Jane Fonda and American Christianity

Actress and pop icon Jane Fonda represents American pop Christianity. She’s currently in the news for a new “milder and gentler” yoga training video that she released for “senior citizens” like herself (she is 75). It really wouldn’t matter what Jane Fonda is doing, except that she made a profession of Christianity in 2001 and she very much represents the pop Christianity that predominates in America and that is spreading across the world as part of the global culture. It is not a Christianity that is based on the Holy Bible as God’s divinely-inspired Word or a Christianity in which the proponent acknowledges himself as a fallen sinner deserving of God’s eternal wrath, repents of sin and idolatry and trusts exclusively in Christ’s blood alone for salvation.

It’s none of that. It is a me-centered, me-still-in-charge type of Christianity. It is the end-time Christianity described in 2 Timothy 3-4. Jane’s Jesus is the non-judgmental Jesus described in The Shack. Her Christian faith is far more influenced by pop philosophy than the Word of God. She has renounced marriage for shacking up. She remains an activist for abortion rights, radical feminism, and homosexual rights. She persists in the pagan practice of yoga, without regard to what the Bible says, simply because it seems to provide physical and emotional benefits. Her thinking and desires remain her ultimate authority.

In fact, she hates “fundamentalist,” Bible-believing Christianity that interprets the Bible literally. She has “nothing to do with the perceived doctrines of fundamentalist Christianity” (Fonda, “About My Faith,” June 10, 2009). She despises a church authority structure over her life. Her Christianity is about “the need to give ourselves over to our higher power,” after the fashion of the third step of the Alcoholics Anonymous 12 Step program. It is about welcoming a nebulous and vaguely-defined “Holy Spirit into our innermost selves.” The focus is on feeling God and mysticism. She describes ancient Gnosticism as “the Christianity that is my spiritual home” (My Life So Far, 2005).

She remains a universalist who loves the Sufi poem that says, “Every child has known God, not the God of names, nor the God of don’ts ... But the God who knows only four words and keeps repeating them, saying, ‘Come dance with Me.’” This “god” is an idol and Fonda’s Christianity is end-time apostasy. Beware, friends, of the siren call of this dangerous generation. There is only one Creator God, and He is the God revealed in Holy Spirit. He is the most loving, compassionate Being there is, the source of all true love, but He is at the same time thrice-holy and righteous and just.

We can understand His character only by looking at the cross. God is so holy that He had to sacrifice His own Son in order to redeem men from the just penalty of breaking His laws, but God is so loving that He was willing to do that very thing. Any other “god” and any other Christian faith is a lie. 

(Friday Church News Notes, January 11, 2013, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143)

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