The Impostor’s Gospel

On the fake Christianity permeating America.

Sam Harris wrote a letter to a Christian nation. It was a sharp letter, and a fair one, aimed at the Christianity that actually exists in American public life — the Christianity of culture war, of political identity, of social enforcement dressed in the language of salvation. Harris is a careful thinker and he engaged the target he found in front of him.

I think he aimed at the wrong thing.

Not because Christianity deserves a defense — I am not a Christian, and I approach the Gospels the way I approach any foundational text of Western civilization: as a secular mythologist, a careful reader, someone with no stake in the theological outcome but a serious interest in what the text actually says. I have read the Gospels closely. I have read the letters of Paul. I have sat with the Sermon on the Mount the way you sit with Hamlet or the Iliad — as literature that contains, encoded in its narrative structure, a set of moral claims serious enough to deserve engagement on their own terms.

What I found there is not what Erick Erickson is selling.

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Erickson is a radio talk show host from Georgia. He is also a prominent voice in the intersection of American evangelical Christianity and Republican politics — which is to say, he is one of the more visible practitioners of exactly the Christianity Harris was writing against. He recently published a piece arguing that Christianity is, at its core, simple. His argument runs as follows:

The early Christians were called atheists by the Romans because they believed in a living God. Roman gods were dead gods. A living God was, to the Roman mind, no god at all. So the Christians were, paradoxically, atheists.

From this historical observation Erickson draws a theological conclusion: Christianity is not a religion of works. There are no steps. There is no “I” in the faith of Christians. “It is only He.” Christ does everything. The believer does nothing. Salvation is a gift received, not a life lived.

Christianity, he concludes, is simple.

I want to be precise about what is wrong with this, because the error is not minor. It is not a matter of theological interpretation or denominational emphasis. It is a straightforward misreading of the primary text — the kind of misreading that is only possible if the primary text has never been seriously read.

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Let us go to the text.

Matthew 7. The Sermon on the Mount is drawing to its close. Jesus has spent three chapters delivering the most demanding ethical program in Western literature — a systematic raising of the bar on every moral question his audience thought they had settled. You have heard it said do not murder. I say to you, do not be angry. You have heard it said do not commit adultery. I say to you, do not look with lust. You have heard it said love your neighbor. I say to you, love your enemy.

This is not a simple religion. This is a devastating one.

And then, at the close, Jesus says this: “Not everyone who says to me ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father.” And then, more precisely: “Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons, and in your name perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers.’”

Read that passage carefully. The people Jesus is addressing are not pagans. They are not Romans. They are not atheists. They are people who believe in him, who invoke his name, who consider themselves his followers, who have done works in his name. And he calls them workers of iniquity and turns them away.

This is the passage that defeats Erickson’s entire theological program. You cannot read Matthew 7 and conclude that Christianity is about accepting Christ and then waiting for Him to do the work. Jesus himself says — explicitly, without ambiguity — that the people who do exactly that will be turned away.

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The rich young ruler is the other exhibit.

A man comes to Jesus and asks what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus asks if he has kept the commandments. The man says yes — he has kept all of them since his youth. Jesus looks at him and loves him. And then he says: one thing you lack. Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.

The man goes away sad, because he has great wealth.

Jesus does not call after him. He does not say “don’t worry, I’ll regenerate you, you don’t have to do anything.” He watches him leave and observes that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.

The disciples are astonished. Who then can be saved?

Jesus says: with man this is impossible, but not with God.

Erickson reads this as confirmation of his thesis — salvation is God’s work, not ours. But that is not what the passage says. What the passage says is that the ethical demand is so total, so complete, so annihilating of the comfortable life, that it cannot be met by human effort alone. It requires transformation. It requires grace. But the grace is in service of the demand, not a replacement for it. The man is not turned away because he tried to do good works. He is turned away because he was unwilling to do the specific work asked of him.

The difference matters enormously.

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Erickson’s error is philosophical before it is theological. It is, in fact, the same error as Descartes.

Descartes sat down to doubt everything and arrived at the one thing he claimed he could not doubt: cogito ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. But thinking — computation, the manipulation of symbols according to rules — is not the irreducible thing. A calculator computes. A sorting algorithm computes. Computation does not feel. Computation does not observe. Computation does not love its enemy or sell its possessions or weep at a tomb.

What Descartes needed was not I think but I notice that I am thinking. Observation is the irreducible datum. The felt witness. The awareness from the inside that something is occurring. That is what cannot be faked, cannot be computed, cannot be reduced to process. He reached for the wrong verb, and four hundred years of Western philosophy followed him through the wrong door.

Erickson makes the same move in theology. He reduces Christianity to a single formal operation — accept Christ, receive salvation — and in doing so expels the thing the Gospels are actually about: the situated, embodied, willing creature who has to decide, daily, what to do with his money and his anger and his enemies and his neighbor lying wounded on the road. The actor. The observer. The one who must choose.

Jesus keeps returning to the body. He heals bodies. He feeds bodies. He sweats blood in Gethsemane. He asks Bartimaeus, the blind beggar, “What do you want me to do for you?” — as if the wanting, the asking, the specific desire of the specific person in front of him, matters. The Incarnation is the theological point: God enters the flesh precisely because flesh is where the real is.

Erickson’s Christianity is Cartesian Christianity. A mental transaction that leaves the body, and the poor, and the enemy, entirely unaddressed. The error is identical in both cases: mistaking formal assent for lived reality.

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This brings me back to Sam Harris.

Harris’s critique of Christianity is essentially correct as a description of the Christianity Erickson practices. The political identity marker, the culture war instrument, the social enforcement mechanism dressed in the language of grace. Harris saw this clearly and named it clearly and I have no quarrel with his description.

But Harris critiqued the practice while accepting the interpretation — that this is what Christianity is, that the text authorizes the practice, that the religion and its most prominent public practitioners are continuous with each other.

They are not. The most prominent public practitioners of American evangelical Christianity are doing to the Gospels what Erickson is doing to theology: reducing a demanding, embodied, ethically annihilating text to a permission slip. Accepting the formula, performing the identity, and going away with their great wealth intact.

Jesus has a word for this. He uses it repeatedly in the Gospels, applied specifically to the religious leaders of his own tradition who perform righteousness without practicing it.

The word is hypocrite.

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The question of whether Jesus was God is, in the end, a secondary question. The primary question is whether what he said was true. And what he said was: by their fruits you shall know them. Not by their declarations. Not by their formulas. Not by whether they have said the right words and accepted the right transaction.

By their fruits.

That is not a theological claim. It is an epistemological one. It is a claim about how you know what anything is — by what it produces, by what it does, by how it acts in the world. It is the only test that cannot be gamed by a sufficiently sophisticated formula.

Erick Erickson has been, for his entire career, a practitioner of exactly the politics Jesus spent his ministry opposing: the consolidation of religious identity with political power, the performance of righteousness as a substitute for its practice, the comfortable theology that leaves the rich man’s wealth undisturbed.

Sam Harris was right that this Christianity is a problem.

He was wrong that it is Christianity.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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