Marginal Christianity

By Nick Bryant BBC News, New York Share this with Facebook Share this with Twitter Share this with Messenger Share this with Messenger Share this with Email Share this with A year ago Donald Trump produced the biggest political upset in modern-day America, but were there historical clues that pointed to his unexpected victory? Flying into Los Angeles, a descent that takes you from the desert, over the mountains, to the outer suburbs dotted with swimming pools shaped like kidneys, always brings on a near narcotic surge of nostalgia. This was the flight path I followed more than 30 years ago, as I fulfilled a boyhood dream to make my first trip to the United States. America had always fired my imagination, both as a place and as an idea. So as I entered the immigration hall, under the winsome smile of America's movie star president, it was hardly a case of love at first sight. My infatuation had started long before, with Westerns, cop shows, s...

SEPTEMBER 22, 2017 BY  TIM SUTTLE    0 COMMENTS      The most powerful religion in the Western world is no longer Christianity. It is economics. It can actually be quite instructive to consider economics not as a science or sociology but as a religion, complete with doctrines, priests, and constant references to faith. So says John Rapley in  his essay  from  The Guardian  last July. “Think about it.  Economics  offers a comprehensive doctrine with a moral code promising adherents salvation in this world; an ideology so compelling that the faithful remake whole societies to conform to its demands. It has its gnostics, mystics and magicians who conjure money out of thin air, using spells such as “derivative” or “structured investment vehicle” … it has its prophets, reformists, moralists and above all, its high priests who uphold orthodoxy in the face of heresy.” If the economy is the new rel...

Joseph Hartropp 23 June 2017 | 12:13 PM American theologian and ethicist Professor Stanley Hauerwas has hit out at Donald Trump and offered a stark challenge to the contemporary Church. 'Donald Trump is an idiot who wants you to be in his reality show', Hauerwas said. 'The challenge is not to let him dominate your life.' The man Time Magazine once named as 'America's best theologian' was critical of Trump, but said that the president may remind the Church what it truly stands for. He was speaking this week at lectures for both the think tank Theos , and St Mellitus College , in London. He said: 'Trump may not be good for America but he may be pretty good for the Church. 'Trump forces Christians to be a people of justice rather than looking for the state to give justice.' Read more at https://www.christiantoday.com/article/trump.wants.you.to.be.in.his.reality.show.us.theologian.stanley.hauerwas.challenges.the.church/110162.htm...

"What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to ... read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting plea...

by ROBERT P. JONES May 2, 2017 After the British writer G. K. Chesterton visited the United States for the first time, he remarked that America was “a nation with the soul of a church.” Mr. Chesterton wasn’t referring to the nation’s religiosity but to its formation around a set of core political beliefs enshrined in founding “sacred texts,” like the Declaration of Independence. He noted that the United States, unlike European countries, did not rely on ethnic kinship, cultural character or a “national type” for a shared identity. The profoundness of the American experiment, he argued, was that it aspired to create “a home out of vagabonds and a nation out of exiles” united by voluntary assent to commonly held political beliefs. But recent survey data provides troubling evidence that a shared sense of national identity is unraveling, with two mutually exclusive narratives emerging along party lines. At the heart of this divide are opposing reactions ...

Posted on  6 December, 2016  by  Jason Goroncy  ‘There really is no such thing as “Christian marriage” as the term is commonly used. “Christian marriage” is a vain, romantic, unbiblical conception. “Christian marriage” is a fiction. There is no more an institution of “Christian marriage” than there is a “Christian nation” or a “Christian lawyer” or a “Christian athlete.” Even where such terms are invoked as a matter of careless formulation and imprecise speech, they are symptoms of a desire to separate Christians from the common life of the world, whereas Christians are called into radical involvement in the common life of the world. To be sure, there are Christians who are athletes and those who practice law, and there are Christians who are citizens of this and the other nations. But none of these or similar activities or institutions are in any respect essentially Christian, nor can they be changed or reconstituted in order to become Christian. They are, on t...

1.      Voting is the least significant act of citizenship. 2.      If voting is your only form of active citizenship, you are likely a poser. (Voting alone does not make you an active citizen any more than church attendance makes one a Christian) 3.      Only if voting is a symbol of actual involvement in seeking the well-being of your community are you an active citizen. 4.      Only if voting is a sacrament of your life broken and poured out for the world is it a Christian act. 5.      Only if voting is a sign of your solidarity with the last and the least and reflects their needs and interests is it in line with the Gospel. 6.      Only if voting is bathed in prayer and reflection with a community of faith is it an act of God’s love for the world.  

Posted September 22nd, 2016 by Alex Wilgus & filed under Religion . American Christians, especially Evangelicals have long been taken to task for rejecting the life of the mind. Mark Noll’s 1995 book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind and most recently Alan Jacobs’s much discussed piece for Harper’s “The Watchmen: What Became of the Christian Intellectuals?” tell a story of withdrawal from academia and intellectual pursuits. The long and short of it seems to be that yesterday’s fundamentalists and today’s evangelicals make up the religious wing of Richard Hofstadter’s famous assertion of American “anti-intellectualism” and the national preference for sloganeering over sophistication. The evangelicals, like their fundamentalist forbears, shrunk from the intellectual calling because of some animus toward smartypants types. But there is a different way to tell the story. By the first quarter of the twentieth century, the world was in a scientific mood. New industry and...

Thu, 22/09/2016 - 15:39 | Andrew Perriman In an article on the Christianity Today website Ed Stetzer dismisses the doom-sayers and gloom-mongers who say that the church is in terminal decline and puts forward five fundamentals for an evangelical future . I am of a naturally cheerful disposition, but I think his analysis and proposals are superficial and naïve. Jeremiah warned Israel against the complacency of the false prophets who said that the people would never go into exile, or if they did, that it wouldn’t be for long, a couple of years at the most ( Jer. 7:1-15 ; 28:10-16 ). Sometimes the pessimists are right. Stetzer is confident that the sky is not falling for evangelicals: we just need to “face some truths and change some...

Elizabeth Farrelly I knew an unemployed artist who found work with a registered training organisation. Not teaching art. Teaching forklift drivers. "You ever drive a forklift?" I asked in surprise. He said no, unnecessary. He'd done a short course (not in forklift driving). He'd ticked the VET boxes for the TAE certificate from the RTO. All good. To me it made no sense, even sans the alphabet soup. Still doesn't. But this is what we have now instead of an education system: a market. Caveat emptor. It has to end. Neoliberalism was always based on a fundamental failure of self-knowledge. Now surely it has run its course. For decades, belief in The Market as divine presence – guaranteeing fairness and quality and providing a universal template for everything from museums to democracy to prisons – has been sewn like a nasty neoliberal pellet under our social skin. Gradually, as it released its low-dose toxicity into our bloodstream, we've depriv...

By Andrew J. Bacevich / TomDispatch My earliest recollection of national politics dates back exactly 60 years to the moment, in the summer of 1956, when I watched the political conventions in the company of that wondrous new addition to our family, television.  My parents were supporting President Dwight D. Eisenhower for a second term and that was good enough for me.  Even as a youngster, I sensed that Ike, the former supreme commander of allied forces in Europe in World War II, was someone of real stature.  In a troubled time, he exuded authority and self-confidence.  By comparison, Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson came across as vaguely suspect.  Next to the five-star incumbent, he seemed soft, even foppish, and therefore not up to the job.  So at least it appeared to a nine-year-old living in Chicagoland. Of the seamy underside of politics I knew nothing, of course.  On the surface, all seemed reassuring.  As if by divine mandate...

God is not a Republican, God is not a Democrat and God does not believe in American Exceptionalism Tony Fratto, George W. Bush’s former Deputy Press Secretary, made a salient observation when tweeting about the DNC: He felt like he was “watching Democrats talk about America the way Republican candidates used to talk about America.” If the RNC featured conservative faith mobilized for the xenophobic hate spewing from Donald Trump, the DNC displayed an incredible amount of religious and secular faith justifying the militarism, imperialism, neoliberalism and American Exceptionalism of the Democratic Party. Once the hallmark of the Religious Right, a liberal version of these values have found a comfortable home in the centrist coalition being formed by the Democratic Party and its presidential nominee, Secretary Hillary Clinton . Democrats rebutted Trump’s slogan “Make American Great” with the affirmation that “America is already great.” As the DNC featured speaker afte...

Well, it finally emerged at the end of Trump’s acceptance speech last night. Running around and through his whole campaign, it now came out in the open. His “Make America Great Again” slogan bared its teeth. “Freedom, Independence, and Strength” Trump intoned is the trinity underwriting this program. There’s nothing in this, really. Freedom is the master value that energizes all things America. Independence is our characteristic way of doing thing. And strength is power by which we get things done. What Trump’s foregrounding of this American trinity does is place the onus on those evangelical Christians and leaders to explain their support for such a trinity. They owe the rest of the Christian community a theological accounting of their advocacy for this way of “doing” politics and life. The master value of freedom has devolved over the last several centuries to a pale, diminished shadow of its former self. Now it merely asserts the “right” to be unconstrained by extern...

1. Your attitude toward the plight of African-Americans in this country reflects your theology. Sekou: If you tell me what you think about Jesus, I can tell you what you think about Ferguson. Christianity in and of itself is not simply about the redemption of the world, it's about some peasant articulating a vision of the world and the state crucified him and he rose again.  Knox: God is always committed the poor and the marginalized and those who are disconnected. God is constantly rearranging power. That's what justice is. It's about rearranging power. How are we as churches rearranging power in our own lives? We need a theology from below, not a theology from above. That means taking into consideration what minorities have to teach us about life, about economics, about power, about justice. Theology from below is taking into consideration of something you don't have control of.   2. White churches don't need to become multicultural. They need to show...

"All Lives Matter" suggests we're all in this together facing a common problem. We're not. We have different problems that must be addressed in different ways. "All Lives Matter" suggests that we all get along in the world in our continuing inequitable ways, only that we stop killing each other. The latter is certainly desirable but the former is not. "All Lives Matter" is disingenuous because white lives have always mattered and no one questions that. Justice, real justice - political, social, and economic equity is the non-negotiable basis for any claim that "Black Lives Matter. Having parades together and singing "Kum Ba Yah," while important as a beginning point must be followed quickly be concrete steps in the right direction. Otherwise it's just so much hot air. Excuse me if this sounds negative. But I don't trust that white America will willingly cede power and resources to Black America. I hope that h...

-"Black Lives Matter" doesn't mean white lives do not. That's never in question in America so it seldom needs to be said. -Beyond the question of personal culpability and responsibility no one "caused" the shootings of the last few days. Racism did. It holds all of us, whether we personally hold racist views or not. It's an "us"-problem not a "them"-problem. -It's one of those "principalities and powers" thingies Paul talks about that should have functioned to keep and make h ... uman life human but rebelled against God and has distorted life in racist ways. But Christ has defeated these powers and in himself created a zone of freedom called the church which should display the new life we were created for. -politics, law, et. al will not solve racism (though their contributions will be important at various points). Only a demonstration of freedom from it in Christ will demonstrate its reality to the world. And...

OPINION  |  Centre For Public Christianity Friday 17 June 2016 The first step in navigating your way through any complicated topic is to work out what the main approaches are and try (as best you can) to identify what is appealing about each position, as well as what might be a weakness. In our efforts to think through the fraught topic of same sex marriage, the Centre for Public Christianity has developed the following brief guide to seven approaches we’ve encountered amongst Christians wrestling with this topic. It does not claim to be exhaustive. It cannot capture every nuance. But we thought it might still be helpful to describe the various perspectives in a simple, convenient format, and invite readers to evaluate their own position in light of the alternatives.  1.     Innovators : moving beyond scripture Innovators enthusiastically support same sex marriage. They do so with what they hold to be a generous moving beyond the Bible’s te...