My primary hope for the whatever shape the new guard takes is that it's more rooted in the local church. Both a parachurch organization like Focus On The Family and the YouTube-brained influencer types lack this foundation.
Thank you for this! So appreciate your winsome approach to hard topics. This conversation is so needed. Just curious, have you read “The Light in Our Eyes”, by Nicholas McDonald? There’s a lot of common ground in what you share here regarding American evangelical culture.
This piece had me thinking about the old guard evangelical institutions and what formed them. Many, if not all, were reactionary towards the fears of the day - in the case of FotF, changing attitudes in the US, specifically regarding women's roles and sexual ethics, as well as the fear of communism abroad.
I don't know that newer institutions, moving forward, will have the kind of unity of purpose that the religious right stirred up. But I would hope that such institutions would be less utilitarian in their ethic, more focused on discipleship and spiritual formation than on leveraging social fears into political power. At the end of the day, Dobson furthered a message about the importance of character and then discarded it when convenient - actions that are not the fruit of mature spiritual formation.
To be reactionary isn't strictly bad, the Epistles being an easy example. But the messages of those Epistles is moving believers toward a more Christlike ethic, not why believers should outbreed the Corinthians or how to beat Rome at it's own game.
Fear moves a lot of books (and videos. And magazines. And conference tickets). But my hope is for a wiser kind of evangelical institution that prioritizes spiritual maturity without an ulterior motive.
Thank you for posting this, Alan. I've been feeling it for years, and saying it for years, so I'm grateful to be hearing it from you. US Christians have been resorting to political activism because they have lost faith in the gospel. They try preaching it. They see no results. Not for months, years, decades. So frustration builds until they divert their effort into political action which can produce tangible results over time.
This started with Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority in the 1970s, which coalesced around opposition to abortion and in reaction to some of the more hedonist directions our culture took in the late 1960s through the mid 1970s. It gained political clout with Reagan's election and has built up from there. The tradeoff since Reagan has been that if you vote Republican, we'll put in SCOTUS judges who will overturn Roe vs. Wade.
Then the rhetoric was amplified to make abortion the single worst thing in the history of the US. It was called a holocaust when it was not -- in the US at least, abortion is an elective procedure that individual women choose. The actual Holocaust was a nationally organized program carried out by a government for the deliberate extermination of Jews and other people. There is no comparison no matter what the numbers.
Overturning Roe versus Wade didn't happen for over 40 years. It was always a false promise -- something to keep Christians strung along. They got desperate after Obama and then Trump's loss to Biden so had to deliver. But from Reagan to the present it has been a political, and politically manipulated, movement supported by billionaires and corporations that never cared about human life of any kind, just their own profits. Christians are just there to manipulate. They are a joke to the Bushes and Trump. They are stooges and tools.
So there shouldn't be any real guessing about what direction these movements are going to take. They are not grassroots. They are funded by wealthy individuals with no concern for anything but their own profit. Dobson was a trained psychologist who studied the family seriously. While he too was a political tool, he had some real investment in his message. That will be completely absent from any successor in any similar movement for the sake of big money support. I think you know this but don't want to say it yet.
What do we need to preach? 1 Cor. 5:1-12. Do not judge those outside the church.
"12 What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? 13 God will judge those outside. 'Expel the wicked person from among you.'”
Those closing words "among you" do not refer to the body politic, but only to the church body.
Evangelical Christianity does the opposite. It judges those outside the church and looks the other way at the sins of its favorite leaders and politicians for as long as they are delivering or able to deliver. This pattern goes on for years before it is caught for a reason. Falwell's son at Liberty University was a case in point.
My primary hope for the whatever shape the new guard takes is that it's more rooted in the local church. Both a parachurch organization like Focus On The Family and the YouTube-brained influencer types lack this foundation.
Thank you for this! So appreciate your winsome approach to hard topics. This conversation is so needed. Just curious, have you read “The Light in Our Eyes”, by Nicholas McDonald? There’s a lot of common ground in what you share here regarding American evangelical culture.
This piece had me thinking about the old guard evangelical institutions and what formed them. Many, if not all, were reactionary towards the fears of the day - in the case of FotF, changing attitudes in the US, specifically regarding women's roles and sexual ethics, as well as the fear of communism abroad.
I don't know that newer institutions, moving forward, will have the kind of unity of purpose that the religious right stirred up. But I would hope that such institutions would be less utilitarian in their ethic, more focused on discipleship and spiritual formation than on leveraging social fears into political power. At the end of the day, Dobson furthered a message about the importance of character and then discarded it when convenient - actions that are not the fruit of mature spiritual formation.
To be reactionary isn't strictly bad, the Epistles being an easy example. But the messages of those Epistles is moving believers toward a more Christlike ethic, not why believers should outbreed the Corinthians or how to beat Rome at it's own game.
Fear moves a lot of books (and videos. And magazines. And conference tickets). But my hope is for a wiser kind of evangelical institution that prioritizes spiritual maturity without an ulterior motive.
Thank you for posting this, Alan. I've been feeling it for years, and saying it for years, so I'm grateful to be hearing it from you. US Christians have been resorting to political activism because they have lost faith in the gospel. They try preaching it. They see no results. Not for months, years, decades. So frustration builds until they divert their effort into political action which can produce tangible results over time.
This started with Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority in the 1970s, which coalesced around opposition to abortion and in reaction to some of the more hedonist directions our culture took in the late 1960s through the mid 1970s. It gained political clout with Reagan's election and has built up from there. The tradeoff since Reagan has been that if you vote Republican, we'll put in SCOTUS judges who will overturn Roe vs. Wade.
Then the rhetoric was amplified to make abortion the single worst thing in the history of the US. It was called a holocaust when it was not -- in the US at least, abortion is an elective procedure that individual women choose. The actual Holocaust was a nationally organized program carried out by a government for the deliberate extermination of Jews and other people. There is no comparison no matter what the numbers.
Overturning Roe versus Wade didn't happen for over 40 years. It was always a false promise -- something to keep Christians strung along. They got desperate after Obama and then Trump's loss to Biden so had to deliver. But from Reagan to the present it has been a political, and politically manipulated, movement supported by billionaires and corporations that never cared about human life of any kind, just their own profits. Christians are just there to manipulate. They are a joke to the Bushes and Trump. They are stooges and tools.
So there shouldn't be any real guessing about what direction these movements are going to take. They are not grassroots. They are funded by wealthy individuals with no concern for anything but their own profit. Dobson was a trained psychologist who studied the family seriously. While he too was a political tool, he had some real investment in his message. That will be completely absent from any successor in any similar movement for the sake of big money support. I think you know this but don't want to say it yet.
What do we need to preach? 1 Cor. 5:1-12. Do not judge those outside the church.
"12 What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? 13 God will judge those outside. 'Expel the wicked person from among you.'”
Those closing words "among you" do not refer to the body politic, but only to the church body.
Evangelical Christianity does the opposite. It judges those outside the church and looks the other way at the sins of its favorite leaders and politicians for as long as they are delivering or able to deliver. This pattern goes on for years before it is caught for a reason. Falwell's son at Liberty University was a case in point.