Column Title: Faithful Witness: Speaking and Living Truth in Public Life
Column Entry: “Faithful Witness and the Problem of Self-Righteousness”
By Mark Allan Steiner, PhD, Christopher Newport University
Column Description: It is all too often true that American Christians, just as the Apostle Paul warned against in Romans 12:2, are conformed to the pattern of this world in ways we don’t realize and are hard to see. In this column, a religious rhetoric scholar and aspiring theologian reflects on how we can avoid this kind of cultural conformity, and how we can speak and live in genuinely countercultural and God-honoring ways.
June-July 2024 | February 2024 | January 2024
Faithful Witness and the Problem of Self-Righteousness
Welcome back to my column on faithful witness, everyone! I’ve been silent for a few months, and there have been some reasons for that. During this time, though, I’ve seen more clearly some of my own weaknesses as a person that bring into sharper relief a major stumbling block facing those who desire to inhabit and live out an authentic “faithful witness” perspective. What I have seen even more clearly in the past few months is that doing all of this well is every bit as much about character as it is about understanding, and developing the character of faithful witness means facing not only the specific weaknesses that each of us may have, but also facing the reality of the fallen and deceitful hearts that all of us still have as a consequence of our current fallen-and-not-yet-fully-redeemed condition. We must face our character weaknesses soberly and self-reflectively, and we must resolve—depending on God’s power and providential care—to change our hearts in these areas. One of the most daunting of these I have seen, particularly in my own life, is the temptation to self-righteousness.
One of the three pivotal experiences I’ve had in this regard over the past few months was teaching a Sunday school class on the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Philippians. I not only saw how faithful witness as a perspective captures well the broader mission to which Paul is exhorting his fellow believers in a generally healthy and flourishing church, but also saw how much Paul highlights character development: working to cultivate (1) a desire for unity in the church; (2) humility; and (3) resilience, particularly in the area of enduring suffering in part by seeing present circumstances in light of the finality of redemption that is sure to come. While I didn’t see it clearly at the time, this kind of core character development is an important antidote to the sort of self-righteousness that all of us—but myself especially—are seduced by.
The second and third experiences were much more explicitly political in nature. A few months ago I went with some family members and friends to see in a movie theater the documentary God & Country, which portrays the contemporary resurgence of Christian nationalism particularly as it relates to the embrace of former President Donald Trump by significant numbers within the conservative American evangelical Christian community. While this is a familiar subject for me, I wasn’t emotionally prepared for the documented and overt depictions of Trump as an explicitly messianic figure, ordained by God Almighty to be reelected in the 2020 Presidential election. I wasn’t emotionally prepared for the sight of people agitated and wailing at the shocking realization that their political messiah’s continued reign was not going to continue, agitated and wailing over what they clearly saw as the triumph of evil over God’s clear plan. Overwhelmed myself, I thought, “How can authentic followers of Christ think this way? How can they behave this way? How can they pine away for an idol that is as brazenly obvious as Aaron’s golden calf in the Old Testament? How can God’s people be this utterly stupid?”
More recently, I watched—as many people did—the Presidential debate between Trump and the sitting President, Joe Biden. Like many, I found the whole event disorienting and disturbing, from Biden’s lack of composure to Trump’s freeform lying and steadfast refusal to answer the questions he was asked. What I found frightening, though, was how Trump talked about immigrants. This wasn’t anything particularly new, of course. For years, he has consistently referred to immigrants as “bad hombres,” criminals, drug smugglers, rapists, and even as “Hannibal Lechters.” But this time something snapped within me. I was not only experiencing a renewed fear that Trump might actually win in November, but also a realization of just how Hitlerian Trump’s language and political style actually are. Associating any disliked thing with Hitler or Nazis is almost always a stupid thing to do, of course, usually signaling argumentative sloppiness and condescension that almost always “stops the conversation.” But it didn’t seem far-fetched this time. All of my study of Weimar-era Germany in graduate school, as well as the reading I’ve done by and about Dietrich Bohnhoeffer, came roaring to my mind and heart. With a mix of anger and despair I thought, “How can people who claim to follow Christ support a man who summarily and brutally dehumanizes entire classes of people the same way that Hitler did with the Jews and other ‘undesirables’? Doesn’t the Bible have a lot to say about this? Do these Christians even know what the Bible has to say on this subject? Do they even care? Are they so willing and eager to align themselves with evil as surely as many German Christians (all the ones with whom Bonhoeffer and the Confessing Church broke fellowship) did in the early 1930s in supporting Hitler? Doesn’t evil within the Church need to be confronted, just as Bonhoeffer confronted the evil and the spiritual co-optation in his own day?”
You can probably see why I’ve shared these recent experiences with you. As I reflect on and write about these, it’s viscerally obvious to me how easily I slip into just the sort of heart posture that so effectively fuels self-righteousness. At the time, though, it wasn’t clear to me at all. When I was recently having a conversation with my 18-year-old daughter Meghan about the debate, about the Presidential campaign, and about how well-meaning Christians could possibly support Donald Trump, it quickly became difficult to keep my tone calm and measured. It became easy—too easy—to see Meghan’s argumentative posture as willful recalcitrance and as a stubborn refusal to see what seems so obvious to me.
The funny thing is, of all people I should know better. I’m a trained rhetorician who has been teaching and mentoring students on the subjects of rhetoric and rhetorical sensitivity for well over 20 years. I’ve thought about—and written about—the idea of faithful witness for almost as long. And yet, even now and even with the people I am closest with, I slip into the same behaviors that I have earnestly seen and rightly called out in others. I have a heart that continually needs to be disciplined and trained better to feel and desire in ways that make “faithful witness” possible.
So, what I am continually learning myself—the hard way—is that when it comes to inhabiting and living out an authentic “faithful witness” perspective, our hearts matter as much as our minds. We need to learn more about rhetoric, dialogue, and audience, for sure. We need to become more theologically literate, for sure. But ultimately little of this will matter if we don’t also cultivate the character and heart habits necessary for faithful witness. And part of cultivating these is working diligently to see and to discipline our own temptations to self-righteousness. For where there is self-righteousness, faithful witness is impossible.