The Limits of the Purpose-Driven Life: Can Twenty Million Readers Be Wrong?

Purposefulness is a crucial, if often unexplored, virtue. Both individuals and society require a sense of purpose if life is to involve more than, in the one case, taking one step after another on a treadmill and, on the other, standing for something other than accumulating a larger gross national product. One of the many ways in which human beings are different from other animal species is the degree to which we are able, should we opt to do so, to incorporate a sense of purpose into our actions.

No one has had a greater influence on the way Americans think about purpose than Rick Warren, the founding pastor of Saddleback Church, in Orange County, California, one of America’s premier examples of a megachurch. Warren’s two books, The Purpose-Driven Church and The Purpose-Driven Life are best-sellers, but as far as the latter one is concerned, the term “best-seller” barely begins to describe its success. Some twenty million copies of The Purpose-Driven Life have been sold, making it, by some accounts, the largest selling book in the history of the United States. If anyone seems to be leading a purpose-driven life, it is Rick Warren. His success as a preacher and author is due in large part to his impressive ability to tap into the desires that large numbers of Americans have for a life with meaning and direction.

Although the sheer number of books Warren has sold is record-breaking, and although megachurches are unlike traditional mainline congregations, there is nothing particularly new about inspirational advice books in American culture; Norman Vincent Peale cornered this market long before Rick Warren. Yet it would be wrong to dismiss Warren’s efforts as one more example of America’s fascination with positive thinking. Although there is a therapeutic dimension to Warren’s output, his books are not just examples of an “I’m okay, you’re okay” disposition that glides over difficult issues.

For one thing, Warren makes no bones about his explicit commitments to Christianity; The Purpose-Driven Life is bound to be discomforting to Jews, Muslims, and even Christians who do not share an evangelical perspective on their faith. Indeed, so strong are Warren’s religious convictions that one cannot find in his book a definition of what purpose is divorced from Christian language. To lead a purposeful life, according to Warren, does not mean figuring out what your life goals ought to be, but instead is achieved in five-fold fashion – through worship, ministry, evangelism, fellowship, and discipleship. Readers who turn to Warren for personal advice, therefore, will (with some exceptions) find that we best achieve our sense of purpose by becoming part of God’s family. And the only way to do that is to try to become like His son. “When we place our faith in Christ,” Warren writes, “God becomes our father.” Lest anyone doubt how we accomplish this, Warren continues that there is “only one way to get into God’s family” and that is “by being born again into it.” This is not the wishy-washy spiritualism that insists that it does not matter what you believe so long as you believe in something. In Warren’s world, what you believe, not whether you believe, has everything to do with whether you live a purposeful life.

Nor do we find in Rick Warren much sympathy for those who insist that, however strong a Christian they may be, they can find God on their own. As his first book makes clear, Warren is a believer in the importance of the church. There are strains within American Christianity, even, if not especially, within its evangelical precincts, that view institutional affiliation, whether to denomination or congregation, with suspicion; Jesus had no church, those who insist on worshipping at home will tell us, and we do not need one either. And there are others in the United States who, however much they describe themselves as faithful people, also tend to view organized religion with considerable skepticism. In contrast to these often anarchistic trends in American religion, Warren is an institution-builder. He demands that you come to church in order to experience the sense of fellowship that gives meaning to a purpose-driven life. To experience God, you have to sacrifice, whether in terms of the money you contribute to your congregation or the time you devote to worship and small group activities.

Not having been born again in Christ, and only in church on Sundays to do research rather than to pray, I am, on Warren’s count, doomed to live without purpose. Yet I do not fault him for his commitments. So long as we do not have a society that forces religion on its citizens, I have no objection to, and in many ways appreciate, the evangelical urge in contemporary Christianity; evangelicals should be as free to deliver their messages as their hoped-for recipients should be free to reject it. And while not a church-goer myself, I am disturbed by anti-institutional impulses in American life that weaken not only religious organizations, but families, political parties, labor unions, and universities. It is, frankly, refreshing to read someone who stands for something and is honest enough to follow his convictions to their logical conclusion.

But I do wonder whether Warren’s commitments, even on their own terms, can adequately lead to the sense of purpose he rightly finds so important. Evangelical Protestantism is much to be admired for its energy and its capacity to speak to the needs of huge numbers of Americans; Warren’s efforts prove that. At the same time, evangelicalism is only one way of being religious – or even, I would add – purpose-driven, and it has its flaws as well as its strengths.

From its earliest origins in the Reformation, Protestantism has emphasized the importance of faith over deeds. Warren reflects this faith-first attitude throughout his books. God created you, Warren tells his readers, and what He wants from you in return is your willingness to bring a smile to His face. When we worship God, we enter into a deeply personal relationship with Him, a relationship that demands we offer Him, not so much service in His name, but rather our unconditional love. “God is far more interested in what you are than in what you do,” Warren writes. It is not up to us to determine what our purposes are and then to act upon them.

Warren’s emphasis on faith does not ignore deeds; once we give ourselves to Jesus, we will act better toward ourselves as well as toward others. Yet there is very little in Warren’s work about the idea of calling that grows out of Luther’s teachings. A calling – Luther used the German beruf – refers to the inward purpose we develop as we consider the personal responsibility thrust upon us by our belief in God. Except for accepting Jesus into our lives, people are not called to God in Warren’s understanding of the purpose-driven life. They do not develop the sense of internal autonomy admired by German thinkers and inspired by that country’s Lutheran tradition – that autonomy made famous by Immanuel Kant who contributed so much to the Enlightenment’s commitment to reason. “The only biblical condition is that you believe,” says Warren, which raises the question of whether belief, by itself, is sufficient.

Belief by itself has not been a sufficient condition for faith in the writings of other Christian thinkers, perhaps most noticeably St. Augustine. Augustine was second to none in his insistence on the reality of human sin, but there nonetheless existed in his work a relatively optimistic view of human nature. Since we are God’s creation, Augustine reasoned, the greater we are, the greater the force that created us; as Michael Novak summarizes Augustine’s theology: “With humans, God is no puppeteer but rather something like a dramatist, a great dramatist whose characters spring to life with a mind and will of their own.”

Warren accepts the same notion that human beings are God’s creations, but he, unlike Augustine, does not imagine human beings as creative people whose exercise of reason is all the more proof of God’s glory. On the contrary, because the most we can strive for is imitation – to be as much like Christ as we can – we copy more than we create. God is, in this sense, not unlike a puppeteer; he pulls the strings and we follow.

Warren uses a different metaphor to make the point. Think of your life as if you were in a speedboat heading in one direction on autopilot, he urges his readers; you will only frustrate yourself and defeat your objectives if you try to override the mechanism that guides you. A better alternative is to change your autopilot by thinking in a new way about the Lord. It is a good metaphor – Warren is adept at metaphors – for it suggests that we can steer a new course. But it also reminds us that we are not the pilots of our speedboat; we did not design it, put it in the water, and, most importantly of all, we cannot ask it to change direction if we discover that we are about to enter dangerous waters.

Warren leaves unanswered the question of whether a God who is great would take more pleasure in us if we were captains of our own speedboats. “God’s ultimate goal for your life on earth is not comfort, but character development,” Warren writes, but in truth, he views character as something formed rather than developed. Lacking the capacity to grow into a relationship with the divinity by exercising the full powers of the mind, we lack – once again a German term seems appropriate – bildung, the process of discovering who we are and why we exist in this world.

And let there be no doubt: The idea of human beings as agents capable of thinking for themselves does not rank high among Warren’s conceptions of the virtues. To be sure, Warren acknowledges that God wants something more from us than slavish devotion. As important as it may be to express our authentic appreciation of God’s gifts, truth must be as central to our worship as emotionality. Warren’s God is “bored with predictable, pious clichés.” He wants us to be honest about our faults and is willing to listen to doubts, for He recognizes that we are not perfect and loves us nonetheless.

Yet although God wants us to engage in dialogue with Him, He does not want us to question His authority or even to ask Him any difficult questions. Our obligation is not to analyze but to surrender: “Surrendering your life is not a foolish emotional impulse but a rational, intelligent act, the most responsible and sensible thing you can do with your life.” Warren points out: “Surrender is hard work.” It requires that we give up some of our worldly ambition, that we risk losing status in the eyes of others, or that we fight against our own inclinations. But if we do not surrender to God we will surrender to something else, since surrender is built into the human condition: “Surrender is not the best way to live; it is the only way to live.”

Surrender in general would seem to include intellectual surrender in particular. Rick Warren’s conception of what faith demands, while expressive of the dominant tendencies within American evangelicalism, is not in accord with recent efforts by evangelical thinkers to develop a life of the mind. In his comments on the importance of unity within the church, Warren writes that “a critical spirit is a costly vice.” His comment is meant to suggest that one makes a better contribution to the Christian spirit by working cooperatively with others rather than by acting like Monday morning quarterbacks. But surrendering a critical spirit in one facet of the religious life is likely to lead to similar sacrifices in others. To write, as Warren does, that “It is the devil’s job to blame, complain, and criticize members of God’s family,” is to conclude that Christians honor God more by rallying around each other than by thinking too hard or in too complicated ways about who they are and what their relationship with their God should be.

Warren’s insufficient appreciation for the critical spirit may make Saddleback an uplifting church, but it is unlikely to be welcome at Calvin College, Wheaton College, and other evangelical institutions trying to cultivate a sense of intellectual discipleship among Christians.

Warren is certainly not a Calvinist in the strict sense of the term; his disposition is too sunny and his preference for love over intellect is too pronounced to find much in common with Geneva’s great reformer. Yet Warren does, in his own way, rely on one important element in the Calvinist tradition: its insistence on predestination. To be sure, we are not talking here about such ideas as “double predestination” in which the fates of both those who are saved and those who are not are decided in advance; there would not be much to say about a purpose-driven life if all life’s purposes were so tightly scripted. Still, Warren’s avoidance of the more positive view of human nature admired by Augustine does lead him in the direction of those leaders of the Protestant Reformation who opted for a narrower conception of human ability than those, often described as Arminian, who viewed people as agents whose salvation could be influenced by their own actions.

To lead a purposeful life, as Warren tells the story, God’s plans are all that matter, not yours. Indeed you do not really have a plan because everything was decided before you were born. “Not only did God shape you before your birth, He planned every day of your life to support His shaping process,” Warren writes. This does not leave us without decisions to make; we are obligated to serve God, but how we do so – how we shape ourselves to discover how He shaped us – does depend on the way we understand our experiences in everyday life and turn them into opportunities for service. God gives us great things, but it is up to us to use them purposefully.

Warren’s, then, is a soft version of Calvinism, allowing a sufficiently powerful God who has chosen for us our fate, while at the same time offering – as a strict Calvinist could not – a therapeutically-tinged guide to the temptations and wonders of everyday life. “You must build your life on eternal truths, not popular psychology, success-motivation, or inspirational stories,” Warren informs his readers, but whatever it is called, The Purpose-Driven Life does contain advice that can best be described as psychological.

Once we recognize that we have more to gain from cooperating with others and refraining from judging their actions than from being envious of their success, we can opt out of life’s rat race. There is no need for us to impress others by dropping names or touting our achievements for “the closer you get to Jesus, the less you need to promote yourself.” If we are sufficiently blessed to make money – Warren has nothing against that in principle – we also must remember that the funds are not ours but belong to God and we must use our resources to build His kingdom. The Purpose-Driven Life would not be the book it is – that is, a wildly successful effort to reach the hearts of millions of Americans – without its often quite sensible attempts to provide suggestions for improving our capacity to negotiate the difficult dilemmas of everyday life.

Once he enters into the terrain of therapy, however, Rick Warren, although he warns his readers about the dangers of excessive competition, faces a competition of his own; will his approach to living a purpose-driven life offer a better guide to the ordinarily perplexed than the work of academic psychologists? While Warren has dominated the market with respect to purpose, he is not the only thinker in the United States pondering the question of how we should direct our efforts to live a life of meaning. Secular treatments of the nature of the purpose-driven life exist alongside religious ones, and it is worth comparing them briefly.

Interesting enough, three of America’s most famous psychologists have written a book strikingly similar to Warren’s in intent, however different it may be in methodology and approach. Howard Gardner, the Harvard University psychologist and advocate for the idea of multiple intelligences, joined together with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of Flow, and prominent educational theorist William Damon, author of The Moral Child, to write a book called Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet. Like Warren, these writers use terms, such as mission or goodness, that would be familiar to religious writers. They even have, just as Warren does, a five-fold conception of purpose. People striving to be both good at what they do and ethically responsible: create new institutions, expand the functions of existing ones, reconfigure the membership of existing ones, reaffirm their values, and take personal, moral stands. As the emphasis on institutions suggests, these three psychologists share yet another similarity with Warren, who focuses so much on churches as communities of believers. Of course Gardner and company have not racked anywhere near the sales of The Purpose-Driven Life, but they are covering much of the same ground.

Where the psychologists differ from Warren is that their book is filled with empirical data, in this case stories of real people in the worlds of genetics and journalism offering their accounts of the moral dilemmas they face in their professions and how they try to deal with them. Readers are not offered these accounts so that they can copy from successful people. The objective instead is to illustrate the range of potential choices human beings can face so that, were a reader to find himself in his own particular situation where excellence and ethics appeared to be in conflict, he could find his own way of trying to navigate between them. “As long as we human beings live on this planet,” the authors write, “we can expect strains, conflicts, crises. The more we anticipate these trials, the more honestly we can deal with them, the greater the likelihood that we will survive them.” To do this, imitation cannot be our method; living a purposeful life requires a sense of duty that comes from within.

Gardner, Csikszentmihalyi, and Damon view ethical conduct as behavior that serves the interests of society. In so doing, they raise, even if indirectly, an important question: if individuals can benefit from a sense of purpose, should collectivities do so as well? In particular, should America strive to live up to a sense of purpose – and how?

Not that long ago, Americans devoted a considerable amount of attention to the question of whether their countrymen shared a sense of national purpose. Commissions were formed on the subject – then-governor Nelson Rockefeller attempted to bring some of the best minds in the country together to address the issue. John F. Kennedy made America’s lack of purpose the main theme of his campaign for the presidency in 1960. Even if lacking the evangelical fervor of nineteenth-century attempts to describe America’s “manifest destiny” in the world, books appeared routinely throughout the 1960s and 1970s addressing questions such as whether the United States has a special mission to promote its values around the globe.

It is not that difficult to understand why the question of national purpose appeared on the political agenda in those years; so long as we understood ourselves as engaged in a never-ending struggle with the Soviet Union, we had little choice but to reflect on our character as a nation. For one thing, the Soviets themselves claimed to have a sense of national purpose embodied in their Five Year Plans, and it seemed insufficiently robust for us to respond that capitalism, for all its virtues, ought to forgo the capacity to offer and realize a sense of national direction. In addition, we had, thanks to the fantastic economic growth of those years, a rare opportunity to put money where our mouths were; if our national purpose included fighting a war on poverty, the funds seemed available to carry it out.

If the Cold War promoted discussions of national purpose, the end of the Cold War brought with it the prospect of setting that particular task aside. And we do seem to be in a period of retreat from discussions of national purpose. True, the war in Iraq has been accompanied by a great deal of talk about bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East, but at home, there is little discussion of how to define American goals and even less of how to pay for reaching them. Endless deficits do not offer much opportunity for endless ambitions. As Bill Clinton’s emphasis on small issues such as school uniforms suggested, and as George W. Bush’s insistence on tax cuts then achieved, our era is not one of grandiose plans and strenuous attempts to finance them.

All of this makes the appearance of Rick Warren’s The Purpose-Driven Life even more appropriate. Warren is by no means oblivious to the role that collectivities play in American life; in the strong emphasis he places upon the sense of fellowship realized through church, Warren acknowledges the importance of community. Still, Warren’s book captures the current American zeitgeist by focusing so explicitly on two realms of existence that have little or nothing to do with the nation and its sense of purpose: God, who reigns above nation states and human beings who exist, in a sense, below them. Neither actually needs the nation state; God, who created all things, created the nations that, as the Bible puts it, “so furiously rage together,” and people themselves, to find a sense of purpose, must look to heaven, not to Washington.

Politics, the stuff by which our nation decides what its sense of purpose is going to be, simply makes no appearance in Warren’s book; there is no talk of whether Christians are obligated to pay taxes, whether they should serve in the military, whether government should attempt to base its actions on religious values, and whether church and state ought to be separate.

Rick Warren’s avoidance of politics may be one of the reasons for his success as a writer and preacher; Americans pay more attention to God than to, say, antitrust enforcement, and if you are obligated by your evangelical commitments to reach people in their hearts, you do not write about the Sherman Act. Still, Warren’s antipolitical turn is somewhat surprising given a long-standing belief among evangelicals that Americans are a chosen people, selected by God to realize His purposes on earth.

The nineteenth-century equivalent of The Purpose-Driven Life was Josiah Strong’s Our Country, which outsold every other book in America, including Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Strong, an evangelical and missionary for American purpose abroad, included in his title what Warren never discusses in his book: the country in which he happens to live. Given the fact that Strong’s belief in America’s mission for the world could so easily be transformed into more imperialistic inclinations, we are perhaps better off without a strong evangelical sense in America’s special destiny. But its absence also leaves a gaping hole in Rick Warren’s account of what makes for a purpose-driven life, for if individuals are shaped by and in turn shape their society, it may not be possible to lead a purpose-driven life, no matter how sincere one’s faith in God, if the society itself reinforces behavior and attitudes that put self-satisfaction ahead of service in any form.

Warren concludes his book by asking his readers to develop a life purpose statement. This is not, he says, a mere list of goals, such as (although he does not mention them by name) “the seven habits of highly effective people.” Warren points out, “Goals are temporary, purposes are eternal.” Yet in elevating purpose to the realm of the eternal, Warren leaves his readers with a frustrating, incomplete sense of what, besides giving ourselves over to Jesus, we ought to do in the here and now to begin to lead a purpose-driven life.

A faith-driven life? A life devoted to Jesus? Those objectives are clear, and for people who seek them, and who seek a sense of purpose through them, Warren’s book, as its success suggests, has been a great boon. But by its very anchoring in evangelicalism, Warren’s understanding of what purpose requires will fall flat to those more focused on the world around them than on the eternity that awaits them.

Purpose is so important to human beings, it is such a requirement if we are to lead a good and meaningful life, that Warren is to be commended for bringing the subject into our public conversation in such a powerful way. But to act purposefully when unexpected conditions arise, to know what to do when we are distracted from pursuing our goals, to fit our sense of purpose together with others who may not share our religious commitments but who do share our country – for all of these occasions, there has to be something in between a world of people acting aimlessly and without purpose and a world in which people find a sense of purpose by surrendering themselves to God for all eternity.

The tentative steps, the decisions we ought to take now to begin the process of transforming ourselves into purpose-driven people – these are the missing ingredients in Rick Warren’s The Purpose-Driven Life. Without them, his book has flourished, but one has to wonder whether, lacking them, his book will also not lead people in directions that will frustrate them as time goes on. In asking for so much in our devotion to God, Warren has actually demanded very little of us as we decide how to make the world around us a better place in which to live.