Whistling in the Dark, alongside the born-agains

Last updated on: January 16, 2025 at 10:58 am by Cara Meredith

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Whistling in the Dark, alongside the born-agains 2025-01-15T20:02:17-07:00 Cara Meredith

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I finally read a book that had been sitting on my shelf for a while:

To be honest, it wasn’t my favorite Buechner book. Telling Secrets, I loved; Listening to Your Life, I ate up at various times of indecision. But Whistling in the Dark felt antiquated and lazy, like a primer the publisher believed a good idea to publish simply because they knew it would sell (simply because his name graced the cover).

The concept was simple: create a dictionary of “just plain words,” as he describes and define them as such. From A to Z, readers come to understand his definitions of certain words and their religious dimensions, so we can know “how —whether we are aware of it or not— the Holy is all around us” (xii).

In truth, I wanted to like it a lot more than I did.

But then I saw this definition for “Born Again”:

Some of those who specifically refer to themselves as “Born Again Christians,” however, seem to use the term in a different sense. You get the feeling that to them it means Super Christians. They are apt to have the relentless cheerfulness of car salesmen. They tend to be a little too friendly a little too soon and the women to wear more make-up than they need. You can’t imagine any of them ever having had a bad moment or a lascivious thought or used a nasty word when they bumped their head getting out of the car. They speak a great deal about “the Lord” as if they have him in their hip pocket and seem to feel that it’s no harder to figure out what he wants them to do in any given situation than to look up in Fanny Farmer how to make brownies. The whole shadow side of human existence — the suffering, the doubt, the frustration, the ambiguity – appears as absent from their view of things as litter from the streets of Disneyland. To hear them speak of God, he seems about as elusive and mysterious as a Billy Graham rally at Madison Square Garden, and on their lips the Born Again experience often sounds like something we can all make happen any time we want to, like fudge, if only we follow their recipe (24).

As soon as I read that paragraph, I read it again (and then once more again). I bookmarked the page. And I thought, I feel seen, because for so many years of my life this was the very definition of me.

Even though the book was originally published in 1988, the definition stands the test of time.

For years, I jokingly described myself as a Professional Christian (in fact, I even did so in last week’s Patheos post), which is to say that I believed myself a Super Christian. When asked if I had a favorite verse, I would have rattled off a verse involving a whole lot of joy — about the joy of the Lord being my strength (Nehemiah 8:10) or about always being full of joy in the Lord (Philippians 4:4). What this didn’t reveal is that I so heavily relied on joy, that the emotions I deemed negative, like anger and sadness, quickly took a backseat. And this happened because it was what I believed I should do as a Christian, a follower of Jesus, a person of the Way.

The funny thing, of course, is that I would have never described myself as born again. They were too extreme. They voted Republican, in every election. They were a different kind of Christian, and I wasn’t that kind of Christian.

But I was.

In my next book, Church Camp, which releases in late April, I define evangelicals as such:

Theologically, “evangelicals are people who take the Bible really seriously … (or at least some carefully selected parts of it),” as a writer from Religion News Service quips. For years, evangelicals were simply defined by the Bebbington quadrilateral: the Bible, the cross, the concept of being born again, and activism. Some say evangelicals are people who check “born-again Christian” on the religious preferences section of an online dating profile, while others are those who make up the 81 percent who voted for former president Donald J. Trump in the 2016 election. When it comes to politics, the majority of these folks vehemently oppose abortion and enthusiastically hold their signs high for traditional definitions of marriage — that marriage is only supposed to be between a man and a woman, so bakers in Colorado should reserve the right to not have to decorate a cake for a same-sex couple (15).

As I later write, though, “authentic engagement means accepting an invitation into conformity, which is to say, into an idealized image of Jesus followers” (20). This, of course, returns us to the Super Christians, the utterly joyful ones, the ones who held the “relentless cheerfulness of car salesmen” — of which I was a proud, card-carrying member.

Image by Michal Jarmoluk from Pixabay

In truth, just as a book that was published in the late eighties, that found resonance with who I fashioned myself to be 10, 20 years later, still holds true today — even if some of the definitions around born-again Christians have continued to morph and change.

Today, this particular slice of the Christian pie is largely defined by those who hold both the Bible and our country in high esteem (to the point that they excuse “a man accused by dozens of women of assault, harassment, and misconduct; a man who has boasted about taking elemental body autonomy from the girls and women of this nation; a man who once said that if his daughter were not blood relation, that he might be dating her?” as John Pavlovitz writes).

Born-again Christians often now, most offendedly, wear the hat of Christian nationalists — even if (once, like me), they wouldn’t call themselves nationalists, even if they merely see themselves as MAGA hat-wearing supporters of the 45th and 47th presidents.

But in truth, not a whole lot has changed.

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About Cara Meredith

Cara Meredith is a writer, speaker, and part-time development director. The author of The Color of Life (Zondervan) and the forthcoming Church Camp (Broadleaf), she gets a kick out of playing with words. A lot. You can read more about the author here.

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