Yes, Virgina, there are liberal Christians.
You and I might wonder about their actual adherence to Christianity, but
they don't.
David
"If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it
costs when it's free
"If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it
costs when it's free."*---P. J. O'Rourke*
On 4/23/2014 12:01 PM, [email protected] via Centroids: The Center of the
Radical Centrist Community wrote:
Southern Baptist Convention
Canon and Culture <http://www.canonandculture.com/>
A Project of the
Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission <http://erlc.com/>
* *The Moral Majority Is No More: Millennials and a New Social Witness*
By Owen Strachan <http://www.canonandculture.com/author/owenstrachan/>
- April 18
They are born after 1980. They donâEUR^(TM)t know much about Thatcher,
but they do know about Bieber. They take âEURoeselfies.âEUR? Much
discussed, oft-misunderstood, they are the Millennials.
A December 2013 poll
<http://iop.harvard.edu/blog/iop-releases-new-fall-poll-5-key-findings-and-trends-millennial-viewpoints?utm_source=homepage&utm_medium=hero&utm_campaign=Fall2013Survey>
of this much-fretted-over demographic offered fresh light on their
political views. Harvard UniversityâEUR^(TM)s Institute of Politics
conducted the poll and found that 35 percent of Millennials approve of
Democratic congressmen and just 19 percent of Republican congressmen.
This data leads to rumination both sociological and theological. How,
exactly, will Millennial ChristiansâEUR"in a jaded generation but not
of itâEUR"engage with politics, with the public square? The way
Millennials answer this question will play a vital role in the public
prospects of Christianity in America and the West.
*A hard nightâEUR^(TM)s day: Public Christianity after the Moral Majority*
With apologies to the Beatles, the last thirty years have left many
Millennials with some baggage. The fire-breathing model of engagement
practiced by some leaders of the âEURoeMoral MajorityâEUR? left many
Millennials with a bad taste in their mouth. The disillusioned and
justly confused Millennial masses include many young pastors and
scholars who find their identity in the vibrant âEURoebig gospelâEUR?
movement of the last decade (like the /New York Times/,//you may have
just heard of it). Young Christian leaders today often express a
desire to distance themselves from the Moral Majority and its ilk,
adopting an âEURoeapoliticalâEUR? or relatively indifferent political
stance.
This is a partly helpful and partly unhelpful response to their
heritage. It is helpful because it means that many young church
planters and pastors and thinkers will avoid reducing the faith to a
policy position. They will focus on making friendships with people not
like them and living a âEURoemissionalâEUR? way-of-life. The church
will be the /listening church/, a spiritual body of believers that
gathers to hear the lion of the Scripture roar from His Word each week.
This response is unhelpful because young Christian leaders might
forget that the church must also be the /speaking church/. Many
Millennial leaders understand the dire need for evangelization of lost
friends, but fewer grasp the importance of public square witness. Few
of us Millennials will emulate the Moral Majority at its apex, but we
also must recognize that, in their imperfect way, various figures of
this group spoke courageously on behalf of the unborn, the natural
family, and the moral fabric of their nation. There was real bravery,
and real sacrifice, in this witness. It came at a real cost in a
culture and society that now reads any attempt, however noble, to
intervene in othersâEUR^(TM) lives as hostile and injurious.
Unlike the Moral Majority, many Millennials are quiet as a church
mouse on public square issues, save for a vocal rejection of past
tactics. Let me get down and dirty here: If your only significant act
of public square proclamation is a sneering disavowal of Jerry
Falwell, youâEUR^(TM)re doing it wrong. A church inspired by the
gospel, aware of its claim on all of life, and in tune with a historic
tradition of figures like Augustine, Wilberforce, and Colson cannot
content itself with exquisitely calibrated public neutrality. Neither
can it accept the velvet muzzle its opponents offer. It cannot dance
like a celebrity cha-chaing his way back to the C-list when a confused
church member asks for guidance on cultural questions of grave import.
It must speak. It must offer a new social witness.
*
Not only this, but that: four paths toward a new social witness*
How, though? How can younger evangelicals who have no inclination to
start a PAC or accost people on the sidewalk while holding
impressively weathered clipboards engage in public square witness? Let
me suggest four broad ways forward.
/First, young Christians can recover a sense of social agency/. I find
a striking paradox in the mind of many Millennial Christians today. We
love Bonhoeffer, and we thrill to WilberforceâEUR^(TM)s daring and
spectacularly successful efforts. When it comes to our own moment,
though, we feel beaten down. The culture seems so big and bad and
scary and foreordained, and so we toggle back to Facebook and retreat
to our Bon Iver playlist. SomethingâEUR^(TM)s not clicking here.
Millennial Christians need to recover a sense of agency in the
culture. Almighty God is our benefactor, and HeâEUR^(TM)s got way more
power than any billionaire the /New Yorker /might profile in 8,000
skeptical words.
I have utterly no idea what the future of America and the West looks
like. Things in general are not promising, to be sure. Much seems to
be slipping away from us in our day. But I resist a narrative of our
culture suffused with gloom and written in stone. In the face of some
jaw-dropping defeats, we also are seeing some enlivening gains,
especially in the pro-life realm. God is unstoppable, and of the reign
of His kingdom there is no end. LetâEUR^(TM)s get to it, shall we?
/Second, young Christians can speak up for truth on behalf of
flourishing. /Part of what has pushed some Millennials away from being
the speaking church is that we have not always heard our leaders make
the biblical connection between rightness and health, truth and
flourishing. But what is true is always what is best. We need to make
this elegant connection on moral matters.
Millennials have an opportunity today to speak on matters of sexuality
and gender, for example, from the perspective of both rightness and
health. It is wrong to change GodâEUR^(TM)s super-intelligent design
for the family, for example. But we also must make clear that altering
the family will not lead to human flourishing. Let this message ring
out from a thousand missional pulpits (or elevated coffee tables, as
it were).
/Third, young Christians can count their lives and reputations as
nothing./ Millennial believers are cursed by a desire to be popular.
We want friends, virtual and actual. We donâEUR^(TM)t want to be
tagged with the epithet greater than that which cannot be known:
/awkward/.
I understand this desire. ItâEUR^(TM)s no good thing to be hated for
its own sake. But we must not forget the long, bloody and glorious
tradition of courageous Christian public witness. It starts with Moses
holding court in a pagan Egyptian throne room, extends to Daniel
praying in public and thereby facing down a horde of Persian
/courtiers /eager to see him torn limb from limb, jumps to the grisly
martyrdom of John the Baptist for offering a short course in public
ethics, and peaks with Christ before Caesar, sacrificial and
triumphant in death (Exod. 5-11; Dan. 6; Matt. 14; 27). However nimble
and winsome we young evangelicals must be, we also must shake the
heavens with our prayers for courage, the courage to speak even in the
face of persecution so that evil and death might lose and
righteousness and neighbor-love might win.
/Fourth, young Christians must play hardball when necessary/. In
practical terms, this means not only engaging the culture when a
particularly momentous vote or decision is at hand, but in the many
smaller events that lead to the historic ones. Our new social witness
must be marked both by love and by an appropriate evangelical
/Realpolitik. /Not every issue is created equal. But we must not
consent to a death by a thousand cultural cuts, either.
Millennials have extensive and often-overlooked biblical precedent for
this kind of action. We can cite Joseph acting shrewdly as an
administrator of the state for the goodness of his people, Esther
using her queenly position to advocate for the salvation of the Jews
from genocide (working closely with Mordecai), and the Apostle Paul
appealing to his Roman citizenship as just a few biblical examples of
the kind of gracious hardball we can play in the public square (Gen.
41-47; Esth. 2-10; Acts 22-26).
*Conclusion*
Few of us can predict what the future of America will be. Whether poll
numbers on social questions rise or fall among youngsters, I am not
most concerned with data. I am most concerned with the church and its
future. Extraordinary and altogether necessary attention has been paid
to our identity as the listening church. More attention needs to be
devoted to our tricky, historically problematic, but hugely important
identity as the speaking church. May we do so in coming days, speaking
love and truth, never giving up, never abandoning our neighbor, never
falling silent.
Share On
About the Author
Owen Strachan is the author of /Risky Gospel: Abandon Fear and Build
Something Awesome/ <http://riskygospelbook.com/> (Thomas Nelson,
2013). He is Assistant Professor of Christian Theology and Church
History at Boyce College and Executive Director of the Council on
Biblical Manhood & Womanhood. He is writing a biography of Charles
Colson for Thomas Nelson.
© Copyright 2014 âEUR" The Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of
the Southern Baptist Convention.
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