Don't Normalize Christianity

The Indigenizing Principle, Pilgrim Principle, and the Donkey God

When I was a youth group kid in the late 90s and early 2000s, Evangelical Christianity hit the height of “mimic culture.” Whatever pop culture came up with, we found a way to mimic it. When Survivor became a cultural phenomenon, we took the logo and baptized it for our latest youth group retreat or camp. When big band swing made an unlikely cultural comeback, we got the Supertones.

Our mimicking of pop culture was inevitably cheesy, but, hey, we had fun doing it. Beyond the cheese factor, I think it was largely harmless, although much less evangelistically effective than we sometimes hoped.

I think the primary problem with the mimic culture of Y2K youth groups was the subconscious messaging that our goal ought to be normalization. Yes, we had “Jesus Freak,” but we also wanted the world to realize that we weren’t that weird. We weren’t that different from them.

Photo by Matt Botsford on Unsplash

Andrew Walls’ Two Principles

The great historian of Christian missions in the last century, Andrew Walls, identified two sometimes contrary principles in Christianity.

First is the indigenizing principle. The message of the gospel is that Christ receives us as we are. The Apostles, following the Spirit’s leadership, made one of the most important decisions of Christian history when they decided that Gentiles did not need to Judaize to become followers of Christ. We remain who we are when we come to Christ—human beings, conditioned and enculturated by specific times and places.

Second is the pilgrim principle. Even as the message of the gospel takes us as we are, it also separates us from the world. We become pilgrims or exiles in a world that is not our home. Our values become different from the values of our unbelieving neighbors. While we remain in the world, we no longer belong to the world.

Living out both the indigenizing principle and the pilgrim principle simultaneously, in one sense, is the entire battle of progressive sanctification. Yet, we often fail by emphasizing one principle more than the other. If we neglect the indigenizing principle, then we will become “holier than thou” legalists who seem phony to the world around us. On the other hand, if we neglect the pilgrim principle, we risk creating an odd mimic culture that really doesn’t offer the world anything unique and we seem phony to the world around us.

We need the pilgrim principle

While everyone individually and ecclesiastically has their own unique struggles, I think that on the whole we as Evangelical Christians are still recovering from our Y2K mimic culture. Perhaps I’m just speaking for those of us Millennials who lived it, but I think there remains a subconscious emphasis on the “normalness” of Christianity.

But Christianity is not worshiping a generic God, loving your neighbor, and becoming a better person. Christianity is weird.

If you heard the message of Christianity as if for the first time, it would likely sound as strange to you as the cult of Zorp, the Lizard God.

We believe that a Judean man from the first century is in fact the Creator of the Universe, and even though he was executed by the Romans as a rebel against Caesar, he is alive. He is seated at this moment at the right hand of God the Father and will return at any moment to judge the world and renew creation.

The earliest depiction of the crucifixion of Jesus, the Alexamenos graffito found in the Palatine Museum in Rome.

Worshiping the Donkey God

That message was weird in the first century, and it remains weird in the twenty-first century. The first artistic depiction of Christ’s crucifixion speaks to this, the Alexamenos graffito found in Rome. In this crude sketch on the walls, made in the second century, the “artist” depicts Jesus on the cross with the head of a donkey and writes below the picture, “Alexamenos worships his god.” (See above.)

The artist mocks Alexamenos’ worship of Christ because of the weirdness of a Roman worshiping a crucified Jew, and if Christianity was not the foundational truth of reality, then the artist would have been right to do so. The story is ludicrous, unless it is real.

While there has recently been a conservative movement in the West to acknowledge once again the centrality of Christianity to Western culture, bolstered by interesting voices like Tom Holland and Jordan Peterson, we must remember that ultimately what has made Christianity attractive for over twenty centuries is not its “normalness” but its weirdness.

Only when we wholeheartedly embrace the uniqueness of the Christian message do we have anything to offer the world.