As a preacher, I’m often encouraged to preach “relevant” messages. When I look at those who subscribe to the ethos of “relevance” I see messages based on wisdom. Surely people do need wisdom: wisdom on how to have a marriage, how to raise kids, how to get and keep a job, how to manage all relationships, how to be happy and healthy. All that is desirable, and in an age that has, in many ways, rejected wisdom, is needed. But none of those things are particularly Christian.

Elizabeth Bruenig writes in The Atlantic of an apparent Christian revival happening in Silicon Valley. She doesn’t mention the recent revival of Stoicism, but her description puts it in the same context. In their eyes, she says, “Religious faith is a tool for keeping people productive, in other words, a private code of ethics that enforces the kind of activity that lends itself to producing wealth.”

She recognizes that using Christianity – or God – as a tool is not what Christianity is about.

In that sense, Silicon Valley Christians perhaps see Christianity as a kind of technology, which is to say a product used to accomplish human purposes. Granted, Christianity promises certain benefits to its adherents, such as inner peace, eternal salvation, the comfort of community, and prosocial ethics. That said, Christianity at its core is not a religion that can reliably deliver socially desirable outcomes, nor is it intended to be. In Matthew 19:21, a disciple asks Jesus how to live as a model Christian, to which “Jesus said to him, ‘If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.’” Christianity disrupts life as we know it rather than reinforcing a self-serving status quo. It venerates generations of Christian martyrs whose examples are prized precisely because they placed obedience to God before more advantageous beliefs or activities. The formation of their faith was contingent not on temporal success, but rather on another principle altogether: that Christianity is worth following not because it has the potential to improve one’s life, though it can, but rather because it is true.

It may be a good thing for these Silicon Valley folk to gain a positive assessment of Christianity, but I’d rather it was a positive assessment of Christianity, and not some other phenomenon that just happens to use some of the same words.