What Did You Plan To Be Hated For?

Christians are no longer hated for grace, but for nature

“Martyrdom of Ridley and Latimer, 1555”. Ridley and Latimer were burned at the stake on 16th of October, 468 years ago this week.

Christians expect to be hated. But what do we expect to be hated for?

When I was in secondary school, (2004-2011—simpler times, dear reader), I think there were generally three things which would rile people up when it came to my faith.

The first was the exclusivity of the Gospel. Telling people that we were all sinners in need of saving, whose good works counted for nothing, and who could only be saved by faith in Christ, offended even the sensibilities of my fellow teenage boys. 

The second was personal piety. I was doubtless not as good a witness on this score but, in God’s goodness, my relatively pious lifestyle was evident enough to generate a good deal of mockery.

The third (closely related to the second) was personal love for Jesus. The most mockery I ever received was after introducing some friends to dc Talk’s “Jesus Freak” whilst on a school residential. Perhaps not the best idea in hindsight, admittedly—they found it eye-wateringly hilarious. The idea of expressing specific and personal devotion to Jesus of Nazareth, of saying “I love Jesus” or “I’m a Jesus Freak”,  was just too much (and, let’s be honest, reading those phrases probably still makes most of us cringe). It was quite meta, really—sitting there as a Christian, being mocked for listening to a song about being mocked for being a Christian.

I am grateful that I was well prepared for all this as a teenager. The teaching I received in evangelical youth work was very clear that I would be persecuted—hated, even—for being a Christian. And, in general, it was assumed that such persecution would be due to the above reasons.

We could group all of these causes into the realm of “grace”. They all arise from the unexpected and undeserved interruption of God into history. The fallen human heart recoils at the suggestion of its sin, the rejection of its good works, the offer of unconditional forgiveness, and the possibility of a transformed life.

Being hated on account of grace is a thoroughly biblical expectation—the Gospel is after all, in the Apostle’s words, a scandal: “Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block [skandalon] to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” (1 Cor. 1:22-23). All forms of human pride are dashed to pieces on the rocks of the cross.

Accordingly, there is a clear New Testament imperative for Christians to ensure that they do not put unnecessary stumbling blocks in the way of the divinely appointed stumbling block that is Christ. Christians are to live a quiet life (1 Thess. 4:11), to pray that rulers would let us live quiet lives (1 Tim. 2:2), and to become all things to all men that we may save some (1 Cor. 9:22). If people are going to reject Christ, we want it to be because they rejected Christ, not Christians.

Christians, then, have long been reconciled to people hating us on account of grace.

But the world is changed.

We no longer live in a world which simply hates grace; we live in a world which hates nature—and understanding this fact is one of the most urgent priorities in Christian discipleship today.

These days, the reality is that people trip over the ground under their feet long before they’re in sight of the stumbling block. As I noted when I first launched The New Albion, we are in what Aaron Renn has dubbed “the Negative World”—a time (post-2014) when Christian faith acts as a net negative to one’s social standing. 2014 was when I graduated from university, and so my aforementioned time at school was all carried out in the Neutral World (1994-2014). We should note that, in the Neutral World, aspects of the Christian faith did serve as social negatives for people (see my “Jesus Freak” episode), but these were more or less balanced out by lingering social positives. These negatives were largely the things I’ve mentioned: exclusivity, piety, devotion. 

However, the primary cause of Christians’ negative social capital is no longer exclusivity, piety, or devotion. It is nature. 

The Christian faith requires confession of the Gospel, but it also requires confession of creation. “I believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen”—so begins the Nicene Creed. We are witnesses not simply to the fact that God has acted to redeem the world, but that he created it in the first place. Insisting that there is such a thing as Reality, and that this is evident to all human beings, has been baked into Christianity from day one. 

The reality of Reality, however, is no longer a settled fact. In a technocratic age, in which the digital world divorces us from the limiting factors which have defined human identity throughout all of history up to this point, all things can be remade. There is no such as a “human nature” which should determine our behaviour and rein us in—or if there is, our technological innovations are as much a part of that nature as anything else, and so should be seamlessly welcomed into our very selves as we slide imperceptibly into the posthuman. The most evident manifestation of this war on reality is in the transgender movement, which sets itself against the most basic fact of human bodily existence: the sex binary. This is, however, downstream of cultural capitulation on other issues of human sexuality (e.g. contraception, so-called same-sex marriage), which themselves are the product of a technologically enabled elective approach to reality. All this is, in short, incompatible with the basic Christian acknowledgement that God created humanity as male and female, and that this is very good.

The litmus test for social respectability in 2023 has become one’s willingness to partake in the brave new world of the LGBT agenda. If you think this subject has been done to death, or that we’re past “peak wokeness”, then you aren’t paying attention. Keir Starmer—the Man Who Would Be Prime Minister—may have thrown a bone to his targeted working class voters by recently saying that 99.9% of women “of course haven’t got a penis” (having previously said that it’s wrong to say that only women can have a cervix), but at the Labour Party conference last week he made life mighty difficult for the 0.1% of women who apparently do have a penis by covering over all the urinals at the conference venue in the name of creating gender neutral toilets. He also made life difficult for the 99.9% of penisless women, who were introduced to the grim realities of the gents’ toilets.

That 0.1% is Keir Starmer’s pinch of incense to the emperor (and I suspect he’d like to give more). This is what is now demanded of all of us: that we deny the reality and the goodness of the human gender binary, even if (for now) we only admit 0.1%. Starmer, like many others, is clearly afraid of the consequences of confessing a fact as basic as the sex binary, and even more afraid of ever suggesting that such a fact is a good thing. 

While Starmer was busy forcing women to stand and sit in men’s urine at the Labour conference, a story broke about Gladwys Leger, a Christian secondary school teacher dismissed from a CofE school for refusing to teach “extreme” LGBT ideology—including the affirmation of gender identity—in her lessons. She now faces a potential ban from teaching. This is what happens when you refuse to burn the incense.

Gladwys Leger was willing to be hated on account of nature. Yet reading her story last week, I wondered how many other Christians—especially my fellow evangelicals—are willing to do the same.

As I’ve said: we have been well prepared, for many years, for hatred on account of grace. And we have been well trained, in general, in seeking to avoid unnecessary stumbling blocks in evangelism.

I fear, however, that these two instincts often lead to a situation where we think that the only things worth being hated for are the Gospel, our personal piety, and our personal devotion to Jesus. These three things are, we know, non-negotiables, and so we don’t mind people stumbling over them. Outside of those, however, we want to bend over backwards so that people aren’t unnecessarily hindered from coming to Christ. And this is a noble impulse.

Our criteria for what makes an “unnecessary” hindrance, however, has become dangerously skewed. Modern evangelicals have long overlooked what we mentioned above: that the Christian faith requires certain claims about reality and creation as well as claims about the Gospel. We have jettisoned the well established, biblical traditions of natural theology and natural law—that is, the belief that there are things we human beings, Christian or not, can know about God and morality without the aid of special revelation. For instance, it is assumed in Scripture that the moral order of the universe is evident enough for even the Roman authorities to discern good and evil sufficiently enough to reward and punish them (1 Pt. 2:14). It therefore does not seem like too much of a stretch for Christians to expect the Labour party to know what a woman is.

Questions about the basic reality which all human beings share, then, are not adiaphora for Christians. They are not something we can shed as we seek to become all things to all men.

Increasingly, we live in a world that is not scandalised by the claim that Christ is Saviour or Lord. We don’t even get that far. Rather, the world is scandalised by the claim that Christ is the Creator. And this means that our conversations (or attempts at them) increasingly stop far short of discussions about the Gospel. 

Of course, Christians have been confronting atheism head on for decades now. And, on one level, all sin is a rejection of “nature”, of “the way things are”, since it involves rejecting the Creator and replacing him with something created. Yet, despite the inconsistency of the position, Western society still generally held to the goodness of the created order during the early stages of modernity, even if it increasingly rejected the reality of the Creator. But modernity is catching up with itself fast.

It’s worth noting as we draw to a close that there is another reason Christians may be hated. Russell Moore, Senior Editor of Christianity Today, recently stated in an interview with The Atlantic that, more often than not, Christians (he has evangelicals in mind especially) are hated “not for how Christian we are, but for how un-Christian we are.” 

Now, I try here at The New Albion to offer distinctly British Christian cultural commentary and to avoid the common vice of treating American ills as if they’re our own. However, Moore’s whole outlook has gained traction here in the UK, so it’s worth addressing.

It’s not hard to see basically where Moore is coming from. All Christian traditions, evangelicalism included, have things to be ashamed of, and so Moore’s point is doubtless true some of the time. But as a governing principle for understanding Christian persecution today, Moore’s diagnosis is dangerously mistaken to the point of naivety. It makes sense neither of high profile stories of Christian persecution, like Gladwys Leger, or the experience of most Christians on the ground.

Why is a diagnosis like Moore’s attractive? 

First, it allows us to avoid facing the reality of how aggressively the world hates nature, and the fact that, if we hold the line on sexuality, transgenderism etc. then there is increasingly nothing we can do to get people to listen to the Gospel, no matter how hard we try or how well we conduct ourselves. 

Second, lamenting the flaws of the church in Moore’s fashion can now swiftly gain you some approval from our society’s socially liberal powerbrokers. Moore is these days often branded a “court” or “regime” evangelical—one who tells people on the Left everything they want to hear about how bad conservative evangelicals really are, and is duly rewarded with spots in The New York Times and The Atlantic. If you watch the clip of Moore linked above, you will see that his remarks received a vigorous round of applause from a room full of Atlantic readers. The persistent irony of Moore’s career at this point is that all his lambasts against his fellow evangelicals for supposedly cosying up to political power are, in fact, in service of him doing the exact same thing.

In that interview, Moore asked the same question that I opened with: what do Christians expect to be hated for? The answer is simple in one sense: we should expect to be hated for Christ. He has told us as much: “If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first” (John 15:18). Yet the Christ who said this is himself the Creator, the Logos by whom all things were made. And so to be hated because of nature is to be hated for Christ’s sake just as much as being hated for grace is. If we do not grasp this fact, stressing it to ourselves, our churches, and our children, then we will not be ready for the days ahead.