What is it about the culture in which we live that defines our Christianity? After spending my entire life in America, I find myself working in ministry in Western Europe for some time now. Sometimes the differences are striking, other times it is amazing how similar we really are despite being divided by water, time and space.
I find in the Christian culture so much is the same. From the traditional to what’s considered cutting edge, all you have to do is remove the accents and you could fool me that I was in some part of America. The songs are the same, the order of service is identical; I could go on and on. It even appears to remain consistent within denominational traditions.
But the way the secular culture sees Christianity, and Christian culture, definitely seems to change depending on what area of the world that you live. The first time I realized this was when we received a hate email regarding our ministry in Western Europe. We were well prepared for this by Christians already in the field here, so the email itself wasn’t a shock. What surprised me what it wasn’t, and what it was. What it wasn’t was what I had thought it would be:
“You crazy Christians, stay away from my friends and family with your weirdo cult stuff.”
What it was is paraphrased as:
“Yankee go home. My country doesn’t want your American religion, we’re proud to be who we are and don’t need this introduced into our culture.”
Whoa. I had expected people to reject what we were doing, mostly on the basis of John 3:16 or perceptions based on televangelists. And I never expected anyone to be thrilled with me because I’m American. I expected the line to be more like, “I don’t like you because you’re Christian,” not “I don’t like you because of your American religion.”
I wish we could have had a better dialogue with the person, but he hid behind email, not using a full name or wanting to have a mature conversation. We’re pretty sure he’s never met us in person, and the rest of the interaction deteriorated into him calling our intelligence into question and stereotyping what we must be like due to our American heritage. It seemed to fall away quickly, and it’s been months since the incident. But it did get me thinking: is Evangelical Christianity uniquely American?
Looking through some quick history, it’s difficult to make the case in a broad sense. You’ve got Jews (Jesus, Paul and more) spreading the Gospel on foot and Martin Luther the German massively influencing the face of Protestant Evangelicalism. And the Gospel itself certainly isn’t an Americans-only Gospel, nor does it really back up the Capitalist ethics in the States (make more money, limited generosity, or individualism/self-reliance).
Perhaps the reference has to do with the aggressive-types shown on religious programming or an unfortunate incident with a zealous stranger that hasn’t learned about relational evangelism. Maybe the real issue is Christians who, in borrowing from the American model, are not culturally-sensitive when interacting with a non-Christian. But I just don’t see how being an Evangelical Christian equals American.
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Missionary Defined
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The Missionary’s Dilemma, or Let the Dead Bury the Dead
Having grown up in a Catholic country as a daughter to American parents, I totally understand that the person considered Evangelicalism to be American. My beliefs were shrugged off all the time (I am not currently in Europe but hope to return) because I was American. The stereotype is that Americans are “happy” no matter what, not very deep, not very intelligent, belligerent, wanting to be right, and wanting to convince others of their ways. Wouldn’t it be easy for evangelism to look a lot like these aspects of cultural imperialism that the US has spread throughout the world? Also, in many cases people in Europe see religion as a socio-political aspect of their history and identity. Evangelicalism (at least in my country) is a foreign entity, with (almost) no indigenous roots in our country. (Well, they were killed or kicked out at the time.)
So, I think it’s easy to see that to ask someone to become an Evangelical Christian may seem like asking them to change nationalities. Let’s remember that there are other Christian churches that are more native to western, continental Europe, as well, and working for their renewal may also be a valid way to reach people for Christ.
@cstop: I know exactly what you’re saying, now more than ever since I wrote this post over two years ago. Our field is very, very similar to what you describe. As people here slowly get to know us, they find we’re not very typical Americans at all, nor are we pushing the stereotypical American Christian agenda, either. We’re here to talk about Jesus; how their relationship with God looks in this culture (compared to ours) is irrelevant to us (as long as it’s not against God’s laws, etc.).