The Malignancy of Ideology
A Review of
The Church in Dark Times: Understanding and Resisting the Evil That Seduced the Evangelical Movement
Mike Cosper
Paperback: Brazos, 2024
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Reviewed by Stephen Kamm
My brother and I grew up in the evangelical church. We attended a small evangelical college and, with our friends, worried that Amy Grant had “gone secular” with the release of “Baby Baby.” We were all in. My brother lives in Colorado Springs and attends a right-of-center Presbyterian church. I attend a left-of-center Presbyterian church in Seattle. To this day, we remain remarkably aligned in our approach to faith. And yet we tussle —sometimes at volume—when he derides evangelicalism as having “capitulated to political extremism.”
I counter that any movement claiming both John MacArthur and Shane Claiborne is impossibly diverse. I further suggest that many evangelicals quietly live their faith—proclaiming Jesus and helping the last, the least, and the lost—without a whiff of extremism in small congregations throughout the country. My brother (rightly) points out that I don’t encounter a large segment of the movement. “Steve,” he’ll say, “I know not all evangelicals who voted for Trump in 2016 or 2024 did so for the same reason. But if I suggest that I’m not 100% behind him, I’m met with shock at best, if not derision.” Mike Cosper’s The Church in Dark Times: Understanding and Resisting the Evil that Seduced the Evangelical Movement aims to help my brother understand his experience.
Cosper, the Director of Podcasts at Christianity Today and author of eight books, is perhaps best known as the writer and producer of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, a podcast that explores the creation, meteoric growth, and abrupt implosion of Mars Hill, a Seattle church led by the charismatic and controversial pastor Mark Driscoll. It is a remarkable effort, rightly praised for thoroughly and thoughtfully examining the phenomenon of celebrity leadership in the evangelical movement. The Church in Dark Times shares an animating question with the podcast: How has the evangelical church been undermined by allegiance to something other than faithful witness? In the book, Cosper suggests simply that ideology has corrupted the church.
It’s a deceptively straightforward premise, the bare bones of an idea, and Cosper takes great care to bring it to life. Ideology, according to 20th-century political theorist Hannah Arendt, “purports to explain every event by reducing it to a single premise.” Cosper quotes this definition and expands upon it: ideology is a narrative, ironclad and exhaustive, and when a believer is fully indoctrinated into its explanatory power, its demands become relentless. Cosper refers to this as the “iron logic” of ideology—an unyielding rigidity that distinguishes it from a set of beliefs or a worldview—and suggests that the certainty of an ideological narrative often overwhelms the adherent’s capacity to think. Citing Dostoevsky’s Demons, Cosper proposes that an ideology is not something you have. Rather, it has you. A better translation here might be, “You did not consume the ideas. The ideas consumed you.”
Cosper contends that ideology’s power to “consume” grew when modernity repositioned the individual from a subject experiencing the world with awe and wonder to an observer studying the world as an object. In a particularly nice passage about Columbus’s travels, Cosper notes: “By mapping the world’s boundaries, we effectively replaced the question mark at the borders of our imagination with a period.” As such, according to Cosper, “The world is now an object we consider in the abstract, as though we were looking at it ‘from the viewpoint of the universe,’ not as the place we are a part of.” This shift, and the assumed objectivity inherent in it, suggests that individuals can discern the meaning of history by observing and analyzing patterns of life. The modern mind believes it can discern ‘the key,’ the one true thing about history. Absolute clarity is ideology’s seductive power.
According to Cosper, the “evil that seduced the evangelical movement” lies precisely here: when a pastor (or leader in a parachurch organization) believes they have discerned “the key” to the church’s role in the world. Cosper writes, “We don’t call it ideology, of course. We prefer the more common name: a vision statement or mission.” These supposedly God-baptized plans, supported by the certainty of an ideological vision, lead evangelical leaders to impose a rigid belief framework within which all experience must fit and to which all effort must be directed. “The key” consumes even within the church, and Christians have been co-opted when they confuse the sound of a mission statement with that of the Psalms.
This is, I believe, a fair summary of Cosper’s case against a segment of the evangelical movement. (How much of the movement is not entirely clear.) Relying heavily on Arendt as a guide, he covers a lot of ground, quickly. Consider the following chapter titles—“Ideology and the Comprehensible World,” “Ideology, the Fall and the Limits of Our Knowing,” “Authority, Violence, and the Erosion of Meaning,” and “Discovering the Banality of Evil”—which the book attempts to address in just 84 pages. My marginalia is filled with comments like, “This is important, but I need more,” or “A fantastic insight, but not well developed.” At times, reading the book felt like walking through a large sprawling home, still under construction, with good materials but needing more time to complete – it was hard to inhabit.
Cosper notes in the Afterword that he was finishing the book in Israel during the Hamas-led attacks on October 7. He admits he was distracted: “I was very late in submitting the manuscript (as I tend to be), and yet I would come to the computer and open the manuscript, but I would quickly find myself scrolling through social media, texting friends or family in Israel, and obsessing over the grim news as it trickled out.” He wondered whether he should publish the book. Paradoxically, the Afterword—a meditation on ideology and the attacks—might be his finest work. It feels less like a jeremiad and more like a lament. Beautifully written, he reflects on the attack—the tragedy, confusion, and intractability of the problem—with insight and deep feeling. In this brief section, the reader sees an enfleshed example of ideology’s corruption, how it can create a horrific logic that justifies atrocity in the name of holiness.
The effectiveness of his afterward and the (at times excessive) brevity with which he addresses potentially fruitful topics suggest that the book is either far too long or far too short. It could have been a rich and provocative essay or a tome fleshing out the myriad ideas he touches on briefly. As it stands, it feels rushed, with more than a few lapses in production. Consider the following sentence: “Until that time, human beings were mortal, but they lived long lives and didn’t die.” Or take a more substantial example: he tends to italicize ‘think’ early in the book. Without further explanation, it’s impossible to know why, until much later when he suggests that thinking is rooted in solitude, which is necessary to avoid the lure of public recognition and groupthink that can degrade good thinking. These are two examples of regrettably common oversights. It felt like listening to someone with hiccups give an important lecture. It doesn’t necessarily ruin the lecture, but it is distracting.
Nevertheless, amid these distractions, Cosper rightly identifies a malignancy—one most evident when he shifts from critiquing evangelicalism as a whole to offering pastoral reflections for individual believers. Each believer, he warns, must resist the strong pull of ideology that threatens to sweep faith into its current. Ideology corrupts when it replaces a narrative of certainty with faith, false optimism with hard-fought hope, and achievement with surrender to God’s sovereignty. As Cosper observes, “God illuminates past and future but not in a way that simplifies, explains, or provides a key for interpreting them.” This, he argues, is intentional. Dependence on God is the Christian’s daily salvation. Scripture provides signposts for the journey rather than handholds for control. We are saved by faith.
As an antidote to ideology’s toxicity, Cosper argues—at times pleads—that the church embraces the ambiguities of life and faith: “To resist ideology is to recognize life as a series of encounters with wonders, mysteries, and perplexities and to allow for the reality that we may not, in the end, make much sense of it all.” Undoubtedly, there is truth in this. Yet, it’s worth asking: if the church leans too heavily into ambiguity, how does it prevent itself from sliding into equivocation and, in turn, slipping away from a strong creedal confession into irrelevance? My grandparents were fundamentalists, and they were certain. Though their certainty could often feel intractable, was it not also faithful? When does conviction, a healthy cell, transform into something cancerous?
Richard Niebuhr opens Christ and Culture with a caveat: Any effort to “define the essence of Jesus Christ, who is one and the same, faces the impossibility of stating adequately, by means of concepts and propositions, a principle which presents itself in the form of a person.” All representations of Christ in word or worship will be imperfect until, that is, we meet him face to face. In the meantime, faith is hard. Building and leading Christian organizations will always be flawed. Evangelicalism takes many forms, some perhaps more deeply infected by ideology’s cancer than others. Cosper’s The Church in Dark Times offers an important diagnosis, though it’s often difficult to discern exactly to whom the diagnosis applies. One can easily imagine a provocative and illuminating series of podcasts exploring both a diagnostic framework and proposed treatments. I, for one, would welcome it.
Stephen Kamm
Stephen Kamm is a writer living in Sammamish, Washington. You can read more of his writing at stephenkamm.com. Find him on Twitter: @stephenkamm
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