End of Evangelicalism (1) Fitch and Ideology

Back when I was employed as a pastor, I was the minister in a rural parish, where most to the people were sheep farmers. One farmer supplemented his income with fitch farming. He bred these ferret-like animals for their fir skins. A fitch is a ferret that has been domesticated. I thought of this recently when I was reading a new book, “The End of Evangelicalism? Discerning a New Faithfulness for Mission” by David E. Fitch. The subtitle is “Towards an Evangelical Political Theology”. I wonder if David realises that a fitch is a domesticated ferret. He certainly has an amazing ability to ferret out the truth.

David Fitch teaches at Northern Seminary. In this book, he examines the presence of evangelicalism in North America. He asks why evangelicals are perceived as arrogant, exclusivist, duplicitous, and dispassionate by the wider culture. He uses the ideological theory of the European philosopher Slavoj Zizek to diagnose the problems faced by evangelicalism in America. He ends his study by examining the possibilities for a new faithfulness emerging and missional church movements springing forth in the current day.

I found this book very challenging and thought provoking. In the next few posts, I will summarise his main points and outline my response.

When I found that David had used the philosophy of Zizek to provide a framework for analysing the problems of evangelicalism, I was puzzled. I was not familiar with this European philosopher, so I was wondered why he wanted to go there. The funny thing is that it works. He explains Zizek’s philosophy very clearly, in a way that it can be understood by someone who is not familiar with it. He uses Zizek’s approach to expose the antagonisms and contradictions in American evangelicalism very effectively.

I suppose that he could have gotten to the same place by waiting in the council of the Lord like Jeremiah, but I have heard the Spirit speak through donkeys, street signs and atheists, so I am not going to complain. If he can hear the Holy Spirit speak through an obscure European philosopher, all power to him.

David Fitch provides a better summary of the nature of ideology and why it is important in a blog post.

My position (if I can say it that way now) is that before one can engage cultural issues both inside and outside the church, you must step back long enough to discern ideology at work. Because, once you take a position on the terms offered from within an ideology you have in essence already assented to that ideology. There is now no way to escape it. The ideology now determines how you will live out this issue in your life on the terms it puts down… This goes for any number of social/cultural issues including justice and economy.

I have argued for several years now that the church in the West must accept that it finds itself in the minority position in an increasingly post-Christendom culture. I have drawn from Anabaptist and Neo-Anabaptist theologians (and their philosophical friends) to teach evangelicals how to be alright with that and indeed come to a new self-understanding as the church in Mission in the West.

…..But more and more, over the past five years I have seen the need to discern the ways ideology works and how it thwarts our engagement with culture. To me, a good Anabaptist theologian needs to understand the critique of ideology (here is where people accuse me of being a Marxist which is hard to do if you’re an Anabaptist rejecting church-state alignments). My book End of Evangelicalism? carries out this argument extensively using Slavoj Zizek.

A good critique of ideology should teach you:

• How to recognize the signs of an ideology at work. And so often, when you dare to reveal contradictions at work within an ideology, or use a code word differently, you will see an explosion of excess emotion, fear and anger. If you threaten an ideology that people are most comfortable in, it cuts to the core of our deepest fears and angers. Be of with that. Recognize it at work in yourself. Be ready to repent.

• That you cannot directly criticize ideologies. You have to kindly provoke, push the ideology’s absurdities to their extreme to reveal the powers at work. Let people come to their own revealing. Only then can they “traverse” it and be “saved.”

• That ideologies run on lacks, and antagonisms and fears, the opposite of what should be the body of Christ’s fullness in the Triune God. So whenever we see fear and anger and security driving a discussion in the church, we know that the church itself has succumbed to ideology.

When discerning ideology, the local indigenous community must be present. Instead of conceptually entering into an ideology and taking positions to win some “street cred,” instead we must discern individual issues one at a time together with real people in relationship. The first church did not have a “position” on pro-life/pro choice. They simply went about rescuing babies as they were confronted with infanticide in their streets. That was their position. And in that witness, the world was changed. Today, we must do likewise

In his book, Fitch addresses three main issues for evangelicalism that feed out of its struggle with a modernist ideology. I will discuss these in the next few posts.