Not Christian Enough

Setting the record straight on what gets to count as “Christian” activity.

After a recent Anselm Society lecture, a young woman took the mic during the Q&A. She was majoring in theater at a Christian college. She told the speaker that some of the theater productions her group wanted to do were shot down by university leadership; not because they were morally inappropriate, but because they were “not Christian enough.”

This is a common issue I’ve encountered. A lot of Anselm’s Arts Guild members come to us frustrated by this perspective—but it’s not always easy to explain why it’s wrong. When this question came up at our recent event, I decided it was time to write something.

The idea here is that for something to be Christian, it must be explicitly so. At its worst, this requirement can be as specific as mandating the inclusion of a conversion story or a specific mention of Jesus. Even at its best-intended, though, it reflects an attempt, often due to limited resources, to prioritize productions that explicitly represent the gospel or are known to be influenced by Christian themes. In other words, “Christian” is an artistic category, like country or hip hop would be in music.

Behind this line of thinking lies an assumption about the nature of the Christian story that is worth addressing.

Christianity as innovation

The assumption is that Christianity is an innovation.

In this view, the Christian story is a story of evacuation. God created the world, we wrecked it, and God had to go to plan B, sending His son to take supernatural punishment to open the door so He could remove us from this world.

In this story, a Christian is a specialist; a rescue worker. Someone whose full-time job is to go around telling the residents of Pompeii that Vesuvius is going to erupt. For something to be “Christian” is for it to pertain to that work; distinct tasks like evangelization, or Bible study that helps us toward that end.

That’s why a lot of churches elevate certain professions, give them special commissioning and prayers in Sunday services, and even misleadingly apply the label “pastor” to roles they view as useful to the rescue work. And it’s why those same churches don’t quite know what to do with your job as a data analyst or theater manager.

Christianity as consummation

However, the actual story that Christianity has told for 2,000 years is not one of innovation but of consummation.

In the beginning, God made the world to be His temple; He gave it to His people to cultivate and grow so that He could dwell with them. All kinds of generative work from music to storytelling to engineering to gardening are a part of this. Crazy, right? In a sense, in Genesis 1 God left the work incomplete, for us to finish in participation with Him. Untamed nature isn’t the goal; the goal is a garden and a city (more on this here).

As I’ve written elsewhere, the incarnation, sacrifice, and resurrection of Christ mark the beginning of this consummation, not an innovation. They are the turning point of the story. He wants to be united to us, to redeem and restore His creation–which is why His work of salvation begins with Him physically entering the world, rather than washing His hands of it.

In this story, the laws of the world – of right and wrong, truth and falsehood, beauty and ugliness, goodness and evil – are still God's laws (theologians call them “general revelation,” scholar J. Budziszewski calls them “things we can’t not know”). We are still made with the same purpose: to cultivate the earth and make it a dwelling place for God.

So the call of Christianity is not to accept a job as a rescue worker. It’s to accept the power of Christ (“special revelation”) to fulfill the created calling of the human race. Christians aren’t specialists; they are generalists. Christianity isn’t a type of activity, it’s a manner of activity–as we claim all of reality for God and offer it to him in worship. Our vocations aren’t oriented toward escaping to the New Jerusalem, but living now as people of it; in some sense, participating with God in building it.

So what?

So a Christian theater program (or anything else) cannot cede 97% of theater to the fire. It must claim all that is good and true and beautiful for God, and model the calling of God’s people to reflect and shape and create these things. While certainly there are lines of actual perversion we shouldn’t cross, human voices soaring in song is Christian. Human bodies spinning in graceful dance is Christian. Human imaginations telling wonderful stories is Christian. And because Christians have the whole story in their possession–the source of hope rather than just the longing for it–they have a responsibility, not to mention an opportunity, to do it best! (Side note: there is still a place for explicitly Christian art, but the lines are drawn differently–more on that here.)

In our story, there is no separate truth for Christians. There is only God, the source of all truth, goodness, and beauty, past, present, and future. And any distinctly “Christian” activities, like formal corporate worship, are to train us for spilling that worship into every atom of the world.

So this isn’t all a sneaky way of saying everything is special, go do whatever you want. It’s actually a bigger, harder calling than the one the story of evacuation gives us. To be a Christian in any honorable vocation does include doing your work well as for the Lord (which is about as far as much theology of vocation goes), but it is so much more than that! We have to apprentice and work toward mastery of what God has put before us; learning God’s ways, learning His world, learning our role in it, and slowly mastering the craft of dominion–shepherding the earth in the worship of God. And when God is done, there won’t be one inch of it conceded to anything else.

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About Brian Brown:

Director of the Anselm Society, co-host of the Imagination Redeemed podcast, co-editor of "Why We Create." Read more about Brian here.