Some Musings on Missions…
May 28, 2007
One of my favourite magazines is Books & Culture, a sort of Christian New York Review of Books. Its editor, John Wilson, is perfectly suited to his job: generous, clear, and demanding toward his authors, and in his editorials astonishingly erudite, invariably wise, and never, ever dull. If you’re tired of “dumb” religious media, here’s one to restore your faith in, well, faith.
Your servant happens to have a piece published in the most recent number, offering some provocations regarding evangelical views of missions. And there’s lots more in the archives, including a terrific evisceration of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion by mega-philosopher Alvin Plantinga.
I’m betting that anyone who likes this blog will really like this magazine. Check it out!
Christianity and the Politics of Weakness
May 24, 2007
Over the last few years, American evangelicals have been making news by saying that they’re not all on the political right. Some are on the left–at least, as “left” as mainstream American politics ever gets, which isn’t very “left” from a Canadian point of view, let alone a European one, let alone a Latin American one!
But new books keep coming out–I saw an announcement for yet another just today–from evangelical authors telling us that true Christianity eschews both the right and the left, and instead withdraws from power politics entirely. Indeed, this is the “way of weakness, not power,” the “bottom-up” or “up from under” rather than “top-down” approach, and is attributed to Jesus himself “whose kingdom was not of this world,” and so on.
I’m finishing a large-ish book manuscript that takes on this viewpoint at length–as well as some others, such as the “let’s take it over for Jesus” model of cultural transformation (whether on the religious right or left). I won’t try to summarize that argument here.
What I’ll do instead is tell a story about a story.
Church Membership: Who Counts? Who Cares?
May 20, 2007
The Washington Post reports on how “soft” numbers are for church membership in the United States–an old story among us sociologists and historians, but an important story nonetheless. The numbers are generally inflated, as many denominations and congregations don’t drop people from the rolls unless they are explicitly asked to do so–and who bothers to do that once they have drifted away from church? They’re also inflated because in at least some regions of the United States it is still “expected” that you belong to a church, so you say so when a pollster asks.
Ironies and paradoxes abound. Here’s one. The Roman Catholic Church, known for making one or two demands on its members, nonetheless keeps on its rolls anyone baptized in its churches unless they ask to be removed. But so do the Mormons and the Southern Baptists, who also are known for expecting members to toe a certain line of doctrine and practice. And even if they were the only three denominations to practice this weird kind of inclusivity (and they’re not), they’re so big that they alone would account for a huge statistical problem.
I was preparing this morning for my fourth interview on the life of Jerry Falwell when I thought I’d look into the strange case of his taking on the Teletubbies. This was a man, after all, who took on pretty big foes: Bob Guccione and Penthouse, Larry Flynt and Hustler, the liberal news media, the Democratic Party….
So what was he doing “outing” Tinky Winky?
Almost every article I looked at this week mentioned Falwell going after Tinky Winky, the purple, “magic-bag”-toting Teletubby as a covert normalization of homosexuality among the preschool set. And how risible everyone seemed to find it: Jerry Falwell attacking a cartoon character who couldn’t possibly be taken seriously as a symbol of gay pride.
–Except that Falwell was right.
Jerry Falwell, Father of the Religious Right
May 15, 2007
The Reverend Jerry Falwell has gone to his reward. He departs this life with a significant résumé in public life. And if it weren’t for him, people like him wouldn’t have such résumés.
For in the 1970s Jerry Falwell led American fundamentalists out of their self-imposed seclusion from the mainstream of American culture. Since the 1925 Scopes evolution trial, fundamentalists had withdrawn from major American institutions, or lost battles over them, and devoted their considerable energies henceforth to forming their own parallel institutions: schools, colleges, seminaries, missionary societies, magazines, publishing houses, congregations, denominations, and more.
Jerry Falwell changed all that. Much as the indubitably right-wing politician Richard Nixon could open doors to China, the indubitably right-wing clergyman Falwell could open doors to American public life. And fundamentalists have surged through those doors ever since.
Of Course It Matters that Mitt Romney Is a Mormon
May 14, 2007
U.S. presidential aspirant Mitt Romney continues to attract attention because of his allegiance to the religion of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS), known popularly as the Mormon Church. Above all that attention is the “meta-question” about whether his Mormonism should even matter in political discussion. I suggest that there should be no question that it does.
Many point to John F. Kennedy as the first successful non-Protestant to win his nation’s highest office. So if Kennedy’s faith wasn’t a problem, so this logic runs, nor should Romney’s.
But Kennedy, as several decades of history have subsequently shown, was different from Romney not only in the type of religion he had–Roman Catholic versus LDS, which is a pretty big difference in outlook–but also in his adherence to it. Romney, by all accounts, is a faithful Mormon. Kennedy, by all accounts, was no one’s idea of a faithful Catholic. So of course Kennedy could be relied upon not to take political orders from Rome. He certainly wasn’t taking sexual orders from the Church. His Roman Catholicism literally didn’t matter. But Romney really believes LDS doctrine and really practices that religion’s faith.
There’s No Such Thing as a Catholic Evangelical
May 9, 2007
Recently, Francis Beckwith, a respected philospher at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, announced his return to the Roman Catholic Church. That is interesting enough, given that Baylor is the flagship school of Texas Baptists. But Beckwith simultaneously resigned from the presidency of the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS), and later resigned from the organization entirely.
His reported reason for the latter move was apprehension about the contentious nature of the ETS, which has been roiled by sometimes-vituperative controversies–most recently over so-called open theism (a new form of evangelical theology, promulgated by Clark Pinnock, John Sanders, Greg Boyd, and others, that suggests that the future is “open” because even God does not know it for certain).
According, however, to the acting president of the ETS, Hassell Bullock of Wheaton College, Illinois, the main issue was simply that Beckwith, as a Roman Catholic, could no longer subscribe to the ETS’s statement of faith, which includes the following clause: “the Bible alone and the Bible in its entirety, is the Word of God written and is therefore inerrant in the autographs.”
