Millions of evangelicals root their faith in the temporal
“The crisis for the Church is a crisis of discernment,” Rev. Ken Brown tells The Atlantic‘s Tim Alberta. Brown pastors Community Bible Church in a Detroit suburb. “Discernment [the ability to separate truth from untruth] is a core biblical discipline. And many Christians are not practicing it.”
Brown with his podcast has set about combating misinformation and disinformation among his flock. His diagnosis, Alberta writes, is that millions of American evangelicals have “come to value power over integrity, the ephemeral over the eternal, moral relativism over bright lines of right and wrong.”
Remember when the latter two was their knock against the 1960s generation?
There is a war being fought. But not a cultural one so much as “for the soul of the American Church.” This war pits Christian against Christian. Many evangelicals are fleeing their churches for congregations as much far right as for Jesus. Pastors remaining watch what they say:
One stray remark could split their congregation, or even cost them their job. Yet a strictly apolitical approach can be counterproductive; their unwillingness to engage only invites more scrutiny. The whisper campaigns brand conservative pastors as moderate, and moderate pastors as Marxists. In this environment, a church leader’s stance on biblical inerrancy is less important than whether he is considered “woke.”
The fanatics are running the asylum churches.
“It may sound like Chicken Little. But I’m telling you, there is a serious effort to turn this ‘two countries’ talk into something real,” says Russell Moore, the public theologian at Christianity Today. “There are Christians taking all the populist passions and adding a transcendent authority to it.”
Alberta’s essay examines how over the decades the wall between church and state has dissolved for these believers. Caesar and God have mated and birthed … whatever this is that calls itself Christianity and stokes animosity for immigrants, liberals, government, nonwhites and the poor.
After the Bill Clinton years, things had almost sttled down under George W. Bush.
“And then,” Brown said, “came Barack Obama.”
Dartmouth historian Randall Balmer in 2014 discussed the real origins of the religious right’s political crusade. With the leaked Justice Samuel Alito draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, Balmer is back this week to remind readers how abortion caught on as a cause célèbre on the religious right. It was cover for Christian anger over segregated religious schools losing tax support in the 1970s. The right’s folktale about abortion is a myth.
I’ve long argued that what is really at stake, what really drives animosity on the right, is status anxiety. Last place aversion. But as with segregation and abortion, admitting that fear is the last thing the earth-inheriting meek will do.
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