I haven’t seen the film, but I’ve heard Tolkien includes no reference to J.R.R. Tolkien’s faith. This may even be one of the reasons why the Tolkien estate has disavowed the film. Now, of course the exclusion of his faith is intentional: much work goes into creating a movie; it wasn’t left out accidentally.
But why was Tolkien’s faith left out?
We might automatically assume his Christian faith was omitted by the producers, writers, and directors to denounce the Christian faith. Such an assumption is that the creators intentionally omitted it out of a desire to assault the Christian faith, so that our faith might be subverted.
Maybe…
But perhaps there’s a less sinister—but more serious for us—reason. And perhaps this other option, as surprising as it may seem to many of us, is one of the major reasons why the Christian faith is often diminished in the public sphere, whether it be in movies, music, news articles, or conversation.
Seen as Secondary
What if the world omits and downplays our faith not because they’re attempting any sort of militant attack on the faith, but simply because the world sees the Christian faith in a way we often show it, namely, as secondary?
To be clear, “secondary” does not mean “unimportant.” There’s no doubt that the world thinks most evangelicals hold their faith as “important.” But the world realizes, and we should too, that importance is relative: we each have a lot of “important” things in our life. So, “secondary” doesn’t mean “unimportant.” Instead, “secondary” means that the world may see our faith as a means—a means to more primary ends. Unbelievers may see our Christian faith—the doctrines we hold, the congregations we meet in, the lives we live—and think, by how we live, that it’s all mainly an avenue to something else, something more primary in our lives. Hence, secondary.
A Means to Our Ideals
And let’s be brutally honest, increasingly today in evangelicalism this “something else” often is politics and cultural change. (This may apply to both the evangelical left and evangelical right.) Now, is this sinful or wrong that we Christians engage in politics because we care about the good of the society, nation, or world? Of course not. But what if, by how we engage, speak, and act in and toward the world, we do so in a way that makes our Christian faith come across as a means to a certain political ideal?
While we do so, we might still claim our faith is important and one of the most identifying things about us. We might trumpet our Bibles, celebrate our born again-ness. But if we then demonstrate our faith as mainly a means to something else, then can we blame the world when they diminish it? If this is the case, the world is watching and simply deducing that our Christian faith is actually not as significant as we’re saying: they’re seeing that in reality it’s secondary; they’re witnessing that what we really care about is political change, or control, or power, or money, or wanting to make ourselves feel like we’re better than others.
If this is the case, then oftentimes the diminishing of our faith in public is not because these people explicitly hate Christianity or want to attack our beliefs (although that may be true for some). Rather, it very well might be that they’re observing us use Christianity to attain our real goals, use it as the means to our other ends. Seeing this, the world is able to (unintentionally? perhaps) skip past or diminish what they perceive to be only our instrument.
A Call Back to Christ’s Centrality
Which brings us back to this specific cultural instance: the film about J.R.R. Tolkien. The unbelievers who made the movie intentionally left out his faith. But the reason they did so might not be because they wanted to attack Christianity—such a thought honestly might’ve not entered many of the creators’ minds. Instead, perhaps they simply attached onto Tolkien’s Christianity much of what they witness from many of us. Perhaps they thought that Tolkien was like some of us modern evangelicals, namely, that his personal faith was something that mainly existed to help other pursuits, like his desire to create; that his personal faith only served his real passions; that his personal faith in Christ was secondary, a means to his real ends.
If so—and I think this is more possible than we might want to admit—then the leaving out of Tolkien’s faith is a convicting wake-up call to us, the confessing church. And this reason may be true of other public slights of the Christian faith, too. It may not be because the unbelieving media is attacking Christianity. They instead might just have witnessed Christians use Christianity as a means to something else for so long that they assume that personal faith in Jesus isn’t really something of primary importance.
But Christ is not a means to an end. He is the goal. He is central. Yes, our faith in him will result in fruit, in good works which will impact culture for good. But we must carefully navigate our lives and our witness to display his primacy.
