Buyer Beware!
Don't Buy into Counterfeit Christianity
A couple years ago, there was a story in our local news about a single mother who did not have a lot of money but really wanted to take her children to a Packer game. She found tickets online for a really reasonable price, and paid the seller cash for them. But when she and her kids arrived at Lambeau Field, they could not get in because she had been scammed. The tickets were counterfeit.
I like to do my daily walk on the treadmill around 10:00 at night. (Don’t judge me. I am a night owl who has no ambition in the morning but gets a second wind late at night.) Every Sunday evening at 11:00, channel 4, our local NBC station broadcasts a message from Joel Osteen. I am blessed to belong to a church committed to accurate biblical teaching, so I have known for a long time that Joel Osteen was a false teacher. I think one pastor even mentioned him by name when preaching on the topic of false teaching. But on a couple recent Sunday nights, I came upstairs from the treadmill and Joel Osteen was just coming on. Dad had been watching the news but had fallen asleep so the television was just on. The first time this happened, as I was rehydrating myself, I decided to send up a quick, silent prayer for protection from the Holy Spirit, but to just listen to what Joel Osteen was teaching. In so doing, I could see how people less fortunate than me, people who don’t belong to a church committed to accurate biblical teaching, perhaps people who are sad or lonely just flipping through channels, could be fooled by him. It is not that everything he says is untrue. For example, this first sermon I saw was titled “Your Place of Blessing.” He recounted the story of Hagar, Sarai’s servant in the book of Genesis, who ran away with her young son Ishmael because Sarai was mistreating her. But an angel appeared to her, comforted her but told her to return to Sarai. Joel Osteen used this story to illustrate that God may be calling us to stay in an unpleasant environment because it is his place of blessing for us. It is true that God may have a purpose for keeping us in an unpleasant situation. The problem is, Joel Osteen puts “me” at the center. How can God bless Me? What is God’s destiny for me? It’s all about me, me, me with a little bit of God and Scripture sprinkled in. What a stark contrast from the sermons at my church where God is at the center. But if you are lost and haven’t had the good fortune of receiving good biblical teaching, you may not realize that Joel Osteen’s version of the Christian gospel is counterfeit. It occurred to me after watching this sermon that at some point, a blog post warning about counterfeit religion was in order, especially because the overarching purpose of my blog is to show how Christian Nationalism is also counterfeit Christianity.
Obviously the Packer ticket analogy is not a perfect analogy. For one thing, counterfeit religion is on a completely separate level of seriousness from counterfeit Packer tickets. For another, as Russel Moore discusses in his book Losing our Religion, the sad reality is that the most ardent Christian Nationalists knowingly and willfully buy into counterfeit religion because their lust for earthly power, and a commitment to the ideology of white supremacy has hardened their hearts to the point that Jesus himself is angrily rejected, accused of being liberal, and because identifying as Christian based on cultural heritage is a lot less costly—at least in the sense of our worldly comfort—than the heart transformation through faith which Jesus requires. In fact, these ardent Christian Nationalists have not only bought into this counterfeit religion: they sell it to vulnerable people for personal gain. Unfortunately, while we should pray for these sellers to have a change of heart, it may be that only God can reach these people. But so many of our friends, neighbors and loved ones, I believe more closely resemble the vulnerable mother. Christian Nationalism is so engrained in our culture and history that we don’t realize we are consuming counterfeit religion.
The U.S. Secret Service, in addition to protecting the president, also investigates financial transactions involving counterfeit currency. But their advice for helping banks and businesses spot counterfeit currency does not list every example of counterfeit currency they have seen. This would be impractical and counterproductive. Instead, they focus on what genuine currency looks like, as being well-versed in what genuine currency looks like will make all the clever attempts of criminals to create counterfeit currency easier to recognize. A similar principal can be applied to religion, and our training in what real Christianity looks like occurs when we read the Bible.
I do believe in the grace of Christ. Unlike the ticket checkers at the Packer game, Jesus will be able to sort out whose hearts have accepted Christ, even if they made mistakes, accidentally drank a little of the Kool-Aid sold by ardent Christian Nationalists. In fact, if you are a white American, it is virtually impossible not to inadvertently drink a little. I believe a vulnerable person whose heart is in the right place will not be denied salvation. But people in positions of power and influence have saturated media platforms with so much counterfeit religious teaching and teaching that is so slick and convincing to people who haven’t taken the time to really study the Bible, that they may not even realize they are consuming counterfeit religion, and by the time they do, they may be so intoxicated by the Kool-Aid that their hearts are hardened and they are no longer interested in studying the Bible or following the true teachings of Christ. I have even heard stories of people who at one time attended churches with good, biblically sound teaching, but were so enamored with Christian Nationalism that they left and shopped around for churches that aligned with this ideology. The sad thing is, this ideology will be proven worthless, both in this life when, whether they realize it or not, they are angry and bitter, never experiencing the peace that passes understanding, and in the next when they may not get to enjoy eternal life if their hearts are so hardened that they never truly accept Christ. In fact, in this brilliant essay written by a Black activist, Jonathan Walton, it doesn’t even deserve to be called Christian at all. Instead, he calls it White American Folk Religion (WAFR) “a race, class, gender-based hierarchy that hijacks the Christian label to sanction abuse, greed and violence, and then absolve leaders who live lives contrary to the teachings of Jesus and wield power in opposition to God’s plan for the world.”
At the end of the story about the mother given counterfeit Packer tickets, the reporter gave advice to prevent this from happening to others. Only buy tickets from trusted sites where the legitimacy of each ticket is verified. Always use a credit card so that you have recourse if you are scammed. If a price is too good to be true, it probably is.
Perhaps, similar advice should be applied to religious teaching. The Bible should be the final authority in all spiritual matters. Given that the Bible is similar to the U.S. Constitution in that it was written at a particular time of history and therefore could not explicitly address every situation that would come up in our modern culture like—stem-cell research for example—and since God intended for us to worship in community with others, we can consult other sources, but Scripture must always have the final word when determining spiritual truth. Prayer and a willingness to be still and listen to the Holy Spirit is the best insurance to guard our hearts against false teaching. In Luke 3:8, John the Baptist tells the crowds coming to be baptized, “”Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not begin to say to yourselves, “We have Abraham as our Father.” For I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham.”” In other words, your cultural heritage or family lineage won’t save you, only a genuine commitment to turn away from sin and follow Christ. If a pastor’s teachings don’t align with this explicit truth from Scripture, if they are preaching a gospel that is too convenient to be true,—it always seems to line up perfectly with your political views,—it probably is.