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People have often heard Christians say they are called to be “salt and light” in the world. But where does that phrase come from? What does it mean? How has its meaning changed over time? What can it tell us about how different Christians might understand their place, and the place of others who are not like them, in society? And how does it reflect contemporary Christian nationalist understandings of “Christian America?” Dan tackles these questions in this week’s episode.
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Hello and welcome, as always, to It's in the Code, a series that is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
I am your host, Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
Quick shout out to somebody who reached out with an email and happened to be driving up the interstate in Vermont and was like, oh my gosh, that's where Landmark College is, and dropped me a line.
Cool to have, I guess, kind of a visitor up in my neck of the woods.
Anyway, diving into today, I want to hit a topic.
It's funny, all of you are great and you send me these topics and these ideas and sometimes you're like, I can't believe you haven't talked about this, or maybe you talked about this and I missed it, which is usually the nice way of saying, like, I've been through your whole list and you haven't talked about this.
And this was one of those topics where I was like, oh, how have I not ever thought about that?
But a few people had reached out with really what feels like one of the, it's like a Goldie Oldie of kind of conservative religious language in America, American evangelicalism, what have you.
And it's also an idea that I think has a lot of different kind of valences and nuances to it.
I think that's why folks reach out with these ideas is because they can have like different senses and different meanings and as we're always interested in different uses.
And this one is the specific phrase, salt and light.
When somebody says, you know, that they're called to be salt and light or that somebody says Christians are salt and light, And people reached out and were like, what is this?
And they were talking about some of the contexts in which they hear it.
And I was like, yeah, salt and light.
Like, I haven't thought about that one, but that's definitely one of those phrases that goes way back.
And I think It's also one of those phrases where the meaning has shifted tremendously in recent decades.
And so, I want to dive in.
I want to look at, you know, what does it mean?
How is it used?
What are the tensions embedded in that phrase?
And how do I think it's changed within contemporary evangelicalism?
I want to hit all that in like 20 minutes, which is a tall order, so dive right in here.
Typically, we'll start with the context here.
And the first thing, like, if you didn't grow up in church, if you're not used to churchy kind of language, if you've never been part of the evangelical context or that subculture, and somebody says, Christians are called to be salt and light, you're like, what the hell are you talking about?
Salt and light?
And so if you're not from that world, or you're not familiar with Biblicist Christianity, that is Christianity with a certain view of of the Bible, and what the Bible is, and how to use the Bible, and so forth.
It's going to be really, really strange.
So, let's just start with some context, because this is a phrase that actually comes from the Bible, directly.
And specifically, it comes from chapter 5 of the Gospel of Matthew.
Matthew is the first book in the Christian New Testament.
It tells the story of Jesus of Nazareth, and so forth.
And it is part of a broader section within Matthew 5, probably the most famous section of Matthew, that has come to be known as the Sermon on the Mount.
And if you've ever heard the Sermon on the Mount, you know it has like a bunch of blessed hour passages—blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are those who mourn, blessed are, blessed are, blessed are—and it's right after that.
Most people know the blessed hour part, but there's a lot more to this discourse called the Sermon on the Mount, and this is part of it.
So it's in Matthew chapter 5, starts in verse 13, right after all the blessed hours, Jesus says—and I'm just reading from Matthew now—you are the salt of the earth.
But if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored?
It is no longer good for anything but is thrown out and trampled underfoot.
You are the light of the world.
A city built on a hill cannot be hid.
No one, after lighting a lamp, puts it under the bushel basket but on the lampstand and gives light to all in the house.
In the same way, let your light shine before others so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.
That's the passage, okay?
I think it's also worth noting that it's immediately followed by this other passage where Jesus says that he has come to fulfill the Jewish law and that to enter the kingdom of heaven, individual's righteousness has to exceed that of religious leaders.
It's a really strong focus on Righteousness and holiness and leading a holy life and all of that sort of stuff, okay?
But that's the passage.
When people say they're called to be salt and light, they're sort of merging verses 13 and 14 together.
You are the salt of the earth, that's 13.
You are the light of the world, that's 14.
Okay?
So that's where it comes from.
And I think the meaning within a particular kind of context is clear enough.
Again, we cite things in the Bible and stuff.
Not all Christians use the Bible in the same way.
They don't all appeal to it in the same way.
But I think that within a particular kind of Christianity, this passage has long—and by long, I mean like long before contemporary evangelicalism, long before the 20th century, like for big chunks of, you know, Christian history.
This passage has provided encouragement to live a life that stands as an example, and specifically an example to quote-unquote the world, that is to non-Christians.
And the basic idea was that Christians are supposed to be a light in a dark world, that they are to season, so to speak, a world that is spiritually bland or favorless.
I used to get hung up when I was a kid and read that and be like, if the salt loses its taste, how can its saltiness be restored?
I'm like, how did salt become non-salty?
I don't know if that actually happens or not, but that's not the point.
The point is, I think, this idea that it adds seasoning or flavor or preserves the world, you know, what have you, the metaphors that we're talking about salt.
And I think for even the uninitiated, the metaphor of light probably makes more sense.
We understand the metaphor of light as something that reveals, as knowledge.
We have the concept of enlightenment, whether we're talking the European Enlightenment movement, whether we're talking sort of Buddhist and other Eastern philosophies that might talk about enlightenment, we understand that metaphor.
It's the same idea, okay?
And the idea—I grew up with this passage.
This was a passage I heard routinely, and this was, you know, an admonition we received all the time.
We're to be salt and light.
We're to be the light of the world.
The idea I grew up with was that Christians were called to live out their values and beliefs in such a manner that they stood as an example to non-Christians in the world.
Essentially, the churches I grew up in, they believed if someone was truly a Christian, if your faith was authentic and real, you would live a life of holiness and integrity and joy.
And the idea was that this would stand in contrast to the lives of the quote-unquote lost people around you.
It was essentially an issue of character.
Your Christian character and the way that this played out in concrete ways would, again in Christian terms, make you a witness for Christianity, for Christ.
It would do this for the world.
And the idea is that Others would come to the faith.
Others would come to the faith because they would see this difference in how you lived and the kind of experience you had and what kind of person you were.
Other people would see this so-called witness, and they would want to live this kind of lives themselves.
They would see this joy that you have, and they would want to have that.
And this is what would bring people into the Christian fold, okay?
So, a core idea in my own Christian self-understanding was that personal holiness and integrity was an absolute demand of the Christian life.
And the kind of Christianity that I grew up with, the kind of Christianity I preached, the kind of Christianity I lived, Basically said that if you weren't living out that example, if you were not living a salt and light, you had no right to enjoin others to become Christians.
You were a hypocrite if you did that.
Now, there's downsides to that.
There are plenty of downsides to the demand to live a life of holiness that's exemplary and so forth.
And that's a thing, but that's a different topic than we've got time for today, okay?
But that was the model I grew up with.
Now, we're also, of course, as I said, we're not just concerned with, like, what the phrase means or where it comes from or just, like, how did Dan live it out or something, whatever.
We're interested in what the phrase does and how people use it.
And as I said, there can be a lot of valences to this.
The one I grew up with is one valence, but it's not the only one.
And I think you could plot these on kind of a continuum, you know, from sort of one set of meanings to another.
And at one end of the continuum is the actual, the secular usage of this term, right?
You have probably, maybe you've never heard, I've called to be salt and light, but you might have heard a description of somebody saying, oh, they're real salt of the earth kinds of people, or he's a real salt of the earth kind of guy.
It's probably not a phrase that, like, you know, 20-year-olds are going to use, but if you've got people in your life who are of a certain age, certainly older than me, you will have heard that phrase.
That's a phrase that alludes to this Bible passage, but it's not typically intended in an early religious sense.
It just carries the idea of somebody who's basically a good, unassuming, non-pretentious person.
That's the kind of person who's a good neighbor.
It's the kind of person who, you know, you're stuck in traffic and you can call your neighbor and say, I'm really sorry, but like, somebody's got to pick my kid up from school at five.
Can you do that?
They'll go out and do that.
It's the kind of person who, you know, will stop and help a stranger fix a tire if they've got a flat on the side of the road.
It's that kind of person.
And It doesn't necessarily have a religious valence, but on that end of the spectrum, that's kind of the Christian meaning that I had when I was growing up.
If you were a good Christian person, I mean, you were a good, kind, caring person.
You were good and kind all the time, and you were caring to everybody, and you helped people, and that's just what you did.
That is how being a Christian would manifest in the world.
And if I put my sociology of religion hat on, sociologists who've studied American evangelicalism will say, and they're right, it was a very individualistic vision of Christianity.
It was very much the vision—which is the vision that I grew up with, it's the vision that I had for a period of time when I first became a pastor—that The way you change the world is by changing individuals and by helping others.
And the world gets better as more people become Christians.
And how do people become Christians?
Yes, they become Christians.
We preach to them and stuff like that.
But really, we draw them into Christianity through our example.
And you can still find this meaning.
I was just Googling around, looking at, you know, Salt and Light, and kind of seeing what came up.
And more than once, I found things like food ministries or care ministries for the poor, and some of them had the name Salt and Light, and they were very clear that their aim was just helping others.
Like, they weren't there to preach at people, they weren't there to judge people, they weren't there to convert people.
Their view is we are called to be salt and light in the world, and that means we're going to help people.
So that's like on one end of the spectrum.
And I'll tell you, I think most people, Christian or not, are not going to find that super objectionable.
Most people, if they've got the neighbor who's just really nice all the time, it's just like Ned Flanders in a way, just nice and helpful and kind.
And you're like, all right, it's a little weird.
It's like they've got Bible verses all over the walls inside their house and like, They talk about going to church all the time and like I'm not really comfortable with that but man like you know they're really nice and they have that neighborhood cookout and invite everybody over all the time and and I know that they're not really in agreement with the gay couple down the street but they invite them over and they're nice and they don't you know yeah I think lots of people are like okay if that if that's what religion was
Even for lots of non-religious people, they'd be like, okay, yeah, practice your faith, do whatever you want, cool.
You do you, and as long as you let us do us, that's fine.
And yeah, I think people don't find that offensive, okay?
But there can be other valences to this.
And maybe on a big, long, sort of middle section of that continuum, You start finding or you know sort of other visions and again my googling around I come across things these these kind of like I don't know well newsletters or there were like sermons or things like that that the people had and it was this idea of being salt and light in people's specific communities like their neighborhoods and things like that and this involved things like quote-unquote witnessing to neighbors.
I've talked about this phrase before witnessing It's hard to get out of churchy language.
Witnessing means quote-unquote sharing your faith.
What that means is basically proselytizing.
You're telling other people about your faith in the hopes that they will become Christian.
Okay?
And so it's tied sometimes into a more explicit, you know, effort to bring people into the religion.
It also talks about things like prayer walking, like walking your neighborhood and just praying over it for God to work in the hearts of others and protect people and so forth.
And there it can start tying in with so-called spiritual warfare models that Our neighborhood, our community, our space, you know, it's part of a tug of war between divine forces and demonic forces that want to lead people astray.
And part of being salt and light is participating in the spiritual warfare and praying over the neighborhood and so forth.
Naming or marking the geographical space of your neighborhood or your home or whatever as sort of God's territory.
And there you're getting into some more sort of Pentecostal and charismatic elements.
You're getting into other biblical metaphors, you know, the militaristic metaphors and the spiritual warfare metaphors.
And you also start to tinge into things like just the general militaristic tonality of a lot of contemporary evangelicalism.
I read one that said, you know, you establish a quote-unquote Christian beachhead.
Within your community by being salt and light.
So we're moving beyond the, I'm going to show my faith by example and enlighten the world this way, to I'm called to be a kind of Christian warrior claiming this space for God and helping to win others and so forth.
And I think that we start to turn a corner to a more adversarial approach.
And I, in my Christianity, I had my moments with this as well.
This tension was there between those who were like, I'm just going to quietly live my life, live my faith, do my thing, and people are going to see that.
And others are like, no, we have to be more explicit.
We have to tell them why we're doing this and so forth.
Okay.
But if that's like a broad middle part of the spectrum, I think at the far end of the spectrum, or maybe off the spectrum entirely, this idea of leading by example essentially disappears.
There may still be the language of salt and light.
I don't think it figures as prominently, but when it's there, we're not talking about leading by example.
Here we're talking about the militaristic Christian nationalist expressions that currently dominate the culture of conservative American Christianity.
Now, if one hears the language of salt and light, it refers essentially to the imposition of Christian order On to an unbelieving and fallen and disobedient world.
We're called to be salt and light, the light of the world, so we are going to make the world, we're going to make our society a Christian society, and we're going to enforce that.
And that's the model of culture war.
That's the model of culture war that's undertaken because non-Christians are people who call themselves Christians, but they're not really those liberal Christians or LGBTQ-plus inclusive Christians.
People are Christians in name only.
This is the model of culture war that's undertaken because those are literally demonic enemies that must be subdued.
We're not just walking around our neighborhood quietly praying that demons would be held at bay.
No.
People who aren't like us are in fact demonic and they are enemies and they need to be countered and that's what Salt and Light is.
This is the Christianity of book bans, and voter suppression, and xenophobia, and targeting trans kids, and so many other things, okay?
And in this model, which again has precursors, goes all the way back to the settler colonialism that populated the Americas with Europeans.
In this model, America, not just individual Christians, but the state, the United States, is the light on the hill.
The whole thing about you don't hide a light under the bushel basket, you put it on the lamp stand in the same way, let your light shine before others, all of that, that's America.
America is the light on the hill.
And it is a fundamentally theocratic social vision.
Okay?
So this model is not about character.
As of an individual, it's not about setting an example.
It's certainly not about service.
And this is why, when people for a long time have said, well, people call themselves Christians, but like, they're just kind of shitty people, or they don't go to church, they don't do all the Christian stuff that they're supposed to do.
I think this reflects that shift in Christian identity, what it means to be a Christian, right?
This is not a model about character or setting an example, and we see this in the politicians.
You want to see this on display?
Just look at the big figures who are there.
Look at the pastors and the theologians who are big figures in the MAGA movement.
You don't hear them talking about personal example or good character, and they can't because the person they have hitched their wagon to as the model of Christian America is Donald Trump.
They can no longer appeal to character.
And in fact, if you were to appeal to character, well, you need to be a good person, a caring husband, a loving father.
They would consider such appeals signs of weakness or wokeness.
These are all the same Christians who made fun of Gus Walls for crying during the DNC.
It's that.
It's tied in with masculinity and patriarchy and a bunch of other stuff.
That's the far end of that spectrum.
And I think that this theocratic culture war model is fundamentally at odds with the other end of that spectrum.
And this is one of the ways where I think, from the earliest days of straight white American Jesus, I've talked about this, this question sometimes in wondering, you know, my own movement out of evangelicalism and so forth, how much has American evangelicalism changed and how much does it feel like it's changed because I've changed?
I've changed radically.
I think the movement has too.
I think that if somebody had said to me when I was, you know, God, the 18, 19, 20-year-old me would have been so opposed to this theocratic vision because it was incompatible with evangelical theology.
Evangelical theology says to be a Christian one has to commit oneself as an individual to God through personal faith in the saving work of Jesus of Nazareth.
Within that model, doing good things by itself doesn't make you a Christian, it can't get you to heaven, and it doesn't save you.
So even when I was, you know, in my 20s and people would talk about needing to post the Ten Commandments, I'd be like, well, we could post the Ten Commandments, but following the Ten Commandments doesn't make you a Christian.
It doesn't save you.
Living in a society with Christian rules doesn't save you.
Only individuals can be saved by giving themselves to God through faith in Jesus, and that is still a core component of evangelical theology, right?
So that theocratic model, in my view, back then and still is fundamentally incompatible with that other model of salt and light of, you know, having to have good Christian character and being consistent in your faith and bringing others in and so forth, and it's ultimately self-defeating.
The evangelical Christian logic or argument against a theocratic social vision should be that you'll have a bunch of people who think that they're Christian because of laws and social rules and books that aren't in the library or whatever, But because they think they're already Christian, they'll actually miss conversion and so forth.
Now, I don't personally believe that stuff anymore, but within an evangelical worldview, I did.
So, all of that to say there are real tensions and valences with this idea of salt and light and how it might play out.
Within these divergent Christian contexts, which is why you might have the nice old lady next door who brings you cookies all the time and just says, you know, they're just being salt and light in the world and thought you could use some brightening up and brought you some cookies.
It's like, oh, I don't know what in the world that means, but that's really nice.
All the way to somebody who thinks that they're being salt and light in the world by making sure that they marginalize and oppress those who need to be marginalized and oppressed.
Right?
And that brings me to the final point to kind of wrap this up, which is that I think if we're really decoding this, when the contemporary super-MAGA Christian nationalist type uses the language of salt and light, they're using it as a kind of alibi for Christian nationalism.
It's the kind of person who's like, well, you know, I'm not saying this is what I want, but, you know, the Bible says I have to be salt and light in the world.
That means I need to fight for a Christian society.
And so God demands that I do this.
You're essentially appealing to that traditional model of salt and light, but you evacuate it of any sort of personal character dimension.
And just use it as an alibi for feeding terrible things, for feeding fear, for feeding anger, for feeding resentment, for taking joy not in being a Christian and living a good Christian life or whatever, but taking joy in the suffering of others, in targeting others, in trying to punish others for not believing and doing what you do.
And that's where we often are.
And so when I hear from folks and They'll talk about, you know, Uncle Ron doing and saying these terrible things, but appealing to this notion of salt and light.
What's that about?
That's what I think is going on.
So I think that you have this spectrum of ranges, and I think that you get overlap between those, and I think that often when people appeal to that, especially people who've been evangelicals for a long time, maybe they grew up in a context like I did, Where it was about being a good person, they are now full-on Christian nationalists, so they hold on to that language.
But what it actually means, how it plays out, what they do with that language has shifted radically.
And as always, of course, that's what I'm interested in.
So, thank you to the folks who reached out about that.
Again, a goldie oldie in the sense of, you know, a Bible idea that has been a central part of a lot of people's Christian consciousness for generations.
But I think it can have a lot of different meanings, and I think, I really do think if you time warped somebody from like, I don't know, 1985 to now, and they heard sort of public Christian discourse, I think that they would be very taken aback by how that phrase might play out really differently now.
Thank you, as always, for listening.
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Daniel Miller Swag, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
Keep the ideas coming.
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