Do you think teenagers are self-absorbed? Africans are poverty-stricken? Evangelicals are judgmental? If so, how did you come to believe such a thing?

The Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie, in a beautiful speech filmed for the annual TED ideas conference, speaks of the dangers of reading and believing the “single story” of a people. She tells of a childhood reading British books about characters and objects that were completely foreign to her—and consequently writing books about those same characters, even though they were merely ghosts from her dreams, because that’s what characters in literary books were supposed to be.

 

It is a moving speech designed to see us as gorgeous, fractured communities of people—all of us diverse and meaningful according to our experiences. As I was watching it, I was drawn to her thesis and, quite honestly, her delivery. While compelled by her arresting accent and ethnic head wrap, I felt a fleeting wish to be unusual, exotic. Who am I, a painfully mainstream American woman with a common story? Have I contributed to a single story about evangelical Christianity, or are my individual experiences allowed to bend and color that story?

If Adichie’s thesis is true—that we must be careful not to embrace a single story of a people at the expense of individual experience—the same could be said of evangelical Christianity in America. On the one hand, Christianity is a single story, a linear theology made up of three non-negotiable strands: a transcendent text, a spotless Savior, and a broken man. On the other hand, Christianity as it affects the life of its followers is not static or rigid; God is the same yesterday, today, and forever, but his people are evolutionary and their experiences are intricate and nuanced.

Parents, publishers and pulpits get the first crack at defining the story of an American Christian, and it’s not surprising that all three versions begin to resemble each other. The parent goes to church in which the pastor has read the books that the publisher decides to promote about parents who go to church led by book-reading pastors. I’m not being cynical; it’s the way a single story gets written for us, just like all British orphans in the 1800s must be like a Dickens’ characters, or all Compton hip-hop thugs will commit crimes. It’s the danger of the single story. If you tell a group something about themselves long enough, they begin to live in a way which fulfills the narrative.

American Christianity is beginning to shift away from the hyper-marketed evangelicalism of the past several decades, but its offspring choked for awhile on its single story—one that often urged its members to follow the cultural storyline more than a theological one. Members and non-members alike begin to believe the plotlines being read to them: evangelicals must be white Republicans, lousy artists, non-intellectuals, and Hollywood-haters.

As I see it, my children must discover how their unique and nuanced lives rotate beautifully around the fixed narrative of God. I love tethering them to the undeniable salvation of Jesus Christ and then watching their stories take them to places, possibly outside the boundaries of evangelicalism, possibly outside the Bible study bullet points, perhaps beyond the expectations of their parents and youth leaders and even past the limits of their imaginations. If God’s narrative, as set out in the holy Scriptures, is wild and illogical and intense and at times unpredictable (think Daniel, Mary, John the Baptist, Abraham, and a host of other lives who didn’t fit any fixed plotline), could not we think to wander away from the single story being laid out for us?

John Donne writes so beautifully in his Meditation 17 that “all mankind is of one author, and is one volume.” God’s story is fixed, but ours never is. The Jew and Gentile, the near and far, the twisted and the straight, the colored and the pale—are we not included in the gorgeous, intricate narrative of God? When Donne asserts that “God’s hand is in every translation,” he hints at the variation of the human text we call mankind. Adichie is right; there is no such thing as a single tale for you and me. God, on the other hand, is a different story.