Earlier this week I posted a link on my Facebook feed: “What Dave Ramsey Gets Wrong about Poverty” - an opinion column by Rachel Held Evans. Little did I know the intensity of response it would receive.

Rachel is a polarizing figure among the evangelical blogging public these days. A progressive woman who isn’t afraid to speak her piece, she’s gained a significant audience in the past year or two. (This is not the first time she’s had a guest piece on CNN.com.) At the risk of over-simplifying her piece (which I recommend reading in its entirety), her main points were these:

  1. “Much of what Ramsey teaches is sound, helpful advice, particularly for middle-class Americans struggling with mounting credit card bills.”
  2. Ramsey’s “views on poverty are neither informed nor biblical”.
  3. A recent piece on Ramsey’s website “confused correlation with causation here by suggesting that [certain] habits make people rich or poor”
  4. “Ramsey’s perceived “direct correlation” between faith and wealth should be more troubling than his other confused correlations, for it flirts with what Christians refer to as the prosperity gospel, the teaching that God rewards faithfulness with wealth.”
  5. Ramsey “glosses over the reality that economic injustice is not, in fact, limited to the developing world but plagues our own country as well.”
  6. “People are poor for a lot of reasons, and choice is certainly a factor, but categorically blaming poverty on lack of faith or lack of initiative is not only uninformed, it’s unbiblical.”

Now maybe it’s just me, but these points seem fairly obvious and valid. So I was more than a little surprised at the vehemence of negative responses to my link and on the subsequent re-sharings of a few of my friends. It would appear that, among American evangelical circles these days, criticizing Dave Ramsey on anything is nearly as dangerous as commending President Obama for anything.

What is more striking, though, is the common thread I saw in the negative responses. The assertions were all along the lines of “I think she misquoted Dave” (though no one provided any specifics), and “Dave’s system worked for me, so people shouldn’t criticize him.”

And here we see a scary bit of illogic that is far too common these days - the immediate defense of the person under critique without seemingly no consideration of the points that were actually made. No one tried to argue that Ramsey’s views of poverty were biblical, or that his correlations of faith and wealth were incorrect, or that systemic economic injustice is not an issue. All they said was “it worked for me!”, which, incidentally, was the first thing Ms. Evans acknowledged in her column.

Now, I’ve been guilty of this tendency myself often enough. A critique of something or someone I generally support feels like an attack on that person, which in turn I take as an attack on me, and my first response isn’t a thoughtful, reasoned response, but instead a knee-jerk reaction.

This has got to stop.

We as American evangelicals have no hope of actually solving some of the systemic problems in our church and our country if we’re unwilling to examine, critique, and correct even our most popular sacred cows.

We must have wise awareness of the motivations of those who are teaching and selling to us, even when that message is clothed in the “safe” garb of evangelical Christian vocabulary.

We must understand that, outside of Jesus, no teacher is always right, and almost no teacher is always wrong. This will free us to wrestle with uncomfortable truths. When we do we will find surprising agreement with those whom we previously considered adversaries. We will also have the (very healthy) realization that even our most revered evangelical heroes are fallible humans just like us.

We must embrace God’s truth through whatever channels it comes to us. (Yes, that means I’m likely to write another post with quotes from the Pope’s latest exhortation.) We similarly need to be willing to discard error wherever we find it, even when we find it in those who we like and have found helpful.

Learn. Think. Act. Grow. Learn more. Think more. Humbly turn. Grow more.

This is our calling as followers of Jesus Christ.