Catholic and Enjoying It!
One of the strange little riptides in American Christian culture is Evangelical hostility toward metal as Satanic, coupled with general Evangelical zeal for our military adventures. It will be interesting to see what older Evangelicals (the James Dobson generation, not the Emergent crowd) make of things like the Four Horsemen of the aROCKalypse, bringing the good news of Christian America’s benevolent designs to Muslims suspicious of the Great Satan.
One of the greatest triumphs of doublethink in my lifetime is the curious conviction many older Evangelicals still have that, looking at America, a non-Christian would have any impression that America is typified by the sort of Ned Flanders piety that Evangelicals cultivate. Our chief cultural exports are Madonna, the freak show of our infotainment media of pagan sex and violence, and condoms. As one Iraqi summarized the glory of our culture, it’s “Democracy! Whiskey! Sexy!”
Of course, as our noble Afghani allies make clear, our exportation of perversion is not mucking up native Edens. But still, I gotta wonder how Evangelical believers deal with the raw contradictions between the picture of “America: The Light and the Glory” and a culture that hardly even pretends to care about the things Evangelicals *say* are central to any healthy functioning human civilization.
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