Tulip-Picking and the Stories We Tell

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything on here, and I’m wanting to ease back into it. No promises on frequency, but I’m planning to at least occasionally post some thoughts I don’t have another natural outlet for.

Recently, I was perusing a hot-button book making the case that the evangelical church is being hijacked by left-leaning political interests. At the same time, I was watching a documentary making the exact opposite case, that the evangelical church has been hijacked by the right. It has me reflecting on our love of narratives and the ways forming narratives poorly leads to some of the issues I see in how we relate to each other as Christians and human beings.

A simple observation to start: the world is complicated, and most of its subsidiary parts are also complicated. Social groups involve millions of individuals, and even if we’re focused on powerbrokers and influencers within those groups, we’re talking about hundreds or thousands of people, often with different loci of power and influence. This complexity is certainly true when we discuss something like “the evangelical church in the United States.” We are talking about something like fifty million Americans in tens of thousands of churches in hundreds of denominations (or non-denominations). We’re discussing leaders as diverse as Andy Stanley, John MacArthur, Joyce Meyer, and John Piper. Which is to say: a complicated, diverse group.

One danger of such complexity is that it is possible to construct almost any narrative and find ample evidence to support it. Imagine a field of tulips. I might pick a hundred red tulips from the field and then make the case that “red tulips are taking over!” I might do the same for yellow or purple (which is, obviously, the color that is the true threat). There are plenty of data points on which to hang whichever story I choose.

Now, those who are familiar with logic or statistics will be nodding along. After all, they will remind us, this is the problem with single data points. The plural of “anecdote” is not “data.” A single story, or even a hundred stories, does not equate to a pattern, which is why we need more generalized data. Yet when dealing with social trends, such data is often impossible to find or measure. People can’t even agree on what an evangelical actually is, let alone conduct the sort of randomized, detailed survey of them it would take to make real assessments of general trends.

So what do we do in such a situation? Well, I think it first and foremost requires modesty, that cousin of humility which hesitates to make sweeping claims. People don’t like modesty because we want easy narratives that tell us how to live in the world. The problem is, to abandon modesty in our claims is in fact to embrace the sort of pride that inevitably leads to downfalls.

Consider the two pieces of media I mentioned earlier and their contradictory arguments. What is a modest claim? Well, there are some evangelical leaders that have certainly seemed to move leftward in their political and cultural rhetoric, such as the aforementioned Andy Stanley. There are other leaders that have seemed to move culturally and politically rightward, such as John MacArthur. And some have stayed pretty much where they always were, which could be to the left or right of where we find ourselves.

We almost certainly find one of those narratives more persuasive than the other. We always will. When looking at an ink blot, I’m going to see some images more clearly. Yet that doesn’t actually say much about reality; what it says is something about me. If I feel things are moving leftward, that is probably because I lean to the right. If I’m worried about a rightward turn, that reveals my more leftward inclinations. The patterns we find in data tend to reflect the patterns of our presuppositions and fears.

Why does modesty matter? Well, in large part, it is because without it we will end up treating people in wrong ways. I’ve watched church communities get wrecked by individuals or groups who are so invested in a singular story that they can’t recognize the complexities of the world where we live. Who are convinced of some political or cultural drift that isn’t actually there, or to read a specific individual as an example of a supposed sweeping trend rather than understanding them for who they actually are. 

What’s more, such narrative immodesty will often be used to excuse other errors. This danger is certainly a threat for both extremes in the evangelical world, both so convinced they are the persecuted minority standing against the rising tide that they excuse all sorts of questionable behavior in the name of protecting themselves.

None of which means such works as the two I’ve been pondering are useless. They are often telling true stories about individuals or groups within the larger whole. We should mark changes in the thinking of influential people and be mindful of how that will shape their ministry and thought. But when we turn that into a sweeping generalization, we take something that starts as a useful point of light and turn it into a blinding darkness.