Category: Evangelicalism
Jesus Plus Masculinity for America’s Sake: Replying to “Jesus and John Wayne”
As I reflected on Calvin University professor Kristin Du Mez’s brilliantly provocative and painful, Jesus and John Wayne, I realized how many different intersections I had with her subject. After all, I serve as a pastor in a Presbyterian denomination...
Defining “White Evangelical Crap”
One of the comments I got in response to Monday’s post was a fairly simple question: “What exactly do you have in mind when you talk about ‘white evangelical crap?'” It’s a fair question. So here’s an attempt at an...
After Evangelicalism
Recently I was talking with a dear friend about how the gift that our particular collegiate experience gave us could be summarized this way: It made it possible for us to disentangle “Christianity” from “stupid American evangelical crap.”
An Unbelieving Church
Author and psychiatrist, Curt Thompson, once remarked “we become what we pay attention to.” Reformulated as a question, it becomes arguably the guiding question we need today, namely who are you becoming? In a time of political crisis and social...
Radio Theatre and the Problem of Evangelical Art
I. Embed from Getty Images Either you’ve never heard the name John Avery Whittaker, or you recognize it like an old friend’s. In fact, his friends call him Whit. You’ll like him immediately, and the more you learn about his...
What the Courtship Movement and the Jedi Both Get Wrong
We are going to play a game. The game is called “Joshua Harris or Jedi Path?” and if you bring it out at parties, you will not be invited back.
We Don’t Need Revival
“We need revival.” ~The Teeming Masses This phrase, ubiquitous among broad evangelicals, has transmogrified from banal cliche to axiomatic mantra. Having been chanted with such frequency that there is virtually no quarter among popular Christianity where it doesn’t reverberate, it...
Can Justice Be Saved? Part Two: On Faith
Christians can't embrace all aspects of contemporary ideas of social justice. But we must also recognize that what came before was similarly dangerous.
The Church of Individualism
Mark Sayers defines secularism as the pursuit of “the fruits of the Kingdom without the King.” It’s a beautifully succinct summary of a culture with a historical amnesia of it’s once-upon-a-time countercultural Christian foundations built to support the social virtues...
American Evangelicalism isn’t patriarchal or feminized. It’s matrilineal.
For many years, researchers have pondered the growing absence of men in conservative Protestant churches, especially evangelical churches. In fact, losing men has been a problem for Christian denominations since the late 19th century, which ushered in the era of...