by Matthew Raley My email command center refreshes the inevitable advertisements whenever I so much as breathe. So I find myself confronted with faces smoothed from wrinkles and thighs cured of cellulite -- all by the miracle of photoshop. When the screen isn't filled with skin, there are rows of teeth.

I understand the intent. I'm supposed to be repelled by the yellow teeth, and attracted to the white ones. And, lo, I am repelled by mouths full of yellow, though the sight of lips drawn back and gums glistening with you-know-what isn't exactly delightful.

But I have to admit that I'm not attracted to the white teeth either. For starters, they're just another photoshop fantasy. Also, when drawn-back lips reveal yellow, the implication is one of age, disease, perhaps odor. When the lips and gums show stark white, it's like my computer screen is growling at me. I don't know whether to laugh or run.

Furthermore, it's just a fact: some chemical compound stripped this person's teeth. And if the toxin is capable of that, what's it going to do to the liver?

Ultimately, what bothers me about the pictures of white teeth is that I'm looking at the newest pose of self-absorption. Face against mirror, lips stretched, looking up, looking down, evaluating the yellow. Do this pose once and you'll never be able to stop, because we're always wondering, "Am I hideous?"

Yesterday I finished unChristian: What A New Generation Really Thinks About Christianity ... and Why It Matters.

This is a serious book, a salutary contribution to the debate about evangelical problems. It is filled with careful analysis, rigorous comparisons of data, and balanced conclusions. The book is honest, the statistics illuminating, and the interviews well-selected, yielding an account of outsiders' perceptions that rings true.

David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons give, on the whole, sensible guidelines to change these perceptions. I do not find a compromise of the gospel in this book, or a wavering on moral standards. The most commonly repeated admonition is to listen to outsiders before correcting them. You should read unChristian and be instructed.

I only have one concern about this book. The frame it adopts is mistaken. On the back cover, scattered through the pages, and stated in the first sentence is the way the authors want us to interpret their data: "Christianity has an image problem."

Like members of any subculture, evangelicals are sensitive about how they look to outsiders. They feel like they cannot belong to the mainstream, like they can never be understood, like the ways of their group are an embarrassment. They scheme to prove the outsiders wrong, to show who they "really are," which involves getting the rest of the subculture to look right.

The seeker-sensitive movement was a particularly ruthless example. We were told that our churches were comprehensively embarrassing. We were told to look and sound different. If you didn't go along, then you didn't care about The Lost.

Kinnaman and Lyons are not peddling that old message. They go deeper into the issues, and their prescriptions for evangelicals are often aimed restoring simple godliness.

But I think they made a mistake in catering to the evangelical obsession with image. We've been gum-to-mirror evaluating the yellow for years. We've rinsed our teeth with chemicals over and over, asking each time, "Do we twinkle now?" Our smile has only become more frightening.

The long, hard look unChristian offers at what we are doing and saying is needed. But the most powerful impression I get from it is that evangelicals are self-absorbed. The root of their problem is their vanity. The spiritual change we need will not come from image-sensitivity, which can only motivate changes of systems, mission, and presentation.

We have to be new.

Such transformations require us to pull our faces off the mirror and gaze upon the image of the invisible God.

For a long time, evangelicals have seen big media as a key to cultural influence. Such icon-creating events as Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ, the nomination of Sarah Palin for vice-president, and the current fracas over Miss California's views on gay marriage have enticed evangelicals into believing that media attention is a significant opportunity. Such attention is an opportunity -- to get eaten alive. In all three of these instances, the principals have become part of the tabloid culture.

The old culture of journalism, back when journalists were collectively known as "the press," had a liberal arts sanctity about it. Objectivity was the gold standard, and certain subjects were beneath notice. The New York Times was in every sense the gray lady: All the news that's fit to print.

The news that wasn't fit to print got picked up by the National Enquirer.

Over the last 25 years, old-school journalism has been eroded by the tabloid aesthetic. Low-brow shows like Entertainment Tonight gave rise to a new style of reporting perfected by, among others, Bill O'Reilly on Inside Edition, a tabloid show that would report in sensationalistic style on anything. The news departments of the major networks held their collective noses, but they also catered more and more to tabloid aesthetic in their magazine shows, adding music to their reports and using edgy graphics.

A large part of the hostility between the old networks and Fox News has to do with Fox's wholehearted embrace of tabloid culture. The red graphics, the blonds, and of course the tabloid reporters themselves: Bill and Geraldo.

We now have a fully assimilated tabloid culture in mainstream journalism, with bloggers, entertainers, and "personalities" operating as authority figures. Old-school journalism is hopelessly compromised.

In this new media culture, political figures have to treat the tabloid appetites carefully. They can use the entertainment reporters, the bloggers, and the "personalities" to soften their images. (Think of Barack Obama's deft use of Oprah.) But if they step too far into the tabloid zone, they become embarrassing.

Sarah Palin aspires to lead Republicans. But she failed the critical test of old journalism, the one-on-one interview with a heavy. Charles Gibson annihilated her. She thought to rescue herself by performing well on Saturday Night Live, deliberately stepping into the entertainment world, the tabloid aesthetic's all-you-can-eat buffet. She succeeded there.

Today, she and her family are owned by tabloid culture. It's Bristol and her ex-fiancé from now on.

(Rule: if you have gravitas, you can do an SNL turn. If you don't, run away.)

Mel Gibson wanted to a make a deeply Catholic art film. But he filled it with his signature stomach-turning violence. Tabloid culture continued to own him, and he ended up with a DUI ornamented by anti-Semitic ramblings.

Over to you, Miss California.

Was Carrie Prejean asked an unfair question? Maybe. Was the blogger who asked it cruel and crude? Yeah. Has the leaking of old photos been cruel and crude? Certainly.

But this was a beauty contest, people! There is no pageantry more suited to tabloid culture than a beauty contest, a wrestling match of vanity. And in tabloid culture there is no such thing as a fair fight, or a low blow, or a civilized discussion. There is only one way to end a tabloid event: the walk of shame.

If you're going to take a stand on conviction, you can't do it in the mud.

When are evangelicals going to get it through their heads? Media grandstanding is nothing more than trotting into the Colosseum, smiling, inviting the lions out, and praying the Lord will use the spectacle for his glory.

It's not martyrdom. It's folly.

A couple of years ago, browsing through a used bookstore in St. Helena, CA, I discovered a paperback edition of Alexis de Tocqueville's classic, Democracy In America. The volume was flawless, the spine and the covers uncreased, the pages without a mark or fold. I bought it, only to discover that the book had a story to tell beyond Tocqueville's. St. Helena is a fascinating artifact in itself, one that dramatizes the problem I write about in my forthcoming book, The Diversity Culture.

The town's Main Street might have been the set for Bedford Falls, and you half expect to bump into George Bailey outside the Building and Loan. It was an all-American, white, Christian town, its economy agricultural and its ways rural and bourgeois.

St. Helena is anything but that now.

While its economy remains heavily agricultural, one has to specify that the crop is grapes and the product wine. The storefronts that once held dry goods, hardware, and clothing at middle-class prices now display oils and soaps, Cartier fountain pens, designer jeans, and prints of John Lennon drawings. The old movie theater that once would have shown It's a Wonderful Life now shows indie flicks.

Ethnically, there are Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, Latinos, Blacks, and a healthy number of people whose background can't be determined at a glance. Sexually, there are gay and lesbian couples, and the number of married tourists spending the weekend is declining.

The spirituality of the town is Eastern. There are evidences of Buddhism and Hinduism, often in the forms of those systems' gods themselves. And the politics of St. Helena . . . well, the town's in the orbit of San Francisco.

Such was the context in which I opened my new literary treasure to find something I'd overlooked -- an inscription inside the front cover.

Uncle Jack has given this copy of Tocqueville to Kyle (my guess at the handwriting), addressing him pointedly as "Sir" and referring to his new "career defending America." The choice of Tocqueville tells us a great deal about Uncle Jack, as does his ebullient patriotism: democracy is "in Americans' souls," and it "empowers all great Americans onward to greatness."

Uncle Jack is a red-blooded, conservative, Fox News guy, busting his buttons about his nephew's joining up.

July 19, 2003 is well into the period when post-invasion Iraq was looking muddled, with WMD nowhere to be found and security almost as rare. But the invasion was still seen as a military success, and the 9-11 mindset remained strong.

So who sold Uncle Jack's gift, unread, the cover not even bent back, to that bookstore? Was it a disillusioned Kyle, rejecting the cause he had joined? Or was it a bereaved parent or spouse, embittered by too steep a sacrifice?

Either way, the gift given with pride seems to have been rejected viscerally. Uncle Jack would've felt right at home in old St. Helena. But the rejection of Democracy in America belongs to the new.

With America polarized about politics, sexual morality, war, and religion, any discussion about Jesus Christ is threatened by hot emotions. Evangelicals now are wondering how to navigate the hostility between left and right, the points of view of interest groups, and the intersections of church and state.

If Uncle Jack is an evangelical, he is probably trying to "reach" his St. Helena relatives, fumbling for some way to get his spiritual views across, and finding it hard even to get a response. If any dialogues about Christ do take place they do not go well, ending somewhere in "Bush lied, people died" territory.

The Diversity Culture is about a recovery of confidence that the Gospel can be heard powerfully in this atmosphere. It gives a tour of the barriers between evangelicals and other Americans. It develops a theology for reaching diverse groups. And it gives practical help for dialogue.

I wrote this book because I've lived at the intersections between evangelicals and the diversity culture my whole life. I graduated from public schools and a secular university. As readers of this blog know, I am committed to the arts. I am, in some ways, more at home in the diversity culture than among evangelicals. But I have also learned how needful the gospel is on the diversity culture's own terms. And I've learned how potent the message of Jesus Christ is when I give it as he did.

Main Street in St. Helena, changed though it certainly is, offers more opportunities for the gospel than ever.

by Matthew Raley It transpired in the media during Holy Week that evangelicalism, like Lazarus, is bound for the grave despite the earnest prayers of believers for healing. That this came to light is not cause for dismay.

The week began with a cover story by Newsweek's editor Jon Meacham, "The Decline and Fall of Christian America." Meacham gives a detailed analysis of data from, among other sources, the 2009 American Religious Identification Survey showing that the percentage of self-identified Christians has dropped by 10% over the last 20 years, and that the percentage of the religiously unaffiliated has doubled.

Meacham's thesis, that the decline of Christianity means the end of the religious right's "Christian nation" concept, is undeniable. His assessment that Christianity can benefit from a religious free market is, I think, also undeniable. Here's a quote:

The Founders' insight was that one might as well try to build a wall between economics and politics as between religion and politics, since both are about what people feel and how they see the world. Let the religious take their stand in the arena of politics and ideas on their own, and fight for their views on equal footing with all other interests. American public life is neither wholly secular nor wholly religious but an ever-fluid mix of the two. History suggests that trouble tends to come when one of these forces grows too powerful in proportion to the other.

One evangelical leader Meacham quotes extensively, Al Mohler, agreed with this assessment, while emphasizing that Christianity formed the soil in which such freedom grew. Mohler gave an endorsement to the article in comments on his blog, saying,

Mr. Meacham also suggests that this new situation is perhaps healthy for the church.  To this extent I agree -- the church gains a necessary knowledge any time the distinction between the church and the world is made more evident.  Our first concern is and must be the Gospel.  It is good that non-Christians know that they are not Christians and that Christians be reminded of that fact that what sinners need is the Gospel of Christ, not merely the lingering morality of the Christian memory.

This dialogue was provocative enough.

Then, on Good Friday, came an article in London's Daily Telegraph. The English paper, it seems, scooped the American press on a month-old speech by James Dobson. Upon leaving the board of Focus on the Family, Dobson talked to his staff about the political defeats sustained by the movement he has led for so many years. According to the Telegraph,

“We tried to defend the unborn child, the dignity of the family, but it was a holding action,” he said.

“We are awash in evil and the battle is still to be waged. We are right now in the most discouraging period of that long conflict. Humanly speaking, we can say we have lost all those battles.”

The article gave reactions from grass-roots evangelicals.

“Conservatives became so obsessed with the political process we have forgotten the gospel,” said Steve Deace, an evangelical radio talk show host in Iowa who broadcast a recording of Mr Dobson’s address, which he said had appeared on Focus on the Family’s website before disappearing.

Mr Deace added: “All that time spent trying to sit at the top table is not time well spent. Republicans say one thing and do another.”

Dobson claims to have been misquoted, though in an interview with Sean Hannity, he merely adds that he is not giving up the fight. He still acknowledges that the religious right lost in the recent elections, and he says nothing to persuade me that there is a prospect for winning politically in the future. Indeed, I found his political appraisals incoherent.

It is tempting to read these stories with a spirit of gloom. But giving in would be a mistake.

Readers of this blog will not be surprised by any of these media items. A week of bad PR has only brought to light what we have long known: Christianity is in trouble in America. Evangelicalism, as a cultural expression of faith in Christ, may well die in the sense that its institutions and ways will no longer be sustainable. I have been writing and preaching with a goal of preparing our church for this time.

But something new will emerge.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ remains the strongest force on earth. Al Mohler is right: when God's people see the distinction between the world and Christ's Kingdom sharply, they are ready to see the Gospel's power in new ways.

I am not convinced that we are in a dark time at all. To be sure, there will be ongoing cultural trauma, and much personal cost from the loss of the Judeo-Christian heritage. Still, I'm convinced that this cultural collapse has given us the biggest evangelistic opportunity in centuries. I wrote The Diversity Culture, to be released next month (excerpt in the blogroll), to show why I believe the opportunity is so large, and how we can take advantage of it by returning to the message and life of the Gospel.

America still has many people who have met the risen Christ, who know what He does, and who display Him faithfully. We have to remember why Lazarus went into that tomb: Jesus withheld healing so that he could give resurrection.

The apologetical style I exhibited in recent sermons and developed in a series of posts (1, 2, 3, 4, and 5) is not designed to be aggressive. That is, my argument is not intended to close the sale with unbelievers, but to supply what is appropriate for a season. I think the stance of evangelists has been too rigid about procedure. There is a moment in which you become a Christian, the moment when you pray the sinner's prayer. When you pray the prayer you pass from darkness to light. The appeals of evangelists and the arguments of apologists have often been designed to drive a person to that moment.

Many Christians are rethinking this stance, wondering if important decisions are really settled by a single prayer. Two theological truths are relevant.

First, there is no middle ground between those who are in Christ and those who are not. The two heads of household in the world, Jesus and Satan, are at war, and a person is in one house or the other. "[The Father] has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins." (Colossians 1.13-14)

The purpose of the sinner's prayer, to articulate a moment of transfer, is important.

Still, secondly, the Bible prescribes no spiritual pitocin for inducing the new birth. The sinner's prayer is not found in any conversion in the New Testament. Baptism declares a faith that already exists, and is not a means of belonging to Christ. The gospels show many individuals engaging with Jesus in a process of transfer (e.g. John 3.1-21; 7.45-52; 19.38-42) that is slower than the moment of praying the prayer. This process is under the direct management of the Holy Spirit (John 16.7-11).

While there is nothing inherently wrong with the sinner's prayer, then, it is only one possible means of coming to Christ, and I know many people who have shown the fruits of the new birth without it. Biblically, the radical change that moves a person into Christ's household has a process behind it. The change does not occur in a moment, but perhaps may become apparent in a moment.

The aggressive style of apologetics that claims positively to prove Christ's claims, and to disprove competing claims, has been too focused on The Moment of conversion, and not focused enough on the process in which people find themselves dealing with Christ.

I am trying to develop a style to bring clarity to that process, a style that frames choices instead of driving points. It involves several assumptions about audience.

For starters, I assume that no one needs me to drive them to Christ. Christ is driving them to Himself through his Holy Spirit. If the Spirit is at work in a person, then I need to assume the honesty of the person's intentions. If the Spirit is not motivating the person, then no argument from heaven or earth will work.

In other words, I am talking to people who are well and rightly motivated in their decision-making. They will be moved by words that are in harmony with the Spirit's voice (1 Corinthians 2).

Furthermore, I accept that someone investigating Christ is uncertain. He or she is weighing claims, and is trying to find the best basis for deciding between them. That uncertainty is not a spiritual problem, but is, in fact, the Spirit's goad. The evangelist who tries to force certitude before the individual has genuinely found it is making the disastrous error of being disrespectful. In accepting people's uncertainties, I am not compromising with "relativism," but am recognizing that their questioning is what God will use to draw them to himself.

Where the Spirit is involved, a person's doubts are an ally, not an adversary.

Finally, I recognize that there are many factors involved in making life decisions, and each of these factors has to be treated with its own ethic.

Intellectual factors are significant in such decisions, and these must be addressed with rigor. But people also make spiritual decisions in response to pain. It is not appropriate to intellectualize someone's pain, as if suffering can be "answered." Even further, people make life decisions out of their sense of who they are: can they see themselves on a particular course with a particular group? Facts and logic often have little to do with this issue, since it turns more on culture and experience.

To treat all of these factors appropriately and biblically is to treat the process of conversion with the respect it deserves.

In other words, there is a time to reason, and a time to react; a time to think, and a time to feel. There is a time to analyze and a time to synthesize.

In the process of life-change, there is a season for every kind of word.

My college student friend is like many people today who form their beliefs with an almost total disregard for evidence. He is open to supernatural claims, but closed to logic-chopping. He's ready to believe in ancient traditions, finding them not merely interesting but enlightening, and discusses them alongside the latest in string theory. Christians today are conflicted about how to address this mentality. The apologetical mode for decades has been focused on proof, but the audience for proof is dwindling.

Should I try to persuade my friend that evidence matters? Or should I provide him with a plausible narrative for faith, excusing myself from the standards of intellectual rigor?

It may help to be more specific about the postmodern person's suspicion of evidence and logic.

I believe that the use of logic to build systems and discover truth is regarded by many today as a bluff, a game played by the erudite to intimidate the uninitiated. Evidence and logic matter, but an individual's relatively small knowledge base leaves him open to counterfeits. He feels that he can't untangle truth from falsehood because he lacks expertise.

I don't think the average person agrees with the anathemas against reason pronounced by academic postmodernism. Rather, like my student friend, he is suspicious of what he cannot personally verify.

In working to persuade people of this mentality to follow Christ, there are two issues to untangle.

1. To agree with much academic postmodernist thinking that reasoning is artificial and without significance is to undermine human thought and embrace nihilism.

A biblical thinker should recognize the law of non-contradiction as foundational to thought and communication. The classic arguments for the existence of God, for example, are founded on deductive reasoning from this law, and have never been refuted. We should not pretend that speculative logic is worthless.

But these arguments have been set aside, and for good reason, to wit ...

2. Audience does matter -- its capabilities, its knowledge base, its experiences.

The abstract reasoning of, say, the ontological argument for the existence of God has always been a matter for audiences with technical fluency. There are real problems in trying to popularize such an argument.

To begin with, for most people even to comprehend it would require lectures for which they have no interest,  patience, or, in particular, use. We can agree with Mortimer Adler that every person should be a philosopher while recognizing that few have been educated as he would have educated them.

A Christian apologist has to decide whether he is a philosophical educator or a preacher of the gospel. The two callings are jealous of devotion.

Another problem with popularization is that the smiling apologist who reduces a classic argument to its breeziest simplicity will puff an audience of Christians with overconfidence and self-satisfaction. Oversimplification is not part of a healthy spiritual diet.

So propriety in reasoning matters. But so does audience.

I believe that, in our context, the Christian apologist should employ logic defensively, not to attempt positive proofs of the faith but to refute competing claims. And he should reason about matters genuinely open to his audience's knowledge base.

In my current sermon series, then, I am taking on a proposition that is heard incessantly. The world's religions are merely different expressions of the same spiritual realities.

The average person in my church has heard this. His or her friends have said it over and over. So this proposition is within his or her knowledge base, something the person is competent to evaluate.

My argument establishes a fact. The world's religions are not different expressions of the same spiritual realities. They express different spiritual realities, and the differences are consequential.

In the sermons, I have used documentation from primary sources, and analysis of those teachings in comparison with John 10 to establish this fact. I have posed questions to my audience to drive home the contrasts, inviting their own investigations of other religions to test my statements.

The focus of this approach is narrow. I want to equip my audience to dispose of a flippant generalization. I also want my audience to evaluate the claims of Christ with greater specificity and rigor, regardless of whether they already claim to believe in Jesus.

Here's my bet: take away people's generalizations about Jesus and they will have to deal with what Jesus actually said. And if they deal with what he actually said, they will end up dealing with him.

This is a method that I believe maximizes what reason and evidence can accomplish, while speaking to issues that an audience is competent to assess.

by Matthew Raley On March 20th in Dallas, TX, I will give a workshop on my new book, The Diversity Culture: Creating Conversations of Faith with Buddhist Baristas, Agnostic Students, Aging Hippies, Political Activitsts, and Everyone In Between.

This book is about the new openness to anything and everything in America, and about how you can be like Jesus in the midst of it. Here is an excerpt.

My workshop will be part of the Christian Book Expo, for which you can register at the top of my sidebar. If any of my Texas readers can be there, I'd love to meet you.

by Matthew Raley One of the most common searches that brings readers to Tritone Life is some version of, "Should Christians read Harry Potter?" Readers land on a post from my Tough Questions series last summer.

Evangelicals' visceral reaction to the Potter books continues to amaze me. The young wizard seems to symbolize their problem of how to guide children through the American diversity culture, the openness to anything and everything, without losing faith in Christ.

At Writing for the Soul, the annual conference of the Christian Writers Guild in Colorado Springs last weekend, this problem was a focus of attention, with Harry still being the reference point.

One catalyst for discussion was a keynote speech by Dr. Dennis Hensley, whose address on postmodernism was a tour de force of analysis and passion. He said that the negative view most pastors have of postmodernism needs to be revised. Postmodernism is indeed a tapestry of dangerous threads. But the increased diversity in American culture, the openness to other points of view, the humbling of Enlightenment arrogance are interwoven with threads of opportunity.

Dr. Hensley showed that our biggest opportunity as Christian writers is to create heroes who do not win their battles, but who successfully live in the moral universe God has created. Such heroes would be biblical: they would model submission to God's law in self-sacrifice, as Jesus did. They would also speak to postmodern imperatives, showing success through personal authenticity without empty triumphalism.

After such a rich address, the new cultural realities echoed in many conversations.

I talked with a Christian educator, asking whether he had tracked the spiritual journeys of his high school graduates. He had: "The majority are really struggling with their faith." They enter a culture teeming with sensual temptations, and saturated with moral and spiritual questions, and they flounder. My observations tallied with his: a deep crisis of faith incited by culture shock is now the norm.

Many believers, like my friend, assess the trials of young Christians honestly. Believers can see their kids struggling to keep and express faith in Christ without the cultural support past generations enjoyed. The response of compassion and grace is godly.

Still, many other believers are shocked by the diversity culture and its heroes. These believers will not countenance Harry, as if by pouring scorn on his popularity they can protect their kids from godlessness.

At lunch during the conference, someone asked me what books I've read to my boys. I said (trouble-making instinct freely acknowledged), "I read the first Harry Potter book with my 8-year-old. He loved it." Around the table there was silence, with one or two dangling jaws. My interlocutor said, "A pastor reading Harry Potter to his son?" Two other brave souls volunteered that they'd read the entire series.

That evening at dinner, Harry Potter came up again, and again I got surprised looks from around the table for saying that my son and I had read it. But we  discussed why Harry was so popular. A couple of writers said he was a well-drawn, living character. Rather than trying to make a "Christian" copy of him, they said, we should create vibrant characters of our own.

Artistic power won't save souls. But it might at least express Christ's truth.

In some ways, Harry speaks to postmodern children because he fits Dr. Hensley's description of a postmodern mythic hero. Harry succeeds according to a higher law, but doesn't always win. In other more important ways, Harry will continue to be a beloved character simply because J. K. Rowling has written classic stories.

For me, as a Christian parent, the issue is not so much the meaning of diversity culture heroes like Harry Potter. The issue is initiation.

Who will initiate my 8-year-old into the culture in which he must live?

If a postmodern true-believer initiates him, then my son will learn how to interpret this era, its stories, and its heroes from a point of view that may as well come from the Anti-Christ. Such is the power of the initiator.

But if I initiate my son into the culture in which he must live . . .

Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream, (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 233 pp. by Matthew Raley

I have followed the incisive writing of these men in National Review for several years, and have regretted taking so long to get to their book. Their version of recent political history, their analysis of the working class and the new stratification of American society, and their road map to Republican success are compelling.

But my interest in their book is focused less on their political acumen than on their revealing picture of evangelicals.

Religious, socially conservative voters have been a base of the Republican party for several decades. These voters come from all classes, but they are disproportionately working class and southern. They have pushed the party to adopt pro-family, pro-life, and anti-gay marriage positions, and to side with them against the sexual mores of Hollywood.

When Douthat and Salam show these voters' problems as part of the larger working class in America, a disturbing portrait emerges.

The authors assert (p 133), "The most important thing to understand about today's stratification -- economic, social, and cultural -- is that it starts at home, where working-class Americans are far less likely than their better-educated peers to enjoy the benefits of stable families."

Come again?

Better-educated Americans are liberals. They're the ones who don't have stable families, who don't even believe stable families are important. So what's this about the working class not enjoying stable families?

Douthat and Salam explain (p 133), "The divorce rate exploded across all classes in the late 1960s, but among the college educated it leveled off quickly and then began to drop." Here are the numbers (pp 133-134):

In the period from 1970 to '74, 24 percent of all first marriages among Americans with college degrees ended in divorce within ten years; two decades later, that figure had fallen to just 17 percent. During the same period, by contrast, the divorced-within-ten-years rate crept up among Americans without a college degree, from 34 to 36 percent. As late as 1980, the divorce rate for women without a four-year college degree was just three percentage points higher than the divorce rate for women with a four-year degree; by 2000, this "divorce divide" stood at nine percentage points.

Or take illegitimacy (p 134):

In the early 1960s, the rate of out-of-wedlock births was 5 percent among the best-educated third of the population and just 7 percent among the least-educated third. Over the next forty years, the illegitimacy rate would triple for the least-educated third, while barely budging among the best-educated segment of the population.

For Douthat and Salam, the social conservatism of so-called Red states is directly related to the working class's economic interests.

They quote Garance Franke-Ruta of the American Prospect (p 140): "People in states like Massachusetts, for example, which has very high per capita incomes and the lowest divorce rate in the country, are relatively unconcerned about gay marriage, while those in Southern states with much higher poverty, divorce, and single-parenthood rates feel the family to be threatened because family life is, in fact, much less stable in their communities."

The authors' point that social conservatism is not, as many liberals argue, a distraction from the real problems of the working class, is needed.

But the disconnect between the voting passions of evangelicals and the way their families live has bothered me since the late nineties, when it became increasingly obvious that the loud, beefy Rush fans were just as, if not more, immoral than their NPR nemeses, and that Red-state church attendance was not having much impact on this hypocrisy.

I read Douthat and Salam's policy recommendations with enthusiasm. I hope a talented politician is studying this book.

But when I finished it, my thoughts went back to evangelicals. Their sexual morality is more an aspiration than a fact, which puts them in a poor position to lecture the rest of the country about righteousness. The out-of-wedlock pregnancy in the Palin family is all too typical of evangelical households right now, and protests that we believe a gospel of grace are not going to gain us sympathy.

Evangelicals need to recall that the kindness of God should lead us to repentance.

My sermon on Sunday explored the connection between ignorance of God and unbelief. When God's people don't know his history, his promises, and the worldview he instantiates in the Bible, they cannot have confidence in him. In their worship, God becomes a mystery guest. The broad ignorance of American evangelicals about the faith they claim is well-documented. But I have many questions. Specifically, what kind of ignorance are we facing? In order to have abiding faith in God, what should evangelicals learn? And how?

Many have decried evangelicals' biblical illiteracy, which I have seen all too often. Once, at a banquet where I'd been invited to speak, I was seated next to a woman who'd been highly involved at the host church. She told me about a T.V. movie she had seen: a young man in olden times was sold into slavery by his own brothers, was taken to a foreign country, even wound up in prison, but eventually became the nation's ruler. The movie was really exciting, she said, adding brightly, "And it was based on a true story!"

There is, beyond this, a lack of doctrinal knowledge. People no longer learn a system of teaching about the faith, a biblically derived intellectual framework. Some even attack doctrine as a hindrance to faith.

Further, people lack a knowledge of devotional disciplines, which the spiritual formation movement now aims to teach. Further yet, there is a broad decline in practical family skills like parenting, budgeting, and communication -- skills that used to be inherited but now have to be taught.

All these species of ignorance populate evangelical pews. Churches are filled with men and women who are confident socially -- who smile and laugh with their friends, and who are eager to be involved in activities. Many of the people have confident political views as well. But let God become the sole focus of conversation, and their eyes show a certain retreat, a vulnerability and wariness.

So, what are we dealing with?

First, we are oppressed not such much by individual ignorance as by cultural ignorance. Regardless of what individuals may or may not know, communities don't know enough. People do not have a large enough fund of shared knowledge.

Cultural knowledge is, as the rhyming preachers say, caught not taught. It is gained in the rhythms of a way of life. A person learns the story of Joseph deeply -- learns Joseph's traumas, learns his importance, learns the Lord's providence in his life -- not because she hears about him in a class, but because in her church Joseph is still alive. He is a constant reference point, an icon of God's faithfulness in human suffering. Joseph is shared.

Cultural knowledge is not fully conscious. The bulk of it is prejudicial. It is not theoretical or abstract, but instantiated. It is not even coherent, in the sense that the community has fully untangled all its paradoxes. Cultural knowledge is gut-level.

Which leads to a second point: evangelical ignorance is not merely a dearth of facts but of emotion. Evangelicals do not recognize the significance of the Bible, of doctrine, of devotional and practical godliness -- recognize the significance at gut-level. Spiritual realities leave them unmoved.

When people do not have shared knowledge, they do not feel deeply enough.

A Christian way of life in America has been lost. Its rhythms of community are loose, and its shared symbols are neglected or sentimentalized. For a long time now, evangelicalism has been a parasite on consumerism, having little vitality or nourishment on its own. This is why evangelicals become wary when they're confronted with God himself. They do not share him; they share worldliness.

Pastors have been frantically trying to replace cultural knowledge with mere training. Give the people more facts, more tools, more tips.

In particular, pastors have been trying to make applications of biblical knowledge using generalizations. Joseph's story isn't "practical enough" as Genesis narrates it. In order to become "practical," the man Joseph has to be atomized into a series of "principles" that can be "applied" to "real situations in your life." So, keep a good attitude in hardship. Always do your best, whether you're in prison or in power. Just like Joseph in olden times. See ya next week.

This training approach is not necessarily wrong. But it won't educate the kind of ignorance we face: it won't build up a community's shared knowledge. It won't train people's guts.

If evangelicals are going to believe God deeply again, the preacher will need to address his own ignorance. He will need to explore how the Bible instantiates truth artistically -- through poems, narratives, and, yes, sermons. He will need to find how he can instantiate the same truth, bringing the Bible's instances to life with such specificity and detail that no one can ignore the implications. He will need to recover a sense of drama with God as the central character, not human beings.

In other words, evangelical ignorance results from the emotional detachment of evangelical preachers.

Early in 2007 I went to a writers conference in Colorado Springs, the home base of Ted Haggard. Haggard was supposed to have been a headliner at the conference, but a couple months prior he had become a headliner in a less positive way: he had resigned from his megachurch and from the presidency of the National Association of Evangelicals because of drug use and sexual immorality. Though he was not speaking at the conference, he haunted it.

At most meals, conversation discovered members of New Life, where he had been pastor, and gingerly probed them, finding them in various stages of anger and sorrow -- and also defensiveness. One man of Calvinistic views and Socratic habits, whose method I had the misfortune to witness over dinner, peered at a New Lifer through heavy glasses and questioned whether Pentecostalism had been the real cause of Haggard's fall.

The hardy soul under interrogation insisted New Life was going to be just fine.

In this buzz, I happened to be pitching a novel about pastoral deceit (since published as Fallen). I took it to a mentor for some feedback, an editor who lives in Colorado Springs, and after reading the first couple of pages he mused about the lightning chain of people he had witnessed saying to each other on the day Haggard fell, "Have you heard about Ted?"

Colorado Springs had been haunted for months.

It is not free yet. Two weeks ago, an article reported that Haggard was back, not at New Life, but at a church in Illinois. What are we to think about his return to preaching? The piece sampled many reactions, three of which made me realize something about the nature of unbelief among Christians.

Start with H.B. London of Focus on the Family -- a faithful man who is devoted to restoring fallen pastors, and who had been helping with Haggard's restoration. The article summarizes his view: "a return to vocational ministry in less than four or five years would be dangerous." Then London is quoted as saying, "To sit on the sidelines for a person with [Haggard's] personality and gifting is probably like being paralyzed. If Mr. Haggard and others like him feel like they have a call from God, they rationalize that their behavior does not change that call."

That kind of personality and gifting. He's wired to lead. You can see why he rationalizes his return, but . . . it's dangerous.

A negative assessment majoring on compassion. London's emphasis probably isn't reflected accurately by the article, but I wonder why the nod toward Haggard's charisma and talent is needed at all, and why his return would be dangerous rather than completely unjustified.

The statements seem tempered. What I think ought to be sharp edges of principled reasoning are blunted. As reported, they are weak.

A second reaction comes from Leo Godzich, who has met with Haggard weekly as part of the restoration process. "If all men are honest," he says, "all men are liars and deceivers. Once someone is gifted and called, that is something they generally cannot escape. . . . True redemption occurs when someone is fulfilling a destiny and purpose in their life."

Those sentences almost made me blow out a swig of coffee.

1. The doctrine of moral equivalence: all men are Haggard. Hit the gong. Not all men have systematically deceived their wives, their children, their associates, their subordinates, their boards, their constituents, and the public at large in order to cover up their behavior.

2. The notion of calling: Haggard "cannot escape" his "destiny." Get the hook and yank Godzich offstage. There's a substantial difference between "not escaping" and renewed self-promotion.

3. The new salvation: "true redemption" as fulfilling your purpose. It's trapdoor time for Leo. Down to the dungeon. True redemption is actually the forgiveness of sin, not the fulfillment of a calling that is very much in question.

This is the perversion of principles to fit a man.

A third reaction comes from the Illinois pastor who invited Haggard to preach. Chris Byrd says, "I had confidence his heart was solid, his theology is sound and the message he's always brought to the body of Christ would come forth." By what standard was Byrd confident that Haggard's heart was solid?Why should I be confident Haggard's theology is sound? On Byrd's say-so?

This is the substitution of pious avowals for discernment, again because of partiality to a man.

I constantly encounter people whose faith in Christ is in crisis. The reason is always the same: their relationships are entangled in unconfessed, unrepented sin. Sometimes the sin is their own; often it belongs to others. In order to salvage these relationships, they want to give and receive compassion. They want to have the space to change, and they want to give that space to others.

They are dancing a minuet of mercy with their partners. To keep the dance going, they have to keep Christ from cutting in. They have to redefine sin, broaden righteousness, and avoid judgment. But after years of giving and receiving vague compassion, they have relationships haunted by destruction. And when their rationalizations no longer give comfort, they want Christ to wave his magic wand and do a "work of transformation" -- which he won't do on such terms.

This is an anatomy of unbelief today.

In all likelihood, many New Lifers from that haunted 2007 conference have learned something about true redemption -- that sin, righteousness, and judgment will not be redefined by partiality, and that forgiveness is a sharp tool for healing.

My prayer is that they've gained a gospel worth believing.

Sermon audio (11-16-08): How To Pray For Our Region Much of the deadness of evangelicalism today traces to an uncomfortable fact: it is often a religion of mere words.

Families go to church, singing, speaking, and listening to waterfalls of words, but after the families return home, their lives do not change. Christians read page after page of words. They listen to still more words on the radio. They surf blogs to find more words yet. But the words have at best a momentary impact.

Sometimes the words themselves are solid. Faith is an ancient term describing a real action of reposing confidence in God, and when the term is paired with a definite article, the faith, it describes a real system of thought. But if a Christian uses such terms without reverence for the realities they describe, he will become more insensitive to truth. Solid words can't be thrown around without danger.

More often, the words are not solid, but squishy. Christian preaching, writing, and conversation reek of clichés, piles of vain phrases that stink up the mind's moldy corners. Let go is an imperative that can be obeyed with reference to dollars, ropes, and Eggo waffles. Let go and let God cannot be obeyed because it cannot be understood. Let go of what, exactly?

There are two words today that seem to have become poisonous: ought and should. They both express obligations. "I ought to read my Bible." "You should witness to your friends." But they also give a tacit qualification: should, ought to, but won't. These two words now express primarily guilt and yearning.

The spirituality of ought and should is what many Christians live out, a religion of mere words that presses condemnation deeper into the conscience without any hope of redemption. The biblical term for this state is unbelief.

How can a person be raised from such a death?

The only answer is prayer. Concerning which, some semi-random thoughts:

1. The realization that faith and unbelief describe the two roads of ultimate human destiny can be a powerful motivation to seek God. It's a realization that can move you from yearning to doing. It suggests danger and possibility at the same time -- the danger of unbelief, and the possibilities latent in prayer.

2. Here is a discipline that can revolutionize your prayers. Treat each word you say to people as if it were a promise. Treating your words as promises means screening out flippancy, evasion, inaccuracy, and lies, and placing sincerity, justice, and simple accuracy into your speech. This is a recognition that others depend on your words.

What is the connection between this discipline and prayer?

I think you'll find a strange dynamic begin once you weigh your every word. You start seeking God's wisdom, consulting him in real time. You start organizing your biblical knowledge for application, for quick mental retrieval, and you start asking God for his priorities in each situation. In short, you start to pray.

What I have just written may seem strange. But it works.

3. A high view of God can draw your prayers upward. If you view Jesus Christ as royal, unstoppable, and intimately engaged with everything that happens in this world, then your mind will be drawn toward him irresistably. This is the view of God behind statements like Colossians 3.1: "If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God."

The religion of mere words has a view of God that is low. God is not royal, but remote. Far from being unstoppable, God seems hindered by our inability to do his will. Far from feeling his engagement in the world, we seem unable to hold his interest.

To be raised up from dead spirituality, we have to exchange our mute idol -- an abstract, cool deity -- for the living God. The God of the Bible listens to us and knows us. That is why Jesus taught (Matthew 6.7-8), "And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. Pray then like this . . ."

Sermon audio (11-9-08): The Blind Man Finally Sees The ongoing furor over Proposition 8 -- the successful California initiative banning same-sex marriage -- heats up the question of how churches should relate to society in general and governments in particular. The intensified hostility against evangelicals, pointedly expressed on picket lines and in court rooms, is focusing believers' minds up and down the state.

In our church, we have just finished studying the man born blind in John 9, the beggar who stood alone against the rulers. What are the potential applications of his example in today's California? Will Christians face persecution because of their stand on marriage? More broadly, how does the New Testament portray the relationship between 1st century Christians and the societies in which they lived?

Some not entirely random observations, starting with the broadest issue:

1. The culture portrayed in the New Testament was diverse, and idolatry and sexual immorality were mainstream, institutionalized fixtures.

Roman society had many gods, with cultic practices that varied from city to city. The idolatry permeated civic and social interactions, and no Christian could escape direct contact with it (1 Corinthians 8-10). Places such as Corinth and Ephesus were notorious, but not unusual, for their public sexuality. In 1 Corinthians, Paul dealt with the impact of this immorality on the church, issues like which sexual relationships were legal and illegal, and the common use of temple prostitutes (1 Corinthians 5:1-2; 6:12-20).

The New Testament commands Christians to look after their own purity in sex and worship. It nowhere commands them to legislate Jesus Christ as the official God of their cities, or to pass laws that reflect biblical standards. Cultural and economic upheaval is anticipated as more people follow Christ, but only as a secondary consequence of Christ's power, not as a result of direct agitation by Christians (Acts 19:21-41).

2. Christianity in the New Testament was an urban phenomenon. The apostles went from city to city, and the gospel thrived in the hustle of commerce and the competition among new ideas. Indeed, the fact that ethnic and religious identities were softened by so much cultural interaction was a major opening for the news that a Jew had died for the whole world.

3. We are living in the decaying civilization called Christendom, an accumulation of habits, institutions, and modes of thought rooted in Athens and Jerusalem. This era of decay is a monumental time in Western civilization, at the end of which a new collection of cultures will emerge with ethics, religions, and polities that are not entirely foreseeable now. In the sweep of human history, this process is normal. The Bible records many such shifts.

California is not at the leading edge of this transition. Europe is.

4. The end of Christendom is not something to celebrate.

The decay of old habits and institutions is destabilizing and even corrupting. The cynicism and decadence that we find everywhere now are signs of selfish and purposeless living, not signs of intellectual vitality. When a simple virtue like gratitude for our cultural inheritance is held up to scorn, we can be assured that other personal disciplines like courage, integrity, and fidelity have long since passed.

Declining to throw a party over the end of Christendom is not a sign of cultural arrogance. It is simple realism. All cultural decay, at all times, and in all places leads to moral confusion.

5. The fight to preserve Christendom is misguided.

Same-sex marriage is not the tipping point in the demise of Christendom. That point was passed long, long ago. (World War I might be a good candidate.) As much as we may mourn at the grave of our heritage, it is not a sign of health to try and dig up the corpse.

Again, Christians who mourn the loss of what was good in our inheritance are not wrong. But, as they mourn, they need to do the day's work. The end of governments founded on broadly Christian notions is an opportunity to change what Christendom built in error -- specifically, we can now detach the spiritual from the political.

6. Christianity can thrive in California.

Our context is more like the first century than the nineteenth, more like the societies in which Christian faith exploded than those in which it was dying. The predictions of the death of the faith in California are foolish. There is nothing happening now that hasn't constituted an opportunity for believers in the past. The faith may indeed die out here, but if it does, it will not be the result of unstoppable external forces. It will die because Christians stop believing.

7. Christians can now thrive if they will think of themselves more like the beggar in John 9 than the rulers.

Evangelicals project a sense of ownership in American society, ownership that is at best debatable and probably specious. Their populist calls to arms are all based on the planted axiom that the rightful authorities have been usurped. This is the wrong posture. We face a confident and established culture of secular priorities. The unbelievers rule. Let's be the beggars.

The beggar's individual integrity is more powerful than collective activism. His first-hand testimony about Jesus Christ is more potent than arguments about the shape of social institutions. And the beggar's suffering is for one cause and one only: the name of Jesus Christ.

I'll put it differently. When each Christian in California has the simplicity and tenacity for Christ that the man born blind had, we won't worry any longer about the death of our traditions. We will be at the beginning of a Christian counterculture.

Sermon audio (10-26-08): Aggression Against Christ In You Last week, I received an email with a video claiming that a Massachusetts man went to jail for protesting pro-gay material that his son was given in public kindergarten. The video was produced by the Family Research Council (FRC), and was sent up and down California by the American Family Association (AFA). It interested me because of the defiant beggar we are studying at our church these days (audio above).

Let's score it.

First, I'll make a distinction. I am discussing the way this story is told by the video's producers, the FRC. The Parkers, the couple featured in the video, will have said many things in the process of making it, only a few of which the producers kept in the presentation. So I am focused on the decisions made by the producers, and by those who distributed the video.

Start with the email that went out from the AFA. The subject line was, "A father goes to jail to protect his son." That was written to be scary. The implicit claim is that if one father is arrested then others will be too. The explicit claim is that the father was arrested was "to protect his son." If those claims are true, then the subject line is scary for a good reason. If not ...

Move to the video's music. The sad and scary sound of the introductory music sets an ominous atmosphere for the story. It's a not very subtle technique that lowers the video's tone to that of a tabloid piece or a negative political ad.

The narration of the story is calm. For the beginning, the producers seem to have made the sensible decision to let the facts of what the Parkers' son encountered speak for themselves. He was given a book making a positive portrayal of a homosexual household. The producers show the Parkers expressing shock that they were not informed about this book in advance, but their point of view comes across without melodrama.

So far, while I am bothered by the tabloid gimmick telling me what to feel, the video lays out its case in a defensible way. It asserts that if same-sex marriage is legal then teaching about it will come in public schools, regardless of parents' views. This is a reasonable assertion, and the tone and content of the video up to this point are consistent with it.

But the story abruptly lurches toward a shocker ending, as the subject line of the email and the tabloid gimmick announced it would do. Mr. Parker demanded an assurance from a school administrator that he would be notified before any more teaching about homosexuality, adding that until he received such an assurance he would not leave the school.

The producers show Mr. Parker saying that he was arrested, and they juxtapose comments from Mr. and Mrs. Parker making the clear assertion that he was arrested for demanding his parental rights. The producers show Mr. Parker describing the small filthy cell, and they show him breaking down. Then they switch to a voice-over of Mr. Parker giving a call to arms.

The video, in other words, tips from a reasonable assertion to a shocking one, an assertion that totalitarians run Massachusetts. If indeed a school administrator had Mr. Parker arrested for demanding parental rights -- for using his rights to free speech -- then we have a clear case of tyranny.

So what about that claim?

Here is the Boston Globe story on the incident. "David Parker was arrested for trespassing ... when he refused to leave the building until school officials promised to give him prior notification of their use of books that include homosexual characters." Arrested for trespassing.

Contrast the story on WorldNetDaily. "The dispute grabbed headlines when Parker, on April 27, 2005, was arrested and thrown in jail by school officials over his insistence on being notified regarding his son in kindergarten being taught about homosexual relationships by adults." Thrown in jail because of the gay agenda.

You're the administrator. The guy in your office escalates a disagreement by saying that he will not leave the facility until you give him what he demands. At this moment, what's the issue? And what's your decision? In an era of random school violence that has been the subject of planning and training at all levels for at least a decade, your decision is open-and-shut. He does not have the right to make that threat.

The score is: Boston Globe -- 1, FRC/AFA/WND -- 0. Whatever value the video might've had in warning Californians about the probable consequences of the failure of Prop 8 is undermined by the producers' fatal overreach. This was not a case of state aggression, but of civil disobedience. If you are a victim of state aggression, you get thrown in jail against your will. If you protest through civil disobedience, you have announced that going to jail is your intention.

Mr. Parker may make this clear when he speaks without producers editing his statements. (He comes close to doing so at one point in the video itself.) What dismays me about this video is the willingness of the producers and the activists to exploit such an incident for no other purpose than fear-mongering.

When did Christian leaders decide that propaganda was okay?

Sermon audio (October 5, 2008): Jesus Invades Your Experience The other day, I was riding with our old Dutch dairyman Pete in his massive red truck. Over the grinding of the diesel engine, we talked about today's young men, and Pete observed that they seem to take years to figure out who they are, and what they should be doing with their lives. "I see it over and over, even in good families. There's something missing in these guys."

His comment made me think of my three-year-old son Malcolm, a tough, thick-set package of nuclear energy. He knows what he wants and he lunges for it. He had wanted, for instance, a ride in Pete's red truck, thinking it was a fire engine, and he cried angry tears on my porch when we left. I wondered why our society dissipates boys' drive and potency, and what I need to do to ensure that Malcolm keeps a healthy sense of self and grows up strong.

The woes of boys are getting increasing comment these days, but the problem of the formless, unmotivated, needy self is everywhere. Many people seem to lack solid identities, to be unable to form healthy relationships, seem to drift from one thing to the next like so much channel-surfing through life.

In this context, a pastor's temptation is moralism. Every month or so, after surveying someone's personal wreckage, I think, "I really need to do a series on time management," or, "I've got to preach on financial priorities." I wonder whether I give enough "practical application," telling people what's what.

If moralism is a temptation as a pastor, it is doubly so as a father. It is enticing to think that I can build up my son's identity through his submission to my authority.

Moralistic preaching and parenting tries to rebuild crumbling boundaries using precepts. Thou shalt and Thou shalt not. If you allow entertainment to suck your time, then of course there won't be enough hours in the day for your responsibilities. Thou shalt turn off the T.V. If you blow your money on toys, restaurant food, and mortgage-backed securities, then of course you won't have a financial chair when the music stops. Thou shalt not go into debt.

But moralism has been the downfall of contemporary Christianity. The precepts of godly wisdom nurture life in those who already have life; but among the legions who do not, the Get a clue! method of preaching doesn't edify. The "practical applications" of moralism merely compound people's guilt.

Moralism has been the downfall of Christianity because it is not the gospel.

For the needy contemporary self, the only hope is God-focused individuality, the unique expression of God's glory in a reborn personality. As we are seeing in our series on the man born blind in John 9, Jesus himself has to invade a person's life, not merely to reset what a person does, but who a person is.

Consider an observation: Human beings cannot define themselves, but are only defined in relationship.

There are two common myths about the self. One is that you can be true to some wisdom or potential inside your personality, wisdom defined by you alone -- the Oprah storyline. The other is that you can improve yourself, work hard, pull yourself up by your own bootstraps -- the moralistic storyline. The two myths are equivalent in the sense that they both portray individuals having potential on their own.

Malcolm is growing up in a society that preaches these myths, and that requires him to invent himself according to one or the other, and sometimes both.

The reality is, Malcolm doesn't have any sense of self autonomously. His definition of who he is comes from his relationships -- and it always will. He learns about himself through the process of relating to me, to his mom, to his grandparents, to other adults in the community like Pete. His self-awareness as an adult will grow in the context of interaction. He defines himself in relationship.

If I surrender to the temptation of moralism, then I will raise Malcolm using precepts. I will portray Jesus as the person with high standards, who is forgiving of Malcolm's faults, but who is all too frequently "disappointed." Malcolm's relationship to this Jesus will teach him a sense of self that is sickened by failure.

This is not the Jesus of John 9, who heals the blind.

Jesus is Malcolm's creator, and designed Malcolm to display the works of God. All of Malcolm's traits have the potential to make God's glory visible. Because Malcolm has this potential, Jesus is invading his experiences. Jesus is not waiting for an invitation. Having paid for sin, and bringing new life with him, Jesus is able to slather Malcolm's eyes with mud and give him spiritual sight. As Malcolm is defined more and more by his interactions with Jesus, even Malcolm's limitations and faults will become visible marks of divine love.

The gospel calls for a new individuality in Christ, a uniqueness forged by loving relationship. The gospel resets who people are. I don't know if the passive, disappointed Jesus who is just waiting for people to be interested in him is the sole cause of today's unformed, unmotivated, needy self. There may be more causes than Christian moralism.

But I do know that what's missing from people today is Jesus himself.

Sermon audio: Do Evangelicals Portray Jesus Accurately? This question from the community invites me to do what some believe I do best: criticize my own subculture. Of course, I will answer, "Evangelicals often do not portray Jesus accurately." And, of course, I will try to specify which evangelical qualities are misleading. By merely asking this question, someone has presumed a negative answer.

There is a larger issue. What attitude should we have toward the deepening problems of evangelical churches?

The criticisms from emergents that American evangelicals are Christianized consumers, that they lack authentic community, that their worship is stilted, and that they are not on the side of the poor all have merit. The doctrinal criticisms from the reformed movement (MacArthur, Piper, et al.) rightly indict the lack of biblical integrity among many evangelicals. Even the criticisms that the church growth movement has made over the past thirty years -- that churches are not reaching non-Christians -- are accurate. (The criticisms just happen to be accurate of the church growth movement itself, as well.)

Put all of these criticisms together, and the picture is dire. A movement that is not growing, not intellectually coherent, and not engaged with other cultures is a movement near death.

James Stockdale, one of the most famous American POWs in North Vietnam, has been used as an example of how to survive dire situations by business author Jim Collins. (The book is Good To Great.) What kind of man did not survive the POW experience? Stockdale said the optimist, the man who was sure he'd be home by Christmas, but whose steadily retreating target dates for release were never kept. The positive thinkers died.

The survivors, said Stockdale, had two things. They had faith that they would survive, and discipline to confront the brutal facts of their environment. Collins tagged this the "Stockdale paradox," the irony that unstinting honesty about dire situations can actually bolster the faith one needs to survive.

I want to see evangelicals eschew optimism about their predicament.

Let's take, as an example, their recent explosion of support for Gov. Sarah Palin. Personally, I like her. She gives a great speech. I admire her decision not to abort her baby boy, and I respect the way she and her husband have handled the appalling media abuse of their 17-year-old daughter. I think the clash of the classes her nomination has provoked is good old-fashioned political fun.

But the adulation of her by evangelicals is in one important respect delusional. She will not change Washington from the vice president's mansion -- populists to the contrary. She will not change American culture. She will not even change the culture of evangelical churches -- though she reflects and represents them well. Her presence on the national stage simply does not address the spiritual issues we face.

We won't be freed from the dire evangelical crisis by Christmas.

A brutal honesty about our future says:

1. Our compromise with America's consumer society has been a disaster. Consumerism will have to be rooted out of our churches soul by soul.
2. Our transformation of churches into entertainment platforms has been a disaster. Devout worship of the living God will have to be rediscovered soul by soul.
3. Our financial selfishness will have to be corrected by the good hand of God soul by soul, until we are once again the people who stand with the poor.
4. Our doctrinal ignorance and folly has turned our brains to mud. Knowledge of the truth will have to be taught soul by soul.
5. Our fear of the cultures around us, and our refusal to interact meaningfully with them -- that is, interact beyond marketing ploys -- has left us unable to articulate the gospel in our own time. Soul by soul, we will have to rebuild a vigorous way of life and witness in hostile territory.

I believe that, once we are honest about these things, we will have ground for a strong faith that Christianity will survive and prosper in the future. The moment we look at these five realities, harsh though they are, we realize that the tool for teaching soul by soul is everywhere in this country: the local church. The body of Christ in its many meetings has been doing this job for centuries. We just need to start doing the job again.

Our ultimate ground for faith is our Lord and his plan. As we follow him afresh, Jesus is well able to portray himself accurately in his churches.

Sermon audio: Can We Live Like the Devil and Go To Heaven? I left the wording of this question exactly the way it came to me. I like the flamboyance. But I do wonder how anyone came to ask it at all. I think one factor is the evangelical reliance on the sinner's prayer.

Here's the gist: "Jesus, please forgive my sins because of your death on the cross. I ask to you live in my heart, and to give me eternal life." People are exhorted to pray this way to become Christians, and many have been encouraged to see their prayer as the guarantee of their new life in Christ. After praying this, we've been told, you cannot lose your salvation.

Our questioner is asking how strong that guarantee is.

My own relationship with the sinner's prayer has been troubled.

In a sense, my Christian life did begin by "praying the prayer." One evening when I was five, my dad was giving me a piano lesson. At one point, he stopped talking about music and asked if I'd ever invited Jesus into my heart. I said no. So we prayed together and that same night my parents took me to both sets of grandparents to tell what I had done. Which was better than finishing my scales.

Dad told me recently that he saw a marked change in me after that prayer.

In another sense, however, the prayer was not the beginning of my Christian life. It only summed up what the Lord had already been doing in my heart-and-mind, and gave expression to a faith I already had. Crucial aspects of walking with the Lord came later in my experience, and these were more deliberate moments of commitment.

In my teenage years, I wondered what the sinner's prayer really accomplishes.

Some of the things I saw growing up in church had made me skeptical. One Sunday morning a man gave his testimony, telling a great story of how he came to pray the prayer. A couple weeks later, I overheard a conversation that my mom had on the phone, in which she learned that this man had left his wife for another woman.

I saw kids in youth group go forward during the altar calls at big conferences. We would throw a party over the sinner's repentance, only to see him continue his immoral lifestyle. In fact, few of the converts from youth group remained Christians past college.

The more questions I asked about salvation, the more I heard answers that didn't work.

One idea was that those who abandoned the Christian life after praying the prayer were still eternally saved. I thought it was simply unbelievable, flying in the face of both direct experience and scriptural teaching. Another idea was that lapsed converts didn't believe "enough," which wasn't any clearer to me. By and by, I learned that there was a theological category for "carnal Christians," who live like the devil but make it to heaven anyway. Another flop, as we'll study on Sunday morning.

I concluded that the Christian life was founded on something larger than one prayer. (More thoughts here.)

But after years of wrestling, I'm returning to the sinner's prayer because it does accomplish a few basic things.

It gives a person words.

Someone who senses the reality of Christ needs a way to express his faith, even if he has a church background and biblical knowledge. When a person recognizes his sense of Christ in the words of the sinner's prayer, and adopts those words as his own, his understanding grows.

The prayer also articulates a beginning.

Repentance has to start somewhere, and the prayer offers an excellent place. Viewed as the start of an earthly life of hope in Jesus Christ -- as opposed to the final purchase of a ticket to heaven -- the prayer can frame a person's future decisions about right and wrong, personal crises, and relationships.

The sinner's prayer can even set that hope into a pattern.

If someone confesses sin specifically, seeks forgiveness explicitly, and asks for the work of the Spirit, then she has a model for a spiritual discipline she can use every day. When salvation is taught as the work of God rather than the result of a prayer formula, there is less danger of her thinking that she's "lost her salvation" when she sins, and more encouragement to return to her salvation's source.

The biggest virtue of the sinner's prayer is that it can put the individual face-to-face with Christ. The person summons the courage to address God -- no small thing. He asks for something according to God's promise. And he starts acting on the belief that Jesus is not dead but alive.

In other words, the work of God in a person's soul is what guarantees salvation, not a prayer -- however significant that prayer may be. The Christian life is founded on God himself.

Sermon audio: Should Faith Influence Politics? I once tried to be a speechwriter for a gubernatorial candidate in Oregon.

The former five-term congressman was fighting to win the Republican nomination, and his staff thought he needed help in the English language department. He began speeches by saying, "You all know I'm a straight shooter. So what you hear tonight is coming straight from the shoulder and straight from the heart." His researcher winced every time she heard it.

Since I was a recent graduate of the congressman's alma mater, someone recommended me to the campaign manager as a speechwriter. So, by and by, I showed up at the headquarters wearing chalk stripes and carrying a portfolio of political stuff I'd written, and I got the volunteer position.

At one point during the interview, the manager left me sitting alone in her cubicle. I happened to look up, and was startled to see the congressman, his hand in the trouser pocket of his Brooks Brothers suit, chewing gum and staring at me without any intention of saying hello.

He didn't want a speechwriter.

The first meeting I attended was with the congressman, the manager, and the researcher. The goal was to produce an op-ed about the release of a murderer because, that year, the crime issue was a good bet for mobilizing voters. But we got stuck on the first line. "The first line," said the congressman, "has to be, 'You've got to be kidding!'"

Silence. The researcher offered, "We could start by stating what we're objecting to." The manager nodded.

"No. Just, 'You've got to be kidding!'"

The meeting lasted all of ten minutes. He didn't want to be told what to say.

There were road trips. Several of us would pile into a Lincoln and roar down the I-5 at 90 mph, the radar detector blinking on the dashboard. One would think it was an ideal time to get to know the man whose voice I was supposed to capture in writing. But the candidate took numerous calls, chatted with the driver, and read position papers. I had very pleasant conversations with his wife -- number three, very smart.

I watched and listened to the congressman for a day, and returned a week later with a draft. I handed the speech to him, the manager smiling, and without so much as a glance, he handed it to the driver. "I won't be using it today." And we were off again.

But a few miles up the freeway, the phone rang. It was the manager. She asked the congressman if he was on the speaker phone, which he was. So he switched to the hand-held. "Uh huh. Uh huh. Uh huh. Yeah." Click. He reached into the pile of papers his driver had put in the car and read through my speech.

"It's good. Yeah. I like it. Some good lines in there."

But he went back to "straight from the shoulder and straight from the heart."

Evangelicals have savored their few moments of influencing politics. But they haven't achieved the cultural change they were hoping for. The country hasn't turned to Christ. Families are not measurably stronger because of any legislation passed. The main evangelical successes have been in opposition to gay marriage and abortion, not in advancing a vision for the country.

The lack of progress boils down to resources.

In politics, you have to influence a five-term congressman. You have to be big enough, mobilizing a large enough constituency or having the money to lobby him. Or, you have to have access to the person who influences how much funding goes to his district. Or, you have to have helped elect him in the first place.

Fundamentally, he must want to listen to you. And even that is not enough. He can think of many reasons to listen to a lot of other people too.

Evangelicals have committed vast resources -- not just financially, but in terms of grass roots organization, media time, and depth of experience -- to influencing five-term congressmen. They have been successful at becoming big. But now they are experiencing again how hard it is to move a nation from the top.

What would have happened if, for the last twenty years, they had committed the same resources to making disciples for Christ? Imagine the impact on American culture if local churches had been successful at saving marriages, nurturing new generations of Christians, deepening people's knowledge of the Bible, and developing their capacity to pray. Imagine the impact if local churches had been as passionate about God's priorities as they've been about ballot initiatives.

When confronted with what it really costs to make disciples, most evangelicals for the past twenty years have said the same thing. "We don't have the resources. We don't have the time, the money, or the patience. We can barely make disciples of our own kids."

The sad reality of these two decades is that political parties have been able to attract evangelical resources, but the cause of making disciples has not. We will talk about the political implications of this reality on Sunday morning.

My candidate for governor got the nomination, but went down in flames that November. My effort to influence him didn't even survive the primaries. He fired the campaign manager.

There is one thing that will make a five-term congressman want to listen. A cultural transformation in his district. The question is, how much do evangelicals really want to influence politics? Are they willing to move a nation from the bottom?

Intellectuals thrive on complexity. They regard certainty and simplicity as signs of immaturity, and they have some good reasons. Take Brian McLaren's critique of mainstream evangelicalism. McLaren has identified an attitude that is a hindrance to everything from effective persuasion to loving fellowship. The attitude is the us v. them, chip-on-the-shoulder, we're-right-they're-wrong impatience with which evangelicals tend to deal with the wide surrounding world. From his writings, one gathers that McLaren has had enough.

The problem with evangelical pomposity is that it has preempted learning. If we're right and they're wrong, then all we have to do is stay right. Tell the unbelievers one more time why their views on abortion, education, government, and values are heinous. Our fidelity to the truth can reduce to repeated talking points -- say it again, this time with feeling! -- a tactic that shuts out feedback and degrades relationships to mere exchanges of rhetorical bullets.

McLaren wants to change this attitude, and he is right. I have devoted many posts to the cultural backwater that is evangelical populism, where applications of truth are stagnant.

But McLaren's desire for greater openness seems to have led him to oversimplifications of his own, and ultimately to a redefinition of truth itself. The book is, of course, A Generous Orthodoxy.

His now-famous modification of orthodoxy with generous suggests that orthodoxy by itself is petty. When he comes to defining what orthodoxy is, McLaren starts this way (p 28): "For most people, orthodoxy means right thinking or right opinions, or in other words, ‘what we think,' as opposed to ‘what they think.'" For McLaren, orthodoxy tends to be petty because most people view it in adversarial terms.

The sentence is an early bit of slippage. I know many self-satisfied Christians who like few things better than to hear the us v. them story again and call it Christianity. But their pettiness does not determine what orthodoxy is. McLaren is building up to his redefinition by implying a simple choice between orthodoxy alone (petty) and orthodoxy plus generosity (loving).

His alternative definition comes in the next sentence. "In contrast, orthodoxy in this book may mean something like ‘what God knows, some of which we believe a little, some of which they believe a little, and about which we all have a whole lot to learn.'" The truth is beyond our reach, in God's mind, and the various factions of human spirituality each have pieces of it. To follow orthodoxy, according to this definition, is to be generous to the other factions and to learn from them.

Orthodoxy may mean that. It may mean something like that. In this book.

The care with which McLaren poses as tentative and playful is necessary to disguise the enormity of what he puts over in that definition. Orthodoxy is inaccessible. It's "what God knows." This is a romanticist punt, even transcendentalist. Emerson could've written it, irony and all. Intellectuals may feed on such continually evolving knowledge, but the gruel is too thin for simple believers.

Actual Christian orthodoxy teaches that God himself is incomprehensible, but that he has given us a revelation of his nature and will by which he is knowable. Orthodoxy is not in God's mind. It's in his Word, both written and incarnate. It's accessible. The distinction between the living God and the doctrines about him --the distinction that ought to keep us humble -- already thrives where theology is a scholarly discipline rather than a grass-roots rallying point.

But I just ran smack into another sentence closing McLaren's paragraph on orthodoxy. McLaren says, "Most people are too serious, knowledgeable, and busy for such an unorthodox definition of orthodoxy." So he makes an intriguing definition tentatively and then bluffs his way out of being examined, an escape-hatch from accountability that he seems to open pretty often.

The definition I've analyzed comes in a chapter titled, "For Mature Audiences Only." How would McLaren define mature? I'll venture a definition for him: "For most people, maturity means being accountable for what you say. In contrast, maturity in this book may mean something like being comfortable with irony."

I hope we can learn and grow as human beings without intellectual games.

Intellectualism has long said, to coin a phrase, "Everything must change." Will emergent intellectuals be any different from the utopians of the past? Not so far. Their knowledge seems enslaved to ideology: Evil is built into our social structures. Racism is systemic. Economic inequality is institutional. War is the result of the military industrial complex. Poverty in the developing world is the legacy of imperialism, imposed first by Western colonial powers and then by cold war superpowers. So, if we're serious about addressing all these problems, the world has to be reorganized.

Fortunately, this is now possible.

A new generation has outgrown the confines of the Enlightenment and is emerging into postmodernity. We no longer think in outmoded ways. We're no longer shackled by the prejudices of ye olde puritanism, or the bigotry of Western thought, or the obsession with proving others wrong. We know that we can change everything because we have what previous generations lacked: dialogue about theoretical models.

And all God's people said, "Yes we can!"

Utopianism of this kind has a pretty well-documented history. Michael Burleigh's recent book about the decline of Christendom, Earthly Powers (HarperCollins, 2005), narrates how political schemes for restructuring society gained religious authority. Among the vast collection of intellectuals Burleigh sketches is Auguste Comte (pp 229-230):

One of the fathers of modern social "science", who in 1839 coined the term "sociology", Comte sought to establish the philosophical basis for the sciences and for the scientific ordering and reform of society, a formula calculated to appeal to the right as well as the left. . . . [Comte's] Positivism was supposed to be a third way between the outmoded theologically grounded world of the ancien regime and an abstract, critical rationalism that had become anarchic and incapable of creating anything.

Burleigh continues:

The essence of his Religion of Humanity was to redirect mankind's spiritual energies away from the transcendental and towards the creation of a happier and more moral life here on earth through the worship of the best in man himself.

The idea that science must direct cultural change led to an array of horrors.

Burleigh narrates the course from Saint-Simon and Comte, among others, to the totalitarian regimes of the early 20th century. Turning to older scholars, Russell Kirk, in The Conservative Mind, showed the many responses of Anglo-American thinkers to the destruction of culture by utilitarian reformers. In The Road To Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek argued that centrally planned economies lead to tyranny. Jane Jacobs documented the dehumanizing impact of urban renewal dogma in The Death and Life of Great of American Cities. Paul Johnson scandalized the chattering classes with his book Intellectuals, which did the extreme disfavor of comparing the ideals of famous thinkers with their actual behavior.

And the emergents?

Infatuation with causes on the left is deepening, especially among younger evangelicals. It is now God's work to protest the war in Iraq, to bring about world peace, to end poverty all over the world, and to advocate environmental regulations. A renewed identification of the gospel with social justice can be heard in many churches, as well as impatience with the idea that salvation is for heaven and not for this world.

I am not saying that emergents are simply latter-day versions of Comte. But I will say that many of them are intellectuals in the old style. Their obsessive theorizing about the course of history and their absorption with grand political change are characteristic of alienated model-mongers. I see two problems with their leftward tilt, just as I see other problems with populist conservatism among evangelicals.

1. The evils of this world are not systemic, but spiritual. Reorganize, restructure, reform all you want, but the power of wickedness will merely shift. A culture is only transformed as the individuals who live in it are reborn in Christ. The reason evangelicals are failing spiritually in America is not that they have ignored progressive political causes, but that they have ignored the Holy Spirit's call to their own souls.

2. Evangelical pastors should not surrender their authority to intellectuals. Every generation since the French Revolution has seen vicars of "progress" emerge. These parsons, whom Malcolm Muggeridge used to call "tame clergymen," bow from their pulpits to the greater authority of Comte's social sciences, giving their benediction to whatever totalist model has favor this year, whether it's emissions caps or a UN war crimes tribunal. A pastor's authority is in his fidelity to the Bible, not to the consensus at Davos.

The linkage between the Kingdom of Christ and earthly power is an old, old folly. If emergents are unable to shake the euphoria of knowing how to change everything, they will end in the enclaves of bitterness, and nothing will have changed.