American Christianity: Fiddling While the World Burns
Ralph Enlow
I anticipate that many of my fellow American Christian educators share my incredulity and gnawing disgust in the wake of the January 6th US Capitol assault. A mob, saturated with falsehood-fueled outrage and manipulated by vulgar and violent seditionists, surged through police barriers and inflicted physical violence upon both public property and public servants. Thank God it was relatively swiftly subdued.
Others have already offered much more eloquent expression than I to the sense of horror, shame, perplexity, and contrition that lingers in the wake of that debacle, the proportion of which Thomas Kidd judges to be among top five worst moments in American history. David French has, in my judgment, rightly called us to a sober reckoning with and repentant repudiation of the perpetrators’ and participants’ syncretistic Christian identity. In the meantime, paradoxically, much less sensational but arguably far more compelling global developments have been thrust into my awareness:
One of my German doctoral students requested accommodation in completing his assignments in the wake of political developments disrupting his relief work efforts in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
A Lebanese Christian education leader and relief agency executive wrote to me: Since early December Lebanon has been experiencing a significant increase in COVID-19 cases. The holidays did not help. Starting in January the positivity rate has jumped to 25%. Hospitals have run out of ICU beds. Patients are dying in parking lots and in ER beds that have filled the hallways. Our health workers are overwhelmed and some hospitals are urging emergency personnel to stop transporting patients their way. … The economic crisis is not helping either. Pharmacies are running out of medicines, even over-the-counter ones. Basic medication such as Tylenol is being rationed to 10 tablets per customer. … Lebanon has been without a government for 5 months. Our caretaker prime minister has no executive powers to tackle the pressing needs.
With the characteristically wry and resilient dark humor of former Soviet Union citizens, the leader of Eurasia’s theological education network described his Covid-19 diagnosis in Ukraine: I visited the hospital to be tested for the Covid-19. … You come to a backdoor and stand in a line for some time. … During this procedure you are surrounded by people standing in the line. I guess this is to ensure that if you do not have the Covid when you have come for a test, you should leave the hospital with the Covid. :) You also have to get to the hospital by public transportation. Because if you are sick with the Covid, you will not have enough physical strength to walk to the hospital.
In Hong Kong, where I was scheduled to teach a short-term intensive course on biblical leadership in 2021, widespread arrests of political dissenters and Christian leaders proceeds while Americans—including the majority of Christ-followers—are largely fixated on our national folly.
The irony grips me. While many of the world’s people languish under the weight of civic catastrophe, hunger, disease, poverty, and political oppression, far too many American Christians persist in pursuing the navel-gazing, insular, pseudo-gospel of conspicuous consumption and apocalyptic canards. Do too many American Christians, like Nero, fiddle while the world burns?
From Amos to Acts, the Bible demonstrates the tendency of God’s people to wallow in self-obsession and self-indulgence, forsaking their calling to channel God’s blessings to all the nations.
We educators are right to join our fellow citizens in soul searching in the wake of recent seditious foment. The present generation is arguably the mostly extensively schooled and least educated ever to walk the earth. Prominent among the many laments and calls for reform emanating from educators are those urging a return to the liberal arts with their emphasis on cultivation of the social values and personal virtue required for responsible democratic citizenship. Such reforms may offer some promise and would, in my view, represent an improvement upon shallow, utilitarian, technocratic curricular programming and educational outcomes measures rendered according to the reductionism of gainful employment and lifetime earnings.
Christian educators at every level, however, must embrace an even higher and holier calling. Above all and through all, our education must amount to “citizenship education” that resonates the grand biblical narrative. We dare not merely cultivate better American [or whatever your country’s] citizens. We must seek to form students who above all identify and act as citizens of Christ’s inaugurated kingdom, the reach of which encompasses all the earth’s peoples.
When will we who call ourselves Christian educators fully awaken to our crucial role in the church’s mission to declare the good news of salvation in Christ and deliver the accompanying, authenticating good works of justice and mercy to an increasingly desolate and desperate world? Our education amounts to a sub-biblical, sub-Christian aberration until our students are imbued with Isaac Watts’ eschatological vision: He comes to make His blessings known far as the curse is found.
Ralph Enlow, who previously served as president of the Association for Biblical Higher Education, currently serves as chair of the Board of Directors for the International Alliance for Christian Education.