The Dangers of Thin Religion

Dick Keyes

The following was originally a Massachusets L'Abri newsletter. We are grateful to Dick Keyes for the permission to reuse it here.
Francis Schaeffer used to say that what was needed in our time was both revival and reformation. Revival meant a deep work of the Holy Spirit toward moral integrity and spiritual reality in the lives of Christian people as well as equipping them to speak to the non-Christian world with great persuasiveness about Jesus. Reformation meant not a return to the 16th century, but a radical renewal of Biblical thinking about the truth itself and about how to live it out into the contemporary world in all its fullness and richness.
Many of us have been saddened by repeated reports, studies and polls showing how little Christian people seem to differ in either their behavior or their thinking from those who do not call themselves Christians at all. In L’Abri we have also been saddened over recent years to see so many students come to us professing faith but faith having no solidity or connection to life, the world or to other important parts of God’s truth. I have thought of this as “Christianity lite”. I can remember one student who said he was a Christian and knew the time he had “accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior”. But he was not at all sure that there was a God and was surprised when I suggested that there was a disconnect. Faith is made up of spiritual sound bites from Christian leaders like Rick Warren, Max Lucado, Dallas Willard, Francis Schaeffer or C.S. Lewis, and then lived out under the guidance of little moral and political packages of values from one’s local culture. This is why we need revival and reformation.
We recently heard a radio interview with Miroslav Volf, a Croation Protestant theologian now teaching at Yale. He reflected on his experience in the ethnic violence and horror when Yugoslavia came to pieces after the fall of Communism. The violence was between Catholic, Orthodox and Muslim, so he was asked what made religion so violent. His answer was interesting. He distinguished between “thin” religion and “thick” religion. Thin religion is superficial. Thick religion is deep. Thin religion has little solid content, but exists in slogans, clichés, hot-button issues and formulas used to quickly separate good from evil, friend from enemy. Thick religion is built on deeper reflection and awareness of the scriptures of the tradition, its history and a prophetic voice that questions all expressions of the faith.
Volf maintained that it is the thin religion that is really dangerous because it has all the power to inspire religious intensity and passion, but because of its thinness, it is vulnerable and easily taken captive by the powerful idols of the moment – such as nationalism, tribalism or racism, all of which can thrive on violence. Religion that is thick is less likely to be violent because of its grasp of history, the integration of its whole view of the world, and a prophetic voice exerting a check.
The problem is not that today’s Evangelical Christians are in danger of taking up arms soon. But Evangelicalism’s liteness or thinness certainly has made it vulnerable to being co-opted by local idols. So much of what calls itself Christian has caved in to the individualism of self fulfillment, the secular redefinition of sexuality and a crass consumerism – thus, the awful polls. As such it has no backbone within itself and no traction in society. The marriage of commerce and spirituality I find terrifying because its consequences are so long-term and yet so little recognized. In a catalogue I received an advertisement for “The Full Armor of God Playset”. For $18.99 plus postage you got plastic pieces of armor corresponding to Paul’s list in Ephesians 6. With the playset you could start your child off in battle-readiness against “principalities and powers”. It was for three years old and up. How can you hope to do this without making some of the heaviest things of the faith lite, trivial… ultimately absurd?
Of course thin faith vaporizes when life’s brokenness and losses come. Nor do the sound bites, clichés and little moral packages hold together when young people collide with the sophisticated power of relativism in our universities. More than that, thin faith will never represent Jesus, who had no interest in providing spiritual halos for local idolatries, but seemed concerned for poor people and sick people, for justice, honesty, generosity and a radical caring for things beyond ourselves.
I would love to have a quick new plan for how to thicken faith but I am forced back to our well-worn themes. Thick faith must be a full worldview, connecting with every part of life because God cares about it. It reaches back in time for the perspective of history because God teaches us through it. Thick faith must also extend down into our bones and be growing from there. Could it be that God might want his people to be both radically alive and also deeply reflective people – about God? about their faith? about their world? It isn’t a question of becoming academic or getting degrees, but of hunger and curiosity for wisdom and effectiveness in the kingdom of God. We have also seen that Christian community can be a help for many people to have an accelerated experience of learning about the faith and its interpersonal realities.
Dick Keyes is the Director of L'Abri Fellowship in Southborough, Massachusetts, where he has worked with his wife and family since 1979. He holds a B.A. in History from Harvard University, and an M.Div. from Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. (Author: Dick Keyes)

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