So, wow, Rip van Winkle has awoken. Almost five years since I last posted here, not only am I still alive, I’m still grappling with my “does not quite fit in” faith. Especially after the last year of our nation’s history, that faith has a lot more dents in it.
The last time I left off here, I had passed through the waters of the evangelicalism of my post-conversion days and dipped my toes into the roaring rapids of the emerging church, only to find myself landing in the not-quite comfortable eddy of post-evangelicalism. And then life happened (three young-but-now-getting grown-up kids). And then the election of 2016 happened.
I spent most of the first week after the election listening to punk rock.
You see, everything that I had learned about Jesus as a young convert and then re-learned as my wineskins were refreshed in the last decade was tossed out the window by my fellow -evangelicals in their zeal to defend the last few pearls of Christendom to which they clutched.
Michael Gerson, in his excellent article in this month’s Atlantic (read it all), sums up the underlying problem better than I could:
The moral convictions of many evangelical leaders have become a function of their partisan identification. This is not mere gullibility; it is utter corruption. Blinded by political tribalism and hatred for their political opponents, these leaders can’t see how they are undermining the causes to which they once dedicated their lives. Little remains of a distinctly Christian public witness.
Gerson goes on to give an excellent history of evangelicalism in this country dating to the period before the civil war, and states that because of his own experiences with the faith, that he is “hesistant to abandon the word evangelical.”
Lets just say I’m not quite so hesitant. Honestly, at this point, I’m not quite sure that evangelicalism is worth saving. But with the crash-and-burn that happened to the emerging church, I’m also not sure what the alternatives are. What I can say at this point is that for the longest time I took up the definition of post-evangelical where the post- doing the work meant “moving beyond and embracing something greater than.” But I suspect that now I should really call myself a post-post-evangelical, with the new post- stating that I sadly have to reject -evangelicalism in all its forms altogether.
Which is funny, because I currently attend an evangelical church that I have no intentions of leaving. But more on that later.