I was cruising around the latest Ligonier “State of the Bible” report from last fall, when a question slammed me to a halt: Why was Ligonier so worried about evangelicals holding different beliefs from their prescribed lockstep? Why did perfectly lockstep beliefs matter so much? A hunt for answers yielded a lot of guesses, but nothing definite. But I found one eventually anyway, and I’ll share it with you today.
(This post first appeared on Patreon on 1/25/2023. That’s where its audio broadcast lives as well.)
The absolute state of evangelical beliefs in 2022
Every couple of years, the Calvinist evangelical group Ligonier runs a survey asking Americans of all beliefs what they, well, believe. Then, they freak out over what the results predict—and offer interested evangelical leaders products that they think will help bring their flocks back in line with their self-described “orthodoxy.”
This past year, they didn’t uncover anything markedly different. As in previous years, Americans as a general group skew more secular. At the same time, Americans drift further and further away from Ligonier’s brand of TRUE CHRISTIANITY™.
What’s interesting here is Ligonier’s hand-wringing over the defined, affiliated evangelicals who aren’t in lockstep. To figure out who counted as a real evangelical, Ligonier uses Lifeway’s four-prong definition. This definition relies almost completely on beliefs. Evangelicals qualified if they “strongly agreed” with these four statements:
The Bible is the highest authority for what I believe.
It is very important for me personally to encourage non-Christians to trust Jesus Christ as their Savior.
Jesus Christ’s death on the cross is the only sacrifice that could remove the penalty of my sin.
Only those who trust in Jesus Christ alone as their Savior receive God’s free gift of eternal salvation.
However, Ligonier also counted respondents as evangelicals if they simply claimed an affiliation with the correct churches. That seems like a messy crossing-of-wires which could easily account for their strange results on some questions.
Either way, they got results that made them deeply, deeply unhappy. Again.
The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy plays out with surveyed beliefs
As I mentioned, Ligonier defined evangelicals themselves by certain beliefs. So unsurprisingly, their defined evangelicals were nearly in complete lockstep regarding certain questions. For instance, the second statement on the survey asks about the heretical belief of Trinitarianism. Ligonier doesn’t mention this being one of their dealbreakers for evangelicalism, but it clearly is. About 2/3 of Americans generally agree with Trinitarianism. But a whopping 96% of defined evangelicals embrace this foul heresy.
Similarly, the fifth statement centers around the literal resurrection of Jesus. Here, again, about 2/3 of Americans generally agree that he totally did resurrect himself, while about a quarter disagree to some extent. But 96% of defined evangelicals agree, with none disagreeing. (1% weren’t sure.) We see the same pattern in statement 17, “The Bible is 100% accurate in all that it teaches.” Of course their defined evangelicals, who are evangelical by virtue of believing that the Bible is the highest authority of all, will agree with this, and 95% of them do.
Amazingly enough, when survey designers specifically define a group as holding thus-and-such beliefs, then they’re going to see overwhelming support from their defined group for those specific beliefs.
File this shocking discovery under shit we already knew.
But there are signs of tension and strain in these statements about beliefs
It’s where the defined evangelicals differ markedly from lockstep that really interests me.
For instance, consider statement 4: “God learns and adapts to different circumstances.” That doesn’t sound too controversial, does it? But it really is, to evangelicals like these Calvinists at Ligonier. Their god is IMMUTABLE, meaning he can’t change. Learning and adaptation would necessarily imply this god moving from a lesser state of perfection to a greater one. And that can’t happen, because he’s already completely perfect.
About half of Americans generally thought this statement sounded fine. Barely a third disagreed to at least some extent. But over on the defined-evangelical side, about a third agreed with it! And only about 2/3 disagreed!
To Ligonier, this is a very serious problem:
Nearly half of both groups believe that God changes by learning and adapting. This may indicate the influence of open theism (which denies God’s complete knowledge of future events) and process theology (which denies God’s omnipotence and asserts that He does undergo changes) within the evangelical church. This finding may also indicate a lack of clear, biblical teaching on the character of God in evangelical churches.
OH NOES! A lack of clear, biblical teaching!
There are lots of other similar breaks in lockstep in the survey. I encourage you to explore around their interactive site to see them. (#6, about Jesus being “the first and greatest being” that Yahweh created, is quite tantalizing.) If you play around there, I invite you to consider what these breaks mean, and wonder—as I did—why evangelicals take a common set of beliefs so seriously.
I really think this was the first time I ever wondered that. In the past, I’ve put this emphasis on blast. But I’ve never asked why they even have it in the first place.
Super-correct beliefs are important because they’re important, apparently
My first obstacle: It seems that super-correct beliefs are important simply because they are, in fact, important. Every site I consulted insisted that they were important, but very few actually gave any reason for this assertion.
Ligonier’s writeup in particular concludes without them offering a single credible reason why evangelicals desperately needed to adopt their Calvinist beliefs beyond it leading to them adopting “unbiblical” and “secular” worldviews. (So?) They end by asserting that super-correct beliefs “can equip the church to bring truth and light to a deceived and dark world.”
But they don’t bother sharing the mechanism involved, nor do they show readers how to evaluate when this “truth and light” has actually happened. They don’t even say that it does “equip the church.” Only that it can. And apparently, it is the only thing that can.
Using Bible verses that don’t apply: a favorite evangelical game
One site offered a wealth of Bible verses to support their reasoning. However, none of their Bible verses actually applied to anything they claimed. Its writer tells us,
It is important to understand “the faith” before one can exercise personal faith toward God. Getting our doctrine right helps getting everything else right. Living right begins with thinking right.
Let’s ignore the centuries of saints who didn’t hold these beliefs and yet died in the traces, often advancing Christianity considerably before they passed. The same writer went on to assert that Christians needed to have correct beliefs because they needed to be able to defend their beliefs. But the verse they offered to support this assertion, 1 Peter 3:15, doesn’t ask for apologetics sleight-of-hand or doctrinal super-correctness. It only tells Christians to be able to discuss “the hope you have as a believer.”
Heritage Foundation, a politicized Christian Right group, claims that super-correct beliefs, along with super-correct practices, “contribute substantially to the formation of personal moral criteria and sound moral judgment.” But they offer no way to evaluate anything they claim. It seems to me that they’re doing the same thing Ligonier did: defining TRUE CHRISTIANITY™ in a certain way, so that those who don’t follow the rules are by definition excluded from the category. If they think you’re immoral, clearly you believe the wrong things.
Did you notice a trend here? Both sites’ writers assume that if a Christian holds super-correct beliefs, then they will inevitably follow evangelical leaders’ rules. I don’t think the followers of either site would approve much of this other guy I found who thinks that beliefs aren’t nearly as important as how we behave toward each other.
(Also: I see a friend’s name in that guy’s comments. 💖)
So: Not once, not anywhere do we find any Christian site outlining how correct beliefs translate into correct behavior.
Yes, yes, but how do they know?
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen evangelicals assert that super-correct beliefs inevitably lead to rule-following. We noted it as far back as 2016, with Preston Sprinkle’s voicing of it in People to be Loved. He assumed that anyone who had the correct beliefs would of course never be mean to LGBT people. So as he saw things, he needed to make sure to laboriously re-re-re-outline his tribe’s bigoted teachings so that everyone understood them for realsies. That would totally take care of evangelical cruelty toward LGBT people!
Except it didn’t. It never does. It didn’t even stop his.
When we ask how exactly Christians know that super-correct beliefs always translate into super-correct behavior, that’s as much as we’ll get from them. Somehow, super-correct beliefs perform a sort of mystic alchemy on a Christian’s entire behavioral system, their motivations, their needs and desires, and their coping mechanisms. This alchemy always and without fail results in a Christian following all the rules that their judges think they should be following.
This is why, in a recent post I wrote about prayer, one source explicitly assumed that evangelicals’ shirking of their prayer duties was clearly happening because they simply didn’t understand what the Bible said about prayer! So his job, as he saw it, was to laboriously educate his readers in this topic, just in case they’d somehow, against all odds, by some bizarre fluke of fate, missed those Bible verses in all their time in evangelical groups. He wasn’t even curious about measuring prayer adherence claims after his Bible study concluded. As far as I can tell, he’s never even wondered if his if-then statement is actually true.
And why should he wonder, really? This belief is a rock-solid part of evangelicalism by now. Not even reality itself could change evangelicals’ minds about it.
So what are we to make of the leaders holding super-correct beliefs who fall to scandal anyway?
It’s not like evangelicals have some strange lack of examples contradicting this belief, either. Plenty of super-duper-correct-believing evangelicals in the Ligonier-approved tradition have fallen to scandal.
Consider J.D. Hall, who was so super-correct in his beliefs that he ran websites and podcasts like Pulpit & Pen that brutally slammed evangelicals whose beliefs were, he felt, inferior to his own. (BTW, he renamed it “Protestia” after Facebook banned it. Ban evasion: a fine TRUE CHRISTIAN™ tradition.) He apparently devoted his entire life to persuading others to adopt his package of super-correct beliefs.
Well, not long ago a trans woman dragged him into court for committing libel against her. He lost that case and had to make a public apology and retraction statement. Not long after, in February 2022, he filed for bankruptcy because he couldn’t pay the fine that he’d earned in that case. Then in May 2022, he was arrested for driving under the influence. He also had with him a concealed weapon while he was drunk, thus breaking another law. Eventually, it came out that he’d also developed a substance abuse habit, and that’s when he seems to have finally lost his pastor gig.
I didn’t see any of his followers questioning their beliefs in the wake of his mostly-self-inflicted troubles, any more than Ravi Zacharias’ followers did after his death. (In fact, I’ve seen plenty of Christians writing odes to his TRUE CHRISTIAN™ character before he died—which have aged like milk, as you might expect. Jesus sure didn’t tell them about all his sex abuse!)
For that matter, nobody but nobody embraced all that Pentecostal nonsense as hard as my Evil Ex Biff. And yet he was a hypocrite on every single conceivable level.
That brings us to another glaring problem. Now, I know Ligonier would say Biff became a hypocrite only because he didn’t embrace exactly the same beliefs that they push. They might even accuse me of deconverting for the same reason. Chances are good that Hall and Zacharias differed from them in some respect. But these facts only make us ask:
Who judges these beliefs?
Every evangelical group insists that its package of beliefs is the most super-correct one imaginable. Every single one of them can back up their claim—often with hundreds of Bible verses. A tedious few have even evolved counter-apologetics regarding competing beliefs, much of it centering on convoluted interpretations of the Original Greek and Hebrew.
All too often, though, each group simply publishes its statement of beliefs and its corroborating Bible verses, and then it considers the job done. Anyone who disagrees is just, I don’t know, oppressed by their off-limits desires or demons or something. Or just totally confused, may Jesus forgive them. Christians’ grand solution in these cases is to pray that Jesus strong-arms those folks into realizing they were wrong.
Somehow, Jesus always agrees with each and every evangelical about their own beliefs. Somehow, he never tells them they were flat wrong about the Trinity, or that they’ve grievously misinterpreted the Bible regarding their entire anti-abortion culture war. He’s happy to let someone go their entire life wrong about this or that doctrinal point.
One Christian’s super-correct belief is another’s shocking heresy. One judge is another Christian’s poseur. And often, the people disagreeing are all very fervent Christians who really want to believe only the most super-correct claims possible. However, we can find hypocrites and failures in every single flavor. We can also find occasional gems of compliance in every flavor.
No set of Christian beliefs has any kind of monopoly on rule-following, no matter what any Christians say about the matter.
And why are they so important, when behavior is the real test?
The last time evangelicals tried very hard to push compliance with their demands was around 2005. That’s when the president of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), Bobby Welch, set a huge challenge before his followers: He wanted them to bagsie one million baptisms within one 12-month period.
Welch seems to have understood very well that this challenge would be seen as a sort of referendum of the Conservative Resurgence itself (that conservative takeover of the denomination, which concluded in the late 1990s). The takeover’s backers insisted that more correct beliefs would necessarily result in better recruitment stats. But recruitment fell steadily after the takeover’s completion.
Despite having drastically reformed their beliefs along much more conservative lines, Southern Baptists’ recruitment stats did not improve at all. The challenge failed catastrophically, resulting in even fewer baptisms than the year before.
Did we see any reexamination of those beliefs? A questioning of the takeover?
No, we did not. We certainly did not.
Instead, Calvinists began griping harder than ever that the SBC hadn’t adopted all of the beliefs they liked. Clearly, that was The Big Problem Here!
Cheap substitutes for the real thing that matters
I suppose it’s far easier for Christians to judge another Christian’s beliefs than to examine their own behavior.
Every evangelical fails to follow at least some of their rules. This failure is assured and certain because their roadmap to good behavior doesn’t work. They become hypocrites when they pretend they don’t fail to follow their rules, and/or when they try to hold others to the rules that they themselves can’t and won’t follow. Really, it’s much easier to ensure lockstep in beliefs than it is to ensure compliance with the tribe’s rules.
As a result, for many years now evangelicals have been hard at work developing cheap, easy substitutes for all that boring stuff they don’t really want to do.
Instead of becoming good neighbors and real friends, they “work on their relationship with Jesus.” I’m not the first person to notice this. As far back as 2006, a Christian was talking about evangelicals’ clear preference for orthodoxy over orthopraxy (correct beliefs vs correct behavior):
Now, I’ve got no problems with creeds or creedal orthodoxy. But I’d like to suggest that this early emphasis on “right belief” has seriously skewed the Christian tradition in ways that I don’t think are all that healthy. Specifically, by emphasizing “right belief” (orthodoxy) over “right practice” (orthopraxy), Christians have lost (or never acquired in the first place) a robust notion of “Christian practice.”
I agree completely. Many times, I’ve noted that evangelicals in particular clearly hate doing what Jesus directly ordered his followers to do. As a group, they do everything in their power to avoid being kind, compassionate, charitable, or even decent toward others. Why bother? It’s not like you can not go to Hell twice. They think they already have the biggest reward of all without lifting a finger.
Orthodoxy vs orthopraxy: The last dance
As a result, someone can consider themselves “a good Christian” if they embrace all the most perfect, most correct beliefs they can find, even if they have utterly failed to fulfill even the most basic of Jesus’ direct commands. But if someone manages to fulfill all of those commands but doesn’t hold the correct beliefs, then these same “good Christians” usually think that person is going to Hell. One evangelical tract maker, Jack Chick, delighted in showing the shock and consternation on the faces of exactly such people in tracts like “Flight 144“:
In the strip above, “Ed” is a creepy, judgmental, boundary-seeking missile, incidentally. He recently converted in prison while serving time for murder. But he holds correct beliefs, so he goes to Heaven after the plane crash—while the sweet missionary couple goes to Hell. Evangelicals never consider what kind of god would happily accept terrible people like “Ed” into Heaven but reject truly good people. That sure wouldn’t be my idea of Heaven. It reminds me of that silly cartoon with the chimpanzee evangelist:
Of course, I’m leaving out the endless squabbles Christians have regarding the importance of rule-following. In the comments on that 2006 blog (relink), you can see exactly what I mean: Christians are supposed to follow their rules as a result of having correct beliefs, several insist. So a Christian who fails to follow the rules is obviously Jesus-ing wrong somehow.
This doesn’t solve the problem of noncompliance at all. It’s just a re-ordering of the same basic problem:
Correct beliefs don’t automatically produce desired behaviors.
They never have, and they never will.
So it’s a real indictment of evangelicalism in particular, with its huge emphasis on holding correct beliefs, that they are the worst at displaying those desired behaviors. But they find more than adequate rewards in maintaining this emphasis, or it wouldn’t be happening.
Question these assumptions wherever they pop up
This assumption of evangelicals just flies under their radar. But it flew under mine, too, for years. I might have danced around the edges of this realization, but it hasn’t ever hit me quite like it did today: WHY do evangelicals make this assumption? Where’d it come from? What evidence do they have for it?
If someone like me couldn’t quite get to the center of it, I don’t expect evangelicals in the thick of their bubble to do so.
We see assumptions like it in other places, though. This isn’t the only place where people might assume that correct beliefs will ensure correct behavior. Even years after deconversion, I continued to assume that the only reason people disagreed with me was that they didn’t understand what I did. So my solution was to explain at length until they did. As I criticized evangelicals for doing exactly the same thing here today, I remember that I did it too, and I did it long after deconversion.
There are some big problems with this assumption, however. And to illustrate it, I’ll draw upon something outside the religious world.
Lessons from the world of call centers
When I worked at call centers, I still had this tendency to explain to find agreement. I wanted my callers to understand why things were happening to them. Meanwhile, my handle time was going through the roof.
Eventually, I had a two-hour-long call with a pair of middle-aged women whose service was always getting suspended and gathering late fees. They’d called me together to figure out why. I quickly figured out their mystery, too: they paid every month, but always paid a month late and only ever took care of their past due balance. They’d started their account two years previously by missing the first payment, and had been playing catch-up ever since. Somehow, in all their years, they’d never figured out how bill cycles work.
By the time they landed on my desk, they had become absolutely convinced that my company was slapping them with wrongful fees and interruptions.
But no matter how I tried to word the reality of their situation, they refused to accept it. The solution, as they saw it, was for me to reactivate service, credit their account to bring it current, and then lavish them with credits to “compensate them” for the fees, their time, and their feelings.
How I stopped worrying about people’s beliefs to focus on handling the problems at hand
After that call, which did not end on great terms, a manager reviewed it with me. He gently told me to quit explaining things. Yes, he said, he knew I was a great agent with a great understanding of the company’s processes and policies. But I needed to keep my knowledge at a background level with callers like these. They’d already decided upon a solution, and that’s all they were willing to accept. If my answer wasn’t “Sure, I’ll credit all of that,” these callers wouldn’t care, wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t learn, and certainly wouldn’t ever concede that the real solution looked like them paying their entire balance in full every month by the due date.
If someone’s emotional or physical paycheck depends on them not understanding something, they won’t. In particular, if someone feels defensive then their antiprocess shields will completely destroy their ability to absorb or process new information. That manager taught me to figure out who would be receptive to the deep, in-depth level of information I could provide, and who just needed to be told to pay their full balance on time every month.
Evangelicals, whose entire sense of emotional balance depends on being absolutely correct, are very unlikely to take kindly to pushback or contradictions from others.
They certainly don’t want to be evaluated on the basis of compliance, and so they’ve created this alternate substitute method of evaluation that they vastly prefer.
You can just about taste their anger with all the meaniepies who keep refusing to let them go with it, and who keep reminding them that someone can believe the right things and still deconvert, or all the wrong things and still stay in the pews for life.
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