Conservative Christian NPCs?

Can Christians be just as thoughtless and reactionary as others?

One of the new words I’ve seen coined lately is ‘NPC’, short for ‘Non-Player Character’. It originates in the world of computer gaming: an NPC is a character which is played by the computer rather than a human person. They usually act completely predictably - they don’t have their own opinions, initiative, or anything. They simply say and do exactly what they were programmed to do.

It is, perhaps, no surprise that the word has been taken by people on the online right, who use it to describe those who simply spout the ‘correct’ opinions without any critical thought. So, someone who doesn’t have more to say than slogans such as “refugees welcome” or “transwomen are women” is an NPC: they are simply repeating opinions they have been ‘programmed’ to have, rather than thinking critically about it.

I can see why it’s caught on (to some extent at least): I am often astonished by how little people seem to think about what they are saying, and how many people simply can’t handle alternative opinions. It lies behind cancel culture - they know the argument can’t be won by making a more convincing and persuasive case, so they have to use other means.

Whatever the terminology, it does seem to be the case today that people tend to spout opinions which come from their particular ‘tribe’, rather than thinking carefully about all the different options and weighing up the evidence. I’ve spoken about several of these issues before - the Israel / Palestine question is a good case in point. Most of those on the left support Palestine, while most of those on the right support Israel. There doesn’t seem to be much scope for nuance and complexity.

What concerns me, and what I want to write about today, is how even Christians seem to be susceptible to this kind of ‘tribal’ thinking. I fear that a lot of Christians - and I’m talking about conservative Christians here, those who actually believe in the Bible - don’t really think through what the Bible says, but simply say what they have been taught to say.

I believe that we as Christians need to do better if we are to reach people in our current cultural moment.

Christian NPC opinions

One of the features of NPCs is that they don’t think issues through themselves, they simply repeat opinions which their tribe says they should have. I believe that, in certain circles, the Bible and Christian teaching has just become another kind of tribe: conservative Christians hold certain opinions and say certain things, not because they have thought it through from the Bible, but simply because it’s what they have been taught to believe.

The truth is, I know what your average conservative Christian will believe about a whole range of issues, in the same way that so-called NPCs have predictable opinions. For example, I know that every conservative Christian will believe that marriage is the lifelong union of one man and one woman - which rules out same-sex marriage. They will also believe that God created male and female, which rules out transgenderism.

I don’t want to name names here, because I think that would be unfair, but there are a fair number of conservative Christian commentators in the alternative media who come out with these very predictable opinions on a regular basis.

The problem is, as I see it, that they are not really engaging with the Bible. Defining marriage in the way that I mentioned above is fine as far as it goes, but the Bible has a lot more to say about the issue. You can’t reduce what the Bible says about sex, relationships and marriage to a soundbite! When it is reduced like that, it feels to me as if the power is taken out of the Bible: rather than the living and active Word of God, it has become dry and dusty, reduced to a set of conservative soundbites rather than speaking in all its fullness.

Let me home in on the issue of marriage to explain why I am uncomfortable here.

Case study: Marriage

Recently, I’ve heard a lot of people talking about marriage being the ‘lifelong union of a man and a woman’. You can barely go five minutes listening to a conservative Christian commentator before they say it. (OK, I exaggerate, but it’s said a lot.) The problem is, that’s not all the Bible has to say about marriage - and, in fact, it’s not really even the most important part.

I am fascinated by marriage and relationships. I’m quite good at picking up on tension - if there is tension within a couple, I’m often able to spot it. One of the things I’ve begun to realise over the last few years is that there are a lot of people who are unhappily married. In fact, I can think of several Christians couples off the top of my head who are not happily married. They may be Christian, they may have always been faithful to their spouse, and they may believe in the ‘correct’ definition of marriage — but they are still unhappy. Why should that be the case?

The answer is that they’re not thinking about the Biblical definition of love; they’re thinking about the soundbite definition. A happy marriage is built on love - something which the soundbite doesn’t mention at all. I honestly believe that many couples out there, even many Christian couples, think that all they need to do to keep God happy is to get married to one person (of the opposite sex, of course) and then doggedly stay married to them. It’s as if love doesn’t come into the equation.

If that wasn’t bad enough, there’s more: the question of how we we relate to people we’re not married to. When I was at Bible college a few years ago, there was a somewhat strange atmosphere when it came to men and women. It didn’t really become clear to me until I was looking back on the experience, but it was tangible: men and women were not expected to be friends. As in, there was a kind of unwritten rule that men and women should speak to one another from a ‘safe’ distance. We rarely spoke about the need to be family, how we were literally brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ and all that entailed for our relationships. I honestly think this is one of the biggest blind spots of the church today - God does not want men and women to hold one another at a ‘safe’ distance in the church!

The point I’m making here is, what the Bible teaches about marriage and relationships cannot be reduced to a soundbite. If we do reduce it, we distort the message of the Bible - and that is a serious business.

We have to continually guard against the “yeast of the Pharisees” (Matthew 16:6): that is, the belief that we can please God in our own strength, by our own efforts, simply by following a list of rules. If marriage is reduced to the soundbite definition - that is, getting married to one person, and sticking with them no matter what - then that might be doable on our own strength. But if marriage is about loving your spouse day by day, that’s something we very much need God’s help for (speaking from personal experience!)

If you’d like to explore this more, I talk about the problems of Pharisaism and the Law in my book Confused by Grace.

There is another problem with this kind of NPC / Soundbite Christianity.

Sympathy for the questioners?

A few years ago, there was a big movement of people who had conservative Christians roots but were very publicly moving away from those roots. People such as Rachel Held Evans and Greg Boyd were popular in this movement. In fact, I actually reviewed Greg Boyd’s book Benefit of the Doubt a few years ago.

What’s interesting to me now, looking back at that review nearly ten years later, is that I have a lot more sympathy for people like him than I did at the time. That’s not to say that I agree with him - my critique still stands. But I can see now, in a way I didn’t back then, how bad the culture is in the church that they were reacting against.

Back then, I said (naively):

I would consider myself to be a naturally inquisitive kind of person – I ask the awkward questions, I’m not satisfied with a “because it just is” answer. Many of the people I went to theological college (seminary) with were the same.

At the time I believed that most Christians were like me - they didn’t just want pat, soundbite answers but they wanted to know the truth. They weren’t satisfied with the answer “because the Bible says so”, but they wanted to know the inner logic of it all. It turns out that I was wrong - the last few years have demonstrated that a hundred times over! Many Christians aren’t really interested in working out what the Bible says about contemporary issues; all they want is a simple soundbite which they can tick off.

“What does the Bible say about marriage? OK - I’ve done that - tick. What does the Bible say about obeying the government? OK - I’m doing that - tick.” And so on.

Truth, not power

I can understand why people like Evans and Boyd reacted in the way they did against the church establishment. Once again, that’s not to say I agree with their conclusions - they were wrong then and they are wrong now. Nonetheless, the church itself must shoulder at least part of the blame for being content to give simple “the Bible says…” soundbites without thinking through why the Bible says these things and the complexities involved.

At the end of the day, if all the church has is a few “the Bible says…” soundbites, how is that different to the NPCs who simply regurgitate what they’ve been taught to say? All we’re left with is a power play - which particular tribe you’re going to align with and whose authority you’re going to accept.

Christians, on the other hand, believe that the Bible is not simply correct in some kind of abstract mathematical way, but rather that the Bible speaks the same truth as the world because they are authored by the same hand. When God gives laws and commandments, they are not simply morally correct; they describe his perfect will for our lives. However, he has given us the task and the privilege of thinking through why they are correct.

Francis Schaeffer helped me to see this: he recognised that Christians have nothing to fear from reality. Because God is the author of reality and the author of the Bible, Christians can have absolute confidence that Biblical teaching will always ‘work’ better in life than anything else. There is no better way to live. Sometimes Christians hide behind ‘the Bible says’, because they are scared that they might find God’s ways are not best after all. But they’re only scared of their soundbite being exposed for the shallow thing it is. Those who are truly rooted in the Scriptures have no need to be scared - God’s ways will ALWAYS prove themselves to be best.

The world at the moment has lots of competing authorities vying for our allegiance. Another insight from Schaeffer is that Christianity is not simply true, it is THE TRUTH. There is no deeper or more fundamental reality than the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. If we want people to accept the message of Christianity, I believe what we need to do is show people how Christianity is the truth - how it is not simply ‘true’ but the key to reality and enjoying life in this world.

This means we might need to do some hard thinking about the Bible, Christian teaching, and the way the world is. That’s what I started Sacred Musings for. Let’s keep thinking.