The Rise of Sub-Christianity
Introduction
The wreckage of evangelicalism is easy to spot. Fog machine spirituality. Revolt against confessionalism. Hyper-subjectivity. Truce with Sigmund Freud. Friends with Russell Moore. Degradation of obedience as legalism and sacraments as meaningless. Feminism so entrenched that it now passes for common theology. Forced diversity. Institutional gatekeepers that double as sanguinary tyrants. A movement that boasts of gospel-centeredness while neglecting the gospel of fuller consequence.
When left with such unprofitable chicanery—such thinness—it’s easy to understand why professing Christians are pining for more, wishing to see evangelicalism deposed. Some race to the Eastern Orthodox Church or the Roman Catholic Church, hoping that a new system of authority will compose a new nature, education, and habit of life. Others race in the opposite direction and adopt an anti-institutional bias, a full-on embrace of autonomy, insisting that no name, no power, no function, and no artificial institution has more virtue and wisdom than the sovereign self.
Still others drift into something different, a substance and mass that together constitutes a sub-Christianity. What is this? Sub-Christianity is a desertion of the real thing, while maintaining the label. It is to melt certain beliefs and practices into something new, at once a reactionary and liberalized “Christian” life. It is to invest with great power and authority certain habits that bastardize Christianity into a lesser version of the real thing.
Consider three mores that professing Christians openly practice and call Christian, but scripture energetically contradicts.
Three practices of sub-Christianity.
First, pray to AI instead of God
Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as praying to a machine. But there is such a thing as idolatry, namely, when a person parks a created thing into the temple of sublime exaltation. With Artificial Intelligence (AI), there is the irresistible pull to seek its help, and, in turn, forget to seek God’s help. So, if a child is sick, the parents go to AI for answers forgetting prayer to the Great Physician.
It’s important to understand how this happens and what’s the result.
How does this happen? Human nature craves assistance from a higher, mysterious, and unseen being. This is God’s design that leads his image bearers to pray and worship the Creator (Ps. 149:5). But, due to the sin nature, people have a tendency to create approximations—i.e., idols—that are more responsive on human terms (Ps. 97:7). These half-creations appear to have some characteristics of the divine, but they also do away with the characteristics people don’t like. So, gone is the waiting and the need for patient persistence in prayer (Lk. 18:1-8). Gone is the difficult answer and the need for humble submission (Job 40:2-5). Gone is the painful reform of reordering loves in confessional repentance (Acts 9:10-19). Now, when an immediate answer is needed, it is received. No need to bother God about that one.
What is the result of asking AI for support while ignoring God? To worship the wrong thing is to become the wrong thing (Ps. 115:4-8; 135:15-18). If you worship a chatbot, then you will trust the algorithm and grow deaf to the Word of God. If in everything, by prayer and supplication, you let your requests known to Grok, then the machine will guard your heart and mind (Phil. 4:6-7). If you give thanksgiving to an avatar, then you will become futile in your thinking and your foolish hearts are darkened (Rom. 1:21). If Claude’s thoughts are your thoughts, then Anthropic’s invisible attributes and power are perceived (Rom. 1:20).
If you pray to AI instead of the living God, what have you done? You’ve exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man (Rom. 1:23). On the surface, facts merely appeared in order like a procession marshaled by an omniscient herald. But what have you become? Someone possessed materially, but not spiritually. You know more about the sickness, and there is no harm on that front. But you’ve forgotten that you need the Resurrected Man to heal a sick child.
Second, pursue lust rather than resist
Even though Scripture clearly and repeatedly forbids sexual activity outside of marriage, and lusting after someone not your spouse (Col. 3:5), evangelicals think they can safely ignore such prohibitions. Church members, married and unmarried alike, use porn. Divorce fills the church. And young people create a church-based hook-up culture.
Evangelicals today think that personal, sexual morality is of minor moral significance. Why do they think this? They think that what they do with their bodies is personal and private. No one will get hurt, they mistakenly believe, and no one will find out. If it is sin at all, it’s just a minor sin with minor consequences. Shouldn’t we focus on issues with real consequences, like the Joos and the libs?
But this is a sub-Christian way of thinking. God’s word says the consequences of living in sexual sin are not minor. “On account of these things the wrath of God is coming” (Col. 3:6). There is no bigger consequence than living in sexual sin with no resistance to the flesh.
The Apostle John said, “Whoever makes a practice of sinning is of the devil, for the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil. 9 No one born of God makes a practice of sinning, for God's seed abides in him; and he cannot keep on sinning, because he has been born of God” (1 John 3:8-9).
The Apostle Paul said, “Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, 10 nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Cor. 6:9-10).
Just like praying to AI instead of God is less than Christianity, so too giving into lust without a fight is less than Christianity.
Third, rage instead of peace
The tendency in the church today is to let red pill rage rule the heart. And then, once you’ve worked up a fervor of outrage, you insist this response is “masculinity.” Christians increasingly respond to the insanity of the Left by taking, what they think are, red pills that help them see the world for what it really is. They see that society has lied about feminism and fatherlessness. They see God’s good design has been smothered by unstoppable forces. They see the gross injustice of the system. And then, they let the intense anger of outrage fill them.
The problem is that while some red pills help you see the world for what it is, some are laced with poison. The poison pills make people think they are seeing what’s true. But, it’s put into an untrue frame, or it’s organized into an untrue system, or true facts are presented with an untrue disposition.
The Colossian church lived in a society of lies too. Paul tells them to put off wrath (Col. 3:8) and put on the peace of Christ (Col. 3:15). Christians must not allow the root of bitterness or hatred toward others fester in their hearts. The peace of Christ must rule their hearts. Jesus said in John 14:27, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you.”
The peace of Christ is other-worldly because it is eternal salvation. Second Thessalonians 3:16 calls Christ the Lord of Peace. The new man, the Christian person, lives in the sphere of gospel peace. The peace of Christ holds sway over the new creation, over the whole of the new man, such that letting wrath rule your heart is less than Christianity.
Conclusion
Unless your righteousness exceeds that of sub-Christianity, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Christ told the Pharisees it’s a bad bargain to trade in utter falsehoods. They made the temple of God unrecognizable. The worship of God became a colossal combination of self-importance, hypocrisy, and greed. Jesus said to them, “But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut the kingdom of heaven in people's faces. For you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in” (Mt. 23:13).
Sub-Christianity hides behind the colorable pretext that the success of the modern church depends on creating an atmosphere, manufacturing a mentality, and assuming a point of view that is virile enough to survive the unique threats of the current moment. But, when praying to idols, sleeping with prostitutes, and raging against enemies are passed off as Christianity, it suggests an enemy has tunneled underneath our stronghold, snuck into the cathedral, and replaced devotion with counterfeits. As Shakespeare put in in the Merchant of Venice, “There is no vice so simple but assumes/Some mark of virtue on his outward parts/How many cowards, whose hearts are all false/As stairs of sand, wear yet upon their chins.” We must call these things what they really are, a false religion of farce and folly, a destroyer of church and country, an enemy of truth and liberty.
Jason Cherry is an elder at Trinity Reformed Church in Huntsville, Alabama, as well as a teacher and lecturer of literature, history, and economics at Providence Classical School in Huntsville. He graduated from Reformed Theological Seminary with an MA in Religion and is the author of The Culture of Conversionism and the History of the Altar Call and The Making of Evangelical Spirituality.
The wreckage of evangelicalism is easy to spot. Fog machine spirituality. Revolt against confessionalism. Hyper-subjectivity. Truce with Sigmund Freud. Friends with Russell Moore. Degradation of obedience as legalism and sacraments as meaningless. Feminism so entrenched that it now passes for common theology. Forced diversity. Institutional gatekeepers that double as sanguinary tyrants. A movement that boasts of gospel-centeredness while neglecting the gospel of fuller consequence.
When left with such unprofitable chicanery—such thinness—it’s easy to understand why professing Christians are pining for more, wishing to see evangelicalism deposed. Some race to the Eastern Orthodox Church or the Roman Catholic Church, hoping that a new system of authority will compose a new nature, education, and habit of life. Others race in the opposite direction and adopt an anti-institutional bias, a full-on embrace of autonomy, insisting that no name, no power, no function, and no artificial institution has more virtue and wisdom than the sovereign self.
Still others drift into something different, a substance and mass that together constitutes a sub-Christianity. What is this? Sub-Christianity is a desertion of the real thing, while maintaining the label. It is to melt certain beliefs and practices into something new, at once a reactionary and liberalized “Christian” life. It is to invest with great power and authority certain habits that bastardize Christianity into a lesser version of the real thing.
Consider three mores that professing Christians openly practice and call Christian, but scripture energetically contradicts.
Three practices of sub-Christianity.
First, pray to AI instead of God
Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as praying to a machine. But there is such a thing as idolatry, namely, when a person parks a created thing into the temple of sublime exaltation. With Artificial Intelligence (AI), there is the irresistible pull to seek its help, and, in turn, forget to seek God’s help. So, if a child is sick, the parents go to AI for answers forgetting prayer to the Great Physician.
It’s important to understand how this happens and what’s the result.
How does this happen? Human nature craves assistance from a higher, mysterious, and unseen being. This is God’s design that leads his image bearers to pray and worship the Creator (Ps. 149:5). But, due to the sin nature, people have a tendency to create approximations—i.e., idols—that are more responsive on human terms (Ps. 97:7). These half-creations appear to have some characteristics of the divine, but they also do away with the characteristics people don’t like. So, gone is the waiting and the need for patient persistence in prayer (Lk. 18:1-8). Gone is the difficult answer and the need for humble submission (Job 40:2-5). Gone is the painful reform of reordering loves in confessional repentance (Acts 9:10-19). Now, when an immediate answer is needed, it is received. No need to bother God about that one.
What is the result of asking AI for support while ignoring God? To worship the wrong thing is to become the wrong thing (Ps. 115:4-8; 135:15-18). If you worship a chatbot, then you will trust the algorithm and grow deaf to the Word of God. If in everything, by prayer and supplication, you let your requests known to Grok, then the machine will guard your heart and mind (Phil. 4:6-7). If you give thanksgiving to an avatar, then you will become futile in your thinking and your foolish hearts are darkened (Rom. 1:21). If Claude’s thoughts are your thoughts, then Anthropic’s invisible attributes and power are perceived (Rom. 1:20).
If you pray to AI instead of the living God, what have you done? You’ve exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man (Rom. 1:23). On the surface, facts merely appeared in order like a procession marshaled by an omniscient herald. But what have you become? Someone possessed materially, but not spiritually. You know more about the sickness, and there is no harm on that front. But you’ve forgotten that you need the Resurrected Man to heal a sick child.
Second, pursue lust rather than resist
Even though Scripture clearly and repeatedly forbids sexual activity outside of marriage, and lusting after someone not your spouse (Col. 3:5), evangelicals think they can safely ignore such prohibitions. Church members, married and unmarried alike, use porn. Divorce fills the church. And young people create a church-based hook-up culture.
Evangelicals today think that personal, sexual morality is of minor moral significance. Why do they think this? They think that what they do with their bodies is personal and private. No one will get hurt, they mistakenly believe, and no one will find out. If it is sin at all, it’s just a minor sin with minor consequences. Shouldn’t we focus on issues with real consequences, like the Joos and the libs?
But this is a sub-Christian way of thinking. God’s word says the consequences of living in sexual sin are not minor. “On account of these things the wrath of God is coming” (Col. 3:6). There is no bigger consequence than living in sexual sin with no resistance to the flesh.
The Apostle John said, “Whoever makes a practice of sinning is of the devil, for the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil. 9 No one born of God makes a practice of sinning, for God's seed abides in him; and he cannot keep on sinning, because he has been born of God” (1 John 3:8-9).
The Apostle Paul said, “Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, 10 nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Cor. 6:9-10).
Just like praying to AI instead of God is less than Christianity, so too giving into lust without a fight is less than Christianity.
Third, rage instead of peace
The tendency in the church today is to let red pill rage rule the heart. And then, once you’ve worked up a fervor of outrage, you insist this response is “masculinity.” Christians increasingly respond to the insanity of the Left by taking, what they think are, red pills that help them see the world for what it really is. They see that society has lied about feminism and fatherlessness. They see God’s good design has been smothered by unstoppable forces. They see the gross injustice of the system. And then, they let the intense anger of outrage fill them.
The problem is that while some red pills help you see the world for what it is, some are laced with poison. The poison pills make people think they are seeing what’s true. But, it’s put into an untrue frame, or it’s organized into an untrue system, or true facts are presented with an untrue disposition.
The Colossian church lived in a society of lies too. Paul tells them to put off wrath (Col. 3:8) and put on the peace of Christ (Col. 3:15). Christians must not allow the root of bitterness or hatred toward others fester in their hearts. The peace of Christ must rule their hearts. Jesus said in John 14:27, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you.”
The peace of Christ is other-worldly because it is eternal salvation. Second Thessalonians 3:16 calls Christ the Lord of Peace. The new man, the Christian person, lives in the sphere of gospel peace. The peace of Christ holds sway over the new creation, over the whole of the new man, such that letting wrath rule your heart is less than Christianity.
Conclusion
Unless your righteousness exceeds that of sub-Christianity, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Christ told the Pharisees it’s a bad bargain to trade in utter falsehoods. They made the temple of God unrecognizable. The worship of God became a colossal combination of self-importance, hypocrisy, and greed. Jesus said to them, “But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut the kingdom of heaven in people's faces. For you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in” (Mt. 23:13).
Sub-Christianity hides behind the colorable pretext that the success of the modern church depends on creating an atmosphere, manufacturing a mentality, and assuming a point of view that is virile enough to survive the unique threats of the current moment. But, when praying to idols, sleeping with prostitutes, and raging against enemies are passed off as Christianity, it suggests an enemy has tunneled underneath our stronghold, snuck into the cathedral, and replaced devotion with counterfeits. As Shakespeare put in in the Merchant of Venice, “There is no vice so simple but assumes/Some mark of virtue on his outward parts/How many cowards, whose hearts are all false/As stairs of sand, wear yet upon their chins.” We must call these things what they really are, a false religion of farce and folly, a destroyer of church and country, an enemy of truth and liberty.
Jason Cherry is an elder at Trinity Reformed Church in Huntsville, Alabama, as well as a teacher and lecturer of literature, history, and economics at Providence Classical School in Huntsville. He graduated from Reformed Theological Seminary with an MA in Religion and is the author of The Culture of Conversionism and the History of the Altar Call and The Making of Evangelical Spirituality.
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