Time to Leave Babylon? Part 4: American Idol Christianity
This is a 21 minute read (minus the review section)
How We Got Here (in case you missed it…)
In Part 1 (What is Babylon?), I introduced the concept of Babylon as a spiritual world power, a philosophy, and a system destined to suffer the full weight of God’s wrath at the end of the age. Like a giant hamster wheel, Babylon leverages the carrot of Satan’s original lie about the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil to distract each one of us from discovering and pursuing our God-given birthright in Christ.
In Part 2 (Exposing the Root), we drilled down on the origin of the Babylonian system, exposing its root at work during the drama of the Tower of Babel. We saw how Nimrod leveraged his notoriety to build his own kingdom using the energy and resources of others. He created a system that fed into humanity’s insecurities, allowing people to feel like they were part of something special—some bigger cause—while they spent their lives building Nimrod’s kingdom rather than growing in their own authority and pursuing their own birthrights. The Babylonian system promised a shortcut to protection, enrichment, and power, while actually keeping them weaker and poorer and smaller than God intended.
In Part 3 (The Babylonian Two-Step), we unpacked the two sides of Babylon’s strategy by contrasting Adam and Eve’s fall, and then we tied it all together with the concept of religious and secular humanism.
If you missed any of those previous posts, you may want to go back and read them now to ensure you get the full value out of today’s post. I’ll wait here for you…
Ready to proceed? Good, now it’s time to look for areas where the weed of the Babylonian system has infiltrated today’s society. There are a thousand places we could start, because the infestation is already pervasive. Many of society’s systems of business, commerce, government, education, entertainment, media, etc… leverage an incestuous web of rules and controls designed to consume the best of our time and energy, reducing men and women to cogs in service of the machine rather than sons of God expanding the light and love of God into the world through the free and creative exercise of our God-given talents.
If you are familiar with the movie The Matrix, then you already have a decent analog for understanding what the Babylonian system does to the human spirit. It uses us as human batteries to power its systems and maintain control. The saddest part is that we’ve been conditioned to accept these systems as good, or at least necessary, for humanity to thrive. Or we’ve settled for the imaginary benefits of the system while abdicating our God-given birthrights.
But I won’t darken your day by unpacking The Matrix analogy any further. Following that rabbit trail is a futile exercise until we deal with the forms of Babylon that we’ve harbored in our own houses. We can’t hope to extricate ourselves (or others) from external systems of distraction and control if much of the modern Christian Church is currently relying on piously embellished versions of those same giant hamster wheels. So the question I’m asking you to ponder in this post is this: What does Babylon look like inside the four walls of the Church?
Clarifications and Caveats
Our focus will be the church in America. When I talk about the “American Church,” I’m using an imaginary construct to reference some general attributes that I believe are shared by most Christian churches in America. Some of those attributes are positive, and some less so. Either way, I know it’s an unfair stereotype to lump such incredible diversity into one group—like throwing a bucket of paint at a canvas and calling it a portrait—but in this case, time and practicality demand it.
Also, I don’t know how much of this applies to churches in other countries. Maybe churches in England or China or Brazil typically share some of the same characteristics as American Churches. Maybe not. I’m unsure, so I’ll constrain my observations to the American Church.
To be honest, I’m not even sure if God looks at things this way. Does He categorize all (or even a subset) of church organizations under a single banner like “The American Church?” On the one hand, the Bible seems to refer to churches in various cities and nations as distinct entities with unique strengths and weaknesses, like the church in Corinth, the church in Ephesus, and the church in Laodicea. On the other hand, the Bible is also clear that these groups are no more separate Churches than my leg and my arm are separate bodies. Both share the same Head and are directed by the same Brain, even if they have different functions based on God’s design:
There is one body and one Spirit, just as also you were called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all who is over all and through all and in all.
Ephesians 4:4-6
He is also head of the body, the church; and He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that He Himself will come to have first place in everything.
Colossians 1:18
Just as each of us has one body with many members, and not all members have the same function, so in Christ we who are many are one body, and each member belongs to one another.
Romans 12:4-5
There is only one body. One Church. One Head of the Church. Some churches refer to themselves as a Body, but that is technically incorrect and potentially dangerous.
Yes, there are denominational and/or local church boundaries with various systems of ecclesiastical government formed around like-minded tribes of believers. And yes, the New Testament and Church history suggest that God sometimes honors and blesses such structures, especially when they respect Christ’s headship and support His unique design for the individual members involved. But it is important to recognize that those human-made structures, while perhaps biblically permissible, are ultimately artificial, temporary, and voluntary for the members of Christ’s Body, because there is only ONE body and only ONE head.
So when I talk about the American Church, I’m really referring to the common artificial structures that American believers tend to embrace to help us organize around shared interests and communities. Some of us refer to this concept as the Institutional Church, which stands in contrast to the eternal and organic spiritual structure of the worldwide Body of Christ. Every believer is a member of the Body of Christ whether or not they are connected to an institutional church system.
And yes, I know everything I just casually stated as truth may be controversial or even offensive to some, and yes, that’s why I’m being intentionally vague in describing what I mean by the artificial structures that make up the Institutional Church. Most of that is a conversation for another venue. Since this is a simple blog post and not a doctoral thesis, my goal is to sow a few seeds in a narrow lane, and leave the rest unsaid for now so that you can compare it to scripture and unpack it on your own if you are so inclined. At the end of the day, judging the legitimacy of some of these church structures requires more wisdom than I possess. Either way, God is gracious to use many imperfect things, and some aspects of the Institutional Church are clearly permissible and beneficial, at least for a particular time and place. It is unwise to judge fruit before its season.
I also recognize that my perspective of the American Church is limited to what I have read, observed, and experienced during my short lifetime. And even within that small window, I do not assume any authority to correct the King’s betrothed. My responsibility is to share my observations in love, leaving room for Holy Spirit to highlight or diminish my words if, when, and where He desires.
One more thing. My goal for this post is less about telling you exactly where the defilements reside in the Church, and more about teaching you what to look for, giving you a spotlight specifically calibrated for the finding, and equipping you with a powerful enough weapon to cut them down when they manifest. We’ll take some of the principles we discussed in previous posts, refine and sharpen them for the specific task at hand, and then point ourselves in the general direction of danger. So at the end of the day you should have a custom-built pick-axe for swinging haymakers at the foundation of Babylon’s tower. Or for digging up weeds at the root, if you prefer that visual.
Asking the Hard Questions
Time to get our hands dirty. Given everything we’ve discussed about Babylon in the previous posts, can we see its influence anywhere in the American Church? Have its weeds already entered our structures? It’s a broad question fraught with dangers. I’ve heard it said that it only takes one eye and a carnal mind to find fault. It doesn’t take spiritual discernment to see that the Church has issues, and complaining only further darkens our spirit. We were made to see Jesus, become like Him, and do the works He did. Instead of staring into the darkness when we recognize an obstacle that keeps us from seeing Christ clearly, our goal should be to illuminate and eliminate the hindrance as quickly as possible so we can get back to knowing Him and making Him known.
To that end, over the next two posts I want to shine light on two major ways that the system of Babylon is impeding the American Church from the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. We’ll use the male/female pattern of two that we discussed in Part 3 - The Babylonian Two-Step as our spotlight. In today’s post, we’ll see one example of Babylon’s assault on our female role as the Bride, because that is where the enemy attacked first in the garden, and that deception is easier to see and simpler to explain. In the next post, we’ll turn our spotlight to a more complex and perhaps controversial example of Babylon’s attack against our male role as sons of God.
So let’s refine today’s question. Where has religious humanism infiltrated the American Church? For reference, the religious side of humanism—the tower-side of Babel—seeks to undermine the headship of Christ and attack our ability as the Bride to receive directly from Him. Like Eve was led astray from the simplicity of devotion to God, religious humanism draws our attention to something other than Christ as the source.
That idea needs a little more focus before we can use it as a spotlight. Remember that Eve was tempted to embrace a poverty mindset which, in her mind, denigrated the provision God had given her and minimized her perspective of the person God had designed her to be. A poverty mindset has little to do with physical poverty, and it often blooms amid great abundance, because it flows from an inability to recognize the spectrum of God’s provision when it comes in forms we did not seek or expect. Eve couldn’t see the full value of what God had placed in her and around her, and that led her to reach for an alternate source of knowledge for power to fulfill her purpose.
As a result of her fall, God described a curse that was the logical conclusion of the poor perspective she had embraced about herself. From then on, her greatest gift (motherhood) would only be accessed through great pain, and she would forever default to seeing herself as subservient, desiring to have someone else (Adam) lead her rather than embracing God’s intention for her to be coequal with Adam in the dominion mandate (see Genesis 3:16).
Both parts of Eve’s curse had a literal impact on women, and in a sense they also apply to all of humanity, both men and women, because they impact the female/receiving posture of our spiritual relationship with God. And although the curses of the fall are removed in Christ, the fear and shame of them can remain as the enemy’s main leverage points in our flesh, and they often lead us to compensate by embracing Babylonian systems.
American Idol Christianity
So how does Eve’s folly apply to the American Church? Again, we’re talking in a spiritual sense about our ability to receive from Christ unrelated to one’s physical gender. Are there any overarching ways we see the same poverty mindset of religious humanism at work in us today? Are there any systems in place that encourage leaning on humanity (ourselves or others) for legitimacy?
One answer can be seen in something we’ll refer to hereafter as American Idol Christianity. I’m not talking about the American Idol television show, though that show does exemplify some of the same traits. I’m referring to the American propensity to idolize celebrities, even in the Church. It can manifest in the exaltation of one human over another to the detriment of our own personal responsibility and authority, and it can also manifest in our own pursuit of celebrity for self-exaltation and external resources. In both cases, it is a subtle form of idolatry that places someone other than Jesus on the throne of our hearts, and it blocks us from receiving the fullness of the treasures of wisdom and knowledge that are hidden in Christ.
American Idol Christianity is driven by the religious side of humanism, which leverages the good side of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil to tempt us to seek identity, or legitimacy, or knowledge, or any other empowering resource from something other than Christ alone. And it is rooted in a poverty mindset.
A Common Problem
Despite my attempt at a cheeky name, America didn’t invent this form of idolatry. We’ve already seen it at work in the fall of Eve and in the building of the Tower of Babel, and scripture is replete with many other examples. Even the 1st Century Church, for all of its youthful passion, abundance of spiritual gifts, and miraculous displays of divine power, was beset with this folly:
For I have been informed concerning you, my brothers and sisters, by Chloe’s people, that there are quarrels among you. Now I mean this, that each one of you is saying, “I am with Paul,” or “I am with Apollos,” or “I am with Cephas,” or “I am with Christ.” Has Christ been divided? Paul was not crucified for you, was he? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?
1 Corinthians 1:11-13
For when one person says, “I am with Paul,” and another, “I am with Apollos,” are you not ordinary people?
What then is Apollos? And what is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, even as the Lord gave opportunity to each one. I planted, Apollos watered, but God was causing the growth. So then neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but God who causes the growth.
1 Corinthians 3:4-8
Paul was dealing with a deeper issue here than mere quarrels and divisions in the Body of Christ. The result was division, but the root was a poverty mindset that caused the Corinthians to minimize who Christ was IN each of them, and that caused them to search for external sources of legitimacy. Their insecurities coalesced around the biggest spiritual personalities of the day, to whom they clung for identity and empowerment. Likewise, whenever we derive legitimacy from other people, we reduce ourselves to “ordinary people” (as Paul called them) unable to grow beyond the person or group we idolize. This is incredibly limiting and defiling, even when the object of our aspiration is an immense spiritual hero like Paul, Apollos, or Peter (Cephas).
That’s why Paul later addressed the poverty mindset behind the Corinthians’ religious idolatry, pointing them back to the immensity of what was already theirs in Christ, reconnecting each member back to the Head:
So then, no one is to be boasting in people. For all things belong to you, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas, or the world or life or death, or things present or things to come; all things belong to you, and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God.
1 Corinthians 3:21
All things belong to you, and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God. How’s that for an antidote to religious humanism?! Doesn’t leave much room for a poverty mindset. Or for deriving our legitimacy from another human or group. Or for worrying about what we think we have and don’t have. He is our all-sufficient Source, and He has already given us everything we need. We just need to learn how to recognize His bountiful treasures, whether they come in the form of liquid assets or raw materials that must be mined and refined.
Perhaps America’s uncommon freedom and prosperity have provided fertile soil for this malady of religious humanism to thrive. We have so much prepackaged and readily available at our fingertips that we are disincentivized to dig for our own treasures. And we have so exalted the giftings of professional ministers and other experts that we feel disempowered to unpack the deepest spiritual resources God has placed just below the surface in our own lives.
We flock to men and women who have invested the time and effort to unpack some of the divine treasures in their lives, thinking that God has given them something he hasn’t given us. It is easier to leach off someone else’s well than to seek out the springs of living water God has strategically hidden for each of us, often in the valleys of our pain, and sometimes on the mountaintops of our divine encounters.
Righteous Honor
To be clear, there is nothing wrong with drinking from another person’s well, for a time. The whole reason God gives is so that we can grow from receiving, and then we can give away to others so that the whole Body is enriched and the Kingdom of God is expanded. But the process is only sustainable when each member learns to receive directly from God and then learns to give away what they have received. If only a few at the top are receiving directly from the Source, then the waters eventually become defiled from frequent regurgitation, like a diluted gene pool breeding sickness. This leads to the impoverishment of the individual members and eventually the whole Body for lack of the diversity of new life that Christ intends to introduce through each member’s unique gifts.
It is also good and right to honor those who effectively give away what they have learned to receive from God. That’s called serving. But it is a sign of the poverty mindset when we elevate them to celebrity rather than following their lead to become servant leaders expanding His kingdom through whatever unique blend of gifts and resources God has placed in our lives.
American Idol Christianity flows out of a desire to be something we were not designed to be. Or to not be what we are designed to be. And both follies flow out of an inability to see the grandeur of the unique masterpiece of God’s intention for each one of us. And that poverty mindset derives from (and feeds into) a defilement of the dominion mandate.
Defiled Leadership
We’ll discuss the defilement of the dominion mandate more in the next blog post because it bleeds into the male side of Babylon’s attack against our role as sons of God. The defiling impact on leadership is like the bridge that connects Babel’s tower to Babel’s city. More on that later. For now, it’s just important to remember that the dominion mandate was given to Adam and Eve as a blessing and a command to unpack the life of God hidden in creation through the exercise of sacrificial service. God did not intend for humanity to use the strength of our will to dominate others or conform them to our image. Neither did He design us to be on the receiving end of that kind of Babylonian leadership.
When we idolize others instead of stepping into the responsibility of learning how to receive directly from Christ ourselves, we open the door to this defiled kind of leadership. Remember that Babylon’s merchants are “the great men of the earth,” (see Revelation 18:23), meaning that Babylon effectively peddles her system through the power and seduction of celebrity. And since she owns the keys to most world systems, she is the gatekeeper to celebrity, and she uses its allure to her advantage.
I know I’m drawing bold and idealistic lines around the dangers of celebrity when real life often requires more nuanced shades of gray. Remember the pick-axe. I’m trying to give you clear, divinely powerful principles that you can use to remove Babylon’s distractions. Leaning on good-enough won’t sharpen our weapons.
Having said that, celebrity itself isn’t evil, and sometimes God bypasses Babylon’s systems to bestow it on individuals for His purposes. And sometimes He uses celebrity originally derived from Babylon’s systems to accomplish His agenda. These actions are His prerogative to work inside a fallen world within the confines of human free will, but the wise do not seek such things for themselves. We should endeavor to be like Christ, seeking excellence in everything we do, aligning ourselves with the perfect principles of the Father’s character, and receiving only from Him.
The desire to gain the fame, wealth, and influence of celebrity is one of the main seductions of Babylon. Chasing that desire is a snare…even when we tell ourselves we’ll use said resources to build the Kingdom of God. To the degree that we gain our resources by leveraging Babylon’s systems, whether religious or secular, to that degree we are enslaved by Babylon. God doesn’t use our resources to build His Kingdom. He’s neither a thief nor a manipulator. He freely gives us His resources and invites us to grow in stewardship through interaction with His Kingdom.
Idolizing Others
In summary, American Idol Christianity has two deformed faces: Idolizing others by giving them celebrity, and idolizing ourselves by seeking celebrity. Both distortions attack our ability to receive from Christ, and both produce defiled leadership (either in others or in ourselves).
When we idolize gifted and charismatic leaders, we give them undue influence and authority over our lives, we short-circuit the headship of Christ, and we lock ourselves into a spectator role as “ordinary people.” If not spectators, then we serve the vision of the leader rather than investing our lives to expand the Kingdom of Christ outside the four walls of the Church. And as we’ll see in Part 5: Rat Race Christianity, this behavior actually leads to the proliferation of the male side of the Babylonian system (the city of Babel).
American Idol Christianity can happen in mega-churches, small isolated fellowships, individual homes, and everything in the middle. It can cause us to idolize apostles, prophets, pastors, teachers, evangelists, elders, worship leaders, priests, bishops, or any other leadership construct found in the various streams of the faith.
Again, honoring honorable leaders is important. That’s not what I’m talking about here. God often speaks through people, so if we don’t honor the life of God cultivated in others, we will miss when He speaks through them. That is basically what godly submission to authority looks like in the Bible: voluntarily aligning ourselves with the life of God when it flows out of servant-leaders. Servant leaders don’t give commands or Lord it over the sheep of God’s pasture; they lay down their lives for the sheep. And that kind of leadership never stands between the members of the Body and the headship of Christ.
We’ve touched on all of this in Part 3: The Babylonian Two-Step, but it bears repeating: Godly leadership doesn’t attempt to impact our will through strength or coercion. It gives instead of taking. It serves by creating safe environments for others to connect to God and then it gets out of the way. We know this because the writers of the New Testament were humble enough to record their struggles to grasp the principles of Kingdom leadership, and Christ frequently corrected them for our benefit. But mostly we know this because of the way Jesus lived.
In contrast, American Idol Christianity leads to inappropriate kinds of submission. It disempowers the idolizer and places the idolee in a hallowed position in our hearts where none but Christ belongs. And those who would assume such a position of influence over others are already defiled by Babylon, by virtue of the fact that they accepted resources not provided by Christ. That’s not a healthy recipe for spiritual maturity.
Idolizing Ourselves
On the other hand, when we elevate servants to celebrities, misunderstanding the very nature of godly leadership, we eventually idolize the very idea of celebrity. And then we can start longing for our own platforms of influence for selfish reasons. Such longing leads to a very destructive version of the poverty mindset.
Human wisdom says that the larger our platform, and the bigger our influence, the greater our impact for the Kingdom. But that is not how the Kingdom of God grows. That is actually the vicious cycle of a poverty mindset that first builds towers to heaven rather than elevating the headship of Christ, and then builds cities to expand and maintain its power. We’ll expound on that idea in the next post.
What’s Next?
I encourage you to take this general description of American Idol Christianity’s impact on our ability to receive from Christ and use it as a relentless spotlight for searching out its defiling influence, first in your own heart, and then in the organizations with which you interact. If you decide to swing the pick-axe, I trust you to do so only under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, remembering Paul’s exhortation:
I, therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, entreat you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, showing forbearance to one another in love, being diligent to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.
Ephesians 4:1-3
The spirit behind American Idol Christianity leads to quarrels and divisions, as we saw in Paul’s exhortation to the church in Corinth, so it will take the grace and wisdom of the Holy Spirit to help you remove the weeds without adding to the disunity.
That is why I’ve given you portable principles without many real-world examples. But that will change with Part 5 - Rat Race Christianity (coming soon), when we home in on some specific institutional church systems that are defiled by the city-side of Babylon, impacting the way we give to God, the Church, the World, and the Kingdom. As always, we’ll proceed slowly with gentle questions that leave room for healthy introspection. Still, it won’t be an easy discussion. Toes might be stepped on. Sacred cows might be harmed. And hopefully you’ll be empowered to identify and remove even more obstacles that impede your interaction with Jesus…
In the meantime, please use the comments section to let me know what you think so far, or ask questions if you have them.
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