Jesus Shrugged

Whatever you may think of Ayn Rand as an author, Atlas Shrugged has an interesting premise. What if, instead of dissatisfied workers going on strike, the industrialists went on strike? It’s a fascinating question. What would happen if Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, Warren Buffett, and the rest walked away from it all? Would Amazon and Tesla and Google and Berkshire Hathaway just have happened in a slightly different form? Or would the world be a poorer place without them? I see Atlas Shrugged as the Rand’s equivalent of the book of Revelation, describing the end times, the final suffering of the world and the righteous before all is made right.

A generation later, the Left Behind book series also reinvented the story of Revelation, and in doing so, asked a similar question. What would happen if all the believers in the world disappeared? Unfortunately, unlike Rand, LeHaye and Jenkins answered that question in an essentially meaningless way. Their story was based on reimagining the actual book of Revelation.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic and response, I have been thinking about, and writing about, the current state of the church in the developed world (see here). This question begs to be asked in every church. What would happen if Jesus shrugged? If every believer in your church left the community over the course of the next 5 years? It doesn’t matter where they would go – Mars, the center of the earth, a commune in Siberia, wherever. Why should they leave gradually? To avoid the cheap and easy answers that come with any massive dislocation of people. The question is not, “What happens when a lot of people leave an area?” We know the answer to that question fairly well, and have seen it happen many times. The question is, “What happens when the people in a place change from being believers to being non-believers?” Like George from It’s a Wonderful Life, imagine the world without you, without us.

Does the world mourn our loss? Does it rejoice? Does it notice? Is there less love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control? Do laws change? Does the economy change? Do morals change? Is there more war, or less?

More personally, how would your community change if your church went on strike? How about your extended family and your social network? Your neighbors? How many non-believers are you connected to that would notice your leaving?

I can only imagine what I would hear if I asked that same question to non-believers, whether they are atheist, agnostic, Muslim, Hindu, or whatever. In fact, the answers that I hear from believers are discouraging as well. The astute reader notes that we don’t have to actually philosophize very much. It is quite possible to look at Europe and see for yourself what kinds of things might happen when believers gradually disappear. Answer: Not much.

This is another reason to investigate our church’s way of being! Rand is absolutely confident that a strike by industrialists would cause massive economic hardship. Are you as confident of the negative effects of your congregation? We must be willing to ask ourselves the tough questions. Do we matter? Are we making a difference? The early church did and it was.

The church is in a sad state when at least a large portion of the population see a mass exodus of industrialists as disastrous and a mass exodus of Christians as a minor demographic shift. This is a symptom of our structure. To borrow Rand’s language, the local church has moved from small groups of relatively decentralized, spiritual “producers” each bearing a lot of individual responsibility to a mass of relatively centralized, passive, spiritual “consumers”. The result – a world that doesn’t care that much if we are around or not.