One of our best sightseeing experiences in New York City was taking a boat out to Ellis Island, the portal through which millions of immigrants streamed into America during the early 1900’s, including some of my Danish ancestors.
It’s a moving experience to stand in the great hall that looks and feels like a small train depot and imagine the lines of people waiting for hours to walk up to small desks that still exist. In a few brief moments, they would discover if their answers were good enough to justify the month-long sea voyage—often in deplorable conditions of sickness and malnutrition—as well as the financial cost, the family dislocation and the many other hardships they faced to win the right to be admitted to this new society.
As people arrived at the dockside in small boats from the steamers, plain clothes agents chalked an “X” on the coat lapels of anyone who appeared to be sick or mentally disturbed. These people were diverted into another line where they received a far more thorough grilling. I’m sure after breathing diesel fumes for a month in cramped cabins far below the waterline, I would look and act a little mentally disturbed myself—especially when thrown into a raucous situation trying to obey directions in an incomprehensible language. Imagine how your acceptance might have hung by a thread….if you were mumbling to yourself as you walked down the dock….which line you got in….if the immigration officer whose desk you ended up in front of had had a fight with his wife that morning.
But Ellis Island was only the beginning. As soon as they stepped onto the boats that deposited them in the ghettos of Manhattan or the trains that took them to the tenements of the eastern industrial cities or out across the plains to Nebraska where my ancestors settled, they faced far more difficult tasks: learning a new language and finding a way to earn a living.
The most daunting task of all was deciding how they would keep alive their own culture—their own music and songs and stories and habits and foods and traditions about all kinds of things like courting and marriage and the proper way to raise children—all while learning to how to live in this new society.
If you are a Christian, you and I are such immigrants. You have not moved geographically. You have not had to book passage on a steamer or rattle along for days in a train across the wide open spaces. But you have stepped from one worldview into another.
For you it is has been a journey every bit as dislocating and harrowing—maybe even more so. You have moved from 21st century American society to the Kingdom of God.
This is a real leap. Becoming a Christian is not only an individual thing, where you believe some new things that you didn’t believe before and everything else stays about the same. NO! It’s a whole new existence. Jesus told the Pharisee Nicodemus that “unless you are born again you shall not enter the Kingdom of God.”
Some churches today take that phrase “born again” and turn it into heresy by preaching an individualistic gospel—a false gospel of personal salvation and forgiveness of sins that has no consequences for any other part of our lives.
But just as we are born into families, Jesus said we are born again “into” something—the Kingdom of God. The people of God have a 4000-year heritage with a unique culture, and traditions and worldview.
One modern author has called Kingdom of God people “resident aliens.” That’s a good term. Christians are aliens. We do not claim whatever society in which we live as ultimately our own. And yet we are residents in that society and owe it certain types of allegiance.
The challenge for the people coming through Ellis Island in 1902 is the same challenge for us today in 2017—how much should the culture of our homeland (the Kingdom of God) overlap where we are taking up residence? When should we assimilate? When should we fight to maintain our uniqueness?
Think of two circles. One circle represents the Kingdom of God worldview which we joined when we trusted our lives to Jesus Christ. The other circle is the worldview wherever we live.
Some have answered this assimilate/maintain uniqueness tension by keeping the two circles as separate as possible.
Think of the Amish, whose horse-drawn buggies we often shared the road with when we lived near an Amish community in western Pennsylvania. Their way to preserve a distinctive Christian life is to keep it an island of early 19th century life simplicity in the midst of the 21st century.
Another example is the movement that began in the early 1900’s called Fundamentalism. Fundamentalists did not withdraw physically from modern life as the Amish do. They withdrew intellectually—that is, they saw modern science, arts, and literature as threats to their Christian faith. Thus, they distrusted the life of the mind—which is why you may know nothing about Fundamentalism as a religious movement, but equate the word with closed-mindedness.
For others, the circles have overlapped as much as possible. They believed they needed to get involved, go native, show the society that they were engaged with it’s thoughts, issues, and needs.
This is also a worthy impulse. It lives out Jesus’ call to his disciples, “you are the light of the world..you are the salt of the earth…” In other words, Christians should be salt preventing decay and light penetrating darkness.
As the danger of the first approach is isolation from the culture and therefore irrelevance, what is the danger of the second? It is irrelevance as well. How so?
Becoming absorbed by the surrounding culture means Christians lose the distinctives they bring to it. This is the danger of classic Liberalism, which so desires to assimilate with society and not stand out as “different” that it ends up thinking and acting like the society around it. Society calls the tune. All distinctiveness vanishes. Thus, the Christian distinctive–the salt and light–become irrelevant.
This is a tough question with no easy answers! If we are Christian, where should we overlap with the worldviews around us? Where should we fight to hold on to God’s worldview, because the society we live in has radically different assumptions about life?
Many of Jesus’ stories are fundamentally about this question. Here is one of them:
Then he told them a story: “A rich man had a fertile farm that produced fine crops. He said to himself, ‘What should I do? I don’t have room for all my crops.’ Then he said, ‘I know! I’ll tear down my barns and build bigger ones. Then I’ll have room enough to store all my wheat and other goods. And I’ll sit back and say to myself, “My friend, you have enough stored away for years to come. Now take it easy! Eat, drink, and be merry!”’“But God said to him, ‘You fool! You will die this very night. Then who will get everything you worked for?’ Yes, a person is a fool to store up earthly wealth but not have a rich relationship with God.
What is at issue here? Let’s be clear that it’s not the desire to plan ahead or even to make a profit. No, the issue is the attitude behind the plans. Human life is fragile and temporary. Accidents, illness, even terrorists can cut short our lives just as quickly as the mist dissipates before the morning sun.
The material world that our technology allows us to often bend to our control is only a small part of all reality. We live in Time, measured in minutes and hours. But we also live in Eternity. An unseen spiritual realm influences everything we see and touch. To pridefully think we can chart our own futures is just plain dumb. It’s out of touch with reality. Centuries ago the Greeks called this boastful overconfidence that still causes many lives to crash and burn hubris.
Jesus’ story also points out that the worldview of the Kingdom of God and American society are never more opposed to one another than in the area of material wealth.
That’s not a great surprise to many of us. Yet everyday come the situations when we must choose which path we will follow—which voices we’ll let influence our decisions.
The Bible never condemns wealth pers se, but rather wealth’s great temptations—hoarding, self-indulgence, and especially misuse of the power of money to manipulate and control others.
The American Dream (if we still have one) is not the dream that brought my Danish farmer ancestors to Ellis Island in search of a better life. It is rather amassing more and more things. Success in life is measured not by character or virtue or the respect of one’s family or community, but by the size of ones’ house or brand name of ones’ car.
How we express our human sexuality is another front burner issue today. The 1960’s brought a sexual revolution which has played out in ever-expanding ways over the last decades to the point that the sexual mores contained in the 10 Commandments, the teaching of Jesus and the lifestyle of the early church seem antiquarian, as though they belong in a museum. Our Christian worldview of human sexuality is totally at odds with our culture. Will we be salt and light? Or will we assimilate into the culture’s mindset?
If we are resident aliens, how do we respond to these issue and many others?
We cannot hope to be true to what it means to be biblical Christians if we do not live in a community that is still practicing the worldview of the Kingdom of God.
I live in America, but my true homeland is the Kingdom of God. There is indeed some overlap between the two. I can be thankful I live in America and be grateful for its many benefits while realizing it is not my true ,homeland.
I must sing my Kingdom’s songs and keep listening to my Kingdom’s stories if I am to remain who I really am. Otherwise, I will lose everything of the “old country” and become swallowed up by the culture around me.
Question: What is an issue where you have lived in the tension between assimilating to the culture around you and standing firm for biblical principles, even though you may appear as an ‘alien’ to those around you? Please share it in a comment.
In 2008 I was General Counsel of the Sacramento County Employees’ Retrement System when Proposition 8 (providing that only a marriage between a man and a woman would be considered valid in California) was adopted as an initiative by the voters. The very next day I participated in a conference call on a totally unrelated topic at work when one of the participants volunteered his opinion that it was so very sad that Proposition 8 had passed. Everyone, but me, quickly subscribed to this opinion.
I not only felt like a “resident alien,” I also was conflicted about what I ought to say, if anything. Resisting the temptation to say nothing, I settled for stating simply that I had voted for the proposition.
Years before I was a partner in a private law firm, tasked with interviewing candidates for a clerical position. I received a call from a Christian acquaintance informing me that one of the candidates was homosexual. It was not difficult for me to conclude that the person’s sexual orientation should have nothing to do with our personnel decision, and we did hire her. She turned out to be an excellent employee, and a personal friend.
Today, any Christian merely expressing the opinion that God intends marriage only between a man and a woman will most likely be labeled a bigot – even by many Christians. The challenge for any Christians believing that Scripture proscribes gay marriage is to demonstrate that they also believe that all persons, regardless of their sexual orientation, are equally created in the image of God, and entitled to our love and respect.
As to how Christians may need to live in an increasingly alien society, I commend for your consideration a recently-published book by Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option. He argues that we can learn from how the church responded to the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century. St. Benedict established monastic communities which kept the faith while still engaging the surrounding culture. Worthy of consideration?
Jim, thanks for sharing this very vulnerable and thoughtful comment. I’m sure your experience may resonate with many readers. You mentioned the book “The Benedict Option.” I actually wrote a post referring to it a few weeks ago: A 60-Second Question about a New Dark Ages for Christians