Weird Time for Christians

Archy1221 said:
What do you mean? 
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That religion is a social construct and it’s only real power is in the hands of humans.

I respect my parents and I share their values.  I know that if they knew I wasn’t making my kids attend Confirmation classes they would be very disappointed in me.  I don’t like disappointing them, but I also don’t have time to set aside a couple hours a week for something I don’t believe in.

 
funhusker said:
That religion is a social construct and it’s only real power is in the hands of humans.

I respect my parents and I share their values.  I know that if they knew I wasn’t making my kids attend Confirmation classes they would be very disappointed in me.  I don’t like disappointing them, but I also don’t have time to set aside a couple hours a week for something I don’t believe in.
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Your Sundays will be so much better now. 

 
A very good (but long) article sent to me by my son.  I've quoted important sections of it below - actually quoting the ending in the first quote box below. 

It is worth the read.  It is important that true Christians reclaim the true faith from the political faith that has developed in America.  True Biblical faith can be a force of much good, but when it gets tied to politics, it becomes corrupt and is destructive.  

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/evangelical-trump-christians-politics/620469/

Peter Wehner is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He writes widely on political, cultural, religious, and national-security issues, and he is the author of The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.

The historian Mark Noll’s 1994 book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, will be rereleased next year. In the forthcoming preface, which Noll, himself an evangelical, shared with me, he argues that in various spheres—vaccinations, evolutionary science, anthropogenic global warming, and the 2020 elections, to name just a few—“white evangelicals appear as the group most easily captive to conspiratorial nonsense, in greater panic about their political opponents, or as most aggressively anti-intellectual.” He goes on to warn that “the broader evangelical population has increasingly heeded populist leaders who dismiss the results of modern learning from whatever source.” And he laments the “intellectual self-immolation of recent evangelical history.”

“Much of what is distinctive about American evangelicalism is not essential to Christianity,” Noll has written. And he is surely correct. I would add only that it isn’t simply the case that much of what is distinctive about American evangelicalism is not essential to Christianity; it is that now, in important respects, much of what is distinctive about American evangelicalism has become antithetical to authentic Christianity. What we’re dealing with—not in all cases, of course, but in far too many— is political identity and cultural anxieties, anti-intellectualism and ethnic nationalism, resentments and grievances, all dressed up as Christianity.

Jesus now has to be reclaimed from his Church, from those who pretend to speak most authoritatively in his name.

Too many Christians have “domesticated” Jesus by their resistance to his call to radically rethink our attitude toward power, ourselves, and others, Mark Labberton, the president of Fuller Theological Seminary, told me. We live in “an era of acute anxiety and great fear,” he said. As a result, too often Christians end up wrapping Jesus into our angry and fearful distortions. We want Jesus to validate everything we believe, often as if he never walked the face of this Earth. What we’re witnessing can be explained “more by sociology than Christology,” he said.

Unlike in the Sermon on the Mount and the parable of the Good Samaritan—unlike Jesus’s barrier-breaking encounters with prostitutes and Roman collaborators, with the lowly and despised, with the unclean and those on the wrong side of the “holiness code,” with the wounded souls whom he healed on the Sabbath—many Christians today see the world divided between us and them, the children of light and the children of darkness. Blessed are the politically powerful, for theirs is the kingdom of God. Blessed are the culture warriors, for they will be called children of God.

For many of us who have made Christianity central to our lives, the pain of this moment is watching those who claim to follow Jesus do so much to distort who he really was. Those who deform his image may be doing so unwittingly—this isn’t an intentionally malicious enterprise they’re engaging in; they believe they’re being faithful—but it is nonetheless destructive and unsettling.

I believe the portrait I’ve painted in this essay is accurate, but it is also, and necessarily, incomplete. Countless acts of kindness, generosity, and self-giving love are performed every day by people precisely because they are Christians. Their lives have been changed, and in some cases transformed, by their faith. My own life has been immeasurably blessed by people of faith who have walked the journey with me, who have shown me grace and encouraged me in difficult moments. But I can recognize that while also recognizing the wreckage around us.

Something has gone amiss; pastors know it as well as anyone and better than most. The Jesus of the Gospels—the Jesus who won their hearts, and who long ago won mine—needs to be reclaimed.
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Scott Dudley, the senior pastor at Bellevue Presbyterian Church in Bellevue, Washington, refers to this as “our idolatry of politics.” He’s heard of many congregants leaving their church because it didn’t match their politics, he told me, but has never once heard of someone changing their politics because it didn’t match their church’s teaching. He often tells his congregation that if the Bible doesn’t challenge your politics at least occasionally, you’re not really paying attention to the Hebrew scriptures or the New Testament. The reality, however, is that a lot of people, especially in this era, will leave a church if their political views are ever challenged, even around the edges.

“Many people are much more committed to their politics than to what the Bible actually says,” Dudley said. “We have failed not only to teach people the whole of scripture, but we have also failed to help them think biblically. We have failed to teach them that sometimes scripture is most useful when it doesn’t say what we want it to say, because then it is correcting us.”

Teaching people how to think biblically would help, Dudley added, as well as teaching people how to disagree with one another biblically. “There is a lot of disagreement in the New Testament, and it gives us a template for how to listen to each other to understand rather than to argue,” he said.

Many Christians, though, are disinclined to heed calls for civility. They feel that everything they value is under assault, and that they need to fight to protect it. “I understand that,” Dudley said. “I feel under assault sometimes too. However, I also know that the early Christians transformed the Roman empire not by demanding but by loving, not by angrily shouting about their rights in the public square but by serving even the people who persecuted them, which is why Christianity grew so quickly and took over the empire. I also know that once Christians gained political power under Constantine, that beautiful loving, sacrificing, giving, transforming Church became the angry, persecuting, killing Church. We have forgotten the cross.”

Dudley, my high-school and college classmate, left me with this haunting question: How many people look at churches in America these days and see the face of Jesus?

Too often, i fear, when Americans look at the Church, they see not the face of Jesus, but the style of Donald Trump.

The former president normalized a form of discourse that made the once-shocking seem routine. Russell Moore laments the “pugilism of the Trump era, in which anything short of cruelty is seen as weakness.” The problem facing the evangelical Church, then, is not just that it has failed to inculcate adherents with its values—it’s that when it has succeeded in doing so, those values have not always been biblical.
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Several months ago, I spoke with one such pastor, who had not only resigned from his church, a congregation of the Presbyterian Church in America, but had also decided, at least for now, to leave the ministry altogether. He told me that he felt undermined by people in his congregation, including by some whom he had trusted but who, it turned out, were less animated by spiritual matters than by political agendas. This former pastor used the word betrayal in our conversation; he talked about the pain this episode has caused him and his wife. In his words, “The gentleness of Jesus was utterly discarded” by those who felt he wasn’t championing their cultural and political agendas aggressively enough.

“They don’t care about the relational collateral damage,” he said.

In a similar vein, I recently had a conversation with a senior pastor who is planning to leave his position soon; he’s not yet sure where he’ll land, or even whether he’ll stay in the ministry. He has simply been worn down by the divisions within his church. He has not been the target of outward hostility, but he can feel the ground shifting beneath his feet. He feels that he is growing apart from people in the congregation; there’s no longer the same sense of common purpose. He is watching the collapse of an evangelical movement to which he has devoted much of his life. At one point, as we talked about what is unfolding within American Christianity, his eyes welled with tears.

Bob Fryling, a former publisher of InterVarsity Press and the vice president of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, an evangelical campus ministry, has been part of a weekly gathering of more than 150 individuals representing about 40 churches. He’s heard of conflicts “in almost every church” and reports that pastors are exhausted. Earlier this year, the Christian polling firm Barna Group found that 29 percent of pastors said they had given “real, serious consideration to quitting being in full-time ministry within the last year.” David Kinnaman, president of Barna, described the past year as a “crucible” for pastors as churches fragmented.

The key issues in these conflicts are not doctrinal, Fryling told me, but political. They include the passions stirred up by the Trump presidency, the legitimacy of the 2020 election, and the January 6 insurrection; the murder of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter movement, and critical race theory; and matters related to the pandemic, such as masking, vaccinations, and restrictions on in-person worship. I know of at least one large church in eastern Washington State, where I grew up, that has split over the refusal of some of its members to wear masks.
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TGHusker said:
So Mr TWO Corinthians didn't find a way to make it to an Easter service - I guess golfing was more important. 
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If someone doesn't want to go to church, that's their choice.  But, then don't fake it.  It's laughable and sad at the same time when so many of his worshipers list him being a good Christian as reasons to follow him.

 
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