Christians in the Age of Outrage

How to Bring Our Best When the World Is at Its Worst

Ed Stetzer

• Publisher: Tyndale Momentum
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781496433640
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Are you tired of reading another news story about Christians supposedly acting at their worst?
Today there are too many examples of those claiming to follow Christ being caustic, divisive, and irrational, contributing to dismissals of the Christian faith as hypocritical, self-interested, and politically co-opted. What has happened in our society? One short outrageous video, whether it is true or not, can trigger an avalanche of comments on social media. Welcome to the new age of outrage.
In this groundbreaking book featuring new survey research of evangelicals and their relationship to the age of outrage, Ed Stetzer offers a constructive way forward. You won't want to miss Ed's insightful analysis of our chaotic age, his commonsensical understanding of the cultural currents, and his compelling challenge to Christians to live in a refreshingly different way.

Everyone can be destructive and negative. It’s easy to stand on the sidelines and shout out what’s wrong with a situation and why everyone and everything is bad or wrong.

And pithy words are easy to come up with. I saw someone’s post on Facebook after a school shooting. It was a cartoonlike graphic with these captions:

“Dear God, why do you allow such violence in school?”
—A concerned student

“Dear concerned student, I’m not allowed in school.” —God

Actually, for the record, God is everywhere. And so are stupid T-shirts. But it is easier to be angry and pithy than to be Christlike and on mission. Such outraged approaches are self-destructive. Some of them are even contrary to what God calls us to as leaders of his church. We need to be constructive, offering Christians a vision for how to navigate outrage and be more effective in showing and sharing the love of Christ.

And speaking of schools, God is indeed at work in some surprising ways there. For example, Katie Beiler is a literacy liaison for Pequea Valley School District in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. She visits families in their homes to encourage parents to read aloud and develop other habits to build their preschoolers’ vocabulary and social skills. Beiler’s aim is to ready young children for kindergarten —something that has been a problem in her district. Pequea Valley has been experiencing a rise in poverty, and in 2017 only 64.8 percent of third graders passed Pennsylvania’s standardized English language arts test.[1] Beiler plays an essential role in ensuring that Pequea Valley preschoolers are exposed to books and language before they enter the school system.

What is unique about Katie Beiler’s role is that she is employed by Grace Point Church, not Pequea Valley School District. In order to keep the balance of separation between church and state, Beiler uses a nonreligious curriculum, reports to a district official, and has a Pequea Valley identification tag. However, she also gives monthly updates to Grace Point’s pastor. Currently, Pequea Valley has a $45,000 grant that applies to Beiler’s position, which helps offset the cost to Grace Point Church, but when the grant ends the church will shoulder the entire $70,000 annual cost. This program is so important to Beiler and to the entire church community because they want to be, in the words of lead pastor Tim Rogers, “a transforming presence in the town square.”[2]

Yet that’s just not how it’s done in most places. Far too often we make snarky references on Facebook rather than engage in Christlike ways, as Grace Point Church has done. But before we get to where we want to be, we have to acknowledge where we are now.

Good thinking requires good diagnosis. It requires a discussion of what is wrong, how we got here, and what blind spots and behavior are feeding the problem. So part 1 of this book is necessary to lay the groundwork for the rest of the book.

Let’s get out the stethoscope before we start prescribing the treatment. But let’s not confuse diagnosis with the cure.

[1] Jeff Hawkes, “Literacy Teacher Actually Employed by a Church,” U.S. News & World Report, March 31, 2018, https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/pennsylvania/articles/2018-03-31/literacy-teacher-actually-employed-by-a-church.

[2] Ibid.

Chapter 1: Outrage Cause #1: A Cultural Forking

• Of evangelicals with an opinion, 82 percent believe that since the 2016 presidential election, groups within the Christian church have become increasingly polarized on issues of politics.
• Of evangelicals with an opinion, 73 percent believe the 2016 presidential election revealed political divides within the Christian church that have existed for a long time.

WHEN I CAME TO WHEATON COLLEGE, I began to serve as the Billy Graham Distinguished Chair. (The chair is distinguished, not the chair holder, I assure you.)

That role, and the role at the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton, came with a key responsibility. Eventually, I was given a card that I was told I needed to carry on my person. On campus, traveling to conferences, and even on family vacation, I needed to make sure this card was always on me.

This was all part of something called “The Washington Project,” a secret phrase we would use to refer to what we would do after Mr. Graham passed. (Hint: I’m not good at keeping secrets.)

But this was a serious responsibility, and I took it as such. It got to the point that I was thinking about having the card tattooed to the back of my hand.

Printed on the card were step-by-step directions to follow when Billy Graham died: the people I needed to call, the e-mails I needed to write, and the flights I needed to book. We knew that when this news finally broke, there would be a frenzy of activity. Arrangements would need to be made, interviews given, and articles published. This wasn’t hype; we understood that the opportunity to celebrate the life of Billy Graham was going to be a major platform to continue the work to which he devoted his life: preaching the gospel to the world. As it turned out, his funeral was, in a sense, his last crusade, and millions tuned in.

But why? Why such an ordered procedure? Why such intensity to make sure the process happened immediately? Why such a big deal?

Because it was Billy Graham.

Non-Christians and even younger Christians today may have difficulty understanding the impact and importance of Billy Graham. After all, thousands of preachers today have their own followings, YouTube videos, and podcasts. Ask ten Christians who their favorite Christian preacher or leader is, and you will likely get ten different answers. During the second half of the twentieth century, however, the vast majority of Christians gave the same answer: Billy Graham.

When obituary after obituary called Graham “America’s pastor,” it wasn’t an exaggeration. To many Americans, including presidents, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists, and award-winning actors, Graham was their only connection to Christianity. He was their pastor.

Graham seemingly walked effortlessly across the cultural divisions that proved insurmountable to so many other leaders. From Karl Barth to Carl Henry, from Martin Luther King Jr. to Richard Nixon, from Johnny Cash to Queen Elizabeth, Graham won friends among communities and traditions, and in doing so, he proved to be one of the most unifying forces in American life.

To grasp the scale, consider that in Gallup’s yearly poll listing the ten most admired men, Graham appeared sixty-one times between 1948 and 2017. For comparison, among other men the one who came closest was Ronald Reagan, who appeared thirty-one times. Queen Elizabeth came closest overall; she has appeared forty-nine times in the list of the ten most admired women. Among people who are not national leaders, Oprah Winfrey has appeared thirty times and Bill Gates has been on the list eighteen times. Consider how staggering that is. As much as the world loves Oprah or Bill Gates today, Graham had more than double the appearances of Oprah and was on the list three times as often as Gates.[1]

Consider also that in a recent research project we conducted at the Billy Graham Center, we asked evangelical pastors, “What two nationally known pastors have been most influential in the way you do ministry at your church?” Though Graham had been out of the spotlight for nearly two decades, he was still ninth among all pastors. He jumped to second when we asked the same pastors who the most influential pastor on their ministry in the 1990s was. More than just shaping the public perception of Christianity, Graham was (and continues to be) considered by many Christians as an example to follow, not only in their evangelistic projects but in their entire ministries.[2]

For almost seventy years, Graham had been the living embodiment of the West’s religious openness. Even those who did not believe recognized in Graham a model of Christian virtue and ethics. He won begrudging respect from those we might classify as his cultural or theological opponents —a situation that seems almost impossible today.

One of the major causes for the age of outrage is that this religious and cultural consensus has evaporated. Graham’s death in February 2018 was not the beginning of this change but serves as an appropriate bookend to a past age. Out of the spotlight for many years, Graham’s declining presence in American life parallels the decline of the consensus he forged throughout his life. Thus, the incessant need of many Christians to find “the next Billy Graham” speaks to a recognition that we have lost a unifying force within a culture that was already splintering.

When Nominals Become Nones

Baseball great Yogi Berra used to say, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

America did. So did Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. The majority of people in these nations were once vaguely Christian, but for years, those with loosely held religious beliefs have been dropping them, and as a result, the entire English-speaking Western world is becoming more secular.

Focusing on the United States for a moment may help, though similar trends are taking place across the English-speaking Western world. Most Americans, who identify as loosely Christian, are becoming less so —they are more frequently choosing “none of the above” rather than “Christian” when surveyed about their beliefs. In fact, each year about an additional one percent of Americans no longer identify as Christian.[3]

Put another way, the nominals are becoming the nones. And as they become nones, their mind-set is more aligned with secular-minded people and they have less affinity with the avowedly religious. At the same time, the percentage of the devout has remained relatively stable.[4]

The effect of this trend is that American culture is incrementally polarizing along religious lines. People are either becoming more secular or staying devout, though the biggest group is becoming more secular. This is where we meet the fork in the road: How do we engage with our faith in a culture now polarized along faith lines rather than being at least nominally Christian?

It is useful to think about culture as a river, flowing in the direction of our collective beliefs and values. Within this river, there were once three primary streams, each of which included about a quarter of the population (the other quarter being self-identified non-Christians). These three groups are

Cultural Christians: People who self-identify as Christian because they are not something else and were born in a historically Christian country. They are Christians, in their minds, because that is part of their heritage.

Congregational Christians: People at church on Christmas Eve, and maybe for the occasional wedding or funeral. Although they may not have a vibrant faith, they retain some connection to a local congregation, probably going back on Easter, for example. As a result, over the last few decades, most churches have tried to reach these people.

Convictional Christians: People who identify as Christians and are decidedly more religious. They more likely go to church regularly, live values that align with Christianity, and choose their spouses based on their faith. (According to the General Social Survey[5] and some analysis I have explained more thoroughly in USA Today,[6] the percentage of people in this group has remained relatively steady for the last few decades.)

While historically there have been divergences and reunions in our cultural river, the overall consensus among Americans (like most of the West) was shaped by a common Judeo-Christian belief system. Even though there was significant di...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Endorsements
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction: Welcome to the Age of Outrage
• Part 1: Why the Age of Outrage?
• Part 2: Outrageous Lies and Enduring Truths
• Part 3: The Outrageous Alternatives to Outrage
• Appendix: Key Findings from the Billy Graham Center Institute
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author