Who Is a True Christian? Contesting Religious Identity in American Culture – by David W. Congdon

The question “Who is a true Christian?” is as old as the Church itself, and yet perhaps never more urgent than it is in our present age of division and noise. David Congdon’s book, Who Is a True Christian? Contesting Religious Identity in American Culture, takes this perennial question and exposes its modern distortions, revealing how, in the United States especially, Christianity has often been confused with ideology, culture, and even national identity.

A Mirror to the Modern Conscience
Congdon begins by holding up a mirror to our contemporary religious discourse. “No true Christian could vote for Donald Trump.” “Real Christians are pro-life.” “You can’t be a Christian and support gay marriage.” Such statements, though often offered as moral clarity, instead unveil the deep anxiety of a people uncertain of who they are. In these assertions we hear less the serene voice of faith, and more the defensive cry of identity politics draped in theological language.

For centuries, the Church has proclaimed that our identity is not constructed by ideology but received through communion. Yet in our age, many have turned from the living mystery of Christ’s Body to a self-fashioned image of Christianity defined by cultural allegiance or political loyalty. Congdon’s work traces this impulse across American history, showing how believers, seeking certainty in uncertain times, repeatedly try to reclaim a “pure” Christianity, one uncontaminated by modernity, culture, or dissent.

The Temptation of Certainty
Throughout his study, Congdon identifies a recurring temptation: the desire to enclose the faith within an unchanging system, to defend “orthodoxy” as if it were a monument rather than a living organism. But Orthodoxy, rightly understood, is not the preservation of formulas, it is fidelity to the life of Christ unfolding in history through the Spirit.

Congdon argues that when Christians attempt to freeze the faith into a single ideological expression, whether through “Biblical literalism,” “historic orthodoxy,” or “Christian nationalism” they inadvertently cut themselves off from the very vitality they seek to preserve. The Church, he reminds us, has never been static. From the apostolic age to the desert fathers, from Byzantium to the modern West, the faith has always adapted without losing its essence, because its essence is not a formula, but a Person.

The result of rejecting this living dynamism is what Congdon calls a project to “Make Christianity Great Again.” Like its political counterpart, this effort seeks safety in nostalgia, a retreat into mythic purity rather than a pilgrimage into divine transformation.

The Church as a Living Mystery
For Orthodox readers, Congdon’s critique resonates profoundly. The Church is not a sociological construct nor a mere fellowship of the like-minded. She is the mystical Body of Christ, enlivened by the Holy Spirit, transcending time and culture while incarnating herself in each. To forget this is to forget what the Church is: not a human project striving for uniformity, but a divine organism sustained by communion.

The attempt to define who is “in” or “out” of the faith, apart from the life of repentance and the sacramental mystery, leads inevitably to spiritual pride and schism. The early heresies were not merely doctrinal errors; they were ruptures of communion. Similarly, modern American “culture Christianity,” whether progressive or conservative, often becomes a form of heresy in this ancient sense: a choosing of part over whole, ideology over communion, identity over grace.

A Call to Kenosis and Communion
Congdon’s alternative is not relativism but humility. He proposes what might be called a kenotic ecclesiology, a self-emptying faith that confesses the limits of human language before the mystery of God. He invites us to see Christianity not as a fortress to be defended, but as a table of fellowship continually expanding at the invitation of the Crucified One.

Matthew Thiessen of McMaster University describes Congdon’s vision as “a supple Christianity consciously constructed around an inclusive norm of polydoxy.” That term, polydoxy, may sound foreign to Orthodox ears, but if we understand it rightly, it echoes the catholic fullness (pleroma) of the Church: a unity not of sameness, but of harmony. As St. Maximus the Confessor wrote, “The one Logos is multiplied in the many logoi,” and the Spirit breathes where He wills.

In that sense, Congdon’s call is not to dismantle dogma, but to rediscover its true purpose, to point us toward communion rather than exclusion, mystery rather than control.

Faith Beyond Ideology
The book’s intellectual breadth is impressive, moving from patristic apologetics to modern Protestant and Catholic debates, all the while pressing toward one unrelenting insight: the Church loses her voice when she mistakes boundaries for essence. When Christianity becomes a badge of cultural identity rather than the way of self-emptying love, it ceases to be the Church and becomes a tribe.

As David Hollinger of UC Berkeley notes, this is “a vigorous critique” of the endless attempts to define Christianity’s “essence.” Congdon reminds us that every attempt to capture the faith in purely human terms exposes its fragility, and that our only true identity is found not in conceptual clarity, but in the Cross.

A Word to the Eastern Christian Heart
From an Eastern Christian perspective, Who Is a True Christian? offers a sobering reminder: the Church’s life cannot be reduced to slogans, parties, or purity tests. The Orthodox understanding of the Church as the communion of saints means that our faith is not self-contained; it is always relational, always kenotic, always growing in love.

Congdon’s challenge, though written from a Western academic standpoint, calls us back to that living Orthodox vision of the Church as both divine and human, eternal and historical, where truth is not a weapon, but a fire that purifies.

This book will unsettle many readers, but those willing to enter its discomfort will find it deeply edifying. It invites us to look again at our own assumptions, to repent of our tribal certainties, and to rediscover the humble, cruciform heart of the Gospel.

In a time when “Christian” has become a label wielded in battle, Congdon dares to ask a question that is less about identity and more about transformation. Perhaps, in the end, the “true Christian” is not the one who claims the title most loudly, but the one who, in silence and mercy, reflects the image of Christ to the world.