Review: The Church in Dark Times

December 6, 2024December 5, 2024 / rtrube54 / Leave a comment

Cover image for "The Church in Dark Times" by Mike Cosper

The Church in Dark Times, Mike Cosper. Brazos Press (ISBN: 9781587435737) 2024.

Summary: Understanding and resisting the evil that seduced the evangelical movement, drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt.

Mike Cosper has both experienced and closely studied how leaders and their followers abuse power, embrace ideologies contrary to the gospel, and often act with cruelty toward those who question. He left a church with such a leadership culture. And he chronicled the ministry of Mark Driscoll in the podcast series The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill. In this book, Cosper tries to understand how people of good intention were corrupted. And he articulates “practices of resistance” for those who do not want to repeat this history but resist it.

There are a spate of books that have been written on this topic. What sets Cosper’s book apart is his use of the thinking of Hannah Arendt, the philosopher who studied Hitler’s totalitarianism. However, in opening, he is quick, invoking Godwin’s Law, to deny an attempt to equate churches with Hitler. Nevertheless, the embrace of aspects of a totalitarian and authoritarian vision can inflict great harm. As he notes, “one can fall far short of [Hitler’s] monstrous achievements and still land squarely in hell.”

He begins with Arendt’s treatment of ideology, a story of everything that exchanges the gospel of grace for an iron logic. He uses Driscoll’s masculine ideology as an example, with its sweeping thesis that the church has failed to reach a generation because it lost all the men. To challenge Driscoll was to not be “man enough.” And this opened doors to spiritual abuse. Ideology proposes grandiose visions of changing the world through a particular leader or movement of leaders. An example Cosper gives is Bill Hybels and the Willow Creek movement.

The problem with ideology is that we bend reality and morality to ideological ends. It has meant exchanging the humility of redeemed disciples for the implacability of the fight. Authority is abused to attain spiritual goals. Often, we tend to look for moral monsters as a result. Instead, what we find is a banal form of evil, as Arendt did in studying Eichmann. Very ordinary people give little thought to the evil system they support. Likewise, church leaders often collude and close ranks against dissenters, not out of principle, but simply loyal conformity.

But how might we resist ideology and authority? Cosper turns to a Seattle native of another generation for help. Eugene Peterson never led a big congregation. He eschewed bigness for the pastoring of people. Rather than casting visions, he was more concerned to see how God was already at work in lives. Out of all this, Cosper arrives at three “practices of resistance.” First he encourages solitude and thought. Second he advocates storytelling and culture making–reflecting Dostoevsky’s idea that “beauty will save the world.” Finally he advocates worship that reminds us of the bigger story of God within which we live.

Cosper goes deeper than some in exploring the dynamics of authoritarian and ideologically captive churches. If nothing else, he introduces many to Hannah Arendt as a prophet for our time. The practices he commends make sense for resistance. They may not win the day in the sense of persuading people to repent from subverted ideologically driven churches. Rather, they sustain faithful witness to the gospel. Solitude and thought bring discernment. Storytelling and culture making point to the good, true, and beautiful gospel. And worship reminds us that as communities, we are God’s dwelling places, caught up in God’s cosmic plan to redeem all things. As dark as our times may be, the real destiny is not one of making one country great but extending God’s love to a world for which he died and will one day return to as king.

Cosper speaks unsparingly about the dark times facing evangelical churches within our cultural landscape. But he offers hope from the only sure source Christians have ever known-the risen and returning Christ. Many talk of speaking truth to power. Mike Cosper preaches the gospel of Jesus to every false ideology. What other hope and what other answer can we offer to dark times?

____________________

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: Prophet Song

February 9, 2024February 8, 2024 / rtrube54 / 1 Comment

Prophet Song, Paul Lynch. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2023.

Summary: A mother tries to hold her family and life together as Ireland descends into authoritarian rule.

Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, winner of the 2023 Booker Prize is a tough read in two respects. One is seeing the unraveling of a democratic society through the disbelieving eyes of Eilish stack, an educated, middle class mother who works for a biotech company. It is disturbing becausew of how close to home it strikes.

The other respect is the text, written without paragraphs with dialogue without quotation marks. Yet this running text reflects increasingly unsettled and anxious perceptions of Eilish, fusing dialogue, emotions, and interior thought. We sense her movement back and forth from disbelief to concern, from hollow assurances that even her children don’t believe to rising fear, from clinging to the hope that her “disappeared” will come home to the realization that no one taken by the government comes home, from the illusion that she can preserve her home and way of life and that their only hope is flight. It’s the increasingly frantic and instinctive thought of one who loses husband, two sons, her job, her respect as “traiter” is spray-painted on her car and home, as her neighborhood becomes a battleground between the regime and the resistance, and finally her flight with her daughter and infant son, having to pay “fees” at numerous checkpoints as she they try to flee. The running text takes us inside her mind and we live the growing terror with Eilish.

It all begins when the National Alliance Party takes over the Republic of Ireland, declares emergency powers and suspends the constitution including writs of habeas corpus. The reality comes home when her husband Larry, a leader in a teacher’s union, goes out to a protest–and never returns. Her eldest son Mark has to go into hiding to avoid the drafting of 17 year-olds. He joins the resistance. After infrequent communications on burner phones, Eilish hears no more, but persists in hoping he will come home. Then, after a list of draft-dodgers, including her son, is published, she learns her services are no longer required. Meanwhile, her father, across town, is descending into dementia. Yet, in his occasional lucid moments, he tells her she must take the children and leave.

Subsequently, her neighborhood becomes front lines in the battle between the Party and the resistance. Power and water are intermittent and the gone. Buildings around suffer bombardment. Yet she uses all her resources, including money from her sister for her to get out of the country to survive. She can’t let go of hope that her husband and son will come home. Only when another son goes missing does she realize that she must save the two who remain–if she can.

The story takes us into the powerful disbelief that democracy really can’t unravel and how rapidly a society can consume itself when it does. We also see how powerful the urge is to try to hold onto home, onto some shred of normalcy. We glimpse how bad things must get for someone to flee from home and become a refugee. When Eilish’s neighborhood becomes a warzone, her running narrative gives the reader of what lived reality must be like in Gaza and other warzones.

Paul Lynch takes us to a place those of us in the West resist going. We join Eilish in denial that it can happen here–that our institutions, the rule of law, our education, jobs, and suburbs will protect us. He forces us to look into the dark abyss through the eyes of Eilish to recognize the vulnerability of all of this when we embrace unfettered power rather than the less “efficient” processes of the rule of law and democratic legislative processes. His book reminds us that the possibility of effective resistance after the fact is far more perilous than resisting beforehand, as inconvenient as that may be. Is this book a “Prophet Song” for us?

Review: Twilight of Democracy

August 10, 2020August 10, 2020 / rtrube54 / 1 Comment

Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, Anne Applebaum. New York: Doubleday, 2020.

Summary: An extended essay considering the shift to authoritarian leaders in Europe and the United States, analyzing both why such leaders are attractive, and the strategies they used to gain power.

Anne Applebaum’s book might be subtitled, “The Tale of Two Parties.” It is bookended with a party in 1999, and one in 2019. Many on the guest list of the first would not be on the second, or even on speaking terms with the author. Applebaum is a center-right neo-conservative, married to Radek Sikorski, a Polish politician. For much of her career she has written award-winning books documenting Soviet-style totalitarianism. The time of 1999 was a heady one, with former eastern bloc countries embracing Western style liberal democratic ideals (at least to some degree).

The book begins with Applebaum describing the fate of three of those on the list, one who had drawn close to Poland’s Law and Justice party leader and would no longer speak to her, another who had become an internet troll, amplifying American alt-right proponents, while a third had become engrossed in conspiracy theories. Throughout the book, Applebaum moves between trying to understand what has happened to her friends, and what is happening in a number of European countries, from Poland and Hungary, to England and the United States, where shifts have occurred to authoritarian ideas and leaders.

She explores how contemporary movements differ from fascism and Communism. Instead of the “Big Lie,” these leaders use the Medium-Size Lie designed to play on fears and offer simple explanations for complex realities–immigration explains economic woes and crime, for example. Sometimes it is a conspiracy, for example “the deep state,” when in fact the real conspiracy lies with the networks of people fomenting these ideas. She describes how this works for example in Viktor Orban’s Hungary, where all of Hungary’s woes can be attributed to non-existent Syrian refugees (to whom Hungary never opened their borders) and George Soros, whose conspiratorially funded the immigrant hordes. All of this buttresses a corrupt, self-serving government where power is increasingly concentrated in the hands of its leader. Chillingly, Applebaum observes that studies show roughly one-third of the people in most societies to be susceptible to authoritarian leaders, particularly in times of upheaval.

She discusses the appeal of nostalgia, the longing for some idealized past when those appealed to dominated the culture as an alternative to the pluralistic, multi-ethnic cultural landscapes that increasingly characterize both Europe and the United States. She describes how Boris Johnson leveraged this nostalgia in the run-up to Brexit, even though the English had led the initiative forming the European Union. Particularly dangerous, she believes, are the “restorative nostalgics” whose “memory” of the past is often selective, and whose vision for restoration reflects those gaps in an idealized version of the past.

She portrays the manipulation of digital media streams to promote the narrative, including the characterization of established media as “fake” and part of the “conspiracy.” She writes:

This new information world also provides a new set of tools and tactics that another generation of clercs can use to reach people who want simple language, powerful symbols, clear identities. There is no need, nowadays, to form a street movement in order to appeal to those of an authoritarian predisposition. You can construct one in an office building, sitting in front of a computer. You can test messages and gauge the response. You can set up targeted advertising campaigns. You can build groups of fans on WhatsApp or Telegram. You can cherry-pick the themes of the past that suit the present and tailor them to particular audiences. You can invent memes, create videos, conjure up slogans designed to appeal precisely to the fear and anger caused by this massive international wave of cacophony. You can even start the cacophony and create the chaos yourself, knowing full well that some people will be frightened by it. (117-118)

She describes the shift she saw in once-friend Laura Ingraham. I think one of the most important insights Applebaum offers here is the increasing concern Ingraham, and others like Pat Buchanan have over the evidence of American moral decline. Ingraham decries various forms of extremism from “cancel culture” to overreach into religious communities, breaching First Amendment protections. These signs of decline have led her and others to conclude that they cannot be fought by “politics as usual” but require more extreme measures and justify “undemocratic” means.

I wish Applebaum would have done more with what I thought a perceptive observation. I know people like those Applebaum describes, and one thing that is overlooked is that most of these feel that figures like our current President are the first to take them seriously. Many of these people live in America’s heartland. They probably are more religious. Most work hard and pay their taxes. And they feel patronized by many politicians, overlooked, treated as part of “flyover” country. Like Laura Ingraham, they also feel they are witnessing a “twilight of democracy.”

While I am deeply sympathetic to Applebaum’s concerns about authoritarianism, all her talks about toney parties with fellow refugees from the neo-con movement don’t really address the concerns of the time adequately. She concludes by addressing some vague hope in the cycles of history to right things, which seems to me a hope that, after a time, the “right” people will regain power. My observation is that we are in the midst of more and more violent pendulum swings, with winners and losers becoming increasingly energized against one another. What I do agree on with Applebaum is that democracies are not indestructible. Might our common care about the future of democracy be a starting point for a different kind of political conversation? Might this common, and urgent concern bring people together from across the political spectrum who all perceive the abyss toward which we are hurtling? I cannot help but think that this next decade may be decisive in many ways for our country–and for humankind. Will the twilight we are in give way to night–or a new dawn?