Os Guinness is an internationally renowned speaker and the author of numerous books, including Time for Truth, The Gravedigger File, and Long Journey Home. An Englishman, he was born in China and holds degrees from the universities of London and Oxford.We should seek to understand the sources of the prejudice directed against us, and where there is some reason for it, to work to remove the grounds for the sake of our ongoing witness. In my experience, there are three major sources of prejudice against Christians and the Christian faith in the West today, and in each case the prejudice is half-warranted and half-unwarranted.
One source of prejudice grows out of reactions to the evils and excesses of Christendom. Never mind that the Christian faith has inspired the greatest reforms in history—ranging from the banning of infanticide and the gladiatorial games through the abolition of slavery and the rise of the women’s movement to civil rights. Simply mention the public influence of faith and what will be raised will be the specter of the Inquisition, the Crusades, and the wars of religion.
Another source of prejudice stems from the repudiations of the Enlightenment. Never mind that many of the very greatest thinkers of the West have been men and women passionately in love with Jesus Christ—Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, Newton, Edwards, for example; not to speak of some of the greatest minds today. Following the Enlightenment, all faith is routinely dismissed as irrational, anti-intellectual, and reactionary. When I was a student, I often heard Bertrand Russell quip: “Most Christians would rather die than think—in fact they do.”
Yet another source of prejudice arises from the erosions of faith in the modern world. Never mind that the Christian faith is the single most influential force behind the rise of the modern world, Christians are repeatedly dismissed as “harmlessly innocuous and dangerously extremist.” At first I thought that accusation was contradictory and muddled, until I realized that both charges spring from the same irrelevance of faith that has been eroded by the modern world. Faith is dismissed as harmless when it is “privatized”—privately engaging but publicly irrelevant; but faith can equally be seen as dangerous when it is “politicized” and believers are exploited as “useful idiots” in the service of an ideology or party. “The first thing to say about politics,” it is well said, “is that politics is not the first thing.”
If, as I argued last time, we should be evangelical and unashamed, then nothing is more important than defining our responses to others as Jesus taught us to—not demonizing our opponents and not responding to hate mail with hate mail, but loving our enemies, doing good to those who hate us, and forgiving insult and injury as we have been forgiven. Our generation has yet to see what so many followers of Christ, at such a moment and with so much at stake, could accomplish if they were to engage the world as followers of Christ are called to.
First Baptist Church of Perryville is located in Perryville, MD.