Red Letter Day
Mark your calendar, for I’m now going to pass along, in all sincerity, tips on how believing Evangelicals (i.e., excluding the “I never knew I was Evangelical until I went to a Trump rally” types) can do Christianity better — without necessarily becoming Orthodox (although, as always, the invitation to “come and see” remains in effect).
These tips ring true to me, but I left frank Evangelicalism 45 years ago; your mileage may vary:
Here’s the problem: That sociological environment that birthed evangelicalism as we know it today is basically over. The economy that shaped that world from the 50s to the 2010s is ending. That much has been clear for nearly ten years now—Brexit and the Trump election both represented quite explicit movements against the post-war open society model. …
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Because the sociological environment that created evangelicalism is winding down, it has created enormous anxiety and uncertainty for evangelical believers who simply don’t know how to imagine a Christian movement outside of the unique environment created by the 1950s economic environment, the Baby Boom generation, and the post-Cold War pax Americana.
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People who aren’t as steeped in evangelicalism as a sociological entity often find all this mystifying. One friend with ties to an eastern Christian tradition once remarked to me that, “you evangelicals are kind of a joke, you know? My people have been persecuted for centuries. Our children have been stolen from us. We’ve had martyrs. Our churches have been burned. But still we are faithful. We still follow God. We still meet for worship. We still pray. We still raise our children in the truth. But you evangelicals discover that critical race theory is a thing that exists and six months later you’re devouring each other.”
So what should you do in this environment if you are a Protestant Christian concerned with the life of the church? One tip: Stop caring so much about “evangelicalism” and the celebrities who define it as a sociological phenomenon.
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To stop caring about “evangelicalism” is not the same thing as no longer caring about Christianity or Jesus or the church in general or even specific churches in our communities. It is, rather, to turn away from the mostly fake discourses that pervade Christian media and to focus instead on actual flesh-and-blood Christian communities and Christian believers.
Jake Meador, The Importance of Not Caring about Mark Driscoll
Was there ever a “positive world”?
I am on a social medium with Alan Jacobs of Wheaton, Notre Dame and now Baylor. I’m so glad. He’s got a very good detector for the kinds of plausible nonsense I’m still too likely to fall for. For his powerful critique of the idea that we lived in a culture that was “positive” toward the conscientious practice of Christianity (not mere profession) before 1994, for instance, see here, here and here.
Like the commemoration of martyrs in Orthodox Matins, I find strangely encouraging the thought that lived Christianity has never been popular.
Disjunction
I join a reunion of my Bible-college class. … At the reunion later that day, my classmates speak in phrases we learned as students: “God is giving me the victory…I can do all things through Christ…All things work together for good…I’m walking in triumph.” Yet they speak a different vocabulary when relating their lives after college. Several are suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome, and others from clinical depression. One couple has recently committed their teenage daughter to a mental institution. I wince at the disconnect between these raw personal stories and the spiritual overlay applied to them.
Philip Yancey, Where the Light Fell
The incoherence of American Folk Religion
I took to studying the ones of my teachers who were also preachers, and also the preachers who came to speak in chapel and at various exercises. In most of them I saw the old division of body and soul that I had known at The Good Shepherd. The same rift ran through everything at Pigeonville College; the only difference was that I was able to see it more clearly, and to wonder at it. Everything bad was laid on the body, and everything good was credited to the soul. It scared me a little when I realized that I saw it the other way around. If the soul and body really were divided, then it seemed to me that all the worst sins—hatred and anger and self-righteousness and even greed and lust—came from the soul. But these preachers I’m talking about all thought that the soul could do no wrong, but always had its face washed and its pants on and was in agony over having to associate with the flesh and the world. And yet these same people believed in the resurrection of the body.
Wendell Berry , Jayber Crow
Hubris
Popular authority figures like Bill Bright, Oral Roberts, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson all assume that no previously existing educational enterprise is capable of meeting the demands of the hour. Despite the absence of formal educational credentials, each man presumes to establish a Christian university.
Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.
I distinctly remember Jerry Falwell dreaming of “a Christian University with a first-class football program,” thus giving the back of the hand to Notre Dame and, by implication, to Roman Catholics generally.
I’m puzzled, though, about the claim that Bill Bright established a Christian University. I don’t recall any such thing and Wikipedia’s article on him doesn’t mention it.
Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.
George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 