Daily Archives: March 10, 2009

Prophethood and Partisan Hackery

Posted by on March 10, 2009 8 comments

A recent post on First Things lambastes progressive evangelical leaders Jim Wallis, Ron Sider, and David Gushee for styling themselves as “prophetic” voices that “speak truth to power” while gushing in support of Barack Obama, and particularly the recent appointment of Gov. Kathleen Sebelius as Secretary of Health and Human Services. Sebelius is widely known to have a strongly pro-choice position on abortion, and as of now evangelical leaders such as these still purport to be opposed to abortion. Hence the disgust of the First Thingsers:

Now, we all know that those who engage in the rough and tumble of everyday politics, including the hardball of cabinet nominations, have to make compromises and make careful judgments of prudence. There are, no doubt, worse appointments than Sebelius (although one simply could not imagine an Obama appointment these guys would actually protest).

But if you are going to get into the rough and tumble of everyday politics and if you are going to take the side of President Obama, the most powerful man in the world, against evangelicals and Catholics leaders in the pro-life movement on a cabinet appointment, could we at least be spared all the self-righteous drivel about being “prophetic,” and “speaking the truth to power.” You can be a flak for the Obama administration on things like cabinet appointments. Or, you can claim to be a “prophet” and “speak the truth to power.” But you can’t be both. It seems obvious what the Wallis, Sider and Gushee crowd have chosen.

Now, on one level Pavlischek’s post is certainly right, to the degree that Wallis et al claim to be representing “prophetic” religion they are certainly full of shit. This has been true all along and should not be news to anyone. Neither should it be news to anyone that the First Things crowd could never muster up one criticism of the Bush administration, even when the Pope straight out condemned the war. Everyone here is quite clearly and ideologue.

However, what’s funny about the post is that it portrays a sort of pissy jockeying between the First Things crowd and the new evangelical left over who has the clout to call themselves prophetic. It’s the evangelical equivalent of Rush Limbaugh and Al Franken arguing over whether republicans or democrats are the true patriots.

Eugene McCarraher on Abortion

Posted by on March 10, 2009 17 comments

Lately the “culture of death” rhetoric has been heating up among many conservative commentators in reference to the issue of Obama’s lifting the ban on stem cell research. This has become yet another occasion for many to rail against abortion as the great moral evil of our time. Now, I don’t really actually disagree with this, and I’ll have some more words on this shortly, but I think Eugene McCarraher makes the ultimately important point about this sort of reflexive rhetoric of opposition to abortion in an interview from a couple years back in the Other Journal:

As for abortion, I think we have to stop seeing it as the primary culprit in a culture of death. Abortion becomes conceivable as a moral practice once we take individual autonomy as the beau ideal of the self; but to recognize that is, if we’re logical, to indict not only abortion but also our cherished idyll of choice or freedom. But that, then, is to indict capitalism, which employs a similar language of sovereignty both to legitimate itself and to obscure the remarkable lack of creative freedom at work. I know that I’ll catch a lot of hell for saying this, but I think that a lot of opposition to abortion is sheer moral sentimentality which turns the fetus into a fetish. (You’ll notice that I think fetishism of some sort or other is a pretty salient feature of the contemporary American moral imagination.) Many of the same people who oppose abortion are champions of laissez-faire capitalism, and they either don’t see or don’t care to see the linguistic and cultural affinities between themselves and the pro-choice advocates they fight. They’ll retort that capitalism doesn’t kill anyone in its normal operations, but first, that’s just not true—capitalism has never been instituted or maintained anywhere, not even in the North Atlantic, without considerable coercion and violence—and second, it doesn’t matter, because the exercise of market autonomy has devastating effects on individuals and communities regardless of whether or not they wind up dead. (“Yeah, the company cut your medical benefits or cut your job or left your town a mess, but hey, you’re still alive!”) When I say this, a lot of people retort that I’m changing the subject. In one way, yes, I am, but for a reason—because I want them to see that it is the same subject in a different guise. Talking about abortion is a way of not talking about the autonomous individual, the latest ideological guise of libido dominandi, discussion of which would topple quite a few idols and not just reproductive choice.

Long story short, you can’t rail about abortion and in the same breath deploy your theology to legitimate capitalism.

Stringfellow, Death, and the Word

Posted by on March 10, 2009 Comments Off

“In the face of death, live humanly. In the middle of chaos, celebrate the Word. Amidst babel, I repeat, speak the truth. Confront the noise and verbiage and falsehood of death with the truth and potency and efficacy of the Word of God. Know the Word, teach the Word, nurture the Word, do the Word, live the Word. And more than that, in the Word of God expose death and all death’s works and wiles, rebuke lies, cast out demons, exorcise, cleanse the possessed, raise those who are dead in mind and conscience.”

– William Stringfellow, An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land, 142-41.

The Coming Evangelical Collapse

Posted by on March 10, 2009 18 comments

Interesting article in the Christian Science Monitor by Michael Spencer today that I came across via Rod Drehr. He argues the bold and stark thesis that “We are on the verge – within 10 years – of a major collapse of evangelical Christianity. This breakdown will follow the deterioration of the mainline Protestant world and it will fundamentally alter the religious and cultural environment in the West.” Wow! That’s thesis for you. At least we’ll know for sure whether or not he was wrong in ten years. Here are his seven little points that form the nucleus of the article:

1. Evangelicals have identified their movement with the culture war and with political conservatism. This will prove to be a very costly mistake. Evangelicals will increasingly be seen as a threat to cultural progress. Public leaders will consider us bad for America, bad for education, bad for children, and bad for society.

The evangelical investment in moral, social, and political issues has depleted our resources and exposed our weaknesses. Being against gay marriage and being rhetorically pro-life will not make up for the fact that massive majorities of Evangelicals can’t articulate the Gospel with any coherence. We fell for the trap of believing in a cause more than a faith.

2. We Evangelicals have failed to pass on to our young people an orthodox form of faith that can take root and survive the secular onslaught. Ironically, the billions of dollars we’ve spent on youth ministers, Christian music, publishing, and media has produced a culture of young Christians who know next to nothing about their own faith except how they feel about it. Our young people have deep beliefs about the culture war, but do not know why they should obey scripture, the essentials of theology, or the experience of spiritual discipline and community. Coming generations of Christians are going to be monumentally ignorant and unprepared for culture-wide pressures.

3. There are three kinds of evangelical churches today: consumer-driven megachurches, dying churches, and new churches whose future is fragile. Denominations will shrink, even vanish, while fewer and fewer evangelical churches will survive and thrive.

4. Despite some very successful developments in the past 25 years, Christian education has not produced a product that can withstand the rising tide of secularism. Evangelicalism has used its educational system primarily to staff its own needs and talk to itself.

5. The confrontation between cultural secularism and the faith at the core of evangelical efforts to “do good” is rapidly approaching. We will soon see that the good Evangelicals want to do will be viewed as bad by so many, and much of that work will not be done. Look for ministries to take on a less and less distinctively Christian face in order to survive.

6. Even in areas where Evangelicals imagine themselves strong (like the Bible Belt), we will find a great inability to pass on to our children a vital evangelical confidence in the Bible and the importance of the faith.

7. The money will dry up.

The author predicts three developments that will occur in light of this debacle. 1) There will be ongoing migration of former evangelicals into Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. 2) Pentecostalism and the influence of Christianity and the global south will make missionary impact in the West and form new and different sorts of churchs. 3) There will be a significant house church movement, emphasizing discipleship and “empire subversion.”

Interesting forecast. Not without some merit, I think.

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