"What Are Christians For?" 1.0

As my frequently interrupted summer draws to an end, I've picked up Jake Meador's new book, "What Are Christians For? Life Together at the End of the World" (IVP 2022). Covering some of the same ground as Carl Trueman's "The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self" (final in a lengthy series of blog posts here), Meador's book is a social history rather than the intellectual history of how we (Americans) got to where we find ourselves in the second decade of the twenty-first century. "What Are Christians For?" is also substantially shorter than Trueman's, coming in at 170 pages of text. Meador's brevity and more popular style carries some costs, however, because his arguments are not always fully developed. Finally, the genre of social history tends toward the selective and thus runs the risk of straw-manning. None of these concerns should be taken as sufficient reasons not to read "What Are Christians For?" Beginning with this post I plan to make some idiosyncratic observations on the book that I hope will spark the interest of my readers.

In her Foreword, Karen Swallow Prior begins with an observation: "It is the mark of particularly modern Christians that we have given so much attention to what we do (morality) and what we think (worldview) that we have perhaps forgotten to consider why we are here." Regular readers of this blog will recall that I have repeatedly decried the reduction of the Christian religion by American Evangelicals to worldview (here and here for some examples.) Moralism, too, is a besetting problem but it is hardly limited to right-leaning Evangelicals. As to the fundamental question--why we are here?--it's not so much that Christians don't think about it but that neither they (nor most others) have the categories in which to think about the human telos. Since the displacement of virtue ethics in the West by the ethics of autonomy or utility, consideration of why of human life has been reduced to either expanding personal sovereignty or simply having more [fill in the blank]. For virtually everyone in America, the Right precedes the Good.

In his Introduction, Meador begins with an extended narrative of his encounter on a flight to London with Fr. Ted, a Roman Catholic priest from South Africa who had played a significant real-life role in the life of anti-apartheid activist Steven Biko dramatized in the in-flight movie Cry Freedom that Meador was watching. Meador uses the life of Fr. Ted as a foundation from which to evaluate the lives of contemporary, well-off, white American Evangelicals. If Fr. Ted found his why in "a 'whole life' political philosophy [that is] concerned with creating a society that pervasively open to and supportive of life 'from the womb to the tomb'", where does Meador's hoped-for audience find its? In his words, "our vision of the Christian life has too often been implicitly conditioned and defined to leave the characteristic idols of the Western world untouched, unscathed, and unchallenged."

Just another Progressive Christian screed against the natural rights of Americans and that for which America stands? Or a thoughtful critique of the social imaginaries that constrain many Americans? Only time and a few more chapters will tell.