Friday, April 27, 2018

Post-FFW April Reads

The past week and a half or so of reading seems to revolve around some major related themes: our cultural crisis, the crisis of evangelicalism in America, and how should we live as faithful Christians in this time of upheaval.

 First, let's look at the recent meeting of evangelical minds on the generally anti-Trump side of things. While it's good to see a stalwart group of people committed to seeking the ways of faith, this meeting seems a bit disappointing in its ultimate outcomes. As Jemar Tisby has asked, what is it about white evangelical theology that either tends toward Trumpism, or lacks the resources to stand firmly against it? Beatty's piece points to a few of the spiritual strongholds to which evangelicalism turns something of a blind eye; while I would have liked to see more analysis of these tensions, the fear of addressing racism head on – whether spurred from the threats of their donors or their own sinful hearts – is, if not the ultimate root, certainly deep near the source of the rot in the American Church (more on this later). Ruth Graham's piece on the mutual embrace of Trump and Christian TV networks is a fantastic look at how American Christians are uniquely vulnerable to sentimental appeals to false nostalgia:


So, we have a crisis. Jake at Mere Orthodoxy gives a solid overview of where we stand at the moment, surveying the cultural situation in which we find ourselves, the challenges of racism, sexism, and doctrinal understanding in America's pews (for example, see Abigail Rine Favale's piece on her students' lack of creedal knowledge), and he wonders whether the American Church is adequately equipped to address the needs of the refugees of our collapsing culture: 

These cultural challenges manifest in the churches within that culture. For instance, American capitalism makes us skeptical of the Bible's warnings about the sinful allure of riches; our ingrained work ethic and ethos of self-reliance make us prize work above rest:


In the white American Church, we have a particular struggle with racism. It should not be hard to admit the deepness of this particular sin in our collective past, and there is no escaping its legacy within our own hearts. We should, as confessing Christians, all be willing to confront sin in all its forms, called as we are to let judgement begin at the house of God, but we struggle even to agree on the lasting legacy of our racial sins. Even churches who ostensibly acknowledge these evils still struggle to eradicate them in practice.


It isn't just in the Church that these crises manifest. Enormous forces of questionable intent (look, we know it's BAD intent, let's be real) surreptitiously record our every move. The supposedly innocuous pasttime of social media has been hijacked by malicious forces, maneuvering into the malleable minds of young people seeking quick riches. Kyle Chayka's fantastic essay on Big Data's forays into the world of fashion brings up the excellent question of whether capitalism possesses the resources to craft an identity that is not merely an expression of homogeous algorithmic consumerism:

Indeed, as many have noted about Patrick Deneen's recent book, the very roots of our political and economic system, despite its many benefits and ostensible goods, undermine the very virtue and moderation necessary to maintaining it:


Our culture is death-oriented; it does not value the lives of the poor, or of black people, of children. We can see other iterations in the parallel death-orientations of India and China, with their trends of sex-selective abortion and China's one-child policy starting to show their massive consequences:

The Church needs a change in how we view politics: a change that focuses on eternal ends rather than opposing temporal sides; a change that humbles us and refocuses our desires towards our neighbors' needs. We need to seek co-belligerents in our endeavors from outside the Church walls; we may well have something to teach them about the need for intentional formation in living a moral life:


Our view of life must be expanded, inverted even, to see how our own weakness is revealed and Christ's love is reflected in caring for those more vulnerable than ourselves:

We must open our homes to others, not as performance to show off our accumulation of cultural signifiers, but as a step towards more fully opening ourselves to the love and service of others – plus, it's a great opportunity to step into a real-life fantasy novel, where good food is abundant:


It isn't merely American Protestants feeling the strain of modernity; the Roman Church, too, is in flux, searching for a new balance between cultural assimilation and distinctiveness, and flirting (perhaps dangerously) with adapting to social changes at the expense of sound doctrine and reliable tradition:


As James Davison Hunter has observed, we're all Protestants now, enmeshed inexorably in Charles Taylor's "secular age." How do we maintain discipline in a world where an authoritative admonishment might be seen as causing sufficient friction to break with a church, and where another church, more fitting to one's consumer preferences, is readily available? How also do we speak the truth in love to those shaped by such a world, walking a road to recovery alongside sinners that may be longer than we imagine? 
We cannot do better for coming generations by focusing on an imagined future and allowing the present to fall into our mental gutters. As in just about all of Gracy Olmstead's writing, the influence of Wendell Berry looms large in both of these pieces, as she suggests we might start to think a bit smaller for our solutions:


In the interest of locality, then, we turn to Baltimore, to see the manifestation of our more local crises. As with the larger, problems, national or ecclesial, here are no easy solutions, whether it is the closing of small businesses, the reforming of an utterly corrupt police department, the tension between revitalization and gentrification, or the ramifications of the national War on Drugs on a particular city:


In past times of crisis, there are been voices of prophetic wisdom cutting through the melee; Andrea Barnet looks at the overlaps between Rachel Carson and Jane Jacobs, who both saw the contradictions and consequences of technocratic modernity and spoke forcefully against its destructive systems. Would that we might listen more closely to the women speaking out with such wisdom now; after all, it is not merely straight, white, middle-class Protestant males that the country is supposed to be for (even if this is usually how the game seems to be rigged):

We need many voices calling out in alarm to our collective conscious, exposing our blind spots and offering better stories through which to live our lives. We need to build churches with embodied ministries for the good of the cultural refugees around us; we need to build better cities in general. We need to read widely, being nourished with the empathy of great writers, while appreciating that their work is not an unlimited resource to which we are entitled:


And we must recognize our own limits, too. We are embodied creatures and our bodies are frail. We cannot solve every problem; we must find our rest in the God who made Heaven and Earth and plans to remake them. As Augustine wrote, our hearts are restless until they rest in Him, and these are truly restless times. It is a gift to participate in the emergence of His Kingdom, and part of that gift is that He is not bound by our great limitations and failures.

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