By the Way | My Career as an Influencer

I’ve decided to become an influencer.

It’s true that I don’t exactly know what an “influencer” is or does, but a recent article in the Boston Globe says that influencers can make up to $100,000 a year by, well, influencing, I guess. And that’s not pocket change. 

Besides, my wife, the Lovely and Talented, is after me to develop new interests and hobbies in the event that I choose someday to retire. Influencing seems like a real possibility, don’t you think?

I gather that every influencer has a niche—food, fashion, home design, identifying tropical bird calls, tut-tutting on the finer points of grammar, or something—so I need to find a niche. And I think the idea is to amass an audience interested in your influence.

As a pescetarian for four decades, I doubt that food is in my wheelhouse; not many people are clamoring to know the distinction between king and sockeye salmon. And fashion? Yeah, right! I persisted in wearing a coat and tie in the classroom until very recently, so I’m hardly in the vanguard of fashionable trends.

That leaves history and religion, which have fascinated me pretty much all my life and I began studying, well, let’s just say sometime in the previous century.

On religious matters, I propose to wield my influence to restore some decorum to evangelical worship. So-called praise music traces its roots to Ralph Carmichael (“He’s Everything to Me”) and especially to Calvary Chapel and the Jesus movement of the early 1970s. There’s nothing wrong with it, I suppose, but it’s pretty undemanding: four notes, three words, two hours, as my friend Tony Campolo likes to say.

So, I propose to wield my influence to bring back some of the old standards. Bach, Tallis and Palestrina might be a bridge too far for congregations weaned on “Shine, Jesus, Shine”—an influencer can only do so much—but let’s start with “Tell Me the Old, Old Story” or “Rescue the Perishing” or “Abide with Me Fast Falls the Eventide.”

Doesn’t Psalm 96 say something about worshiping in “the beauty of holiness”?

I confess that “I’ll Go Where You Want Me to Go” made me more than a tad uneasy when I was growing up in evangelicalism. I was afraid I’d be sent to places I didn’t want to go, so we can skip that one. 

I’m an influencer, after all—and a crotchety one at that, especially when it comes to what another friend, Don Wyrtzen, calls the worship wars.

While we’re at it, let’s do away with those infernal worship teams—or at least demand that they open their eyes at least once after the second verse. Ugh. 

Can an influencer impose a cone of silence? If so, let’s target David Barton, the faux historian who has fashioned an entire career out of spreading falsehoods about the United States being a Christian nation. His lies and fabrications are so egregious that his very conservative publisher, Thomas Nelson, withdrew his book from circulation.

The historical record is abundantly clear. The founders did not intend for the United States to be a “Christian” nation. Well aware of the religious conflicts that had roiled Europe and England, they were emphatic that they wanted no entanglement between church and state.

Despite Barton’s tortured claims to the contrary, the founders themselves were not evangelical Christians. Put another way, with the possible exception of Benjamin Rush, a physician, and John Witherspoon, Presbyterian minister and president of the College of New Jersey, no founder would qualify for membership in any church currently advocating for Christian nationalism.

Also, there is the nettlesome matter of the Treaty of Tripoli. In my role as an influencer, I would insist that every citizen of the United States read the Treaty of Tripoli, which was ratified unanimously by the U.S. Senate on June 7, 1797. Article 11 reads in part, “As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion…” 

Barton’s lies have caused untold damage and have unleashed fevered assertions that the United States is and always has been a Christian nation. Nothing could be farther from the truth—which is a good thing because religion has flourished in this country as nowhere else precisely because of the First Amendment and the separation of church and state.

Barton should be writing science-fiction comic books, not volumes that pretend to be history.

Speaking of history, as a historian and an influencer, I would encourage my fellow evangelicals to familiarize themselves with the history of their own movement. Evangelicalism was not always reactionary. 

Evangelicals in the nineteenth century and even in the early twentieth century cared about such matters as poverty, education, workers’ rights and women’s equality. They had their shortcomings, to be sure, but they worked very hard to make society more fair and just. 

There’s a lesson there. An influencer worth his salt should be able to make the case.