Sample 3

Introduction

The atheist Christopher Hitchens once admitted to a pastor in the back of a taxi that the best argument for the existence of God was probably the fine-tuning of the universe. He saw that equations suggested that the world we’re in is like what you would get if you flipped a universe a quintillion times and a quintillion times it landed heads. And so if you were opening this book for a proof of the existence of God, well, there, you found it. You can look it up. It’s got to do with the fact that the more we learn about physics, the more that the universe looks like it was planned with eye-popping precision. It’s the argument I might be giving if I were sitting next to Christopher Hitchens: but I’m not in a taxi, and I’m also not in a tux in the debating chamber of the Oxford Union. I find myself among a generation in which people are less interested in arguments about the existence of God and more interested in having fewer arguments.

The world I grew up in was never curious about what’s really going on in religion to begin with: in high school, I learned about geometry and C++ programming and the only instruction I had about religion was either not to think about it, or not to think well of it. In history, we learned about the “wars of religion” and the Scopes Monkey Trial; we learned that the religious people lived in the Middle Ages, and that they threw Renaissance men like Galileo under house arrest. Nowadays, on my phone, the browser that I didn’t install keeps showing articles about culture wars and preachers having affairs. All this makes me shrug.

This book is like a letter to a generation shrugging Christianity. I think it’s time for us to wake up to the fact that we’ve been trained to be uncurious about something startling.

That brings me to the title. The first part of the title is an older word: epistle. The word epistle means a letter, and it refers to the letters that the early Christians sent in the mail back in the days when mail was read aloud. These letters explained the startling call of Jesus step by step, back when the good news was new. This is going to be like an epistle, but written in another empire.

The second part of this title is Americans. That, of course, should be the part of the title that needs no explanation, but the next thing I want to do in this Introduction is to expand upon this word.

If I have one aim in this book, it is for Christianity to make sense to one of the most unreached people groups: ordinary Americans. Let me explain what I mean.

The ordinary American today was raised in a culture with little overlap with the way that the good news has been traditionally understood. Americans don’t stay up at night worrying about sin. Most people – even churchgoers – don’t want someone else to think that they have the right to tell them that what they’re doing is wrong. But the ordinary American stays up at night wrestling with the self. If you were to put up a pushpin board with everything that Americans worry about and make movies about and try to sell products with, and step back a few feet, it would be instantly clear: self-affirmation, self-love, self-care, authenticity, and the thoughts swirling in your head. And so in this book, my aim is to retell the story of redemption not merely as God saving us from our sin, but as God saving us from ourselves. As for that, well, we’ll see – but it already lies at the beating heart of the good news of God in Jesus Christ, who offers us Himself. But I am getting ahead of myself.

The second thing I want to say about Americans is that they are more skeptical of authority than ever before. This is extremely important in relation to Christianity. The greatest religious trend today is the rise of a group of people who disaffiliated from religious institutions: the Nones. Every poll or demographic survey shows that if people had to select a religious identification from a dropdown box that included Christian, Jew, Sikh, Muslim, Hindu, and so on, more people in America each year would select “None.”

It’s also common for this to be the majority group in blue-state, metropolitan areas. It’s time to start seeing the Nones for what they are: a distinct culture. The best way to think about the Nones is that they belong to a world in which “no religion” is the default. Their movies, sitcoms, cartoon strips, histories, novels, video games, and holidays feature no religions at all, as if the religions connecting people for thousands of years were cut out by a giant pair of scissors. To the Nones, religion isn’t good or bad, as much as it’s an appendix. Maybe it’s there for a reason, or maybe evolution put it in us, but we don’t know what it’s there for, and it no longer serves its purpose. The Nones usually ignore religion until they’re reminded by the 24-hour news cycle that sometimes it's deadly. Many are demanding an appendectomy. 

In this book, I want to explain how Christianity works in a way that makes sense even to those who are skeptical of authority and treat all religion like an appendix. Let me introduce this book with a picture. 

Imagine you’re in a room with a door you can’t open. You try to force it, but it won’t budge. At this point, you might start looking around the room for something to stick in the lock, like a paperclip or a bobby pin. They seem to help, but not enough. They probably engage with some of the pins in the tumbler, but still won’t pick it. I want you to think about what you would do next if you could engineer a key to open the door. Would you have any idea what shape it would be? Chances are you might go about designing all kinds of keys that you imagine might do the trick. Finally, at last, when you’re given the key, you might have no idea how this could be the right one, since it’s not even close to the shape that you swore it had to be. That, I think, is what we find in Christianity. At first, the shape of the faith may not be what you predicted. Were we to invent a key using the knowledge that we can currently gather with our five senses, we’d probably invent something else. Not many of us would come up on our own with the idea of a dying and resurrected man who gives Himself in bread and wine. 

What I think we should see, though, is that the odd shape of Christian belief is an exact fit to human nature. Human nature is something that we don’t learn much about: in fact, we may be taught that it’s just an invention by one people group to exert power over another people group. But all humans do take a certain shape. We may be as unique as locks, but we’re still locks. In that sense, human nature is like the springs and cylinders and pins, and what makes us unique is not what’s inside of us, but how they’re arranged.

In Part One, we’ll pry human nature out of the doorframe and put it on the table and look at it together. Then, in Part Two, we’ll look at the key: and we’ll examine how the story of redemption culminates in a man. We’ll see how the odd knobs and cuts that we find across Him are the result of the divine life cutting human nature in reverse, forging a master key. I think this will lead to one of two conclusions. Either this is a faith which tradition has locksmithed more precisely than our own contemporary ideas: or the central claim of this faith is true, and the holy has met humanity, and is inviting us to come in.

In Part Three, we’ll lay out the landscape of religion in America today and how that relates to Christianity. This step is crucial, since we are sorely lacking vocabulary in how to talk about the role of religion in the twenty-first century.

For now, in this introduction, I only want to say one more thing. It’s probably the case that if you’ve come across Christianity from journalists and professors, you’ve heard about the wolves in sheep’s clothing, and little about the sheep. From them you will rarely hear a good word spoken about Christianity except for a regime-approved, toothless version of it. Today, it can be very profitable to be a critic of the church. That would not be for the first time in history. In the second century, rumors swirled about what the followers of Jesus were doing in secret and tales of incest and cannibalism circulated. Early Christian authors invited their readers to learn about the faith for themselves. And in this way, I offer this book as a different news source. To paraphrase one of those second-century epistles:

Start all over again, clearing away what you’ve been told – and now listen, as if you were hearing a new teaching for the first time.