American evangelicalism, which has boasted in creedlessness, is failing chiefly through the lack of them. In one sense, of course, fixed creeds are inescapable. The moment you take a stand against creeds, you’ve firmly fixed your own. You stand by it, under it, and for it. You identify with it. This is what creeds do. They establish a framework consensus.

One misconception about creeds is that they produce narrow Christians. The reverse is the truth. G.K. Chesterton explains, “For while men are and should be various, there must be some communication between them if they are to get any pleasure out of their variety … If we all start with the agreement that the sun and moon exist, we can talk about our different visions of them.” In other words, we can’t talk about our differences until we espouse our agreements.

When Christians agree on a core, they may respect differences elsewhere. Chesterton said, without the “liberty of dogma, you have the tyranny of taste.” In other words, without the creed, it becomes about the tyranny of preference, which, in evangelicalism, is announced through catchphrases. Evangelical jargon—doing life together, God spoke to me, God laid it on my heart—is the replacement for the creeds. The cocksure pride of evolving past creeds foreruns a paralyzed inability to get beyond clichés. This is why the ubiquitous tyranny of personal preferences stalks the American church.

Why does it happen like this—that the creedless impose the “tyranny of taste” (as Chesterton called it)? Consider the effects of those who embrace a creed and those who don’t. In the case of those who profess a creed, they pronounce openly and unabashedly. This creates a big tent for all confessors—birds of a feather flock together, so the saying goes, even if the birds lack identical appearance. The creed determines the essential DNA that connects them all, allowing for cooperation between all the different-looking birds of that feather. But for the creedless, whose creed is pretended tolerance, the tyranny of unwritten rules causes the birds of the scarlet red feather to form a clique and the birds of the ruby red to form another. Once the cliques are formed, with their podcasts and protests, they shun heresy or disagreement. They cast stones at the candy apple red clique, chirping about tolerance in a strongly-worded Relevant Magazine article.[1]

The lack of a creed means the different groups are always competing to establish the essential DNA. Without the recurring figures of church history, their ballast is their whims. The problem is there is no such thing as a corporate whim. By quoting the Apostles Creed or the Nicene Creed you embrace the bond that held together Augustine, Athanasius, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Wesley, Charles Spurgeon, C.S. Lewis, and Martyn Lloyd-Jones. Lest you misunderstand, that bond is Jesus Christ. Without that bond, each church—No! each professing Christian—gravitates to his own idea. This doesn’t work for the simple reason that we were told to be the body of Christ (1 Cor. 12:12-31). We were told to be the temple of God (1 Cor. 3:9, 16f). That’s part of the reason we recite an ecumenical creed every Lord’s Day, because a people without root beliefs aren’t a people.

Jason Cherry is an elder at Trinity Reformed Church in Huntsville, Alabama, as well as a teacher and lecturer of literature, American 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 book The Culture of Conversionism and the History of the Altar Call, now available on Amazon.

[1] G.K.Chesterton, The Miscellany of Man (New York; Dodd, Mead and Company, 2017 Orig. 1912), 47ff.