The Christian Feint.

I grew up in a mainline church. I have wonderful memories of running around the church and being part of a church environment that focused on being a family. I also remember doing mission work in Cincinnati. I remember how neither the Catholics nor the Baptists really knew much about Lutherans. Needless to say, coming from an environment where everyone was Lutheran to one where people are not is a bit of a shock.

Today, I don't neatly fit into either category of Christian right or Christian left. My friends on the left would say I am a conservative and my friends on the right would call me a liberal. I can get equally frustrated with people on both sides of an issue. However, what is becoming most infuriating these days is a level of snarkiness that emerges in a Christian dogma rooted in fear rather than Christ.

I should be perfectly honest, I am not aware of the Christian right as much as I should be. To be sure, they can be as disingenuous as the Christian left. However, the Christian right seems to have turned a corner. The pastors are either allowing the secular right to take over the jeremiads against culture or they have realized that there are bigger fish to fry. The Evangelicals have usually been more attuned to culture shifts and have moved accordingly. Today the leading voices in Evangelicalism are people such as David Platt, Francis Chan, and Tim Keller. Some of the older crowd still listen to the profit-seekers in prophets clothing, but in reality the Evangelicals are pretty even-keeled and the magazines like Relevant and Christianity Today are unafraid of delving into deep issues.

The same cannot be said for the Christian left, and that is what this blog post is about. The cassandras of the left feel consistently and constantly embattled. On one side they are dealing with being culturally irrelevant and on the other side they are dealing with being theologically irrelevant. The response is usually a vicious and dismissive snarkiness. They tend to be open-minded to the wider zeitgeist, but antagonistic to the Evangelicals and larger Christian historical thought. In this way they are a feint. It appears they are hitting the spirit of the world with punch, but they really reserve their attacks for the Evangelicals.

It manifests itself in many ways. For one thing when looking at their crippling decline, they try and show that other denominations on the other side are losing more. Which they are not. They talk about how they do not water down the message. Which they do. They speak of how they are adapting to the times or remaining true to the old forms. Which is not true either.

Yet all these remarks are said with a high-brow snobbishness that only wins them the nods of approval of people who have accepted a watered-down Christianity with enough trappings to make you feel like you are getting a full meal. There are classes where professors dismissed anything that didn't go along with bureaucratic orthodoxy. There have been church services with bon mots against fellow believers. I have even witnessed pastors chuckle at the "stupidity" of the laity.

The biggest difference between the Evangelicals and the Mainlines is that the Evangelicals have chutzpah to tell you what they really think. Were that all Christians more concerned with speaking openly and honestly and not snarkily.