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Defensive Spirituality creates a small, little world which feels warm and loving, but what a tragic deception it is. It’s a well-ordered world with high fences to shut out confusion and unpredictability from aliens, but it’s a fragile fortress. This is not the power of God at work here. Rather, it’s a primitive lifestyle forming close-knit Tribes with shared views.

It’s a good life for children, because the Tribe provides security and identity. Without the Tribe, the young and vulnerable are unprotected. These simple minds perceive the world in black-and-white terms, and the Tribe is simple enough to understand. Within these confined walls, love works. The customs and quirks of tribal life provide warm and familiar memories of a place where people lived with purpose and belonging, and the Tribe is glorified in songs and dance, stories, festivals and art, so teenagers who once despised their tribal roots grow nostalgic in adulthood and try to reproduce it.

But Tribal love is also primitive and immature. The social contracts are clear, with little argument. Relationships work inside the Tribe because it’s bound together by an authority which can be quite overbearing and stifling. Its harmony and safety trigger deep feelings of love, but it’s a superficial love, not God’s love: choices are minimized, the harmony is actually conformity, and the love is extended with countless conditions attached.

When older Tribal members continue to live and love by these simplistic rules, the Tribe is in tremendous peril. It means nobody in the Tribe can interact confidently with the outside world, and so the Tribe is perpetually vulnerable and naive. Sooner or later outsiders will intrude and upset the equilibrium of the Tribe, throwing relationships into disarray and exposing the weak foundation of the community.

Christian Tribalism

American Christianity is notoriously tribal and exclusive: what Francis Schaeffer labeled a “Christian ghetto” impoverished by cultural ignorance. The latter half of the 20th century witnessed the rise of a theology new to American Evangelicalism called “Personal Peace and Prosperity” or just “Health and Wealth”, and it produced a widespread basis for Tribal love among Christians. Today Christianity is known more for its “family values” like the Mormon church than its concern and love for outsiders. “The centrality of the family to all social and political life” has pushed aside the centrality of the Kingdom of God as taught by Christ.¹

Because Tribal love is so immature and weak, it cannot effectively penetrate the non-Christian world. Is anyone surprised that 90 percent of Evangelicals have never brought a non-Christian to church? This hardly reflects the love practiced in the early Christian church:

For the word of the Lord has sounded forth from you, not only in Macedonia and Achaia, but also in every place your faith toward God has gone forth, so that we have no need to say anything. - 1 Thessalonians 1:8

Tribal Christians are just too frightened to share their faith because they’re too frightened by aliens and outsiders. Defensive Spirituality produces a flabby, overweight character unfamiliar with suffering and too preoccupied to the point of obsession with the Tribe’s welfare, but it backfires: rather than protecting the Tribe, immature Tribal love exposes the Tribe to real dangers from outsiders. Continue Reading »