11 thoughts on “The New Face of American Evangelicalism”

  2. The clip worked for me (though I hate auto-playing media!). (Firefox, Windows XP).

    I clicked through to the abc link anyway, because your blog format doesn't display the whole video—it clips the right side out, even if the window is maximized.

    Great discussion, by the way. Thanks for sharing.

  3. Have have a fetish about keeping the embedded videos cropped to fit the template. I like a clean blog. But this clip (the audioplay in particular is killing me. I think I'll delete the clip. The link is enough.

  4. On a random technical note, I took a peek at the video source and found there share button. If you take the code they give you, you can find all the sections that say "width" and "height" and tweak out the size to fit the template. Most of the video clips are blocked at work for me anyway, but it is nice to be able to view the clip without having to click to multiple sites.

    Hope this helps!

  5. It's surprising or insightful that 5 members of the religious left won't even acknowledge the evil of abortion yet they're all too ready to talk about genocide and sex slavery in Thailand?

  6. You can even take it a step further. Think about the issues they're comparing. Take abortion and 6 year old sex slaves in Thailand. The religious left's argument is "well, in voting, there are lots of issues besides abortion that I care about, so don't tell me all I have to vote on is abortion". The problem with this logic is that their vote *will* influence abortion law, but will not influence 6 year old sex slaves in Thailand (or "global poverty", etc). There is no "pro global poverty" party in America. No pro 6 year old Thai sex slave party. No pro-genocide in Africa party. So it's a cop out and it's not even based on reason. It's simply a way to cast votes for Democrats and finding a reason (rationalization) to do it. And it's perfectly fine to vote for Democrats. Just be honest about it. Saying "well, I know abortion is bad, but I also care about educational inequity so I'm going to vote Democrat" is very, very weak argument.

    I find it insulting to our collective intelligence that someone would declare "educational inequity" to be the major issue requiring their attention while 1 million kids per year are aborted.

  7. I typically do crop the HTML code, but the code for this clip isn't like the code from YouTube. You can crop it, but it crops the "window" of the clip rather than the clip itself (that is, as I reduce the size--width and height--you just focus in more tightly on a part of a clip rather than cropping/shrinking the whole). I've never seen anything like it.

  8. I lived through the Jesus people movement in the 70's, the Moral Majority in the 80's, the Church Growth Movement in the 90's and beyond, and now a resurgence of the political Christian right as the boomers are in the later adult years and along with that it is another movement represented by this panel. I really like some of the things that I heard from them but have an uneasy feeling that this is just the next thing in Christianity in America, that will have it's day and then will be slowly replaced by something else. I don't know if this is good or bad. I am uneasy about the start of a new fad though and feel there may be some basic flaw that leads to these fads. It will no doubt be a mixed bag.

    I tend to give a lot of credibility to those who do their best to be a decent human being and don't try to over theologize or politicize things quite so much. For instance I’ve watched starving children on TV my whole life and also watch churches being built that cost $10s of millions in areas that don’t even need a building. There’s something wrong and it doesn’t take a Christian philosopher or even a Christian of any kind to realize that. Good video, but I’m really uneasy.

    Greg

  9. I agree. I think this is, actually, the way things always work. Change, trends, actions, reactions, generational shifts. The goal, I think, to use biblical language here, is to "discern the spirits," sorting the good from the bad and trying to pay attention to the authentic winds of the Spirit versus some new church fad.

  10. I like that way of thinking about it. I guess I haven't been very convinced that the last few waves or fads have been very helpful. I need to keep an open mind that good things may be happening. Thanks for your thoughts.

  11. Some of the good things happening now, I think, is an embrace of the "this-worldliness" of Christian spirituality and morality. Personal piety (e.g., not cussing or smoking) is being viewed as less important relative to how you treat others (that is, the vertical concerns of "loving God" are being more tightly associated with the horizontal concerns of "loving my neighbor"). I think that's a good thing. I also like, as I've discussed before on this blog, the more expansive vision of what being "pro-Life" entails.

Leave a Reply