An Activist Faith Week 2: Being Thermostats
Reflections on Strength to Love Chapter 2, "Transformed Nonconformist"
Romans 12:2 (KJV): And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.
King, “Transformed Nonconformist:” “Most people, and Christians in particular, are thermometers that record or register the temperature of majority opinion, not thermostats that transform and regulate the temperature of society.”
Having done youth ministry for about a decade, Romans 12:2 and the metaphor of thermometers/thermostats were handy go-to’s to communicate the general principle of resisting peer pressure. At least in church spaces, being in alignment with God’s will is quite important, and separately, the idea that we should influence and transform the circles we’re in, instead of being passively transformed by said spaces, is also appealing.
Yet it’s also worth thinking what exactly are we supposed to influence, and what we’re supposed to avoid conforming to. My faith background growing up inculcated more of a fortress mentality: it assumed the outside world was a dangerous place, and that I should avoid its influences through prayer, church attendance, and generally proper behavior. There are certain logics I still hold from this upbringing that I appreciate: for example, while I will drink small amounts of alcohol at weddings, I generally abstain (for a mix of reasons). Even if occasionally I feel like I stand out (in the bad way) due to this, I can’t deny the health benefits.
And so I initially heard Romans 12:2 to justify caution with the outside world, which makes sense: if one defines it as the stereotypical Hollywood portrayal of a party scene (with the mix of drugs, alcohol, and decisions that are regretted the next morning), there’s legitimate concerns in there of safety, consent, and the like that are worth avoiding.
And even beyond stereotypes, there’s a lot of generally accepted wisdom that’s worth not conforming to. For example, I often hear that America’s military spending is 3.5% of total GDP, for example, and that’s frankly a ridiculous number. For comparison, the amount we invest in roads, bridges, and infrastructure is apparently only 2.3%, which means that we invest 1.5x more in the ability to eradicate another country’s bridge than to make sure that our own bridges don’t collapse on their own (and this is, uncomfortably, my closest point of commonality with several GOP politicians).
And even if you don’t agree with my specific examples, there’s probably something commonly accepted that you don’t quite like. So the general critique that there’s something broken isn’t wrong. However, fortress mentalities falter in assuming that these things can be safely kept out with high walls of reinforcing behavior. Oftentimes, while these spaces vehemently critique the outside, inside they promote a worldview that is unapologetically traditional, too often leading to disastrous and certainly not God-ordained outcomes as people let the first half of Romans 12:2 trump more basic concepts such as loving your neighbor as yourself.
Because the blunt reality is that church spaces are rarely the safe havens they purport to be. Even beyond the specific church scandals (and oh boy so many scandals), general movements outside the church tend to echo within the church walls, for example #MeToo becoming #ChurchToo. In my own ministry experiences, I’ve had to wonder how I welcome and lead new believers right as the church had ejected its pastoral staff because it was going through severe factionalization (not something the Apostle Paul encourages).
Which leads to this sermon, and to King, who deployed the same image much more vividly in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” It’s too good not to quote in very large chunks, so:
Yes, I love the church. How could I do otherwise? I am in the rather unique position of being the son, the grandson and the great grandson of preachers. Yes, I see the church as the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists.
There was a time when the church was very powerful—in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being “disturbers of the peace” and “outside agitators.” But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were “a colony of heaven,” called to obey God rather than man. Small in number, they were big in commitment. They were too God-intoxicated to be “astronomically intimidated.” By their effort and example they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contests.
Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's silent—and often even vocal—sanction of things as they are.
But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today's church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.
King deploys the thermostat metaphor, hearkening to Romans 12:2, differently than my church experience growing up: rather than avoiding the bad experiences from the world, we’re called to be within it and transform it for the better. This may come as a surprise, but even a lot of black churches didn’t really want to have anything to do with civil rights back in the 1960s: the majority opinion there, as well as most major church spaces, was that social ills like race prejudice were bad but something that only God will fix in his time. And even as King sat in Birmingham’s jail, other prominent church voices urged prayer and patience as an alternative solution. So when King notes that the church is being an “archdefender of the status quo,” he’s not making some ivory tower proclamation, he’s noting lived experience.
The other thing that’s worth noting, of course, is King’s warning that if the church doesn’t become thermostats it risks its very relevance. Because, some sixty-years later, even as the American church continues to rebel against everything the 1960s stirred up, it would love to have the general prominence and percentage of attendees it had at 1963. Simple things, like the fact that multiple church leaders not only joined the March on Washington but got to speak on the podium, just seem unimaginable when considering how much the church today is simply a shield for a political party’s positions, many of which are unpopular, or an obstacle for progress on many of the pressing cultural issues of our day.
So how should we properly understand the call to avoid conforming to the world? King re-interprets the Apostle Paul’s call away from the explicitly outside manifestations of evil that are easy to assume we oppose: it’s possible to measure, for example, how many expletives someone utters or other controllable behavior. Rather, it’s much more the sinful, selfish temptations that all of us struggle with no matter what worldview we espouse or religion we profess: the amount of times I want to hurl every curse under the sun at the person who just cut me off in traffic. Because it’s not external boogey-men that keeps us from suffering for others’ sake or from loving others as ourselves. The reasons that they’re focused, far from transforming people so that they can hear God better, is that these popular ideas and criticisms seemingly diminish the church’s power: partying on Saturday makes it less likely that one’s butt is in the pew on Sunday morning, and “poor behavior” can scare away the potential members that are viewed as more ideal, ignoring the fact that these ideas rarely seemed to bother Jesus during his earthly ministry.
Rather, King points this out in “Transformed Nonconformist:” As Christians we must never surrender our supreme loyalty to any time-bound custom or earth-bound idea, for at the heart of our universe is a higher reality—God and his kingdom of love—to which we must be conformed. The world we’re to avoid conforming to is internal as much as external: it’s about our own lust for control and power, alongside our willingness to hurt others to get what we want, factors that appear both inside and out of Christian community. So living a transformed life doesn’t have to mean avoiding swear words and alcohol and partying, but rather it means taking radical actions to demonstrate love for others and concern for the world.
And that also means challenging our own failings, prejudices, and blind spots, and placing actual people over ideologies. And this is hard. Even though I know that every person has fundamental worth through being God’s creation, it’s a challenge for me to think of certain politicians as my spiritual siblings who deserve fundamental kindness no matter what they say. Beyond that, it also means refusing to define someone’s worth through their bank account or whether they have a roof over their head, despite cultural values that place honor upon wealth (which is why the press reports Elon Musk’s views on matters where he is not an expert).
But to end on a slightly positive note, change can be possible. I commented in last week’s post about King’s relative failings, so I’ll just note here that, on the whole, King’s life story stands as proof as what a creative minority, more concerned about God’s call than about people’s judgments, can actually do to influence the course of history. And even if we set the bar lower, the general call to be more radical in our love for others and concern about the world can bear good fruit.