Religion Up, Morality Down

How to have a reformation.

It’s time to unwrap the cross.

Last year, Billy Graham and I had back-to-back press conferences at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention. As I waited in the wings for my turn, Ko Durieux, a Dutch telecaster, asked, “We read all about people in America being born again, that this was the Year of the Evangelical, that thousands—perhaps millions—are coming to Christ. Yet, we also see in America abortion on the increase, deterioration of the family structure, the crime rate increasing. How is it that so many can be born again and your society still be so sick?”

I said a quiet prayer of thanks that the question was asked of Billy Graham, not of me. But it has continued to plague me. Reports of a mighty religious revival are coming from all quarters. Gallup reports that one in three adult Americans claims to be born again and that one out of five adults attends Bible study or prayer meetings at least once a week. Time and Newsweek labeled 1976 the “Year of the Evangelical” and “born again” has become the fashionable catch phrase of the times. Church attendance is up after a seventeen-year decline; evangelical churches especially are thriving. Fifty-eight per cent of Americans say their religion is “very important” to them; 44 per cent believe that religion is increasing in its influence on American life, an opinion held by only 14 per cent in 1970.

Accounts from South America, Africa, and behind the Iron Curtain indicate that what is so evident here is no isolated phenomenon. This is good news, and some are proclaiming the arrival of the “Third Great Awakening” of modern times. Dare we hope so? Maybe. But first we need to know how much substance lies beneath the slick surface of America’s religious veneer. After a recent survey Gallup put the issue squarely: “Religion is increasing its influence on society but morality is losing its influence. The secular world would seem to offer abundant evidence that religion is not greatly affecting our lives.”

How is it possible that upwards of 50 million Americans profess to have experienced the regenerative power of new life in Christ and yet are not permeating the world with the values of Christ? Some reasons for our failure spring quickly to mind: Much contemporary teaching and literature pays no more than lip service to the real meaning of servanthood and commitment. “Love one another as I have loved you,” Christ commands. For him, that meant laying down his life; it can mean no less for us. Simplistic “Jesus saves” and “Heaven is yours now!” messages saturate the media and adorn automobile bumpers. It is superficial and perhaps this accounts for the little impact we have. Our fascination with such miracles as healing deformed limbs obscures for us the greatest miracle of all—that the Word became flesh. Such a Gospel depends, it seems today, not on revealed truth, but on showmanship. We lack “the deep conviction of sin and repentance that have marked past religious awakenings,” according to Richard Lovelace of Gordon-Conwell seminary.

Divisions within the body of Christ over theological, social, and structural issues too numerous to list here rob us of spiritual unity, hence of power. Many believers—some expecting the Lord’s return any moment, others merely content with their own piety—seem to care only about rescuing lost souls. But personal holiness without social holiness is disobedience to Christ’s second great commandment and a disembodying of the Gospel. Francis Schaeffer correctly warns that Christians are failing to stand squarely on biblical authority. Finally, some argue that it is too early for a new awakening’s impact to be felt. Yet when revival broke out spontaneously in Wales in 1904, its impact was felt throughout the country within months.

Each of these explanations has an element of truth in it; yet I believe that there is a more deeply rooted, more pervasive, and perhaps less easily identifiable flaw. I am a relatively new Christian, but I cannot help wondering whether we have not so accommodated the Gospel to twentieth-century humanism that what we offer is no more than a better way for man to achieve his humanistic goals—from personal gratification to nationalistic power. Unless our words are absolutely clear, the Gospel is heard as an appeal to egocentric desires and jingoism. When, for example, we say that “Christ will give you a more abundant life,” the word abundant is understood in this age of obsessive materialism to mean “the good things of life.”

The current awakening runs the risk of not making a clear distinction between the Jesus Christ of the Scriptures and the vague deity of American civil religion. I love my country, but when we suggest that God has singled out America for his chosen purpose, wrapping the flag around the cross, we confuse the enduring kingdom of God with the crumbling works of man and make the Gospel hostage to the political fortunes of a nation. We often thoughtlessly equate our Christ with a typically American stereotype: white, upper middle class, dwelling among the “good” people who drive station wagons and go to handsome churches on Sunday; then we are baffled when two-thirds of the world surrenders to alien forces like the humanist fraud of Marxism. The reason is obvious: they promise at least to give the hungry their daily bread while our response seems irrelevant to someone with an empty belly. We speak of our compassion for the poor, but we expect some relief agency to meet the need. For every problem we expect an institutional, preferably governmental, solution. Then when the institution fails, our frustration intensifies, blinding us to any sense of personal responsibility.

Jacques Ellul, in his Political Illusion (Knopf, 1967), contends that in the governments of the world we are creating monolithic, technological, all-controlling, impersonal goliaths—computer-like monsters that will devour our individual identities and personal responsibility. As the media rivet our attention upon the crisis of the moment, “politics obsesses and gives us hallucinations, fixing our eyes on false problems, false means, and false solutions.” Ellul concludes that “the real problems cannot be resolved by political means”; but “what is needed is a conversion of the citizen, not to a certain political ideology, but on a much deeper level of his conception of life itself—his presuppositions, his myths.” My point in citing Ellul is not that we should ignore government; Christians must strive to see that it and other institutions of society are influenced to be God’s instruments for restraining sin and promoting justice.

But we cannot abdicate the responsibility Christ demands; we cannot rely on man’s institutions to respond to human need. That four out of five crimes are committed by exconvicts underscores the now generally accepted fact that prisons cannot rehabilitate; man’s institutions, incapable of genuine compassion, cannot change human hearts—except to cause them to become further hardened. But in those same prisons I have for the past two years seen the mighty working of God’s Spirit changing lives, as Christians, one by one, take the Gospel to those people in need. The impact on society is dramatic as men and women come out of prison, not as hardened criminals but as new creatures in Christ.

What is required in prison—and elsewhere—is individual involvement and total commitment, meeting the whole human need, genuinely sharing pain, thereby living the Gospel. Ellul puts it eloquently: “… until we have wrestled with God till the break of day. like Jacob; that is, until we have struggled to the utmost limits of our strength, and have known the despair of defeat …, our so-called ‘confidence’ in God, and our ‘orthodoxy’ are nothing less than hypocrisy, cowardice, and laziness. When we have really understood the actual plight of our contemporaries, when we have heard their cry of anguish, and when we have understood why they won’t have anything to do with our ‘disembodied’ Gospel, when we have shared their sufferings, both physical and spiritual in their despair and their desolation, when we have become one with the people of our own nation and of the universal Church, as Moses and Jeremiah were one with their own people, as Jesus identified Himself with the wandering crowds, ‘sheep without a shepherd,’ then we shall be able to proclaim the Word of God—but not till then!” (The Presence of the Kingdom, Seabury, 1967, pp. 140–141).

Lest this article be simply another rhetorical polemic, let me offer some concrete suggestions.

• Be an authentic witness to one other person. We have discovered, as have others like Volunteers in Probation (Michigan) and M-2 (California), that one-on-one programs in prison cut the repeat-offender rate dramatically. No amount of teaching, preaching, or prison-supported programs can be a substitute for the personal involvement of individual Christians. There are 300,000 men and women in prison; 300,000 Christian families could cut the crime rate dramatically (while $17 billion in government spending can’t even dent it). I am called to prison; you may be called to the inner city, juvenile centers, nursing homes, or hospitals. The point is the same.

• Teach another to be a disciple. We spend so much effort teaching others to win still others that evangelism becomes almost an end in itself. But think what could happen if each committed Christian called one other person to a deeper walk with Christ. The impact within the body of Christ would be powerful.

• Get involved with moral issues. Christians do respond to public campaigns dealing with life style issues, such as homosexuality, prolife, and the broadcast of explicit sex on prime-time television. But we need to do more across the whole range of moral issues. We must actively support Christians who are leading in such causes.

• Encourage Bible study and biblical preaching in your church. Evangelicals may be outnumbered in many denominations, but you can still be God’s agent for renewal.

• Urge your church to expand its vision. Missionary support is increasing. But do we care as much about the ghetto down the block as we do about evangelizing Africa? The church can open its doors to those in need in its own neighborhood. A church in Washington, D.C., has taken responsibility for two large housing co-ops in the inner city. That church, though small, has made its ministry felt throughout the nation’s capital. Your church can also have such an impact.

• Each day demonstrate the whole Gospel. The Apostle James, in the earliest New Testament epistle, indicates the incongruity of mouthing formulas—be warmed, be filled—without doing something to meet our brothers’ and sisters’ needs. What might happen if fifty million believers each day would meet one human need?

• Examine how much of your Christian effort involves genuine compassion. The world sees evangelicals as self-centered separatists, concerned only with syrupy sermons and tent revivals. Such evangelical organizations as World Vision shatter this image. If you are not involved yourself, get behind groups that are involved with the problems of the world.

This listing is by no means all-inclusive; but it is a beginning. If we begin to do these things, we will reassert the historical role of the Church in meeting the needs of society. In the Great Awakening of the early nineteenth century, literally thousands of Christian societies grew directly out of a deepening evangelical commitment. One could not say then, as Gallup does today, that religion was not greatly affecting lives, because it was—dramatically—from the elimination of the barbaric slave trade in England to the elimination of dueling in America, from poor house and prison reform to treatment and care of alcoholics. Young men’s Christian groups and organizations to feed the poor were sprouting in every city.

We must realize once again that the Church of Jesus Christ is not an evangelical fellowship club. It is a holy nation, a royal priesthood, the very living presence of God’s rule here and now, the means through which God brings about not mere revival but reformation.

D. Bruce Lockerbie is chairman of the Fine Arts department at The Stony Brook School, Stony Brook, New York. This article is taken from his 1976 lectures on Christian Life and Thought, delivered at Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary in Denver, Colorado.

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