Christianity and the Cultural Crisis of Authority
Americans lack trust in many traditionally influential institutions. While there is no doubt that many of these institutions have committed abuses that justify this decline in trust, their diminishment has also ushered in a much more dangerous trend. Because external sources of authority can be corrupt, many have started to assume that internal authority must be more reliable.
Perhaps this diminishment is why it is so culturally important to be authentic and to look out for number one. If you commit yourself to something beyond yourself and it lets you down, you might be disappointed. If your only commitment is to yourself, you might not live up to your own expectations. However, it is much easier to rationalize your own failure and externalize the causes of your subpar performance to society in general than it is to handle the difficult reality of institutional disappointment.
Christianity makes a bold claim amidst this cultural noise. Christianity suggests that you present yourself as a living sacrifice (Romans 12:1). Your life is not your own, but your purpose is to become aligned with God’s purpose for you. What is God’s purpose for you? To bring glory to Him. Nowhere does it say that you are supposed to follow your heart or treat yourself. It is not hard to see how countercultural Christianity actually is in a culture that idolizes the self. When everyone is telling you to become more and more of yourself, Christianity is telling you to die to yourself and live for Jesus.
Many reasons are cited for the decline of Christianity in the West. I am not going to chronicle all of them here, but a simple Google search will return all kinds of articles, and there are plenty of good answers to this question. However, authority is at the root of so many of the conflicts that Christianity has with culture.
Consider a quote from CS Lewis’s response when asked in an interview which religion in the world brought its followers the most happiness. He responded, “I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.” While the wording is slightly different, he was answering to similar cultural noise that exists in the world today. If the chief virtue in life is happiness, Christianity will not necessarily do that for you. As a result, there must be another reason for accepting it.
While the rest of the interview does not delve into reasons for believing Christianity specifically, one could turn to Lewis’s book Mere Christianity, where he writes, “The central Christian belief is that Christ’s death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start.” In other words, Christianity is based on the truth of a specific claim. It is based on the historical fact of Jesus dying and rising again, as well as the incredible gift of salvation that was brought about through that sacrifice. You must accept the free gift of salvation by acknowledging the risen Jesus Christ as the Lord of your life and your Savior from sin.
Christianity is true or false, regardless of how I feel about it. My internal authority has no power over the truthfulness of Christianity. While I have the authority to believe it or not, my belief does not impact the objective facts of Christianity itself. It is either true or it is not. I have to come to a conclusion about the facts, but I do not determine what the facts are as they already exist. Even at the most basic level of becoming a Christian, Christianity cannot be twisted into some kind of question of internal authority. The facts are the facts, regardless of my emotional reaction to those facts.
Our culture continually pushes the message that the most important thing you can be is true to yourself. Christianity contends that defining your purpose in that way will not lead to fulfillment. Paradoxically, fulfillment is only going to come by surrendering yourself. Only when you begin to trust in the authority of God’s plan for your life will you be able to end up where you are supposed to end up. You may not end up where you imagined, but once you get there, it will be the place you are truly meant to be. The conflict between internal and external authority is quite clear. Not only does Christianity begin with an acknowledgment of an external truth and an authority beyond our own feelings, but even our ongoing purpose after that initial decision requires the acknowledgment of an authority beyond ourselves.
What we cannot afford to do is water down the truth of Christianity.
There might be the temptation to relativize our faith. We all know people who will say that Christianity is true only because I say it is true, but Islam is also true for people who believe it is true. They are trying to apply a dimension of internal authority over claims of external authority. People who believe this are preaching a false gospel. There might be pressure to walk away from our faith, as I mentioned in the opening. If Christian institutions are less trustworthy, perhaps the entire faith is suspect. There might also be other temptations to dilute or even abandon Christianity, but each of us needs to remember that the truth of Christianity is not like a choose-your-own-adventure book. You do not determine the outcome. It is either true, and you must live in light of its truthfulness, or it is false and does not matter. As Christians, we have obviously chosen the former, but we cannot compromise on this matter to try to appeal to the idol of authenticity and internal authority. The minute we do that, we are not talking about Christianity anymore.