Blue like jazz

There's a lot of good stuff in here that is especially timely for issues the American church is facing. There are also quite a few examples of Miller getting in his own way, adding unnecessary tangents to otherwise-good points that seem to be there primarily to shock the reader -- there's a blurry line in this book between humble honesty about Miller's own faults and borderline-pride at being different from other Christians by not being so strict about things like the appropriateness of joking about sex or swearing.

Much of what's in here could and should convict American Christians who are steeped in "sanitized church culture": the need to actually go out into the world and show the love of Christ to the "unlovables" of the world who need His redemption most ("My friend Andrew the Protestor believes things. Andrew goes to protests where he gets pepper-sprayed, and he does it because he believes in being a voice of change. My Republican friends get frustrated when I paint Andrew as a hero, but I like Andrew because he actually believes things that cost him something. Even if I disagree with Andrew, I love that he is willing to sacrifice for what he believes. And I love that his beliefs are about social causes. Andrew says that it is not enough to be politically active. He says legislation will not save the world. On Saturday mornings Andrew feeds the homeless. He sets up a makeshift kitchen on a sidewalk and makes breakfast for people who live on the streets. He served coffee and sits with his homeless friends and talks and laughs, and if they want to pray he will pray with them. He's a flaming liberal, really. The thing about it is, though, Andrew believes this is what Jesus wants him to do. Andrew does not believe in empty passion...Andrew doesn't cloak his altruism within a trickle-down economic theory that allows him to spend fifty dollars on a round of golf to feed the economy and provide jobs for the poor. He actually believes that when Jesus says feed the poor, He means you should do this directly. Andrew is the one who taught me that what I believe is not what I say I believe; what I believe is what I do."), or the need to break the American Church of being inexplicably joined at the hip to the Republican party (a human organization that Miller correctly identifies as one that "doesn't give a crap about the causes of Christ"), and the need to re-evaluate how we look at the lost not as "enemy combatants" who must be conquered and put down, but as hostages of sin ("The churches I attended would embrace war metaphor. They would talk about how we are in a battle, and I agreed with them, only they wouldn't clarify that we are battling poverty and hate and injustice and pride and the powers of darkness. They left us thinking that our war was against liberals and homosexuals. Their teaching would have me believe I was the good person in the world and the liberals were the bad people in the world. Jesus taught that we are all bad and He is good, and He wants to rescue us because there is a war going on and we are hostages in that war. The truth is we are supposed to love the hippies, the liberals, and even the Democrats, and that God wants us to think of them as more important than ourselves. Anything short of this is not true to the teachings of Jesus.")

The American Church in the 2020s needs to hear these things desperately, because it's fallen prone to a thirst for political power and control that's led it away from the true gospel of Jesus Christ and towards the false gospel of Ronald Reagan and Jerry Falwell. (As the book puts it, "Tony the Beat Poet says the church is like a wounded animal these days. He says we used to have power and influence, but now we don't, and so many of our leaders are upset about this and acting like spoiled children, mad because they can't have their way. They disguise their actions to look as though they are standing on principle, but it isn't that, Tony says, it's bitterness. They want to take their ball and go home because they have to sit on the bench. Tony and I agreed that what God wants us to do is sit on the bench in humility and turn the other cheek like Gandhi, like Jesus. We decided that the correct place to share our faith was from a place of humility and love, not from a desire for power.")

So there's much that's good in here. There's also quite a bit that could have made the book better if it was left out entirely -- like Miller's seeming endorsement of profanity as somehow "liberated" rather than unbiblical, or his apparent view of sexual promiscuity not as sinful but as just empty, as evidenced by the casual way he brings it up frequently as though it were a normal part of life.

Miller also plays a bit of a shell game with terminology that, if he examined it himself a bit more honestly, he might find to be disingenuous, or at least inaccurate: specifically, he takes many of the things he dislikes about how Christianity is practiced in America today -- most of them legitimate faults that are attributable to American culture rather than to Christianity itself -- and labels them as either "the Christian religion" or "Christianity", instead taking all the "good parts" out and labeling them "Christian spirituality", mixing in quite a bit of disdain for any sort of mandates for personal holiness as part of just "religion" rather than the sort of "essence" of Christianity (his "Christian spirituality").

This behavior takes a bit of the wind out of the sails of a theme throughout the book of pursuing Christ and imitating Christ without putting cultural preferences in the way of actually practicing Christianity, and of showing grace and love to sinners and seeing the person through their sin. Miller's willing to extend that grace to those the American church has typically treated as lepers, even when they're unrepentant (homeless people, mentally-ill people, politically-liberal academics, homosexual people), but seems less willing to do the same for the sinful people who comprise the church (yes, even the "big Christianity" churches that embody much of Miller's often-legitimate complaints).

On the whole, it's a good book to read with a grain of salt, because it provides plenty of opportunities to react to it strongly, and then to test our reactions against the Bible to "shake out" which of our adverse reactions are Biblical and which are merely a product of cultural comfort zones. Such an exercise is needed by the American Church in the 2020s, at a time when the marriage between American Evangelicalism and the Republican Party has led to much of the church clinging to a political gospel-of-Republican-power (with Trump as its golden calf), which is in nearly all ways opposed to the true gospel of Christ Jesus.