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Your God is NOT Real: Evangelical Idealism

Your God is NOT Real: Evangelical Idealism

Last updated on: October 19, 2026 at 1:40 pm by Eric Scot English

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Your God is NOT Real: Evangelical Idealism 2026-10-19T13:40:08-04:00 Eric Scot English

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Empty Church

When I was in college, an expression made the rounds on campus. It was something like, if Jesus walked with you, would you still do what you do? It was aimed at guys like me, trying to survive dorm life without drowning in the usual sins college life supplies. Picture Jesus standing next to you at Blockbuster while you scan the new releases wall a little too long. Yes, I am that old. The idea was that if you could make him real enough, close enough, watching enough, you might make better choices.

It took me years to understand what that saying was actually admitting. It wasn’t a strategy for holiness. It was a confession. We needed a trick to make Jesus real because, on some level, he wasn’t. Not to us. Not in the way that mattered. I don’t think Jesus is a cosmic voyeur outside video stores. That premise is absurd. But the saying pointed to something already happening back then, something that has only calcified since — a slow redefinition of who God is in the evangelical imagination. Not a presence. An idea.

Idealism Versus Realism

Here is the argument I keep returning to, book after book: American evangelicalism has drifted into a kind of religious idealism. God has stopped functioning, for many believers, as a living presence who acts and confronts, and started functioning as a concept you affirm and defend, the way you’d defend a position in an argument. An idea cannot look you in the eye at 2 a.m. It cannot grieve you or correct you. So when God becomes primarily an idea, the whole structure of faith reorganizes around defending the idea rather than obeying the God who used to attach to it. Watch modern political Christianity and you’ll see this with almost mathematical precision. The believer doesn’t ask whether a leader reflects Christ’s character. He asks whether the leader defends the idea of Christian America. The idea becomes the thing worth protecting. I traced how we got here in The Kingdom of Man; here I only have room for the outline.

But there’s an older word for what faith was supposed to be, and it makes the modern drift look worse, not better.

What Pistis Actually Cost

The New Testament uses one Greek word, pistis, for what English splits into “belief” and “faith.” That split is ours, not the Bible’s. And pistis wasn’t neutral vocabulary Christians invented. It was patron-client language — the loyalty a client owed a patron who protected him. It was imperial language, the same word used for oaths of allegiance to Caesar. Inscriptions call the emperor pistos, faithful, the same title Christians gave Jesus. So when Paul wrote of pistis in Christ, he was taking the empire’s own loyalty-word and pointing it somewhere Caesar never authorized.

That wasn’t without cost. Trade guilds held dinners that opened with a sacrifice to a patron deity; refusing meant losing your guild and your income. Civic festivals expected a pinch of incense to the emperor’s genius. And while there was no single, empire-wide law demanding Christian blood for most of the first three centuries. Persecution was local and sporadic, not constant, as Pliny’s famous letter to Trajan shows. The possibility of a magistrate demanding that same incense, on pain of death, never fully went away until Constantine. Pistis was a public, economic, occasionally lethal reassignment of loyalty. It was never a private opinion held safely in the mind.

That’s what makes James statement so blunt: “Faith without works is dead“. This isn’t poetry, it’s a diagnosis (James 2:14-26). And James picks his examples carefully: Abraham binding Isaac, Rahab hiding the spies — both acts of allegiance offered voluntarily, before anyone forced the issue. James even names the counterfeit directly: “You believe God is one; even the demons believe — and shudder” (James 2:19). Demons have the content right. They know the claim is true. What they don’t have is trust that reorders loyalty and behavior. That gap between knowing and trusting is exactly the gap idealism lives in.

It’s worth noting Jesus rarely made repentance the price of his help. The bleeding woman, Bartimaeus, the Roman centurion — all healed on the strength of trust, not moral confession. Ten lepers were cleansed together; only one came back to say thanks, and Jesus didn’t revoke the other nine’s healing. When he did require something, it was almost always faith, occasionally obedience woven into the act itself — the blind man told to go wash in Siloam, healed only once he moved. What never appears, anywhere, is Jesus withholding compassion until someone’s record was clean. The bar, when there was one, was trust. Not righteousness.

Evangelical Christianity Isn’t the Persecuted Church. It’s Rome.

Here is the turn I think matters most, and it inverts the comfortable story evangelicalism tells about itself. We like to imagine ourselves as heirs of the early church, the Rahabs, the ones who’d pay the cost. But look at the actual mechanism. Rome didn’t ask people to worship an abstraction. It fused the state to the sacred so completely that loyalty to Caesar and loyalty to the gods became a single act. That fusion is precisely what a large swath of American Christianity has rebuilt, just with the poles reversed. Rome sacralized the state. We’ve nationalized the sacred. A flag in the sanctuary. A president who reflects nothing of Christ’s character but protects the tribe, handed Caesar’s own titles — anointed, chosen, God’s instrument.

And the enforcement runs through the same channels Rome used, just relocated inside the church. Rome’s test ran through guilds and festivals: refuse the incense, lose your trade. Ours runs through pulpits, denominations, and now social media, where self-appointed “public theologians” with no institutional standing can pressure seminaries and seminary presidents into political purity tests, deciding in real time who still counts as Christian enough. Refuse the nationalist fusion — defend an immigrant, question the flag in the sanctuary, decline to call an amoral leader righteous — and you can lose your platform, your ordination, your pulpit. That’s a magistrate demanding incense. It’s just a Twitter account instead of a Roman court.

Which means the position of the early church now belongs to whoever refuses the fusion, not whoever defends it. The pastor deplatformed for preaching that immigrants bear God’s image. The believer who was quietly frozen out of their small group for refusing to treat a party as inseparable from faithfulness. Those are the modern Rahabs, paying an actual, uncompelled cost for allegiance to Christ over the empire’s version of loyalty. The mainstream fusion of flag and cross pays no such cost. It isn’t the persecuted church. It isn’t even neutral. It’s occupying Caesar’s seat, wearing a cross, still asking for the same incense Rome always asked for.

Conclusion

As Christians, we should ask ourselves the question, “Is my God real?” Not “do I believe the right things about him.” I mean: does he show up in your actual decisions, or has he been replaced by a defensible idea, a tribe, a flag standing where a person used to stand? The saying from my college dorm was more prophetic than anyone realized. We didn’t need a trick to make Jesus feel real. We needed to stop asking for incense and start recognizing who’s still refusing to give it. That’s the only pistis the New Testament ever recognized as real, and it was never the comfortable kind.

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About Eric English

Eric is a rogue philosopher, theologian, author, podcaster and ninja. He is a father of three, husband of one, and a poet unto himself. Eric’s main areas of thinking are in philosophy (specifically, Soren Kierkegaard), theology (Narrative Perspectivism), and culture. Eric also hosts the podcast UNenlightenment. You can read more about the author here.

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