In his book Streams of Living Water: Celebrating the Great Traditions of Christian Faith, Richard Foster identified six streams of spirituality that flow into the wider river of Christian practice and thought. These include the charismatic, contemplative, evangelical, holiness, incarnational (or sacramental), and social justice traditions. Each tradition holds its own unique set of emphases, all of which spring forth from various biblical texts.

It isn’t difficult to look at this framework and decipher what waters various Christian denominations and movements swim in that give them their defining characteristics. Most would claim to embrace each tradition, but one or two will almost always take precedence, with the others used to bolster the dominant streams of practice.

For example, there have been robust evangelical movements within Catholicism and Orthodoxy throughout history. But these have almost always been in service to drawing others into the sacramental life of the church. And evangelical churches can lean into the social justice tradition with gusto, but the ministries that spring forth from this usually have conversion as their ultimate goal.

Additionally, many of the streams hold far more in common than may appear on the surface. Although churches that herald contemplative spirituality may look decidedly different from charismatic congregations, the walls between the two traditions are paper-thin.

Renovaré, the nonprofit organization Foster founded, uses the “six streams” framework to encourage believers to adopt a balanced approach to spiritual formation. The idea is that each tradition holds a sacred place within Christianity, and incorporating them into our lives is necessary for developing spiritual maturity.

Outside the confines of spiritual formation, however, Foster’s framework poses interesting questions about what draws someone to a particular tradition. I thought about this over the holidays when I visited an evangelical megachurch for its Christmas Eve service.

Strategic Omission

It wasn’t the Christmas circus show that a particular Texas megachurch gets thrown through the social media ringer over every Christmas, but it certainly had some of those elements. Fog machines, lights, all that. It had some incredibly beautiful moments as well, including a young girl’s violin solo that moved me to tears.

But the clear, consistent message communicated through every movement of the service was one-dimensional: The Christmas story is only about how we are all sinners and how Jesus came to die for us. Even the children’s sermon, which had the requisite cute and funny moments, focused on how all the kids were bad little boys and girls because of the Garden of Eden, but Jesus is the gift that prevents them from an eternity of death.

Not a word about Herod or the holy family’s precarious predicament. Astrologers from Asia crossing borders to pay honor to a Jewish baby were suspiciously absent. And Mary’s prayer of thanksgiving—that God has “brought down the powerful from their thrones” and “sent the rich away empty”—was nowhere to be found.

It was all about sin, salvation, and what happens to our souls when we die.

As I sat there, I wondered why some churches reduce the story of Jesus to one thing or another—salvation or social justice, sacraments or sanctification. And then I remembered this particular church is home to many powerful people: politicians, bankers, movers and shakers.

It also consists of folks on the margins—the working poor and disabled, the down and out.

Threats to Power

For those who hold tightly to power, all the great streams of Christian spirituality pose some level of threat, but none more so than the social justice tradition. The prophets of justice—Amos, Micah, MLK, John the Baptist and a man named Jesus, to name a few—call them to relinquish or, at the very least, redistribute power.

But the evangelical tradition, when stripped bare of all it calls us to do and be in this world, gives the powerful the best hope of retaining their status. It is pliable. It allows them to see justice as a hypothetical result, not a clear requirement, for salvation.

None of this is to suggest that those who lean heavily into other traditions don’t willfully ignore the other aspects of Christian spirituality for self-serving reasons. Those of us in the social justice or mystical traditions can embrace our “belovedness before all things” and the image of God in all people while downplaying the principle that “all have sinned” (Romans 3:23)—and that sometimes sin is personal, not just societal.

But to speak of “evangelical” is to declare something about “good news.” When the “good news” is narrowed down to being exclusively about our sin and what happens to us when we die, all manner of atrocities can be ignored, especially when they come from allies in power.

In the first Trump administration, evangelicals clearly supported Donald Trump and his policies of chaos and exclusion. This time around, they are mostly silent. Having extracted what they need from him—defederalizing abortion policy—they now mostly ignore his reign of retribution.

They have returned to the eternal salvation of souls as their primary focus. They’ll chime in occasionally to offer their words of approval for something he’s done. But aside from the charlatans on Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission, most of them are lying low.

The results are just as dangerous, not just for the world, but for the very souls they are trying to save.