Hello, fellow wayfarers … How we convince ourselves that we can be cruel and nihilistic and Christian all at once … What Flannery O’Connor advised about an unhealthy obsessiveness about one’s sin … Why she and Walker Percy didn’t have time to square dance … What one reader has to confess about going to Hooters as a young Christian … A Desert Island Playlist from the Land of 10,000 Lakes … This is this week’s Moore to the Point.
How Christians Embrace Nihilism
“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.
Flannery O’Connor on Obsessing Over One’s Sins
We just passed what would have been the 100th birthday of Flannery O’Connor (which is why she shows up in at least a half-dozen separate places in this week’s newsletter).
I think of her often whenever I encounter a Christian plagued with constant self-judgment over sinfulness. Usually, this moroseness is not cognitive. The person usually knows what the Bible says: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9).
The person’s mind spins round and round not over whether Jesus will forgive a repentant sinner but whether the repentance is real enough, or heartfelt enough, or sincere enough. Sometimes that comes from a legalistic background, one in which the person absorbed the idea that repentance means that one is free from ever grappling with the same sin over and over again.
Who can know one’s own heart? In those conversations, I think of O’Connor’s letter of January 12, 1948, to a priest, in which she discloses her own tendency to second- and third-guess her own repentance of sin.
“Then you begin to wonder if your confessions have been adequate and if you are compounding sin upon sin,” she said. “This probably all comes from faulty training and being taught by the sisters to measure your sins with a slide rule. It drives some folks nuts and some folks to the Baptists. I feel sure it will drive me nuts and not to the Baptists.”
Flannery O’Connor on Maintaining Attention
Often when I’m frustrated at getting interrupted from the long periods of time it takes me to write and prepare, I also think of yet another Flannery O’Connor quote—or, rather, a quote about a Flannery O’Connor quote.
Novelist Walker Percy was once asked, “For most of your life, you have chosen a life of seclusion. Why?”
Percy replied:
Because writing is murder—both joy and murder. I would agree with Flannery O’Connor that if she spends three hours in the morning writing, she had to spend the rest of the day getting over it. This doesn’t leave much time for square dancing.
A Reader’s Hooters Story
After last week’s newsletter on the impending bankruptcy of the Hooters restaurant chain, many of you sent in notes with some of your own stories—and many of them made me laugh out loud.
Here’s one of them. Reader Jon D. from Murfreesboro, Tennessee, writes:
I’m a long-time listener, reader, and fan of your work. Reading your newsletter today and the discussion of Hooters’ bankruptcy made me think back on my only visit to the restaurant. Not necessarily a story I’m proud of, but one that still makes me smile when I think about it today.
I was a college student at Asbury University, near Lexington, Kentucky, and one afternoon me and some friends went to the “big city” to run some errands. Dinnertime was approaching, and we happened to be close to a Hooters. One of my friends suggested we go there “’cause they have really good food”—he was the only one of us who’d ever been.
Another friend voiced his approval. I was on the fence but reluctantly agreed to it. My roommate Matt had a girlfriend and was really against the idea. He said something like, “The only way I’m going in there is if we flip a coin and it lands on tails three times in a row.” (It’s been over 20 years, so I don’t remember if he said heads or tails or the number of times—but you get the idea.) This was something he thought wasn’t going to happen … but it did, and he couldn’t believe it.
We slowly headed for the door and were welcomed inside, and immediately noticed something unexpected. We were expecting to see the Hooters girls in their Hooters attire, and yet no one was wearing it. They were all dressed up … for Halloween, which was the next day.
We were seated by the hostess who was fully clothed and dressed as a mad scientist, wearing a lab coat, wig, etc. Our waitress came to our table and was also fully clothed—black pants, long-sleeve white shirt, and long black cape—dressed up as a vampire.
She started to talk to us and was struggling to speak, and then paused and took out her fake vampire teeth so she could tell us about their specials.
So yeah, we had a very non-Hooters experience at Hooters that day. And I’m not mad about it.
Desert island Playlist
Every other week, I share a playlist of songs one of you says you’d want to have on hand if you were stranded on a desert island. This week’s submission comes from reader Martin Willow of Champlin, Minnesota, who writes:
Two of the songs I chose are beautiful instrumentals (“Over the Rainbow” and “Clair de Lune”). The other songs with lyrics have meaningful messages, but also are fine compositions with excellent musicianship. I could listen to each selection over and over without feeling bored.
Here’s Martin’s list:
- “Over the Rainbow” by Jeff Beck
- “Goin’ Back” by The Byrds
- “The Coming Rains” by Bruce Cockburn
- “San Tropez” by Pink Floyd
- “Live on My Mind” by Bruce Cockburn
- “I Found You” by Jarod Lavik
- “Goodnight Song” by Tears for Fears
- “Please Come Home for Christmas” by Johnny and Edgar Winter
- “On an Island” by David Gilmour, with David Crosby and Graham Nash
- “I Can Dream About You” by Dan Hartman
- “Last Night of the World” by Bruce Cockburn
- “Clair de Lune” by Claude Debussy, Héloïse de Jenlis on harp
Thank you, Martin!
Readers, what do y’all think? If you were stranded on a desert island for the rest of your life and could have only one playlist or one bookshelf with you, what songs or books would you choose?
- For a Desert Island Playlist, send me a list between 5 and 12 songs, excluding hymns and worship songs. (We’ll cover those later.)
- For a Desert Island Bookshelf, send me a list of up to 12 books, along with a photo of all the books together.
Send your list (or both lists) to questions@russellmoore.com, and include as much or as little explanation of your choices as you would like, along with the city and state from which you’re writing.
Quote of the Moment
“About the fanatics. People make a judgment of fanaticism by what they are themselves. To a lot of Protestants I know, monks and nuns are fanatics, none greater. And to a lot of the monks and nuns I know, my Protestant prophets are fanatics. For my part, I think the only difference between them is that if you are a Catholic and have this intensity of belief, you join the convent and are heard from no more; whereas if you are a Protestant and have it, there is no convent for you to join and you go about in the world, getting into all sorts of trouble and drawing the wrath of people who don’t believe anything much at all down on your head.”
—Flannery O’Connor
Currently Reading (or Re-Reading)
- Ralph C. Wood, Flannery O’Connor and the Church Made Visible: A Revolutionary Witness for the Sake of the Gospel (Baylor University Press)
- Gregory W. Lee, The Essential City of God: A Reader and Commentary (Baker)
- Nicholas Carr, Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations (Norton)
- Douglas Coupland, Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! (Atlas)
- Eric A. Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present (Yale University Press)
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Russell Moore
Editor in Chief, Christianity Today
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