David Kinnaman, president of Barna Group

Barna Group president, David Kinnaman, recently co-authored a new book with Mark Matlock called Faith for Exiles: 5 Ways for a New Generation to Follow Jesus in Digital Babylon.

The book’s premise is this: America’s youth are leaving churches in droves due to 1) the American church’s inability to cover their exclusionary policies toward women and minorities with nicer, more welcoming language (see his previous books, especially unChristian), 2) exposure to a diverse array of worldviews via the Internet (current book), and 3) less societal pressure to claim Christianity as one’s faith due to the previous two reasons. Therefore, he claims, the young people who do not forsake their faith in spite of the above are more resilient than other Christians, and we should study their resiliency tactics and learn how to teach and apply them. His new book claims to have the answers.

I’ll make four main points.

Kinnaman and Matlock’s definition of Christian faithfulness is time and culturally-bound. The book utilizes an anti-Semitic metaphor for its framework. The American Christian persecution complex is pervasive and based on an inaccurate assessment of the state of Christian rights. The book openly longs for the days when white, Christian, middle-class norms dominated. In other words, MAGA. It ignores the experiences of non-white, non-Christian, queer, and poor Americans during that time.

Who Is Faithful?

First, how did Kinnaman and Matlock determine who is “faithful” as opposed to who is not? They used these criteria:

Christ followers who attend church at least monthly and engage with their church more than just attending worship services; trust firmly in the authority of the Bible; are committed to Jesus personally and affirm he was crucified and raised from the dead to conquer sin and death; express desire to transform the broader society as an outcome of their faith.

Notice numbers 1, 2, and 4 appear nowhere in the ancient Christian creeds — not the Apostles’ Creed, not the Nicene Creed, not the Chalcedonian Creed, not the Athanasian Creed. Let that sink in.

Their criteria for Christian faithfulness is contextual to our historical moment and our American culture. The authority of the Bible as primary to Christian life is relatively new to Christianity (about 500 years ago) — the results of which birthed 30,000+ Protestant denominations. I wrote an entire book on Christian authority with Ken Wilson called Solus Jesus: A Theology of Resistance.

Anti-Semitic Premise

Second, the framework of the book stems from a sloppy understanding of history and is anti-Semitic. The authors postulate a dichotomy: Jerusalem before the Babylonian exile, they say, was “monoreligious, slower paced, homogenous, centrally controlled, sweet and simple,” and the major hangup of of the Jewish people was religious pride and piety. In contrast, exile in Babylon was “pluralistic, accelerated, frenetic, diverse, open source, complex, bittersweet” and the major hangups of the Jewish exiles were that they wanted to fit in and not miss out on all the action the city had to offer. It was so much easier to be faithful to God in Jerusalem, these authors claim.

Two Things, Before I Continue

One, multiple Jewish prophets foretold the coming Babylonian exile because of the people of Jerusalem’s general ill-treatment of the poor, the widows, and the foreigners among them. Pre-exilic times were not “sweet and simple” glory days for marginalized people, and God paid attention to them, the oppressed. That is the witness of our Jewish siblings.

Two, presenting any geographical crossroads (such as Jerusalem)or religion (such as Judaism) as homogenous is disingenuous, and the latter is dismissive of Jewish scholarship and writings.

Moving On

Kinnaman and Matlock then go on to compare the amount of time Americans spend in front of screens to the experience of Jewish exiles in Babylon, surrounded by Internet distractions and multiple ideologies — what they label “digital Babylon”. Conversely, American Christians who resist screen time (in order to adhere to the authors’ definition of faithfulness) compare to the Jewish exiles who doubled-down in their adherance to a faith that stood in opposition to the surrounding culture.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

How would our Jewish siblings feel about having their Babylonian exile — prior to which they had their homes ransacked and destroyed, their temple burned to the ground, their walls decimated, and many of their family members killed or injured — compared to American kids hanging out on the Internet reading things that might make them have questions about their faith? That would be like saying Syrian refugees who lost everything in their recent and ongoing civil war compare to American kids spending too much time on their iPhones. The lack of empathy, the utter privilege, spilling out into the world from this book is staggering.