Ernie: I have been watching a number of Ross Douthat videos lately. YouTube offers a good number, mostly with reference to his book, Bad Religion. Which, BTW, is quite good. I read it a couple of years ago. Not that you would be all that interested. But his thesis is unarguable: Namely, the growing irrelevance of let's call it Evangelical orthodoxy has identifiable causes and little is being done to remedy the problems. The mentality to do so is almost non-existent. Which he didn't say out of any gladness, either. He is Catholic but he describes his youth as his parents went on a decade long quest that took them, most of that time, into Pentecostal Christianity -which he also became involved in and which he respects and admires in various ways. But that whole approach -as he sees it- is unsustainable in America. Maybe (for the time being) very sustainable elsewhere, but not here. Why? Because Evangelicals have lost the young. Obviously not all of the young, but most, by far, and the problem is getting worse, not better. As one example, he cited acceptance rates among the under 25 crowd of "gay marriage." It stands at something like 75 - 25. But pick almost any issue and its pretty much the same thing. Douthat also made much of pluralism, the fact that truth claims of Evangelicals (also some other Christians, but not all) just don't make sense to the young. Maybe it doesn't mean much in rural Alabama or small town Nebraska, but everywhere else, say to a young person that Buddhists or Hindus follow a false faith and are going to hell, rings utterly wrong. What about my buddy Saito, what about my pal Krishna? Worse, as he sees it, is the politicization of the Evangelical churches. You may as well call them Republican churches. Sure, the problem is even worse for the Religious Left, but basically (as do I) he writes them off. So we get a mess and what is being done about it? No-one says that there are no "rays of hope," but generally the situation is more-or-less hopeless. Especially the young but lots of others too, are -in Douthat's wording- heretics. Actually examine their beliefs and you simply do not get orthodoxy. Far from it, in fact. Which is a different issue than the problem of the 20% who are "nones." Well, I'm not too concerned about lack of orthodoxy but I am very concerned about lack of coherence and lack of knowledge and lack of interest in becoming coherent or becoming more informed. And lack of interest in discovering the Christ of real history on whom to build one's faith. How do you re-create Christian faith for the 21st century and beyond? Tell you one thing, that cannot happen through indifference to the questions Douthat raises and by insisting over and over that the only possible solution is Evangelical orthodoxy and half of Christ, Jesus as love-motivated savior and absolutely nothing else. Being effectively "shunned" has had one great advantage, it opened my eyes to some realities that I might otherwise have glossed over, or not seen until much later. There are exceptions, I know that, but these are people who don't give a damn about me -nor about a lot of other people for some of the same reasons they don't care about myself. Hell, be as silent as you want. If you think that is smart who am I to differ? Its just that I will interpret that silence in ways that make sense to me. There isn't an alternative. Billy
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