Here's a thread to talk about general Christian news and commentary in the US across confessional lines.
An interesting news item is popular evangelical preacher Andy Stanley recently hosted a conference for parents of sexual identity-confused youths which featured pro-homosexual panelists. It's produced some blowback from more conservative figures in evangelicalism, but indicates yet another leftward step for evangelicalism as a whole.
I wanted to post this following commentary in the Evangelicals thread in the Protestant forum, but I guess I'm not able to post there since I'm Orthodox. I feel like it's pertinent to this thread as well, though.
I grew up Evangelical in the 1990s, where there was something of a thriving Christian counterculture in the US producing some pretty good alternative music (some of which achieved mainstream success, like Jars Of Clay), social movements like Promise Keepers, and literature that became national bestsellers - most infamously the Left Behind series, but also authors like Frank Peretti became pretty successful. It felt like evangelical Christianity was overall a positive movement with an optimistic message for culture, and which actually presented a viable counterculture for kids that could be somewhat hokey, but had a certain charm for it. It's easy to look back fondly on those times as the heyday of parallel Christian culture in the US.
That all changed during the Bush years with the rise of Jerry Falwell, who sort of became the pope of evangelicalism, at least in public consciousness. By the late 2000s evangelicalism was starting to react to it, and it kicked into overdrive with the Martyrdom of St. Trayvon. Today, major publications like Christianity Today, The Gospel Coalition, and Relevant seem to wholeheartedly embrace nearly every point of the progressive urbanite agenda, with the exception - for now - of revisionist sexual ethics. Perhaps that is changing.
I always comfortably identified as an Evangelical when I was younger, going to Southern Baptist or nondenominational (which let's face it, is basically Baptist with the serial numbers filed off) churches that broadly followed conservative political ideology. You could pretty reliably identify evangelicals by points like this:
The modern evangelical - well-represented by someone like the recently-departed Tim Keller - looks more like this:
Big Eva, as some commentators have taken to calling the modern evangelicalism, is quick to decry Trump and everything he supposedly represents. Of course, many on-the-ground evangelicals - especially of the Boomercon variety - are very much still Falwellites and find themselves alienated by the direction Evangelicalism as a whole has taken. There is a large disconnect between Boomercan Evangelicalism and the major institutions and publications of Big Eva. It is interesting how this development parallels what happened about a hundred years ago with fundamentalists splitting off from the mainline denominations.
Many disillusioned evangelicals such as myself converted to Orthodoxy or Roman Catholicism as it became evident the evangelical tradition had become deeply unstable, prompting an investigation to older, more durable forms of Christianity.
An interesting news item is popular evangelical preacher Andy Stanley recently hosted a conference for parents of sexual identity-confused youths which featured pro-homosexual panelists. It's produced some blowback from more conservative figures in evangelicalism, but indicates yet another leftward step for evangelicalism as a whole.
I wanted to post this following commentary in the Evangelicals thread in the Protestant forum, but I guess I'm not able to post there since I'm Orthodox. I feel like it's pertinent to this thread as well, though.
I grew up Evangelical in the 1990s, where there was something of a thriving Christian counterculture in the US producing some pretty good alternative music (some of which achieved mainstream success, like Jars Of Clay), social movements like Promise Keepers, and literature that became national bestsellers - most infamously the Left Behind series, but also authors like Frank Peretti became pretty successful. It felt like evangelical Christianity was overall a positive movement with an optimistic message for culture, and which actually presented a viable counterculture for kids that could be somewhat hokey, but had a certain charm for it. It's easy to look back fondly on those times as the heyday of parallel Christian culture in the US.
That all changed during the Bush years with the rise of Jerry Falwell, who sort of became the pope of evangelicalism, at least in public consciousness. By the late 2000s evangelicalism was starting to react to it, and it kicked into overdrive with the Martyrdom of St. Trayvon. Today, major publications like Christianity Today, The Gospel Coalition, and Relevant seem to wholeheartedly embrace nearly every point of the progressive urbanite agenda, with the exception - for now - of revisionist sexual ethics. Perhaps that is changing.
I always comfortably identified as an Evangelical when I was younger, going to Southern Baptist or nondenominational (which let's face it, is basically Baptist with the serial numbers filed off) churches that broadly followed conservative political ideology. You could pretty reliably identify evangelicals by points like this:
- Votes Republican
- Zionist
- Pro-guns
- Pro-life
- Anti-feminist
- Pro-capitalism/big business
- Indifferent to environmental issues
- Premillennial dispensationalist/The Rapture/Left Behind theology
- Young Earth Creationist
- Male clergy
- Parallel Christian culture
The modern evangelical - well-represented by someone like the recently-departed Tim Keller - looks more like this:
- Votes Democrat or inoffensive third party, definitely not Trump
- Still pretty Zionist
- Concerned about guns
- Ambivalent about abortion/deflects to Social Justice issues
- Pro-feminist, warming up to sexual revisionism
- Still pretty pro-big business, especially if it's Apple or Google
- Cares about environment
- Ambivalent about eschatology
- Theistic evolutionist
- Enthusiastically embraces female clergy
- Desperate for mainstream cultural approval
Big Eva, as some commentators have taken to calling the modern evangelicalism, is quick to decry Trump and everything he supposedly represents. Of course, many on-the-ground evangelicals - especially of the Boomercon variety - are very much still Falwellites and find themselves alienated by the direction Evangelicalism as a whole has taken. There is a large disconnect between Boomercan Evangelicalism and the major institutions and publications of Big Eva. It is interesting how this development parallels what happened about a hundred years ago with fundamentalists splitting off from the mainline denominations.
Many disillusioned evangelicals such as myself converted to Orthodoxy or Roman Catholicism as it became evident the evangelical tradition had become deeply unstable, prompting an investigation to older, more durable forms of Christianity.
