Our friends the: BIble Churches

Jan 4

I’ve spent the last two years exploring various corners of Christianity. My goal has not been rigorous anthropology or to provide a survey of as many denominations as possible, such as “Atheist Church Audit” (check him out!). My goal has been to find communities of believers I can profitably interact with in the furtherance of my own faith and Christian life.

So, I am not looking for, and do not believe, I will find the “One True Church”. My views on this most closely match those of an Anglican chaplain I spoke to recently. There is the visible church and the invisible church. Although some denominations or congregations are closer to the truth than others, there is no way for humans to tell who is truly close to Christ, and true believers can be found throughout multiple institutions. This has a basis in the gospels, for example the Parable of the Weeds in Matthew 13. It is not for the workers to separate the elect from the damned, but God knows. My goal is not to argue for or against any particular tradition, though I have to call a spade a spade. It is simply to provide a conclusive summary of what I’ve found, for purposes of my own understanding. For sanity’s sake, I’m going to go one tradition at a time. This week are the Evangelicals and Fundamentalists. They may call themselves Baptist, Reformed, Nondenominational or Bible-based, but they share a certain doctrinal conservatism. I am just a visitor in this world, but this is how I see it.

Fundamentalists Are Wise

I’m talking about the real Bible thumpers (from here on out, BTs). The typical criticism of BTs by coastal elites has been that they’re stupid… because they don’t read the Times or something. It is certainly bracing to meet people who, in the Year of Our Lord two thousand and twenty-five, believe that the dinosaur bones were put there by Satan to fool us. But, in the halls of elite institutions, from Harvard to the NIH, it is normal and normative to believe equally ridiculous and far more consequential things. Though some in these institutions are quietly sane, most of the loudest voices believe it is a moral imperative to deconstruct and problematize our cultural patrimony, and militate against the straight white family — of course, taken through an intersectional lens, nuance is so important [FAA]. Remember the legacy media line the real virus is anti-Chinese racism? Or, one of the most sinister lies, the idea that police presence causes crime [PoPo]. Believing in such fashionable nonsense has real costs, which make the costs of disbelieving in macroevolution seem mild by comparison. Fundamentalism, though fundamentally flawed, is wiser than leaving one’s brain open to the current fashions of the Acceptable Sort of prestige media.

We are called to use both purposeful ignorance and purposeful curiosity for the greater glory of God. BTs can display truly heroic ignorance of fashionable nonsense. Everything needs to be checked against the 66 books of their Bible, and neither man nor God can help you if you claim otherwise. This creates problems of its own later, but it is a strong first line of defense against many of the brain parasites endemic in less grounded circles. These brain worms often gain access by a sort of “consistency and commitment” sales trick — you’re open-minded, aren’t you? Well, why won’t you just CONSIDER the idea that all knowledge is ultimately meaningless and simply an operation of Power? Oh, you don’t want to have sex… You’re a smart person, right? You believe in Freedom? Let me EDUCATE you as to how slut shaming is simply the Patriarchy’s oppression. Such attacks find no purchase here, because there is core of trusted and proven moral ideas to hold up new information to. The BT mind is not invulnerable — they are susceptible to exploits of their rules for drawing meaning from scripture. Mormon-style proof-texting [PT] is one example of such an exploit. There is also the problem of adaptation — a culture that allows no new information to enter is a dead man standing. It’s increasingly hard to adapt parables about sheep to a digital age. Still, their grounding in scripture truly does keep them safe.

Not only safety, but knowledge, community, and growth come from this close focus on the Bible. Reading the scriptures at all hours of the day connects people to God, the deep past, each other, and a common cosmic and ethical language. It provides constancy from day to day, and a coherent, canny, and hopeful worldview. Spiritual knowledge is not something hidden behind institutional barriers. It is not an ineffable mystery known only to some barely-accessible guru. God is Here, Now, these are His Words, this is how we get to know him. Here, I’m starting to go into the deep wisdom of Christianity in general, but to be blunt, most Christians are so in name only; their attempts are quarter-hearted at best. These people are Serious about God, and are blessed for, by, and through it.

Fundamentalists are Smart

It bears repeating — the elites of Fundamentalism are more intelligent than almost every member of the NYT-reading Outer Party. Look at who these people hold up as their high priests, the people they choose to listen to. Read the columns of their pet Republican, David Brooks. Compare him to Gavin Ortlund. Look at prestige media darlings Robin DiAngelo, Ibram X. Kendi, and Ta Nehisi Coates. Compare their resumes and their work to that of Vern Poythress. I defy you to come to any conclusion but this: Vern is not only head and shoulders above them, he is on a completely different order of magnitude. Caltech BS at 20, Harvard Math PhD, MLitt from Cambridge. I know of few liberal theologians who can display that level of raw intelligence and mastery of science and math. This isn’t a one-off, either.

Bible churches, especially those that favor expository preaching, are intellectually rigorous places. While fundamentalists can be rightly criticized for literalism, black and white thinking, and inability to tolerate mystery, they are not stupid. The fact of BT non-stupidity has been re-discovered, repeatedly, by psychologists motivated to find the opposite [NFCS]. Add to that the fact that having half the Bible in your head is a powerful tool for making sense of the world, providing “crystallized intelligence”. Add to that the fact that they regularly read difficult texts, and that verbal fluency is a source of prestige in the community. In many ways, these norms are an example of the best the Enlightenment has to offer.

I also want to highlight a particular online Bible Christian named Berean Patriot. Look him up. If Vern Poythress is the best representative I could find of respectable, institutional Fundamentalism, Berean Patriot is the best example I have found of the “Nondenominational” (Baptist) Independent Bible Church tradition. I mean this with all sincerity: This man doesn’t just bleed red, he bleeds red, white, and blue. He’s a pioneer. He’s an explorer. He’s got the Fire of human liberty, he’s setting fires everywhere. The Founders would be proud of him. This is what a robust, fault-tolerant, distributed Christianity looks like: men of character and intellect digging deep, reaching their own conclusions, and doing their very best to let the evidence speak for itself. If all Bible Christians were like this guy, I would seriously consider signing up.

WHence Fundamentalism?

So, where does the bad reputation come from? Sadly, it’s not just the envy of ungodly bi-coastal bisexuals. There are real problems here. Best I can tell, Bible churches, like many charismatic religious groups, have an odd mix of the overly emotional and alexithymic. Similar mix to silicon valley startup culture, in many ways. There’s an explicit cultural emphasis on flat hierarchy and thinking for yourself, along with implicit mild totalitarianism, language policing, and groupthink. To extend what Tom Wolfe (may he Rest In Power) so astutely pointed out in his essay on Intel, these similarities are no accident. It’s a family resemblance. Silicon Valley is a direct descendant of Congregationalist Christianity, and what is more, it is a descendant of the conservative, rather than the liberal, stock of the Puritans, the same as our beloved Fundamentalists. Perhaps that is why they hate each other so much. Tracing the genealogy of these two groups will help us understand the soul of the modern protestant fundamentalist, and perhaps something of the soul of America.

it keeps happening. Again and again, liberals take over what were once conservative strongholds. The true believers are forced to decamp to the countryside, taking their Bibles and their unshakable faith. Westminster Theological Seminary, where Poythress is a professor, was created this way in the early 1900s after the Modernist/Fundamentalist split and subsequent Modernist takeover of Princeton. But the first time this happened in America was a century earlier, at Harvard. The Unitarians, theological and biological ancestors of the arch-progressive Unitarian Universalist tradition, took over, forcing the orthodox Calvinists to decamp to Andover in 1807. The next generation of Andover ministers would go on to found Grinnell College on the Iowa frontier. It was at Grinnell where Robert Noyce first encountered the Transistor. A preacher’s son, Noyce moved out to California, built Intel from nothing, disentangled himself from God and his first wife, and married his head of HR. Generations of conservatism, it would seem, were no match for the thrill of teaching rocks to do math, and younger women who Just Get You. I wonder what his brother, who worked at Yale Divinity School, felt about all this.

So over and over, the faithful, both individually and institutionally, have to see their brothers and sisters in Christ abandon the fundamentals of the faith. This is where the movement got its name: In the face of all this change, conservatives defined what “The Fundamentals of the Faith” were, to rally around them. This is odd given the many existing creeds, e.g. the Nicene Creed, and confessions of faith, e.g. the Westminster Confession of Faith. The whole point of such a document is to make sure everyone is on the same page as to the basics of belief. What to do when ministers (and it is usually ministers, not lay churchgoers) openly deny essentials of the faith, while insisting on tolerance for their heterodoxy? I will not comment on the wisdom of the fundamentalist schisms of old. But I can certainly understand the factors that drove them to it — a love for their faith, and a desire to preserve it in its essentials.

Ultimately, the Reforming instinct that set the Puritans to found New England, unmoored from the core of a sacred, unassailable Bible, turns in on Christianity itself and creates something unrecognizable or explicitly non-Christian such as Unitarian Universalism. This is a serious problem, and Fundamentalism is, at its core, an attempt to strongly define and defend this core of tradition that cannot and should not be questioned or deconstructed.

Proof-texting, bible worship, and SHard Idolatry

While I feel compelled to correct defamatory and false rumors about the stupidity and foolishness of our friends the Bible Thumpers, there exist certain stereotypes that are, sadly, true. In general, they allow their own fear, reactivity, and need for certainty and moral justification to get in the way of proactively following Christ through the uncertainties of life. I’ll outline three specific ways this occurs:

Firstly, they are not immune to Pharisaism, even though they tend to think they are. There is no set of laws you can follow or tribe you can join that will save you. You can be a “Legalist” Baptist; the word has a particular meaning, and you can’t rules-lawyer your way out of it. Further, denying that you have a tradition or laws does not mean you don’t have them, it just makes you blind to what they are, ignorant of the past, or forces you to lie about them. As mainline conservative Presbyterian youtuber “Redeemed Zoomer” is fond of saying, “No creed but Christ, no book but the Bible” is, itself, a creed. Laws about belief or speech are still laws. Of course, many Evangelicals understand, but it is still an under-appreciated problem. Some examples:

Just because one can technically find scriptural basis for something, does not mean it is in line with the Holy Spirit, and vice versa. The Bible is a large library of books, and it is possible to cobble together all manner of unholy collages from isolated and decontextualized verses. I have personally seen, on a variety of occasions, specific bible verses taken out of the context of their epistle, to be used as weapons, in perplexing contrast with the meaning of the broader epistle. So that’s a particular example of how laws of evidence (see how lawyerly that sounds!) that Evangelicals use can lead to poor consequences.

Another example: There is also often extensive self-policing of behavior that appears “ungodly”. There’s something wrong with a community where a couple can’t innocently hold hands in church, but where physical abuse inside the home is excused or ignored. Whitewashed tombs indeed.

Often one hears “Legalism” used in these sorts of communities as a dogwhistle for “Catholic or Episcopal”. Just as Christ said to the ancient Jews, being non-Samaritan will not save you. So too, being anti-Catholic will not save you. There is a kind of peculiar N+1 legalism here, where the focus is, like the pharisee in Luke 18, on the sins of Catholicism and simply reversing them. Yes, it is possible to fall into rote prayer when using a standardized text. However, standardized texts allow multiple people to pray together. And, what is more, ex tempore prayer can be done with a sinful heart just as easily as a standardized prayer, though one may have a greater danger of pride and the other of half-heartedness. Similarly, there is a danger of idolatry, but there is also a danger when you never physically humble yourself as part of worship. There is a danger in forgetting the lessons of the bible, but there is a danger of forgetting the lessons of the liturgy. The Reformation was sorely needed, and certain aspects of the Medieval and Early Modern Church were truly abominable. But in many important respects, that Church that dissenters still react against no longer meaningfully exists.

How to tell what is a worthwhile concern and what is the product of a dangerous intra-protestant purity spiral? To me, the important litmus test is thus: If the Roman Catholic Church was redeemed, would you celebrate? Or would you be concerned, with nobody to point the finger at any more? Would it be OK with you if God saved the Pope, as the Bishop of Rome, not as a new member of Gaithersburg Free Will Baptist Meeting House? Even if your brother really is in sin, would you withdraw your accusing finger and instead fix your eyes on God?

“I don’t have a religion. I believe in a God. I don’t know what it looks like but it’s MY god. My own interpretation of the supernatural.” ~ Jennifer Aniston

Secondly, it is an individualistic religion, and this is not a complement. It’s not clear what the process for resolving “God told me X” vs. “But God told me Y” debates is — this may be a point of genuine ignorance on my part. Some, such as CJ Cornthwaite and TM Luhrmann, claim that many Evangelicals are trained to mistake their inner voice for the voice of God.

Reconciling our individual interpretations of the Bible, and of the book of Nature, is always a process. The Quakers have their process — consensus driven. The Holy Ghost cannot contradict itself, so everyone has to be on board. The Roman Catholics have theirs — top-down authority. Fundamentalists have their own process, and it is oddly reminiscent of the labor flights and boardroom drama of Silicon Valley. Perhaps the entrepreneurial process, messy as it is, has some good to it.

At their best, these groups follow the Bible where it leads, and try to let the evidence speak for itself — not authority, or institutional prestige. But, ultimately, authority and institutions are inherent to the structure of reality. We can engage them without letting them rule over us, and we ignore this aspect of natural law at our peril.

There is a robustness in trying to come to your own conclusions, without simply copying others. But once schism is on the table, it’s easy to just use that as a solution to disagreements, and sacrifice a relationship or community to one’s own personal sense of certainty. This is in direct contradiction with the seriousness with which schism was taken by even the framers of the Westminster Confession of Faith [Baillie]. But, many “Bible Church” congregants may not know this history. It is a natural human tendency to separate ourselves from the impure, and the beginning of sanctification. But there are two dangers here, of looking in the mirror and thinking we see God, and mistaking the Holy Bible for The Word of God, the divine Logos, which is the person of Christ Jesus. There is a danger of mistaking the Bible for Christ himself, and mistaking one’s interpretation of the Bible as the Word of God.

At their best, they let the fashions of the time wash over them as they stand firm on the Rock of Ages. But at their worst, they invent things in the Bible that were never there, then make all-or-nothing claims about ahistorical misapprehensions, or turn them into litmus tests. Looking back through the Church Fathers, Augustine of Hippo, through [Calvin], we see an attitude that the Genesis narrative was not literal. I don’t think the early Christians would have recognized Creationism as an important part of their faith, but in striving to make their religion hard and impervious, they have made it contrived and inflexible.

Finally, it is tough but brittle. A lot of apologetics techniques used in Bible Churches are sort of anti-CBT common in high-control groups. They actively encourage black and white thinking, and will double down, in the form “Either you agree with X doctrine, or you don’t believe in God”, or lemmas such as Lewis’s trilemma “Lord/Liar/Lunatic”. So you see a lot of explosive deconstructions, especially online, and especially after people go to college. People will completely crash out from the Evangelical fold, becoming atheists or hard core progressives, and living alternative lifestyles, because a lifetime of “double or nothings” has convinced them that if they don’t adhere to a particular religious worldview, there is no meaning or love in the world [Logic].

A classic example of this reactivity is the way that Creationism has emerged as a litmus test and hill to die on. YEC that doesn’t really align with the Church Fathers and much of historic Christianity, was likely invented in the 1800s, and has such problems that even Vern Poythress admits them, and Gavin Ortlund thinks this isn’t a core belief and shouldn’t be a hill to die on. For many people, when forced into this false dichotomy between Young Earth Creationism and Science, they (reasonably) choose science. There’s good evidence for the Resurrection, the goodness of many Christian doctrines, and the historicity of many of its claims. Rejecting Social Darwinism is indeed morally upright. But, while rejecting Evolution is a cheap way to strongly signal to other Christians, it has negative externalities, and it just isn’t true. Millions of Christians believe in evolutionary science, as well as in the moral teaching of Genesis: God created the world, not pagan deities like the sun. He did it out of and for the purpose of love. He created it for us to tend as one tends a Garden. He created us Man and Woman, and meant for us to be together. As with so many things, there is only a contradiction because the Bible Churches make very particular interpretive choices that force contradictions.

Relatedly, it has to be said that there is a tendency to hide right-wing ideas behind biblical literalism and word-for-word translations. There is no reason that, in principle, one couldn’t support Patriarchal or Complementarian views on family life, and also support thought-for-thought translations as well as word-for-word translations. In fact, most Catholics and Eastern/Oriental Orthodox Christians do this. I share their feeling that replacing “God the Father” with “God the Creator” feels mildly blasphemous. Still, I wish we could fight over our beliefs themselves instead of engaging in a proxy fight over Bible translations.

So, while I can’t sign on the the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy and throw out my RSV2-CE, keep fighting the good fight, Bible Churches. I think poverty of spirit means it would be wrong for me claim to have the answers. I think a question better than “Is the Bible true, or not”, or even “How do we forge a faith like steel, both strong and flexible”, is “How do we nurture this sapling of ours?”. I hope yours grows into something that can move mountains.

Footnotes

FAA: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-a-quick-overview for a concrete, well-reported example of this racial discrimination from the Obama era that seriously harmed the entire FAA recruiting pipeline

PoPo: See the NYT opinion piece “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police”. Compare its reception to the furore over “Send In The Troops”. For readers outside northeastern progressive circles: Yes, you can regularly hear people expressing the opinion that police presence makes areas unsafe, engaging in denial when criminals threaten them on the subway, refusing to report crimes or cooperate with investigations, guilting people who complain about shoplifting etc. A morbidly concrete way to investigate these mistaken and dangerous beliefs is to ask people the lifetime chance the average American black man has of getting killed by a cop. Then ask the lifetime chance that same black man has of being killed by a criminal. These are 1 in 1000, and 1 in 40, respectively. Many progressives completely invert these probabilities when asked.

PT: I believe that one of Mormonism’s killer features is that it contains an exploit of Baptist cultural norms and epistemological procedures. The basic behavioral unit is the practice of asking someone else to read and paraphrase a Bible verse of your choosing. This implicitly sets a frame where the converter is in control of the verse choice but is also a sort of teacher — they can accept or reject the paraphrase. The Mormon is able to literally put words in their mouth, and if the convertee believes these words to be the literal words of God, they are left quite vulnerable. If this lead generation process is successful, the mark will find themselves in possession of a brand new Book of Mormon. The lead nurturing stage is also an exploit of Baptist norms — one is told that if one reads the entirety of the BoM with a pure heart, the Holy Spirit will personally tell them that it is true. In particular, this is an exploit of the doctrine of illumination. They also exploit norms of personal testimony, using it as tool to reinforce the beliefs of both people who give testimony and those who hear it.

NFCS: “need for meaning is considered to be a motivational force of religiosity (Hood et al., 1996) and has been proved to have an important role in religious coping (Pargament, 1997). Interestingly, integrative complexity of thought (ICT) is not negatively associated with intrinsic religiosity (Batson & Raynor-Prince, 1983) nor even with religious fundamentalism (RF; Hunsberger et al., 1994; Pancer et al., 1995; in these studies, RF was related to low ICT in only religious-existential issues, but not in other issues). Religiosity also does not predict low intelligence (Francis, 1998) nor low need for cognition (Burris et al., 1996)” From Beyond Dogmatism: the Need for Closure as Related to Religion

Baillie: “Again, Christ and His apostles did not separate from the church of their time for lack of convincing signs of the true grace of every member of the church. The implications for us are clear, unless we desire a better pattern for our practices than Christ and His apostles, for anything that carries us beyond their line must be high presumption and deep hypocrisy.

Many Scriptures back this up. The scribes and Pharisees were a generation of vipers. Jerusalem was worse than Sodom and Gomorrah. Chorazin and Bethsaida were worse than Tyrus and Sidon, and to be cast lower in hell then they. Yet the Lord did not cease to preach, to pray, to go to the temple with them. Judas, when a declared traitor, did not deter Him nor any of His company from the sacrament. After he went from the table, when his wickedness was revealed, yet none of the apostles offered to cast themselves out of the body because this wicked member was not cut off.

Many members of the apostolic churches were so far from convincing signs of true grace, that what was most evident in their life was the works of the flesh. In the Corinthian church were fundamental errors, open idolatry, grievous scandal, bitter contentions, profanation of the Lord’s Table. In the Galatian church were errors which destroyed grace, and made Christ of none effect. In the churches of Ephesus, Laodicea, and the other golden candlesticks, various members were so evidently faulty that the Lord threatened to remove the candlestick. Yet from none of these churches did any of the apostles ever separate, nor did they give the least warrant to any of their disciples to make a separation from any of them.”, ~ Robert Baillie, signatory to the Westminster Confession

Calvin: https://biologos.org/articles/john-calvin-on-nicolaus-copernicus-and-heliocentrism “Nevertheless, this study is not to be denounced, nor this science to be condemned, because some frantic persons are wont boldly to reject whatever is unknown to them. For astronomy is not only pleasant, but also very useful to be known“

Logic: from grok: “Zero HP Lovecraft (@0x49fa98 on X) wrote a lengthy thread on September 30, 2023, critiquing a certain type of religious or ideological debater who prioritizes logic over faith. He uses Matt Slick and his daughter Aella as a central example to illustrate his point. Here's the full text of the main post in that thread:"There’s a type of person who thinks religion is a debate club. You know the type, these smarmy, or entirely too self-assured types; they are not particular to any one ideology, but they are always repellent wherever you find them.Often these types are myopically convicted of their own rationality, or to be more specific, they are convinced that their own beliefs rest not on any kind of irrational moral sentiment but rather on a bed of pure unassailable logic and rationality.As Christians, they are usually enamored with Plato, they know the names—the Latin names—of all the logical fallacies as if you couldn’t look that up in a book, and they’re so proud of it.I don’t have much love for Keegan’s stages of social development, but as a shorthand it wouldn’t be wrong to say these are grown men who never evolved passed Keegan stage three.This is to say: such people never developed the ability to understand why someone might believe a proposition which contradicts their own map of the world.You meet these types who have memorized 100 arguments that supposedly establish the truth of their faith; ontological arguments, teleological arguments, cosmological arguments, moral arguments, and so on.And you sort of have to wonder, if any one of these arguments were so convincing, then why do you need more of them?There’s a perfect example of this, you might almost say God created him as a parable, to show us what is wrong with this approach.This man’s name is Matt Slick, and you’ve probably heard of his daughter. Matt raised his daughter in exactly the way I’ve described, he thinks he has placed his faith in God, but no, he has placed it in logic.And logic makes a terrible God, because logic will take you wherever your heart wishes to go, it will bend any perception into the necessary shape to affirm whatever you already believe in your heart.And when we look at Matt’s daughter, who goes by the name of Aella, What do we see?We see in fact, that he has perfectly transmitted his faith to his daughter, she has apprehended the shape of his God not from the names that he prayed to, but from the functional understanding that he modeled for her in his integration with being.She has become a bay area rationalist—a pious atheist—a (wo)man who memorizes all of the arguments which supposedly disprove the existence of god.They are exactly the same person. They are the same ideology. When you try to reduce your religion to propositions and mechanisms of logic, there is no longer space for the divine.This type of man thinks a single contradiction is enough to undermine an entire philosophy, or at best it is something to be excised, but he’ll never be able to understand how a contradiction becomes a source of strength.He can never truly have faith in anything, not in Jesus or anything else, because the only space on the altar in his heart is occupied by his sad little god named logic. That’s why he collects so many arguments that supposedly marshal his faith, because he doesn’t actually believe in the first place.And I have a particular contempt for these sorts of people because I see in them a tendency which I possess myself. It’s only when you finally perceive the treachery of logic—the way it never truly leads, the way it is only capable of following—that you learn to move beyond it regarding matters of the heart.The man who traps himself in his little cage made of logic will rage and rage against his own deeply-felt desires, always trying to bind them, always trying to geld them. This is why he clings to his little god named logic:Because he doesn’t have the courage—the moral courage—to plunge headfirst into irrationality, which is where all greatness, and all glory, and all faith, and all heroism are found." Clearly, the original author is blinded in some aspects by contempt, but his overall point is sound.