Barry's Blog

An article in this past Monday's USA Today caught my eye, entitled, "What is a 'real' Christian?" Written by Dan Gilgoff, a senior editor at U.S. News & World Report, the article seeks to explain how religion in general, and our definition of "Christian" in particular, may affect the GOP presidential field. 

Gilgoff begins his article addressing how former senator Fred Thompson is placing strong in polls of Republican voters, and is being encouraged to run for the 2008 presidential race by some leading party activists. As Thompson weighs a White House bid, conventional wisdom suggests that he could win the nomination by riding support of the Republican Party's conservative base, which continues to have doubts over the three GOP presidential front-runners.

Yet a wrinkle has appeared in Thompson's strategy to win the nomination. Gilgoff writes: "Focus on the Family's founder, James Dobson, said recently that Thompson does not appear to be Christian - and that such an impression would make it difficult for him to connect with the GOP's evangelical base. Because Dobson is the country's most politically influential evangelical, his remarks call Thompson's entire strategy into question." Interestingly enough, Dobson later released a press release through his organization that said, "We were pleased to learn from his spokesperson that Sen. Thompson professes to be a believer." Still, Dobson declined to disavow his earlier characterization of the would-be presidential contender, although Thompson has publicly claimed to be a Christian.

While Dobson's statement clearly cannot be understood as a strong affirmation of Thompson's Christian faith, Gilgoff's article does address the issue of what makes someone a "Christian," a semantic brouhaha that has set apart the evangelical Christian movement from many other Christian traditions. As Gilgoff points out, early "evangelical" movements (which might be characterized as conservative expressions of Biblical Christianity), with leaders like John Wesley (the founder of modern day Methodism) and George Whitefield, introduced notions of "true religion" to distinguish their followers from "traditional" or "rountine" religion. Mark Noll, church historian at the University of Notre Dame observes that "Evangelicals have always had a pretty narrow understanding of who is a Christian in the proper sense of the term...Catholics and most Lutherans and Episcopalians would say that anyone who has been baptized is a Christian, but most evangelicals would not agree. They see baptism as an initiation ceremony that may or may not indicate the presence of true faith."

While I would personally concur with the "evangelical" position described above by Noll, its clear that how we perceive a person's religious faith carries tremendous weight as we head into the tumultuous presidential race.

I find the wisdom of C.S. Lewis particularly insightful as we reflect on this question, What really is a Christian? In his classic book, Mere Christianity, taken from his radio broadcasts over the BBC during World War II, Lewis addresses the listener's objection to his use of the word "Christian": "Who are you, to lay down who is, and who is not a Christian? May not many a man who cannot believe these doctrines be far more truly a Christian, far closer to the spirit of Christ, that some who do?" Then, in a masterful stroke of genius, Lewis discusses the word "gentleman," which originally meant something recognizable; one who had a coat of arms and some landed property, and reminds his audience that when you called someone a  "gentleman" you were "not paying him a compliment, but merely stating a fact. If you said he was not a 'gentleman' you were not insulting him, but giving information. There was no contradiction in saying that John was a liar and a gentleman..."

Lewis goes on to suggest that as the word "gentleman" has now been spiritualized and refined out of its old coarse, objective sense, it now means hardly more than a man whom the speaker likes. "Gentleman" has become a useless word, and the same thing has happened to the word, "Christian," Lewis argues.

"We must therefore stick to the original, obvious meaning. The name 'Christians' was first given at Antioch (Acts 11:26) to 'the disciples', to those who accepted the teaching of the apostles. There is no question of its being restricted to those who profited by that teaching as much as they should have. There is no question of its being extended to those who is some refined, spiritual, inward fashion were 'far closer to the spirit of Christ' than the less satisfactory of the disciples...It is only a question of using words so that we can all understand what is being said. When a man who accepts the Christian doctrine lives unworthily of it, it is much clearer to say he is a bad Christian than to say he is not a Christian." (from the Preface, page xv, Mere Christianity)

For FinishingWell,

Barry Morrow