by Peter Walker
I think my election buzz has finally run its course, and I’m starting to feel the effects of impending hangover.
Surveying the collateral damage caused by a long and vicious campaign season, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed with all of the rhetoric still hanging in the air – some of it largely unchallenged. All is fair between politicians, but once the races finish, the American people are expected to forget the harshest allegations and campaign propaganda.
“I didn’t really mean he was a friend of terrorists…”
President-elect Obama called it “do anything, say anything politics.”
But I haven’t forgotten, and neither should you. As Christians, we have some claims to confront, and even more to answer for.
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In a recent interview with Off The Map Rob Bell predicted that the next big shift in American Christianity could be characterized this way, “a little less Billy Graham and a little more Martin Luther King.”
In 1953 Billy Graham wrote his classic Peace with God.
Graham, whether conscious of it or not, was crafting a gospel message that was profoundly contextualized. Peace with God was a decidedly therapeutic idea that appealed to masses of Americans worshipping at the altar of individualism while mixed with the metaphors of Christianity.
“The post war (WWII) revival benefited from a strong social interest in peace of mind. A therapeutic rather than reformist element became a defining aspect of public religiosity” — A World History of Christianity
In 1963 (a mere ten years later) another very public Christian, Martin Luther King wrote his classic Letter From The Birmingham Jail where King was in incarcerated for practicing protest - a decidedly reformist Gospel.
King was also appealing to a context – the lost tradition of caring for the other. Charles Finney (1792-1875) the revered father of American revivalism (and thus evangelicalism) taught that the truly converted person would not only practice personal piety but also “forswear both alcohol and slavery”
This is what is coming. A spirituality that’s more about others and less about me, less my peace of mind and more changing the wrongs committed against others, less Billy G and more MLK.
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An interview with Christine Wicker
Christine Wicker’s provocative new book, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation: The Surprising Crisis Inside the Church, was released last week.
I asked Christine a few questions about her book and her own beliefs.
I’ve posted a sampling of the statistics from the first part of my book on my website. More come in every day and I’m adding them to my site as I hear about them.
In the second part of the book I look at attitudes and behavior and why it’s all happening.
That part of the book is not getting much attention from critics, but evangelicals who really care about the faith, and not merely the institution and their image of power, are reading those pages more closely than the first part of the book. They already know the faith is in trouble.
Mainstream evangelicals are so busy attacking me for even suggesting that they aren’t the robust winners they think themselves to be that they’re ignoring all the reasons the country is rebuffing them.
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