Catch the Snowflakes, Little Children; Count Them As They Bury You Alive
Stephen Mansfield has some stuff to say about the 81% in an article entitled "After 'Choosing Donald Trump,' Is The Evangelical Church In Crisis?" And I mostly agree with him. In the places where I don't, it's usually because I don't think he goes far enough.
For example, he says, "They are in crisis. And I think there's a lot of healing that needs to happen."
Yes, but we can't leave it at that. There's a lot of repentance that needs to happen. "Healing" can't really take place without it.
And that repentance needs to come from various corners, not just the ones that were loudly political and appointed with the movement's money and resolve to speak for all within the tribe. I don't harbor the illusion that every Evangelical wanted to gain societal influence through political means -- but I do recall a strange silence on the matter as far as most people were concerned. A good number of them were probably uncomfortable with the degree to which their faith was forming its identity in terms of political ideology, but there was never much opposition. And when opposition did come, it tended to be more about the tone things were taking, not the direction or the content of the message.
Bystanders are not always innocent, in other words. Allowing the "religious right" to swell and spread unchallenged, and to remake Evangelical Christianity in its own image is contributing to the problem.
Individual adherents may not see the problem, but believe me, outsiders can see clear as day that stuffing shoeboxes for Franklin Graham's Operation Christmas Child constitutes support of the man's many years of venomous vitriol and hurtful hate speech.
You can't have 81% if the politics of the leadership are very different from the politics of the "mainstream".
I also think the author isn't quite right when he says,
I think that they are especially going to lose influence amongst Millennials, who are strongly social justice-oriented, and the surveys indicate that the vast majority of them are very suspicious of Donald Trump.
You've got an unusual situation here where the leaders of the religious right are not only having to account to a watching world for why they compromised their religious message to support Donald Trump, but you also are going to have some blowback from the very people that the religious right is trying to reach. The very people these pastors are trying to reach -- the young, people of color, etc. -- I think they may have lost them and, in some cases, permanently.
Yes, support of a man like Trump has done irreparable damage to Evangelical outreach. But what the Evangelical church has been doing isn't outreach, even though they call it that. Sure, they want to "reach the young, people of color, etc.", but they're not "trying to" actually reach those people. Their outreach tends to consist of flashier shows and trendier music and allowing their congregation to wear T-shirts. They want to swell their ranks, but only on their terms, and that isn't outreach by definition. If your attempts to get people to come to Christ means that they must agree that Roe v. Wade must be overturned, a lot of smart people just aren't going to be interested.
Outreach involves conversation. And for my entire life (and I'm not young), they haven't wanted a conversation with young people or people of color. They want to tell them to sit down and shut up, because even listening to people who aren't them might imply that views other than theirs can have validity, if not that the things they like to shout loudly are wrong. For years, in Evangelicalism, outreach has meant a demand to submit to their political authority -- and I think people are perfectly right to abandon that.
For example, he says, "They are in crisis. And I think there's a lot of healing that needs to happen."
Yes, but we can't leave it at that. There's a lot of repentance that needs to happen. "Healing" can't really take place without it.
And that repentance needs to come from various corners, not just the ones that were loudly political and appointed with the movement's money and resolve to speak for all within the tribe. I don't harbor the illusion that every Evangelical wanted to gain societal influence through political means -- but I do recall a strange silence on the matter as far as most people were concerned. A good number of them were probably uncomfortable with the degree to which their faith was forming its identity in terms of political ideology, but there was never much opposition. And when opposition did come, it tended to be more about the tone things were taking, not the direction or the content of the message.
Bystanders are not always innocent, in other words. Allowing the "religious right" to swell and spread unchallenged, and to remake Evangelical Christianity in its own image is contributing to the problem.
Individual adherents may not see the problem, but believe me, outsiders can see clear as day that stuffing shoeboxes for Franklin Graham's Operation Christmas Child constitutes support of the man's many years of venomous vitriol and hurtful hate speech.
You can't have 81% if the politics of the leadership are very different from the politics of the "mainstream".
I also think the author isn't quite right when he says,
I think that they are especially going to lose influence amongst Millennials, who are strongly social justice-oriented, and the surveys indicate that the vast majority of them are very suspicious of Donald Trump.
You've got an unusual situation here where the leaders of the religious right are not only having to account to a watching world for why they compromised their religious message to support Donald Trump, but you also are going to have some blowback from the very people that the religious right is trying to reach. The very people these pastors are trying to reach -- the young, people of color, etc. -- I think they may have lost them and, in some cases, permanently.
Yes, support of a man like Trump has done irreparable damage to Evangelical outreach. But what the Evangelical church has been doing isn't outreach, even though they call it that. Sure, they want to "reach the young, people of color, etc.", but they're not "trying to" actually reach those people. Their outreach tends to consist of flashier shows and trendier music and allowing their congregation to wear T-shirts. They want to swell their ranks, but only on their terms, and that isn't outreach by definition. If your attempts to get people to come to Christ means that they must agree that Roe v. Wade must be overturned, a lot of smart people just aren't going to be interested.
Outreach involves conversation. And for my entire life (and I'm not young), they haven't wanted a conversation with young people or people of color. They want to tell them to sit down and shut up, because even listening to people who aren't them might imply that views other than theirs can have validity, if not that the things they like to shout loudly are wrong. For years, in Evangelicalism, outreach has meant a demand to submit to their political authority -- and I think people are perfectly right to abandon that.
The title comes from Alexisonfire's "Crisis".
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