However, I’ve been realizing lately how much the media influences public perception of Evangelicals. Within Evangelicalism, people like Pat Robertson are marginal figures. Yes, many people watch The 700 Club, but the media elevates people like Robertson to Evangelical Popery. Within the Evangelical community, the real influence is wielded by people like T.D. Jakes, Tim LaHaye, Joel Osteen, Rick Warren, Bill Hybels, and Benny Hinn, but you would never know it from press accounts. (As this partial listing demonstrates, the real leaders of Evangelicalism are, at best, only marginally less foolish than the media-created ones, but there you have it.)

This state of affairs is not the result of a media conspiracy, but of America’s peculiar religious pluralism. We are a deeply Christian nation with a deeply secular (and antagonistic) popular culture. We’re a nation where 43% of our citizens go to church on Sunday, yet devout Christians feature in film and television almost exclusively as hypocrites, fanatics or criminals. By some unspoken understanding, religion is inadmissible in public discourse outside of the most vague, inoffensive manifestations. This renders the Evangelical world largely invisible to those not initiated into its subcultural mysteries. Those on the outside only the know players the media exposes them to.

Which leads to this: the Press arbitrates what is and what is not “news.” Outside of Section F of your local paper, religion is not news. Evangelicals only appear when they intersect with news, and unfortunately, politics is chief among news topics. So aside from ministry scandals, Evangelicals tend to make the news only when their beliefs conflict with the secular values predominating in the popular culture, such as on sexual morality, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, etc. These issues in turn define the popular understanding of Evangelicalism.

Have our priorities been out of order at times? Sure. But much of the public distaste for Evangelicalism stems from structural factors outside of our control. Finally, lest we forget, there will always be a level of antagonism between the church and the culture. After all, the only way the church could be universally loved by the World would be to surrender to it utterly. The trick is to preserve the natural offense of the Gospel without placing extra cultural stumbling blocks in the way of secular people.

My pastor and I were discussing this over coffee the other day, and he referred me to this column by David Brooks — Who is John Stott?

Trinity United Church of Christ via kwout

Now, it doesn’t take much to notice that the United Church of Christ (UCC) is a very liberal denomination. Just how liberal–and how politically Left–shows up on the first link (as I type) in the News sidebar on their site:

In 1972 the Golden Gate Association of our UCC Conference was the first body of a mainline denomination to ordain an openly gay man. We see the Court’s decision as an affirmation of the Biblical truth we hold so dear–that ALL people are created in the image and likeness of God. [Genesis 1:27]
In 2005 this Conference co-sponsored the General Synod resolution “Equal Marriage Rights for All.” This resolution “urges the congregations and individuals of the United Church of Christ to prayerfully consider and support local, state, and national legislation to grant equal marriage rights to couples regardless of gender.”

(UCC news, Northern California — Nevada Conference affirms California marriage ruling)

Now, let us note that, indeed, any congregation claiming the name of Christ should be able to share the Gospel or a helping hand, without qualms or queasiness, to anyone from prostitute to pusher to politician. We have to know that if we aren’t doing that, we aren’t really in much of a position to push back. And yet…Christ preached forgiveness and repentance, grace given to those whose eyes were opened to their sin, not affirmation given to those whose blindness we compound by our meaningless tolerance and desire to “heal” their flesh-wounds and leave their mortal ills untreated. Activism for gay marriage is hardly part of this; ordaining and affirming those who practice homosexual behavior is clearly over the line.

In an interesting and telling mark of its Left street cred, even the map of UCC churches provides a visual iconography lesson: churches are marked with a cross, presumably for traditional Christian reasons, unless they are marked with a comma, indicating their participation in the “God is Still Speaking,” campaign, and, no, I didn’t mistype any commas in this sentence. (more…)

Dr. Albert Mohler, who actually I had expected to be aboard with An Evangelical Manifesto as one of “the usual suspects” for such purposes, is not a signatory. He does note several strengths of the document; he is less troubled than I by the obvious identity politics, though he does note a concern or two on that score. Most prominently, though, the strengths and weaknesses of the document lie in its attempt to be both a theological and a not-very-theological document, and its failure to draw lines in the right places:

The document proceeds to identify several defining beliefs of Evangelicals. Among these convictions is the belief that “the only ground for our acceptance by God is what Jesus Christ did on the cross and what he is now doing through his risen life, whereby he exposed and reversed the course of human sin and violence, bore the penalty for our sins, credited us with his righteousness, redeemed us from the power of evil, reconciled us to God, and empowers us with his life ‘from above.’”

(Dr. Mohler’s Blog)

Mohler notes the sinister “for us” that makes every species of inclusivist, Barthian universalist, and thoroughgoing cultural relativist (these categories overlap a lot, I know) fit for inclusion as “evangelical,” despite the clearly sub-Christian nature of these teachings. As Mohler puts it, the document seems to clearly fail to engage “the exclusivity of salvation to those who have come to Christ by faith”–a basic claim of Christianity, and a basic element in the engagement of the evangelium and the world that needs it.

As I noted concerning Barack Obama’s liberation theology, so I note for universalism: This is not OK.

I wanted to lead off with a straight-up agreement with my gracious host:

If Phil thinks things are bad now, what would America look like if the New Left had been handed carte blanche to refashion our society? Conservative Christians have been the primary defense against the New Left’s radically immoral and anti-Christian agenda.

Beyond a doubt, the weakest point I could see in Phil’s discussion in these posts was his tendency (and this habit of argument runs among preachers a bit, I think) to dismiss all that has been achieved by the fusion of “Religious Right” with small-government conservatives, fiscal supply-siders, and anti-Communists (one should not forget the “Bear in the woods“).

At the same time, I’ve already anticipated a disagreement in how I phrased that.

See, without small-government conservatives, the “Religious Right” and the “Religious Left” would be playing power politics for the right to impose their particular flavor of “pure” or “tolerant” morality, with similarly unpleasant results either way.

Without fiscal supply-siders, we’d be at the mercy of “compassionate conservatives” who manage to use God-talk to make both “Religious Right” (faith-based initiatives!) and “Religious Left” (Jesus was homeless!) ply the Providence of the State for their well-being.

In other words, to say that “Conservative Christians” form the front line against “the New Left” is to miss the point that many a non-Christian conservative (like Jonah Goldberg) has had a hand in saving us from many a non-conservative Christian (like Mike Huckabee).

And that many of those non-conservative Christians have been Republicans, and darlings of the “Religious Right.” There are virtues to be found in opposing Gore or Kerry or Dukakis, even if the results are Bush presidencies; but we should know “it wouldn’t be prudent” to attribute that too much to Christians as God’s people, however much it may be attributed (for better and worse) to some subgroup of American voters and consumers who say “Christian” when they’re polled.

For there is no metric in Scripture by which we can judge the “success” or “decline” of the nations; there is only the surrender of their citizens to the Kingdom to come, their inclusion and incorporation into the Body of Christ, their serving one Lord, professing one faith, submitting to one baptism, zealous for the unity of that Body, the building of that Temple, of which they are members in the redoubled body.

For here lies the key of our disagreement:

“The church as a body has no calling to organize and protest in the political realm.”

What room does this leave for the prophetic role of the church? The church had no calling to organize against slavery, genocide, or the the killing of the unborn?

“The prophetic role of the church” is a misnomer; it suggests precisely the category error which, I hope, we’ve all agreed must not be made. The error of picturing the church as the prophet, and the country as the People.

No nation-state on Earth is God’s People. And we all agree to that, I think. (more…)