Consider this a dispatch from my neighborhood to yours. Christianity Today doesn’t typically publish Orthodox Jewish writers, so you would possibly consider me a distant cousin, writing in an effort to grasp and encourage American evangelicals as they adjust to a dominant culture that’s increasingly postmodern and even pagan. While Jews see this era as but one other chapter in an extended journey, many American evangelicals appear to have lost their ballast—and with it, the cohesion and vision essential to flourish as a minority.
What can this distant cousin offer? Let me take you on a tour of my community. Anchored by the principles of Shabbat (Sabbath), we live sooner or later per week (plus major holidays) as if we were, as one visiting pastor friend remarked, “from the Fifties,” before automobiles, television, and apps got here to dominate day by day life.
Streets fill with people walking—to a neighbor’s house, a park, a prayer service, a celebration—and we encounter many familiar faces and get caught up in conversations along the best way. Weekly life is sustained day in and time out by a powerful set of place-based institutions working in tandem—schools, synagogues, restaurants, charities, and interfamily networks—together making a string of close-knit communities across the country.
How is that this different from what CT readers almost certainly observe and experience of their day by day rhythms? Socialized to consider that their culture was the bulk, it seems Christians have invested much lower than Orthodox Jews in 4 key elements of faithful living required to thrive as a minority: educating children individually from the broader society, marking space and time to bolster community cohesion, strengthening local institutions, and reducing the influence of secular media.
From my vantage, it seems that American Christians normally and evangelicals specifically are perplexed as to find out how to handle a world wherein they’re but a minority. Nationally, many Christians are attempting to reshape the bulk culture and political landscape as if their very own future relied on it, making a backlash against the religion that makes sustaining and enlarging it even harder.
What would actually help American Christians pass the promise of their faith to subsequent generations? Here are a couple of practical suggestions from my experience living embedded in an Orthodox Jewish community, where those 4 elements consistently shape day by day life for me and my family.
First, educate children individually from the broader society and make that learning a lifelong a part of the religion. Jews are famous for our concentrate on learning. We are, in any case, the “People of the Book,” and learning Torah is the central element in our faith.
But there may be one other rarely stated reason religious education is so vital to us: Historically, only Jews who emphasized learning in Jewish schools and absorbing Jewish ideas were in a position to transmit their identity to subsequent generations; everyone who didn’t achieve this assimilated. As such, religious Jews construct schools in every single place we go and (speaking from personal experience) tackle enormous hardship to be sure that our kids only go to such institutions. Public schools usually are not an option. And while some homeschool, most Jews consider that communal educational settings inculcate values and knowledge that would not be replicated otherwise.
Second, mark space and time in ways in which can sustain culture, values, rituals, and identity. Education is barely the beginning if a minority identity and set of beliefs are to be transmitted generation to generation. We must deliberately develop for our community—and particularly our youth—an independent culture, backed by its own history and narrative and instilling a way of quiet strength (and belief in the final word vindication of our beliefs).
Engagement and even partial integration with mainstream society is permissible, but it surely ought to be done in ways in which don’t undermine our community’s values and cohesion. Practically speaking, it’s okay to live in a city, go to a secular college, and work in an enormous company, so long as you reside and mainly socialize together with your own community. It is crucial to watch Sabbath and major holidays.
This observance is a “setting aside” that involves each space and time. Sabbath and major holidays do more to bond and interweave the community than another practice. They force our community to live inside walking distance of one another (no driving is allowed on as of late), to temporarily isolate ourselves from the encompassing society (use of phones, televisions, and other devices can also be banned at these times), to hope and eat together (families with families), and to have fun our unique history and culture (through Torah readings, speeches, and classes). These days are a significant element in Jewish continuity. As a famous Jewish maxim says: “More than the Jew has kept Shabbat, Shabbat has kept the Jew.”
Third, establish a dense network of local institutions to support individual communities in addition to the broader diaspora (or for you, the worldwide church). Jewish communities establish a large network of institutions wherever we go—synagogues, schools, mikvot (ritual baths), cemeteries, gemachim (free-loan funds), skilled support networks, and so forth. The unique Jewish mixture of individualism and communalism encourages this development, but surely 1000’s of years of minority life should have nurtured the habit.
When you reside in small communities that must survive without the assistance of (and sometimes in opposition to) the federal government, it’s essential to quickly develop latest mechanisms to support yourself. These various social institutions—some formally established, many operating ad hoc or on the margins in smaller communities—play crucial roles not only in helping people but in addition in bonding them together in a way that builds social cohesion, identity, and resilience.
Fourth, reduce the impact of mainstream media. Jews establish our own media outlets and thoroughly regulate what information is consumed, especially by children. For Christians, that is where publications equivalent to CT and its partners are so essential.
Media aimed toward children are especially vital. While my kids are energetic borrowers of books from the local library, and I encourage them to read a wide selection of rigorously chosen classical literature and history, we also subscribe to forcing Jewish magazine and book subscriptions. Some Orthodox Jews (myself included) have found it is healthier to make use of radios moderately than televisions and to hold older-style cell phones as a substitute of smartphones. Kids in my community typically get their very own phones at a later age than elsewhere in America, and our schools don’t allow phones anywhere near a classroom. (On the Sabbath and major holidays, there is no such thing as a access for anyone, in fact.)
A Christian reader may counter that Jewish rules seem legalistic. Yes, Jewish rules are indeed commands. This is a key difference in our faiths, and Christians appear to enjoy a liberty that Jews don’t. I ponder, though, if community-held “constraints” would bring Christians greater freedom. Could they leave you unhindered by the burden of trying to vary the bulk culture and free as a substitute to pursue joy as a flourishing minority?
This framework shouldn’t be incompatible with the Christian emphasis on evangelism. If Christians built place-based church community across the 4 practical elements above, Christianity might return to the fervency of its childhood—before Constantine—when the religion was all about constructing close-knit, countercultural communities distant from power in ways in which offered the world a daring latest vision.
Strengths latent in Christianity could again change into apparent if Christians offer a fantastic counter to our mainstream culture, which has done a lot to atomize and isolate us from each other. For example, Sabbath-keeping has all the time been a central tenet of each our faiths. I actually have met many younger Christians with an interest in recovering Sabbath rhythms and the community they engender.
But, as rabbi Jonathan Sacks warns, becoming “a creative minority” is “tough, since it involves maintaining strong links with the surface world while staying true to your faith, in search of not merely to maintain the sacred flame burning but in addition to rework the larger society of which you’re a component. This is, as Jews can testify, a demanding and risk-laden selection.”
Jeremiah saw the destruction of Solomon’s temple and his people taken captive to Babylon, but he shared a hopeful—and practical—vision. He instructed the Jews:
Build houses and calm down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have little children; find wives on your sons and provides your daughters in marriage, in order that they too could have little children. Increase in number there; don’t decrease. Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the town to which I actually have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper. (29:5–7)
Twenty-six centuries ago, Jeremiah foresaw that it is feasible to not only survive as a creative minority but to flourish in a way that contributes to and shapes the encompassing society. Long accustomed to living in exile, Jews have fully internalized this message. Amid a paganizing culture, what is going to American Christians decide to do?
Seth D. Kaplan, a lecturer on the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, is writer of the brand new book Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time.
