What Is A ‘Real’ Christian?

The Free Press carried a piece this morning entitled “Can a Democrat Be a ‘Real’ Christian?”  The piece is typical – interview voters, collect a variety of opinions, intersperse a little personal observation, never draw a conclusion – very “NPRish.”  (At least back in the day when NPR really was kinda politically neutral.)  And yet I find the piece infuriating for a couple of reasons…

Reason one – its inconclusiveness is not neutrality.  In tone and in choice of interviewees it clearly leans towards answering its headline question in the positive.  There is a certain dishonesty in this approach to journalism that really turns me off.  Pretending to neutrality is not the same thing as neutrality.  The question posed is one that it is nearly impossible to be without opinion on – so why the pretense?  But even at that, it is possible to report on the variety of answers to the question without revealing, even “subtlety,” one’s own leanings.

But then maybe that is what makes it so “NPRish.”  The smugness, the pretense, all designed to create an air of smarter-then-thou intellectualism that attempts to pretend it is not just another schlub with an opinion. It is the smugness that is really infuriating.

Reason two – to intelligently answer the question of just who is, and who is not, a “real” Christian – one must first figure out just what it is that makes a “real” Christian.  That fundamental question is something the piece only implicitly touches upon.  The piece seems to want to imply that, when it comes to candidates, the decision as to who is and who is not is based primarily on political alignment with the individual answering the question.  That implicit assertion is demeaning to Christians of any stripe reducing their faith to mere politics.  Sure, there are people for whom that is true, but they are a small group within the broad spectrum of Christians.  In point of fact, the majority of Christians in the world are not Americans and have no opinion whatsoever on American politics.  Clearly there is more to Christianity than political alignment.

It dawned on me the other day that I have been writing for HughHewitt.com for a very long time now.  The archive shows my earliest pieces as 2015, but I think I started a bit earlier than that as I recall the host’s invitation coming not long after Mitt Romney lost to Obama, which would have been in 2012.  Anyway, I have been writing here somewhere between 12 and 15 years.  I doubt there are many readers left that recall that prior to writing in these spaces I wrote for “Article 6 Blog” for around seven years.  That blog was dedicated solely to the question of Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith and its affect on his presidential aspirations.  It is distinctly possible that I have spent more time looking into the question of a candidates faith than the author of today’s piece.

By most academic standards Mormonism is an errant offshoot of Christianity, but not correctly Christian.  That is true when one discusses theology.  But is theology the only thing that makes a person a “real” Christian?  Most regularly pew-sitting Christians could not espouse a coherent theology with a gun to their head.  There has to be more to it than that.

The question of who is and who is not a “real” Christian dates all the way back to the founding of the faith in the first century A.D.  There were massive debates between the apostles as to who was in “the church” and who was out of it and just what it was that qualified one for inclusion.  Other than one did not have to be Jewish to be Christian, they were never really able to fully answer the question.  And so the debate has continued for the ensuing centuries.

The apostle Paul did compile a list of characteristics that a “real” Christian would exhibit:

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.

That is as close as anyone has ever come to a simple declaration of what is a “real” Christian.  Please note that 1) smugness is not on that list, and 2) no one has yet achieved a perfect expression of all the characteristics on the list.

The question of what candidate is and what candidate is not a “real” Christian is not one we can easily answer – so I reject the question.  I think we have enough on our hands trying to decide if they are the best individual for the job or not.