The Discipleship Game
The world is gamified and we’re all characters in it.
It was never about Dungeons & Dragons.
At least that was my takeaway from a recent article Russell Moore wrote in Christianity Today called Fantasy Role-Playing Is Hurting America. In the article, Dr. Moore makes a link between the popularity of fantasy role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons and the motivation that would lead someone to storm the Capitol in an insurrection. When the article came out, I saw a multitude of responses decrying Dr. Moore for resurrecting the Satanic Panic of the 80s by instilling fear of the game that inspired Stranger Things into the evangelical psyche again.
That wasn’t what I took away from the article.
Dungeons & Dragons—and the entire genre of Role-Playing games—was a metaphor.
Well, metaphor isn’t exactly the right word. Because the point was that someone like Steve Bannon realized that men, in particular, were drawn to role-playing games for the simple fact that they provided a story for them to find purpose in that was greater than their day-to-day reality. Dr. Moore talks about “Dave from accounts payable” finding more meaning in being “Ajax”, a warrior who dies for a noble cause and is revered by thousands than he does in his normal life.
Bannon realized that he could map the game mechanics of role-playing games onto real life in order to mobilize people to a greater cause, which in his case, was energizing a nationalist movement that culminated in President Trump. By instilling distrust in real-life institutions, providing a metanarrative that someone could find purpose, identifying a villain for someone to defeat, and establishing an identity for people to embody, Bannon could create an alternate reality for people to participate in. Dr. Moore wasn’t trying to say Dungeons & Dragons is satanic.
He was saying that our culture has been gamified and we’re all characters in it.
Stick with me here.
I think Bannon was onto something.
I believe his cause was immoral and evil, but I think he understood something about human nature that has been largely missing from the modern church. He understood the power that story plays in our identity and formation. He knew that providing an alternative story for people to play a role in would be a powerful catalyst for change. Even though he weaponized it for evil ends, the events of January 6th showed just how far people were willing to go to live out the narrative they believed.
The element of story has been largely absent from Christian discipleship in the church.
For the last 40 or so years, it seems that there has been two dominant approaches to formation. The first is the systematic theology approach. This was perfectly typified by my senior Christian worldview class. Our teacher just taught straight through Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology. We were taught straightforward doctrines and told that true Christians believe these exact things. There was little explanation about the significance of the beliefs, nuanced variations of the beliefs that Christians also have believed throughout the ages, and that denying or altering any of these beliefs meant that you probably weren’t a Christian. The point wasn’t formation. It was memorization.
The other approach is the Self-Help Jesus approach. This is what the seeker-sensitive movement embraced when it decided that discipleship was life-hacking tips and tricks for marriage and parenting with principles that are loosely based on Bible verses. Jesus came to set you free from… something. And he was there to help you with… everything. That’s about all it was. The point here wasn’t formation either. It was optimization.
Christianity was never about memorization or optimization.
It’s about being formed into the image of Christ. Paul said in Galatians that he was “suffering labor pains for you until Christ is formed in you.” That is was “no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.” It’s about participating in a new identity. A new story of reality. The old has passed away and the new creation has come. Our call is to live into a new story and bear witness to it so more people join the story through union with Christ.
Kevin Vanhoozer puts it this way:
Sound doctrine ultimately orients disciples to the true story of the world. Put differently, sound doctrine ministers reality, a created and redeemed order to which wisdom willingly conforms, for there is no other order.
That’s the thing about role-playing games. You play a role in a story. Your character has an arc that is developed over time. You start out weak, unaccustomed to the new world that it finds itself in, and has to gain insight and skill through challenges and experiences in order to defeat the enemy and restore peace.
This is the same story that Jesus invites us into.
We were dead in our sin and, by his Spirit, Jesus makes us alive in a new world. While we start out weak, we finally have the power in Jesus to overcome our sin. We’re called to not only overcome our sin but to restore peace to the world as ambassadors of Christ spreading the aroma of his reign. We grow in the Spirit by overcoming challenges, adopting the practices of Jesus, living in community, and practicing the sacraments. We partner with God to restore peace to the world by taking on responsibilities, caring for others, and building beautiful communities and institutions. In God’s story, we have a role to play.
Funny enough, in this framework, systematic theology and Self-Help Jesus both have a role to play as well. Theology is simply understanding the script of the story so we know how to play our roles well. Even better than Self-Help Jesus is the pursuit of God’s wisdom that’s needed to navigate the difficulties of the world and fulfill our purpose.
The world is gamified and we’re all characters in it.
In short, the story we believe is the life that we will live. And as Bobette Buster famously said, “He who tells the best story wins.” What if the story we told in our churches was so good and invited so much participation that the nationalist stories that the likes of Bannon tell, or the hedonistic stories that the likes of the progressive left tell, or the consumeristic stories that our culture tells look strangely dim in the light of his glorious grace?
Maybe we do need to pay attention to role-playing games.
Because after all, we’re all in one.