Surfing through the gap between Liberal and Conservative Christianity

Last Sunday was frustrating. I was trying to find a church to go to. I ended up at Hyde Park United Methodist Church. I looked at some more Progressive fellowships, but after looking at them on the web, I realized I wasn't ready for that yet. The Methodist service was okay, but the problem is that I'm looking for people more like myself, caught in the middle between Liberal and Conservative Christianity, and I don't know where to find them.

So this afternoon I took to the web. Not surprisingly, Google led me to Rachel Held Evans, and a blog post of hers titled Liberal Christianity, Conservative Christianity, and the Caught-In-Between. The post documents responses to her followers on Facebook that expressed a similar exasperation at not being able to find a place of worship where they weren't met with accusations of heresy or smug superiority.

But then Rachel mentioned that she tried to roll her own, so to speak, and that the experiment resulted in failure. I was intrigued, so I went out in search of more information. I found it in Christianity Today in an article entitled Rachel Held Evans Returns to Church. The article spoke of a fellowship called The Mission that was started in 2010, and appears to have lasted around four years, but apparently was plagued by financial issues and fell apart. And again I'm reminded of Leticia's maddening, crazy proposition that we start a church.

But then I got tripped up by almost a peripheral comment. I say almost, because I'm not sure how it fit in to the story about Evans yet, but it definitely resonated with me. And this was actually a reference from yet another article. So then I went to find that one. I found it at christandpopculture.com. Hannah Anderson posited that Evans and other post-evangelicals like her "are perpetuating the very things about evangelicalism that they profess to deplore." Though in truth I liked the way it was stated in Christianity Today better:

Evans and other young, progressive Christians sometimes react to culture-war flashpoints with as much declarative verve and binary categories as the leaders they're countering. The de facto response to one fundamentalism isn’t always nuance; often it’s just another fundamentalism.

Anderson's article points out that using politics as an evangelical tool to dispense morality is a relatively new phenomenon, and immediately my mind went to Jerry Falwell. The very name would cause most liberals to recoil, but I actually remember when Falwell was just a preacher. Our family listened to the Old Time Gospel Hour.

But back to Anderson's article for a moment. She really got me with this:

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 In Religion in America, historians Winthrop S. Hudson and John Corrigan describe evangelicalism as:

a mood and an emphasis [more] than a theological system. Its stress was upon the importance of personal religious experience… it was a revolt against the notion that the Christian life involved little more than observing the outward formalities of religion.” (99)

Central to this identity is a strong emphasis on personal conversion in order to effect societal change.

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This definition of evangelicalism is so good! And this explains how evangelicalism is trying to change society for the better! Such good intentions! How did we go so wrong?

I get Falwell's motivation to start the Moral Majority. I'm starting to understand how Liberals see the government as the way to represent not only their interests but their values as well, and it makes sense that Falwell would see things the same way. Use the government to further your beliefs and agenda. It actually makes sense. How did we go so wrong?