Dr. Du Mez, chapter 16. I’m disappointed. Not at the book, but at critic’s hysteria. Chapter 16 is what WORLD mag always reported on. What’s the controversy? BTW, this book will have a Vol 2 in 10 years b/c their culture is not going to change. The tribalism is alive and well.
As the book demonstrates, and maybe this is the controversy, it becomes very, very clear that the SBC, their non-denom friends, etc. have been a massive liability to the reputation of evangelicalism. No worse than the mainline churches they critique—when we pull the curtain back.
There is no good news. It just “is.” B/c white conservative evangelical culture is personality driven & has no connectional/confessional limits, the dark trends that Niebuhr warned us about, regarding evangelical culture about, will only persist. That’s the moral of the story.
Why? B/c the evangelical culture highlighted in the book refuses to confess its own socio-cultural-economic-political idols. And anyone who points out their pathetic idols is a heretic & an “enemy of the gospel.” As I’ve said before, these people have zero epistemic humility.
It’s a network that refuses to confess & repent of its own idols and instead focusses on why *everyone else* under the struggles with the noetic effects of sin (except them). Another title of this book could have been: “Jesus and the Noetic Effects Of Sin.”
Or “Jesus and the Moral Matrix.” A historian told the story of idolatry among a white conservative evangelical culture & and instead of “manning up” & taking responsibility for sins of the past (Neh 9:2), like vindictive, fragile narcissists, she got attacked. They are cowards.
Had her critics read Jonathan Haidt’s _The Righteous Mind_, the way the book tells the story makes sense, if even you have quibbles about some of the micro-details. Prof Du Mez’s book is a textbook example of religious tribalism using masculinity as a unifying theme. That’s it.
If you read Haidt first, her book won’t be controversial. Here’s the next research question: Why is “complimentarianism” such a unifying idol for so many white conservative men in lower church ecclesiologies? Start here: amazon.com/Righteous-Mind…
Another research question: what will it take for the subculture of evangelicalism presented in the book to have the humility to confess that what binds them together isn’t the gospel, but using Calvinism to theologize their moral psychology of disgust? amazon.com/Moral-Psycholo…
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