Who is My Neighbor?

This is the first chapter of a book in progress, with the working title “Be Not Afraid of Their Terror.”

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I live in one of those places colloquially referred to as “the buckle of the Bible Belt.” Greenville, South Carolina, is where Southern Baptist Theological Seminary was founded, as an offshoot of then Southern Baptist Convention affiliated Furman University. There are still three notable seminaries in the area, Bob Jones, Greenville Presbyterian and North Greenville. One can scarcely drive more than a mile in any direction without passing a church, everything from a historic landmark occupied by mainline Protestants, to a slightly out-of-place looking Coptic Orthodox church, a Spanish-speaking congregation in an old warehouse and, of course, many non-denominational mega-churches that will give you the full concert experience. No professing Christian in Greenville has an excuse to not be somewhere on Sunday morning.

Yet, when my wife and I shuttle our family into the car and pull out of the driveway, there are less cars on the street than at any other time in the week. There are certainly more Christians in my neighborhood than in any other place I have ever lived—our immediate neighbors, like us, are Christian homeschoolers, the neighbor across the street plays organ at his Pentecostal church, and there is a home nearby that flies a meta-flag of Jesus hugging the American flag. Yet, on my way to church, I have no problem taking a left turn onto the main street leading out of my neighborhood that, at most other times, can be a bit of an ordeal.

This example is completely anecdotal, of course, but it speaks to how it feels to be a dedicated Christian in modern America, committed to making the church one’s primary societal touchpoint. According to the Association of Religious Data Archives, over half of Greenville county should be on the road Sunday morning around 10am¹; nearly one out of every five residents is listed as holding SBC membership, alone. On the ground, though, there is simply no way those numbers are accurate.

For those of us who fully hold to traditional, creedal Protestant doctrine, this feeling of being in the extreme minority is only accentuated by our self-imposed orthodoxy. Most of my church-going neighbors attend contemporary non-denominational churches. Even in my own middle-of-the-bell-curve, conservative SBC church I’m on the theologically conservative end of the spectrum. When having conversations about the faith with other Christians, I usually feel like the “fundamentalist” in the room. Though most actual fundamentalists would consider me quite liberal in how I apply Scriptural principles to social interaction, in the eyes of most non-religious Americans I’m a zealot.

Chances are, if you’re taking the time to read a book on loving and Scriptural Christian social behavior in an increasingly hostile Western environment, you feel at least somewhat the same way. Perhaps, like me, you feel trapped between two growing camps of “Christian” extremes. On one side are those so fearful of losing cultural dominance (which has already happened) that they are moving into a belligerent legalism that seems less concerned with victory in Jesus than with victory in politics. On the other side are those who have so vigorously rejected conservative Christianity that what is left of their worldview seems utterly devoid of any absolute ethical standard for believers whatsoever. Both sides are so obsessed with making “Christian” synonymous with a narrow set of worldly political propositions that the actual gospel gets pushed far into the background.

Meanwhile, most of our physical neighbors likely have no clue what that good news is. If you walked over to a neighbor who you knew has never been involved in a church and asked them to describe the gospel, do you think they would be able to give some form of this answer:

• God created the universe from nothing, and created man.

• Man sinned against God and fell into a state of misery and death.

• God condescended Himself and became a Man, lived a perfect life and died on the cross to save us from sin and death.

• He was resurrected from the dead three days later, ascended to heaven and will one day return to judge the living and the dead.

• Those who believe in Him and His finished work on the cross will be counted righteous through Him and will live with Him forever.

Frankly, many of our professing Christian neighbors couldn’t give that answer either. This is the state of Western Christianity, particularly in America. Decades of turning discipleship into yet another form of mass media entertainment have taken their toll on the average Christian’s understanding of core doctrine—in many instances it has produced a hostility towards key concepts, especially hamartiology (the study of the nature of sin). If you’re in the extreme minority of Western Christians who hold to these orthodox doctrines, there’s no way around it, you live in a mission field that could quickly turn hostile towards you in any interaction, even in “the buckle of the Bible Belt.”

It can be easy to fall into a malaise when thinking about this reality, and many Christians have allowed that malaise to fester into resentment towards their neighbor. So often we hear Christians, angry at the state of our culture, professing the need to “speak the truth in love” to those who engage in worship of the self, but when you look at their actual application there’s not much love for the lost to be found. One finds this approach too often a cathartic finger wagging more than genuine gospel entreatment. Paul reminded the Corinthians, “And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Corinthians 6:11). In my experience, those who came to Christianity as an adult, such as myself, are the least likely to engage in this type of cultural belligerence, because there is a visceral understanding of a time when they were given up to their “dishonorable passions” (Romans 1:26). It’s among those raised in American “cultural Christianity,” who have known no other community than that of the saints, where I find this resentment to be the most prevalent.

This is the dark underbelly of modern Western Christianity, that of a worship of what the late theologian Francis Schaeffer termed personal peace and affluence. In the 1976 book adaptation of his film, How Should We Then Live, he described this phenomenon:

Personal peace means just to be let alone, not to be troubled by the troubles of other people, whether across the world or across the city—to live one’s life with minimal possibilities of being personally disturbed. Personal peace means wanting to have my personal life pattern undisturbed in my lifetime, regardless of what the result will be in the lifetimes of my children and grandchildren. Affluence means an overwhelming and ever-increasing prosperity—a life made up of things, things, and more things—a success judged by an ever-higher level of material abundance.²

In the 21st-century West, Christians make an idol of personal peace by not wanting to conduct themselves in a way that affirms the full humanity of their neighbors, many who have never heard the gospel—if they have, it was likely crammed in with some political cause—and who have instead embraced other, humanistic worldviews that promise a false freedom and prosperity that is, in reality, a path to self-destruction. We often try to keep those culturally hostile to our faith at arms length and create an insular bubble of church community and events to fill our social lives (I admit this tendency in myself). How many of us dedicated orthodox Protestants engage in regular, intimate social interaction with non-Christians, outside of our workplace (especially those of us who live in suburban or rural areas)? How many non-Christian friends do you have, with whom you hold significant disagreement on cultural and political issues, but also with whom you still spend regular personal time? Do you make an effort to not judge them for those disagreements? Paul again tells the Corinthians:

I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people—not at all meaning the sexually immoral of this world, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world. But now I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or swindler—not even to eat with such a one. For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge? (1 Corinthians 5:9-12)

Later on in the same letter, Paul gives instructions about eating food sacrificed to idols, and adds, “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God. Give no offense to Jews or to Greeks or to the church of God, just as I try to please everyone in everything I do, not seeking my own advantage, but that of many, that they may be saved” (1 Corinthians 10:31-33). Paul was regularly socializing with people culturally hostile to the gospel, and assumed others in the church were as well, to the point that he felt the need to give them guidance in etiquette.

Peter, while sitting on a rooftop in Joppa, was given a vision of a blanket full of unclean foods from the Spirit and told “What God has made clean, do not call common” (Acts 10:15). The verb translated as to “call common,” κοίνου (koinou), specifically means to defile something sacred, by treating it as common. God was directly telling Peter to do what would be considered by his fellow Jews to be a deliberate act of defiance against Mosaic law. To drive the point home, at that very moment, servants of the Roman centurion Cornelius arrived to invite Peter to accompany them to Cornelius’s home in Caesarea, and God told Peter to go with them. This would be unthinkable to 1st-century Jews; to enter the home of a Gentile would be to defile oneself, which would require a lengthy, prescribed process to return to cleanness. But Peter obeyed God, entered the home of the centurion, touched him, gave his household the good news and baptized them (Acts 10:27-48). All Gentiles who have, from that time, gone by the designation “Christian” are indebted to the Apostle Peter, who obeyed the divine call to intimately associate with those he was culturally predisposed to seeing as the other.

That Gentiles would be brought, as is, into a covenantal relationship with God was such a foreign concept that it persisted as a dividing issue in the church for years, and even Peter later momentarily fell sway to social pressure from the “circumcision party” (Galatians 2:11-14). In our day and age, Christians often feel social pressure to not only separate themselves from the world, but to proactively, and publicly, denounce their neighbors, even those professing Christians who do not share their politics. Peter tells us to “always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you” (1 Peter 3:15), but how is that possible if our stance to those who disagree with us is one of defensiveness, distrust and disdain? How can non-Christians ask about your hope unless you demonstrate hope? How can you demonstrate it to people with whom you don’t have an intimacy?

This juxtaposition of ancient Jew/Gentile with modern Christian/World is not just figurative. Christians are now those with an “advantage,” having been “entrusted with the oracles of God” (Romans 3:1-2), just as the Jews were in the 1st century. As Paul told them to not take undue pride in this advantage, the 21st-century Christian should likewise regard himself as the foremost of sinners (1 Timothy 1:15), which would include among non-Christians.

If you really believe that, how should you behave?

1. “Greenville County, South Carolina - County Membership Report (2020),” https://www.thearda.com/us-religion/census/congregational-membership?y=2020&y2=0&t=0&c=45045.

2. Francis A. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture (Old Tappan, N.J: F. H. Revell Co, 1976), 118–19.