People frequently ask Sophia faculty and trustees what we intend to prepare our students to be and do. This entry is the third installment in answer to that question. With thanks to my faculty colleagues, Drs. Melissa Jackson and Jon Barnes, it continues our statement concerning how Sophia seeks to prepare individuals and a community for having the mind and doing the work of Christ more authentically today.

In addition to addressing the fundamental inauthenticity that infects American Christianity, Sophia’s curriculum and pedagogy must confront the idolatrous cultural captivity – in an extreme form in Christian White Supremacism, but also in the normativity of middle-class values. As Robert Jones writes in White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity,  “The historical record of lived Christianity in America reveals that Christian theology and the institutions that have been the central cultural tent pole holding up the very idea of white supremacy.”)  Allegiance to a particular culture or to the nation-state is idolatry and reflects a pseudo-soteriology. It is idolatry because it involves a penultimate entity calling for ultimate devotion. It is pseudo-soteriology because it confuses the state with the source of all blessing. Sophia’s response: rigorous and unflinching study of the scriptural witness and of the church’s historical struggle with the relationship between faith and political power (Constantinianism and the [ana]baptist insistence on the wall of separation, for example).

This cultural captivity also includes a chauvinism with regard to non-Western expressions of Christianity. Outsiders see the body of those called Christian as a social entity comprised of like-minded, like-race, individuals who value the maintenance of the status quo, the entertainment quality of worship services, and the attainment of middle-class security.  Nothing in this vision bespeaks the radical change Jesus brings to human lives. Nothing in it announces the call to Christ-like servanthood. Nothing in it points beyond the egocentrism of modern consumer culture. American Christians too easily identify a certain version of American culture as an expression of God’s will: American exceptionalism, which often means “America first” (both in terms of supremacy and priority, as it seems to right now) and often suggests an “America, love it or leave it” attitude.  American Christians tend to baptize market forces, even within the church, and to idolize the American system of government. As Philip Jenkins has noted, “[if] we want to visualize a ‘typical’ contemporary Christian, we should think of a woman living in a village in Nigeria or a Brazilian favela” and not a white, middle-class family living in suburbia. Sophia’s curriculum will place special emphasis on developing critical awareness of one’s own culture and open-minded appreciation of the cultures of others.

This cultural captivity, along with the perceived normativity of Western forms of faith, often finds expression in a stark inhospitality that keeps us from being able to experience (and indeed celebrate!) the many ways Christian faith is lived in our world and the many gifts that can be shared and received. First, many do not feel welcome or valued because large swaths of US Christianity have made it clear that they don’t belong. Members of the LGBTQI+ community, the differently abled, and the immigrant are just a few examples. These beloved members of God’s family (and our family members and neighbors) are being told that, despite being created in the imago Dei, they are not worthy of being part of the church (contrast Isa 56:7 and Acts 8:26-40). Second, when looking at migration, our cultural captivity has made us unwilling or unable to recognize the gift of different understandings of God and expressions of faith that exist in our communities. The exponential growth of Christianity in places like Africa, Asia, and Latin America is not just being experienced “over there.” Jehu Hanciles writes that, “new immigrants have transformed America into the most religiously diverse nation on the planet…. [The] majority of … new migrants (at least 60 percent according to one survey) are Christians (from Africa, Asia, and Latin American) who are expressing their Christianity in languages, customs, forms of spirituality, and community formation that are almost as foreign to Americans as other religions. The new immigrant Christian communities are effectively ‘de-Europeanizing’ American Christianity.” While American Christians have the opportunity to worship, build friendships, and find common cause on issues of justice that affect all of us in the communities in which we live, the narrow understanding of faith by many in the US inhibits our ability to receive, learn from, and be transformed by these gifts. Sophia intends to broaden its students’ understanding of the rich diversity and complexity of faithful expression.