End of evangelicalism, part II
David Sessions Feb 06, 2009 COMMENT SHARE
As I expected, a few days' thought requires a follow-up to this windy post about evangelicalism's future. I've re-read iMonk's original posts (here, here, and here), read his response, and listened to his follow-up podcast. He reminds me that he wasn't predicting a total evangelical apocalpyse, as I perhaps incorrectly implied, just the death of much of what we currently call evangelicalism.
I focused on the traces of orthodoxy and solid eductation still happening in the Christian world, which admittedly don't really undercut his overall prediction. Most of the chaff of organized Christianity will pass away and something small and post-evangelical will come together in its place. Most of my post was, I think, a reaction to this paragraph:
We are soon going to be living in a very secular and religiously antagonistic 21st century in a culture that will be between 25-30% non-religious.
This collapse, will, I believe, herald the arrival of an anti-Christian chapter of the post-Christian west and will change the way tens of millions of people see the entire realm of religion. Intolerance of Christianity will rise to levels many of us have not believed possible in our lifetimes, and public policy will become particularly hostile towards evangelical Christianity, increasingly seeing it as the opponent of the good of individuals and society.
That seems possible, but not likely. Not with the trends I mentioned in place, and the growing, mostly invisible number of young Christians who aren't publicly showy about their faith, but who are headed into positions of crucial cultural influence. (And an important point about guaging their influence: If you're not in the places they are, chances are you haven't heard of them.) I'm on board with a much-needed collapse of mainstream evangelicalism, I don't completely buy an "anti-Christian" response in society at large. But it seems plausible enough that I'll agree to wait and see.
Anyway, just wanted to reiterate that there was lots of truth in iMonk's posts, and I suggest you read them if you haven't. And while you're there, check out his "25 random things I do/don't believe in." If it were a manifesto I'd sign it.
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David Sessions is the editor of Patrol. His writing has appeared in Slate, New York, Politics Daily and elsewhere. Based at Patrol''s headquaters in New York City, he blogs about religion, politics, and media.
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1. No human can see the future — or even “read” the past.
2. Apart from personal divine revelation (the truth of which I have no place to judge), all predictions of the future tend to be exaggerations of often-misread tendencies in the near past… because…
3. Past knowledge is the only kind of knowledge we have.
4. So iMonk can make postulate all he wants, but due to the condition that history is never determinist, that persons can and do change history, there’s absolutely no way to know whether the coming age will be a-religious indifference… a Christian revival… or some sort of new era of faith that is not exactly Christian. But it’s still worthwhile to speculate a bit… so…
5. I’ll throw out my own thoughts. I have difficulty imagining that this Nihilist West can persevere in nothingness. The Age of Reason is dead. The Modern Age has ended. Scientism is over. I do not believe we are moving towards a deepening anti-religiosity, but rather to a new and frightening era of belief in… anything. Atheism and skeptical agnosticism are simply not the sorts of myths around which peoples rally. Science has provided a bad story with no sustenance. Few of us really believe in Progress anymore, so we’re gonna need something other than Evolution or Intelligent Design to make sense of the disorder and chaos of our world. Both of those are archaic ideas that were exciting and new three (or more, with ID) centuries ago. Old Darwin plodded in at the tail end of that philosophical movement… and 160 years later we’re still somehow running on his fumes. iMonk apparently thinks those fumes can provide the bedrock for a new age of disbelief? Hardly.
— Mark P · Feb 6, 11:37 AM · #
My mom, the smartest person I know, has been telling me for easily a decade that people will next start believing in aliens. You know, space-seeding? Funny that Richard Dawkins, for example, says exactly that (in the documentary Expelled). A lot of influential people are already into psychic weirdness and space aliens.
— Sarah P. · Feb 6, 04:49 PM · #
iMonk’s article, in an adapted version, made it into the Christian Science monitor, and that article is on the Drudge front page currently.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0310/p09s01-coop.html
— Mark P · Mar 10, 03:56 PM · #