Marginal Christianity

April 26, 2017 Camosy: Do you agree with Dreher’s diagnosis? Michael Baxter: Yes and no. Yes, I agree that mainstream U.S. culture is largely un-Christian, and that the government imposes secular values and mentality on supposedly independent bodies, including churches. But no, I don’t agree that this all came to a head in 2013 with the Indiana religious freedom statue being rescinded and then the Supreme Court decision affirming the right for gays to marry. Dreher sees 2013 and gay marriage as the point of no return. I don’t see it that way. How do you see it? Christians should be as troubled, indeed more troubled, by war, poverty, racism in the United States than Dreher seems to be.  Writing as a “conservative Christian,” as a “values voter,” as he calls himself at one point, Dreher’s timeline and plotline are warped accordingly. He refers to the 1960s as a time of consensus, except civil rights, as if the Vietnam War ever happened or wasn’t a concern f...

by Alan Jacobs 3 . 20 . 17 Surely there has never been a richer and more deeply faithful model of Christian faith and practice than that offered by the leaders of the Church in Roman Cappadocia in the fourth and fifth centuries. Think of Basil the Great, exhorting the rich of Caesarea to “empty their barns” to feed the poor, building hospitals for the sick, upholding Trinitarian orthodoxy against the Arians, teaching young Christians the right uses of pagan literature. And Basil was only one among many great ones, even in his own neighborhood: His sister Macrina, his brother Gregory of Nyssa, his friend Gregory of Nazianzus, were all titans of faith and charity, and built a thoroughgoing Christian culture the likes of which the Church has rarely if ever seen. In 1974, when the great bishop-theologian Lesslie Newbigin retired from his decades of labor in the Church of South India, he and his wife decided to make their way back to their native England by whatever kind...

Rod Dreher's The Benedict Option is all the rage these days. And rightly so. Rod articulates an important perspective as the North American Church continues to try to find its bearings as the reality of the death of Christendom sinks very more deeply into our ecclesial psyche. I have a proposal to throw in the ring too. I call it the "Submerging Church." The following very brief statement will give you an idea of the direction in which I'm thinking. Submerging Church LEE WYATT Though we live (or have lived) in the age of the Emerging/Emergent Church, I have a different proposal for a new vision of church. I call it the  Submerging  Church! Am I serious, you ask? Read on and see what you think. The Submerging Church, as I see it, is  radically  subversive,  relentlessly incarnational, and ruthlessly hospitable.  It dives deeply into everyday life, sharing it with others, while at the same time questioning and critiquing ...

Rod Dreher's proposed “Benedict Option” has generated much pre-publication comment in print and social media. Some like it, some don't. Some have accepted it already, others have proposed revisions and tweaks. The main criticisms are twofold at this point. -First, Dreher's claims of persecution are misguided and play on fear. -Second, his proposal is a withdrawal from engagement with society. Dreher does believes that a progressive secular world is clamping down on various forms of Christian expression and institutions (marriage, family) and the church must respond now or its only going to get worse. The survival of the church in North America is at stake! I suspect some of this is last-gasp Christendom thinking kicking and screaming for its (doomed) life. But where Dreher goes beyond this critique and his proposal gains traction is that he recognizes that unrestrained crony capitalism is leeching the life out our institutions, particularly the...

July 7, 2015 by Thomas Kidd 7 Comments Rod Dreher has been blogging about the need for traditional Christians to embrace the “Benedict Option” of retreat from and engagement with post-Christian society. In a recent post , he commented that It is  retreat  in the sense that it requires a) an honest and sober recognition of the condition of our post-Christian culture, and the relationship of the church to it; b) a realistic understanding of how radically Christianity opposes the mainstream post-Christian culture; c) a clear grasp of how radically Christians have to live, in community, to “push back against the world as hard as it pushes against you” (Flannery O’Connor), and d) implementing these new, and renewed, ways of living, in part to build resilience for the trials to come, and to guard against assimilation. It is about  engagement  in that the church has a mission to serve the world, through evangelism and works of charity. The church can only fulfill i...