Biblicist churches that don’t read the Bible

Over at Plough Bonnie Kristian (my editor at CT and the very very best) has written a wonderfully incisive review of the newly published Anabaptist Community Bible. Here are the final three paragraphs of her piece (bolded emphasis mine):

One big reason I’m no longer a member of a Mennonite church is that I moved to another state. But another big reason is that I saw firsthand how unsteady Anabaptism becomes if it is not solidly grounded in [a] foundation of scriptural knowledge and authority. Other Christian traditions – those that also catechize with creed and liturgy and tend to concentrate instructional authority in ordained, seminary-educated ministers – may more reliably hold on to their convictions without intensive, universal lay Bible study.

But Anabaptism doesn’t work that way. It requires understanding, as Roth writes, that “Scripture – and especially the teachings of Jesus – [are] a road map for living,” a map to be constantly consulted because it is always “relevant and authoritative for the Christian life.” It requires us to read the Bible, in Roth’s words, “with the expectation that it will change our lives.” Anabaptism requires the hunger for and submission to Scripture that, five centuries ago, its progenitors modeled to the death.

If the Anabaptist Community Bible can encourage that hunger, enticing Christians to consume Scripture like a community feast, its makers have done well indeed. That would not only commemorate Anabaptism but extend its legacy for generations to come.

Something clicked for me here, especially this: “…without intensive, universal lay Bible study.” That phrase is a useful descriptor for a cross-denominational phenomenon common to any number of low-church biblicist (even “primitivist”) traditions that arose particularly on the American frontier in the nineteenth century.

Intensive, universal lay Bible study: if anything is a desideratum of non-creedal, non-liturgical, congregationalist churches, that is it. Yet what happens when local churches or whole traditions that remain non-creedal, non-liturgical, and congregationalist—biblicist, in a word—no longer practice intensive, universal lay Bible study? It’s not indulging nostalgia to say that there was a time when biblicist churches were full to the brim of adults (and young adults, and teenagers, and children) who read the Bible every day, to the point where they had whole swaths of it memorized or rehearsable by paraphrase. I’m just old enough to remember those days, and I caught only the tail end.

I recall, while serving at a shelter north of Atlanta circa 2010, a homeless man in his 50s reciting whole paragraphs of arcane scriptural passages to me in perfect KJV. This guy had been raised in a bona fide biblicist church that practiced—nay, enforced—intensive, universal lay Bible study.

Yet today, as I have documented almost obsessively, biblicist churches are moving in a post-biblicist direction while younger generations have utterly lost even the rudiments of biblical literacy, along with literal literacy. (Translation: They don’t read, period.)

Beyond such literacy—beyond intensive, universal lay Bible study (should we call it IULBS?)—there is nothing left; at least, not if you remain, on the surface or even beneath the skin, biblicist-primitivist-congregationalist in polity, doctrine, and practice. The rug has been pulled out beneath your feet, the branch you were sitting on has been sawed off, the pillars have all been thrown down: there is nothing left.

Besides, that is, the Zeitgeist. But discerning the spirits is no longer possible when the word of the Lord in Holy Scripture is no longer known, cherished, prized, read. Where else is there to turn? Either to tradition or to the culture. I see no third option.

Update (Feb 13): There is another option, one I’ve mentioned before but had forgotten to include here, which is the singular authority of a charismatic, entrepreneurial, popular pastor. I take it for granted that this is a bad option, but it’s not only a live one; it’s one many churches and believers have chosen and even sought out.

I should add, too, that for the kind of post-biblicist traditions I write about in this post, the “charismatic option” is a nonstarter. Not because it’s unattractive or unthinkable, but because the Spirit without the Word is as rudderless as the Word without the Spirit is lifeless. Hence my reference to discerning the spirits by the gospel of the incarnate Word, which is just what Saint John commends to us in his First Epistle. Modern-day Montanism is just as undesirable as it was in Tertullian’s day.

Screentopia

I’m grateful to Alan for writing this post so I didn’t have to. A few additional thoughts, though. (And by “a few thoughts” I mean rant imminent.)

Let me begin by giving a term to describe, not just smartphones or social media, but the entire ecosystem of the internet, ubiquitous screens, smartphones, and social media. We could call it Technopoly or the Matrix or just Digital. I’ll call it Screentopia. A place-that-is-no-place in which just about everything in our lives—friendship, education, finance, sex, news, entertainment, work, communication, worship—is mediated by omnipresent interlinked personal and public devices as well as screens of every size and type, through which we access the “all” of the aforementioned aspects of our common life.

Screentopia is an ecosystem, a habitat, an environment; it’s not one thing, and it didn’t arrive fully formed at a single point in time. It achieved a kind of comprehensive reach and maturity sometime in the last dozen years.

Like Alan, I’m utterly mystified by people who aren’t worried about this new social reality. Or who need the rest of us to calm down. Or who think the kids are all right. Or who think the kids aren’t all right, but nevertheless insist that the kids’ dis-ease has little to nothing to do with being born and raised in Screentopia. Or who must needs concern-troll those of us who are alarmed for being too alarmed; for ascribing monocausal agency to screens and smartphones when what we’re dealing with is complex, multicausal, inscrutable, and therefore impossible to fix. (The speed with which the writer adverts to “can’t roll back the clock” or “the toothpaste ain’t going back in the tube” is inversely proportional to how seriously you have to take him.)

After all, our concern troll asks insouciantly, aren’t we—shouldn’t we be—worried about other things, too? About low birth rates? And low marriage rates? And kids not playing outside? And kids presided over by low-flying helicopter parents? And kids not reading? And kids not dating or driving or experimenting with risky behaviors? And kids so sunk in lethargy that they can’t be bothered to do anything for themselves?

Well—yes! We should be worried about all that; we are worried about it. These aren’t independent phenomena about which we must parcel out percentages of our worry. It’s all interrelated! Nor is anyone—not one person—claiming a totality of causal explanatory power for the invention of the iPhone followed immediately by mass immiseration. Nor still is anyone denying that parents and teachers and schools and churches are the problem here. It’s not a “gotcha” to counter that kids don’t have an issue with phones, parents do. Yes! Duh! Exactly! We all do! Bonnie Kristian is absolutely right: parents want their elementary and middle school–aged kids to have smartphones; it’s them you have to convince, not the kids. We are the problem. We have to change. That’s literally what Haidt et al are saying. No one’s “blaming the kids.” We’re blaming what should have been the adults in the room—whether the board room, the PTA meeting, the faculty lounge, or the household. Having made a mistake in imposing this dystopia of screens on an unsuspecting generation, we would like, kindly and thank you please, to fix the problem we ourselves made (or, at least, woke up to, some of us, having not been given a vote at the time).

Here’s what I want to ask the tech concern trolls.

How many hours per day of private scrolling on a small glowing rectangle would concern you? How many hours per day indoors? How many hours per day on social media? How many hours per day on video games? How many pills to get to sleep? How many hours per night not sleeping? How many books per year not read? How many friends not made, how many driver’s licenses not acquired, how many dates and hangouts not held in person would finally raise a red flag?

Christopher Hitchens once wrote, “The North Korean state was born at about the same time that Nineteen Eighty-Four was published, and one could almost believe that the holy father of the state, Kim Il Sung, was given a copy of the novel and asked if he could make it work in practice.” A friend of mine says the same about our society and Brave New World. I expect people have read their Orwell. Have they read their Huxley, too? (And their Bradbury? And Walter M. Miller Jr.? And…?) Drugs and mindless entertainment to numb the emotions, babies engineered and produced in factories, sex and procreation absolutely severed, male and female locked in perpetual sedated combat, books either censored or an anachronistic bore, screens on every wall of one’s home featuring a kind of continuous interactive reality TV (as if Real Housewives, TikTok, and Zoom were combined into a single VR platform)—it’s all there. Is that the society we want? On purpose? It seems we’re bound for it like our lives depended on it. Indeed, we’re partway there already. “Alarmists” and “Luddites” are merely the ones who see the cliff’s edge ahead and are frantically pointing at it, trying to catch everyone’s attention.

But apparently everyone else is having too much fun. Who invited these killjoys along anyway?