The Almost Right and the Accidentally Right

Can Christians Co-Exist with People who do not know all the Truth?

Several weeks ago, my pastor preached on Acts Chapter 26, and paused to discuss how King Agrippa was “almost persuaded” by Paul to become a Christian.  Afterward, we sang the famous hymn by that name.  As Christians, we frequently emphasize the soul who is almost persuaded, but in parallel to the Almost Persuaded, we should also think about the Accidentally Right.  The Almost Persuaded has the right reason but fails to step forward and accept the calling.  The Accidentally Right accepts the altar call but for the wrong reasons.  While the Almost Persuaded is struggling in his heart of hearts with God’s call, the Accidentally Right has a deadened heart and may not even know that he is suffering through a spiritual crisis.  The Accidentally Right may even fancy himself a deeply pious person, a leader in the church, a Christian scholar, a minister, or a seminary professor.

I realize that I’m telling on my bad habits, but I only just got around to reading the December 2024 edition of First Things because of the snow last weekend that closed the highway near my house.  Michael Legaspi’s book review of Christopher and Richard Hays’s latest book was an interesting read on a topic that had shocked the Evangelical community, the public apostasy of the Hays.  I have no complaints about Legaspi’s article, which is well-written and points out some of the key theological errors made by the Hays.  It misses, however, what is a far deeper point: the way that too much of Elite Evangelical discourse is made up of people who are merely Accidentally Right.

Every few months, it seems, there is another announcement of some famous Evangelical celebrity, preacher, or scholar who seems to suddenly adopt a position wildly divergent from the beliefs that they had previously confessed.  Every time, there are the same old remonstrances.  How could we have not seen?  They seemed so grounded in the Word of God.  Their past work was so good.  They told us that they believed in the inerrancy of Scripture, the unchangeability of God, the sufficiency of Christ’s sacrifice, and the permanence of his Church.  How could they suddenly change their minds and spout such utterly depraved nonsense?

To be Accidentally Right is to hold the right positions and beliefs for the wrong reasons.  The Accidentally Right Christian might profess Jesus with his lips because he doesn’t know anything else and has never really considered the question of his salvation.  He might do it because he loves his country and associates America with Protestantism.  He might do it for his mother or his grandmother.  He might do it because he associates Christianity with good morals or with intellectually stimulating discourse on theology and metaphysics.  He might even be a Christian merely because he despises the people who hate Christians.  There are plenty of people who profess Christ because it’s their meal ticket or their way into riches.

At a church I previously attended, there was an older fellow who was well-respected and a deacon.  He always insisted on cutting the grass at the church and was getting such up in age that we were worried for him in that Gulf Coast heat.  One Sunday, the pastor escorted him to the front of the sanctuary since he was so elderly that he had difficulty walking himself.  As tears flowed from this old man’s eyes, he told us that before that week, he had never accepted Jesus as his Lord and Savior.  He first went to church for a pretty girl.  He had continued to do it for the better part of a century because of this pretty girl, now his wife, and because that is what was expected of a good man of his generation.  He told us that he was wrong all these years because that’s not why you should go to church.  He had done the right thing, accidentally, all of these years and now wanted to do the right thing for the right reason.  He resigned his position as deacon and asked the Church for permission to be baptized and to join as a new member.  

With the publication of The Widening of God’s Mercy: Sexuality within the Biblical Story, we see that Richard Hays’s entire career has been one of being Accidentally Right.  In this book, he demonstrates that the god he worshipped was a changeable god, a god whose existence is culturally interpreted and who is less than fully God.  Hays tells us that he is an interpreter of historical texts written by men, not of a Holy Scripture breathed by God.  His god is “A God without wrath [who] brought man without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”  Hays testified to us in his book that he believed in the American religion Niebuhr describes when he says, “It was not God who ruled, but religion ruled a little, and religion needed God for its support.”  That’s not the God of the Bible.  If this being has always been Hays’s god, then his past work interpreting Scripture has not been a work of The God but a false work that coincidentally landed on some true statements.  Hays’s god is the God Without Thunder that the great author and novelist John Crowe Ransom recognized at work in his and Niebuhr’s own day.

I read On the Free Choice of the Will by Augustine of Hippo a few months ago, and it made a very important point in this regard.  Augustine is deeply concerned with the way that pagan philosophers can be Accidentally Right about a great number of things and therefore be persuasive to Christians of his time.  He makes the argument, however, that Truth is not just about happening to land on the correct word or phrase that fits the problem.  Truth is a way of being oriented and a way of facing the source of Truth, the Lord God.  Those who are not oriented towards God will randomly hit the mark the same way that a Cub Scout learning archery will randomly hit the bullseye.  What they cannot do, however, is to consistently hit the mark.  To consistently shoot bulls-eyes requires one to be a master.  It requires you to always be pointing in the right direction, oriented towards the target.

This is why nobody but a Christian can be a true philosopher, Augustine tells us.  A nonbeliever is disoriented, pointing the wrong way, and therefore cannot ever make True judgments.  They lack judgment because they fail to begin with the correct premises, and without the correct premises, they will always jump to an incorrect conclusion.  The arch-critical theorist Martin Heidegger identified those premises: either you believe that God created the universe or you do not.  It is an either-or question, answered not by a simple statement in favor or against but by choosing to live your life in a way that testifies to your true belief.  The truth is not what comes out of your mouth but what proceeds forth out of the life that you live.  You either live as if your world is created by the Lord God, Emperor of Creation, Master of the Universe, or you live as if we mere humans define and create our own world.

When pseudo-Christians claim that God has changed, that his Word is not the same as it was, or that his Truth is subject to social opinions, they are testifying that they agree with Heidegger that the universe is made by Man.  Whatever gospel their mouth proclaims, their actions proclaim otherwise.  This is why I can’t agree with Joel Carini’s letter to the editor in this edition of First Things.  The Accidental Christian and the Nonbeliever’s changing gods mean that their opinions, ideas, attitudes, and beliefs are just a shifting sea of contingencies.  We can’t agree with them, except when they make a mistake.  When we do happen to hold a position that overlaps with their position, it’s by coincidence, not a commonality of principle.  A lasting social bond cannot be grounded on others being Accidentally Right because the accident that caused Oren Cass to agree with the other authors in the October 2024 symposium is nothing more than happenstance.  To accidentally agree today means to be bitter enemies tomorrow.  Look at the history of Neo-conservativism, which accidentally agreed with anti-Communism yet became the greatest poison in the blood of the Conservative Movement in America.  To accidentally agree that the USSR must be defeated does not justify the Forever Wars, Endless Immigration, or the demolition of American civil society in the name of Wall Street profits.

One advantage of being raised a nasty old fundamentalist is that I never grew up with the myth of a Christian America.  I was always taught that most Americans were Accidentally Right and that their true colors would show the moment their accident came with a price.  As we saw with Richard Hays, Accidentally Right means that when the bets get called, they become strategically wrong.  You can’t trust or rely on an accident to keep recurring on a consistent basis.  Just like that Cub Scout with the bow, they’re inherently unreliable because they’re oriented in the wrong direction.  This is why Aaron Renn’s work is so important; Christians need to learn that we can only lean on one another, people who are pointed in God’s direction.  It is only in our common orientation through Jesus that we can always trust that we are Purposefully Right.

Yes, we need to figure out a way to live with nonbelievers.  We need to find a way to have a society in which our steadfastness can coexist with their absence of timeless, unchanging principles.  This means doing many of the things that Renn describes in his book, Life in the Negative World.  It means identifying as a discrete community, learning from other religious minority communities, and demanding rigorous coherence to our own standards from our members.  It means saying that Accidentally Right is not good enough, and it’s not God’s standard for his church, any more than Almost Persuaded.  Only when we are Purposefully Right in the Lord together can we ground our relationship to one another and to the unbeliever in something real.

On Christ the solid rock I stand
All other ground is sinking sand


Image Credit: Unsplash

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Benjamin Mabry

Benjamin Mabry is an assistant professor of political science at Lincoln Memorial University. He is a graduate of the University of New Orleans and Louisiana State University. Previously he taught at Louisiana Christian University and Georgia Gwinnett College. His writing has appeared at First Things, the American Mind, and elsewhere.

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