Consider The Mall: How (Not) To Be Not Secular With James KA Smith

Several years ago when speaking at an international Christian education forum alongside educators from what was then Calvin College (now Calvin University), I casually remarked to one of the visiting Calvin speakers that it was important that we hold to the biblical sexuality framework as we shape and form young people facing the Sexular Age.

To my surprise, and a little disquiet, he demurred. He said to me “You might be surprised what we believe at Calvin College about that.”

Fast forward a few years to 2021 and I was no longer surprised. While the sexual agenda, particularly around trans issues, hit the secular campuses hard (think pro-noun policing and cancellations), it did not leave the Christian liberal arts campuses untouched.

And so it was with dismay in 2021 that I watched James KA Smith, surely the poster-boy of  Calvin academics, publish a Twitter/X post that not only welcomed the rainbow revolution to the campus, but affirmed it as well.

Coming from the man who wrote “How (Not) To Be Secular” and whose cultural liturgies trilogy is required reading in how it unpacks the cultural moment we are in, it was a head-swivel moment. Perhaps we were misreading him? Perhaps we were being ungenerous in our assessment of what “affirming” meant. Perhaps that most secular of modern day creeds “Be Nice” that is placed on his bookshelf in that photo was designed to be ironic.

This past few weeks, however, we are to be left in no doubt. Smith has written a succinct, and incredibly clear letter seeking for Calvin to be “divorced” from the church denomination to which it belongs, and whose framework around sexuality Calvin – and hence Smith –  sits under.

Smith’s accusation (and you can read the full letter here) is that the Christian Reformed Church of North America that oversees Calvin, has moved the goalposts about sex since he signed off on the Heidelberg Catechism and the confessions required by the college a couple of decades ago. He actually uses those words in his letter. Here they are:

If, like me, you signed on to the Reformed confessions over 20 years ago, you thought you were signing up for one thing, only to learn, in 2022, that Synod had moved the goal posts. So, since 2022, the university’s administration and Board of Trustees have been trying to navigate, on the one hand, how to preserve the university as a place of courageous curiosity and academic freedom while, on the other hand, how to retain the distinctly Reformed accent that has distinguished Calvin in the wider orbit of higher education.

Get that?  Smith is claiming is that the denomination has been somewhat sneaky in holding Calvin to its confessional stance, and such sneakiness is now hampering true academic inquiry.

And that term “courageous curiosity”. It’s a hold-all for many sorts of things, especially heresy and heteropraxy in drifting denominations. It is thrown down as a gauntlet before men and women in the hope that it might scare them into believing themselves to be retrograde intellectual Luddites. It’s the “get on the right side of history” thing.

For Smith, the true problem lies in the tightness of the relationship with a denomination which is not for budging on such matters. This is seen especially in the pesky problem of academic staffing.  The board does not permit academic who, while affirming a Reformed position theologically, also affirm same-sex marriage relationships. And Smith says this was never supposed to be the intent when he signed on some twenty years ago.

This is disingenuous surely. From what one can see, the Synod has not moved the goalposts, but rather pointed out – highlighted even – where those goalposts actually are. Which, in the light of the constant battering-ram of revisionism that seeks to destroy the church’s doors on these matters and let the enemy in, seems a wise move.

There are times in history when you may have to highlight one deep implication of your theology over another, depending on the cultural air. Smith should know this. It  is commonsense.

No one in the sceptical modern age is going around claiming that Jesus was never fully man, merely that he wasn’t God. But that was decidedly not the case in ancient culture where the gods could assume – but never fully become – human in form. So in those times the humanity of Jesus had to be dialled up – written up in 100pt,  bold, underlined italics.

And so that begs the question: What is the aspect of divine revelation that must be written up in 100pt, bold, underlined italics today? Anthropology surely! And sexuality specifically. It’s all in there. It’s just that it was taken for granted for millennia.  The Synod did not change the rules, only highlighted the ones most at risk of being ignored or broken in today’s world.

Hence the claim by Smith that the Synod’s insistence that the college hold to the implicit understanding of human sexuality is tucked away deep, and should remain there, rings hollow.  Writing in response to Smith’s claim, Thiago Silva, pushes back:

Smith suggests that the 2022 Synod “moved the goalposts” by reaffirming the confessional nature of biblical sexual ethics. But the Synod did not innovate; it clarified. The CRC simply affirmed that the Heidelberg Catechism’s condemnation of “unchastity” includes homosexual practice — something almost universally assumed in Reformed and broader Christian tradition until recent decades. To frame this as a departure is historically inaccurate and theologically misleading. What has changed is not the confessions, but the cultural pressure to reinterpret them. And Smith’s vision — while couched in the language of intellectual freedom — is a call to accommodate that pressure.

If anything is true, it is Smith and his ilk who are innovating. Silva is right. It’s all about cultural pressure to conform. Which is, given Smith’s writing career and academic pursuits, deeply ironic, and tragic.

The cultural pressure is on to reinterpret orthodoxy and orthopraxy. To make the confessional statements about the nature of humanity, and the telos of the body, mere addenda to deeper, insoluble truths. If you can sign off on these, especially in the academy, then you are accepted. If not, you are not.

Central to the cultural pressure in this Sexular Age is the cultural pressure that all academics face in which their credibility is tied to their vision of human sexuality. This issue is not happening in a vacuum for Calvin – or for Smith. This pressure is a crucial force in the secular age that Smith had previously been so fond of skewering.

And that’s why this all makes for sad reading. As I look over Smith’s letter, it unravels many of the issues for which he stood. One of his memorable ideas is that human beings are not “a head on a stick”, and that there is something totalising about what it means to be embodied. Yet in his letter Smith states:

It has been jarring to see my intellectual heroes Nicholas Wolterstorff and Alvin Plantinga dismissed and derided by CRC pastors. How strange that we’re becoming a university where a celebrated Reformed philosopher like Wolterstorff, who affirms same-sex marriage, couldn’t be on the Calvin faculty.

Perhaps they should not be dismissed and derided. But nor should they be permitted onto the faculty of a college that requires sign off of the confessional statements.

Why not? Well Smith has already told us why not: We are not heads on a stick. We are not abstract philosophers or philosophisers. There is a whole body below that head, and there is a symbiotic relationship between the two. Embodied actions shape our thinking, and our thinking filters down to our actions. Yes, even our genitals.

We are corporeal and we are embodied and our repeated actions over time affirm and confirm – or deny – certain things to us about the body that has been fearfully and wonderfully made by God. The telos of the body is crucial. In fact that’s what made Smith’s writing so powerful back in the day.

He did say after all, you are what you love. And he did say that what you love is shaped by what you do. It’s a veritable Mobius Strip. Our desires shape us to actions which embed our desires which embolden our actions. Launder, rinse, repeat. At this point Smith is hoist on his own petard.

Smith, for all his great writing in the past, has let the central truths of those writings slide.  Let’s not forget Romans 1, that confessing ourselves to be wise, has led us to become fools. And for the Apostle Paul the extreme height of folly in that chapter is what is done with one’s body to and with the bodies of others. Once again, we are not heads on a stick!

It’s a a great tragedy that Smith would also appear to have fallen for that most secular of ideas, that the true formation of the human being in mind, body and spirit, is when supposed “academic freedom”, untethered from dogmas, is unleashed. Smith states:

We can either continue to be the capacious and adventurous Reformed university celebrated in the academy and around the world, or we can continue to be tethered to today’s version of the Christian Reformed Church.

At this point it’s worth asking for an extensive list of the capacious and adventurous universities in which true freedom of ideas is running riot. Where exactly are these truly free universities? The past few years have revealed how even our greatest institutions are scourged by group-think, military conformity to heterodox ideas about sex, and a rigid suppression of any vision of human flourishing that places limits on what one does with one’s body.

Once again, where exactly is all of this great academic rigour and freedom taking place in which the true contest of ideas that led to the great universities in the first place, is given equal footing?

Which is exactly what John Lee, also pushing back on Smith across at The Gospel Coalition, wants to know:

Finding grounding and accountability in the communal discernment of a confessional denomination is … not an imposition on Calvin’s academic freedom but rather a vital dimension of it. Faithful submission to Scripture—understood in the CRC as the truth summarized in the confessions—results in more academic freedom and rigor, not less, as it grounds human inquiry in divinely revealed truth. As we communally run in the path of God’s commands, our understanding is broadened

That’s right. God’s truth and his desire for how humans live leads us to live truthfully. It is the ultimate truth-revealer. The Western university was grounded in the commitment to a universal truth. A universal revealed truth.

But when, as historically it has done so in almost all Western university settings, that truth broke away from God’s revealed truth, the loss of that centre did not result in more academic freedom and deeper rigour, but less! It resulted in a spiritual bondage and a level of group-think around moral matters that polices its ever more radical boundaries more tightly.

All truth that breaks away from revealed truth, before pitching itself first as “an aspect of the truth”, then “an alternate truth” and finally “the truth”, ends up being what it is – a lie. And that, sadly, is where Calvin will end up if the CRCNA heeds Smith’s appeal.

And that lie is the bedrock of the secular lie that Smith, in his earlier iteration, wrote about so well.  If you want a textbook case on “How Not To be (Not) Secular, then follow Smith’s trajectory, and the trajectories of the likes of his colleague with whom I spoke at that conference.

It sorrows me that Smith, the man who gave me one of the most enduring images of my own cultural thinking – that of the shopping mall and its cruciform shape and its desire to shape me and capture my loves – , has been so shaped and captured by a more soul-forming institution than even the mall is – the secular academy.

Smith said that “The mall wants us. It wants our loves.” He meant that we are blind to how it shapes us as we practice its “cultural liturgies”.  That’s what makes Calvin’s University’s public statement on its logo such an imperative “My Heart I Offer To You Lord: Promptly and Sincerely”

The mall wants our hearts. It is religious. It offers us enacted liturgies that shape us. That has been a cautionary tale in the life of this particular consumer I can tell you. And now, living in Sydney town, I can see the lure and the allure.

As Smith noted, the very enactment of shopping at the mall embeds the mall’s agenda into our lives in a way that is visceral and invisble. The mall, he said, has captured us not when we can articulate its agenda, but when we cannot articulate it, but enact its liturgy nonetheless.

Well, right back at ya James!  So too the siren call of the academy and its cultural liturgies. For Smith that siren call is influence and academic credibility beyond any commitment to Scriptural fidelity. The academy wants you James, it wants your loves. It has cultural liturgies that embed themselves even as you practice them.

Smith asks:

Why would a university with aspirations to global leadership bind itself to a shrinking church body that provides infinitesimal financial support and fewer and fewer incoming students? I see only downside in this “partnership.” What is gained by this relationship? I’d honestly love to hear an answer to that question.

And that response is completely secular. Peak secular in fact. Leadership is not simply about position. It’s about direction.

The same Smith who, in his last great book, On The Road With St Augustine, sought to shape the direction of the hearts of God’s people, fails to see what a withered aspiration “global leadership” actually is, untethered from a direction worth leading towards.

Like with the mall, – and in line with Augustine’s concerns about the human heart – Smith’s desire has been captured, and his vision secularised. As Lee concludes:

The pain that Smith speaks from is real. But his prescription is wrong. If Calvin wants to deepen its project as a Reformed expression of higher education, severing an almost 150-year relationship with the confessional Reformed denomination that gave it birth isn’t the path to get there.

No longer on the road with St Augustine, but off the path and into the secular ditch.