Outchurched

Update: Jason Boyett, one of the authors I picked on in this article has responded.

This has been sitting in my home directory for several weeks. I guess I should push it out and see what people think.

I recently received the latest issue of Relevant Magazine. If you’re unfamiliar with Relevant, its a sort-of hipster-Christianity magazine targeted at twentysomethings. And I hate severely dislike it.

As an aside, a wise person would ask now why I am a subscriber- well, at one point I thought it was great and bought a 3 year subscription- that was a year and a half ago.

Anyway, I’d like to point out some areas where the magazine really doesn’t get it (and where it doesn’t get that others aren’t getting it). . .

First up, an article by John Fischer entitled A New Model of Cultural Engagement, which attempts to give an alternative to ‘culture war.’ He starts off on the right track, by realizing that the Christian Right is not making much headway in this ‘war’- indeed, despite the best efforts of some right-leaning pundits, the entertainment industry is not moving to the right. But, here’s where he starts to get off track:

A culture war may be instrumental in electing a president, but it is relatively powerless in producing any real change in the culture at large. Hot, sexy and violent shows like *Desperate Housewives* and *CSI* are running just as strongly in the red states as in the blue states.

Ah! There’s so many problems with this! First of all, who says that those shows are running as well in the red states? Perhaps a citation would be in order here?

Still, I’m inclined to believe him- red-state people aren’t that different that blue-state people. In fact, most red states aren’t much redder than blue states- Bush won in many states by a less than 10% margin and won the nationwide popular vote by about 3% (hardly a mandate).

Secondly, just because a group of people voted for Bush doesn’t mean that they’re against sex and violence- to make such a claim would be absurd.

Third, I think Fisher greatly misunderstands the role culture war in this election. This time around, the war was fought by the left and right was defending. The offensive was lead by the Dean campaign, Moveon.org, some users of meetup.com, michael moore, et al.

And it didn’t work.

Because culture wars don’t work.

Fischer says it himself:

A culture war is simply not an effective model for changing culture. It is a negative posturing toward the world that only creates resistance and an over-reaction on both sides… Kerry and supporters were quite confident that victory was possible, yet were surprised by the large number of people that turned out to vote for Bush. What many failed to see is that divisive, inflammatory rhetoric (like Michael Moore) is not the way to win people’s hearts to your cause. If anything, such rhetoric hurts your cause more than it helps. So, you see, “a culture war [was] instrumental in electing a president,” but it was the left who was fighting the war and lost. Back to the article. As I quoted before:

Hot, sexy and violent shows like Desperate Housewives and CSI are running just as strongly in the red states as in the blue states.

Ah yes, in Fischer’s world, people don’t like things hot, sexy or violent. I guess he’d replace Desperate Housewives with something more like Seventh Heaven. People watch TV for entertainment, for something more exciting than their own lives, not something duller.

Enough said, now on to another article in Relevant.

An article named Apocalypse Now: A Nutshell Guide to the End of the World (by Jason Boyett) is an attempt at a survey of various apocalyptic viewpoints. I say ‘attempt,’ because I think it is less a survey of the options and more a survey of ‘the correct answer plus all the wrong answers.’ In other words, I think it is quite myopic and self-centered.

In describing Premillenialism (I’ll explain another time):

Premillennialism is the 800-pound gorilla of apocalyptic theory. It’s the predominant view among modern, conservative evangelicals and the blueprint for Left Behind

Once again- a claim of popularity without evidence- has anyone taken a survey? Doesn’t anyone really know how many people believe this? Does he realize that there is a large group of church-goers have been taught this view, not realizing it is only one of several options?

For those keeping score, the correct answer to all above questions is ‘no.’

It is quite clear from the article that Boyett ascribes to this view, despite the fact that, by his own admission, this view was “condemned as heresy at the Council of Ephesus in [AD] 431.” No big deal, huh?

He goes on to say:

Who believes this stuff[premillenialism]? LaHaye and Jenkins, of course. And Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell and Hal Lindsey. And a bunch of other people. This is a popular view.

Ah, reminds me of high school- someone’s popular because someone said they’re popular.

Later,

Who believes this stuff [amillenialism]? Theological heavyweights like Origen, Augustine and most of the Protestant Reformers. Most Catholics and main mainline Protestants are amillenialist, as are a good many Reformed theologians like J.I. Packer or William Hendrickson.

Ok, so premillenialism is popular, but I suspect that:

Catholics + mainline Protestants + Reformed > conservative evangelicals

But, of course, the conservative evangelical view is the popular view.

It doesn’t surprise me that a conservative evangelical christian who thinks he’s transcending conservative evangelicalism by writing in a hipster magazine would think their view is popular- he’s the coolest kid in the echo chamber.

One more thing I’d like to point out about his article is the lack of objectivity. I’m not sure why people think this, but they really believe that they can be objective. They think they can fairly lay out cases for opposing viewpoints without revealing what they believe. I guess they think they’re smarter than their readers.

But what if the readers are smarter? Or at least smart enough to smell the bullshit? I would suggest that one of your readers is always smarter than you and often many are smart enough to sniff the ’shit. So how about you just come out and tell us which view you hold to? It’d make things easier and might earn you some respect.*

And this is my point, if this rambling piece can be said to have a point- conservative evangelicals don’t understand others and other people don’t understand evangelicals because the two sides don’t talk to each other (and they don’t even speak the same language, for that matter).

• I really am indebted to Dave Winer for this line of thinking. He, one of the blog-fathers, has constantly called upon the MSM and all others to be more forthright.

This entry was posted by Ryan on Saturday, April 23rd, 2005 at 11:56 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.