High Anthropology and the Bait and Switch Gospel

Over the moon to announce that the paperback edition of Low Anthropology is out TODAY! Here’s an excerpt of the chapter, “Low Anthropology in Religion.” 

High anthropology is the tie that binds together nearly every account of religious burnout and disillusionment. It is the foundation of legalistic and oppressive forms of religion, without which they cannot find oxygen. A high anthropology approach to religion devastates. I am speaking mainly about Christianity, but you can encounter instances of it in many traditions. Anytime you hear someone refer to a former religious observance with some form of “I just couldn’t keep it up anymore,” you are in the vicinity of high anthropology.

Dramatic tales of deconversion and denouncement are the most egregious examples of this phenomenon. Far more common, though, is the gradual creep. A refreshingly humble take on human nature greets a person at the outset of their religious journey but then slowly inflates without them realizing it fully.

Take Kara. Her family goes to church about once a month but are not very involved. Kara believes in God, but it’s a private thing. Adolescence presents its usual set of challenges, but she makes it through more or less unscathed. Off at college and away from home for the first time, however, Kara gets lonely and makes a couple decisions she regrets involving alcohol and the opposite sex. Her roommate can tell she is floundering and invites Kara to the campus Christian fellowship.

At the fellowship, she meets a group of gregarious and kindhearted Christians. They’re friendly and funny and not at all weird in the way that some super-religious young people can be. A twentysomething campus minister gives a presentation about the gospel, and Kara hears for what feels like the first time a message that connects with her actual struggles. God cares about her, he says, and understands what she’s going through. God sees her as she is, warts and all, and loves her still — so much so that he sent his Son Jesus to be a beacon of love to the world. The world rejected Jesus, but Jesus did not reject the world in return. Instead, he died to bring lonely, broken sinners like her to God. She is seen, and she is forgiven. What’s more, the God of the universe wants a relationship with her.

It’s a beautiful message, miles away from the coldness of the meritocracy and dog-eat-dog social life that Kara has encountered since getting to school. She decides to come back.

At first, life among these Christians is warm and full of laughter. They talk about deep things, share their hopes and fears, pray together, and organize service projects. It’s a community that doesn’t shy away from the dark side of human nature yet holds out real hope for redemption.

Then something curious happens. The more involved Kara gets, the more pressure she starts to feel. Perhaps there’s a subtle implication from others in the group that she should be praying for longer every day or is too passionate about Lady Gaga. Questions about her romantic life cross the border from friendly interest into investigative concern. It’s never said outright, but slowly the come-as-you-are atmosphere that brought her in is supplanted by an emphasis on personal growth. Sometimes this is conveyed in terms of behavioral purity, sometimes in terms of cultural transformation. Soon, faith begins to feel like a project rather than a refuge.

As the months go by, Kara discerns that, in this group, Christians are meant to play by a different set of rules than non-Christians. For the unbeliever, God is merciful and forgiving. For the believer, however, God expects a bit more: more devotion, more charity, more accountability, more faith.

Before she knows it, faith has turned into a new ladder to climb, a spiritual extension of the meritocracy she thought she was escaping. This time, though, the approval of God Almighty hangs in the balance. Before long, Kara starts running every potential action and relationship through an internal calculus of holiness. She becomes an anxious wreck. Finally, in a fit of relief, Kara decides to “break up with Jesus.” Life is hard enough, and other people challenging enough to get along with, without an added layer of existential pressure.

I have heard variations of this story more times than I can count; it is part of the privilege and burden of working in ministry for twenty years. Sometimes high school is the setting, sometimes early adulthood, but the main beats seldom vary. At one point I thought these burnout accounts were exaggerations. I no longer think this. More often than not, the speaker in question is understating it.

Kara encountered a mild form of what happens when Christians embrace a selectively high anthropology. The thinking goes like this: Before a person becomes a Christian, they are limited, doubled, and self-centered. When they surrender their life to God, he forgives them their shortcomings and imbues them with the Holy Spirit. The Spirit then enables the Christian to be a little less limited, doubled, and self-centered — a little more like Jesus. Thus begins the project of growing in holiness, or what is known as sanctification.

Because a low anthropologist understands the allure of personal control, they might offer a few caveats to the schema, lest the Christian fall back into performance. They might venture that, in the drama of sanctification, the actors are more or less the same, but their parts differ. The Holy Spirit plays more of a leading role than a supporting one; you and I are what the Bible calls vessels — that is, when it comes to driving the plot of goodness and grace forward in a person’s life, we take a backseat to the Spirit, in terms of both initiative and credit. A low anthropologist would therefore caution believers about miscasting the Spirit as an extra dose of motivation grafted onto the human will. More often than not, the Holy Spirit’s activity does not follow a linear, quantifiable progression; “It blows wherever it pleases” (John 3:8), usually bringing a person into deeper dependence on God — who maintains top billing throughout.

In so many ways, the Christian actually seems to remain the same person after conversion.[1] There may be more gratitude, or they might experience victory over some besetting problem, either temporarily or permanently. But they never change to the point where they need God’s grace and forgiveness any less. Many of the nagging foibles that lead a person to Christianity persist even after they become a Christian.[2]

This persistence of sin in the life of a believer undermines selectively high anthropology. When trials come and willpower fails them, high anthropology religion is of little to no comfort. It assumes more agency than a person possesses; it assumes that they have it within them to partner meaningfully with God in healing the world and themselves.

A theological term for this outlook is semi-Pelagianism, and unfortunately it describes a great deal of American Christianity.[3] You may have heard this position expressed in terms of “meeting God halfway” or “co-laboring with the Spirit” or through the injunction simply to “let go and let God.”[4] We naturally want to have something to contribute to our relationship with God, something by which we can be measured and possibly distinguished. Something of our own.

The problems should be self-evident. Questions of exactly how much of a role we play in the God-human tango plague the semi-Pelagian, fostering the anxiety and judgment that push people away from Christianity altogether. A religion of high anthropology pits a person against themselves in a battle they cannot win. More than that, it pits a person against God: God is positioned as a taskmaster and judge for whom nothing is ever good enough as opposed to a loving parent (who happens to like you too). Therein lies the true viciousness of a high anthropology: the adversarial relationship it sets up between creature and creator.

Low anthropology religion holds that the Holy Spirit works through people to accomplish acts of extraordinary charity and love — but that this is often in spite of their resistance to or ignorance of it. Good works are more a matter of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing (see Matt. 6:3). Sanctification tends to feel more like losing than accruing, of getting smaller rather than larger. Oftentimes we ourselves may be the last people to realize the transformative work God has been doing in us. Low anthropology thankfully demolishes the basis of superiority that so often manifests as self-righteousness to those outside the faith.