Ignorant Piety

Have ever felt a strange twinge of guilt for wanting to teach your child doctrine?  Have you had your interest in theology dismissed because the use of the mind is not as important in the pursuit of spiritual things?  Have you every wondered what was the origin of this mindset?

These are the questions asked by Stephen Prothero in his book Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know - and Doesn't, HarperCollins, 2007. 

[F]or many American Christians, then and today, willingness to be a fool for Christ is a mark of true faith.  Christianity is about loving Jesus; it does not require knowing much of anything at all.  How did this happen?  How did religious ignorance become a sign--perhaps the sign--of genuine piety?  And what lessons might this story of our fall into religious illiteracy hold for Americans today? (page 87)

Prothero is the chair of the religion department at Boston University and describes himself as "religiously confused" and will "fess up to being a Christian" when pressed.  But he sees the damage of separating head and heart, intellect and emotions perhaps better than some believers.  This book attempts to find the historical cause of our ignorant piety and offers a solution to the problem.

Contrary to the opinion of the Moral Majority, this decline began long before the Bible and prayer were banned from public schools in the 1960's.  Prothero traces the roots back to the Second Great Awakening, the advent of evangelicalism, and its powerful influence on public education.  However, this view took a very different path from the Puritans who embraced sound doctrine as well as the experiential.  In an attempt to transform the United States into a Christian civilization, believers of all stripes joined hands, agreeing to disagree when it came to doctrine.  Thus identity was a shared experience of "Jesus", a common moral standard, and the lowest common denominator of beliefs.  In an effort to keep all the players happy, doctrine was whittled away until all that was left was morality, which became the new face of American Christianity choosing "heartfelt faith and unmediated experience" over learning.

This spiritual anti-intellectualism--both highbrow and lowbrow, liberal and evangelical--drove a wedge into the Puritan synthesis of head and heart, forcing many Americans to make the Solomonic choice between the intellect and the emotions.  There is an impression, a minster wrote in 1853, "that an intellectual clergyman is deficient in piety, and that an eminently pious minister is deficient in intellect."  As time went on, Americans by the millions would choose piety and check their intellects at the church door.  They would endeavor not to know Jesus but to feel him. Indeed, this is the aim of much of American Christianity today, and it is with us every time, in Sunday schools and public schools alike, children pretend they don't know something in order to be cool. (page 107)

 Dr. Prothero is an engaging writer, and this book is worth reading particularly alongside Think by John Piper.  However, I found it a little sad that for all his clear insight, he is missing out on the goal of our knowledge which is our love for God.

But as Christians, it is worth considering what we may lose if we check our intellects at the church door.  If we fail to know what we believe and why we believe it (thank you, White Horse Inn), we may be Christians in name and deists in reality, worshipping what we do not know like the Samaritan woman. The heart of the Gospel can be eroded away in the name of pragmatism or for the sake of rallying around a sociopolitical cause and never be missed, because we never knew what the Gospel was to begin with.

[W]e had already taken one giant step toward the contemporary era in which morality is the essence of religion and the term Christian connotes opposition to abortion and gay marriage rather than faith in the incarnation and the redemption--an era in which having a relationship with Jesus is more important than knowing what he actually did, in which believing in the Bible matters more than knowing what the Bible has to say.  More than the forces of secularism, it was the sort of religion that would do religious literacy in. (page 86)