About a month ago I lit a bunch of stuff on fire and then grabbed some popcorn and set up a lawn chair to watch what would happen. The next day, even as the embers were still glowing a little, I took some time to explain myself. I’m going to do that again, I think, after last week’s post, which lit a different pile of things on fire.
Earlier this week David Gushee continued his sad decline with a cowardly piece for Religion News Service. It’s all par for the course for progressive evangelicals like Gushee, of course, which is why I’m generally not too bothered by what they say. But even so the dishonesty in this particular piece is jarring and merits further comment.
I could quote multiple lines, but this one will suffice, to begin. In talking about those awful backwards bigots (that he used to hang out with), Gushee writes, “(Religious conservatives) are organizing legal defense efforts under the guise of religious liberty, and interpreting their plight as religious persecution.” Continue reading
Note from Jake: This is the final post in Matt’s social conservatism series published in 2012 which we are re-publishing this week.
One of my underlying themes through this week has been the current lack of confidence among mainstream social conservatism. I’ll grant this is a somewhat surprising subcurrent: after all, the religious right hasn’t exactly earned its street cred through timidity and reserve. But I have always been haunted by that old verse, “in quietness and confidence shall be your strength,” as though the most authentic and honest sign of assuredness is the mocking silence in the face of those who oppose us. Continue reading
Note from Jake: This is part three of Matt’s series on social conservatism from the fall of 2012 which we are re-publishing this week.
Let’s start today with a detour through David Brooks’ column from this week, which hits on some of the themes I addressed on Monday and Tuesday: Continue reading
Note from Jake: We are re-publishing Matt’s old series from the fall of 2012 on social conservatism:
Thesis: For social conservatism to thrive, it needs to end its hostility toward elite institutions that are currently opposed to it.
Consider this bit by Rick Santorum from this year’s Values Voter Summit, which both stunned and saddened me: Continue reading
This guest post is by Matthew Mellema.
“The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfills himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.”
Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
The rise of Donald Trump has me thinking of Tennyson, and specifically of the last scene in “Idylls of the King.” Arthur, mortally wounded in a final battle against his son Mordred, reflects on his failed kingdom to Sir Bedivere, his only surviving knight. It reminds me of the Religious Right after Trump.
I have some expertise on the Religious Right. I worked at an evangelical ministry during the halcyon days of the Bush Administration. Early in college, I was that conservative firebrand who loved picking fights with liberals in econ class, and thought that Reagan’s gospel was a logical extension of Jesus’s.
A lot of that embarrasses me now, and I’ve been distancing myself from it for years. But I still have enough of a connection to feel like Sir Bedivere, alone among the ruins of Camelot. Like Arthur, the Religious Right sowed the seeds of its own destruction. But also like Arthur, there’s something tragic in its passing. Continue reading
Alan Jacobs has some very good questions for critics of the Benedict Option, and at the risk of possibly digging myself into a deeper hole with yet another BenOp post I would like to offer some answers.
My only grounds for doing so are that I have lived in about 2½ different communities that I think could be considered “Benedict Option” (the ½ being my homeschool co-op, which I would say lacked the localism that attends most BenOp discussions).
Here is Jacobs’ succinct description of why we need the Benedict Option followed by a conclusion, which I find quite helpful:
The dominant media of our technological society are powerful forces for socializing people into modes of thought and action that are often inconsistent with, if not absolutely hostile to, Christian faith and practice.
In America today, churches and other Christian institutions (schools at all levels, parachurch organizations with various missions) are comparatively very weak at socializing people, if for no other reason than that they have access to comparatively little mindspace.
Healthy Christian communities are made up of people who have been thoroughly grounded in, thoroughly socialized into, the the historic practices and beliefs of the Christian church.
From these three premises proponents of the Benedict Option draw a conclusion: If we are to form strong Christians, people with robust commitment to and robust understanding of the Christian life, then we need to shift the balance of ideological power towards Christian formation, and that means investing more of our time and attention than we have been spending on strengthening our Christian institutions.
NOTE: Because Jake is a nincompoop he accidentally forgot to update the author information on this post before posting. The post is by Samuel James of the ERLC.
Last summer, David Brooks wrote that the social conflicts “oriented around the Sexual revolution” were over. Legal same-sex marriage and the declining influence of traditional Christianity had combined, he wrote, to put the goals of the culture wars of the last few decades out of reach. Conservatives, Brooks argued, now had two options: They could continue to fight a losing battle and eventually be counted among our culture’s worst civic villains—or, they could fight a new war, not zeroed on things like sexuality, marriage, and abortion, but on poverty and the fragmentation of society.
The defining face of social conservatism could be this: Those are the people who go into underprivileged areas and form organizations to help nurture stable families. Those are the people who build community institutions in places where they are sparse. Those are the people who can help us think about how economic joblessness and spiritual poverty reinforce each other. Those are the people who converse with us about the transcendent in everyday life.
Brooks acknowledged that conservatives are already involved in the work he suggests, but his prescription was that such work in humanitarian efforts become the primary concern of social conservatives. If Obergefell ended the first culture, conservatives should go fight another one, a war centered not over ideas about human flourishing but over situations where it is threatened.
Continue reading
Ruth Graham’s latest in Slate is, to the surprise of no one who reads her regularly, a well-done, interesting take on the future of American Christianity. You should read the whole thing, but the excerpts below gets at the key idea well enough: Continue reading
It’s happening again: Someone did something bad and now other people are threatening not to do business with them. But in this case the target for the boycott is not Starbucks or Chick-fil-a or JC Penney or Forever 21; it’s Georgia. The state, like Indiana and Arkansas before it, has passed a Religious Freedom Restoration Act that, like the laws passed by Indiana and Arkansas before it, is basically identical to the Federal bill signed into law over 20 years ago by a Democratic president whose wife now brands herself as a champion for gay rights. Continue reading