One of the old yarns the mandarins of geopolitics love is that amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics. I wonder whether this isn’t a helpful cliché for church mice too. I have stacked beside each other on my shelf Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne and Aaron Renn’s Life in a Negative World, Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option and Mike Cosper’s Church in Dark Times, even Megan Basham’s Shepherds for Sale. It’s a small miracle nothing has spontaneously combusted. These books are big thinks, grand ideas, wide takes about what has gone wrong in the church, a perennial question for followers of Jesus. They’re thrilling, if uneven and at times (some more than others) misleading. They are what we could call “grand cultural strategy.” They contain details, to be sure, even if some details are contested and—in the case of Basham—wrong. But the details are not the point. My question is, Are the stories that pepper such books and bolster such arguments significantly representative? These great big church takes need a little social science—a sample size or a threshold for significance. I want to know: Is this a story or is it the story?  

Take Cosper’s little book, which is the newest and my favourite. His title, with emphasis added, is The Church in Dark Times: Understanding and Resisting the Evil That Seduced the Evangelical Movement. So many definite articles for such a small book. Even though “Dark Times” lacks one, I would add it to the list, because it is defining the times.  

These are very American books too, and even for all the pearl clutching around polarization, their subjects are remarkably homogeneous: the same kinds of problems seem to persist everywhere. But is it a negative world in the Baptist Bible Belt? Is it patriarchy and misogyny in the American Ivy League? Are the vicars of Catholic conservatism selling out in First Things? My point is not annoying, casual Canadian whataboutism. It is that, if we are talking about the challenges of cultural discipleship, the strategy must fit the logistics. Perhaps grand (church) strategies are not one-size-fits-all. Perhaps not only what we believe but also where we live (or where we think we live) is awfully important. Perhaps, for a strategy to make sense, for it even to be intelligible, we must put the geo back in geopolitics: we must discern where we are. 

The problem with grand strategies of church and culture is not that they’re wrong. It’s that they’re stories from places. And, even in America, we do not all live in the same place.  

The Banality of Evil  

Cosper draws on one of the great minds of political and social theory of the twentieth century: Hannah Arendt. Her work is famous for all the right reasons, and Cosper leans on her ideas of evil and ideology.  

Yet Arendt is placed too. In probably her most famous book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, her question underwrites a whole postwar field of social psychology: How do people end up doing such horrifying things? Arendt’s answer would be familiar to most teenagers: Human beings are never the villains in their own stories. Our self-narrations and our self-identities are as much formed by our surroundings as they are from any internal compass. As Calvin Seerveld liked to put it, the wisdom on which our life rests is rarely only taught—it is caught.  

Arendt described a “banality” of evil, a sociological and political process whose abominations secreted themselves into the common practices, thoughts, and sociability of everyday polite society in pre-war Germany. Her point was not that all Nazis were moral monsters, but that the social commonness of Nazism made it hard, if not impossible, for them to see the horrors within their society. Eichmann memorably intoned that exterminating Jews was the equivalent of exterminating rats. He, like so many other Nazis, did not lose sleep over it. 

John Calvin once quipped that worship is a gymnasium. That is, what we venerate is honed through daily practice. To this we might hear theologians cry, “Yes!” But the social scientists are less sure; it depends on what we are practicing, what kinds of exercises we are doing. Nazism was a gymnasium too. The point is not to explain how such an ideology could take widespread hold on the German people but rather to explain how we come to accommodate and rationalize such everyday evil. For Arendt, such banality finds its rest in us. And this is where the geography of ideology becomes all-important. 

Being liked, being accepted, having a home—these are intensely human needs. We are all from somewhere. But growing in maturity means escaping the easy veneration of childhood, where our parents can do no wrong, or the slippery condescension of adolescence, where our parents can do no right. It takes courage to learn about where we are, and to learn to discern what is good and right and true and beautiful and what is wrong and hateful and destructive. Courage is the absent virtue in the mob. Arendt’s argument seems almost intuitive. It is not the Adolf Eichmanns that need explaining; it is the Dietrich Bonhoeffers. It is not the collaborators but the resistance who are the exception. Likeability, sociability, and acceptance are all core drivers of human beings. Courage comes at the point of breaking faith not with enemies but with friends. Courage comes when we name the evil in our group. 

All of which means we need to do a little social geography about audience and intent when we talk about selling out, or negative worlds, or corruptions of faith. Who we are talking to depends on where we are or, more to the point, where we think we are. And the geography of that question is made inestimably more complex by the fact that where we are or who we imagine we are talking to is shattered into a billion bits down fibre optics and phone lines. Should we punch left? Should we punch right? We’re whirling dervishes on satellite dishes, caught up in a storm of mobs.  

Does Discernment Scale?  

A conversation, we’ve all somewhat belatedly realized, is hard to hold in the crowded theatre of social media. But even books, targeted at as broad an audience as publishers and authors can muster, get caught in the cul-de-sac of mob mentalities. Every author, no matter their intentions or abilities, writes from somewhere. Everyone has arguments they find more or less convincing, because of their own story or place. Even though my wife and I have remarkably similar theological and political views, she is far more receptive to arguments from one part of the political spectrum than I am. The reason for this lies more in our upbringing and socialization than in our positions. While we usually agree on the positions we hold, we do so from different places. We get there a different way.  

When it comes to what the problem is with the church in these times, we are left with a crisis of geography and scale in our discernment. Even if we all want to follow Jesus, we do not live in the same places mentally, intellectually, or geographically. Joseph Heath in Cooperation and Social Justice makes this basic point. In scaling something up we can be introduced to new, unintended, and unexpected effects. Heath borrows “scalability” from computer science, where it is well understood that the architecture of a system implies its upper limit. In other words, the way something is built means it can accommodate only so much.  

Organizations and interactions, Heath says, have the same quality. Some things work well on a small, local scale, and some things do not. A kind of reverse-engineered sphere sovereignty emerges here. Some things work in some scales, and some spheres, but produce pathological outcomes in other spheres at other scales. As Robert Kaplan puts it in his new book, Waste Land, “Scale itself can become a generator of crises, exactly as in our world today.” Could discernment and discipleship be one of these things that simply cannot be scaled? When it comes to how to follow Jesus, sweeping, grand strategies may lack so much for logistics, for detail and context, that they miss most of their mark. Worse, they may hit the wrong mark entirely. They may shoot blindly into the crowd.  

Manuel Castells long ago called the rise of the network society a crisis of cultural geographies. While at first it seemed like the emergent technologies of connectivity would create more homogeneity, the reverse has happened. We are not a society of crisis; we are a society of crises. We are not a world on the brink; we are on the brinks. Our challenges are legion. Hence the potpourri of Davos buzzwords: poli-apocalypse, perma-crisis. So it is hard to diagnose a grand cultural strategy when what “we” need is sometimes one thing but sometimes also its opposite. It depends where and when and with whom we are. Context is king when it comes to strategy. The pendulums are thrown back, again and again, ever more fiercely, but somewhere, even close to home, it is at its opposite end, and even a gust in the same direction will cause untold misery. We criticize and exorcise, but the demons are too many; they are layered, tiered, in a way that makes it hard to say in only one part of our life and discernment, “Here lies the fundamental error.” 

Arendt has something to say here too. The fundamental mistake of political philosophers since Plato, she argued, was ignoring the fundamental nature of politics. Politics goes on among humans, each of whom is in their own story and their own place, each of whom can act and start something new. Such a politics is hard to achieve, requiring careful conversation, listening and hearing, and fundamentally trust. This, among other reasons, is why Arendt thought politics beyond a certain scale was unlikely to be just. Even the best federal systems that operate by proxy conspire to coalition, compromise, conspiracy—mistrust. 

Arendt was also in a place and a time. Her concerns may not be our own, but her arguments about being in a place, about geography, proximity, and politics, are worth hearing in the church. After all, if Arendt is skeptical that something as proximate and pedantic as politics can be scaled up, how could something as intimate and ultimate as discipleship be? 

Everyone Follows Jesus from Somewhere  

David Koyzis, author of Political Visions and Illusions, is helpful to read alongside Arendt. Koyzis calls ideologies modern versions of what the Bible calls idolatries. He clarifies that idols are made of something created that is good. It is not the gold in the calf, or sex, or money, or power, that is evil. It is the twisting of their created purpose, beyond their created intention. It is where they command in us responses owed only to God: to love, trust, and obey. The powerful created goodness of sex, money, and power is the reason that, when twisted, their perversions are so destructive. 

This means that the Christian applications of the virtues of Christ are not unambiguously good at all times in all places. An exercise of Christian virtue that incorrectly reads the time and place can, in fact, obscure or reinforce idols or undercut some crucial good. 

For example, a prophetic criticism of what some today call “the idolatry of family” might make a lot of sense in a context (a mob) dominated by a kind of patriarchal health-and-wealth gospel, where God’s favour is evidenced in children and where childlessness and even celibacy are disrespected and dishonoured. On the other hand, preaching such a criticism in contexts in which the sexual revolution has come to dominate, where sex is cheap and abortion is a right, may feed the fires of idolatry. Is the message about the idolatry of family correct? The answer is: it depends. 

What does it mean to follow Jesus on the construction site or in the dairy barn? What does it mean to follow Jesus in the palliative care home or during the night shift at the oncology ward? It’s hard not to feel that the grand strategies that have so far proved popular are targeted at a specific social and economic caste, one that is very much online and footloose, one that often forgets its place. 

Much of the Christian life, much of following Jesus, is not just about the right answers; it is about prudence, about balance and proportion in responding to the excesses or idols of our particular places and times. To know how to follow Jesus where we are, we must have both books of God’s revelation wide open: the book of his word and the book of his world. We must know God’s law and how to apply it where we are. We must know, to reference Calvin’s structure of The Institutes, not only God but also ourselves.  

The problem is that the clues to application are contextual. When we study the Torah, for example, we may encounter a common if sometimes confusing distinction between the moral, civil, and ceremonial laws. This distinction started very early, at the Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15). The moral law (including though not necessarily limited to the Ten Commandments) endures, whereas the civil and ceremonial laws are somewhat contextual. This does not mean the latter laws are irrelevant; it means they are concrete cultural examples of what the moral law looked like in that place and time. The civil and ceremonial laws often seem arcane and obscure to twenty-first-century readers, which tells us we know very little about the world into which those laws were given.  

Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount is a similar kind of contextualization. Jesus does not give a new law but provides a new contextualization for the existing law. His teaching in the sermon is a restoration of the law, applied properly for that place, that time, and those people. Even that sermon has a geography. Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck writes, “When we keep all of this in mind it becomes very easy to understand why Jesus . . . exalts precisely those virtues [in the Sermon on the Mount] which his disciples would require about everything else in such circumstance.” Given the context of the community to which the Sermon on the Mount was delivered, “passive” or “negative” virtues were exercised: “truth, righteousness, holiness, purity, modesty, temperance, prayer, vigil, fasting, faith, love, longsuffering, generosity, hospitality, compassion, lowliness, meekness, and patience.” 

These virtues remain crucial, but their deployment depends on the context. Because of this contextual change, writes Bavinck, “the church must adapt a different posture to the world.” He argues that in church history “the exercise of negative and passive virtues was no longer sufficient to sustain [the church] in its new task of reforming and renewing the world in accord with Christian principles.” What was needed alongside the passive, negative virtues were active, world-engaging virtues.  

Bavinck’s proposal was not to add to the law any more than Jesus added to it in his sermon. Bavinck argues that such virtues are “latent in the central facts of the Christian gospel,” in the incarnation, resurrection, and exaltation of Christ. Our goal is not to reject the law, or the Sermon on the Mount, but to contextually apply Christ’s teaching and example: “While the virtues to which the imitation of Christ calls us are the same, circumstances may modify the application.” The early church may have applied mainly the negative or passive virtues, but in a new context we may need to emphasize other virtues. Our context may require not only a law of liberation, not only a law of self-denial, but also a guide for grateful living. 

John Bolt summarizes this nicely: “The Christian church’s task is not the same always and everywhere. . . . Its ethical ideal needs an adjustment when circumstances change.” This is the impulse of much of the origin of neo-Calvinism: old wine in new wineskins, modern yet orthodox. It was the impulse, too, of reformist Catholic social thought, evidenced in the application the church’s ancient teaching to “the new things” (rerum novarum).  

All of which makes me think of the Levitical command not to boil a goat in its mother’s milk. I guarantee not one reader of this article has ever been tempted to do this. It’s a baffling command, not least because it depends on context. We must know a fair bit about the ancient Near East, about Hebraic thought and law, and about God’s call for them in that place, in that time. And yet we must all, in some way, refrain from boiling goats in their mother’s milk. But the connections of cyberspace and the fragile intimacies of the digital world mean our idols are less geographic, less local, than they used to be. Whole institutes—for example, Wheaton College with its recent witch trials—might be hard to pin down as subject to one or another idol. In fact, we might find that places like Wheaton are where the American evangelical world meets its own rival idolatries, some progressive, some populist, but no knock-down, drag-’em-out, only-punch-this-direction kind of discipleship. Some parts of the Christian world have swung too far in some directions, and some are more susceptible to some idols, often in their fear of other idols, than others. It depends where we are and who we are with. The mob is always with us. How wonderful it is to find a way to be liked and lauded while following the Way. The message to watch out, to be on your guard against the socialization of over-corrections in some spheres, could be right. It depends. Wheaton is in the enviable position of hosting a plurality of evangelical idols, which is another way of saying it is still listening, still discerning, still labouring to follow Jesus.  

Wheaton’s dilemma is a Christian dilemma; it is basic and law-driven: things have changed. What has changed, where, how much, and why—well, these are questions for rich sociological disagreement and debate. But certainly the context has changed, leading to a question: Are these still the right virtues, with the right emphasis, to follow Jesus in my group, in my place? This is a question for every place, every generation, every people. It may not have broad-based, grand strategic answers. Even at the level of institutions, Wheaton may not have answers. Professors themselves may need to change how they talk from student group to student group. Learning how to speak, and what to speak, now includes a humbling process of discernment: understanding who we’re talking to, along with their priors, their idols, their goats in their mother’s milk. But we dare not ignore the question all the same, because even a virtue, exercised at the wrong time, in the wrong way, to the wrong proportion, can turn into a vice. Smooth-sounding law conformity that repristinates rather than renews is always in danger of Jesus’s whitewashed tombs. 

The Geopolitics of Christian Culture 

A conventional if counterintuitive realist take is that Americans think the Cold War was about ideology when it was really about geography. This probably overstates it. As a ballast, though, for Christian culture takes, it helps us see that while there may well be common, overarching trends, how those play, why, and to what extent differs a great deal from place to place. Grand strategy needs geopolitics for the same reason: there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Even grand goals must be adapted to local, proximate circumstances. It will look different across the world because the world is different in those places. And sometimes it is not the strategy that is wrong but the read of the place, new circumstances that we don’t understand. This is why professionals talk logistics while amateurs talk strategy. Adapting strategies for successful operations in theatre is the hard part. 

All this grand-strategy conversation needs to bring us back to following Jesus. Big ideas and wide takes can help, but I admit to more than a little sympathy for Hannah Arendt on church discipleship: if it’s following Jesus we’re after, if it’s law-patterned obedience we’re living, my answer in my local congregation may not be the same as your answer in your local congregation. My answer in my job might not be your answer in your job. Learning how to follow the law in grateful obedience may be more proximate, more local, more menial than the high-flying theories of cultural change and social transformation trafficked by publishers and platforms.  

This isn’t a plea for live and let live. Big trends do exist, and some trends are more powerful than others, some idols, or forms of idols, more common. Social science still matters; so does a kind of grand strategy. But my argument is simpler than that: in our talk of evangelical grand strategy, let’s attend carefully to geographical discernment. This might earn us, if not some mercy, maybe some curiosity about why we follow Jesus the way we do where we are. It might help push us, first, to know a person, as David Brooks puts it, and start a conversation. Every flash of what appears to be unfaithfulness may be a proportionate virtue for another place, another people. I’m not above a punch or two when there is cause. Jesus wasn’t. Paul definitely wasn’t. But let’s not fall prey to amateur culture war. Big ideas can help. They’re just not where most of us live.