The Rhetorics of Christian Revival

The rhetorical core of an American Christian revival is: Alternative Living.

The rhetorical core of the Christian religion as it is presently structured in the United States is a touchy-feely goofing around, that it is nothing to be taken seriously. It is a feel-good show soaked in a brew of maudlin emotion and decadent hedonism-lite. For any revival of Christianity to catch on, it would need to refocus its rhetorics on the opposites, that it is a serious religion that places demands on its membership, that it calls on its members to make deep and meaninful commitments. It would have to excavate its roots, rediscover and then amplify its masculine edge and tamp down the emotional feminism that has so captured it.

Secondly, yet just as important, it would need to reassert itself into its natural magisteria and retreat wholly from the realms in which what it has nothing serious to say, specifically the scientific realms of inquiry. Christianity has nothing at all it can add to understanding medicine or how species relate to one another, but it has quite a lot to say about how people can live a good life. I've long found it mystifying why Christians remain so silent about what a good life looks like. Christians seldom articulate anything like that in the form of things people can actually do to make life better. Christianity ought to offer a distinct alternative to the dominant American hedonism, but as it is currently structured it merely offers a hedonism-lite, so it offers no real reason to practice the religion in the first place.

Let me tell a personal anecdote that illustrates what I mean. Many years ago, I divorced my ex-wife who was, I thought, the love of my life. I had it all. I had the nice house and the family and so it felt like after years of struggle, we had finally arrived at the American dream together. Well, she betrayed me, and it all came crashing down so that six months later we had lost the house, lost our jobs, and lost our family as now I was only seeing my children every other week. I was shell-shocked, lost, and I had turned to alcohol as a means to forget my problems. When I was drinking, things weren't so bad. So, my life was in a downward spiral.

Once I hit the bottom, I looked for a divorce support group for help, and the only game in town was offered by a local Methodist church. What did they offer a man as broken as I was at the time? Hugs and prayers. That's it! Oh, your whole life came unglued? Let's hug it out and pray about it. Everybody was hugging on me.

Maybe that works for some people, but for me, I needed somebody to kick my ass and give me something to do. You know what really helps people get over divorce? Gardening. Go outside and tend some tomatoes. Anything would have been better than hugs and prayers. What I'm saying is that Christians gave me absolutely nothing I could do about about my situation. Absolutely nothing.

How can this be? How is it that Christians have nothing to say about how to handle life's challenges, about how to live a better life?

Imagine Muslims answering the call to prayer to attend a Muhammad-Rock show instead of bowing in a show of submission to God. Imagine them instead throwing their hands up into the air in a scene more reminicint of an old Grateful Dead concert than a traditional call to prayer.

You can imagine this, but it is an odd image. It doesn't really jive with what you know about Muslims, does it? They seem to take their religion quite seriously, and it just so happens to be the world's fastest-growing religion, while Christianity is in steep decline in every Western enclave.

Compare the posture of submissive bowing that characterizes Islam to the hands raised and waving pick-me, pick-me, look-at-me that characterizes so many worship services in Christian churches.

In the image above, you have throng of people at some kind of Christian service waving thier hands in the air. Remove the crucifix, and it is indistinguishable from a rap concert. This is the problem in a visual form.

Another way to demonstrate the problem is in a phrase I hear come out of the mouths of Christians all the time, like they were programmed to deliver it: It is a relationship, not a religion. Everything wrong with Christianity is neatly tied up in that phrase, but the core of it is that the Christian and God are on an equal footing, in a "relationship". Islam places a lot of demands on its adherents. Chritianity places no demands on its adherents. When I walk around Wal-Mart, I cannot tell the Christians from anyone else. When I deal with Christians, nothing about them markets the religion to me as a way of life that is better than the alternatives. Let's say you just fell off the turnip truck and you had no prior knowledge of either religion, yet you were in the market for one. You want to live a good life, you see, so that you don't waste the one life you have, and you're looking for a system that will help out with that. From Muslims you see family cohesion, deep commitment, structured practice, in short, you see a religion that is quite serious. From Christians you see no such commitments required at all. You see a hyper-emotional touchy-feely system that says pretty much nothing about how to live a good life. Which would you pick?

I ran across this post on forum when I was researching the origins of the uplifted hands phenomenon, and I think it characterizes this problem pretty perfectly:

One thing my wife and I have noticed is that when a Modern Contemporary Worship song is played we see the hands lifting in the air. But when a Hymn is played/sung, we rarely ever see those same hands lifted up, if any and not usually til the chorus. So it seems that the music of today along with perhaps the lyrics to a lesser degree seem to have a manipulative effect on those who want to raise their hands. There seems to be a lot more emotion involved and less meaningful thought. If some wish to disagree that's fine, but we see what we see and the same pattern we have seen in multiple churches. On the other hand when we've been to a Bible teaching conference that sing only the Hymns we rarely ever see a pair of hands go up in the air.

I've noticed that GOP candidates, specifically Marjorie Taylor Greene and Ted Cruz, recently tested the word revival in some of their speeches, and that tells me they are sensing that it has rhetorical potential during this historical moment. While hedonists on the left are screaming the rhetorics of social justice that destory every social boundary, GOP candidates would do well to speak to a Christian revival that rebuilds and fortifies those boundaries, a revival of law and order, or the old-time relgion, of decency and respect and hard-work and responsibility and clean living. In tandem, Christian churches ought to offer an alternative lifestyle that demands quite a lot of its practitioners.

1. Hymns, not rock songs. A-capella is the best because it engages the entire audience, but if instruments must be used, organs and pianos only. No guitars. No drums. No rock instruments at all.

2. A religion with rules to live by, no relationships. If you want to live a good life that is pleasing to God, do these things. Get active. None of this, I'm-just-a-lowly-sinner-and-God-understands-me narcisistic bullshit.

3. A complete and utter retreat from any other realm. We have nothing to say about evolution or science. We're too busy living good clean lives and submitting to the creator of the Universe to get drawn into irrelevant scientific commentary.

4. Emphasis on masculine order and structure and a marked de-emphasis on female chaos and emotion. Dress codes. No yoga pants. No blue jeans. Women must wear dresses. Men must wear jackets. Have church jackets in a closet in the foyer with a cross emblazoned on them. It won't take long for people to get the message that this isn't a come-as-you-are anything goes, but a place in which you meet a standard. You come up to God. He doesn't come down to you. He's the supreme God of the universe. Humble your damned self!

5. Marketing, marketing, marketing. Run ads and billboards that state this: Piney Grove Baptist: We Are the Alternative.

6. Rituals, rituals, rituals. Why in God's name every Christian church doesn't do the communion ritual every Sunday is utterly beyond me. A unique ritual that reinforces sacrifice and submission, one of the strongest of all the Christian rituals, treated by pretty much all denominations as an afterthought. It boggles my mind.

Those are just suggestions, ideas I would implement if I was in charge of it. The core is alternative living, though, and Christianity ought to take all the abject hedonism that has so ruined cultural life in the United States and create something that is dinstinctly counter to it, something that places demands on people and gives them structure. Christianity ought to be a way of living a better life, not a wreched watered-down hedonism.