Recently in Evangelicals Category

Take a look at this Mac vs. PC ad campaign from a Christian church:

I get what they're trying to do, and I'm mildly sympathetic. Bumper-sticker Christianity drives me crazy too. But "Christian No More" as the name of this campaign? Oh, please. And is it really the case that the answer to cheesy sloganeering Christianity is to disavow the word "Christian"? Isn't that even cheesier? How is that going to look in five years? I bet everybody associated with this campaign will be embarrassed by it. At least, I hope they are. I think Aaron D. Wolf, writing in a recent Chronicles (the link to the column itself is not online), has the better take. Excerpt:

There is no doubt that plenty has been done in the name of Christianity that has not been good for advertising. But then again, the Faith once delivered to the saints Itself is not really marketable in the first place. It may comes as a shock to some of the Christ-followers out there, but Christian has taken a beating more than once in the past. And yet, the response of Christians has not been to change the packaging. In fact, they didn't see the name as packatging at all: It was a confession.

Prosperity preachers just burn me up. But how can you save people from themselves? Excerpt from a Times story about how prosperity preacher Kenneth Copeland is still doing land-office business in hard times:

Stephen Biellier, a long-distance trucker from Mount Vernon, Mo., said he and his wife, Millie, came to the convention praying that this would be "the overcoming year." They are $102,000 in debt, and the bank has cut off their credit line, Mrs. Biellier said.

They say the Copelands rescued them from financial failure 23 years ago, when they bought their first truck at 22 percent interest and had to rebuild the engine twice in a year.

Around that time, Mrs. Biellier first saw Mr. Copeland on television and began sending him 50 cents a week.

Others who bought trucks from the same dealer in Joplin that year went under, the Bielliers said, but they did not.

"We would have failed if Copeland hadn't been praying for us every day," Mrs. Biellier said.

The Bielliers are now among 386,000 people worldwide whom the Copelands call their "partners," most of whom send regular contributions and merit special prayers from the Copelands.

A call center at the ministry's 481-employee headquarters in Newark, Tex., takes in 60,000 prayer requests a month, a publicist said.

The Copelands' broadcast reaches 134 countries, and the ministry's income is about $100 million annually.

The Bielliers were at the convention a few years ago when a supporter made a pitch for people to join an "Elite CX Team" to raise money to buy the ministry a Citation X airplane. (Mr. Copeland is an airplane aficionado who got his start in ministry as a pilot for Oral Roberts.) At that moment, Mrs. Biellier said she heard the voice of the Holy Spirit telling her, "You were born to support this man."

She gave $2,000 for the plane, and recently sent $1,800 for the team's latest project: buying high-definition television equipment to upgrade the ministry's international broadcasts.

Mrs. Biellier said some friends and relatives would say the preacher just wanted their money. She explained that the Copelands did not need the money for themselves; it is for their ministry. And besides, even "trashy people like Hugh Hefner" have private airplanes.

"I remember Copeland had to once fly halfway around the world to talk to one person," she said. "Because we're partners with Kenneth Copeland, for every soul that gets saved, we get credit for that in heaven."

You hardly know where to begin with these people. Any of them. These Bielliers are over $100,000 in debt, yet they find the money to send thousands to these televangelists crooks. And somehow, the Copelands live with themselves, knowing that they're taking money from people who cannot afford to give. Like the good book doesn't say, but should, "A fool and his money are soon parted." Still, I would hate to be Kenneth Copeland, having to explain to Almighty God one day why he did what he did, taking advantage of the desperate.

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.

During the Bush years, I would often be irritated by people on the left who would get all alarmist about Bush's Christianity, especially as it related to the Middle East. You'd often hear them say that Bush's bellicose policy was driven by a "Late Great Planet Earth" millenial vision. I thought they really misunderstood not only Bush, but Evangelicals. There were many reasons to oppose Bush's policy and question his judgment, but to chalk it up to his religious convictions surely was a sign of ignorance and prejudice.

Looks like I may have been wrong. Excerpt:

In 2003 while lobbying leaders to put together the Coalition of the Willing, President Bush spoke to France's President Jacques Chirac. Bush wove a story about how the Biblical creatures Gog and Magog were at work in the Middle East and how they must be defeated.

In Genesis and Ezekiel Gog and Magog are forces of the Apocalypse who are prophesied to come out of the north and destroy Israel unless stopped. The Book of Revelation took up the Old Testament prophesy:

"And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them."

Bush believed the time had now come for that battle, telling Chirac:

"This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people's enemies before a New Age begins".

The story of the conversation emerged only because the Elysee Palace, baffled by Bush's words, sought advice from Thomas Romer, a professor of theology at the University of Lausanne. Four years later, Romer gave an account in the September 2007 issue of the university's review, Allez savoir. The article apparently went unnoticed, although it was referred to in a French newspaper.

The story has now been confirmed by Chirac himself in a new book, published in France in March, by journalist Jean Claude Maurice. Chirac is said to have been stupefied and disturbed by Bush's invocation of Biblical prophecy to justify the war in Iraq and "wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs".

If this is true, then it is truly beyond shocking. The man took the country to war in part because of his dispensationalist beliefs! And he had the lack of self-awareness to attempt to justify the war to another head of state by referring to a particularly American view of Biblical prophecy. It means the left's paranoia about having a convinced Evangelical in the White House was not paranoid at all.

Tim Rogers, a friend and a magazine editor here in Dallas, took his little boy to see a Christian bodybuilding show at a local Baptist church. The Rogerses are Catholic, but Tim figured there was no harm in going to see Evangelicals do weightlifting stunts. And then:

"Raise your hand," the bodybuilder said. "Don't be shy. Who wants to be saved tonight, to accept Jesus Christ as his personal lord and savior?"

My son's hand went up. Uh-oh.

Then the Team Impacter summoned to the altar the dozen or so people who'd just been saved (that's all it takes, apparently, just raising your hand). I figured the boy wouldn't much care for getting up in front of a bunch of strangers, and he'd ask me whether he had to do it. I'd tell him that he was okay, seated right next to me. But no. Up he jumped, without hesitation.

I had to smile, seeing my son up there receiving applause for having been saved. I thought about Fr. Roch and Fr. Henry, the Cistercian priests who'd baptized my son, and what they'd make of these tank-topped men crusading for the boy's denominational allegiance--especially Fr. Henry, who is dead and able to haunt me. The woman seated next to me, seeing my smile, asked, "Are you proud of your son?" I told her I was, knowing she'd misinterpret my response.

Read on to see what happened next. Infuriating. I love Evangelicals, but this is the kind of thing that gives their style of evangelism a bad name.