Christian Smith

Go ahead.

Well, I was gonna say, the Psalms, the Fathers, the, the Psalms are one of the most quoted of the Biblical books in Christian history.

It's not exclusive to the Fathers.

B- because the church was pr- These, these are the basis of their pr- public and common prayer, uh, the Psalmity shapes the imagination of, of those who pray it, and those who pray the liturgy hours, and you pray it regularly, your imagination, your language, the idiom becomes almost second nature.

Absolutely.

And, and, and it really comes down to the supernatural gift of faith.

I make the point in a footnote that, that there may be a, a pious Christian who has no more than a high school education but a living relationship with Jesus-

I love that line

Mark's dedicated his career to studying Luther, and we wanted to talk to him in this season as we're exploring discipleship, because Luther faced the same challenge churches are facing today.

As Luther visited congregations across his region in Saxony and found people who could tell you they were Christian without being able to tell you much of anything about what that meant.

And so he wrote his catechisms in response.

Mark has some ideas about why that gap opened up between being a Christian in terms of nominally at least and actually understanding and living your faith more deeply.

So we're going to talk about what Luther was trying to accomplish with his catechisms and how other reformers were working at some of those questions and what it all means for discipleship today.

So, Mark, welcome to Pivot.

Luther could take for granted the world of Christendom.

In other words, he lived in a fairly narrow world by our understanding.

I'm Graeme.

Today we're talking about exvangelicals, the growing number of people who've walked away from evangelical Christianity of its various stripes and forms.

why they're leaving and how Christians who love scripture can respond with both truth and tenderness.

There's a written version of this on my blog and sub stack with the links in the show notes.

Within a few years, the hashtag had spread across social media.

And it now labels a whole online world of memoirs, podcasts, TikTok videos, support groups, and Instagram accounts.

Some ex-evangelicals have left Christianity altogether.

Some have moved into mainline or progressive churches.

This past weekend was my lovely wife's birthday, and as a family we went down to Ashland and hung out for a little bit and had dinner, but before we had dinner we were walking around downtown Ashland there and looking into the different shops, and we came across this little sticker that said this, "'Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than standing in your garage makes you a car.'" that was kind of, you know, clever.

And I thought it really gets at, in a lot of ways, what we're actually going to be looking at in this passage this morning.

See, to start, let me ask you a fairly simple question, but a question I hope you wrestle with and really grasp this morning.

The question is this, what is a Christian? Or maybe to phrase it another way, what makes one a Christian? Does being a Christian mean that you come to church every single week or Does being a Christian mean that you serve in First City Kids or you serve on the welcome team or you're serving in a bunch of different ways even outside of First City? Does being a Christian mean that you vote a certain way? Are those two things somehow aligned and mean the same thing? See, whether you're a part of First City or whether it's a culture at large, there's a lot of different sort of views or understandings or ways that people articulate this is what a Christian means or this is what a Christian looks like.

And in many ways, as we're looking at the Gospel of Luke together, we're in this section where over and over and over again, Jesus really wants to put at the forefront what does it really mean to be a part of God's kingdom? And what does it look like to be a follower in my kingdom? Because there's a really sobering truth that just being familiar with Jesus is not the same thing as following Jesus.

There's a lot of people, especially in our culture and especially in this part of the country, that are very familiar with Jesus, his teachings, the kingdom of God, theological vocabulary.

You don't just get to slide on the coattails of someone else's faith.

That's not how this works.

There's a lot of funding for those sorts of questions, whereas there's kind of less funding for the Goffman-esque questions that you were talking about of, you know, how do people make sense of the world and how do they navigate it? It's harder to make policy recommendations based on a Goffman-esque study.

In preparation for today's discussion, I started reading a book by Christian Smith called The Sacred Project of American Sociology.

He's going to be on the podcast later in the year, and here is a quote from the book.

American Sociology's Sacred Project is a secular salvation story developed out of reformist progressivism, sexual liberation, civil rights, and feminism.

American sociologists felt compelled to fill in the sacred void left in Christianity and Judaism's absence by proselytizing the world with a secular salvation gospel of its own making.

Sociology's product is ultimately spiritual and sacred and not simply political or ideological.

I think Christian Smith is onto something.

There is a religious aspect to the sociology project, feminism, civil rights, and gender that needs to be researched and taught.

They also have, historically at least, have enough birth rates to be able to continue and have a perspective on that.

So basically the question that faces the West then is, is it Christianity or nothing? Because there's nothing else stable that the West could go to in this nonstop East versus West dynamic that we see.

So it just helps you to understand, if we did this presentation in another 10 years or 15 years, I guarantee you everything that was in this second level will still be there.

And I guarantee you everything that's in the third level will still be underneath it all.

So while these are not Australian facts, I've got a feeling that it's not all that different to what would be revealed in our own culture and our own country.

It was 2005 and Christian Smith wrote a paper, Soul Searching, The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers.

And I was fascinated by what he found after talking to many teens.

And the overwhelming statement was that they do believe in God, but he's not involved in their everyday lives.

So it's been said that the survey shows that God is distant and remote.

His job was there to solve problems and to make people feel good.

And that was quite an obvious theme that came from Christian Smith's paper.

Teenagers pray for help with their problems to make them feel better or happier.

I think nominal...

Now again, Sam at Transfigured had a good video on the relationship between moralistic therapeutic deism, which is something that Christian Smith developed, and read his book Soul Searching, and Rod Dreher sort of popularized as a critique.

Moralistic therapeutic deism, it was sort of a... free, fully secular, spiritual but not religious posture that has more or less pervaded American culture, including a lot of Christianity.

And sort of in the main line, at least for many, sort of became this sort of standard posture that Americans would take.

Um, and I...

You know, there's a, there's a book by Christian Smith and Amy Adams called Handing Down the Faith, and it's basically a sociological study of what are the characteristics and qualities of families that successfully have transmitted their faith from generation to generation.

Like, how does the handoff occur? And obviously, they're just doing sociological work, so it's not like, you know, you can take it a- and, like, apply some kind of formula.

But what I found most interesting about that book was the... and w- what was striking to them as authors was that the families that had, that saw the, the, the, uh, the, the, you know, their, their passing their faith from one generation to the next, um, what was true about their families was that they did not compartmentalize their Christian faith.