Donald Trump is a 1980s television evangelist without any pretense of the gospel. He fits in the same mold.
Trump is distilled, concentrated version of evangelicalism celebrity culture.
Evangelicals are never at our best when we are the majority.
We need to stop thinking like a moral Majority and start thinking like a prophetic Minority. (16:15)
- lacking theology
- misunderstands who we are, and bears false witness to who America is
- We just got to get back to where we were before the culture fell apart. Genesis 3.
- Pelagian triumphalist are buying into a huge loss/fall.
- Evangelicals want to go to extremes, opposite of where they just were
It is increasingly difficult to hold the middle, predicting a divorce between progressives and fundamentalists.
We have to make a distinction between religious persecution and being offended (30 min)
Evangelicals believe that religious liberty is under threat, but want their beliefs given preference.
The Shame Culture
Crouch argues that the omnipresence of social media has created a new sort of shame culture. The world of Facebook, Instagram and the rest is a world of constant display and observation. The desire to be embraced and praised by the community is intense. People dread being exiled and condemned. Moral life is not built on the continuum of right and wrong; it’s built on the continuum of inclusion and exclusion.
.. Second, there are nonetheless enforcers within the group who build their personal power and reputation by policing the group and condemning those who break the group code. Social media can be vicious to those who don’t fit in. Twitter can erupt in instant ridicule for anyone who stumbles.
Third, people are extremely anxious that their group might be condemned or denigrated. They demand instant respect and recognition for their group. They feel some moral wrong has been perpetrated when their group has been disrespected, and react with the most violent intensity.
.. The ultimate sin today, Crouch argues, is to criticize a group, especially on moral grounds. Talk of good and bad has to defer to talk about respect and recognition.
.. He notes that this shame culture is different from the traditional shame cultures, the ones in Asia, for example. In traditional shame cultures the opposite of shame was honor or “face” — being known as a dignified and upstanding citizen. In the new shame culture, the opposite of shame is celebrity — to be attention-grabbing and aggressively unique on some media platform.
.. It is a culture of oversensitivity, overreaction and frequent moral panics, during which everybody feels compelled to go along.
.. If we’re going to avoid a constant state of anxiety, people’s identities have to be based on standards of justice and virtue that are deeper and more permanent than the shifting fancy of the crowd.
.. The guilt culture could be harsh, but at least you could hate the sin and still love the sinner. The modern shame culture allegedly values inclusion and tolerance, but it can be strangely unmerciful to those who disagree and to those who don’t fit in.
The Keys to Enya’s Kingdom
Her success so deeply contradicts accepted industry wisdom that it’s inspired a term — “Enya-nomics” — to describe it
.. In her real life, she checks her email once every few weeks, and even then, very quickly. “It feels so cold,” she says, making a face like she’d bitten into a lemon. “The energy is no good. I’d rather go for a walk.”
.. Her style has been derogatorily described as Muzak or New Age — the aural approximation of a warm bath — but might be more fairly described as ancient choral music on synth steroids.
.. She’s referring to the work of the so-called “triad” that make up Enya, the musical entity. Enya conjures the melodies; husband-and-wife team Nicky and Roma Ryan are responsible for the production (him) and lyrics (her).
.. the sixth of nine children.
.. Enya was in the deep middle of the birth order. “Let’s say there’d be a question like ‘Will we go to the pictures today?’” Enya recalls. “What chance did I have to say yes or no?” At this, she laughs: It’s not a point of resentment. “By the time it came down to number five, — that’s me — it was just like, Here we go. It was difficult to be heard, but I was very comfortable with that because I was able to be myself, able to be let alone.”
.. “And my family, we’d have to be careful speaking Gaelic: If you did, you were pinpointing where you came from, and it was too political at the time. Whereas for us, it was our first language, and we didn’t see anything wrong with it.”
.. Now she overlooks Bono’s house. “It’s really quite covered,” she says bashfully. “There’s a lot of trees. But you do see the top of his house.”
“We meet very often,” she admits. “Because of the areas we frequent to eat, I see a lot of him.”
The Cebrity Pastor Factory
There is an Evangelical Industrial Complex that helps create and relies upon celebrity leaders. Have you ever wondered why you don’t see pastors from small or medium sized churches on the main stage at big conferences? Or why most of the best-selling Christian authors are megachurch leaders?
Here’s the answer we like to believe:
The most godly, intelligent, and gifted leaders naturally attract large followings, so they naturally are going to have large churches, and their ideas are so great and their writing so sharp that publishers pick their book proposals, and the books strike a nerve with so many people that they naturally become best-sellers, and these leaders become the obvious choice to speak at the biggest conferences. As a result they ascend to celebrity status.
.. In the place of a church hierarchy we’ve built the Evangelical Industrial Complex where we expect publishers, conference directors, and radio producers to be the gatekeepers. We trust them to filter out the immature, ungodly leaders, and for many years the managers of the EIC were willing to serve this function. Those days are over. Chaos in the publishing world has put incredible pressure on the EIC to sell books and fill conferences profitably. Managers within the Evangelical Industrial Complex are remembering that they were not appointed to shepherd us, but to sell to us. Those who had functioned as evangelicalism’s bishops for decades have taken off their vestments to reveal their business suits once again.