AZspot AZspot

blue bits. red rocks.

evangelicals

Monday 28 May 2012

For Evangelicals, the Old Testament leads to the Gospel story. For Paul, the Old Testament is transformed by the Gospel. For Evangelicals, the Old Testament, read pretty much at face value, anticipates Jesus. For Paul, the Old Testament is reshaped in order to conform to Jesus. For Evangelicals, the Bible is God’s final authority. For Paul, Jesus is the final authority to which the Bible must bend. Would Paul Have Made a Good Evangelical?

Thursday 29 March 2012

Broadly speaking, of course, nearly all of contemporary western culture is rooted in Christianity and the Bible one way or the other, if you trace it back far enough. So the idea that Hollywood needs to create small subsidiaries to attend to some niche it calls “Christian” seems absurd. What Hollywood is really doing is creating small subsidiaries to attend to Christian conservatives. And why not? Conservatives like movies, too, and maybe some of these will be good. But let’s call them Christian conservative films, because everyone knows that’s what they are. Evangelicals shouldn’t get to claim one of the world’s great religions as their exclusive property. Timothy Noah

When Did ‘Christian’ Become A Synonym For ‘Conservative Evangelical’?

As I lay in bed struggling to wake up I thought: Christian? Christians aren’t some twee boutique demographic. Christians represent the majority. About 78 percent of Americans self-identify as Christian, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. What NPR and Fox and Sony mean when they say “Christian” is “Christian right” or “Christian conservatives,” terms that adherents don’t like because they think they’re pejorative. “Fundamentalist” and “evangelical” are imperfect substitutes because a) the two categories, though they overlap a lot, aren’t precisely the same; and b) some of these folks consider themselves political liberals. (The worldly Cold War liberal Reinhold Niebuhr called himself an evangelical Protestant.) What conservative Christians really like to be called is “Christians.” Hence “Christian rock” and “Christian college” and now “Christian film.” This strikes me as terribly presumptuous. Bruce Springsteen was raised Catholic but he doesn’t perform anything these folks would accept as Christian rock. Wesleyan was founded by Methodists and named after John Wesley but evangelicals would never call it a Christian university. “Christian” has become a euphemism for “acceptable to the type of Christian (in most instances Protestant) who frowns on homosexuality and wishes Saul Alinsky had minded his own business.”

According to Pew, only about one-third of Christians call themselves “evangelicals.” That’s about 26 percent of all Americans. The other two-thirds self-identify as Catholics (23 percent) and with either mainline (18 percent) or historically black (7 percent) Protestantism. (A smattering of Mormons, Orthodox Christians, and other tiny subgroups make up the remaining 4 percent.) To suggest that conservative Christians are the only Christians is like saying Hasidic Jews are the only Jews. It’s a cartoonish misconception that the Christian right has managed to sell to a largely secular news media that’s too sensitive to accusations of anti-religious bias.

Tuesday 27 March 2012

Another odd thing about the Vineyarders, at least as described by Luhrmann, is that they seem to perform no social service. Unlike other serious evangelical groups, which are making headway as missionaries in Africa, there appears to be very little spreading of the faith, or even just of well-being—schools, hostels, soup kitchens—on the part of the congregations Luhrmann joined. Maybe she left out their charitable projects on the ground that her book, as its title tells us, is about the Vineyarders’ relationship with God. But I don’t think so, because now and then she comments dryly on their self-concern. Her fellow-congregant Hannah, she says, got mad at God, “not because he allowed genocide in Darfur, but because little things happened in her life that she did not like: ‘I was upset with him for making me a dorm counselor.’ ” Vineyarders may implore God to help fellow-members of their church, but otherwise, in Luhrmann’s account, pretty much everything seems to be about themselves. T. M. Luhrmann’s Experience with Evangelical Christians

Too Few Evangelicals Practice The Compassion They Preach

You can’t preach the Gospel to a dead person.

Something is smelling decidedly bad in evangelical paradise. It’s unconscionable not to feed a hungry person or help a sick, addicted hurting person stay alive.

What’s wrong with evangelicals? Shouldn’t we who say we have been forgiven so much by a loving God want to share that same love with those in need?

Then there’s the political/religious right issue, with evangelical Christians still mistakenly holding to the belief that a change in presidents will mean a profound change in our country’s direction.

It seems to me that evangelicals are being coopted by a political party and reduced to a voting bloc. How tragic!

There’s one way our country is changed. As Christians live out the tenets of God’s Word, quit judging and focusing on two or three litmus test issues, the world will see that we are Christians by our love and profoundly amazing things will happen.

(via slacktivist)

Sunday 25 March 2012

In fact the very opposite of the social breakdown we predicted has happened. Those Godless abortion-loving, philandering, divorced gay New Yorkers and other Americans in most urban areas are experiencing the lowest crime rates in almost half a century. And when they go to work it is as part of the most productive generation in American history. And this is at the very time evangelicals are losing their influence over the country. (They backed Rick Santorum and that’s not working out too well not to mention that their own young people are leaving their churches in droves and are mostly as pro-gay rights as most other Americans.) Frank Schaeffer

Thursday 9 February 2012
Evangelicals for Gay Marriage

But instead, evangelicals seem to be very good at making sure people who are not Christians know that they are “breaking the rules” of Christianity. And as such, we have gained the reputation for being judgmental, a moniker well-deserved for the most part. It is God’s place to judge the world, it is our place to love it. And just like the story we find in Adam & Eve, when we put ourselves in God’s place, we make a mess of things.

Secondly, then, what is the best way to love the world? And remember, love is not an emotion, but, as DC Talk profoundly says, “love is a verb.” One way I know is to show people the love of Jesus by supporting them in their fight for equality, to stand with them. It doesn’t matter if I agree with their lifestyle or not (it’s not my place to judge, remember). My main goal as an evangelical Christian is to reflect the resurrected Christ and his Kingdom. And I believe Jesus is on the side of those without power and his kingdom is one of equality, where no one is a second-class citizen, whether that be conservative Christian, drug addict, homosexual, atheist, or politician. We all bear God’s image in this story.

Thirdly, I don’t want to be on the wrong side of history again. I am not sure Christians realize that they were, for the most part, on the wrong side of the slave issue. The Bible was used weekly during the Civil War to support slavery as morally acceptable. Not only that, but by taking care of the “less than human blacks,” the white slave owners were being quite compassionate, taking care of a race that couldn’t survive in the civilized world on their own. It was so “obvious” that the Bible supported slavery…

And, lest we forget, it was a Christian culture that kept women from being able to vote until only 100 years ago. I am ashamed that a “Christian” culture didn’t support or even acknowledge the equality of women until … well, in some Christian circles, they still don’t.

Monday 6 June 2011

In the first decade of the twenty-first century the Evangelical and conservative Roman Catholic (and Mormon) outsider victim “approach” to public policy has been perfected on a heretofore-undreamed of scale by Sarah Palin. She is the ultimate holier-than-thou Evangelical queen bee. To understand Palin’s style of “leadership” you have to understand the Evangelical’s clinging to the victim status as their excuse for their ideas about society being rejected by most Americans. Rather than admit that they might be wrong — on everything from creationism to the “fact” that stem cell research is “murder” — Evangelicals have concocted a myth of victimhood. I should know, I helped establish this myth back in the 1970s and early 80s when I was an anti-abortion crusader along with my Evangelical leader father, Francis Schaeffer. Frank Schaeffer

Monday 16 May 2011

These two pre-eminent issues — abortion and homosexuality — have become the crux of American evangelicalism (pun intended) in part due to the politicization of evangelicals over the past three decades, years in which evangelical Christians have come to be regarded, by both outsiders and insiders, as primarily a bloc of voters. A great deal of money was spent during those years to convince evangelicals to come to think of themselves in this way and that money has had its intended effect. But the strange elevation of these two shibboleths to creedal importance above all else wasn’t exclusively a product of this political manipulation. They also became the cornerstone of evangelical identity because each is, in slightly different ways, a convenient surrogate for and signifier of what are regarded as essential evangelical attitudes toward the Bible and toward the rest of society. They are regarded both as the most glaring examples of the pervasive immorality that supposedly characterizes the ungodly and as shorthand litmus tests for acceptance of “the authority of the scriptures.” The latter point is much clearer with regard to homosexuality, for which the well-known “clobber verses” provide a binary test of submission to the authority of prooftexts and to a host of unspoken accompanying hermeneutical assumptions. slacktivist

Thursday 12 May 2011
From Bible Belt to Sunbelt

From Bible Belt to Sun Belt tells the dramatic and largely unknown story of “plain-folk” religious migrants: hardworking men and women from Oklahoma, Texas, and Arkansas who fled the Depression and came to California for military jobs during World War II. Investigating this fiercely pious community at a grassroots level, Darren Dochuk uses the stories of religious leaders, including Billy Graham, as well as many colorful, lesser-known figures to explain how evangelicals organized a powerful political machine. This machine made its mark with Barry Goldwater, inspired Richard Nixon’s “Southern Solution,” and achieved its greatest triumph with the victories of Ronald Reagan. Based on entirely new research, the manuscript has already won the prestigious Allan Nevins Prize from the Society of American Historians. The judges wrote, “Dochuk offers a rich and multidimensional perspective on the origins of one of the most far-ranging developments of the second half of the twentieth century: the rise of the New Right and modern conservatism.

Thursday 10 March 2011
Searching for a New Story: The Possibility of a New Evangelical Movement in the U.S.

[56] This article began with a statement from Robert Putnam indicating the historical significance of evangelicals in progressive social change. The aim of this work has been to explore the possibility of a growing New Evangelical movement in the United States. One of the most pressing concerns in this regard is investigating the character of social movements in order to articulate the nature of this emerging form of evangelicalism, particularly expressed by the younger generation. This investigation necessarily involves an understanding of the long history of evangelicalism’s theological and social engagement.

[57] The “crisis” among new evangelicals appears evident as they increasingly disassociate from the Religious Right and take up a progressive theological agenda oriented toward social justice – with an emphasis on a broad range of social issues. What is less clear is how they develop a shared narrative and means of sustained informal interaction. Despite the lack of an apparent organizational center, there are significant commonalities among the new evangelicals. The most significant of these shared aims is their growing agenda, which places an emphasis on social justice issues and the degree to which their theological expression is intimately bound to the exercise of social responsibility.

[58] This key goal is being increasingly expressed through innovative social activism and entrepreneurship. Although increased technology is not replacing the need for face-to-face relationships, it is expanding the means by which this new generation of evangelicals is connecting with one another’s shared self-interest. This is evident through the qualitative research presented in this article, as the respondents were determined through a random sample of an online Facebook group. The participants of this group were able to informally interact in ways previously not possible. As we move into a new decade, one cannot help but wonder how the energy and creativity of these young evangelicals will impact a world saturated with such complex problems. No doubt, the race is on among politicians, researchers, and clergy alike to answer this very question.

Thursday 3 March 2011

Jesus unambiguously preached mercy and forgiveness. These are supposed to be cardinal virtues of the Christian faith. And yet Evangelicals are the most supportive of the death penalty, draconian sentencing, punitive punishment over rehabilitation, and the governmental use of torture. Jesus exhorted humans to be loving, peaceful, and non-violent. And yet Evangelicals are the group of Americans most supportive of easy-access weaponry, little-to-no regulation of handgun and semi-automatic gun ownership, not to mention the violent military invasion of various countries around the world. Jesus was very clear that the pursuit of wealth was inimical to the Kingdom of God, that the rich are to be condemned, and that to be a follower of Him means to give one’s money to the poor. And yet Evangelicals are the most supportive of corporate greed and capitalistic excess, and they are the most opposed to institutional help for the nation’s poor — especially poor children. They hate anything that smacks of “socialism,” even though that is essentially what their Savior preached. They despise food stamp programs, subsidies for schools, hospitals, job training — anything that might dare to help out those in need. Even though helping out those in need was exactly what Jesus urged humans to do. In short, Evangelicals are that segment of America which is the most pro-militaristic, pro-gun, and pro-corporate, while simultaneously claiming to be most ardent lovers of the Prince of Peace. Phil Zuckerman

Wednesday 2 March 2011

The Evangelical foot soldiers never realized that the logic of their “stand” against government — often motivated by so-called pro-life issues — has played into the hands of people who never cared about human lives beyond the fact that people could be sold products. By the twenty first century, Ma and Pa No-Name were still out in the rain holding an “Abortion is Murder!” sign in Peoria and/or standing in line all night in some godforsaken mall in Kansas City to buy a book by Sarah Palin and have it signed. But it was the denizens of the corner offices at Goldman Sachs, the News Corporation, Koch Industries, Exxon, and Halliburton who were laughing. …And that is “why” the Republicans are lashing out at unions, government, and at anything “collective” in fact at anything that diminishes the fact-free go-it-alone “ethos” of todays embittered Evangelicals. Their real war is with modernity, facts, science and progress. But since religious conservatives choose to live in an imaginary and magical “universe” and can’t turn back the clock to a time when everyone else did to — say the thirteenth century — they’d rather see the whole fabric of our civil society shredded rather than reconsider their most cherished beliefs. Frank Schaeffer

A GNT creation ©2007–2013