ronically, the billions of dollars we’ve spent on youth ministers, Christian music, publishing, and media has produced a culture of young Christians who know next to nothing about their own faith except how they feel about it.”

Ugh, christian music.  A bigger abomination than the shrimp BLT

It’s almost as if spending billions of dollars on useless consumer crap would leave people feeling hollow and unsatisfied.  If only there were some good use for that money that might make young Christians feel more connected to their faith, something charitable like feeding the hungry or clothing the poor.  Too bad we don’t have any of those around anymore.

Ironically, the billions of dollars we’ve spent on youth ministers, Christian music, publishing, and media has produced a culture of young Christians who know next to nothing about their own faith except how they feel about it.”

That’s because Christians who know more about their faith and other people turn out very liberal, or go agnostic/athiest.

I’ve read some of Spencer’s stuff. He has a pretty good head on his shoulders, and most of his observations seem very spot on - especially his willingness to shoot at the sacred cows of his own tradition (to mix the metaphor).

I have some real trouble with his homophobia - he’s one of those “there are no gay people, just people with sexual sins who need to repent, and then all will be well” folks who gets enraged when someone calls him on it. Makes it hard to read the rest of his stuff, but it is not a central point in his writing.

Modern Evangelicalism has bought into the prosperity Gospel idea, that you don’t need to think, work hard, work with other people, pay attention to science, or even basic logic, as long as you have faith, God will just give you stuff, so come to our megachurch. In this economy, that is going to ring real hollow, real fast.

I expect a major resurgence of the kind of Christian i remember from my youth, that is a bit more focused on loving one’s neighbor and getting through the rough times with a community you can rely on. I think the organized politics thing is going to shatter somewhere along the way.

It’s about damn time! We don’t need any more damage caused after their several-century run.

However, they did forget one of the reasons why their kids aren’t as ridiculous as they are- They have more common sense. They realize that the science that gives them laptops, cell phones, cars, airplanes, and life-saving operations isn’t as wrong or evil as mommy, daddy, and pastor say it is. And once you accept science as being right, you can’t quite be a fundy anymore.

It could not happen to nicer people… BWHAAAAAAAAHAAAAHAAAA!!

I read this the other day, but Mormons and other religious repression is still out there and it is not like this will be the end of intolerance. Something else will come along and fill the void that could be even worse or maybe better.

Just think of how sad all those rapist will be! Soon they won’t be forgiven and get a free ticket into heaven. Oh the gilt they will be forced to live with as they sit in prison. (sarcasm)

Oh would you look at that!
———————————————-
An evangelical Christian chaplain, Navy Lt. Shane Dillman won honors for his work with wounded military members and their families during a previous assignment at Bethesda Naval Medical Center. He twice escorted President George W. Bush on tours of the hospital.

In January 2008, Dillman was charged with a range of offenses, including soliciting female sailors for sexual encounters, having sex with a woman who was not his wife, and engaging in “unduly familiar” relationships with junior enlisted women.
http://hamptonroads.com/2009/03/rear-admiral-recommends-courtmartial-chaplain

It is SHOCKING!!! That evangelical Christians are not still flocking in…..

So right, Lynele.

With the conscience clause stuff, I’ve been tempted to career change to the healthcare field, just so I could tell some fundernut when they came in for treatment of any sort of illness that caused excruciating pain - sorry, I won’t give you anything for pain relief you see, I’m a biblical literalist and pain is your deserved punishment from god for you sins.  SO giving you pain relief is going against god’s plan and that’s asking me to sin, too - SO SUFFER- WINGNUT!

Oh this is just so fucked up!!

High Point, NC—After originally posting bond, a High Point youth pastor and Christian school athletic director was re-arrested on 19 additional sex charges.

Being a repressed freak really fucks you up in the head.
http://www.digtriad.com/news/local/article.aspx?storyid=120512&catid=57

Um ... this wasn’t what they wanted all a long?  Maybe the seed company put the wrong labels on the ones they planted and fed a steady diet of steer manure?

Don’t get me wrong - misguided religion will still be out there. The Catholic Church is not a fundamentalist group, but they’re still seriously hosed. You don’t have to completely deny science to be a religious wingnut.  But the Fundamentalist flavor of Evangelicalism is seriously in danger.

So ... the same folks who rant on and on about how being gay is nothing but a feel-good lifestyle are now confronted with young people whose experience of the world has been carefully edited and who embrace Christianity as a feel-good lifestyle.

Okay.

Meanwhile, God keeps making gay people who have all different sorts of lifestyles.

There’s a commercial on the teevee selling a multi-CD compilation of contemporary christian worship music.  At one point during commercial they make the ridiculous claim “This is the GREATEST CHRISTIAN WORSHIP MUSIC OF ALL TIME!”...uh,no…and if there is a hell, anyone making such a claim about this soul-numbing dreck in comparison to Handel or Rosetta Tharpe is headed straight for it.

Also..I don’t know about this article’s grand claims of evangelism’s collapse..but in my opinion, there are a great many of the recently developed mega churchees that (a) are entirely automobile based in their congregation recruiting and (b) are based somewhere at their core on a shady land deal or land speculation that may come home to roost sooner than later given our current economic climate, tearing congregations apart with money squabbles.

If it’s true, it’s cause for celebration.  Don’t forget however, these thrive, they must have persecution even if it is from the inside.  I don’t doubt a lot of people are disenchanted with the whole megachurch experience but there’s always a willing crop of new, soft minds, ready for step in line for jesus.

It’s funny isn’t it how the Catholic Church said pretty much the same thing about “cutting dead wood” when the Western parishioners were bailing like rats leaving a sinking ship after the priest scandal broke? 

It’s almost like they’re saying “I meant to do that!  No really!  I totally meant to do that.”

...evangelicalism as it is known in the West is “bloated and hyper-inflated” and will soon collapse because of its emphasis on the culture war and affiliation with the Republican Party. According to Spencer, many people who are identifying themselves as evangelicals are not at all sold on the evangelical version of personal discipleship and commitment to Jesus Christ.

Rebolded and em’ed by me, to make my own point—Spencer first correctly identifies the danger of affiliating with the limited and unChristlike purposes of culture war and the party of wealth and privilege and abuse of both, and then reveals he shares the same blind spot those he criticizes do when he conflates their obviously flawed notion of following Jesus with the “evangelical version of personal discipleship and commitment to Jesus Christ.”

Last fall I picked up a book whose title and author eludes me at the moment; it was a survey of divergent moral attitudes within evangelical churches, written by an evangelical for evangelical audiences. Oh, wait, I believe the title was Unchristian.

Yes, here it is, by Kinnaman and Lyons.

Anyway the point is that K&L;, like Spencer, are worried that the younger generation of evangelicals doesn’t buy the confrontational, self-righteous, judgmental frame that people both outside and inside these congregations associate with them. Apparently all these authors are hip enough to recognize the reality that younger people really share a different moral frame with their generation at large, and K&L;at any rate even conceded that in some ways, these “kids” today seem more Christlike than their crochety elders. But, they like Spencer can’t really cross the line, and conclude that whatever good may be in these differences, they nevertheless are a fatal lapse in real Christian values.

Because, at the end of the day, their vision of Christ is inseparable from what I call a “dominator society” and others call patriarchy.

There is someone who comments on Fred Clark’s Slacktivist pages I’d like to cite here, but I don’t think I should because people there feel he is having a hard time personally, and he didn’t choose to come here. This is frustrating because, while he has successfully distinguished his particular fundamentalist church from the worst of others that get discussed there, his own recent heartfelt (apparently) rants against the “liberal society” that is “crushing the life” out of his church are very interesting. For him, it is all about the “rules” and he seems honestly perplexed by the world-views of those of us who feel it should be more about the overall quality of life, with rules at best being a means to such ends. He can’t see what good ends what we call “progress” lead to; part of his problem, I think, is this teleological assumption that everything in the Universe has ends; it is Creationist thinking. A lot of what we call progress is of course not a line item on some checklist agenda toward some ideal world order; it is the outcome of struggles that arise in specific circumstances because there is a problem, and we seek the nicest solution to said real problems. It is just a different view of the world, one that I think I can explain.

But it’s both amusing and informative to see what sort of stuff these people come up with to explain their situation as they see it.

There is someone who comments on Fred Clark’s Slacktivist pages I’d like to cite here, but I don’t think I should because people there feel he is having a hard time personally, and he didn’t choose to come here.

I know exactly who you’re talking about, and I feel badly for him too.  It sounds like his church has been pounding in the notion that civilization is doomed, DOOMED, now that right-wing Republicans are no longer in charge of the country, and he honestly thinks the world is ending.  I doubt his religious leaders have any idea how much they’re scaring and depressing the guy.

I don’t know if it’ll really happen, but losing political power would be the best thing that could happen to Christianity in this country.  I’m reading Rapture Ready!, and one theme that keeps coming up is the increasing dismay that many evangelical Christians feel toward the politicization and commercialization of Christian culture.  Even culture warriors who used to beat the drum against atheists and feminists and homosexuals and all the other evildoers of the modern age seem to be a) getting tired of hatemongering, b) realizing that the politicians they’ve been supporting have no real intention of turning the U.S. into a theocratic paradise, and c) questioning how much any of this actually has to do with being a good Christian.

bout half of evangelical churches will die off in the next 25 to 30 years

He says that like it is a bad thing.  Worth noting that the most recent polling data indicate that Americans are increasingly turning away from religion of all sorts.  Perhaps the Enlightenment has finally arrived here.

I don’t know if it’ll really happen, but losing political power would be the best thing that could happen to Christianity in this country.

When I was a kid (by which I mean until I left my parents’ home and went to live on my new college campus, at age 18) and still thought of myself as a devout and conservative Catholic, I actually thought this had already happened centuries ago in the USA, and everywhere by my lifetime, and that it was indeed a very good thing. I was aware of the outrageous abuses of power my Church and other Christian denominations had performed historically, and figured that now, in 20th century America, we Catholics who remained were people of genuine faith; our religious authorities had moral authority only and no secular power and this kept them honest and focused on their true mission, and so we weren’t the people Martin Luther nailed his theses on the cathedral door against anymore.

Of course I was blissfully ignorant of many sordid abuses some of these priests were still committing; I was ignorant of the manner in which the Catholic Church and various Protestant denominations had in fact warped secular governance throughout our history and if anything even more in the past few generations (from inserting “Under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance and “In God We Trust” on the money to making illegal abortion the horror show it was before Roe), and a lot of theoretical positions I would have asserted the day I graduated high school (the “sanctity of life” prohibiting abortions except to save the life of the mother, for instance, or even that birth control was sinful—though I heard that one questioned openly by a (male!) friend in religion class taught by a nun in 6th grade) I had pretty much rejected as wrong and obviously tending toward unreasonable subjugation of women within a year. It took me a while to find a new frame to consistently house my heretical views in, but they were there, in retrospect, long before I left home. The stance that homosexuality was sinful was something I actually (if silently, at least consciously) rejected even before then, largely in reaction to various blowhards cloaking their obviously mean-spirited and fearful homophobia in sanctified garb. But only after I left home could I see the integrated system of intimidation and manipulation for what it was.

You know what I love most about everything that’s happened in America over the past six months?

The knowledge that my views on all of these issues generally fall in line with the majority of Americans.  The knowledge that the good people are starting to win the culture war.

I remember back in 2003 when the Iraq War was in its early stages, and it wasn’t very popular to be against the president back then among the general population.  I remember feeling like I was always in the minority when it came to trying to debate in favor of the progressive agenda, that we were just a backwards ass country that didn’t get it.

And while I still think that I’m probably more liberal than the average bear, I know now that while positions haven’t fundamentally changed, the rest of America’s have, and when it comes to someone who considers themselves a “centrist”, that the ideas my side is presenting are going to seem a lot more appealing to them than the crap being spewed forth by Limbaughs and Hannitys of the world.

All of this gives me… what’s the word?

HOPE.

“All of this gives me… what’s the word?
HOPE.”

...what is this “hope” you speak of?  It seems vaguely familiar, and yet I can’t quite place it…

Ugh, christian music.  A bigger abomination than the shrimp BLT

Can I get an AMEN?!

While I love to believe it, I simply don’t. 

They will find some way to continue hating, be it with new members or with a new strategy.  Hate is taught, and while the younger generation may not have been taught the proper tenets, they’ve been taught to hate.

Catholics do a piss poor job of teaching their own their faith.  You’re supposed to do what they tell you to do—you want to graduate from 8th grade?  You get confirmed.  Doesn’t matter if you’ve ever really thought about it or not, or that the true dogma prefers a questioning faith.  In the parochial school system, it’s still pretty much listen to sister or else, even though there aren’t many sisters teaching anymore.

There are too many fundies who hate.  I’m pleased that Obama’s election has brought the hatred out into the open, where they can be more soundly rejected by the majority, but what if McCain had won?  You know the type of judge he would put in Ginsberg’s place.  You know there would be no stimulus to go along with the corporate bailouts.  He’d just cut taxes and continue allowing ‘conscience clauses’ and other encroachments on rights.

We were too close to that outcome.  Losing power is a shock to them, but they won’t leave.  When Armageddon doesn’t come during Obama’s administration, they will come up with some excuse for why this was just a testing time, preparing them for the eventual Armageddon.

They’re evil.  They aren’t going away.  Best we can hope for is to marginalize them and get new laws on the books protecting us from their flawed theology and get better judges in place to protect those laws.

It’s the same old “OMGZ TEH PRESSHUN IS HEAR JAYZUS IZ COMIN!” rally crap they do every time people start waking up to their shit.

Shorter Michael Spencer: “I guess making that pact with the Republican party wasn’t actually the most Christian thing we could have done.  Think it’s too late to get our souls back?”

They’re evil.  They aren’t going away.  Best we can hope for is to marginalize them and get new laws on the books protecting us from their flawed theology and get better judges in place to protect those laws.

Caren-Sun-blocking Creator of Animorphic Pancakes on 03/14 at 08:15 PM

ANd make damn sure that school vouchers don’t get in. (And that academic freedom remains at the post-sec level.) That’s how the real fundie fundies keep their young from having contact with the outside world and ideas they don’t approve of.  If vouchers get in, there will be no counter to their indoctirnation-because they will do one hell of a recruitment job to get that voucher cash.  This said as a homeschooler for academic reasons to whom the cash would definitely be a benefit - for things like chemistry sets and a subscription to Biology.

See, I’ve always thought vouchers were an evil idea.

Why should you be allowed to snag money out of the school system just b/c you have a kid in said system?  People without kids are taxed just as much as those with school-aged kids.  It’s a benefit—nay a necessity—in a democratic republic, for all citizens to have an education, and to be capable of performing some sort of work.

Not that the public schools don’t need help or improvement, but why should individual families be allowed to opt out with a chunk of tax money?

about half of evangelical churches will die off in the next 25 to 30 years

Why should we be surprised?  The bump in the demographics known as the baby boom will be pretty much shovel ready by then ... and, lets face it, every other big box hyperleveraged megamarket franchise operation is collapsing right now ... why should megachurches be any different than Circuit City and Linens and Things?

Shorter Michael Spencer: “I guess making that pact with the Republican party wasn’t actually the most Christian thing we could have done.  Think it’s too late to get our souls back?”
Older on 03/14 at 05:39 PM

It’s not a matter of being too late, it’s a matter of their souls still being Republican at heart, even these more thoughtful types who recognize there is a problem and the basis might be something other than just a Satanic plot. Full-on liberalism is a deal-breaker for them, no matter how much they try to finesse reaction with a somewhat more human face.

Because it isn’t a human face they are playing to, it is how they see the Face of God, and they think God is necessarily a reactionary on certain crucial points.

Since I don’t think God is a reactionary (and nowadays I pretty much doubt any kind of God exists at all) I suppose their compulsions come from a social source. If that’s true, their fears are in a sense justified—if secular liberalism prevails they are doomed, in the sense that their current identity and the social interests (which are anti-humane) they are seeking to promote, will fail. That that might be a good thing for them as individual people seems unthinkable, and I suppose the deep social currents they are tapping will be with us for some time no matter how brilliantly we improve things. So they are going to fight.

But some of them do recognize they have their hands tied behind their backs in this fight; that’s good.

Conscience clause? Nah, I’d just tell them that being a republican is a filthy and depraved lifestyle that I refuse to sully myself by acknowledging, and if they want to see their relatives / get treatment for whatever hetrosexual complaint they’re having, they can just go elsewhere. 

//well, okay, that would be totally fucked up

I’m sorta with Caren: as the megachurches ultimately lose power (and they mostly will, because they’re almost all designed as cults around one charismatic leader who will ultimately either get old or flame out in scandal) many of the people who want something to Believe will transfer their allegiance to other belief systems. Which may or may not be as pernicious as the churches. A lot will depend on what kind of social structure we have in the US by then.

You know, I was talking about that the other day, Paul, with our town manager.  Volunteerism in the civic sense (park beautification, tree planting, town picnics) or even civic participation (attendance at town council meetings, appointments to commissions) is declining, usually for a givnenreason of lack of time.  Yet these same people can go off to Africa or South AMerica or New Orleans for a week of mission.   
with
My thought is that one, most towns have become too big (and often too difficult insurance, formalization) and a church community is a more human scale, or two, it’s the glamour of the exotic locale that home will never have. 

However, with the rise of environmentalism, we may be able to get that energy and participation back into the secular civic arena if towns set up the opportunities for individuals and solicit secular groups to participate.

phylosopher, if you live in the areas of the Northeast that are still dominated by machine politics, there is a serious resistance to having people volunteer or work on anything, or start up anything themselves, unless they are a part of the entrenched, parochial, cliques of long-time townies.

Very much a put off?  Yep.

phylosopher:

I’m not sure that the megachurches are really at more of a human scale, but they put a lot of effort into the social-organization side, with lots of events that people can participate in, help (in some ways) when they need it, trips they can go on without leaving their cocoon, and so forth. Meanwhile, with a population that keeps moving around in seach of jobs, with two full-time and then some incomes required to support an “appropriate” lifestyle in many places, volunteerism at all the but upper echelons (where it’s spelled “networking”) is difficult to sustain.

I think the intertubes share some of the blame for this, because people end up caring deeply (and contributing to) friends and causes hundreds or thousands of miles away, and still not knowing what the person across the street or in the next apartment does for a living.

Kate:

The midwest is more of a “too much bother to work with volunteers” of any
clique. 

That’s was just my point to the town manager, paul.  In this time of , perhaps, one laid off person, or an underemployed one, people need, even more to feel that they are contributing, and also some social support and no cost “something to do.”  Towns need to grab that opportunity, or the churches will. 
(Mega churches, do a lot of that “small group stuff.” The are in some cases, small towns in a way.  As towns became more service centers instead of participatory, those churches filled the vacuum.  Time to change that.)

My prediction is that they will blame the evangelical women for not having quivers full of babies to carry on the evangelical churches.