Knowing God?

Consumer Christianity and the Gospel of Jesus

Michael Hardin

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781532683893, 9781532683909
• eBook ISBN: 9781532683916
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Knowing God? is an indictment of Protestant American Christianity in its failure to follow Jesus of Nazareth. Consumer Christianity is laid bare before the gospel and found wanting. After exposing the superstition of American Christianity, Hardin examines the gospel narrative and demonstrates that a truly Jesus-oriented approach must be non-sacrificial in all its ways. Like Jeremiah, Kierkegaard, or the early Barth, Knowing God? rings with a clarion call for followers of Jesus to ask what the Christian life looks like and is all about.

Chapter 2

Mysticism

If you happen to be in a bookstore right now and are browsing this book to see if you wish to purchase it, look at some of the other titles on the shelves. Notice how those titles promise health, wealth, and success and that they offer the “keys” to this or the “secrets” to that or the “ways” to something else.

KEYS! SECRETS! SOMETHING YOU DO NOT POSSESS BUT CAN PURCHASE!

AND TODAY LIVING THE CHRISTIAN LIFE IS 30 PERCENT OFF.

Each of these books is making a promise that if you purchase that book and follow the formula therein you too, like the author, will be assured of achieving your dreams and reaching your goals. You will have a Lamborghini life.

Dreams and goals are laudable. Without them we would remain in the ruts I spoke about earlier. When you were a child, do recall adults asking you what you wanted to be when you grew up? Sure you do. We ask the same thing from our own children from time to time. We seek to help them aspire to something, to think outside the box. If we are wise we teach our children how to formulate realistic goals that are measurable and achievable. We can encourage them to dream and to dream big.

There is nothing wrong with any of that as long as you are in a position to help your children and are willing to do what it takes to be a coach, cheerleader, and shoulder to cry on when the inevitable failures occur.

Here is the thing: there are no guarantees in life. One may practice a skill until fingers bleed or minds ache, and one may still not become top tier or make the final cut.

Life is full of disappointments, of unrealized expectations, and of frustrated dreams. Just ask all those with PhDs who cannot find work in their chosen field and instead are flipping hamburgers at McDonald’s or working at Home Depot (and these two examples are both friends of mine).

Now the Empire of Consumer Christianity has ways to get you to buy your dreams from them. Notice I said “buy your dreams,” because these big visions of life do not come cheap. They have a thousand ways to convince you that you need the church and all of its many colored programs in order to succeed and live “the successful Christian life.”

However, that isn’t the worst part of it. If, after you have shopped at the Mall of Consumer Christianity, and you cannot find what you are looking for, there is a store, a giant retail outlet called the Shop of Mystical Wonders. As you wander inside, strobe lights flash all manner of psychedelic promises, music surrounds you in deep luxurious bass tones and soul-piercing trebles, display after display of anecdotal fashions adorn the aisles as you wend your way through this amazing and majestic wonderland.

At last!

You have found what you are looking for, the promise of an intimate encounter with the Divine.

What more could you ask for than your very own personal relationship with God?

Yes, you too can be the owner of the grand prize, your very own share in this stock, given from heaven and dispensed only here in this store. Look at the sales people with that happy glow on their faces and the store manager who delightfully shows consumers how they can find the perfect mix-and-match mystical ensemble. Why, there are even fads and fashions from foreign markets!

Who can resist such glitz?

You can accessorize your purchases with special event sales (called seminars or ministry schools) and receive all the latest new-fangled experiences available. Some of them are even being beta tested right here in the store.

So, once again you pull out your credit card and gleefully hand it over so that you too may partake in this cutting-edge, fashionable experience.

Cha-ching! Thank you very much.

Mysticism is a big money-making business today. Long before the Empire of Consumer Christianity got into it, the 1960s hippie radicals were finding out all about it through LSD and Indian gurus. How did we arrive at such a place where the odd, the bizarre, and the utterly strange became the norm for spiritual experience?

It begins long before the 1950s. But if you know a little about the post-World War II church-cultural situation in America then you can understand the reaction of the 1960s, the Jesus Movement and the stepchildren of that movement, notably found in certain charismatic Christian circles.

The 1950s were the heyday of the institutional churches, the big denominations like the Lutherans, the Methodists, and the growing movements of Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism. Pete Seeger sang about “ticky-tacky houses all in a row” and the same thing could have been said about the churches of that time. Everything about church life at that time was neat and orderly. People dressed in their Sunday best and America was a fine upstanding nation following the great victory of the war. Business boomed. Suburbs came into being and with those suburbs came white flight.

Then the cancerous division aggressively grew.

Forty-thousand-plus different denominations would eventually register with the US government as a “religious non-profit,” each one presuming it had some angle or corner on the truth the other churches in town did not have. Think about this: there are over 4,000 different types of Baptists.

Four thousand!

Little wonder that Doctrine Wars are the norm. Every denomination sought to preserve their identity by appealing to the past, to their founders, and to their confessions of faith. The Christian life was about believing the right thing. Evangelicals reacted strongly against what they perceived as the liberalism of mainline Christianity and mainline churches reacted against the myopic vision and paranoia of Evangelicalism and Fundamentalism.

Then the 1960s exploded on the scene. The space race and the Beatles, the civil rights movement, Viet Nam, drugs, the importation of eastern religious philosophies, the God-is-dead movement. JFK, Bobby Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr., were all assassinated. There was Woodstock and then Watergate. The comfortable 1950s gave way to the tumultuous 1960s.

The Roman Catholic Church sought to change and the fresh winds of Vatican II blew through her open windows. The ecumenical movement and dialogues of the mainline churches were in full swing. The divide between the “conservative” Evangelical, Fundamentalist, and Independent churches and the “liberal” mainline traditions grew greater year by year. People sought for constancy in a culture that was tearing itself apart.

They fled to the conservative churches. Hippies became yuppies. They traded their VW micro vans for Benzes. The inner cities, abandoned by the white middle class, became destitute and run down. Crime rates soared in the cities, while whites in the suburbs hoped crime would remain there. Conservative churches began to grow exponentially as people sought to find an oasis of stability in a world gone mad.

In the 1980s, as business flourished under the “trickle-down” economics of Ronald Reagan, so did the conservative churches. The Moral Majority was founded. The experimentation of the 1960s gave way to the despair of the 1970s, which in turn produced a “circle the wagons” mentality in Christianity in the 1980s. The success formula of big business began to be applied to church growth models. This in turn led to the rise of the mega church in the 1990s.

By the time we got to January 1, 2000, Christianity had become Big Business. It had its own industries: Christian music, Christian art, Christian entertainment, Christian movies, Christian kitsch, Christian TV and radio stations, and Christian websites. You name it and somebody baptized it as Christian, including business models. It had become a mall.

Pastors became CEOs, people became numbers, politely called “customers’.” Sure, some customers would leave but there were always new customers that could be attracted with the proper marketing.

All this time the Empire of Consumer Christianity was busying itself with creating a system that would not, could not be stopped. Christianity in America had become a “principality and power.” Worse yet, American Christians were exporting this mix of business models, capitalist philosophy, corporate “bigger is better” mentality, and civil religion all over the world.

What the Empire of Consumer Christianity didn’t count on was that people would tire of the legalism, the rules and regulations, the do’s and don’ts, the arbitrary rulings, the bitter recriminations and the burdens of supporting an institution that felt more like a courtroom than a hospital.

People were looking for an authentic relation to the divine that was more than just prayers bouncing off ceilings.

During this whole time, a global explosion occurred that left the Evangelicals in the dust: the Charismatic movement and Pentecostalism swept through third world countries like a wildfire. The poor were attracted to a message of wealth, the sick to a message of health, the weak to a message of strength, the bored with a message of the “supernatural.”

It was the seduction of the masses.

What we see today is the result of that. Third world pastors browbeat their cong...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• Foreword
• Preface
• Consumer Christianity and Christian Spirituality
• Mysticism
• Crucifixion
• Resurrection
• Ascension
• Incarnation
• A Two Chart Primer On How To Read The Bible
• Resources from Michael Hardin