For at least 20 years, the intellectual heavyweights among American Calvinists, Confessional Lutherans, and more conservative heirs of the Wesleys, have been warning that the Evangelical popular culture was in crisis.
Behind the razzmatazz, they cautioned, it merely baptised the presuppositions of a certain confluence of ethnic, regional, generational and class factors. The theological foundation and framework were nonexistent at best, and even that best was far from the norm.
If that subculture has now rallied to Newt Gingrich, then those scholars' point has been proved even more than it was in the Dubya years. But who will give them a suitably prominent place in the conversation? They accrue to bodies such as, most obviously, the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals.
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ReplyDeleteBut... hasn't the theological framework for much of Calvinism generally been a shambles from day one? Maybe it's just the Stuart-era nostalgic Anglican in me talking, but it seems to me that the entire marriage between an entirely neopagan and fatalistic denial of free will, a practically Hindu (at Hinduism's worst; I do not deny that Hindu belief is quite varied on this point) emphasis on accrual of material riches as a sign of divine favour and a baffling irreverence for the aesthetic and spiritual needs of a healthy humankind all seem to me to be a complete nonstarter when placed in the context of the historic faith of the disciples of Our Lord.
ReplyDelete... or perhaps I'm being unkind. There was always something quite charming about Barth's critique of the liberalism of his age. But Barth would have had very little in common with the evangelicals of the modern American South.
The prosperity gospel is something else entirely, and the disregard for aesthetic sensibilities is certainly not there in the historic Scottish and Dutch traditions, for example.
ReplyDeleteDon't get me started on Barth...