Remembering The Basics
“Evangelicalism” has rapidly, in the last few decades, changed from movement inside the church to near-religion in and of itself. This has been fueled in part by the political activism it undertook starting vaguely in the Carter years, but taking real shape under Reagan. There is a problem with this; however.
Evangelicalism can, in its ultimate forms, be much like a cancer. Its devotion to reproducing new Christians is so manically focused, so uni-directional, that is produces Christians without purpose. Like cancer which reproduces rapidly, but produces useless cells that interfere with the working of normal cells. So Evangelicalism seems to produce Christians that interfere with the better workings of the church.
This was driven home to me deeply by ths post “The Point”, a blog of Colson staffers. It looks, briefly, at atrocities committed in North Korean death camps, and then links to a deeply insightful Weekly Standard piece of what has become of the idea of “human rights.” In the middle of the piece, Joseph Laconte, summarizes the problem succinctly:
How did we arrive at this dismal state of affairs? The problem is not simply that human rights have become grossly politicized. The problem is that rights have been profoundly secularized–and severed from their deepest moral foundation, the concept of man as the imago Dei, the image of God.
America is widely acknowledged as the most religious nation on earth. But it strikes me that the religious folk of America, largely now “Evangelicals,” spent so much time trying to make (somehow, although in politics I have no idea how it can be done) new Christians, that they ignore the very basics like this.
The Republican party crumbled into bits this last cycle. One of the bigger fracture lines was religious. A certain segment of Evangelicals – those that see church as a purely reproductive instrument – flocked to “No Chance Huckabee,” apparently because he was “the most Christian.” This left far more able and more broadly conservative candidates like Giuliani, Thompson and Romney unable to pull a winning coalition together. John McCain was, simply, the last man standing. For the sake of some misplaced sense of doctrinal purity we let a president into office that will contribute to this slide of basic human rights. We elected a Congress that will more than help him.
Evangelicals need to learn there is more to being the church than making new Christians. The church is a multi-functional organism. One of the fundamental functions is keeping people alive. It’s hard to covert them after they are dead – particularly at the hands of evil.
Posted in Understanding Religion | 1 Comment » | 
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pdale on 28 Jan 2009 at 9:43 pm #
Well-stated thoughts. Huckabee made things interesting with the jokes and the guitar. But I didn’t appreciate the way he leveraged religion to divide and conquer, denying it the whole time. He was a distraction I hope we never see again.