Last year, I found myself making the rounds of Christian podcasts to publicize a couple of new books I’d written. Most of these conversations were similar, but one ended with an exchange that caught us both off guard.
The interviewer asked whether I’ve changed my mind on any big theological questions. What I took him to be asking was what I’d tell my younger theological self. To which I replied, “You don’t have to be radical to be a Christian.”
After I blurted out my answer, I had to ask myself what I meant. I didn’t have in mind the perennial vigor, earnest energy, and guileless naiveté of youth—or the renewal movements and prophetic indictments of elders these tend to generate. The “radical” trend I meant is a more specific phenomenon, one I expect is familiar to many American Christians around my age.
When we were in high school and college, to be radical for Jesus was presented as the goal of any serious Christian. The message came from youth pastors, from books like David Platt’s Radical and its many offshoots, and from earnest lyrics in Christian pop. As best as I can reconstruct it, the concept had four parts.
First, it held that Jesus’ teachings are the heart of the gospel. If you want to know what it means to be a Christian, look neither to the Old Testament nor to the apostles. Look instead to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and the red letters contained therein.
Second, the radical gospel revealed that Jesus’ teachings are not what you’ve heard at church. Really, Jesus isn’t even particularly interested in church except as a place where people who are committed to living out his teachings gather to support one another. If you were raised in church, most likely Jesus’ teachings were downplayed, muted, or otherwise sanded down to keep their rough edges from drawing blood.
Third, Jesus’ radical teachings are necessarily at odds with the American way of life. At the very least, this meant some mix of individualism, consumerism, secularism, nationalism, and militarism. But it could also include elements of a standard-issue adult life in America: marriage, children, a rewarding job, a mortgage, a safe neighborhood, a decent education, savings in the bank, and paid vacation—the proverbial white picket fence. To be radical for Jesus meant sacrificing all this for his sake. You could follow Jesus or the American way, but not both.
Finally, the radical alternative to the picket fence was the kind of life you read about in church history: the lives of saints, monks, missionaries, and martyrs. Saint Francis selling all his possessions. Dorothy Day founding the Catholic Worker Movement. Martin Luther King Jr. marching in Selma and Washington. Dietrich Bonhoeffer being executed in a Nazi concentration camp.
The preeminent living example was Shane Claiborne. His 2006 book The Irresistible Revolution detailed how he’d helped establish an intentional Christian community in a poor neighborhood of Philadelphia. Claiborne had spent time in Calcutta with Mother Teresa and in Baghdad with a peacemaking team during the US-led bombardment of the city. This is what it means to follow Jesus, would-be radicals concluded (whether that was the message Claiborne intended to communicate or not). Ordinary American Christians had to wake up.
Young, impressionable, precocious believers like me took that message seriously. I learned that there are Christians and there are Christians—people who profess Christianity versus people whose lives manifest their faith.
I wanted to be the latter. I wanted to be an impoverished pacifist and member of an intentional community. That’s what a plain reading of the Gospels required—I was convinced of it—and I certainly didn’t want to want to be a hearer but not a doer of Jesus’ teachings (James 1:22–25). As Jesus warns at the end of the Sermon on the Mount, “Not every one who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven” (Matt. 7:21, RSV throughout).
So I spent summers overseas doing mission work. I interned at a homeless shelter. I looked for ways to give, to sacrifice, to suffer. Newly married—clearly already a compromise with the world and the flesh!—my wife and I lived in an old, ugly one-bedroom apartment outside of Atlanta. One day we were driving through a wealthier neighborhood, and my wife wondered aloud what kind of house we would buy one day when we had kids and real jobs. Uh oh. I replied, with somber spiritual gravity, that I’d be happy to live in our apartment for the rest of my life.
I was promptly informed that I’d be welcome to live there as long as I was also happy to live alone.
I wish I could say that this was a wake-up call, but my self-serious piety took a long time to deflate. Now teaching at a Christian university, a husband and father of four—with a mortgage and a salary and, yes, paid time off—I can only smile when I see a similar piety in my students. So much of it is good, full of sweet sincerity and worthy of nothing but honor and encouragement. Some of it is simply developmental: This phase must be lived. It’s not meant to be circumvented, for the way is not around but through.
Nevertheless, there is something in the lure to the radical that’s worth interrogating. Why was the radical path such an attractive proposition to me and to so many others? Why do similar movements, well-meant but misguided, sometimes go wrong?
The basic appeal is obvious enough: Middle- and upper-middle-class teens could reach for something beyond their parents’ domesticity. Did Jesus come to earth and die on the cross so that suburbanites could have swimming pools and charcuterie boards? Unlikely. Surely there’s more.
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The urge to be radical also played into the mild conspiracism of so much American religiosity: Jesus preached peace, but Constantine baptized the sword. Paul proclaimed martyrdom, but Augustine justified war. Peter distributed possessions to all in need, but the pope gloried in his glittering golden pomp.
In this view, the church is a corrupt or, at best, merely human institution, unworthy of our trust. If Jesus’ original teachings have been rejected or corrupted by “organized religion,” then you need to turn from your local congregation to Jesus alone—or more precisely, to the Jesus you personally find in the Gospels.
There’s an instinct here that is undeniably right. Jesus’ teachings really are hard, both to hear and to put into practice. The church really is full of flawed sinners who utterly fail to live out the way of Christ. Christians really are, in the phrasing of theologian Nicholas Healy, “unsatisfactory.” The salvation God offers us in the gospel really isn’t about earthly possessions, blessings, and happiness. And there really are features of American life that are inimical to Jesus’ life and teachings.
In this sense, the radical message is correct: Wherever churches have compromised the faith and followed other gods—mammon or Mars or any worldly idol—the call to return to Jesus is not just apt but urgent. Return to the Lord, no matter the cost. “Remember then from what you have fallen, repent and do the works you did at first” (Rev. 2:5).
Yet in practice, the radical message reliably comes to an unhappy (if unadmitted) conclusion: Almost no one on earth is a “real” Christian. Almost no body of believers is a “real” church. The folks sitting in the pews and preaching from the pulpits simply are not sufficiently serious or committed. (In truth, the conclusion is usually comparative: not as die-hard in comparison to me, the radical sitting in judgment on them.)
Rather than accepting this grim implication, I’d like to propose an alternative: Yes, radicals are faithful believers. But their path is not the only path for the Christian life. In fact, it is so far outside the norm for most believers in most times and places that I propose that we delete radical from our Christian vocabulary.
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As it happens, that’s not a novel idea. For centuries, Christians did not exhort one another to be “radical.” The word’s usage, particularly as a term of approval, exploded only in the last 50 years. Many Christians don’t realize that among the sources of this use are far-left and reactionary politics, though it has migrated toward mainstream and even centrist usage since the 1970s. In the American church, I suspect one could trace the word’s movement from political left and Anabaptist contexts via the influence of theologians like John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas at the end of the last century.
But whatever the genealogy of the term, we should abandon it for two reasons. One is that by using it loosely and frequently, we’ve drained it of its meaning. In this usage, anything can be radical, provided you really mean it. But if it can be radical to curate that cheese board or listen to Bach, to vote for a certain candidate or buy a painting from a Christian artist, then the word has gone on holiday. Suddenly, being radical has swung back to the very white-picket-fence lifestyle we earnest young Christians were trying to avoid in the first place.
Like most Christians, I know some truly radical disciples of Jesus. I’m thinking, for example, of a longtime friend who for two decades has worked in a major American city to alleviate the plight of the homeless. If we reserved radical for people like him, you’d hear no objection from me. But if that’s not on the table, it’s better to do away with it entirely.
The second reason is that most Christians are neither true radicals like my friend nor self-styled radicals like those I’ve critiqued. The vast majority of all Christians, everywhere, at all times are normies.
They are unimpressive. Unsatisfactory. Barely getting by. They don’t claim to be saints or heroes. They succeed if they make it to church on Sunday and pray before meals and bedtime. They believe in God, confess their sins, and look to Jesus for grace. And if we’re honest, that’s about it.
They are not the rich young ruler, who walked away from Jesus sad (Matt. 19:22), nor Simon of Cyrene, who carried Jesus’ cross (Mark 15:21). They are more like the other Simon, called Peter, who refused to carry a cross and denied even knowing Jesus. They are Thomas, who would not believe until he saw the risen Lord with his own eyes. They are the unnamed father in Mark 9, who cried out to Jesus, “I believe; help my unbelief!” (v. 24).
In Paul’s words, they “lead a quiet and peaceable life,” and they’re fortunate if it’s “godly and respectable in every way” (1 Tim. 2:2). Often they are failures, screw-ups, and dropouts—ordinary people muddling through. They are not what I’ve elsewhere called “spiritual Navy SEALs.” They are everyone who has called on the name of the Lord and—just as he promised—was saved (Rom. 10:13; Joel 2:32).
Christianity might be more impressive if we were all true radicals. But it would be a faith for heroes rather than sinners. It would cease to be good news for the desolate and helpless. It would be a message for the few, not for the whole world (1 John 2:2). It would be a lesser faith in quantity and quality alike.
My younger self was on fire to be radical like Jesus. That was good and right. But what I missed was the weight of sin in the world—and with it, death, suffering, affliction, sorrow, and pain. What I missed was the scope of grace, the gospel, and the church. I didn’t understand that here was offered a liberation deep enough, a healing strong enough, a forgiveness wide enough to comprehend everything fallen humanity needs.
Christianity is not reserved for radicals. The Lord does not help those who help themselves. By a miracle, he helps the utterly and pathetically helpless—of whom I am chief. That’s truly good news. It’s also a terrible scandal. And that’s the point.
Brad East is an associate professor of theology at Abilene Christian University. He is the author of four books, including The Church: A Guide to the People of God and Letters to a Future Saint.
