Hey, We’re Christians Too

Hey, We’re Christians Too June 30, 2015

culture warI’d like to think that New York times columnist, David Brooks, reads my blog but I know it’s not true. (Right David?) His recent column The Next Culture War, is gently, respectfully asking the church to move on – to stop fighting about sex. He offers strategic rather than principled reasoning for his request; he isn’t trying to change anyone’s mind on same-sex marriage for instance. He’s just saying that tactically this battle is lost, at least for a time and what society really needs is for the Church to focus its effort on “[reweaving] the sinews of society,” a society “plagued by formlessness,” where, “millions of kids live in stressed and fluid living arrangements,” where, “many communities have suffered a loss of social capital, many young people grow up in a sexual and social environment rendered barbaric because there are no common norms,” and “many adults hunger for meaning and goodness, but lack a spiritual vocabulary to think things through.”

Rather than redoubling our efforts and working to deconstruct the sexual revolution, Mr. Brook’s prescription for the Church is to “go into underprivileged areas and form organizations to help nurture stable families,” and “build community institutions in places where they are sparse.”

I’d say that pretty much describes the progressive wing of the Church, and of course more and more the evangelical wing as well. Brook’s hope is that the Church “can help us think about how economic joblessness and spiritual poverty reinforce each other, [because we] are the people who converse . . . about the transcendent in everyday life.” Well, sort of. I’m simply not convinced that the progressive wing of the Church has found the language to talk about the transcendent in daily life. When we lost the veracity of our myth to modernism’s relentless critique it seems, by and large, that we lost our ability to speak with anything approaching clarity about the transcendent in daily life, to a world that rolls its collective eyes when they hear “Jesus died for your sin.”

In the face of that reality the progressive church has rolled up its sleeves and focused its energy on working for justice. Alleluia! That’s a really good thing, but when we are disconnected from the source of love that in principle, is supposed to be driving us, we lose the “spiritual vocabulary” that Brooks says (correctly) can provide “meaning and goodness” for all those spiritually hungry adults. I couldn’t help but notice that he wasn’t suggesting that he himself needed any such thing. I wonder just who he thinks will go to these repurposed churches, (or synagogues).

Work for justice set aside for a moment, during the last couple of decades it seems what we progressive types have been up to is reading books by Bishop Spong, trying to feel comfortable with what we don’t believe. (To be fair, I don’t think that describes the readership of patheos.com.) Understand, I think reading Spong, Crossan and Co. is great, even a necessary step forward. It is essential that we transcend the myth, but it is more essential still for us to include the experience of God the myth was pointing to in the first place.

Brooks seems to blame the decline of the Church on the destructive fight concerning social values. I see what he means, but on the progressive side I think it’s our inability to describe the Gospel in a way that makes sense to those holding the dominant cultural world view. So my request, differing from David Brook’s, is not that we keep doing what we’ve been doing, but instead find a new play book that takes us beyond simply the work of justice. The question is, “What should be in that playbook?” That is the subject of tomorrow’s post. (It will be posted tomorrow – it’s already written.)


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