From April 2007

I am mid-way through a nice and concise history entitled That Old time Religion in Modern America by D.G. Hart which traces the history of evangelicalism in the U.S. from about the time of the First Great Awakening to the present. As is the case with most scholars, he notes a crucial schism in evangelical Christianity right around the time of the Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee in the 1920’s. That schism, which is what I am calling it, divided evangelicalism between a sectarian, fundamentalist movement rooted in experiential Pietism and religion of “the heart” versus a more progressive stance that included more nuanced and sophisticated theological underpinnings. While both sides were present, the fundamentalist side gained not only the most attention, but attracted a more staunch and committed group of adherents. Indeed many of those who leaned more on the progressive side became more influenced by liberal progressivism itself - the great problem in American Christianity against which fundamentalism was largely a reaction.

So here is the paradox: the fundamentalist thread that runs straight through “the right”, the Southern Baptist Convention after the public “fundamentalist” takeover, the Christian coalition, and is a force that permeates those in our political system with evangelical religious leanings and, as the press including conservative media would have it, are largely Republican, had jettisoned and even reacted against and religion that had an intellectual or sophisticated theological understanding of the Bible in favor of a more sectarian and distinct form of Christianity rooted in straight Bible study and experience of God. So focused on creating a distinct identity from the rest of culture, this movement segregated itself in order to strengthen and maintain that identity as distinct from any liberal progressive influence which was thought to undermine Biblical Christianity much as the effect of evolution on a Biblical account of creation. But the net effect of this sectarianism was an undermining of the basic premise of evangelicalism which is to go and preach the good news to those who need it most - those who are immersed in the liberal progressive side of Christianity which was also linked to the intellectual production of the time. Naturally this makes it a complex task to change the world if the world in which you live and experience God is intentionally segregated from the world you wish to change! This means that you need a way to bridge those two worlds and that came in the form of premillenial dispensationalism.

The problem and clear contradiction of liberal progressivism is that it espouses a necessary improvement of humankind’s well being due to scientific and technical sophistication. That is to say, the more we know about the world and ourselves, the better our world will be by necessity. However, the fundamentalists were very correct in pointing out that the Great Depression, the two great wars and the nuclear threat all undermined that theory of reality. It seemed that the more we knew about the world and ourselves, the more capable we had become in simply destroying ourselves. Hence the adoption of dispensationalism with the fundamentalist eschatological view of the world - we will only get increasingly more destructive and the world will snowball its own suffering at which point Christ will return “to rapture” the elect Christians literally “in the sky” before it all falls apart. The end result is God reclaiming the planet as his own.

This raises another paradox: behind closed doors the fundamentalist view of worship and the presence of God proceeds with joy and charisma, yet the message to the world is that we are all fated to a future of misery before God returns. Thus, the good news becomes a message of fear - “get right with God or go to hell”. The bridge between the sectarian impulse and the rest of the world is that of conformity. If you do not conform to what we preach, then God will destroy you. If you do conform, then you will have eternal life. We have hope in the future, even though we will have to suffer to get there someday “soon”. Finally this position has lead to a continual question of “soon, but when?” followed by speculations on that last day that the Christian bible explicitly tells people not to do! This was certainly not a new thought in the history of Christianity, but it did take on a distinct American character rotted in the ethos of liberty and the freedom of the individual garnered from the Revolution and onward.

So here is the question that one must ask when looking at the paradox of evangelicalism. The Good News of the Gospel is that salvation and the Kingdom of God are now with us even in the midst of suffering. It is not something that we have to wait for to experience. Nor is it something that we are told in the entire New Testament to experience only in our own Christian community knowing that the world is under the auspices of the devil. Rather, it is very clear that we are to experience the Kingdom everywhere - literally. God is not bound to the church community even as the Israelites learned that God is not bound to the Temple. Thus, God’s Kingdom is always before us even while in the midst of us. So where is the hope in the evangelical message? How can Good News live with fear so comfortably when joy and fear cannot coexist in any comfort whatsoever? Note that I am not espousing that faith needs to be easy, but that it is simply impossible to be simultaneously afraid of one’s impending doom and be joyful about it.

The answer is that the joy and hope that it brings can only be conceived as limited to those who can reach the mountaintop sequestered from the whole of the world. But this is not the Gospel. If God’s Kingdom is everywhere as all that exists is God’s, then Christians ought to be called to live in that kingdom everywhere. It is not a “pick and choose” whom you want to serve message, it is a serve everyone message. The love that we are to express to neighbor and enemy alike is not a love that segregates human attributes and loves some but secretly despises others - the latter cloaked in the term “tolerance”. It is a love that loves the entire person - flaws included. Until a Christian can love what were conceived as flaws in a person to the point where they are no longer flaws, the love that a Christian is called to live daily is not realized. That is the Good News of the Gospel that evangelicalism can preach, but ultimately will fail to live.

So in closing for this thought of the day here is a question for the Christians of the world: If Osama Bin Ladin, Cho Seung-Hui (the VT shooter), Mohammed Atta, Mussolini, Hitler, Jefferey Dahmer, or any of the other people we associate with evil were beaten and stranded by the side of the road, would you help them up? If not, can you say that the mind of God is in you? When one sees a suffering enemy, how quickly the entire point of the Cross is left abandoned on the side of the road and Christ remains beaten by the very ones who would preach his message to a world that needs to hear it.