The Guinness Book

Os Guinness has popped up on my screen here twice in the past week, so I suppose we should see what’s going on with him.

I first encountered Guinness through his entertaining and insightful little book, The Gravedigger File. In that book Guinness shamelessly borrows the mirror-image, devil’s eye view of C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters (if you’re gonna steal, steal from the good stuff) for a breezy discussion of what he calls there “the subversion of the modern church.”

I’d forgotten most of that book, but one thing that has stuck with me over the years since I read it was the Devil’s maxim: “Remember 10-10-80.”

How many times I have watched him listen to devastating reports in cold silence and then utter the words: “Remember 10-10-80.” It is simply the shorthand for his own axiom: Win over 10 percent of the church to be a counter-elite on our side, reduce 80 percent of the church to a state of passive acceptance (either cowed or complacent), and we can disregard the active resistance of the remaining 10 percent (part of which is the lunatic fringe anyway).

This latter 10 percent is a particularly important category. It allows us a margin of error. It also takes into account all those exceptions to the trends we are manipulating successfully. If such exceptions were ever to amount to more than 10 percent, we would have to bring in the contingency plans. But for a long time we have been well within this limit.

That formula seems to me a useful rule of thumb that’s applicable well beyond the particular case of religious vitality. (It might apply, to pick just one example, to the current question about whether America is “ready for” a black or female president.)

Anyway, Guinness’ name popped up last week due to his involvement with the latest “Evangelical Manifesto,” which apparently goes public next week. Sarah Posner discusses the document in her invaluable FundamentaList, linking to this whiny attempt to pre-empt it from Olaskyite Warren Smith.

Smith’s knickers are in a bunch because the theologically conservative professors, theologians and pastors involved in producing this manifesto (to be called, apparently, “The Washington Declaration of Identity”) didn’t kiss the rings of the politically conservative activists, media moguls and other self-appointed bishops who claim to speak for and in lieu of all such theologians and pastors. Smith thus claims the authors of the document “shunned” people like Charles Colson, James Dobson, Tony Perkins and Beverly LaHaye. He suspects this is because of their political views and not because none of those people are actually involved in the leadership of the church (nor does it occur to him that those four might not have been consulted because, to put it mildly, they aren’t actually all that bright).

“Why not let voices from the ‘conservative’ or so-called ‘pro-family’ wing of the evangelical movement have input?,” Smith asks, arguing that their input would have broadened the document’s appeal, making it “truly historic.”

So, yes, Warren Smith is a concern troll. And he’s not even very good at it.

What’s really going on here is that this forthcoming document is an effort to reclaim the word “evangelical” as a religious term rather than as a political one. It is, in other words, a critique of partisan demagoguery masquerading as religion — a critique of exactly the sort of thing that is practiced, professionally, by the very people Smith complains were “excluded” from writing up that critique.

For a foretaste of that critique, let’s turn to the second time Os Guinness came across my screen this week. Will Hinton has been reading Guinness’ latest book, The Case for Civility, and provides this excerpt:

I am angered by organizers of the Religious Right who play the victim card and appeal openly to Christian resentment. …

But whether “victimization” then or a “war on Christians” now, such tactics of the Religious Right are foolish, ineffective, and downright anti-Christian. The problem is not that these people are theocrats, but that they are sub-Christian. They do not violate the separation of church and state so much as they violate Christian integrity. Factually, it is dead wrong for Christians to portray themselves as a minority, let alone as persecuted. Christians are as close to a majority community as any group in America …

Psychologically, victim-playing is dangerous because it represents what Nietzsche called “the politics of the tarantula,” a base appeal to resentment. But worst of all, it is spiritually hypocritical, for nothing so contradicts their claim to represent “Christian values” as their refusal to follow the teaching and example of Jesus of Nazareth by playing the victim card and finding an excuse not to love their enemies. Shame, shame, shame on such people; and woe, woe, woe to such tactics.

Ouch. It’s one thing for such a critique to be published in a book and another thing altogether for it to be published as a document signed and endorsed by dozens of prominent theologians and church leaders.

If the leaders of the religious right seriously want to protect themselves from such a critique then they’re going to need smarter concern trolls.

(One final caveat: I suspect that, overall, this manifesto will be about as effective as all such “declarations,” which is to say not very. We evangelicals are an unruly and disorganized bunch, and these attempts at consensus building by petition are about as close as we come to church polity. The idea is to write something reasonable, sound and persuasive, and then to get as many different “gatekeepers” as possible to endorse it in the hopes that readers will see a name they recognize in the list of signatories and thus regard the statement as worthy of their consideration. It doesn’t work very well, but no one has yet come up with a better approach so we keep doing it. As a form of church governance, it’s far less efficient, far less decisive, far less authoritative, and infinitely preferable to the Catholic magisterium.)