How to Escape From Roy Moore’s Evangelicalism
a new ritual has superseded Sunday worship and weeknight Bible studies: a profane devotional practice, with immense power to shape evangelicals’ beliefs. This “liturgy” is the nightly consumption of conservative cable news.
.. Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson aren’t just purveyors of distorted news, but high priests of a false religion.
.. Fox News is so formative is that it’s this repetitive, almost ritualistic thing that people do every night,” Ms. Schiess told me. “It forms in them particular fears and desires, an idea of America. This is convincing on a less than logical level, and the church is not communicating to them in that same way.”
.. “Their loyalties are much more strongly formed by conservative media than their churches,”
.. “We are, ultimately, liturgical animals because we are fundamentally desiring creatures,” he writes in his book “Desiring the Kingdom.” “We are what we love.”
.. Christians should stop trying to “make America great again,” abandon the ends-justify-the-means politics that leads them to defend predators and scoundrels like Mr. Moore, and focus instead on nurturing local Christian community.
.. In a largely white worship setting, “when you have to prove yourself all the time, when your orthodoxy is always in question due to your blackness, you’re not safe to be vulnerable and honest,
.. Richard Rohr, a Franciscan .. was surprised when his publisher told him that his books on Christian contemplation and the power of liturgy are most popular with young evangelical men
.. “So many of the millennial evangelicals I work with, they’re so disillusioned with their good parents’ inability to deal with racism, sexism and homophobia — the issues tearing our country apart,” he told me.
.. “As America deinstitutionalizes and moves away from religion, people — especially millennials — have lost something. Their community becomes primarily virtual, they’re seeing people through a screen and not flesh and blood, and there’s great data that this leads them to loneliness and depression,