A few months back, the writer and scholar Rob Henderson published a memoir about his life’s journey from foster care to the Ivy League. It’s a harrowing journey, starting in impoverished and drug-riddled rural California and ending with degrees from Yale and Cambridge. It’s a journey, however, that led him to see the highest world of elite education from an outsider’s perspective.
What Henderson repeatedly noticed in these institutions is that his well-off Ivy league peers often advocated for political policies that had little impact on their upper-class life, but he knew firsthand would do harm to the poor communities he grew up in. He identifies a few examples, such as the defund-the-police movement, drug legalization, and the recent fad of polyamory, as upper-class opinions about life disconnected from the realities of poverty he experienced growing up. He called these beliefs “luxury beliefs,” which he defines as “ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.” In Henderson’s eyes, signals of wealth from generations past, like fancy cars and designer clothes, have been replaced by a certain set of unquestioned political assumptions, assumptions that would make problems worse for the poor rather than better.
I’ve noticed a similar pattern within many religious circles. We might call them “luxury theologies”: Christian beliefs that are widely held by a certain social class of Christian that ultimately harm or alienate those from lower socioeconomic classes, as well as those who are new to (or outside of) the church.[1] Beliefs that confer a degree of status, while making faith more difficult to those whose have poor credit scores. Here are a few stabs at rooting out these luxury theologies, with an explanation of why they qualify for the label:
God Helps Those Who Help Themselves.
This one isn’t Christian orthodoxy — it is, in fact, a heresy — but that still doesn’t mean it isn’t a luxury theology. Generally speaking, this assertion exists among those who see Christianity as a form of self-optimization, where God is more of a coach than a savior. Instead of good news, you have lists of steps to achieve wholeness, a #blessed family life, a prosperous career, or the fulfillment of living in God’s mission. Whether explicitly or implicitly, God’s blessing is reserved for those faithful few who measure up. Those who aren’t blessed by God are lacking the right attitudes and motivations. In this way, this “God helps those …” theology is really just another form of legalism, a set of rules one must follow in order to get right with God.
While the perils of legalism and subsequent burnout are noted often enough, what is often overlooked is the class element behind legalism. Legalism is often the heresy of the ruling class. Those who make the rules, after all, usually make rules that are easy for them to follow. Those who are not part of the ruling class don’t get a say in whether it really is God’s will that they attend that 7am Bible study after working the night shift, or have childcare to volunteer at the soup kitchen. When fidelity to God means “more,” those with less get squeezed.
The belief that God is a divine life coach is a hallmark of a luxury theology. It confers status on those who have achieved enough worldly success to try harder. It’s also a recipe for psychosis for the poor, a word of constant condemnation leading to burnout, anxiety, or an exit from the religion altogether out of resignation for never measuring up.
The Political Gospel
The overlap between Christian values and the political realm is nothing new. Our culture wars in modern America, however, are nothing compared to the long history of violence done in Jesus’s name throughout the centuries, by both Catholics and Protestants alike, and by both left-leaning and right-leaning perspectives within the church. While it is appropriate to ask how faith and citizenship align, it is a reductionistic, luxury theology to reduce the Christian faith to the political dimension alone.
Many from both sides of the theological spectrum see government policy as the primary way to enact their preferred interpretation of Christian values. The religious right is well known for justifying stances on social matters like marriage, capital punishment, and private property on biblical principles. The liberal Protestant tradition, of course, does the same for matters of immigration, environmentalism, and social justice. While they differ in kind, they agree in strategy: the ideal way to usher in some sort of godly kingdom is to do so through political activity.
There’s no doubt that political ideas are vehicles for class and status, but what makes the political gospel a luxury theology is that it assumes that the ills of the world are structural in nature. Fix the institution, the hierarchy, the language, or the policy, and that will lead to the flourishing of the people. When it comes to its actual impact on the lower classes, however, this political gospel overplays its hand. Neither end of this political spectrum has specific good news for the woman whose son died from fentanyl overdose, the middle aged man in arrested development because he was sexually assaulted as a child, or the boy whose father ran off when he was nine years old. As Todd Brewer outlined at the recent conference in New York City, the incredible ambivalence that Jesus has for the political structures of his day is a testimony to his belief that the fallen human heart is the origin of the world’s faults and failures.
Status and class for those advocating for their side of the political aisle during church. High promises that underdeliver for the lower class. This has all the features of a luxury theology.
Roman Graffiti, ~200 AD: “Alexamenos worships [his] god”
Over the past half-century, the theory of substitutionary atonement has come under fire by many Christians, principally due to abuses in its teaching. Most especially the idea of penal substitution — that Jesus takes upon himself the punishments of the wicked people he saves at the cross — has been rejected by those who see the arrangement as a dubious execution of justice and a smear on a loving God’s character. Does God really demand “satisfaction” for his wrath? Why is it that human blood is required to achieve it? This doesn’t sound like a God of mercy and love! The result is a number of alternative “nonviolent” atonement theories that have come to prominence, whether it be Rene Girard’s “scapegoat” theory of atonement, Gustav Aulen’s “Christus Victor” theory of atonement, or more mystical, participationist views.
I’m indebted to Richard Beck and his Experimental Theology substack for this insight. Beck, initially sympathetic to this non-violent way of thinking, came to shift his belief as a result of volunteering with a prison ministry. Working through these non-violent theories of the cross with incarcerated criminals, Beck realized that these men were actually desperate and grateful to hear about penal substitution. It made emotional and intuitive sense to them, as grievous offenders, that something great and cosmic and costly needed to be done about their sin so they could be right with God again.
These non-violent ways of thinking about Jesus’s work on the cross only made sense to people with seminary educations or the free time to read heady theology books, the kind of people either insulated from genuine suffering or blissfully (willfully?) ignorant of their own guilt. They confer a sort of secular-liberal adjacent, post-evangelical-enlightenment status on those who believe them, a way to sneer at the unenlightened masses. A bloody man on the cross dying for one’s sins is less welcome in upper class society than an abstract conversation about “mimetic desires.” These atonement alternatives, however, lack the power to address real sins committed by real people in real dire straits. To those affected by guilt, who have suffered more than they can bear, the man of sorrows is the only balm.
Non-Bodily Resurrection Theories
Perhaps no other theology can be labeled as a “luxury” than explanations of the resurrection that don’t involve the physical body. From the very beginning of the Christianity, the emphasis on “the resurrection of the body and life everlasting” was key in the church’s growth among the poor and helpless. To those who had nothing on this earth, the promise of a heavenly rest was great comfort. Modern conversations surrounding the resurrection, however, offer very little hope to the poor, or anyone else for that matter, except the status seeking upper classes.
On the left, for example, the rejection of the bodily resurrection confers secular social status to those who believe it. Jesus’s resurrection is, they say, “spiritual,” or the teachings of Jesus are resurrected after his death in the lives of the apostles. The body of Jesus, and the body of anyone who follows him, remains inanimate. The result is that these left-leaning church-goers can mingle with other cultural elites outside of the Christian faith who find the resurrection implausible. It’s a spirituality that’s passable in a world where the cultural cache belongs to the secular and materialist.
On the right, of course, the resurrection of the dead is a bedrock belief, but it is frequently blamed for religious laziness or lukewarm spirituality. “Yes the resurrection is true, but …” is usually how those sentences start, and they end with some sort of moral injunction. If the doctrine of penal substitution is written off as “divine child abuse” by the left, then the doctrines of the resurrection of the body and heaven and the life of the world to come are written off by the right as “fire insurance” or “get-out-of-hell-free.” Instead of resurrection hope, the shift for many turns toward “kingdom” work — building the kingdom, living the kingdom, etc. Forget about actual heaven and focus instead on trying to build heaven on earth!
The idea that this world is somehow more important than the next, or that the next doesn’t exist at all, can only be spoken by those insulated from the sting of death. Death, properly understood, renders everyone poor in spirit, regardless of income or life circumstance. This may be one of the advantages that the lower classes have over their prosperous peers: like the lesson of the widow’s mite, they are better prepared to see through the trappings of this world and look to the world to come.
When you put these four theologies together, there’s a common thread. Each one is an exercise by an upper class to deny the intractable realities of suffering and death, an attempt to rise above the everyday hardships of life that all humans experience. In other words, they are what Martin Luther called theologies of glory.
For Luther, a theologian of glory cannot imagine God at work in suffering, loss, and hardship, which is exactly the sort of thing that enlivened the first Christians, many of whom were from the lower classes of Roman society. These early believers were all too familiar with theologies of glory from the Roman pantheon of Gods and the history of the empire itself. They knew there was no good news for them in that religious milieu. What was new, compelling, life changing, and ultimately world-changing, was that the God of the cross meant grace and life to those who couldn’t earn it and didn’t deserve it. Here was a God who could be found in the lowness of life, in the valley of the shadow of death, and in the blood of a cross. The kind of God that many in the higher social classes of the time found distasteful, idiotic, and gauche.
Christianity, at its best, casts a wide net. Its vision, even as articulated in the Bible some two thousand years ago, is universal, transcending gender, race, caste, and socioeconomic differences. The story of Jesus, the skilled-laborer-turned-rabbi triumphing over the elites of his day through righteous suffering and forgiving his enemies, is a powerful vision, in that time and in ours. This God found in the low places is a God for everyone, rich and poor alike.
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10 responses to “Luxury Theologies”
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Thanks Bryan for this. Could be analogized to many fields, e.g. environmentalism.
To my mind, one of the unreported stories of the last 50 years is how the mainline, liberal church cut itself from working and working class, non-college educated people.
Good article, Bryan. I love Richard Beck, and I basically agree with his/your critique of the non-violent theories of the cross, especially the moral example theories. They just don’t cut it. Humans desperately need and long for some kind of ultimate sacrifice to be made on their behalf as payment for their sins and the sins of the world. Nothing else will do. That makes sense to me.
I think the basic problem I have with penal substitutionary atonement theory is the idea that God *couldn’t* forgive us without the cross. I’ve heard the reasoning about God’s justice requiring satisfaction in order to open the door for his forgiveness but I just don’t quite buy it. In the end, I feel like God is God and he can forgive us if we wants to forgive us. Jesus certainly forgave folks pretty readily.
But I also know that it’s not really enough for me to say that the cross is just a kind of symbolic gesture of forgiveness God makes to human beings, thus only symbolically appeasing our desperate need for satisfaction. It has to be more than that — it has to change something fundamental. So maybe the traditional version of PSA is the only one that really does that. I don’t know! Anyway, I’m sure I’ll be able to dig into this deeper whenever I finally make it to seminary. Thanks again for the good read.
The first shall be last and the last shall be first.
Great piece. I’d add the belief that we will be working in heaven. Fun idea if you have a comfortable and creative white-collar job; less so for the average person.
My mainline Protestant seminary education fostered the belief that God doesn’t really do anything in the world except stand on the sidelines of our lives and cheer us on—or, more likely, say, “There, there,” when things aren’t going well.
Witness the backlash against the aphorism, “Everything happens for a reason.”
Of course we need to be sensitive and nuanced, etc., but many Christians who repeat this aphorism merely affirm the truth of astonishing promises of God’s providential control of our lives and world, such as Romans 8:28 and 1 Corinthians 3:21-23 (and many others).
Meanwhile, well-meaning “luxury theologians” who disagree with “everything happens for a reason” want to let God off the hook for all the bad stuff that God either causes or allows happens. And I get it… except I find it immensely comforting to know that God is somewhere “in this mess,” working his good plan and purposes. (Especially since my life is messy and painful more often than not. Isn’t everyone’s?)
Regardless, is it any wonder that Pentecostalism is the least “elite” flavor of Christianity, given that Pentecostals are far more likely to believe in an interventionist God who knows how to get things done? I love having Pentecostal prayer warriors in my corner!
Fantastic and much needed write up.
Anthony, if it makes you feel any better, we conservative evangelicals have lost the working class as well.
This was very well put and an important reminder that we should all be aware that there’s a difference between our proclaimed affection for the impoverished and how our beliefs actually affect them.
If I may, I’d like to suggest two ideas for the Political Gospel section. The first is less controversial.
We shouldn’t leave out the many ways the Eastern Orthodox Church has also conflated their theology with political goals over the last 2000 years (even to this very day). While we in the West could ignore this for most of our history, the growth of Orthodoxy in America requires some level of honesty about their past as well. Orthodoxy is not a lifeboat passing by to save exhausted Protestants and Catholics from the American religious experience, although it does offer much that is needed to the American Church writ large.
Second – and more controversially – we should consider the the American Progressive Theologian’s obsession with Christian Nationalism a luxury theology as well. The notion that God is aware of nations and views them as separate entities and cares for them is as old as the Hebrew prophets and continues throughout Christian history until Post-WWII Western Society.
But the concept of nationhood and it’s value is viewed completely differently based the wealth and elite status of the individual. For the working class belonging to a nation is a source of comfort and pride. It creates belonging. When elites, who find their belonging in their wealth and credentials, instruct the working class that such a national affiliation is evil they undercut one more source of identity for the poor.
If you think about the sources of identity a poor American had 100 years ago almost all of them have been co-opted over the last century. Poor families are obliterated with many children growing up with no connection to a father. Marriage is just paper. A naïve choice. Church connections are vaporized since religious activity is now highly suspect among young people. And now national pride is evil as well.
For an income class that has very little hope in amassing degrees and homes and awards by which they can derived some sense of place in the world we offer nothing but slavish support of a globalist Christianity that neither meets their personal needs nor cares about their existence. It merely promises that God will be pleased with their suspicion of their native land.
Jim – these are world class insights re: Orthodoxy, the poltiical gospel, and Christian Nationalism. Thank you so much for adding them to the conversation. I’ve been thinking about ways to engage with more people outside of my own social class on matters of faith (hence this article!), and your insight just kicked my brain into overdrive like a cup of hot coffee. If we meet at an Mbird gathering in the future, I would LOVE to keep this conversation rolling!
I was thinking recently about “secularism as a Christian heresy” and had the thought that perhaps secularism itself is a luxury belief. The West becomes highly Christianized –> Christian assumptions become invisible to us –> meanwhile, partially enabled by Christian influence, science flourishes –> we abandon “superstitious” Christian doctrine –> the West embraces secularism. Secularism might only be possible because of our culture’s spiritual wealth. Then again, is this a new insight, or just another way of noticing how easy it is for the wealthy to forget that they need God?