One decade ago, God is Not Dead proved to the entire world that Nietzsche was wrong. The problem is that America doesn’t understand Nietzsche—we understand what the American church has taught about their feelings about what Nietzsche said. Christians teach Nietzsche as a threat, that he was trying to kill God. I remember hearing about this idea in Sunday School, youth groups, and then in Bible College. That wasn’t Nietzsche. He didn’t try to kill God. If you think this, you need to read him in his original context or you may never understand what he meant so you can disagree with him.

Misunderstanding Nietzsche

What Nietzsche said is that humanity had already “killed God.” What he saw was that Truth was no longer controlled by a single social, metaphysical worldview. No longer could a single Church hold on to the power of social truth—look at how well churches agree today on “Gospel” issues. What Nietzsche saw beginning to crumble was the control of the megalithic Church-state presence over people’s views, which had been unalterably compromised. And he was right. Instead of a singular human source of all truth, humanity would have to be on its own finally. No big Pope to hold our hands and keep us on a chain any more. We don’t know where to find truth anymore – even the Church is full of BS and, even if we get past this, which church?

Nietzsche’s Warning

He warned about the impending implications of how our society would react to this new freedom. It would be nihilism. Here is another point of clarification for Evangelicals: Nietzsche was not for Nihilism. He was against it. He said that Nihilism was coming and that “we” (the people of his time) needed to start preparing future generations for the future philosophy that would be needed. His philosophical writings were meant to be a beginning point for future generations, a warning, and an idea of a direction.

Understanding Nihilism

Nihilism is the state of humanity that believes everything is meaningless and pointless. We all know what that feels like personally. Many of us live our normal days feeling this way, hoping for the next shot of dopamine and serotonin to get us through to the weekend. We find our identity in everything, so much so that nothing is left of our person. We are our reactions, dopamine hits, identities and tribes, and our immediate social and familial relationships. We live a duplicitous life, maintaining the frontal appearance of having it together while there is another, more real, and truer side of us that lies deeper. This individual tension, which almost any reader could quickly identify in their personal experience, causes real-life stress. These collective stresses add up—look around, you can see and hear it now more than anything else.

“Nihilism does not contend that there is nothing, but that everything is meaningless.”
-Victor Frankl

Agreeing with Nietzsche

To make some things personally clear, it’s possible to read, study, and agree with someone without agreeing with all of them. This is me and Nietzsche. The thing is, Nietzsche was right about Nihilism and no longer could an assumed singular church structure provide black-and-white, unambiguous truth for humans. He was right that his generation and the following ones should have prepared us. Nihilism has spread, and it may be no more obvious than in the cacophony of Christian church noise we hear and experience as real people no longer slaves to a church. He was right that we would find some hope in psychology. However, prepared for Nihilism we were not.

American Christian Nihilism

Timothy Keller said, “Nihilism is a consequence of the rejection of the Christian worldview. If there is no God, then life is ultimately meaningless.” Yes…in part. The problem here is “Which Christianity? Which God?” Keller is right that it is a part of the cause but not entirely. The addiction to control the Church (and the people running it) was also the problem—their own sin. I think we forget the Church is regularly guilty of sin just as much as we individuals are. There is no more “one” church—truthfully, there never has been since shortly after Jesus’ resurrection. Even the Catholics (a word meaning “universal”) can criticize publicly their Ex cathedra and Encyclicals, the two highest levels of their church authority, considered divine dogmas. For an American Christian, it is not about a belief in God—it’s about which church’s god they will entrust themselves to this time around.

Here is a more direct way of saying it—American Evangelical Churches are swimming in nihilism, drowning in it, and spreading it when they zealously demand people believe their opinion on the truth. “Sure, you have Jesus, but so do the United Methodist, Baptists, Tech-Nine, and Trump. So who is your Jesus again?” The average Evangelical feels this. They are not loyal to ONE church—how could they be? They will change churches and move when one church is no longer jiving like it used to. They are aware that something is off, that something is off in the American church. Pastors, church leaders, and ministry volunteers say as much, and their eyes light up and start nodding when we get going. Especially those who authentically try to have a “personal relationship with Jesus” and follow His example of love, forgiveness, kindness, grace, and service, who actually give a crap about people—they don’t like how the church feels anymore.

One Flaw in American Christianity

The error of churches is to assume it is the people that are wrong, forgetting they are people and have a long, theological history of getting it wrong…like really wrong.

The flaw in American Christianity is that it assumed it was the answer to nihilism. No, Nihilism was birthed from the sin of the Tower of Babel we had built into a Universal Church. We wanted our truth to be everyone’s truth. By keeping it so, American Christianity has become Nihilism. It’s a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways. It’s so focused on converts that it misses its own life, its health. People sit in the churches, either lectured at or comfortingly reassured, and walk away each week unchanged, doing nothing different. The worst of them go out and try to make converts twice as much sons of hell as themselves. Their Jesus is a fiery one who hangs His enemies on crosses and spreads the Gospel with military might like Emperor Nero. Or, it’s a motivational Jesus with no teeth—this Jesus can’t even stand up against his big bully of a brother—the Jesus preaching Trump across town. They steal business and marketing tactics or blindly regurgitate 300-year-old human teachings, then rebrand them as a divine plan and remedy for all humanity. It’s naive human arrogance. It’s Christian nihilism.

Force vs. Gospel

The idea that you can make someone accept their God the way Evangelicals have been trying resembles more propaganda than “by this, they will know you are my disciples.” Christians today resemble more the early Islamic military conquests they like to criticize and the Dark Age practice of making people convert at the end of a sword. The gospel isn’t an invitation or preached actually as good news—it is not “God did not come into the world to condemn it but to save it” or “For God so loved the world…” or “A new commandment I give you, to love one another…” or “by this, all men will know you are my disciples” or “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” It is, in the most basic and objective ways, not “scriptural.” If it is not, the question must be asked where the heresy truly lies in church history.

The uncomfortable truth is that the American Church has turned more into the Colosseum than the catacombs.