Goodbye, Evangelicalism

Many of these “influencers” have little or no theological education, they haven’t done any Biblical scholarship, but they have wide audiences because they are perceived as authentic or “write from the heart”.

This applies equally to progressive and conservative influencers, I hasten to add. Some of them are very well-expressed, but many of the ideas they share are simply at odds with a Christian worldview.

.. a great many of these people who had been raised on Scripture, prayer, and Sunday School lacked any kind of cohesive Christian worldview. They knew dozens, maybe hundreds, of Bible verses but could not connect them to larger themes or ideas. The problem is that when ideas about sex or greed or whatever are not grounded in a larger framework, it’s easy to simply discard them. “We don’t practice animal sacrifice as Leviticus tells us, so why should I take what it has to say about sex seriously?”

.. the minute that a younger Christian faces cultural pressure because of their beliefs, the inclination is to ask “How important is this particular belief?” rather than “Is my entire framework for living going to collapse if I change?” And what I saw was that despite all the Bible study and whatnot, the culture won almost every time.

.. Even in youth groups, certain kids were held up as role models of what good Christian kids look like, even though the entire county knew those same kids were hammering down beers illegally on Friday night, bragging about stealing, and even discussing sexual adventures on social media. Yet come Sunday they are “walking right with the Lord”. And there seemed to be an invisible but very real pressure among families to present as the Mr. & Mrs. Perfect Christian Family, as if problems don’t exist in truly Christian households.

.. My Evangelical church does almost nothing together except sing. We don’t say any common prayers, or creeds; we don’t confess or repent together; even our Communion ritual is centered around “what Jesus did on the Cross for us”. We don’t do any community events, or really even sponsor any organizations – educational, charitable, whatever – in our area, but leave it to the individual congregants to do that.
In a nutshell, we’re a very atomized, even alienated group.

.. The Evangelical emphasis on right belief is in many respects admirable, but it is also stifling: what if I end up helping someone who isn’t an exact theological copy of me? The horror!

.. we’ve lost 18 legacy members of the church recently, basically the next generation of church leaders, who have all decamped to a newer, slicker church where nobody over the age of 40 is allowed in “public-facing ministry”.

.. my brief and not-at-all comprehensive survey suggests that it’s the 40-60 crowd that likes contemporary praise music; the young people don’t like an awful lot of it because they think it’s “cheesy”, “manipulative”, and “trying too hard”.

.. “We know church music is supposed to be different, so why are they trying so hard to sound like pop music?”

.. our whole church service is focused on the conversion moment, the proverbial altar call.

Our Evangelical Age

The rise and fall and rise of the Christian Right. Terry Eastland reviews “The Evangelicals” by Frances Fitzgerald.

Ms. Fitzgerald dates the Christian right to 1979, when Jerry Falwell, the pastor of a Baptist church in Virginia, founded the Moral Majority, an organization that was designed, as she puts it, “to register conservative Christians and mobilize them into a political force against what he called ‘secular humanism’ and the moral decay of the country.”

Falwell vowed to fight a “holy war” and outspokenly condemned abortion, homosexuality and sex education.

.. high-profile sex scandals that undermined any sense of moral authority: think of the Bakkers, Jim and Tammy Faye, and of Jimmy Swaggart.

..It gained new leaders—among them Pat Robertson and James Dobson—and sought to elect like-minded politicians from the top of the ballot down.
..since the emergence of the Christian right, two-thirds to four-fifths of evangelical voters have voted for the Republican candidate.
..define religious liberty as the right “to carry religious objections from their private lives into their public roles as small business owners, service providers and even government officials.”
.. To her, it appears, religious liberty as the Christian right defines it is itself discriminatory.
.. the Great Awakenings of the 18th and 19th centuries, a series of revivals
.. introducing, as she puts it, “a new idea of conversion as a sudden, overwhelming experience.”
.. the teaching of the church became less important than the life of the individual believer.
.. Bible institutes like Dwight Moody’s in Chicago  .. centers of militant anti-modernism and the training grounds for the evangelists of fundamentalism.
.. called themselves evangelicals, she says, to escape “the associations of bigotry and narrowness” that were attached to militant separatists.
.. Billy Graham .. called himself an “evangelical.” By that he meant a conservative Protestant who had been “born again.”
.. Fundamentalists then became a subset of evangelicals, and most of them were separatists who had left their denominations.”
.. Graham, she also says, thought “that America had a moral and spiritual mission to redeem the world.”
.. Mr. Graham became “a pastor of the national civil religion.”
.. many prominent evangelicals began to distance themselves from the Christian right, including the megachurch pastor Rick Warren, best known for “The Purpose-Driven Life” (2002). The central concerns of the “new evangelicals” have been poverty and climate change, and their churches have paid less attention to politics than did the “old” Christian right
.. she is obviously aware of its persistence and the obstacle it still presents to an “enlightened” or liberal agenda

Phil Vischer: Power and the Church w/Jamin Goggin and Kyle Strobel

What is “power?”  Is it good, or bad?  Is it worth pursuing?  And what if the evangelical church is going about it all wrong?  Pastor Jamin Goggin and professor Kyle Strobel talk power and their new book, “The Way of the Dragon or the Way of the Lamb.”  Plus – horse diapers and religious liberty.  No, really.  This week on the podcast!