An interesting idea in @AJWTheology's latest blog: American cultural power is reflected in our ability to make ourselves & our issues the plumb line for global conversations.
https://twitter.com/thinktheology/status/1369565305811435520
IOW, the unique shape of US culture wars gets exported. It's not that other countries don't have similar issues (e.g. racial inequity) but that the shape of US racism becomes dominant metric for evaluating justice work in other places.
The risk of this is that other forms of racism & injustice might be overlooked insofar as they don't align with US-centric definitions. But the point is larger than this
I've long thought that American evangelicalism acts the same way in relationship to global evangelicalism. We center ourselves & end up exporting our issues to the degree that it's hard to determine where Americanism ends & evangelicalism begins.
This is how cultural influence works. It's a kind of gravity. The strongest culture/subculture exerts an undue influence on the whole, reshaping in its own likeness. Which explains the significance of the SBC w/in American evangelicalism...
It's true that the SBC is only one part of American evangelicalism. You can find many different expressions of evangelicalism, w/ various nuances. But the SBC is the largest part & as such it exerts a kind of cultural gravity on the rest of American evangelicalism.
I'm not here to evaluate what that means just to say that this is a real thing. It's why what happens in SBC is significant to those outside it. It's why what happens in American evangelicalism is significant to global evangelicalism.
Which is also why we must discipline ourselves to learn from those outside centers of cultural power. The center will naturally exert influence. But those outside center must be sought out if we are to be influenced by them. It won't happen w/out work.
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