The Buddhist Mood in Evangelicalism

The rhetoric of American Evangelicalism echoes Buddhist themes

On Monday, a Catholic writer, the Social Pathologist (TSP), wrote about how Western Christianity became infected with Buddhist ideas. This essay has been getting a great response and lots of interaction, some agreeing and some opposing.

Something I appreciate about TSP is that rather than asking what’s wrong with the world, he has focused a lot of his work on asking what’s wrong with the church. As he’s noted several times, when the trend lines are so bad and the track record of conservative Christianity so poor, that should prompt significant self-reflection and self-examination. That’s something we see too little of.

It is my belief that the church in general and evangelicalism in particular have fallen into a number of errors that need to be corrected, and this should be a primary focus of our efforts. My own work has focused on examining gender teachings, but there are several other areas where there would seem to be problems.

The idea of the infiltration of Buddhist-inflected thought is one that is more subtle, so I wanted to highlight it in the hopes of getting more people interested in researching and exploring this.

When I first encountered TSP’s writings on the subject, they resonated with me because although his focus is Catholicism, I saw evidence of a “Buddhist mood” in evangelicalism.

I say mood because undoubtedly evangelical pastors would say that their theology is correct. But even if true, correct theology in a textbook doesn’t mean the way people talk about and experience church in real life doesn’t include other ideas.

What the Social Pathologist described as Buddhism has a number of elements: negativity towards the created order, self-emptying as the goal of the Christian life, and a rejection of distinctions in favor of the universal. I’ll highlight a few ways that I have noticed these themes in evangelical teaching.

Idolatry as Desire

I first encountered the idea of ordinary human desires and feelings being viewed as sinful while watching a sermon from Seattle’s Mars Hill Church circa 2012. It was some type of special service that included a video of a mother describing the tragic death of her child from a medical condition. This woman talked about how angry she had been about her child’s death, about not being able to see him grow up, etc.

Then she said that she had to repent of her anger, because Jesus had decided that her child would die, and her anger was sinful because it rejected God’s sovereign decision over her child’s death.

I found this stunning even when I originally watched it. In what universe could being deeply upset about your child’s death be sinful?

I began to see this pattern repeat itself in evangelical preaching. It’s sometimes used in sermon illustrations about the sin of idolatry, for example. In these illustrations, a person wants something very badly - say, getting into Harvard, or getting married and having children. He works and strives with all his might to obtain it, but fails. He’s devastated by this failure. The pastor then talks about how this is an example of idolatry, of putting our hopes in something other than Christ.

In these definitions, the de facto definition of idolatry is wanting anything so much that, if you don’t get it, you are very upset. Hence, the path to avoiding sin and idolatry, the way to please God, is to purge oneself of desires. This is Buddhism.

Undoubtedly it would be possible for someone to be engaged in idolatry in some of these cases. But there are a lot of things in this world you should be upset about.

I previously wrote about a single and childless Christian woman who published a moving article about updating her will. The thought of not being able to pass her possessions on to children or grandchildren who would remember her was upsetting to her. She describes thinking that this attitude was “self-centered.”

Some things are primal in life. Being able to marry and have children is one of them for many people. It’s not self-centered to desire these things strongly, or to feel it painfully if they don’t happen.

Evangelicals discuss strong desires for anything in the natural world almost entirely in a negative or cautionary way. In fact, I can’t recall ever hearing a pastor describe them in a positive way. Rather than discorded desire, it is human desire itself that is viewed as fundamentally problematic.

The de facto equating of desire with idolatry and sin strikes me as very Buddhist inflected.

A Denial of Self-Assertion

In TSP’s original blog post on Christian Buddhism, he notes that any form of self-assertion is delegitimized in modern Christianity. He wrote:

What has emerged in the 20th Century is something akin to a Christian type of Buddhism which sees the fulfillment of mans desire precisely in the negation of self. Suffering is glorified while righteousness is given lip service. Mercy at the expense of justice. The distribution of wealth instead of the creation of it. Prayer is glorified to fight evil while actual action to fight it is condemned. Indeed it would appear that righteous self-assertion has become foreign to the modern Christian ideal. The ideal Christian would appear to be a punching bag who gets comfort through his prayers to God which in turn strengthen him to continue getting a beating.

This seems to derive from the radical kenosis theology that he discusses in his guest essay. In evangelicalism, I’ve heard endless rhetoric about denying the self, about how Jesus came to give up power not to exercise power, how men should give themselves up for their wives just as Christ gave himself up for the church.

These things are true to an extent, but become misleading when they are presented without the complete context or in light of other verses highlighting different aspects of the Christian life.

I’ve written about this extensively with regards to the evangelical church’s teachings about men and masculinity in which a man has no legitimate claims of his own he can assert, no legitimate desires or aspirations he can hold, no mission in the world to undertake.

As one example, they say men should be servant leaders, but never define a) what service is to be provided, b) who determines what that service is, and c) who judges whether or not he is doing a good job at serving. Pastors will talk about Jesus coming to serve not be served, or about how he washed his disciples’ feet, but neglect to mention that other people did not get to dictate to Jesus what service he would provide them. He made that decision. I go into depth on that here:

One of the interesting parts of the creation story is when God brings the animals to Adam and Adam names them. In other words, God actually wants to watch Adam engage in his own creative ordering of the world, extending what God had originally created. In this scene, Adam is not a passive receptacle for God’s will, but rather God himself wants to see what Adam wills. This sort of ordering endeavor, in which a man asserts his will to impose an order onto the world, is something I rarely see discussed.

In practice, evangelicals tend to describe nature and the natural order as having been so deformed by the Fall that they de facto reject appeals to nature as a concept. Hence man can no longer structure and order the world, or can only do so by virtue of a special dispensation from God (typically referred to as “common grace”). This produces a kind of timidity and passivity towards the conditions of the world. There’s a major streak within evangelicalism that sees the ideas of self-assertion and of exercising power and authority in the world as essentially illegitimate.

I discussed this in a previous podcast on the subject.

Obliteration of Distinctions

Another thing I observe is the tendency to try to apply Galatians 3:28 in a very expansive sense to deny earthly distinctions: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” The idea here is that Christ has obliterated earthly distinctions in favor of a universal unity.

This is obviously a key verse for evangelical feminists, who wish to deny gender distinctions. But you also see it used to reject any form of national self determination or the rejection of the validity of any type of ethnic distinctions.

I have, for example, seen very conservative Christians say things like, “I’d rather live in a neighborhood full of Chinese and Nigerian Christians than I would a neighborhood full of white Americans who aren’t Christian. I have way more in common with other Christians than with my own countrymen.”

Of course, very few of these people actually live in a neighborhood like the one they describe, but this is what they assert. The idea being that Christianity obliterates earthly particularities. (Buddhism is not the only lens through which to interpret this. We might also say that modern Christianity has adopted a neoliberal perspective on this as well).

Interestingly, G. K. Chesterton makes the opposite assertion. In Orthodoxy, he writes:

If any one wants a modern proof of all this, let him consider the curious fact that, under Christianity, Europe (while remaining a unity) has broken up into individual nations. Patriotism is a perfect example of this deliberate balancing of one emphasis against another emphasis. The instinct of the Pagan empire would have said, "You shall all be Roman citizens, and grow alike; let the German grow less slow and reverent; the Frenchmen less experimental and swift." But the instinct of Christian Europe says, "Let the German remain slow and reverent, that the Frenchman may the more safely be swift and experimental. We will make an equipoise out of these excesses. The absurdity called Germany shall correct the insanity called France."

And:

It is just here that Buddhism is on the side of modern pantheism and immanence. And it is just here that Christianity is on the side of humanity and liberty and love. Love desires personality; therefore love desires division. It is the instinct of Christianity to be glad that God has broken the universe into little pieces, because they are living pieces. It is her instinct to say "little children love one another" rather than to tell one large person to love himself. This is the intellectual abyss between Buddhism and Christianity; that for the Buddhist or Theosophist personality is the fall of man, for the Christian it is the purpose of God, the whole point of his cosmic idea.

The idea of “balancing emphasis against emphasis” is what I think accounts for this Buddhist mood. Rather than properly balancing or emphasizing the various diverse points of scripture and Christian theology, some get overemphasized and others under-emphasized.

The net result practically is a teaching and belief system that leads towards the idea that holiness is about purging oneself of desires, not asserting any claims of one’s own (apart from certain claims that are explicitly affirmed by secular society, such as against being a minority victim of racial discrimination), and a denial of the significance or even reality of earthly distinctions and personality. All are Buddhist inflected, even if their origin is not in the Buddhist religion per se.

This post is not intended to be a scholarly, in depth defense of the Buddhist mood in evangelicalism, but rather to share some observations I’ve made and put these categories in your mind so you have them at the ready in your own processing of evangelical teaching and rhetoric. Something just seems very off about the way evangelicals talk about these things.

Cover image credit: Basile Morin, CC BY-SA 4.0