Evangelical culture in America

I am an admirer of Evangelicals and Evangelicalism. I don't share their culture, nor do I share their theological worldview. But we have so very much in common, and I consider them to be friends and allies. But because so much of American Christianity, at least in my part of the world, is Evangelical Christianity, it is difficult to take critical notice of trends in American religious life without looking at Evangelicals. I say this to get it straight from the outset of this comment that any criticism implicit herein is criticism that comes from a friend -- and not, let me be clear, from a position of Orthodox triumphalism. A dear friend of mine left his Greek Orthodox church for Evangelicalism decades ago because he was desperate for an experience of the living Christ, and was tired of church life being a musty museum of Hellenism. I won't let the thread be hijacked by people who want only to beat up on Evangelicals.

That said, here goes.

On Friday afternoon, I drove with a couple of Orthodox church friends out to a youth retreat we held at a parishioner's lake house. As we were driving through one suburb, I pointed to a particular megachurch, and told a story about how a young Evangelical friend decided he'd had enough of that place, and megachurch Christianity, on the day he was watching the Jumbotron-esque screen behind the stage/altar, and they were broadcasting "Live" (according to the crawl on the screen) from a chapel elsewhere in the building, a baptism. The whole idea of church as multimedia event turned his stomach.

My friends in the car both came to Orthodoxy out of Evangelicalism. They got to talking about the praise-and-worship music they left behind. I, who have no experience of Evangelicalism, mentioned something a young Evangelical in Colorado wisecracked to me: that she is pretty fed up with "all this 'I want to make out with my boyfriend Jesus' music." Her point was that too much of the Evangelical worship experience was about building an intensely emotional bond with Jesus Christ. It seemed disordered to her. A former Evangelical who was part of that conversation told me that if I listen closely to the lyrics of many of those praise-and-worship songs, I'll hear a constant refrain of Self. E.g., "Here I stand at the Cross, Lord..." "Jesus, you do so much for me..." "I, I, I, me, me, me."

Again, I have exactly zero experience of this, but when I relayed this observation to my ex-Evangelical friends in the car, they both agreed with that assessment. One of my buddies even said it made him angry to hear that sort of worship music today.

We talked for a bit about how this highly emotional, self-centered approach to God goes hand-in-hand with Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, which is to say the trend among American teenagers to eschew doctrine and dogma in favor of a bland, undemanding, formless deity who has very little in common with historic Christianity. One of my friends, a high school teacher in a private (non-religious) institution, said a philosophical discussion in one of his classes recently turned into a conversation about Christian beliefs. These kids -- who are mostly from privileged families -- had no idea that Christianity taught that Jesus was God ("Isn't that something Mormons believe?" said one). He went on recalling how gobsmacked he was by the sheer ignorance of basic Christianity these kids had -- and this, in a culture that purports to be Christian. They didn't even know enough about Christianity to reject it.

Now, these kids weren't Evangelicals, or at least my friend didn't indicate that they were. But I understood him to say that we older Christians may deeply underestimate how much ground we've lost with the younger generation in this therapeutic post-Christian culture. As my friend put it, "We've spent so much time and energy trying to be 'relevant' to teenagers that we've not given them the basics."

How to effectively address this crisis, which affects all American churches today? Many of us from older liturgical traditions sometimes look with envy on all the cultural energy and enthusiasm (and numbers!) Evangelicals manage. But listening to my ex-Evangelical friends talk about what they lived through -- and these men were by no means embittered ex-Evangelicals -- made me, an outsider, wonder if all the activity in Evangelical megachurches really is as lasting or as meaningful as it seems from the outside. But it also makes me wonder how Orthodoxy, traditional-minded Roman Catholicism and more historic iterations of Protestant Christianity, can effectively reach a technophilic culture that forms souls according to emotive, therapeutic principles.

Thoughts?

UPDATE: I should say that speaking at the youth retreat, sitting out under the stars with some of the boys from our parish (junior high to early high school age), a fear came over me that I sounded like an old fart, easily dismissed, and so did the rest of us older guys. We were all speaking to the young guys without condescension, telling them real-life stories of wisdom hard-won about the kind of courage it takes to be a man and to resist temptations to drugs, sex and the blandishments of the crowd. I knew that everything I said to those boys was true, because I'd lived it. And I have faith that everything the other men said to them was also true. None of it seemed to be canned self-help crap, but the useful truth. And yet, were I sitting there as a 12 or 13 year old, how would I have heard it? Would it have been more blabbity-blah-blah from adults?

Probably.

Maybe the real service there is, as Jesse said today, simply spending time with these boys and forming relationships that will encourage them not to look to us for didactic moral instruction, but simply for personal counseling and even friendship of the sort that will accomplish indirectly what more direct instruction cannot easily do without sounding like a bunch of Wards sitting around telling Wally and Beaver what not to do.