Individualism Wins

I JUST STUMBLED onto the whole Rob Bell thing in the past few weeks. Before that, I knew the name, and I vaguely associated it with some headlines about the founder and pastor of the Mars Hill Bible Church in Michigan becoming evangelical non grata for writing a book, Love Wins, in which he said some thought-provoking things about the afterlife.

That was it. Then, while researching something else, I watched the new documentary The Heretic (directed by Andrew Morgan, available on Amazon and iTunes). I was astounded. A 40-something guy was on stage, alone, dressed in what seemed like an ill-fitting hipster costume: Cropped pants, shoes with no socks, and a weirdly undersized jacket. He held just a wireless mike and talked, to a theater filled with 500 or so paying customers, about Jesus and the Bible and what it all really means. This apparently happens all over the country, and all over the English-speaking world. This was a revelation to me.

Heretic is mostly a tour documentary, of the kind often made about rock bands. So we see lots of shots of people lining up outside theaters waiting to get in, often while being harangued by fundamentalists with bullhorns warning against Bell’s “false teachings.” And interview footage of Bell sitting in one dressing room or another, interspersed with testimony from many of Bell’s prominent fans and a few detractors.

Much of what Bell says in his interviews and on stage is good and, to me, inarguably Christian. Gandhi’s not in hell (the starting point of the Love Wins kerfuffle). God is creating the universe and bringing it to completion through a process of evolution. The Bible is written from the point of view of the poor and oppressed, so many U.S. Christians have a hard time “getting it.” So far, so good. Most of the time, Bell seems to be trying simply to express Christian truths without resorting to churchy jargon.

I’m more bothered by some of his fans. In the documentary Bell is praised by, for example, memoirist Elizabeth Gilbert; comedian Pete Holmes; Bell’s successor at Mars Hill, Kent Dobson; and Carlton Pearson, the subject of the Netflix movie Come Sunday. Besides their positive view of Rob Bell, what all these people have in common is that none of them currently profess anything like orthodox Christianity.

I realize that Bell isn’t responsible for this lineup; the filmmakers are, and I’m sure Bell has plenty of Christian fans, too. But it does suggest that the unique revelation of God through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ may be getting a little lost in the shuffle here. That also may be why I come away from The Heretic thinking that Bell’s religion, or “not-religion,” or whatever you want to call it, is ultimately more American than it is Christian.

To his credit, Bell sees through today’s popular evangelical identification of the Jesus movement with U.S. national power. But he can’t see that his anti-institutional, do-it-yourself approach to “spirituality” is totally wrapped up in America’s most sacred creed: individualism. Well-meaning as it is, this is just another niche-market religion for the social media age, in which people clump into self-selected tribes of “people-like-us” and never have to associate with, much less find common ground with, any of the “not-like-us.”

Most Americans today don’t need a Christianity, or even a “spirituality,” grounded in the affirmation of their uniqueness and freedom of choice. We need one grounded in solidarity and interdependence. And, like it or not, those things can only be expressed in big, broad, and truly diverse institutions.