A Defense of Cultural Christianity

Last updated on: May 11, 2021 at 9:23 am By Gene Veith

Yesterday we looked at a searing critique–from David French and Kierkegaard–about how Christianity can be corrupted by “Christendom”; that is, the faith’s institutional and cultural expression.

Baptist ethicist Andrew T. Walker recognizes the problems with cultural Christianity. But he argues that it’s not healthy for the church to become completely unmoored from the culture and that Christianity’s influence on the culture has been a good thing.

From his essay What We Lose in the Decline of Cultural Christianity:

From concepts like dignity, justice, and rights to the centrality of the family to the idea of life having an ultimate purpose—all of these have found unique expression in Western civilization as the result of Christianity. Even many non-Christian historians would agree with this analysis. Society requires some governing moral vision at its center.

What’s more, the naked public square will be harsh on many groups, not just Christians. To lament the decline of cultural Christianity is to lament not simply the loss of a Christian consensus, but the loss of the social capital born of common grace that secular society was borrowing from. Is it any surprise that a growing secularity is coinciding with the hollowing out of American civil society? When you define well-being in material terms only, it’s easy to miss that alongside growing secularism is a shrinking marriage rate, surges in addiction and suicide, and a whole new category we call the “loneliness epidemic.” As society sheds its Christian foundations, there will be a serious detriment to human flourishing. We should mourn this as Christians. We don’t want just the salvation of our neighbors but the good of society, too.

We shouldn’t ignore the costs of displacing even a cultural Christianity’s influence.

The decline of the Bible Belt will be met with a redefined common good that will be anything but good for millions of people. While I too have concerns about the ambient uses of “culture” attached to Christianity, it would be incredibly naïve and even disrespectful to ignore the ways that Western civilization has been influenced by Christianity. From the idea of the university to the hospital—and even basic charity—the Christian tradition forges principles that birth institutions, not only engaging the culture but transforming it.

Which side do you think makes the better case?

It seems to me that in some cases, Christianity influences the culture. And in other cases, the culture influences Christianity. The latter is where the most problems come from.

Also, Christians don’t always have a choice about their relationship to the culture. Sometimes the culture is hostile to them, which seems increasingly to be the case today. And influence is often unintentional, not so much a planned initiative, but, more often, something that happens of itself, when outsiders notice something they would like to emulate, sort of like, the use the Biblical metaphor, the way salt flavors food. And, of course, cultural influence on the church works the same way, to use another Biblical metaphor, like leaven permeating the dough (Matthew 16:6, 11-12).

Furthermore, the doctrines of vocation, the estates, and God’s providential reign over His temporal kingdom connect Christianity to culture and, yes, to institutions. Those are Lutheran concepts, but they have correlatives in other Christian traditions. There is a tension between Christians acting to love and serve their neighbors in the world, and the sinfulness of that world, indeed, a conflict between God’s reign and the usurpation of the Devil as the “prince of this world,” but God does not generally call us away from the arena.

Photo by form PxHere, CC0, Public Domain

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What They Are Saying About “Spirituality of the Cross,” 3rd edition

Last updated on: April 23, 2021 at 8:28 am By Gene Veith

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I’m sorry for this crass commercialism in hyping the new version of my book Spirituality of the Cross: The Way of the First Evangelicals–3rd Edition. It’s just that I want to get the word out about it.

You can tell the difference between the 3rd edition, which is 42% longer, and the earlier editions because that great painting of the crucifixion by George Rouault on the cover is about that much bigger than on the previous cover. In fact, over the three editions, the depiction of Christ on the Cross keeps getting bigger and bigger, and rightly so:

One more thing, and then I’ll stop. I want to share with you what has been said about the book by those who have written endorsements. I appreciate these comments so much, not just for their kind words but for the way each writer “gets” what I am trying to do:

I remember the first time I opened the pages of Gene Veith’s book The Spirituality of the Cross in 2006. The theology and spirituality from the pages of this little book struck my ears with peculiarity and a strange comfort. At the time, my theology was like an unfinished puzzle—pieces were still scattered and disconnected. And so Veith’s book not only challenged many of my false presuppositions about the Christian faith but also aided me in constructing the rest of the unfinished theological puzzle. The Spirituality of the Cross helped show me a cohesive spirituality that is rooted in Christ and His gifts, flowing outward in the vocations that the Lord has prepared for me to walk in. I had a profound joy in first hearing that a third edition of Veith’s book was being released by Concordia Publishing House. Joy not only because I have an updated edition to rediscover again but also that there will be an updated edition for the next generation to discover. My young children and confirmation students thank you, Mr. Veith, for this wonderful book that they will read in the upcoming years. I pray that this third edition will be as beneficial to the next generation as the first edition was to me. —Rev. Dr. Matthew Richard, Author of “Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up? 12 False Christs,” Pastor of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, Minot, ND

Lutheran theology needs to rule the day. In it, one will not only find biblical fidelity, near company with the church ancient, but also the most comprehensive and relevant verbiage for contemporary quirks and concerns. The Spirituality of the Cross is for all those who are seeking the simplicity of God’s good news for humanity but structured in a systematic way that sticks. —Flame, Grammy-nominated Christian rap artist

Gene Edward Veith’s The Spirituality of the Cross is a must-read classic for every Lutheran—and everyone interested in what it means to be Lutheran! Lifelong Lutherans, recent converts, and outside observers alike will benefit tremendously from Veith’s straightforward and beautifully written outline of the key elements of the Lutheran faith. This new edition is even more relevant, insightful, and moving. Veith unceasingly points the reader back to the core of our Reformation faith: Christ, our God-made-man, for us. —Molly Lackey, author

Gene Veith has gifted every reader of The Spirituality of the Cross with an exceptional compendium of Lutheran theology and practice. Light bulbs go off for either understanding rich articles of the faith for the first time or, at the very least, learning to better express them. This volume liberates from the shackles of natural religion—moralism, speculation, mysticism—delivering the reader to “the power of God,” namely, “the word of the cross” (1 Corinthians. 1:18). The cross is indeed our theology. Christ still brings heaven to earth through His Word and Sacraments, as well as earthly vocations made holy through faith. — Rev. Alfonso Espinosa, PhD, Senior pastor, Saint Paul’s Lutheran Church of Irvine, CA

The Spirituality of the Cross is essential reading for all who desire meaningful Christianity in these otherwise meaningless modern times. Veith provides readers with an updated and expanded version of his classic exploration of what makes Lutheran theology unique and permanently relevant. Just as this edition reflects Veith’s own journey in the spirituality of the cross, I highly recommend this book to all who journey through this life longing for a stout spirituality of the cross. —A. Trevor Sutton, Author of “Being Lutheran” and “Why Should I Trust the Bible?”

And all of these folks who like my book are accomplished in many ways–click the links–and are much younger than I am. They share this spirituality of the Cross, are conveying it to others today, and are carrying it forward in their vocations.

UPDATE: Commenter Chris Brooks has noticed that the Kindle edition of my recent book Post-Christian: A Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture is on sale at Amazon for only $2.99. That’s a savings of $22! What a deal! You can get it here. (As of this moment, it ranks #1 in Amazon’s category of “Apologetics Christian Theology.”) OK, now I’m done hawking my books.

Photo: Cover of Extra Nos, by Flame

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Why the New Edition of “Spirituality of the Cross” Is Needed Today

Last updated on: April 19, 2021 at 4:47 pm By Gene Veith

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More on the release of the new, expanded edition of my book The Spirituality of the Cross: The Way of the First Evangelicals–Third Edition. . . .

To explain why I think this new version is needed today and how it addresses today’s spiritual issues, it will be easiest to just reprint the new edition’s Preface. I don’t think Concordia Publishing House will mind, since they are giving the Preface away free, along with the Introduction and the chapter on Justification.

You can buy the book from Amazon or directly from Concordia Publishing House.

Preface to the Third Edition

This book first came out in 1999. Since then, it has been translated into many languages–Chinese, Russian, Finnish, Danish, Norwegian, Latvian, Korean, Portuguese, Turkish—and, I am told, has been helpful to many readers. I keep running into people who tell me how they found the book “liberating” and “life-changing.” I continue to be astonished and gratified by such reactions, though, as I hasten to say, none of what they are so excited about came from me. I didn’t make any of this up. This emphasis on grace, atonement, forgiveness, incarnation, sacraments, and the transfiguration of ordinary life comes out of a major Christian tradition.

This so-called Lutheran Christianity started as an attempt to reform Catholicism (which didn’t want to be reformed) and gave rise to Protestantism (which soon left it far behind). As such, Lutheranism involves major elements of both Catholicism (sacraments, liturgy, creeds) and Protestantism (the gospel, the Bible, the priesthood of all believers)—making it a uniquely ecumenical form of Christianity—while also having its own distinctives (vocation, the Two Kingdoms, the theology of the Cross). All of this results in a particularly life-affirming, physical-existence-affirming, liberating version of Christianity.

I myself discovered this strain of Christianity as a complete outsider. I grew up in mainline liberal Protestantism, flirted with all kinds of “spiritualities” in college, felt the allure of Catholicism, and became broadly evangelical. But when I stumbled onto Lutheranism, everything came together for me. This, at last, was the church and the theology and the spirituality that I had been yearning for.

I wondered, though, why it had been so hard for me to find. The English-speaking world is not very familiar with Lutheranism. It would have been a different story in Scandinavia or Germany or Eastern Europe or even Africa. Remarkably, even some who go by the name “Lutheran” in the United States have chosen to emulate other American Christians—whether mainline liberal Protestants or conservative evangelicals—rather than their own spiritual tradition. I found Lutheranism with much effort, thanks to pastors who catechized me, led me in worship, and gave me things to read. But I knew there were other people out there, just like me, who knew nothing about the Lutheran option.

So I wrote this book. I decided to write the book that I had needed, that I wish someone had given to me, back when I was floundering. That was back in the late 1990’s. And the book has done what I hoped it would do. Quite a few people have become Lutherans with the help of this book. Quite a few Lutherans have discovered what Lutheranism is all about. Best of all, some people have become Christians with the help of this book, which cast down what had put them off about Christianity and which taught them for the first time who Christ is and what His Cross accomplished for them.

In 2010 the book came out in a second, revised edition. I clarified a few explanations that, judging from reader feedback, were confusing. I expanded some discussions. Most of all, I made adjustments based on my further study and experience.

Now, another ten years later, Concordia Publishing House has asked me to prepare yet another edition. And rightly so. The religious landscape today is very different from what it was in 1999 and 2010. Back then, Christianity was somewhat popular. Evangelicalism was in the ascendant and churches were morphing into megachurches. Secularization was taking its toll, but, for the most part, churches in the United States, at least, were enjoying good numbers and high status. But today the bottom seems to have fallen out of American Christianity.

While Christianity is booming in the rest of the world, it is fading in North America and Western Europe. We are in the era of the “Nones,” those who say they have no religious affiliation whatsoever. There are now as many Nones in the United States as there are evangelicals, each numbering about a quarter of the population. And yet very few of these Nones are atheists or materialists. Nearly three-quarters of the Nones believe in a God of some kind, and nearly four-fifths believe in some kind of spiritual realm. They really are, as many of them say, “spiritual but not religious.” They hold to highly personal and interior spiritual beliefs and practices, assembled from many sources according to their own constructions, but they reject any kind of “organized” or “institutional” religion.

And who can blame them? Liberal churches have made themselves so secular, in a vain attempt to appeal to secularists, that they have little to offer secularists who yearn for something more. Conservative churches that speak much about sexual morality are revealed to be rife with horrific sexual abuse. Some churches keep their popularity by offering a consumeristic “prosperity gospel” and facile pop psychology, as opposed to anything remotely recognizable in historic Christianity. And even churches that maintain a sense of moral and theological integrity often seem shallow and simplistic. Those who are “spiritual but not religious” might well become interested in the rich heritage of Christian spirituality, but they would be hard-pressed to find it in most American churches.

In my opinion, the moral and spiritual weakness of Christianity today derives from a broad-based de-emphasis on the Cross. To be sure, the incarnation, death, and resurrection of the Second Person of the Trinity is central to all of Christianity and all branches affirm that Christ’s crucifixion, in some sense, is connected to our salvation. Lutheranism is in solidarity with all of the other branches of Christianity, but it puts a particularly strong emphasis on the Cross of Jesus Christ, who, through His suffering and death, atoned for the world’s sins and gives us redemption. Indeed, the teaching that we are justified by faith in the atoning work of Christ on the Cross is considered “the chief article”—the underpinning of every aspect of Lutheran theology and, indeed, of the Christian faith as a whole.

In recent years, both liberal and conservative churches have been minimizing this teaching. Mainstream Protestants have been saying things like, “If God punished His son for other people’s sins, that would be cosmic child abuse” (ignoring the union of the Father and the Son in the Trinity). Many conservative Protestants and Catholics have been downplaying a high view of the atonement as an offense against God’s righteousness and so shifting the burden of righteousness back on us (ignoring our inability to bear that burden, as only God can). Christians from across the spectrum are saying that when the Apostle Paul teaches that the Cross frees us from the Law, that he is referring only to the ceremonial laws of the Old Testament (ignoring how those laws themselves are manifestations of atonement for moral transgressions).

Our natural religious impulses and the religions that we devise for ourselves tend to condition salvation based on what we do and what we deserve, on our “good works” or our “merit.” When churches downplay the Cross, this legalistic, merit-based spirituality rushes in to fill the void. Thus, it is commonly believed, both inside and outside the church, that Christianity is all about morality, about “being good.” As opposed to the Lutheran emphasis that Christianity is primarily about finding forgiveness when we fail to be moral, when we are not good.

Certainly, Lutherans believe in morality, in being “good” in all of the senses of that term, but this comes not from rules, external constraints, and the repeated cycle of failing and trying harder, but from an internal transformation that Christ creates by means of our faith. Without Christ’s justification, we try to justify ourselves. That is, we declare ourselves righteous by insisting on how virtuous we are, which becomes a formula for hypocrisy, rationalization, and conflict with others. And when we justify ourselves, we end up justifying our bad behavior. This explains why moralism is so often accompanied by immorality.

But when we no longer have to justify ourselves because Christ justifies us through His Cross, we are freed from all of that. Lutheran theologians say that this kind of justification is “the article upon which the church stands or falls.” When a church plays down the Cross, it “falls.” And that is what we are seeing today. Churches are falling.

Recovering Lutheran spirituality—the spirituality of the Cross—can revitalize all of the Christian traditions. What I have to say here can be helpful, I think, even to those who have no intention of becoming Lutheran. For example, Baptists are currently split between their “Calvinist” and their “Arminian” factions. A Lutheran view of salvation can show them a way forward. Christians are currently having problems figuring out how they should relate to an increasingly secular world. The Lutheran theology of culture can be helpful in resolving those issues. Christians today have difficulty dealing with suffering. The Lutheran theology of the Cross addresses that in a profound and deeply consoling way.

A particular challenge for people today, whether Christians or Nones, is how to live a meaningful life in this seemingly meaningless world. That is, how to be “spiritual” in a “material” world—do we have to be one or the other? Should we run away from the material in an effort to be spiritual? Or should we give up and run away from the spiritual and just be material? Are the spiritual and the material compatible? How do we navigate their contradictions? Lutheranism offers a unique perspective that can help resolve questions like these, so that even the “secular” realm can become charged with spiritual significance.

This third edition is the essentially the same book as in the earlier editions, but I revised it in light of these new contexts and audiences. I have added material, including some adapted from my book with Trevor Sutton, Authentic Christianity: How Christianity Speaks to a Post-Modern World (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2017). This edition also features a brand-new chapter, addressing a topic of utmost importance that Lutherans have developed in some distinctive ways, namely, Christology.

Another reason for another edition is that I have done more study, more worship, and more living. This book is personal, reflecting my own journey, and my journey has continued.

Cover photo from Concordia Publishing House

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The New, Improved Edition of “Spirituality of the Cross”

Last updated on: April 19, 2021 at 4:13 pm By Gene Veith

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I have written, co-written, or edited, at last count, 27 books. My favorite, though, and the one closest to my heart is Spirituality of the Cross. That’s the one that tells what I have learned and how I have been helped by Lutheran theology and the Lutheran church.

This is the book that seems to have had the greatest impact. It isn’t just that the book has sold more than the others. I keep hearing from people that “your book changed my life.” I have heard that everywhere I go, including, since the book has been widely translated, in my trips overseas. Yes, it has brought lots of people into Lutheranism. But, by explaining the Gospel in a way that is not always heard today, it has brought some readers into Christianity, into the Kingdom of God.

This includes Nones, people who are “spiritual but not religious,” and followers of Eastern Religions. My daughter frequented a coffee shop in St. Louis and got to chatting with the barista, who, recognizing her last name (this was before she was married), said that she had read by a book by someone named “Veith.” She had been following the Bahai religion, but after reading that book, she is now a Christian.

I have heard from ministers from various denominations who have read the book and then colloquized to become Lutheran pastors. I have heard from parents who have given this book to their straying children, thanking me for drawing them back to the church.

All of this is very gratifying, of course, but when I hear things like this I find it overwhelmingly humbling. God is actually using this little work of my hands.

Last year, the publisher at Concordia Publishing House, Paul McCain (who has a chequered history at this blog) asked me if I would be interested in putting out a new edition of Spirituality of the Cross, one that addressed the new issues and the new religious climate that we have now, which is rather different from that of the first edition in 1999, and the second revised and slightly expanded edition in 2008.

We discussed it back and forth, and I told him of other things I’d like to do with the book. I have kept living and studying over those decades, and I know much more, for example, about vocation than I did back then. I had other ideas I wanted to incorporate, including answering questions people have asked, particularly about my own life, things that I had only hinted at in the previous versions.

Anyway, I worked on the new version through the COVID lockdown–which gave me plenty of time–and I finished it just a few months before Paul died. Now, as of yesterday, it has been released as The Spirituality of the Cross: The Way of the First Evangelicals–Third Edition.

This version is 42% longer than the previous edition. I know that one of the virtues of the previous editions is their brevity, and this one is still pretty brief in the way it elucidates spiritual issues. There is just more in this one. There is a substantial new preface addressing the state of contemporary Christianity, every chapter includes significant new material, and I have added a brand new chapter on what I have come to realize is a key Lutheran distinctive: Christology.

Among the new material is an expanded discussion of worship, including an explanation of what is going on in the Divine Service, the central Lutheran liturgy. I also overcame my reluctance to talk about myself to include personal details about my own spiritual journey, from growing up in Mainline Liberal Protestantism, to discovering the content of Christianity by reading C. S. Lewis, to a flirtation with Eastern religions while I was in college, to reading the Bible and becoming an evangelical Christian, to my eventually happening upon the Reformation and Lutheranism.

So if you liked the older versions, I am pretty sure that you will like this one too. I kept the good parts of the earlier edition, and my additions are in the same personal, down-to-earth, non-polemical style. If you liked the older versions, I think that you will also want this expanded version, since much of it will be new to you.

Back in 1999, when the first edition came out, evangelicalism was booming and megachurches were sprouting up everywhere. Today, evangelicalism is said to be in the doldrums, church membership in America has fallen below 50%, and we are in the era of the “Nones.” That is the context and that is the audience that I write to in this third edition.

According to Luther, “The CROSS alone is our theology.” I didn’t even know that great Luther quote when I was writing the earlier editions, but it is now the epigraph to this one. I unpack what that means–in all of its senses and applications–in the Spirituality of the Cross. And it has never been more relevant.

To download a sample–the Preface (brand new), the Introduction (mostly the same), and the chapter on Justification (same, plus lots of new)–go here. You can buy it from Amazon or directly from Concordia Publishing House.

Photo: From Concordia Publishing House

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How Christianity Invented the “Person”

Last updated on: April 9, 2021 at 8:26 pm By Gene Veith

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Yesterday we discussed a Christian perspective on institutions. Today we need to discuss a Christian perspective on the individual.

Though social institutions are valuable, according to the doctrines of the estates and vocation, and though our current anti-institutionalism is not healthy, institutions can be dysfunctional and even idolatrous. And though God created us to be social beings–“it is not good that the man should be alone” (Gen 2:18)–it is individuals, not social institutions, who are saved and will enjoy eternal life. So, in an important sense, the individual has priority over social institutions.

As C. S. Lewis observed, “There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours” (“The Weight of Glory“).

Most Americans value individualism to a fault. But it was not always this way, and in many cultures it still isn’t. Cameron Hilditch has written an excellent essay entitled The Christian Invention of the Human Person.

He points out that the word “person” comes from the Greek word prosopon and its Latin equivalent persona. These words meant literally “mask,” referring to the mask that actors would wear in a play, reflecting the role they were supposed to assume. In the ancient world, a “person” was defined solely by the social role that they played. “Different social stations were thought almost to be different species, sharing nothing in common,” says Hilditch, “and no one was thought to have any kind of individual existence apart from the role they played in the state.” Some people, though, were so socially insignificant that they had no status whatsoever. In Rome, slaves were defined as “non habens personam.” They were “non-persons,” having no rights or social status, being little more than tools.

Hilditch quotes scholars who underscore the point:

As they themselves saw it, people in the ancient world really existed only to the extent that they participated in some larger project, whether on the stage or in the city, which constituted their “ground and final justification.” As [John] Zizioulas goes on to write, “identity – that vital component of the concept of man, that which makes one man differ from another, which makes him who he is — [was] guaranteed and provided by the state or by some organized whole.” For this reason, the historian Larry Siedentop writes that in the ancient city, “there was no notion of the rights of individuals against the claims of the city and its gods. There was no formal liberty of thought or action. . . . Citizens belonged to the city, body and soul.” If the individual had any value at all, it was only by reference to some organized collective.

Christianity, though, would change all that:

The advent of Christianity overturned this old order of the ages, which had reigned more or less unchallenged since the dawn of civilization until the first Easter morning in Jerusalem some 2,000 years ago. The proclamation of the first Christians — that God had become man — obliterated the conception of personhood that predominated in the ancient world. If Jesus is a “persona,” as the apostolic and patristic fathers of the Church maintained, and he has died and been raised as a representative of the entire race, then we are all more than society and the state would make of us. A gap opens up between our identity and our social obligations. The individual sets foot on the stage of human history for the first time. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” [Galatians 3:28]

Hilditch worries that this concept of the value of the individual person may not survive the current decline in faith. Already, he says, we are increasingly identifying ourselves and other people in terms of the groups that we belong to.

We see each other increasingly as flattened-out avatars of abstract collectives from which we derive our sense of solidity and meaning. We are Republicans, Democrats, anti-maskers, anti-vaxxers, pro-lifers, pro-choicers. The unique and unrepeatable person that lies buried underneath all of these labels, the pre-political person that Jesus delivered to each of us upon the cross, is being crowded out and suffocated. Furthermore, we have no reason to believe it will survive our cultural abandonment of the faith that brought it to birth.

Americans today may distrust institutions, but they are replacing them with other “collectives,” such as race, sex, gender, and political ideology. “Identity” has become a common buzzword, but today it has reference not to a person’s distinct individuality but to what group a person belongs to. That is a reversion to the pre-Christian notion of “persona.” Today we need to recover not only institutions, in their proper sense, but also what it means to be an individual.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

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The Institutions Americans No Longer Believe In

Last updated on: April 9, 2021 at 3:56 pm By Gene Veith

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A major business leader is bullish about the American economy in the short term, but he has big concerns about the future of the country.

Jamie Dimon, the C.E.O. of the investment banking behemoth J. P. Morgan Chase, has issued a long letter to stockholders that has gotten considerable attention outside the business world.

He is extremely confident that the post-COVID economy will grow dramatically. How could it not, what “with excess savings, new stimulus savings, huge deficit spending, more QE [quantitative easing], a new potential infrastructure bill, a successful vaccine and euphoria around the end of the pandemic.” He thinks the good times will last into 2023. But he warns against letting the coming success blind us to our nation’s underlying problems. “”Unfortunately, the tragedies of this past year are only the tip of the iceberg — they merely expose enormous failures that have existed for decades and have been deeply damaging to America.”

In addition to the usual charts and graphs and information about how the company has been doing–very, very well, by the way–Dimon addresses the bigger problems that businesses and the nation as a whole are facing. He sounds like a liberal in bemoaning inequality and calling for social justice, but he sounds like a conservative in bemoaning the loss of confidence in free enterprise economics and the dysfunctions of government. He goes on to think through some steps that the country might take to address some of these issues.

The letter is an interesting read (not that it was sent to me, proletarian stiff that I am, but it’s posted online). What struck me, though, in all of the issues he brings up, is his point that Americans have lost trust in their institutions. Specifically, he says, “Almost all institutions – governments, schools, media and businesses – have lost credibility in the eyes of the public. And perhaps for good reason.”

Singling out those four is insightful. Americans from all political persuasions have become cynical about the government, are frustrated with our underperforming, self-protecting educational establishment, no longer believe the news media, and are highly critical of big corporations.

There are efforts on the part of these institutions to restore their standing among the public, but these may do more harm than good. President Biden has said that he hopes to restore Americans’ faith in government, but in extending its reach into people’s lives and promising to solve problems that are arguably outside its competence, he risks alienating many Americans still further. Schools are trying to cover up their failure to educate poor children by shifting their emphasis to political advocacy. The news media has whiplashed from non-stop attacks on the previous president to sycophantic adulation of the new one, demonstrating their unreliability. And big corporations are trying to downplay their robber-baron capitalism by a surface embrace of leftist ideology, which is fooling no one.

If there is a broad consensus that these four institutions are not trustworthy, people of different political persuasions also distrust different institutions. Conservatives don’t trust Hollywood or Silicon Valley. Progressives don’t trust police or the church.

Some institutions still retain a measure of trust, though these have taken a beating. Most Americans trust their doctors, but the medical profession has created skeptics, due to its conflicting advice on COVID and ever-changing advice about what is healthy and what isn’t. Such continual revision is just how science works, but it has led many Americans to alternative medicine and to the internet as their main healthcare provider. Most Americans seem to support the military, though it too seems to be becoming politicized. Most Americans remain strongly supportive of the family, even though marriage and birth rates are declining.

Society is made up of institutions. If the members of a society repudiate their institutions, the social fabric threatens to come apart. Dimon sees the current anti-institutionalism as a herald of national decline.

On the other hand, it’s a fair question to ask, to what extent should we trust our institutions?

Luther defined idolatry not in terms of physical depictions of spiritual realities but as having other gods than the Triune deity revealed in Scripture. “What does it mean to have a god?” he asks in the Large Catechism. The answer has to do with what we put our faith in. What or whom do you trust above everything else? Whatever or whomever it is you look to for all of your good is your god.

A god means that from which we are to expect all good and to which we are to take refuge in all distress, so that to have a God is nothing else than to trust and believe Him from the [whole] heart; as I have often said that the confidence and faith of the heart alone make both God and an idol. (LC, First Commandment)

If you “expect all good” and “take refuge in all distress” from government–whether existing or projected–the government is your god, and your political preoccupations are idolatrous. If your “confidence” and your “faith of the heart” are in education, or even in your family, you are worshiping idols.

But then again, Luther taught that God has created human beings to inhabit certain “estates.” That is, certain divinely-established institutions–the church, the state, the family, along with the economic activity that sustains them–for human flourishing as social beings. Through these, God Himself is at work, caring for His creation by means of human vocations.

We should not look to these estates for all our good. But we should look to them for the good that they are intended to do. And they should do the good they are intended to do, rather than to go outside their bounds.

The government, the family, the schools, businesses are not capable of solving all of our problems and meeting all of our emotional and spiritual needs. Only God is capable of that. The government’s job is to protect its citizens so as to enable them to live their lives in peace. Totalitarianism is idolatrous and an offense against the other institutions, which an all-powerful government seeks to displace. Businesses are to provide goods and services to serve other people and so to make a living for those who are a part of it. Not to be the ultimate concern of a person’s life. That would be idolatrous.

Part of the reason we have become anti-institution is our radical individualism that does not recognize our need for and our obligations to other people. But the institutions themselves have fallen short of what they should be. Churches have become like businesses, families have become disposable, the media has lost its concern for truth, schools have given up on educating, etc., etc.

Bringing back our institutions means that they need to rediscover their purpose. And their limits.

And we also need to get a proper sense of the individual, which is also highly valued in Christianity. We’ll look at that next time.

Illustration: “Society” by Nithinan Tatah from the Noun Project. Creative Commons.

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