Being a Christian in an Age of Syncretism

Creed, Credibility, and a Reclaimed Faith

syncretism (noun)

syn·​cre·​tism ˈsiŋ-krə-ˌti-zəm

1: the combination of different forms of belief or practice

2: the fusion of two or more originally different inflectional forms

---

Several years ago when our two older kids were going through kindergarten, each of them in turn played a game called What’s in the Bag? Each child in the class would take turns bringing in a brown paper bag with a secret item in it, and the first letter of the item written on the outside of the bag. The child would also write a simple poem, giving clues for the hidden item. For one of our kids, we put something in the bag and wrote the letter O on the outside. The clue was straightforward prose: “It’s a color and a food.” One classmate shouted, “An Oreo!” To his great disappointment, it was, of course, an orange.

What’s in the Bag? is sort of like the game people play when trying to answer the question of what it means to be a Christian. The clues vary, sometimes from church to church, because the contents of the bag seem to change as people keep adding stuff.

Oh, to be a Christian, you need to vote with the conservative party or the progressive party.

And you can’t watch those kinds of movies or TV shows.

And you may not want to put your kids in public school.

You’ve got to put God first and then country—that is, America.

You’ve got to embrace freedom of all kinds—but especially as it relates to guns and markets.

Cultural values, behavioral norms, personal preferences, and more get lumped in with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit until no one is quite sure what really is in the bag.

People don’t know what they are saying yes to.

They like some of what’s in the bag, but they’ve been told it’s a package deal. Take it all—the holy doctrine and the human dogma, the beautiful gospel and the obnoxious behaviors—or nothing.

And so, they opt for nothing. They walk away. Keep your bag, they say. Like the rich young ruler, they walk away sad, but not because of anything Jesus said and not because they were unwilling to surrender their whole lives to the true King, but because they can’t say yes to the bag they’ve been given. The Christianity they have been invited into is untenable and undesirable. You see, it isn’t just that culture has shifted or that not many are asking the question to which we claim to have the answer; it’s that Christians have lost their way. We no longer know what lies at the center of our faith.

What’s in the bag? It’s anyone’s guess.

Is It Christianity?

In the early 2000s, a sociologist named Christian Smith conducted a survey of America’s religious youth. He found teenagers who self-identified as believing in God and having a faith of some kind. He then asked follow-up questions to see what they actually believed about this God. The survey addressed the distinction between what British theologian Helen Cameron called “operant theology” and “espoused theology.” Operant theology is the implicit theology by which people live, the set of values and convictions about God that guide their decisions and shape their perspectives, even if those values and convictions are unarticulated or subconscious.

Smith found that the operant theology of young people who claimed to be Christians was a far cry from Christianity. In fact, it was so unlike Christianity that he needed a new name for it. He came up with the phrase moralistic therapeutic deism.

Moralistic because God is concerned, above all else, with how I behave, and whether I’m following His arbitrary code. Don’t be naughty; be nice. Don’t smoke, don’t chew, don’t hang out with those who do, and so on.

Therapeutic because God really wants me to feel good about myself and about my life. Yes, He has rules and stuff, but in the end, He just wants me to have a good time and for things to go well for me. God is a way for me to feel better about life.

Deism because this God doesn’t really get too personal. He is detached, distant, and for the most part, uninvolved.

In short, the young Christians that Smith surveyed believed in a God who is far away, who wants us to do good, and who wants us to feel good.

A few years ago, when I wrote The Resilient Pastor, many Christians were becoming aware of a new corruption to the Christian faith, a version of Christian nationalism that insisted God was responsible for America’s history, central to America’s identity, and invested in America’s destiny. Some have, over the years, referred to this tendency as a kind of civil religion—a public version of ideology and morality that loosely connects to Jesus or relies on Jesus-y language but really serves as bonds of solidarity for society. (One possible root for the word religion is literally the things that bind or tie us together.) Jesus is confessed for the sake of unifying or preserving or reclaiming “America,” itself a reference to more than a geopolitical nation-state and more broadly to an idea or an ideal.

Initially, much ink was spilled on how Christians have ruined politics by this pursuit. Subsequent analysis has questioned whether people who hold this view may actually be confessional Christians—What is their creed or belief?—or practicing Christians—Do they participate in the life of a local church? But the outcome is that the name of Christ has been slandered to the wider world.

While the church has drifted into problematic expressions of Christianity like moral therapeutic deism and Christian nationalism, the wider culture has become more individualistic. And that’s an important part of understanding Christianity’s credibility problem today. In trying to describe the landscape of a post-Christendom world, I have used the metaphor of a shift in tectonic plates, resulting in a surge of oceanic waters that has left us with a messy aftermath. As the connection between Christianity and culture became more tenuous, the rise of alternate meaning-making systems of spirituality created a culture awash with confusing and conflicting values and beliefs.

Sociologist Jean Twenge, who has studied the trademarks and tendencies of all six living generations from the “Silents” to the “Polars” or Gen Alpha, reports that “Millennials are the least religious generation of younger adults in American history.” It remains a possibility that Gen Z will surpass millennials in their abandonment of organized religion. But why is it that religion is on the decline among millennials? Twenge’s answer: “In short, because it is not compatible with individualism—and individualism is Millennials’ core value above all else. Individualism promotes focusing on the self and finding your own way, and religion by definition promotes focusing on things larger than the self and following certain rules.”

But if there were a way to distill the overlapping qualities of the dominant way of seeing the world, I would propose we call it something like individualistic syncretistic pluralism.

Credo

The word credible is related to the word creed. Both are about belief. To be credible is to be believable. To have a creed is to have something to believe in. What I am proposing here is that the church’s original confession of belief is what can help us become believable.

As Lesslie Newbigin said, it is a church that believes and lives the gospel that makes the gospel believable. If the Nicene Creed is the rope that leads us home and reminds us who we are and if being who we are called to be makes the gospel believable to the world, then we might say it like this:

Believing and living the Creed can make a Christian credible.

It keeps us from adding things to the bag. It is a purifier, an irreducible minimum of the Christian faith.

But this creed is much more than that. It is meant to hold our feet to the fire, to lift our heads up higher, reminding us how life-altering this kind of faith really ought to be.

Creed and credibility are related because when Christians return to the essence of our faith, we reclaim its power.

That doesn’t mean culture and structures don’t matter or that we can live a kind of decontextualized version of Christianity. No, that’s not possible. The Word became flesh, and faith in the Word is always enfleshed again and again in real human beings and real human communities. The church will look and feel different all around the world. But the Creed reminds us of the core and invites us to live from it.

[This is an excerpt from “What’s A Christian, Anyway?” (Harper Collins, 2025)]