke. But the end result will be the same: “And when they lifted up their eyes, they saw no one but Jesus only” (v. 8).
Many of our evangelical clichés have proven to be truer than we knew. “Jesus plus nothing equals everything,” the pulpit aphorism went. It’s true—Jesus plus nothing does equal everything. Jesus plus nihilism, though, is impossible. We must love the one and hate the other.
Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.
