Each day it seems as though Americans wake to new threats to their relative peace and security. With the stock market tumbling and talk mounting of another Great Depression, it is little wonder that many families have begun to fear for their financial prosperity. And if domestic concerns weren’t enough, a few weeks back many Americans opened their Sunday papers to find a DVD issuing dire warnings that Islamic extremists were out to destroy the American way of life. In the face of such dangers, real and perceived, many American Christians have led the way in adopting a defensive posture, both domestically and internationally. It may serve Christians well, however, to ponder how a culture of fear relates to the historic Christian faith, and to consider how a circling-the-wagons mentality affects one’s witness to the gospel of Christ—in this country and around the world.
Arnold Bocklin, The Plague, 1898, Tempera on Wood, Kunstmuseum Basel.
My attention to these questions was heightened after I came across Rodney Stark’s The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries. Employing modern sociological methods, Stark contends that a series of devastating plagues played an instrumental role in the seemingly miraculous growth of the early church. In AD 165, and again in AD 251, terrifying epidemics descended upon the Roman Empire, killing between a quarter to a third of the population. Contemporary accounts describe widespread panic as family members abandoned their loved ones at the first sign of disease, sometimes tossing them into the roads even before they had died. As a result, many plague sufferers were left without food, water, and basic care that could have dramatically increased survival rates.
Christians, however, soon gained a reputation for their boldness in the face of death. Stark cites the bishop Dionysius, for example, who described how Christians “showed unbounded love and loyalty, never sparing themselves and thinking only of one another. Heedless of danger, they took charge of the sick, attending to their every need and ministering to them in Christ, and with them departed this life serenely happy; for they were infected by others with the disease, drawing on themselves the sickness of their neighbors and cheerfully accepting their pains.” For these Christians, the epidemic became “a time of unimaginable joy,” a chance for believers to witness to their faith by offering themselves as martyrs.
It was Christian doctrine, Stark explains, that motivated believers’ courageous response to the terrors of the plague. While their non-Christian neighbors abandoned their beliefs and retreated in fear, Christians found their faith a source of comfort as well as a “prescription for action.” They knew they were their “brothers’ keepers,” that it was “more blessed to give than to receive,” and that they ought to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” To further understand the radical claims of the Christian faith, Stark suggests taking another look at Matthew 25:35-40: “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me…” By loving one another sacrificially, Christians sought to reflect God’s own sacrificial love. Because they believed that God loved all humanity, they also believed that their own love must extend beyond family and tribe. These were revolutionary concepts at the time, and by taking these teachings to heart, early Christians earned a reputation even among their opponents for their radical loving-kindness.
As Stark demonstrates, Christian compassion and fearlessness in the face of death had lasting consequences. Although many Christians succumbed to the plague, those who survived developed an immunity that enabled them to continue nursing their neighbors in ways that seemed miraculous. Many pagans owed their survival to the care of Christians after their own families had abandoned them. Not surprisingly many of these survivors became converts themselves. Stark concludes that the witness of faithful Christians at this time of crisis, together with demographic consequences of the plague, played a decisive role in the phenomenal growth of early Christianity.
After reading Stark’s account of the rise of Christianity, I was struck by the contrast between the sacrificial behavior evidenced by early Christians and the reputation of many American Christians today. Looking back over recent American history, it is discouraging to note how fear, rather than selfless sacrifice, often seems to have motivated Christians to act.
Even before the recent economic downturn, many Christians worked to safeguard their hard-earned possessions from various threats, particularly from the encroachment of “big government’s” attempts to dole out their wealth to those less deserving. But what if American Christians began to see their wealth as something to offer up rather than horde? Consider, for example, Gandhi’s gospel of non-possession. As a young man he came to understand that anything he owned he would need to protect against the whole world—particularly against those in greater need than himself. But with no possessions, Gandhi found that he had nothing to fear. He was free to love others without reservation.
Although few may be able to aspire to Gandhi’s level of non-possession, Christians may do well to reconsider their values in light of his example. By holding our possessions loosely we may be freed to love our neighbors more authentically. In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, many Americans found in terrorism and Islamic extremism new sources of fear. Many American Christians, quick to draw clear distinctions between “good” and “evil” in the “war on terror,” led the way in calling for an aggressive, militaristic foreign policy aimed at protecting the nation’s security and the American “way of life.” But what if American Christians simply refused to be “terrorized”—if, like their sisters and brothers in the early church, they perceived the threat of failing to bear witness to Christ’s love a greater evil than the threat posed by terrorists to their lives and livelihoods?
At first glance such a radical reconception of values might seem dangerously naïve—yet it is arguably no more so than the actions of early Christians who exposed themselves and their families to the terrors of the plague for the sake of their neighbors, and for the Gospel of Christ. While one might argue that such a posture of willing sacrifice constitutes an untenable foreign policy for a modern nation state, perhaps it is time for American Christians to identify first as Christians, and only secondly as Americans.
But what about a people’s obligations to protect the security and well being of their families? Indeed, a generation of Christians has mobilized socially and politically around the call to defend their families from a wide array of apparent threats. Yet returning to Stark’s narrative, early Christians risked not only their own lives, but those of their families as well, in order to care for their neighbors. What might it mean for Christian parents today to extend an ethic of sacrifice to their own families, rather than striving to protect their children from looming dangers?
I am reminded of the words of Madeline Southard, an early-twentieth-century Methodist who reflected on motherhood at a time when American culture—and American Christianity—had elevated the role of the mother to virtual sainthood. A mother’s ambition for her own children, she warned, “was only selfishness one degree removed.” The family did not exist for its own sake, but rather to prepare people to serve God and others. As Southard explained, parents ought to be brought out of self-centeredness by their love for their own children, but that love must then extend to children everywhere, and ultimately, to all humanity.
Rather than scrambling to protect their own families and interests, then, Christians ought to take seriously the radical command to love their neighbors—far and near—as themselves. This fundamental reorientation would in all likelihood lead American Christians to begin showing more concern for the rights of others rather than for their own. It would most likely involve a redefinition of freedom as well—a freedom defined not in terms of the freedom to have, but rather a freedom that comes from letting go—a freedom that enables one to love one’s neighbors more profoundly.
By offering themselves—and their families—as living sacrifices, Christians may well discover that they have very little left to fear. And perhaps by embracing this radically countercultural position, American Christians could help to usher in a modern revival of Christianity on the scale of that experienced by the early church.
Kristin Kobes Du Mez is Assistant Professor of History at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
