Many conservative evangelicals define “faith” as believing hard things. What this means is that justification by faith is actually earning your salvation through believing hard things and orthodoxy is whatever seems hard to believe in today’s world.
Conservative evangelicals have bastardized the concept of orthodoxy by redefining it as hard beliefs that cut against the grain of secular humanism, the most prominent one being that practicing homosexuality is a sin. This allows them to feel like their faith is “costly.”
The reason conservative evangelicals can never change their view on homosexuality or remove it from the epicenter of their “orthodoxy” is because they need the feeling of “costliness” that being anti-gay provides them in order to have a sense of security about their salvation.
The conservative evangelical definition of faith as believing hard things is not unrelated to their support for Trump. When truth is defined according to its perceived social costliness, political incorrectness and truth become synonymous.
If faith is believing hard things (a.k.a. things that are not in keeping with worldly liberalism), then all Trump has to do to become an honorary evangelical is to believe and say things that make secular liberals rip their hair out.
The irony is that the supposed "costliness" of believing hard things actually serves as a substitute for the actual costliness of lived Christian discipleship. Ideology is always way easier than discipleship.
Here’s the other thing. When you give upper-middle class Christians pseudo-costly beliefs they can use to justify themselves, you’re not actually standing against worldliness; you’re capitulating to their worldliness. Bourgeois moral piety is friendship with the world.
Pseudo-costly self-justifying beliefs are the mechanism by which rich people make peace with their greed and validate their scorn of supposedly morally degenerate working class people. In other words, the pseudo-costly beliefs enable sin because of their self-justification.
Oh and here’s the blog post version of the “faith” of believing in “hard” things. patheos.com/blogs/mercynot… #umc
