As the former editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, a minister, and author of numerous books, Mark Galli speaks to broad audiences on faith, politics, and cultivating spiritual wholeness, or what he calls, a “worldly spiritual life,” in a fractured world. Whether in his writing, interviews, The Galli Report, or speaking engagements, his understanding of contemporary culture and our response to it is as compelling as it is compassionate. In this conversation with Radix, Galli shares about his latest book, but also his thoughts on how to engage our world from a place of optimism.
[Radix] How has being an editor for Christianity Today, Christian History, and Leadership changed your views about evangelicals and the church as a whole?
[MG] It did certainly help me see things about evangelicalism more deeply. So did working for Christianity Today’s Leadership. Connected to that was being a pastor myself for ten years. And it’s hard to be a pastor, even if you’re in a church that is mostly theologically sympathetic to you. It helped to work with Leadership magazine and to read the thoughts of other pastors. There are some really good, good men and women out there doing some extraordinary work.
As far as Christian History magazine, well, it shows you the great things that evangelical missionaries, pastors, and laypeople have done over the centuries. And, yeah, they’ve done a lot of terrible things, too, but that doesn’t take away from the great heroic efforts they make and have made. For example, if you go to a garbage dump in Cairo where people are forced to live in poverty and you run across a Christian mission there, what you’re going to find is it’s either run by Catholic nuns or evangelicals or Pentecostals. And that’s just the type of people that evangelicals are. They will make tremendous sacrifices to get the Gospel out there.
Here is the bottom line though: While I might have pretty serious disagreements about the people who, I think, are too fanatically devoted to Mr. Trump, when you actually get to talk to evangelicals and talk about how they live their lives, these are really good people in a lot of respects. They are the people who volunteer at food banks; they’re the people who collect clothes and toys at Christmas. These are the people who try to do the best they can. So overall, in spite of my severe criticism of the evangelicals in my book, and often in my other writing (though, part of my job as editor-in-chief was to help keep our movement accountable), I’m fundamentally impressed with the evangelical heritage and what it’s doing in the world today.
[Radix] That’s a very strong statement.
[MG] It is, especially given the news. Whenever the news, especially the secular news, wants to feature evangelicals, ninety percent of the time it wants to show them as hypocrites— pious, otherworldly, and super-conservative. And that’s a group that needs to be called to account sometimes, which is what I was doing in my editorials. But we also need to keep in mind that the negativity is way over-exaggerated in the news media. I think it’s important to know you have to separate what’s going on Twitter and Facebook and the national media and what’s happening on the ground on, say, Main Street and in places like Wheaton and Peoria.
[Radix] Considering the media, I just about fell off my chair when I read your statement, “We have to be grateful for the gift the American Church brings to global Christianity – among other things, our American can-do and even must-do spirit. We are a practical group, and we often think about ethics, and we put a lot of Christian boots on the ground.” As you said earlier, we have our weaknesses and areas that certainly need work, but it seems to me that this kind of statement flies in the face of much of the negative view of the Church. Because of your Christian historical knowledge, what might you suggest we supplement our reading with?
[MG] Well, the first thing I would say is that what you’re reading is probably true. You shouldn’t deny that. With that said, though, just keep reading and keep studying and keep exploring because you’re going to find out there are other truths there as well that are being ignored by large sections of the history profession. So, we shouldn’t be afraid of the bad news, but we should use the very tools that are discovering the bad news to find out what’s really going on.
What you’ll find might be surprising. For example, Christianity Today ran a cover story in the 2014 January-February issue called, “The World the Missionaries Made.” It was the story of a scholar and his research into discovering that in spite of the charge that missionaries were merely colonial, the historical evidence is otherwise. His research demonstrated that in countries where there was a heavy missionary presence, the rates of literacy are higher, the rates of education are higher, the rights of women are better. I mean, this is a study done by a respected sociologist, Robert Woodbury. Similarly, I researched the Boxer Rebellion in China and found that during the turn of the twentieth century some radical Chinese activists went on a rampage and murdered tens of thousands of Catholics, but also hundreds of Protestant missionaries. Now, of course, a modern historian would be very sympathetic to the Boxer Rebellion because the missionaries represented colonialism. However, it was in fact the missionaries who were there who were some of the most vocal critics of the imperialism brought in by the British and Americans. The missionaries were the ones fighting against the binding of women’s feet and other things.
I’m not going to pretend that all the missionaries are perfect and none were colonial or thought themselves superior. But among the groups that were trying to fight the negative aspects of imperialism, it was the missionaries who were doing it. So I encourage people to just keep reading and exploring. Don’t think the book ends with a missionary being hypocritical. That’s not the end of the story.
[Radix] While most Christians would agree with your overall assessment that Christians need to read the Bible more, and for the purpose of knowing God, how would you address the problems that some people might have with assumptions of biblical accuracy – especially considering writers like Peter Enns, for example. For the individuals who are exposed to strong biblical criticism, I don’t think it’s fair to paint biblical illiteracy as only laziness, without also addressing the issue of antipathy to the Bible, especially the Old Testament. What are some well-educated counterpoints?
[MG] First, I’d have them step back and think about what’s going on in that world, and realize that this intense biblical criticism, higher criticism, has been going on for over two hundred years. It has caused us to rethink a lot of what Scripture means and how we understand it. But what’s amazing, after two hundred years of intense biblical historical criticism, we still have these huge bodies of people called Catholics, Orthodox, Reformed, Wesleyans, and others who continue to open their Bibles and find it the most extraordinary book that they encounter. Furthermore, many of those people and leaders are intelligent people who’ve spent a lot of time reading the Bible. For example, C.S. Lewis would be the greatest example of a person who read the Bible critically, and yet, in a sense, gave his life to its message and the One it’s about. And that’s Jesus Christ. That’s one thing to think about.
When I was younger and fresh out of seminary I read a lot of commentaries, especially as I was preparing sermons. They were certainly helpful, though they tended to be along the more historical-critical line. I tend to read fewer and fewer commentaries as I’ve gotten older and instead more Christian writers, noting how they handle Scripture. This is especially true in the Catholic and Orthodox tradition, which I think have a rich, rich history. They’re not ignoring the historical-critical aspects. They’re just reading it at a different level. They’re not reading it to find out if a particular thing is absolutely historically accurate. They’re actually reading it. They are asking, “Where can I find Jesus Christ in this passage?” And that’s really what we should all be looking for in Scripture: “What does it tell us about Jesus Christ, even when we’re reading the Old Testament?” Wherever we are looking, we’re ultimately asking that question: “What does it tell us about Jesus Christ.”
To take this further, when you read a contemporary spiritual writer like Eugene Peterson, or an ancient writer like Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, or Augustine, you can see that they’re taking a different approach and they’re asking the most important questions. Ultimately, they’re reading Scripture through a Christocentric lens. That is to say that for them, it’s about Jesus Christ from beginning to end. And that’s a much more fruitful way to read Scripture.
Now, to clarify, this doesn’t mean you have to deny the historical critical work that’s being done. It does mean that maybe that Scripture is a different type of literature and needs to be read in a different way. No one would read a contemporary novel, necessarily, as a book that’s going to give you accurate science or accurate history. You read it differently than you read a history book or a science book. So when we read a book like the Bible, that transcends all those disciplines; we read it in a different way.
[Radix] Let’s take this a bit further and talk about what you would say to those who believe in the inerrancy of Scripture?
[MG] Well, I actually wrote essays defending the word inerrancy in Christianity Today because that was part of our statement of faith. Now, I think it happens to be a bad word to describe “Scriptural authority and accuracy.” I like what the late J.I. Packer wrote about it. He said, essentially, that the Bible is infallible in matters of faith and practice. It isn’t necessarily infallible in terms of science or history. When it comes to matters of faith, what we believe and practice, how we live out our faith, it can be absolutely depended upon. In that regard it’s inerrant. It will not lead us astray.
For those who are committed to inerrancy, here’s where we differ: they’ll say you’ve got to take every passage of Scripture as if it is literally true on its surface level. So they read Genesis and say it must be history and science. My view is that I don’t think it’s history or science, but it’s the Word of God. It tells us the truth that’s even more important than history or science.
So an anti-inerrantist would say, if you find one historical or scientific mistake then the Bible cannot be trusted at all. At that point it’s very difficult to make any progress. I’m not sure what to say to them other than to remember that the Bible is full of lots of different types of literature. We have to read each book, each passage, in that context. So even within the Gospels which are, for the most part, a history of sorts and of a biography of sorts, there is other literature in the middle of it that must be read on its own terms.
Now, of course, some people will say, well, then why can’t we interpret the Resurrection as a myth? If Jonah, Genesis, and the parables are story, why isn’t the Resurrection story? My answer is, just read the accounts of the Resurrection over and over; read the accounts of the early disciples and the apostles and what they were giving their lives for. In doing that, we can assume that something really happened there that people are giving their lives for. It has a kind of veracity, even though the accounts sometimes differ.
[Radix] In the book you say that the world catechizes us to satisfy our desires to do useful things, to be efficient and productive. Can you say more about your choice of the word catechize?
[MG] Well, I partly used that word because it was just a little different than what we normally hear. It’s important to know that we’re in a constant state of being marketed to by someone for something all the time in America. This might be buying a thing or buying into an idea. I think Christians especially have to be on the alert about that. Not that we need to be fearful. We just need to recognize that everything that we read and watch is trying to make us think about the world in a certain way. We can’t be naive about that.
That doesn’t mean we can’t engage in culture that specifically doesn’t have a Christian worldview. We need to understand what they’re thinking. Our antennas should always be up. For a lot of stuff that’s happening in commercials and on popular TV shows, we always have to be willing to step back and say, okay, what are the values that are assumed in this? For some time now, the sexual values in Hollywood present a completely different view of human sexuality. I mean, you find people falling in bed with one another on TV so much more quickly than they ever do in real life. What these writers are doing is giving us a world view on human sexuality. Here is the thing, if you imbibe that worldview regularly, you’re going to start thinking or feeling that same thing yourself. Thus the danger of being catechized by the world. One of our biggest struggles in the world, one of the reasons that we have a hard time holding the line on many issues is because we’ve just been catechized by our media to think about things differently. So we need to be alert and aware of how our values and views are being shaped. When we do this properly, we don’t have to be defensive or fearful.
[Radix] Speaking to the evangelical world and missions, in your book, you make quite the statement: “We are not responsible for saving the world but only for loving our neighbours in whatever form that takes.” Considering the issues of social justice and activism, have you caught some blowback? What do you think will happen with this kind of message?
[MG] I got invited to a national denomination office which basically said, we’d like to have a conversation about this. But they really disagreed with me. Now, they did so charitably. It was just a wonderful example of Christians who agree to disagree and have a conversation together. But I do get those who really push back hard against the notion that our job isn’t to save the world, or that the moral purpose of the Church isn’t to make the world a better place.
I just had a phone call a couple of weeks ago from an associate pastor who said, “I just can’t believe how refreshing your message was to hear. I’m in a church that’s all about mission, mission, mission. And it’s just exhausting.” I was so grateful to hear that. You know, one of the main purposes of the Church is to worship its Creator for all that He’s done for us. Of course we’re to love our neighbor, but first and foremost we are to give glory and honor to God and to give our devotion to him.
I think we all have that tendency to feel an urgency to do something. I feel this myself. If I spend too much time reading during a day, I get a little nervous, like I’m not doing anything constructive. There is something good about that! God does want us to love our neighbor. There’s no question about it. I guess what I want is to just get people to doubt that their activism will somehow save them, and that they’re not justified by their activism. If I can just get them to doubt that for a couple of moments, I’m hoping that will help them bring some balance to their lives.
Of course, we’re not going to stop being active altogether. So it’s not activism, per say, that I am against; it’s a sense of justification by activism. What I want to question is that when we do stuff and then feel that because I did this stuff I am now a good human being. The truth is that we can feel good as a person because God created us and redeemed us and lives with us day by day.
That being said though, there’s a huge difference between those two things, because the one is freeing and really allows us to do more good works. But when we’re justified by our good works it’s a hamster wheel we never get off of and it’ll just kill us.
[Radix] I appreciate that you aren’t afraid to touch on such things that some might think sacrosanct. For instance, being missionally-minded. You worry that being missionally-minded might “encourage our addiction to activity.” The words that popped in my mind when I read your above quote was how the average North American is addicted to the vita activa – and nearly eschews the vita contemplativa. What would you tell every one about this addiction to activity if you had a direct line to them and they had to listen – quietly and in a state of stillness?
[MG] Well, if they were listening quietly in a state of silence, they’re ninety percent of the way there.
[Radix] Wow! What a statement.
[MG] Being quiet is really hard! It’s hard to stay still for more than a few minutes. That’s the place to begin though: still ourselves for two to five minutes and stretch it to ten at some point and then just think about what’s going on inside. The more nervous and anxious we are in that time, the more we’re probably addicted to activity. We need to start thinking about why that is true.
I remember one parishioner from when I was a pastor. If there are sizes of mansions in heaven, I believe she’s going to have a big one because she was fundamentally a really good woman, one of the most active people in the parish that I was a part of. Anyway, I gave a sermon once on how God doesn’t need us, but God wants to use us to further his work in the world. She came up to me after the sermon, teary eyed, and said, “If God, doesn’t need me, then what am I doing all this stuff for?” That’s sometimes what we get to feeling, that God needs me and if I don’t do it, it’s not going to get done. That’s just simply not true. God is sovereign and he’ll get the things done that He needs to get done through the people He needs to get them done through. And it’s a joy and privilege to be able to know that He will use us sometimes to further his work. But we have to know that our activity will only flourish if it’s done out of a love and a gratefulness. If it’s done out of necessity it will only become oppressive.
One of the reasons social justice warriors burn out so quickly is because they are working out of a motive of necessity. Anybody who’s been involved in social justice ministry for a sustained amount of time will say, “The only reason I’m making it is because I spend half an hour or an hour a day in meditation.” They know they cannot be motivated by the need.
You know, there’s this famous idea of Christian mission: “Find a need and fill it.” Well, that’s a sure formula for burning out because there are way more needs than you’re ever going to be able to fulfill. I might change the idea to “Find God, and find out what He wants you to do that day, and that’s all you need to worry about.”
[Radix] “That Day,” what a thought. To end with, I’d like to talk with you about listening.
I know people who hold vastly different – often opposing – opinions. But they hold one thing in common: they are really good people. Loving people, caring people, helping people. One thing I liked about Martin Buber was that while he said it was imperative to listen (which is to turn towards the other, approach the other, listen, and then respond to the other), that doesn’t mean we have to agree with or validate that person’s views. But we have to come to them with a posture of humility. What would you say about the importance of listening?
[MG] It seems to me Buber’s fundamental idea is that when you encounter another human being, you’re encountering a gift, a mystery, just an amazing phenomenon. The first thing you ought to do is to engage them, to absorb them with your eyes and your ears. Just listen really well. When you do, you’re going to find something there that is remarkable and wonderful. Most people think when I wrote my Trump editorial that I just let evangelicals have it. But they don’t realize that I spent literally from the time of the election in 2016 until I wrote that piece in 2019 reading and talking to conservative evangelicals. When people would criticize me for some of my editorials, I said to them, would you mind staying in contact with me, tell me what you think of different things we’re doing in Christianity Today? Because I want to hear what you have to say.
When I first started to write that editorial, I was going to write the typical Mark Galli editorial of something that says, hey, let’s listen to one another and let’s try to learn from one another. But like you said, there comes a point where you do need to lay down what you actually think. But the laying down of what you actually think has to be done after you’ve done the listening. Only then can you know that you’re going to be addressing the central issues and the central concerns of the people with whom you disagree. But that listening process is not just a matter of listening till there’s a five second silence. Rather, after that five seconds of silence, you might instead of interjecting your own opinion, ask another question and then another question.
And this is especially true right now. You know, if you, for example, are a person of my kind of moral and political view, you’re going to have serious disagreements with the current president of the United States. Not only his politics, but also his moral behavior. Coming out of an evangelical background like I am, I have friends and relatives who are totally committed to Mr. Trump. But I will have to say that I’m always thinking of what I want to say next. I am the worst listener in the world, but I sure know how to talk about how to be a good listener.
My job is to engage people and listen and keep on asking questions about why they believe what they believe, why they think what they think, and not in order to, at some point, interject my own opinion. If I sincerely listen and ask the questions and go deeper, at some point they’re going to feel like they’re loved, cared for, like they matter, and like you’re not going to dismiss them. Then, they’ll have the freedom to say, well, heck, what do you think? And once that happens, you will be in a much better place to talk to them about what you think in a way that can make some sense to them.