Prescient if not prophetic
- Shortly after …, Cal Thomas and Ed Dobson, who had been Falwell’s chief lieutenants in the Moral Majority, published a book questioning not just the efficacy of political action but the righteousness of the enterprise. In Blinded by Might they argued that in the process of trying to win elections conservative Christians had been seduced by the lure of power. What had begun as an effort to restore Christian values to the nation had degenerated into an unbridled partisan struggle, creating an atmosphere in which it was assumed that Democrats could not be Christians and that Bill and Hillary Clinton were the Antichrist.
Frances FitzGerald, The Evangelicals (hyperlink added)
That feels prescient, doesn’t it? Things feel exactly like that today, and Jerry Falwell and Paul Weyrich may have shoved us down that slippery slope.
I also sense a parallel between Simon Magus and those who used the name of Christ as if it was a magic incantation, only to be mocked by the demons they were trying to cast out.
There’s always a temptation to try to use some variety of magic to make god(s) do what one wants, and it’s healthy for me to remember that at least two Evangelicals recognized what was happening.
In a similar vein, but with a historic perspective:
Even when Fundamentalists set out to defend the truth, their temptation was to rally large constituencies to the cause rather than to prepare for scholarly exchange.
Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity
Undefined
Orthodoxy theology defines only what is necessary and always leaves unspoken that which cannot be explained. This approach was part of the Christian faith from the beginning. But the Western phronema often suppresses, dismisses, minimizes, or ignores this stance. The Western mind is compelled to define and explain everything, since without a rational explanation a concept or fact cannot be considered true, or, conversely, all truth can be proven rationally.
Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox
Rebel energy
With this in mind, as a storyteller, I think of Christianity remembering its own myths. Digging into the dark wonder of it all.
Not the stuff of empire and conquest, not the mega-churches and donation box, but the sheer radical eccentricity of its stories, the quiet devastation of love that circles the Beatitudes. The call to adventure. The voluntary abdication of consumer-friendly outcomes. Not building a shopping mall around a Grail. The unfashionable weight of such a thought. The five fathoms depth of it. That’s a rebel energy these days, a whispered thing.
Martin Shaw
Distinctions
On my one-and-only active social medium, I happened upon a religious/antireligious discussion, chimed in with my 2-centsworth, and watched the discussion shift.
The odd thing was that the antireligious side was reacting to evangelicals/fundamentalists, “and by extension all Christians.” That was odd because this medium is chock-full of sane Christians, including some sane evangelicals.
I for one detest the assumption that my cosmology and demeanor toward the world is identical with that of any self-styled Christian who ever offended the one making the assumption about me. There’s more to Christianity than superficially ticking off “yes” to a bunch of checklist affirmations, and anyone who can’t tell the difference between, say, Mother Theresa and Jerry Falwell, Jr., because “both believe a myth,” is an idiot.
(Yes, that makes me guilty of “but I’m not that kind of Christian” — because Christianity in North American is manifest in tens of thousands of clumpings, quite apart from they tens of millions who try to go it solo. I do hope, though, that if a day comes when the idiots decide to actively persecute all Christians without distinction, I’ll not betray my embarrassing brothers and sisters.)
Thanksgiving morning, one participant came up with the mike-drop quote, from Marilynne Robinson, who also “isn’t that kind”:
“Over the years many a good soul has let me know by one means or another that this living out of the religious/ethical/aesthetic/intellectual tradition that is so essentially compelling to me is not, shall we say, cool. There are little jokes about being born again. There are little lectures about religion as a cheap cure for existential anxiety. …
“Am I the last one to get the news that this religion that has so profoundly influenced world civilization over centuries has been ceded to the clods and the obscurantists? Don’t I know that J. S. Bach and Martin Luther King have been entirely eclipsed by Jerry Falwell? The question has been put to me very directly: Am I not afraid to be associated with religious people? These nudges would have their coercive effect precisely because those who want to put me right know that I am not a fundamentalist. That is, I am to avoid association with religion completely or else be embarrassed by punitive association with beliefs I do not hold. What sense does that make? What good does it serve? I suspect it demonstrates the existence of a human herding instinct. After all, “egregious” means at root “outside the flock.” There are always a great many people who are confident that they recognize deviation from group mores, and so they police the boundaries and round up the strays.”
Yes! This!
My Lord is the One who resurrects. He resurrects the dead from morning until dusk, and from dusk until dawn.”
What the morning buries, the Lord brings to life in the evening; and what the evening buries, the Lord brings to life in the morning.
What work is more fitting for the living God than to resurrect the dead into life?
Let others believe in the God who brings men to trial and judges them.
I shall cling to the God who resurrects the dead.
St. Nikolai of Zhicha, Prayers by the Lake
In a slightly less poetic vein, Fr. Stephen Freeman used to say “God didn’t come to make bad men good. He came to make dead men live.”
Whether to swim the Tiber or the Bosphorus
[T]here seems to be a shift [in the evangelical world] away from the attractiveness of Catholicism toward Orthodoxy, especially for those who don’t have career ambitions within movement conservatism.
Aaron Renn (italics added; H/T Rod Dreher)
That “ambition” distinction between who converts to Catholicism and who to Orthodoxy hadn’t occurred to me. I’m not sure I agree (if only because, in Renn’s context, the alternative to ambitions in “movement conservatism” may be something like involvement in more extreme “dissident conservatism”).
I found the comments to Renn’s posting interesting, especially insofar as they identified the Eastern-ness of Orthodoxy as an impediment. It’s always interesting to see ourselves as other see us.
Mainlining
Bear with me here for two paragraphs of necessary context before the heart of the item:
In terms of political ideology, only 23% of all mainline white American churchgoers identify as liberal, while 55% of their clergy leaders do so. Thirty-two percent of white mainline churchgoers consider themselves moderates and 43% conservative. In contrast, among the clergy who serve these conservative mainliners, 22% consider themselves moderate and only 22% conservative.
Half of mainline clergy identify as Democrats and only 14% as Republican (those who identify as “moderate” make up the rest). Among United Methodists, 60% of laity say they are Republican and 40% Democrat. While UM clergy are far more apt to be Democrat than Republican, among bishops and board and agency staff the percentage may be as high as 80% to 20%.
This, of course, is hardly news to many. I knew a United Methodist ministerial candidate who graduated from one of our premier United Methodist-related universities and then from one of the most highly regarded (liberal) seminaries in the nation. After all of this preparation he received his first appointment, to a circuit in a rural area in a midwestern state. After two months he not only resigned from his church but dropped out of the ministry.
“This has been a terrible mistake,” he explained.
The best ministerial education possible, at least from an institutional perspective, failed to equip him to minister to ordinary people in an ordinary American setting.
…
I became keenly aware that a number of churches were asking for “conservative” pastors. I do not recall a single instance where a church requested a “more liberal” pastor …
Christendom?
I sometimes wonder if Christians claim too much credit for Western culture. But Ayaan Hirsi Ali apparently believes that credit is deserved, as her appreciation of the culture factored prominently into her recently-announced conversion.
And then there’s this:
“The international human rights regime of 1945,” an American human rights supporter remarked, “is no more. American hegemony has eroded. Europe, even with the events of 1992, is little more than a peninsula. The world is now as Arab, Asian, and African, as it is Western. Today the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenants are less relevant to much of the planet than during the immediate post-World War II era.” An Asian critic of the West had similar views: “For the first time since the Universal Declaration was adopted in 1948, countries not thoroughly steeped in the Judeo-Christian and natural law traditions are in the first rank. That unprecedented situation will define the new international politics of human rights. It will also multiply the occasions for conflict.”
Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
It seems to me that the waning of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights due to the rise of “countries not thoroughly steeped in the Judeo-Christian and natural law traditions” testifies, too, that credit is not undue.
The question remains, though, whether the vices of Western culture were baked into the Protestant Reformation, the emergence of a particular kind of Christianity.
Humility
Don’t overdramatize either your sins or your virtues. Frankly, chances are good that neither are spectacular.
Peter Bouteneff, How to Be a Sinner
Noted
I have definitely tended for decades toward catastrophism. I hope I haven’t overburdened this blog with that.
But I’m taking heart recently. Paul Kingsnorth and Martin Shaw becoming not just Christians, but Orthodox Christians, bringing some enchantment with them. Ayaan Hirsi Ali becoming a Christian of some sort. Now, within the past 24 hours, I’ve learned that Matthew B. Crawford, author of Shop Class as Soulcraft and The World Outside Your Head has become Christian (I had no idea he’d been raised by left coast flakes and lived in an Ashram from roughly ages 10 to 15). He declined to expand on that conversion in an Andrew Sullivan podcast, aware that he’s a novice.
Bearing in mind that the plural of anecdote is data, emotionally if not scientifically, I’m growing in confidence that God is up to something good, and I was sure ready for it.
The human voice: That we can sing seems basis for conjecture that, despite our stupidities and our sinfulness, we might be the reason the universe exists.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.