Monday, December 16, 2019

The parallel universe of evangelical Christianity

Adam Kotsko, The Evangelical Mind, n+1, Issue 35, Savior Complex, Fall 2019.
We were encouraged to imagine the likely response of some curious soul who wandered into our church at random: namely, boredom and alienation. The way to avoid that outcome was to be “seeker-sensitive,” meaning that, ideally, everything about the church would be designed to compel that proverbial curious soul off the street to begin participating immediately.

The seeker-sensitive model is taken to its logical extreme at megachurches like Willow Creek Community Church, where Sunday services feature professional-quality pop music, dramatic skits illustrating Christian themes, and sermons that prioritize applicable life lessons over theology and biblical exegesis—all in a building that feels more like a sports arena or an auditorium than a traditional worship space. Crucially, megachurches are normally not affiliated with any particular denomination. They are free to preach to what they believe to be the heart of the Christian message, without all that irrelevant historical baggage.

This seeker-sensitive ethos fits with the evangelical experience of freedom and surrender. It reflects the belief that the key to salvation is letting go of everything that stands in the way of an unmediated encounter with Christ. On the personal level, that means letting go of your own delusions of righteousness and worthiness. It follows that the church works best when it gets out of the way and lets people encounter God (and themselves) as directly as possible. Any further demands the church makes on you—forcing you to take positions on antiquated theological questions, or making you sit through a boring and outdated musical performance—only complicate the already difficult process of letting go and letting God.

The ultimate goal is to produce a form of Christianity that does not require new believers to “convert” to a new culture. Aside from things that are intrinsically sinful, seeker-sensitive evangelicals believe people should be able to enjoy all the things they have always enjoyed and live the way they have always lived—as long as they do so in a Christian way. This is why the Christian music industry has produced a Christian version of every conceivable “secular” musical style, including usually anti-Christian genres like heavy metal or industrial. The evangelical convert can enter into an entire parallel world filled with Christian music, Christian feature films, Christian novels, Christian parenting advice, and Christian self-help books, and they can attend a Christian Pilates class at the Christian gym on the way to the Christian coffee shop, among the other amenities that are becoming increasingly common on evangelical church “campuses.” This emphasis on immediate accessibility has even affected the style of preaching. As I reflect on the Chuck Swindoll radio sermons I listened to as a child, I recognize now how they imitated the rhythm of a typical sitcom: hilarious hijinks reach a point of seriousness, and after a moment of tension and dramatic silence, a healing joke allows everything to resume course. Swindoll was preaching the gospel message in the key of Cheers (which, bizarrely enough, we were allowed to watch as kids).
The penultimate paragraph speaks to the religion of wokeness, as John McWhorter talks about it:
It is difficult for me to be so sanguine about politics. We are living in an increasingly evangelical country, even as the absolute number of self-identified Christians falls. The “best practices” of evangelical church growth continue to spread. Evangelical values are shaping Supreme Court decisions and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Can we find a new use for this political heritage? I would argue we are already trying, but in self-undermining ways. Any number of social justice causes have become lifestyle brands on the model of the evangelical parallel culture, a trend that corporate “wokeness” is only accelerating. And what could be a more seeker-sensitive model of political mobilization than online slacktivism? More generally, the moralism that pervades much political debate today—reducing everything to a question of individual motives—is deeply in tune with the extreme individualism of evangelical culture.

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