White evangelicalism is in for some serious short-term pain.
There’s nothing to be done about this: it was decided decades ago, the moment that the Moral Majority laid a foundation on the sands of special-interest politics.
What’s yet to be determined is long-term damage.
In an effort to mitigate short-term pain, some churches and denominations will make concessions to white supremacy, Christian Nationalism and misogyny to appease Dixiecrats who hold the purse strings.
And in the process, those churches will lose every young person who can’t unsee the hypocrisy and injustice that 2020 brought unmistakably to the fore. Thus they will sacrifice the future on the altar of the present.
The churches and denominations that last will be the ones who lean into the short-term pain—those who forsake the seduction of political power and material comfort. The future of the church in America is in the pursuit of justice on behalf of the oppressed.
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Note that this is all stuff this guy just made up.
The evangelical marketplace of ideas is resplendent with the uncultivated intuitions of theological entrepreneurs…
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promoting “biblical” perspectives on geology, political theory, developmental psychology, economics, critical race theory, psychopharmacology, gender and sexuality, media and entertainment, public health, and on and on.
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Under the guise of subjecting human reason to biblical scrutiny, American evangelicals have transformed Christian theology into a nomadic culture war
machine:
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Within authoritarian ecosystems, men in power often lie about their opponents in a way that desensitizes their audience to some unpalatable truth about themselves.
Here Joe implies that David French and Russ Moore hold liberal democratic norms on par with scripture—an obvious falsehood.
True to form, Joe doesn’t state the falsehood explicitly—he merely implies it in a way that any competent language user understands.
(French or Moore might claim that modern liberal democracy is rooted in the Christian intellectual tradition, or that liberal norms can be derived from biblical norms. Not sure exactly what their respective views are here, but:
The substantive point is not in dispute: you didn’t read the book prior to commenting on it.
Here you speculate about what arguments are likely to be presented in the book (see screenshot—same screenshot from before, with relevant portion circled).
So why did I highlight the sentence in which you claim the book isn’t meant to be read?
For the same reason I highlighted the sentence before it (which also doesn’t imply that the author hasn’t read the book): namely, that your unearned confidence is hilarious.
If you say that isn’t white Christian nationalism, the disparity in our understanding of what words mean is most likely such that it’s not worth attempting to converse on this or any subject.
If you concede that it is white Christian nationalism, what am I to believe?
Do I believe Stephen Wolfe when he explicitly, obviously, and undeniably advocates *white* Christian nationalism?
Or do I believe him when he denies that he’s advocating white Christian nationalism?
The hermeneutics of legitimization: an approach to biblical interpretation that consistently produces moral justifications for social practices and institutional arrangements that benefit oneself.
The hermeneutics of legitimization has three defining features:
1. Proof-texting; 2. Motivated literalism; 3. Theological paradigm of authority and submission.