We Want the Fruit While We Despise the Root

Written by Timothy Downing, Missionary in Ecuador

There is something almost elegant about the particular lie modern Christianity has chosen to tell itself.

It is not a crude lie. Crude lies are easy to identify, easy to reject, and they carry the decency of their own transparency. This one is sophisticated—layered, well-dressed, fluent in the vocabulary of faith while systematically evacuating faith of its content. It wears a cross on its lapel, quotes the Sermon on the Mount at dinner parties, and it has managed to convince itself, with remarkable thoroughness, that this constitutes a relationship with the living God.

The lie is this: you can have what Christianity built without submitting to the Christ who built it.

Walk through it slowly, because it deserves that attention. Consider what Christianity built. Not merely churches and cathedrals, though the stones of those structures contain within their mortar more theological conviction than most contemporary congregations could muster in a calendar year. Consider the hospitals—the first ones, founded on the radical, then-unprecedented idea that the sick were image-bearers of God and therefore deserved care regardless of their social utility. Consider the universities, born in the shadow of cathedral walls, animated by the conviction that truth existed and could be pursued because a rational God had made a rational world. Consider the abolition of slavery, driven in its most muscular forms by men and women who believed with a specificity that embarrassed polite company that every human soul bore the mark of a Creator who was not indifferent to the buying and selling of His image.

Consider the concept of human dignity itself—that strange, beautiful, philosophically fragile idea that every individual person possesses worth that cannot be conferred or revoked by the state, by the market, by the tribe, or by any calculus of collective utility. That idea did not emerge from thin air. It emerged from a specific set of claims about a specific God who made specific human beings in His specific image and died a specific death to redeem them. Remove those claims and you are left holding the fruit with the root cut away, and you will stand there confidently for a season, telling everyone about the importance of human dignity, right up until the moment you notice the fruit has begun to darken in your hand.

That moment has arrived.

We are holding darkening fruit and refusing to look at it directly, because to look at it directly would require us to ask how we got here—and that question leads, with the inevitability of a stone rolling downhill, back to the root.

The modern church’s relationship with Christian civilization is best understood as the relationship between an heir and an inheritance he did not earn and cannot explain but has decided he deserves. The heir wanders through the estate—through the libraries built by men who believed every book was a kind of participation in the Logos, through the galleries whose paintings were acts of worship before they were objects of aesthetic appreciation, through the legal traditions whose foundations were laid by people who believed in a law above the law of kings—and he takes his ease there, he accepts the admiration of visitors, he speaks warmly about the importance of “values” and “Western heritage” and “our shared moral framework,” and he does all of this without the slightest intention of acknowledging the Name that is written, if you look closely enough, in the cornerstone of every room he inhabits.

He has decided the Name is embarrassing. Too exclusive. Too demanding. It makes people at the dinner table shift in their seats, and he has long since calculated that the dinner table matters more than the cornerstone. And so he speaks warmly of “the Judeo-Christian tradition” with the vague wave of a man citing a document he has never actually read, he defends “religious values” in the public square without ever specifying which religion, he insists on the importance of “meaning” and “transcendence” while carefully declining to specify what or whom he means, because specificity is dangerous and he has long since chosen safety.

The fruit, meanwhile, continues to darken.

Watch how this plays out in the contemporary church—not in the openly apostate wing, which has at least achieved the minor dignity of honesty about its abandonment, but in the supposedly orthodox center, the people who would describe themselves as Bible-believing, theologically grounded, and genuinely committed to historic Christianity.

Watch the pastor who preaches sin but cannot bring himself to name specific sins by their specific names, because specific names might offend specific people who attend the eleven o’clock service and whose offendedness would have specific financial consequences. He speaks of the fall of man in tones that suggest a philosophical abstraction rather than a catastrophe that has left a carcass in every human heart. He preaches grace with the enthusiasm he withholds from judgment, because grace lands softly and judgment lands hard, and landing hard is not the brand.

Watch the denominational leader who has concluded that the best way to serve the Kingdom is to remain at the table of cultural respectability, where he can whisper sensible things in the ears of important people. He has persuaded himself that this is strategy rather than cowardice, that the compromise he makes today is laying the groundwork for the confrontation he will make tomorrow, in some ever-receding tomorrow that never quite arrives. He is a chess player who has sacrificed every piece to protect the king and cannot quite admit that you cannot win chess with only a king left on the board.

Watch the congregation that shows up faithfully, that tithes with reasonable consistency, that participates in service projects and mission trips and small groups—and that has somehow arrived at a fully formed faith in which the central figure demands nothing that actually costs them anything. They believe in Jesus the way they believe in democracy or good nutrition: as a background value, a general orientation, a thing that decent people believe in, which is precisely why they believe in it, and which is precisely why it has zero capacity to demand of them what the real Christ demanded of the rich young ruler, of Peter on the water, of Paul on the road to Damascus.

These are not the enemies outside the gate. These are the people inside the sanctuary, and they are more dangerous to the faith than any external adversary, because they wear its face.

There is a particular passage in the Gospel of Mark—brisk, unadorned, written in the relentless present tense that gives Mark its quality of breathless urgency—where Jesus looks at a fig tree in full leaf and finds no fruit on it. And He curses it. By the next morning it is withered from the roots. The disciples are astonished. Jesus is not. He explains, as if this should have been obvious, that a tree presenting the appearance of fruitfulness while producing nothing deserves exactly what it got.

Modern Christianity is a fig tree in full leaf.

The leaves are impressive. The programming is sophisticated. The production values are high. The social media presence is carefully curated. The worship experiences are engineered to produce the precise emotional frequency of spiritual engagement without the inconvenient byproduct of actual transformation. The small groups meet, the studies happen, the mission statements are framed and hung, the core values are laminated and distributed, and somewhere beneath all of it the root is drying out, pulling away from the soil, shriveling in the dark while the leaves above continue to rustle in the wind and everyone congratulates everyone else on what a healthy tree it is.

You cannot have the fruit while you despise the root.

You cannot inherit the civilization while you refuse to kneel to the King who built it.

You cannot hold the Name in your mouth as a lifestyle accessory and expect it to retain its power.

The fruit withers. The tree dies. And the people who stood in its shade, who ate what it produced, who pointed to it proudly and said this is mine, will find themselves one day holding a handful of dead leaves and wondering, with genuine bewilderment, what happened.

What happened is that they chose niceness over truth, comfort over confrontation, the applause of their culture over the approval of their King. What happened is that they let the root rot in the name of keeping the peace.

This is where we begin. In the smell of a dying thing.

The question is whether we have the courage—and yes, in this context, courage is precisely the right word—to follow that smell back to its source, to name it, to cut away what is dead, and to press the root back into the dark earth where it belongs.

That work is not nice.

It was never supposed to be.

What you’ve just read is a fragment — a single ember pulled from a larger, smoldering fire. It is an excerpt from our recently published book, Un-Nice the Church: Recovering the Muscular Faith That Built Christendom — a work that dares to name what most dare not whisper: that the church has built an altar to niceness, and something ancient and essential has been slowly suffocating beneath its flowers. This book does not comfort. It excavates. It traces the quiet rot that settled in when we traded the steel of Christ’s true teachings for the soft currency of pleasantness — and it calls the reader back, with unflinching clarity, to the raw and rugged faith that once shaped civilizations. If something in these pages disturbed you, unsettled the ground beneath your assumptions — good. That unease is the beginning of something true.