restless reformer

Alastair lays the smack down on loony American evangelicalism.  I just gotta say this plainly: these are all the things I’ve been wanting to say about American evangelicalism, but just haven’t done so, aside from in private conversation with my wife.  Here’s hoping Alastair’s sentiments encourage a bit more bravery in myself and others on these issues (without losing love, of course).

Is there any section of the Church that is more messed up than what passes under the name of Evangelicalism? Like it or not, most people who call themselves evangelicals in the US and the UK today are holding a form of religion that only bears a tenuous relationship to the historic Christian faith. Whilst we would like to quibble about the historic meaning of the term and complain that it has been hijacked by fruitcakes, there comes a time when we simply have to accept the fact that the term ‘evangelical’ now carries a radically different meaning to anything that it ever held in the past. The weird, the heretical, the fad-driven, the fruity, the fanatical, the culturally and intellectually bankrupt has become the mainstream.

People, evangelicalism is a greater threat to Western civilization than Islam is. Islam may oppose the Christian faith, but modern evangelicalism trivializes, parodies and cheapens it to the extent that it is no longer deemed worthy of opposition and cannot be taken seriously. With all of its handwaving emotionalism, kitschy culture, intellectual vacuity, collective narcissism and blinkered politics, modern evangelicalism demands all the respect of a shabby circus freak.