This is being passed along for file purposes only. I doubt if anyone here will actually read it. Maybe in the past some few souls might have done so but those years have come and gone. And this would seem to apply even if Ross Douthat himself was a "card carrying" member of RC.org. He means a great deal to me but I don't see where this is true for anyone else except maybe now and then. I don't think my past perceptions of the group are in error, certainly not in any basic sense. There once was a period when intellectual curiosity mattered very much. As it still does to a few in the group. But let's face it. What is "interesting" to the nexus of today's group is non-news, non-controversy, or non-'philosophical' unless these matters are understood in the sense that controversy can only exist within gentlemen's limits, that "news" means jokes told on late night TV comedy shows, and "philosophy" means a set of ideas that supports career choices that have no relationship to serious and soul-searching quest for truth. Still, I found Ross Douthat's article very worthwhile; and while I have not been pursuing his line of thought on the subjects he discussed, my own ideas have been evolving on a parallel set of tracks. Way I look at it now, thanks to Douthat, is that we are set for -or getting close to- something like a "reformation" among Evangelicals, at least among younger believers, and that when this breaks into the open traditional Evangelicalism will be consigned to the margins of the movement in due course. Luther had it right: Religious faith necessarily must be something that combines heart and mind, that does not give primacy to feelings no matter how important feelings always are, because, you see, we are rational beings and human reason needs nourishment as much as the physical body needs nourishment. The great weakness in contemporary Evangelicalism is that this fundamental truth has only the most modest purchase on the minds of believers -as if none have ever bothered to read the fist chapter of the Book of Romans -the whole first chapter, including the philosophical stuff. For Luther, next to the Gospels, Romans was the most important text in the New Testament, indeed, it is essential to everything else. Sorry, but I cannot think of a single Evangelical of stature who has any such outlook. Hence, as Douthat observed among younger Christians, a slow but sure drift into eastern Orthodoxy. Certainly this is true for me even if my drift all along has simultaneously been into contemporary heterodoxy that is based on Biblical scholarship. Excellent article even if it may have almost no meaning to the group as it now exists. Billy ------------------------ New York Times Is There an Evangelical Crisis? _Ross Douthat_ (https://www.nytimes.com/column/ross-douthat) NOV. 25, 2017
_Continue reading the main story_ (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/25/opinion/sunday/trump-evangelical-crisis.html?mtrref=www.google.com&assetType=opin ion#story-continues-1) Share This Page * _Share_ (javascript:;) About 20 years ago, the eminent sociologist of religion Christian Smith coined a useful and resonant phrase, describing evangelical Christianity in the post-1960s United States as both “_embattled and thriving_ (http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo3683361.html) .” By this Smith meant that evangelicals had maintained an identity in a secularizing country that was neither separatist nor assimilated, but somehow mainstream and countercultural at once. Evangelicals were both fully part of American modernity (often educated suburbanites, rather than the backwoods yokels of caricature) and also living lives in tension with pluralistic and permissive values. And this combination, far from undercutting their communities, was actually a source of religious vitality and demographic strength. Smith’s description still holds up pretty well. The story of American religion lately has been one of institutional decline, of Mainline Protestantism ’s aging and Catholicism’s weakening and the rise of the so-called “nones. ” But there has been an evangelical exception. The evangelical market share has held steady while other traditions have declined, evangelical churches have continued to _win more converts than they lose_ (https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/evangelical-protestants-are-the-biggest-winners-when-people-c hange-faiths/) , and _evangelical resilience_ (http://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2015/may/pew-evangelicals-stay-strong-us-religious-landscape-study .html) is the main reason why religious conservatism retains an intense and active core. The question is whether this resilience will survive the age of Trump. Some evangelical voices think not: Whether the subject is the debauched pagan in the White House, the mall-haunted candidacy of Roy Moore or the larger question of how to engage with secular culture, there is talk of an intergenerational crisis within evangelical churches, a widening disillusionment with a Trump-endorsing old guard, a feeling that a crackup must loom ahead._Continue reading the main story_ (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/25/opinion/sunday/trump-evangelical-crisis.html?mtrref=www.google.com&assetType=opinion #story-continues-2) ADVERTISEMENT _Continue reading the main story_ (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/25/opinion/sunday/trump-evangelical-crisis.html?mtrref=www.google.com&assetType=opin ion#story-continues-3) In a recent cri de coeur on the influential Gospel Coalition site, _Jared Wilson described_ (https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/jared-c-wilson/theologically-orphaned-generation/) younger evangelicals as “basically a bunch of theological orphans,” betrayed by older pastors who insisted on the importance of moral character and then abandoned these preachments for the sake of partisanship — revealing their own commitments as essentially idolatrous, and leaving the next generation no choice but to invent evangelicalism anew. In a somewhat different vein, the Baylor professor Alan Jacobs _responded to a question_ (http://blog.ayjay.org/where-young-evangelicals-are-headed/) (from me) about where younger evangelical intellectual life is going by saying that “as far as I can tell, where young evangelicals are headed is simply out of evangelicalism.” Meaning that they will either go along with the drift of their elders and become church-of-American-greatness heretics, or else they will return to “older liturgical traditions,” Catholic and Orthodox and Anglican, and cease to identify with evangelicalism entirely. I don’t know exactly what to make of these predictions. American evangelicalism has always contained a number of different tendencies: It’s home to rigorous heirs of the Reformation, seeker-sensitive megachurches, would-be ecumenical “mere Christians,” prosperity preachers and hard-edged Christian nationalists. During the 2016 Republican primary, it was _easy enough to argue_ (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/10/opinion/campaign-stops/donald-trumps-christian-so ldiers.html?_r=0) that Trump was exploiting these divisions, winning Fox News-watching cultural evangelicals and prosperity-gospel types while losing churchgoers who cared about character and orthodoxy. Then in the general election it was possible to argue that the latter groups only came around to Trump reluctantly, out of fear of contemporary liberalism’s anticlerical streak, and that their relationship to his identitarian nationalism was transactional and didn’t reflect any deep congruence. If this is right, then the alienation of younger evangelical writers from Trumpism’s court pastors could indeed be a signifier of a coming evangelical crackup. In this scenario the label itself would _become contested_ (http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2017/10/16/burying-word-evangelical/) , with the kind of winsome and multiethnic evangelicalism envisioned by the anti-Trump Southern Baptist _Russell Moore_ (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/15/opinion/christians-in-the-hands-of-donald-trump.html) pitted against the nationalist evangelicalism of a Jerry Falwell Jr. or Robert Jeffress, and churches along the fault line internally embattled and dividing. But it’s also possible that evangelical intellectuals and writers, and their friends in other Christian traditions, have overestimated how much a serious theology has ever mattered to evangelicalism’s sociological success. It could be that the Trump-era crisis of the evangelical mind is a parochial phenomenon, confined to theologians and academics and pundits and a few outlier congregations — and that it is this group, not the cultural Christians who voted enthusiastically for Trump, who represent the real_evangelical penumbra_ (https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/30/opinion/sunday/douthat-the-christian-penumbra.html) , which could float away and leave evangelicalism less intellectual, more partisan, more racially segregated ... but as a cultural phenomenon, not all that greatly changed. If so, then this would imply that white Christian tribalism and a very American sort of heresy, not a commitment to scripture and tradition, has kept evangelical churches thriving all these years. And if the God-and-country, pray-and-grow-rich tendencies sweep aside orthodox resistance, the evangelicalism that emerges might be more coherent and sociologically resilient, in the short run, for being rid of hand-wringers who don’t think Baptist choirs should set “Make America Great Again” _to music_ (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/07/12/another-make-america-great-again-so ng-this-one-from-evangelicals-is-trump-approved/?utm_term=.54b0e2c27559) . This is a sobering idea, and one I hope is wrong. But it is a paradox of this strange time that serious evangelicals should probably be rooting for a real post-Trump crisis in their churches — because its absence will tell them something depressing about where their movement ’s strength lay all along. -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
