How the fading of Timothy Keller's vision for loving the city impacts my marriage to a non-Christian
A response to Katelyn Beaty’s essay- What Happened to the Q Conference?
Every time I read a news story or essay on the topic of our polarized American culture, especially as it relates to the Church, I find myself asking: What about marriages like mine?
My husband and I are entering our 32nd year of marriage this year. He rejects the gospel of Christ, finds it foolish. I haven’t been able to escape the grace of God in Christ since age 17. Christ is all my hope. This is a huge difference.
We also don’t agree about other very important things like, who should be president, what a just government looks like, what morals should guide a person’s use of money, what’s sexually immoral. But despite these very big differences we both chose to stay married.
Don’t get me wrong, our marriage is not a coexist bumper sticker. We have heated discussions about our disagreements. I long for him to see the beauty and worth of Christ. He wishes I wasn’t so religious. But as of today we are still committed, after many years of trial and failure, to trying to learn to understand each other and love each other the best we can.
Living this long in a marriage like ours has me very interested in how so many of my brothers and sisters in Christ justify taking hostile or isolationist stances against the unbelieving people in their places of work, online, in their neighborhoods, and government. Or even against those who share their claimed faith in Christ, but don’t share their political party.
Why do so many of my fellow evangelical Christians seem to be rejecting the call to live like strangers and exiles in our culture, as the Apostle Peter writes? Why are we throwing out the scriptural charge to live in an honorable way, doing what’s good so that our unbelieving neighbors might honor God too? Maybe we’ve lost sight of what it means to live as an exile in our times.
Have we lost the Keller vision?
In a recent essay on Substack, Katelyn Beaty laments what she sees as a loss of the late Timothy Keller’s vision for Christians doing life with their unbelieving neighbors in this culture. Rather than isolating ourselves from the secular culture, or warring against the culture, Keller called for a winsome way of engaging our secular neighbors. A way that sought to serve them and do good.
Timothy Keller’s vision is of course not Keller’s, but God’s. God has always desired his people to be a blessing in the lives of our pagan neighbors, and to seek the good of even those in power who oppose us (see Genesis 22:18 and Jeremiah 29:7). So why are we so far from seeing this as our calling for how to live in today’s culture?
Beaty describes a “fracture along ideological lines” that has taken place since 2007– the legalization of same-sex marriage, the creation of an LGBTQ identifier as the norm, protests surrounding systemic racism and COVID restrictions— which has left conservative Christians on the defense. Beaty refers to Aaron Renn’s term, “negative world” to describe why conservative Christians are defensive. We feel the culture has turned against us. We hold to traditional Christian morals, and the culture views those morals as a violation of the “new public moral order.” We are living in a “negative world.”
The response, Beaty says, so many of us evangelicals have to this negative world is to either retreat into our own separatist bubbles or fight in the culture wars, striving to gain power to impose on the culture our Christian morals. Rather than employing a way of engaging the culture that seeks the good of the people, praying for them and serving them, we fight or flee.
This seems to be the lament of many thoughtful Christians. I hear it from leaders such as Russell Moore and Ray Ortlund and on podcasts like The Bulletin. We grieve what seems to be a collective giving up on what Beaty recalls as a positive vision of cultural renewal. She highlights Timothy Keller’s teaching that Christians are called to renew the places they live and work as they learn to “interface with people who didn’t follow Jesus.”
Would the unequally-yoked Christians please stand up
And this is where I stand up and raise my timid hand in the crowd of Christian thinkers, retreaters and culture warriors and say, “Yes! Yes! Yes! This is what I’m trying to do in my, “unequally-yoked” marriage. Christians like me choose to remain in marriages with spouses who don’t follow Jesus and disagree with us about moral or political issues. We are trying to live out the Biblical call for God’s people to pursue the good of the city— the people who don’t share your beliefs. Brothers and sisters, don’t give up on this way! We need the witness of your faithfulness to endure.”
Marriage is a microcosm of the Church. The Apostle Paul said marriage is a mystery that speaks of Christ and his Church. So the decisions we make in the greater Church, the struggles we have, the cultures we live in, are embodied in marriages in homes around the world. If in the Church we are promoting a fight or flight response to those in the culture who push against our convictions, how should this look in a marriage where one is a believer trying to live out their faith and the other is not, disagreeing with many of their convictions? How does The Benedict Option or the culture-war rubric hold in a marriage between an unbeliever and a believer? And how do those views hold up against the Bible’s call for a humble spirit that seeks to win the unbeliever while remaining in the marriage?
The truth is, the Benedict option and the culture-war way have both been alluring to me in my struggle to learn to love my husband well. I mean every time I withdraw out of anger or pouting I choose the Benedict option. Every time I lash out in defensive anger or shaming I choose the culture war option. But when I quiet myself, confident in the redeeming power of Christ and the hope of resurrection, and listen to my husband’s views, or stand firm in my convictions without lashing out when my husband sees those convictions as foolish, I choose the way of one whose home is not here.
What happened to love being what makes us strange?
Not only is marriage a microcosm of the church, but the individual believers in marriages help make up the body of Christ.
In our individualistic culture we in the church have forgotten that what happens to one happens to us all. We are one body (Ephesians 4:4). When my brothers and sisters in Christ chose to fight or flee from the secular people in their lives they hurt the part of the body trying to be faithful to the call of God on his people to live a different way, a faithful way, an exilic way.
I believe the Bible lays out an exilic ethic for the people of God, one that sees herself as the stranger in culture, and seeks to welcome the strangers of the culture to a common table of what is good, true and beautiful. The Bible Project work on the “Ethic of an Exile” is excellent in painting a picture of what this ethic looks like throughout scripture and ultimately in how Christ lived among us.
I believe this way of living, embodied in Christ, applies both to the Christian married to an unbeliever and the Christian at work with a secular person, or neighbors with someone on the other side of the political aisle.
The call to love our neighbors as ourselves, even our enemies, is universal for the Christian. It is not just in the covenant of marriage that the Christian is required to learn to love. You can remain legally married and not seek to love your unbelieving spouse well. The ethic of a Christian is an exilic ethic that seeks to build a life that honors God and loves their neighbor well. The way we love others and our honorable conduct should be what makes us strange or exilic in this culture. It’s exilic because we are the strangers here. It’s exilic because we are not striving for a home, or power, or what works here.
Can you tell a Christian to war against the cultural moral of honoring same-sex marriage by cutting off relations with their family or friends or coworkers who uphold same-sex marriage, and tell the Christian to remain in a marriage to their unbelieving spouse who believes same-sex marriage is a moral good? Or would you tell a Christian to cut-off their spouse in divorce because of those differences? If so, what do you do with the Christian belief in the covenant of marriage?
My point is the call to love your neighbor as yourself does not change depending on whether you’re married to your neighbor or not. The impact on your daily life might be different-- you can leave the office worker who rails against your beliefs about marriage behind-- but the call to love does not change.
We are all part of one body. Christians seeking to build a life that honors God, pursuing the good of their unbelieving neighbors (whether married to them or not) are setting an example (imperfectly) for the body of Christ to follow so that we might grow more like Christ together in this world.
Is it Woke or Does it Work? That Is Not The Question
In Beaty’s essay, she quotes James Wood as saying that the vision Timothy Keller called for in winsome living with our unbelieving neighbors is “woke” and that “sides will need to be taken on very important issues.” My question is, is it “woke” to remain faithful to your marriage vows, seeking to learn to love your unbelieving spouse well? Is it woke to listen and learn to understand your unbelieving spouse, even if they never convert? Is it woke to spend your life letting Jesus teach you to love another well even if they don’t love you in return?
Maybe to some it is. But whether folks label learning to love your unbelieving neighbor well “woke,” or whether they put loving your unbelieving neighbor on the cost-benefit analysis scale and find it comes up short and doesn’t “work” anymore, I still believe there is a way that isn’t a waste; a way that Christ embodied, and a way he calls us to follow.
His way seeks the good of the city, the neighbor, the spouse, whether they honor Christ as Lord or not. The way of Christ builds a life that witnesses to the kindness of God that leads us to repentance. His way plants the word of God and lives on its bread, feeding the hungry stranger. There is a way that multiplies despite disapproval. There’s a way that pursues the good of our unbelieving neighbors because we are pursued by the goodness and mercy of God all the days of our lives. There is a way that prays without ceasing, with tears, with seed for the sowing, even in long seasons of opposition and lack of harvest, because we believe in the One who intercedes for us, who came for us while we were His enemies.
I’m an American evangelical Christian living in a time of great divisiveness in the culture and the church, and I fear many of us have lost our way because we’re looking for what “works”, we’re looking to win, we’re looking for power rather than looking to Christ. We aren’t saying, “I count all the political power, every argument I could win, even the marriage that could have been gain to me as loss for the sake of knowing Christ.” We don’t want loss to gain Christ, we want what works.
Surely the cross didn’t look like it was working. Surely bearing a bludgeoned body, enduring cursing, mocking and a crown of thorns didn’t look like winning. Surely a stone-sealed grave didn’t look like power. But this is our King. Will we follow him?
Hello Sheila,
Wonderful testimony to your faithfulness to Christ, your marriage, and your heart for the unbelieving world! You are in my prayers, as is your husband.
I recently learned an important lesson: I live in the Puget Sound area, and left a comment about praying for a man who ministers to the street people there. I remarked how Seattle had become a “hell hole” in the many years we have lived here - the usual, crime, drugs, homelessness, woke craziness, etc. He said he appreciated the prayer, but corrected me about the “hell hole” remark. He said it was a beautiful city of *people* - artists, musicians, etc etc. He had a heart for the people, while I could only see the superficialities. Lesson learned.
Thank you for this. I think there’s a strong argument here, in bringing the lessons of love and peacemaking in marriage to the matter of loving our nonChristian neighbors. Peter makes the same connection. When he advises believing wives to “be subject to [their] own husbands, so that even if some do not obey the word, they may be won without a word by the conduct of their wives” (I Peter 3:1-2), he does so in the context of a longer argument about how to behave in this world with unbelievers. In every instance, he urges us to model the humility and gentleness of Christ. And in every instance the goal is “winning over”—not intimidating or coercing—those who don’t know Christ.