Your Church Might Be Training You to Lose
Michael Clary’s Loser Theology names the sickness and prescribes the cure.
Michael Clary has a provocative new book with a provocative title: Loser Theology: Why the Weak Will Not Inherit the Earth.
The premise is simple but it cuts hard: a whole strain of modern Christianity has quietly trained believers to think their highest calling is to lose. Never fight. Never push back. Be a doormat and call it Christlikeness. Michael gives that instinct a name, traces where it came from, and shows how Scripture gets recruited to make passivity feel spiritual.
The genius of loser theology is that it traffics in sound bites. “The heart of the gospel is the cross, and the cross is all about giving up power.” “Christlikeness requires us to lay down our need to dominate.” They sound humble. They sound wise. But try to actually live one out as a father, a police officer, a pastor exercising discipline and the thing collapses into absurdity. What it leaves behind is a Christian who feels guilty every time he asserts his agency, and who has learned to baptize his own passivity as faith.
Michael and I go back to our Acts 29 days, back when we were both nobody guys trying to figure out how to plant churches in a world that was turning against us. We were handed a set of tools — winsomeness, warmth, never give offense — and told that was the whole toolkit. They’re good tools. But they are not the only tools, and a generation of pastors got equipped to be gentle-and-lowly and nothing else. When the abuse case walks into your office, or the culture turns openly hostile, gentle-and-lowly alone won’t cut it. You need range.
That’s really the heart of the book. A fully-orbed Christian life has range, there are times to be meek and mild, and there are times to be fierce like a lion. Loser theology only knows one register. Michael wants to hand the church back the other ones: courage, authority, dominion, the confident expectation that sin can actually be defeated rather than merely confessed on a loop.
We spent a good chunk of the conversation on the hard sayings — turn the other cheek, be servant of all, do not resist the one who is evil — because these are the verses that get weaponized against anyone who won’t roll over. Jesus left some things ambiguous on purpose. He did not leave us with a mandate to be wiped out.
The positive vision Michael lands on is what he calls high agency Christianity: authority, agency, and power are good. It runs straight from the creation mandate through the Great Commission. Go out, civilize, make disciples, take the promotion, exercise authority for the good of the people you lead. Not as a tyrant but as a man fully alive to the glory of God.
Michael joined me on episode 197 of Full Proof Theology to walk through the book, the sound bites, and the case for a church that stops apologizing for having a spine.
Listen to the episode: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1249781/episodes/19512287
Watch the episode:
Pre-order “Loser Theology” here.
The church has enough teachers telling you to lie down. Michael’s book is one of the few telling you to get up.