How Loser Theology Is Poisoning The Church

I had the honor of speaking at the Blue Collar Confessionalism conference last weekend at my friend Michael Foster’s church. My message was called “The Poison of Pietism and the Righteous Pursuit of Power.”

I’ve agreed to publish an essay version of that talk in a two or three part series for Clear Truth Media, the first of which ran earlier this week. The message is about the problems of pietism, which is something I’ve been noticing for a long time. It’s “strong medicine,” as one of my friends put it, but I hope you find it challenging and encouraging.

When the video of my session from the conference is available, I’ll post it here. What follows is a republication of that essay from Clear Truth Media.

How Loser Theology Is Poisoning The Church

Why do evangelical Christians have so little power in our society? According to some surveys, evangelical Christians comprise roughly 25% of the US population, and though we are known for our tendency to vote for conservative political candidates, we have little power outside of our political preferences.

Smaller groups, by contrast, have much greater power in proportion to their numbers. A Gallup survey estimates that 7.6% of adults identify as LGBTQ, yet despite their numbers, they wield extraordinary power in our society. Every major US industry–from tech to business to entertainment to education to government–are all dominated by radical feminists, pro-abortionists, LGBTQ activists, and godless secularists.

If evangelical Christians represent a quarter of our population, then where are the prominent evangelical entrepreneurs, up and coming business leaders, CEOs, innovators and tech pioneers? They’ve got to be out there somewhere. So why don’t we know about them?

Something in the evangelical waters is limiting our potential and causing us to actively avoid gaining and asserting power in our society. We’ve been browbeaten by the evangelical elite class that scolded us for making an idol out of power. They say things like, “the most godly thing a Christian can do with power is to lay it down,” which sounds like something the devil said as a practical joke not expecting us to actually fall for it. But we did.

To be sure, the scriptures warn us about the potential abuses of power. But it also promises that we will receive power and instructs us in the godly use of power. The core assertion of the Christian faith is that “Jesus is Lord,” we have a mandate from God to assert the supremacy of Christ in every area of life, and he has given us power to serve this ultimate end.

The Worthless Servant Who Squandered His Power

Jesus told a parable about a nobleman who went on a journey after giving minas to ten servants and instructing them to “engage in business until I come.” You know the story. The first servant was given ten minas and gained ten more. The master responded, “Well done, good servant! Because you have been faithful in a very little, you shall have authority over ten cities” (Luke 19:17). The second servant received five, gained five, and received a similar response.

The third servant, however, was given one mina, and he did nothing with it. He was afraid, hid the mina he was given, and was rebuked for his wickedness by the master, who subsequently took his single mina from him. 

There are many observations we can make here, but the most pertinent to this topic is that the worthless servant failed because he was afraid. In verse 21 he said, “I was afraid of you, because you are a severe man.” He was afraid of failure and afraid of the master’s severity.

The worthless servant’s biggest failure was his failure to take action because he did not trust the master. He did not account for the master’s grace. The master expected his servants to experience gains and losses, knowing that over time, the gains would exceed the losses and he’d receive the profit. But the worthless servant didn’t trust the master’s grace. He played it safe, put his mina in his piggy bank, and gained nothing.

In the economics of the Kingdom of God, there’s abundant grace for courageous Christians who take Spirit filled risks and fall flat on their faces. The master wasn’t angry that this servant took a risky action and failed. The master was angry that the servant didn’t even try. As Christians, we know that the master of the parable is God, who holds the future in his hands and is sovereign over outcomes. What we experience as risk is not actually risk to God. So, the application of the parable is simple. It is better to trust God, take a Spirit filled risk, and fail, than to never try in the first place.

This brings me back to my thesis: something in the evangelical waters is limiting our potential and causing us to actively avoid gaining and asserting power in our society. That “something” is pietism. Pietism is the theology of the worthless servant. It’s a risk-nothing, gain-nothing, do-nothing theology, and it is robbing evangelicals of our God given potential, making us passive, weak, and ineffective for the Kingdom.

The Poison of Pietism

Don’t get too hung up on the word “pietism.” I’m not criticizing piety, which can refer to a healthy devotion to the Lord. I’m criticizing pietism, which is a false piety that undermines true devotion to the Lord.

Pietism, as I describe below, is not a doctrinal system. It’s more of a spiritual impulse, or set of bad habits, not limited to any particular denomination, and yet so common and reflexive as to go unnoticed in the lives of most sincere Christians. 

If pietism were an outright heresy, with identifiable false teachers and supportive institutions, we could simply label it as such and call it out. But the poison of pietism doesn’t work that way. I call pietism a “poison” for two reasons. 

First, the impulses of pietism are like toxins in the water supply of evangelicalism, shaping our most fundamental spiritual reflexes at the preconscious level, such that we don’t even know it's happening. Regardless of our particular theological tradition, all American evangelicals drink from a common evangelical water supply, from the evangelical history in America, to prominent figures such as Billy Graham, to parachurch ministries that cross denominational boundaries, to publishing houses, to conferences and so on. So we can’t point to “Acme Christian Denomination” and say, “that’s where the problem is!” because the poison is in the evangelical water supply we’re all drinking from.

Second, a principle in toxicology says “the dose makes the poison,” which means an otherwise safe substance can become toxic if you ingest too much of it. “Pietism” is like a spiritual overdose of good, Christian reflexes that ends up crippling one’s spiritual life.

Sincere-piety becomes toxic-pietism when we overdose on spiritual realities that choke out and exclude real-world duties. 

I am familiar with pietism because I have observed such bad habits in my own life, have tried to overcome them, and am writing this to help others recognize and turn from this tendency by God’s grace. 

Definition of Pietism

“Pietism” is a gnostic tendency to overemphasize spiritual realities at the expense of material realities. It relies on a fortune cookie, bumper-sticker, and ultimately fear-based approach to Scripture.  

For example, Colossians 3:2 says, “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.” Here Paul is talking about rightly ordered priorities; heavenly priorities come before earthly priorities. No one disagrees with that. But pietism takes it a step further, into overdose territory, by concluding that earthly things don’t really matter and the only important thing is your inner spirituality and getting to heaven. Thus, pietism tends to privatize Christianity, limiting its application to the heart so that it doesn’t extend to the public realm of the real world.

In practice, a pietist might think the most important thing about your job is to be nice to your coworkers, share the gospel in the lunchroom, and be nice to everyone. A pietist would certainly agree that it’s good for a high school student to pray at home before school. But he might wince at the thought of calling other students to gather around the flag pole to pray for Christ’s name to be glorified at school. A pietist would surely agree that sex trafficking is a great, moral evil, but may oppose an attempt to ban pornography in the legislature. Why? Because, he might say, “you can’t legislate morality.” (Actually, all legislation is moral, but that’s the subject of a different article).

I saw a tweet the other day where one man described “an almost symphonic surge of attacks on our most fundamental rights, by officials, newspapers, politicians, celebrities, & academics. It's not rhetoric anymore, it's an organized massing of institutional forces prior to big moves which seem imminent.” Right on cue, another man came along with this pietistic response, “we should not be trading in the business of fear. Christians are a people of truth, joy, and hope, because we know, love, and worship the King who is Truth, who bears joy by His Spirit, and brings assured hope. Let us be know for this instead.” This response sounds holy and righteous, but this man is getting high on his own supply. It is not godly to dismiss real-world threats with a “fear not” wave of the hand.

In the realm of politics, the pietist will say the most important thing to do when Christians have strong disagreements is to disagree charitably. If a pro-life Christian is speaking with a pro-abortion Christian (if there could even be such a thing), the most important thing is to be Christ-like in disagreement. The pietist is more likely to judge another man’s character by the words and tone with which he expresses disagreement than the content of the disagreement itself. If the pro-abortionist speaks nicely, with calm, soothing words, and if the pro-lifer speaks passionately and angrily about the evils of abortion, how might a pietist evaluate the character of the two men? He would assume the pro-lifer’s character was insufficiently Christlike and the pro-abortionist is a man of high-character. Why? Because the pro-abortionist was nice and the pro-lifer was mean. The pietist may credit the pro-abortionist for being a man of “high-character” because he has an affable demeanor and kindness in his eyes, even though he supports a blood-thirsty policy of genocide against the most vulnerable. In other words, the pietist sees the smile and thinks the pro-abortionist means well, has kindness in his heart, and is therefore a good man, even though the real-world actions he supports is abhorrently wicked.

When challenged on this point, pietists often appeal to cheap slogans to avoid painful or difficult realities. They say things like “we need to take the high road” or “we should stay above the fray” while the world slouches towards Gomorrah.

The fact that pietists value subjective abstractions and ideals makes them an easy mark for leftists, who also live by idealistic abstractions. Leftists are notoriously impractical, because their thinking is idealistic. They are driven by a utopian vision of the world as they believe it should be, regardless of whether or not their vision is feasible practically. The left cannot cope with reality because they refuse to live in the world as it actually is, preferring to live in an idealized fiction of the world as they believe it should be. 

This helps explain some of the head-scratching contradictions of pietists. They may claim to hold conservative convictions on paper, but refuse to fight for them in practice, because that would mean getting their hands dirty. Fighting the left doesn’t feel very spiritual. They prefer to live in a world of spiritualized, utopian abstractions, hand-wringing over the evil in our society while doing nothing to stop it except do evangelism and pray for revival. Thus, impracticality is a feature, not a bug, of pietism.

Thus, pietism and leftism often leads to the same results. The left pushes a radical agenda. The pietists do nothing to stop it. Then they lament the sad state we are in while crying, “how long, Oh Lord!” Take illegal immigration, for example. Pietists ignore the obvious and disastrous consequences of illegal immigration in our country, preferring instead to focus on spiritualized abstractions about loving our neighbors, caring for orphans, welcoming the sojourners, and even how “God is bringing the nations to us!” All of those priorities are good and right in their proper place with the proper “dosage.” Of course, Christians should show hospitality and evangelize people in one’s own local community. But pietists overdose on this priority when they argue in favor of open borders which is tantamount to a foreign invasion. How about loving the neighbors that already live here by preventing a criminal invasion?

But calling out the ugly fact that mass illegal immigration brings in violence and crime doesn’t seem “Christlike” to gullible, soft-hearted pietists, who are convinced that these people are all poor, helpless victims and innocent widows and orphans that Jesus commands us to love. And the fact that leftists incentivize illegal immigration as an electoral strategy by offering free social services that overwhelm our economy doesn’t matter to pietists, who ignore these hard realities, choosing instead to listen to the feel-good sloganeering of caring for the “least of these.” 

A Theology of Losing

Pietism is therefore a theology of losing. It would have us believe that Christians should lose. We’re supposed to lose. In fact, we’re more godly when we lose. Pietists assume the best way to glorify God is to lay down our power before our pagan overlords and subject ourselves to God-hating, abortion-loving, child-transing perverts. And when those people have all the power, and we have none, they will surely persecute us for believing what the Bible says about them, which, of course, gives us the opportunity to demonstrate how Christlike, gentle, lowly, and radical we are. We should not resist this, they tell us. In fact, we should welcome it, as the means God uses to purify his power-idolizing church. 

In the meantime, we’re told, we should be agreeable, compliant, maximally non-confrontational, syrupy sweet, and winsome. Don’t push back. Don’t oppose them while they invade and colonize our churches, seminaries, publishing houses, and institutions. Don’t push back while the radical feminists, drag queens, and gays take over our local school boards and city councils. We should let them sideline and marginalize us, so then we can attract them to Christ with our faithful presence.

And then, that magical moment will arrive. Like the prodigal son, they’ll come to their senses and say to themselves, “what have I done?” And they will say to us, “I was sooo wrong about you! Please tell me why you’re so different! How do you have such joy and peace in this dark world? What’s the reason for the hope that is in you? Why are you, your wife, and your children so healthy and happy? And why am I, my wife, and her boyfriend so miserable? Is there a way we can find peace?” 

Then you’ll think to yourself, “I knew it would work! I’ve been actively losing my whole life for just this moment! Now I’ll share the gospel with them, they’ll all get saved, and mass revival will break out! Then they can join me and we’ll all go back to losing together!” 

Obviously, this is absurd. But these sentiments are far too common to dismiss as an outlier. Prominent evangelical voices like Russell Moore and Ray Ortlund have gleefully celebrated the decline of “Bible Belt” Christianity. Other evangelical voices like David Platt and David French advocate a “beautiful loser” kind of Christianity that is ambivalent about the state of the world. And as the church declines in the west, pietism is a cope these leaders use to feel superior for losing.