Doing the Lord’s Business: A Response to Jonathan Merritt

Last week, Religion News Service columnist Jonathan Merritt wrote an article for This Week entitled, “Stop calling Hobby Lobby a Christian business.” The gist of the piece was that Hobby Lobby, a craft store that claims to conduct its business according to Christian values, shouldn’t be called Christian because of its dealings in China. China has a horrible human rights record, and by selling Chinese-made goods, Hobby Lobby is complicit in this evil. “Hobby Lobby reminds us why for-profit businesses should resist calling themselves ‘Christian,’” Merritt argued,  “The free market is messy and complicated and riddled with hypocrisy.”

I began writing a rebuttal to that piece, but shortly after I began, the ERLC’s Dr. Russell Moore and Christian Post contributor Samuel James both wrote excellent responses that took the words out of my mouth. But this week, Merritt took his stance even further. Not only should we stop calling Hobby Lobby a Christian business, but apparently there are no Christian businesses from an evangelical perspective. This will no doubt come as a shock to the countless Christian business owners and customers across American.

Needless to say, I found Merritt’s piece, “Why conservative evangelicals shouldn’t call a business ‘Christian,’” utterly unconvincing. So much so, that I’ve decided to take the blog post piece-by-piece in a rebuttal:

From Chick-fil-A to Hobby Lobby to In-N-Out Burger, some of America’s best brands are also widely considered to be “Christian.” As it turns out, this label can be good for business.

According to a 2011 Barna Research survey, one-third of all U.S. adults said they would be more likely to purchase from a company that “embraces and promotes the Christian faith.” Active participants in Protestant churches were the most attracted to such businesses. Only 3 percent said a Christian connection would make them less likely to support an organization, resulting in a favorable-to-unfavorable ratio of 12 to 1.

This data undermines many conservative evangelical’s claims that “Christian businesses” are placing their companies at risk for proclaiming their values. But should this group even use such a moniker?

It’s worth noting that Merritt’s opening paragraphs are entirely unrelated to the rest of his argument. His conclusions remain the same if Christian businesses make more profits, less profits, or no profits at all. So why should we care that a Christian identity might boost profits? The clear implication is that because claims of Christianity help businesses, we should treat such claims skeptically. I would note that this type of thinking, when applied to Christian individuals who profit directly or indirectly from their faith, is considered momentously rude. Jonathan Merritt and I both earn a living because we claim to be Christians, but I hope he would agree with me that questioning our faith on that ground would cross a line.

For what it’s worth, anyone who has followed the history of companies like Chick-fil-A and Hobby Lobby will know that their claims of Christianity have undoubtedly harmed their bottom line to at least some degree. To begin with, both stores are closed on Sundays. This likely has some benefit for the companies, in terms of maintaining employee morale and good public relations (Chick-fil-A even admit as much). But the benefit is probably not enough to offset the millions in sales they willingly forgo every week. After all, if closing on Sundays makes pure business sense, why have no other major retailers and fast food joints done the same?

That’s not even counting the millions each company donates to Christian charities, the millions donated to controversial political causes (and the income lost due to that advocacy), the millions of dollars Hobby Lobby has spent in court, the millions Hobby Lobby would face if it loses, etc. At some point, these supposedly profit-minded companies should have realized that they could have just printed Bible verses on their bags like Forever 21 and gotten the same PR bump. The easier answer is that these companies claim to be committed to Christian values because—surprise, surprise— they are.

In order to understand the term “Christian,” we must first ask what the word means. Conservative evangelicals’ view of salvation is understood purely in individual terms. Only a person can become a Christian and only by repenting of their sins and believing on Christ. Can an organization or corporation be “born again?” The answer is no.

Additionally, conservative evangelicals believe that a Christian is a person who is actively engaged sanctification, the process of becoming more holy. They accept that this process is accomplished by the work of Christ through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. But a corporation can neither accept Christ nor be indwelt by the Holy Spirit.

So if someone (or something) can claim the label “Christian” without repentance, belief, salvation, or sanctification, what is left? Or put a finer point on it, what makes a corporation “Christian” exactly?

Merritt moves the goalposts here, and not even subtly. He asks what the term ‘Christian” means, but then discusses the evangelical understanding of what it means to be ‘a Christian’ and “born again.” No one has argued, and no one will ever argue, that Hobby Lobby is a Christian, or that Hobby Lobby is born again, or that Hobby Lobby will ever accept Christ in its nonexistent heart.

Basically, any discussion of what it means to be “Christian” has been shifted from the word itself to the word’s usage as a noun to refer to individuals. Using just that definition, he unsurprisingly finds that the word only refers to people. But Christian companies are described as such under another definition of the word, as an adjective meaning “of, relating to, or professing Christianity or its teachings” (literally the first definition that comes up on Google).

This is why we refer to Christian teachings, Christian music, Christian ethics, Christian books, Christian movies, Christian hymns, Christian faith, Christian holidays, Christian schools, etc. without bizarrely considering if any of those objects or abstract concepts have achieved salvation or sanctification. Corporations (including churches, for-profits, and non-profits) are “Christian” when they aspire to conduct themselves in a way that comports with Christian teachings, ethics and values.

Some would say that if a business has a Christian owner or founder, that makes it Christian. But by this standard all sorts of non-religious businesses would also be labeled as such. Can you become Christian by proxy?

I agree with Merritt that a Christian owner or founder is not enough to consider a business “Christian.” Quite frankly, there are millions of Christians, nominal or otherwise, whose religion does not inform their business practices in any way, shape, or form. Not every lapsed Catholic with a pizza joint owns a “Christian business.”

Or perhaps we might say that a “Christian business” is a corporation that does Christian things (closes on Sundays, gives money to the poor, prints Bibles, or opposes political policies that conflict with Christian values). But this requires one to essentially accept a corporate form of works righteousness—the idea that we are saved by what we do—something conservative evangelicals reject.

I’m not sure I get Merritt’s logic here. Saying that individuals are Christians based on their works is indeed works righteousness, because defining an individual as Christian necessarily implies salvation. But calling a business Christian based on its actions makes no claims about the nature of salvation, because as Merritt dutifully pointed out earlier, corporations are incapable of salvation. Again, Merritt seems to rely on a strict definition of “Christian” that automatically assumes salvation, sanctification, repentance, and all the things we’d expect from Christian individuals, but not Christian institutions. It seems perfectly logical to say that a business or its business practices are “Christian” to the extent that they conform to the teachings of Jesus Christ, while saying nothing about salvation.

Also, it’s rather amusing that Merritt rejects the notion that we can label a business Christian based on its works, given that just a week earlier he denied that a business was Christian because of its business practices. Merritt seems to reject what he implicitly supposed just a week ago: that a company’s “Christianity” can be ascertained from its actions. (Of course, now that he’s denying that a company can be Christian in any way, I guess last week’s Hobby Lobby article is entirely moot to begin with.)

But even more confusing is the way this label conflicts with conservative evangelicals’ view of divine revelation. The group believes that the Bible is the central, if not the only, true and trustworthy form of divine revelation. They claim that we must always look to the Bible to authoritatively guide us in belief and practice.

The New Testament never—not one time—applies the “Christian” label to a business or even a government. The tag is applied only to individuals…

The Bible is indeed, as Merritt suggests, the true, trustworthy, ultimate guide to Christian belief and practice. But it is not Strunk and White. Our vocabulary and how we articulate the ideas expressed in the Bible to modern audiences need not be limited to its language.

The ancient Greek word for Christian (Χριστιανός) is only used in the Bible to refer to people because that was the only meaning of the word at the time. Its relative rarity in the text (twice in Acts, once in 1 Peter) indicates it likely wasn’t even widely used among the early Christians, and may have even been derogatory. The definition of the equivalent English word has changed, and modern usage of the word ought to take into consideration this expanded definition, not some two-thousand year-old definition of no real biblical importance.

By way of comparison, consider the term “antichrist.” In the New Testament, its primary definition is someone who is literally “anti-Christ,” denying that Jesus is Christ. But no one would seriously argue that Christians should go around today calling Jews and Muslims “antichrists.” The phrase today comes loaded with more negative and apocalyptic connotations that render its usage unhelpful. Are Christian supposed to ignore the modern usage and go around inadvertently accusing people of conspiring with Lucifer to bring about Armageddon? Of course not.

…If the Bible is your ultimate guide, the only organization one might rightly term “Christian” is a church. And this is only because a church in the New Testament is not a building or a business, but a collection of Christian individuals who have repented, believed on Christ [sic], and are pursuing a life of holiness.

So Merritt throws in a disclaimer allowing the use of the word “Christian” when talking about churches, because they are “a collection of Christian individuals.” But a “collection of individuals” is precisely what all corporations are. Heck, some Christian businesses are just one individual. Are Christian businessmen not “pursuing a life of holiness” when they run their business according their faith? At some point, does profit-seeking cease to make something Christian? Merritt never articulates why a collection of Christian individuals forming a church is properly Christian, but not a business or nonprofit. The exception he grants the church seems to do less with any consistent understanding of what it means to be “Christian,” and more a realization from Merritt that no one would take his arguments seriously if he excluded churches.

Basically, the piece’s entire argument boils down to an irritating exercise in semantics; conservative evangelicals shouldn’t call businesses “Christian,” because Jonathan Merritt has arbitrarily taken a felt-tip marker to his dictionary. Hopefully, because this is all Merritt telling “conservative evangelicals” what to believe, he doesn’t actually believe half of what he says. Because otherwise, Merritt has hundreds of old writings with presumably hundreds of “misuses” of the term Christian to refer to organizations, ideas, and values. I suggest he get scrubbing.