Book Interview
Secret Faith in the Public Square:
An Argument for the Concealment of Christian Identity
Jonathan Malesic
PLT: Is the publishing of a book on secrecy an oxymoron?
JM: It may be a little paradoxical. In the book, I call for a removal of Christian language from public arenas, and yet here I am using Christian theological language in a book that anyone can buy or get from a library and read. I sometimes imagine the book’s publication as analogous to my trying to quiet down a noisy room full of students. I have to shout above them to get them to quiet down. It is logically inconsistent for someone to yell, “Let’s all be quiet!” But the pragmatic needs of the classroom need to come ahead of strict logical consistency in that case. The same is true for contemporary American Christianity. Practically speaking, publishing a book is the only way to announce the need for this sort of change. Also, the book was published by Brazos, an explicitly Christian press. That is one way of showing that it is meant as primarily an argument within the walls of the church—where secrecy about Christian identity is not desirable.
PLT: You may have heard of the group known as ‘The Fellowship”…When does ‘secrecy’ become ‘without accountability’? Where do you draw the line?
JM: I think that a danger of secrecy in any circumstances is the lack of external accountability. It would be a danger for Christianity, too, though I think there can be ways to mitigate that threat. Christians practicing the secrecy I advocate would need first of all to be very prayerful, opening themselves up to God’s loving criticism of everything they do. They should also be wary of joining churches that are too homogeneous. The church should have diverse perspectives within it that can help Christians avoid groupthink and encourage responsible care for the tradition it’s entrusted with.
From what I know about the Fellowship—which Jeff Sharlet has written a book about—it serves as a network that helps to advance the careers of its members in an effort almost to infiltrate the American power structure. So yes, the Fellowship is somewhat covertly Christian, but I think for reasons different from those I use to advocate Christian secrecy. In fact, I’d say that the Fellowship is part of what I’m arguing against. The secrecy I’m calling for is meant to dismantle networks of political and economic power that set themselves up as Christian organizations. This extends to far more modest Christian organizations, as well. Too often, I think that some groups that bill themselves as being just another bible-study also very conveniently turn out to be very good for the careers of the people involved in them.
PLT: Do you believe that evangelism should be practiced today? If not, why not? And if so, what do you think it should look like?
JM: It all depends on what the evangelism looks like. Christians cannot shun evangelism in all its forms, but I think that many forms of evangelism are just broadcasting without regard to the audience members’ particular situations. In the gospels, Jesus calls people by name to follow him. So I think that handing out tracts to strangers on street corners, or putting on a T-shirt with a Christian message printed on it, or carrying placards with Bible verses around college campuses are bad forms of evangelism. They draw attention to the self and can contribute to the degradation of what Christian identity really means. When Tim Tebow writes “John 3:16” on his eyeblack for the national championship game, is he really preaching the gospel, or is it just another logo?
Instead of this, Christians can evangelize by being a loving community. Even though I criticize Stanley Hauerwas quite a bit in the book’s final chapter, I think that he and I agree on this basic point. On my view, this community’s love continually expands to encompass other people. Those who receive the love of Christians become in some sense a part of the church community. By the time someone who has been receiving this neighbor love gets around to inquiring about the community’s identity, that person is already in the outer precincts of the church, so to speak, and he or she is probably ready to receive pre-baptismal catechesis.
PLT: How do you live out this secrecy in your own life? Have you found this approach to preserve and help your faith?
JM: If I answer that question, I’ll lose all my credibility! Next question, please!
PLT: An impetus and a major critique of the book is Christians broadcasting their faith to aid their social and economic advancement. What are your thoughts about the changing climate in many, increasingly “secular” US urban centers where one’s Christianity might be a hindrance more than a help?
JM: It’s true that displaying a Christian identity doesn’t necessarily help someone in every public context. I doubt it would help someone get elected mayor of Berkeley, California. And we do sometimes hear that Christians are an oppressed minority in the academy, but I think that those reports are often born of resentment more than anything else.
It is probably fair to say, though, that if every sincere Christian in America did what I suggest in the book, then we might have a society that looked “secular” on the outside, but which was nonetheless inhabited by people whose lives were nourished by the life of the church. But I don’t want to project that as my utopia. I think there’s something better even beyond that, maybe a long way off, where people can speak straightforwardly in Christian language and for that speech not to risk devaluing their religious identity.
PLT: As the United States moves towards becoming a post-Christendom society (following Europe’s lead), what implications do you see for keeping faith secret?
JM: First, I’m not sure that this is really happening. The secularization thesis has been challenged quite a bit recently, and American society and law might be different enough from Western Europe’s to make a comparison difficult. There has also been a lot of scholarly literature lately that has tried to show—sometimes triumphalistically—that Christianity still is a medium for American public life, that the secularization narrative hasn’t worked here, despite the supposed attempts by secularists to push Christianity out of public life. If it were true that Christianity really was being marginalized, then more explicit forms of witness might be appropriate. But someone who did decide to display a Christian identity in a normatively secular context would have to be sure that doing so was not an act of triumphalism or resentment. The safest route might still be concealment.
The proposals in the book are really meant as a kind of therapy, correcting Christians’ tendency to try to capitalize on their being Christian. But the reason this happens has as much to do with American society as it does with Christians themselves. Our public square is so often an arena for competition, and the reward structures encourage exploiting any tiny advantage you might have over the next person. So if you can get three more sales than your competitor—or three thousand more votes—by playing up your Christian identity, you’re going to do it, because the winner takes all: the promotion at work, the seat on the city council, the big contract. I want to take Christian identity out of that game. Once it’s out of it, and there’s no more temptation to exploit that identity, then public faith could be appropriate. It may be that American society changes before Christians themselvSes do, and American Christians will one day find themselves in a situation where speaking of faith in public no longer poses problems to the faith’s integrity. But like Bonhoeffer said, Christians may by then find themselves speaking “a new language” made stronger by the therapy of secrecy.
Jonathan Malesic
Jonathan Malesic is Assistant Professor of TSheology at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. In addition to Secret Faith in the Public Square, he has published scholarly articles on the thought of Søren Kierkegaard and essays on academic life and culture in The Chronicle of Higher Education. He is currently beginning work on a book about the prospects that humanism and posthumanism hold for Christian theology today.