The Strange Debate About "Christianists"

A peculiar kind of name-calling has broken out among some of Jesus'’ present-day attackers, and even worse, among some of his followers. Their fooling around is with the word "“Christianist."” You are supposed to hurl this epithet when you want to stick it to someone that he or she is not really Christian --- at least in your own eyes. It'’s the "“ist"” that does the trick. The suffix suggests the kind of extremism that infects all ideologies. It also gets your voice in a proper hissing mode. Stand before a mirror and try it on yourself. Hopefully, by doing so you will come to hate it, as genuinely faithful Muslims hate the "“Islamist"” label.

In the current debate, "“Christianist"” refers to certain forms of conservative Christian belief and practice that strongly oppose abortion (and possibly contraception as well), gay and lesbian relationships, ordaining women as pastors or priests, questioning established doctrines and dogmas, and keeping the realms of church and state clearly distinguished. Christian-ism also strongly supports looking to personal experience of Christ as the defining norm for faith, demanding obedience to familial, political, and religious authority, bringing the world to Christ and Christ alone, and preparing for the imminent end of the world. The Christianist label is coming from believers and non-believers alike who, for many different reasons, are negative about all of the above.

If I am following the bouncing ball accurately, the fights between those who call these conservative Christians ChristianISTS and those who want the conservative Christian label but without the "“ist"” tacked on root especially in divergent attitudes toward questioning established doctrines and dogmas. Unhappily for the well-being of the church as a whole, these attitudes are hardening before our very eyes. If the participants in this singularly annoying debate are any indication, you can opt either to question nothing and become as ornery a Christianist as dogmatic Muslims become when they turn into Islamists, or to question everything and wind up another of those liberals (let your voice tremble as you say it) leading the world'’s peoples to profligate lives of libertinism. Across this great divide --- within both Christian and Muslim communities --- the few swaying rope bridges still functioning are also rapidly unraveling.

It is hard to imagine the followers of Jesus at Antioch, who were the first to get tagged with the name "Christian,"” floundering for very long in a debate as inane as this one is. When Barnabas arrived in Antioch on behalf of the Jerusalem church, to see whether any bad things were happening as a result of sharing God'’s message with Gentiles as well as Jews, he wasted no time getting Saul into the action, and together, Luke went on to write, they lived there in fellowship with the church for a year, instructing large numbers. The fruit of their instruction took the form not of a piling on of "“isms"” in one name-calling brawl after another, but of working up a contribution for the relief of fellow Christians in Judea during a famine. (Acts 11:28)

I wish Luke had said more about why Jesus'’ disciples were first called "“Christians"” in Antioch. Was it the disciples themselves who were responsible for the attribution? Was it a designation coined by others? What were its attributors trying to say by means of it? Why did it first arise at Antioch rather than somewhere else? Why did it even arise at all? What little explanation Luke did offer for the attribution has to be pieced together from the surrounding context, and it is anything but complete or satisfying. One thing that Acts does suggest, though, is that the disciples' getting called by that name was a good thing, at least to most of those who heard about it. Apparently it had something to do with their being seen as "“having the power of the Lord with them"” and not about holding the right doctrines and seeing to it that others do, too.

It is still something of a mystery how people who can differ with one another so completely and so angrily over what and how the church should be teaching can also be deserving of the same attribution, "“Christian."” The Antiochenes must have confronted this same mystery more than once, for the Jewish and Gentile versions of the gospel among them were surely as difficult to reconcile as the Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant ones among us are today. But reconciliation there was, and "“the power of the Lord"” seemed to have played the principal role in bringing it about. With power like that, who needed ideology anyway?