Hi everyone. I've spoken to most of you but I'm thrilled to have a chance for this slightly more organized discussion. Something is changing out there in evangelical land – politically, sociologically, culturally. Jerry Falwell's death sort of made it official. The old stereotypes no longer fit and we have to come up with some new ones. In gay circles they called this moment: "we're here, we're queer, get over it." Christianity Today put it this way in a 2005 editorial: "We're no longer overlooked, persecuted, discriminated against, and misquoted in the mainstream media. So we've been mainstreamed, now what?"
Now what? There are evangelicals on this virtual panel, and I'll let them say what it means for them. I'll answer from the outside.
I'm going to start with an easy one for me: Hollywood. Much has been written about the post-Passion era, in which studio executives try to woo the same audience that turned out to see the Mel Gibson movie, and the Christians flirt back ("Didn't you know," a producer told me a couple of years ago, "Christian is the new gay.") When I saw the network fall lineup last year, this new relationship had me worried. The networks were putting out different permutations of Touched by an Angel, that treacly series about the angel rescue squad that ran for decades. There was a series starring Christian rocker Amy Grant and The Book of Daniel, about a pastor who talks to a live Jesus.
But both these were quickly canceled. Evan Almighty and The Nativity Story flopped. As Michael documents in his book, Christian forays into Hollywood have often been unsuccessful, as one Christian businessman after another barrels into Hollywood vowing to "change the culture" and then runs into David Geffen.
As anyone who's ever worked there knows, Hollywood lives by a brutal bottom line; when no one watches, the studios will ditch the God talk. This is not to say Christians have had no lasting influence. I just finished a long story for the Atlantic Monthly's December issue about how the studio that made the "Golden Compass," the first in Philip Pullman's subversive series of children's novels, washed out the anti-Christian elements. And Paris Hilton does feel compelled to be photographed with her Bible in hand. But we are unlikely to be overwhelmed by cheesy Sunday school dramas. An audience can smell a poll-tested plot line. The evangelical characters that survive tend to be authentic and surprising, like the boys on Friday Night Lights.
Politics is a different story. The Bush administration has served as a training ground for the rising generation of young evangelical elites, who work at every level of the administration. At the same time, the number of congressmen calling themselves "evangelical" has soared in the last thirty years. It's pretty clear that evangelicals have become just another part of the Washington establishment, accustomed to political power.
I disagree with evangelicals on most political issues, so it's hard for me to welcome this development. But what makes me uneasy is not so much the issues as the effect on the political culture. Political disagreements are great - healthy for a democracy, fun for a journalist. But not when those disagreements are loaded with the weight of sin and evil. This generation grew up thinking of Republicans and Christians as twins, and in my experience it's hard for them to separate between those two. Supply side economics is a staple of the Republican party platform, not something dictated by the Bible. Ditto on tort reform, and even gay rights. I would bet that some part of Bush's brain confuses his commitment to the war with his commitment to God.
I don't say this about evangelicals alone. There are also elements of this in Hillary Clinton, who has talked freely about her enemies as people who do "evil." It's an appropriate term for, say, terrorists who blow up buildings. But not for a Senate Majority Leader of the opposing party.
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Fossils are a scientific fact, I agree. Carbon dating is far from a proven science.You can’t prove the age of anything by any dating method, none. It is all speculated. But yet students are being taught that it is a fact and that is a lie. Let me ask you a question. If there is 70 to 80 million year gab between dinosaurs and man, why is it that hundreds of artifacts from thousand of years ago are being found with drawings of anatomically correct dinosaurs on them? Not just one kind but numerous different kinds of extinct (?) dinosaurs. Man could not have known what dinosaurs looked like if the 70-80 million year gap existed between the species. And no, these artifacts are not from pre-historic man (?) but modern man (God created). One more thing, the fossil record does not disprove the creation model. To us it fits nicely. So let’s take evolution out of the science classes and assign it into the philosophy class were it belongs.
I'll stick with the fossils and other found things. I simply can't go with a god creating men and women as they are now. Personally I have no problem with life starting in the ocean.
If indeed carbon dating is far from a proven science, how is it that the Shroud of Turan (spelling?) has supposedly been "proven" to be old enough to be the shroud over Christ? Do you think it is the one Christ was wrapped in? Or a well planned hoax?
All the Christian right pet peeves have been trotted out here: evolution, gays, abortion, sex-ed. Evolution doth not a creator exclude. In a secular society, if we are going to exclude gays from the public process of democracy, why not exclude everybody, since all of us are sinners? Abortion is as old as the hills and as naggingly tenacious: people will do it whether legal or not. Prohibition only drove booze into the criminal underground. And sex-ed? Again, where do you want kids to learn about sex? You may be judicious in teaching your kids about it, but what about your next-door neighbor?
The church, as I said elsewhere, needs a makeover. But why are we always so slow about it? I guess we're cautious....even conservative. Staying far behind the times may seem logical. But don't be surprised if our enterprise becomes marginalized.
bottom line love is their answer
Power for religious people and religious leaders: And pray tell who has not read history back to the Pharohs? Religion has exerted more dire impacts on the path of human development over the past 10,000 years than it deserved - for most of that time religious leaders were and are leaches, parasites who neither spin or sow; and far too often were (and are) aristocrats interested not in perpetuation of some god but their own lineage and worldly goods and priveleges.
Having grown up in a small southern town afflicted with at least two awakenings of which its people were aware, don't tell me that religion is just now getting political power - in my youth there was no other than religious political power. What bunk to contend this is all new. We simply rid ourselves of religion on and off for a couple of centuries - something which I regretfully see declining as the zealots blindly arise up as if sewn as dragon's teeth - a non-seeing resolute army intent on inflicting their particular Bronze Age myths on the body politic. This is religious war for political power. The religiously inclined want to use tax money to inflict their liturgies as public policies, something that some contend the American Revolution was fought for.
If in fact religion were as superior a human solution as it contends, it would be capable of residing with agnostics and athiests and diests in the public sector, claiming what belongs to it and not worrying that the rights of the secular somehow violate the pretenses of the religious and hyper-religous. What noxious nonsense.
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