A generational shift in evangelical Christianity?

[Cross-posted from my "secular" blog, [A]mazed and [Be]mused. By the way, my university-aged son has just joined me as a co-blogger over there, and I'm feeling pretty pleased about it!]

Evangelicals are increasingly motivated by a broader range of social concerns, from disease in Africa, to the environment, to racial reconciliation. And they want to be a witness to these values instead of a tool in the power games of others.

Newsweek. The last sentence of the quote aptly characterizes where American evangelicals have positioned themselves for the past twenty-five years:  as a tool in the power games of others.

(Perhaps I should speak of "Christianists" — the term by which Andrew Sullivan distinguishes this politicized group from other evangelicals.)

The mainstream US media has recently published a couple of articles hailing the arrival of a kinder, gentler evangelicalism. The New York Times reported:

The founding generation of leaders like [Jerry] Falwell and [James] Dobson, who first guided evangelicals into Republican politics 30 years ago, is passing from the scene [either dying or retiring]. … Meanwhile, a younger generation of evangelical pastors — including the widely emulated preachers Rick Warren and Bill Hybels — are pushing the movement and its theology in new directions.

There are many related ways to characterize the split:  a push to better this world as well as save eternal souls; a focus on the spiritual growth that follows conversion rather than the yes-or-no moment of salvation; a renewed attention to Jesus’ teachings about social justice as well as about personal or sexual morality. However conceived, though, the result is a new interest in public policies that address problems of peace, health and poverty.

In my experience, concern for the environment is also taking root among younger evangelicals.

I hope Newsweek and the Times are right to suppose that this represents a generational shift. I'm not quite convinced yet, but I'm hopeful.

There are two trends to consider. The Times is alert to one of the trends, which involves very large, "seeker sensitive" churches.

The church pastored by Bill Hybels averages 20,000 in attendance each week. To maintain a more personal touch, it makes use of 2,600 small groups. The Times comments:

Hybels, founder of the Willow Creek Community Church near Chicago, is very possibly the single-most-influential pastor in America; in the last 15 years, his Willow Creek Association has grown to include more than 12,000 churches. Many invite their staff members and lay leaders to participate by telecast in Willow Creek’s annual leadership conferences, creating a virtual gathering of tens of thousands. …

As his stature has grown, Hybels has seemed more willing to irk Christian conservative political leaders — and even some in his own congregation. He set off a furor a few years ago when he invited former President Bill Clinton to speak at one of his conferences. And the Iraq war has brought into sharp relief Hybels’s differences with conservatives like Dobson.

… On the eve of the Iraq invasion, Hybels preached a sermon called “Why War?” Laying out three approaches to war — realism, just-war theory and pacifism — he implored members of his congregation to re-examine their own thinking and then try to square it with the Bible. In the process, he left little doubt about where he personally stood. He called himself a pacifist.

The other trend is more of a grass roots phenomenon. There is a rising interest in something called the "Emergent" church. Or "movement", or "conversation" — Emergent leaders are uncomfortable being defined by labels.

The Emergent movement reminds me of the internet-driven political campaigns of Howard Dean and Ron Paul. Yes, there are identifiable leaders (e.g., Brian McLaren), but the movement as such has no hierarchy, and is not identified with any individual. It is amorphous — a concept that has spread virally — a meme.

As such, it isn't clear how much impact the Emergent movement will have on Christianity. It could self-destruct, as Howard Dean's political campaign did in 2004. On the other hand, it might represent the beginning of something new in Christianity:  a way of doing church differently in a postmodern era.

The thing to note is that these two trends, so different in approach, have similar ideals with respect to social issues. There's an amusing, semi-serious description of the seven layers of Emergence on a Christianity Today blog. Consider the seventh "layer":

Maybe the mission of the church isn’t simply to become a bigger church? … To their amazement, [the article's hypothetical congregation] discovers significant swaths of the Bible (such as the Pentateuch, prophets, gospels, and epistles) talk about justice, poverty, and compassion. The church begins to speak about social issues and participates in efforts to combat poverty, AIDS, and global injustice.

This paragraph takes a bit of a cheap shot at the Hybels model of doing church — "Maybe the mission of the church isn’t simply to become a bigger church?" Emergent folks tend to be critical of the megachurch model. Nonetheless, the paragraph's emphasis on poverty, AIDS, and global injustice is consistent with the mission objectives of Hybels's church.

In the convergence of these two trends, there is hope for the next generation of evangelicals. The reader may note an approving nod to the Emergent movement in the name of this blog, Emerging From Babel.

The state as a necessary evil

[A follow-up to Church and state: four theses]

I'm currently working through an anthology of essays by philosopher Paul Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination. I've just finished "A Philosophical Hermeneutics of Religion: Kant", in which Ricoeur summarizes Immanuel Kant's Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone.

Tough slogging? Yes, easily the most difficult of the four Ricoeur essays I've studied so far.

In this post, I'd like to call attention to Kant's view of Church and state, as summarized by Ricoeur. The Church's raison d'être is to effect what the state cannot:  the liberation of human beings' bound will.

No political institution can satisfy the requirements of a community devoted to the regeneration of the will. …

Historical action can engender only a relative state of public peace, motivated by the antagonism Kant calls our "unsociable sociability." The civil peace we call a state of law is not virtue, but rather an armistice in the war among interests. …

Kant even goes so far as to say in his essay "Perpetual Peace" that "the problem of organizing a state, however hard it may seem, can be solved even for a race of devils." Establishing peace "does not require that we know how to attain the moral improvement of men but only that we should know the mechanism of nature in order to use it on men … in such a way that they must compel themselves to submit to coercive laws."

For this reason, no political philosophy, and more generally no philosophy of culture, can satisfy the requirement of a community that aims at the regeneration of the will through specific public means.¹

I agree with Kant's view of the state. I would sum it up in the following propositions:

1. The state cannot accomplish what the Church sets out to achieve:  namely, the regeneration of humankind's corrupt will (= the liberation of humankind's bound will).


2. The state has a lesser, but still significant (and, I would add, God-ordained) role:  to establish social order despite the evil that is always present everywhere among human beings.


3. The state employs unethical, coercive means to achieve its end.

Kant's cynical perspective on human beings is captured in the pithy phrase, "unsocial sociability". We stubbornly persist in forming communities, despite our constant prickliness toward one another. Moreover, within any given community, there are sub-communities:  tribes or cliques bound together by shared interests, inevitably opposed to other sub-communities with competing interests.

The best we are capable of, Kant observes, is an armistice of interests. When we arrive at that modest achievement, we call it "the rule of law".

Kant sums up the state's limited role in his remark about a race of devils. The state does not have the capacity to effect an improvement in humankind's morals. The human will remains corrupt but still the state manages to establish (relative) peace.

The state does so by using the "mechanism of nature" on human beings in such a way that they are compelled to submit to coercive laws. It isn't clear, from Ricoeur's essay, what precisely Kant means by the phrase "mechanism of nature". But I think the gist of the statement is clear:  the state assumes wickedness on the part of human beings, and establishes institutions (laws, police forces, courts, jails) to contain wicked conduct within tolerable bounds.

Thus the state is not a benign institution:  it employs coercive tactics. Nor, on the other hand, is the state absolutely evil:  it responds to a real need (the need to contain human wickedness) and accomplishes a significant good (social order).

The state is a human institution, corrupted by the evil that is always present everywhere among human beings. (So is the Church, as I argued in my earlier post.)

The state may be relatively good or relatively evil; in exceptional cases, it may be extremely good or (more likely) extremely evil; but it is never absolutely good or absolutely evil. Hence Paul could instruct us to submit to the state "not only to avoid God's wrath but also for the sake of conscience" (Ro. 13:5).

[For the crucial importance of the Church as a check on state totalitarianism, see my post on Outside the Box.]


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
¹Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, Fortress Press, 1995, p. 89.

Church and state: four theses

Another tangent! In response to Dan's current post, Understandings of Power (why Christians should avoid being in the government).

Thesis 1:
There is no such thing as "the Church" in the abstract.

"The Church" consists of concrete entities (though these entities also have a spiritual dimension to them). Human beings, in all their fleshliness, make up the Church. Buildings, bank accounts, organizational hierarchies — these things also are inescapably a component of "the Church", however much we may deplore it.

Thesis 2:
A human being is a human being, whether inside or outside of the Church.

In my younger, more idealistic days, I took 2Co. 5:17 at face value:  "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come."¹

Bitter experience has taught me that St. Paul here articulates an ideal, rather than a reality. Christians do not cease to be human beings when they are converted. We are fundamentally the same as human beings outside of the Church, not fundamentally different from, pace Paul's bold assertion.

Thesis 3:
The line dividing good from evil runs through the midst of every human being:  Christian and non-Christian alike.

Here I am of course alluding to Solzhenitsyn's famous statement:

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.

Christians are fully human beings. Though they are Spirit-filled, they remain fallen. From the same source comes both blessing and curse. It ought not to be so — but it is so.

Non-Christians are human beings fundamentally like us. Though they are depraved, non-Christians too are created in God's image.

Thus Solzhenitsyn is right:  the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being, Christian and non-Christian alike.

Thesis 4:
Because the Church is a human institution, it commits acts both good and evil. The same is true of the secular state.

Dan asserts that it is intrinsic to government to crucify people. The Church also crucifies people, but crucifixion is extrinsic to the Church.

Dan asserts that it is intrinsic to the Church to benefit people. I hope Dan will concede that the secular state also benefits people — roads, hospitals, schools, donations of aid to other nations, etc. — but Dan dares to maintain that such benefits are extrinsic to the secular state.

Dan asserts that Christians ought not to work for the secular government. This cuts rather close to the bone for me, because I am in fact an employee of the Government of Canada.

Dan's (extreme, ideological) position leaves me rather breathless. I'm not offended by it, because I am unable to take it seriously. But I thought I would offer some theses to counter Dan's theses, to provide a rational foundation for my contrary convictions. Hence the four theses above.

Both the Church and the state crucify people; both the Church and the state benefit people. How can any Christian seriously maintain this intrinsic/extrinsic distinction, when both institutions serve up both good and evil in large proportions?

I use the word "institution" of the Church advisedly. The Church always establishes its own set of power relations, based on property, money, popularity, good looks, charisma, eloquence, musical talent, academic credentials, etc. Every social institution has its pecking order, based on considerations worthy and unworthy. The Church is no exception.

Such a pecking order exists at both the formal (organizational hierarchy) and informal (social hierarchy) levels, and the two pecking orders never correspond exactly.

Why isn't the Church an exception to the general rule? Because there is no "Church" in the abstract — spiritual and elevated above the things of this earth. The Church consists of concrete entities:  human beings plus buildings, cash, pianos, etc.

The state, as a human institution, is simultaneously both good and evil. So too, the Church, which is likewise a human institution.

Brothers and sisters, it ought not to be so. But it is:  and we must live in the real world. We must build our lives on a foundation of reality — not some abstraction that exists only in the pages of St. Paul's Spirit-fueled epistles.

In the eschaton, yes. Here and now? Regrettably — no.



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

¹Unless otherwise indicated, scripture is quoted from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version.