Religion Culture

Sometime with the last couple of decades the people who lived in an interesting and unique environment or neighborhood called out for resistance to the kinds of homogenizing they saw in other places with strip malls, fast food restaurants and the like. According to some the slogan summing up this desire came first from Austin, Texas and according to others from some other part of the country, but it ran like this: "Keep (insert area here) Weird."

Wherever it started, it soon spread out to other locales with the same desire and eventually to ideas that also claimed to offer something unique to the world. Author Michael Frost may not have been the first to use the phrase "Keep Christianity Weird" -- he's certainly not the first person to say that Christianity offers the world something that no other religion or school of thought does -- but he's the first one to put it on a cover in his 2018 book by that name.

Frost suggests that Christianity is "off-centered" from the rest of the world, because instead of placing the self at the center of existence it gives that role to God. Thus "eccentric" by definition, Christians as they live out their faith in the world are called to eccentricity in its terms in many areas. Drawing on a heritage that begins with Paul telling Roman Christians they are not to be conformed to the pattern of this world, he offers several ways in which faithful Christian witness will go against the tide of worldly opinion and practice. Loving enemies, giving sacrificially, concern for the needs of others, demanding justice in the face of power -- it's not really a new list. He does do a nice job of distinguishing between what some Christians claim is weirdness but which actually matches the thinking of the world -- this "fake weirdness" often does more damage to the work of the church than any declared opponent could.

For a vision of Christianity that is supposed to embrace a literal eccentricity from the world, Frost's ideas show a remarkable congruence with modern progressive politics. He also shows signs of shallow research into some of his material -- while abolitionist John Brown was certainly opposed to the structures that allowed slavery to continue, his bloody raid on Harper's Ferry was intended to start an armed uprising. That's not a model Christians can faithfully follow.

Keep Christianity Weird offers several interesting ideas on how Christians should conceive of their place in the world. But Frost's confusion of his political vision with the teachings of Christianity -- a mistake he's hardly the first to make -- and an overall sloppiness in thinking and construction of his argument keep it from being more than a good start on this theme.

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The increase in American society of people who profess no religious beliefs would, we might think, decrease the amount of "religiosity" in our nation. By that we usually mean a kind of pharasaical devotion to the laws of some particular belief system and self-superiority on the part of those who master those laws when relating to those who have not.

But even casual examination of our culture shows that attitude persists long after the religion that's supposed to fuel it has been laid aside, Mockingbird Ministries director David Zahl says. To describe this new religion he coins the term "seculosity" and in his 2019 book of that name he describes how these different seculosities affect not only society as a whole but the church as well.

Zahl's seculosities will probably be familiar to people who read or think about our national culture and the way we live here in the 21st century. At one time or another, each of us has probably elevated busyness, romance, parenting, technology, politics or one of the others on his list to the place we'd ordinarily expect to find a deity. Essays, sermons and other presentations have rightly warned us against the idolatry that these "seculosities" represent. But Zahl's contribution is to combine several of them between two covers and give them a name and shared characteristics that can be helpful in identifying where seculosities have taken hold in our lives, whether we profess a religious faith or not.

Zahl points out that he doesn't offer an exhaustive list of the idols that the 21st century puts forth, and the weakness of Seculosity connects to that. Some of those he has chosen are quite well-known and have been covered pretty thoroughly -- the "Seculosity of Politics," for example, has been a concern of believers and non-believers alike for many years and Zahl's chapter of that name adds very little new to the discussion. Such well-traveled themes make Seculosity drag in its latter third and may make a reader wish Zahl had dropped them altogether or replaced them with one or another of the potential chapters he decided not to use. But overall this self-effacing and humorous caution against modern idolatry hits enough of its mark to make it worth the read and thought it might provoke.