At first this struck me as odd, but then it occurred to me that something similar can be observed in other places. Most Americans are proud of their nationality, but many of them cannot name the most basic events from US history or the fundamental concepts of our government. A number of years ago a study presented sections of the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution to people on the street, and a great many of them identified these as some sort of communist propaganda.
This sort of problem is even more acute in many churches. Most Christians revere the Bible, but a large majority of them almost never read it. And so their definition of "being Christian" is often something cobbled together from a variety of sources, and this definition is often at odds with what Scripture says. Not only to people presume that popular proverbs such as "God helps those who help themselves" are to be found in the Bible (the saying is by Benjamin Franklin), but they presume behaviors endorsed by the society at large must be compatible with the Bible. And so Tucker Carlson could say just the other day that he is Christian and believes in "second chances" but that Michael Vick's killing of dogs was unforgivable and he should be executed.
That is only one, highly publicized example. Many Christians seem to think that their faith is a purely personal thing with no political or societal implications, this despite the fact that Jesus speaks regularly in political terms about a society where God's will is done, where the poor and the oppressed have good news brought to them. And many have combined their faith with American individualism as though there were no tension at all between the two, this despite Jesus' insistence that true life comes, not from claiming our own rights and privileges, but from being willing to give them up for the sake of others.
I could go on and on, but I hope my point is clear. We cannot become Christians simply by absorbing some vague sense of it from the prevailing culture. We must sit at Jesus' feet as disciples, learning from him. And there is simply no way to do this without engaging the Bible. We cannot be Christian in any real sense of the
word if we do not do as God commands Joshua in today's Old Testament reading. "Only be strong and very courageous, being careful to act in accordance with all the law that my servant Moses commanded you; do not turn from it to the right hand or to the left, so that you may be successful wherever you go. This book of the law shall not depart out of your mouth; you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to act in accordance with all that is written in it."
Many of us American Christians are facing an identity crisis. We have lost our biblical identity, and so we not only are prone to being misled by anyone who speaks with what seems an authoritative, religious voice, but we haven't a clear enough sense of what it means to be a Christian to share our faith with anyone else.
But the good news is that all it takes to correct this situation is for intentional faith communities to take seriously their call to follow Jesus, and to begin studying and discussing together what this might look like. And when people starting letting their encounter with Jesus change them and change the faith community they are a part of, then they start to become something that others will notice. Then they start to be the Church, the body of Christ in the world, living out the ways of Jesus for all to see.
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