Mediaboss Marketing

March 13, 2015|1:02 pm

As a child growing up in a Southern Baptist church, I learned my place in American culture through rapture movies. These filmsbased on a pop-dispensationalist reading of prophecypictured a time when the church would be suddenly ripped from the earth, sailing through the air to be with the invisible (to the viewer) Jesus Christ. These films would always then picture the panic of those who were "left behind" and depict the societal chaos that would emerge once the "salt and light" of the culture had disappeared. We never considered that if such a rapture were to happen, American culture might be relieved to be rid of us.

Historian Rick Perlstein notes the "culture wars" that ignited in the 1960s and 1970s were really about dueling secular prophecy charts. "What one side saw as liberation, the other side saw as apocalypse," and vice-versa, he writes. It's hard to argue with his thesis. The scenes of LSD-intoxicated college students frolicking nude in the mud of the Woodstock Festival in New York would seem horrifying to the salt-of-the-earth folk in Middle America for whom "the dawning of the Age of Aquarius" would seem like a threat. At the same time, Merle Haggard's counter-revolutionary anthem would have the same effect, in reverse. The words, "We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee," must seem like hell, if you're in Woodstock.

From Majority to Minority

The problem with American Christianity is that we always assumed there were more of "us" than there were of "them." And we were sometimes confused about who we meant when we said "us."

The idea of the church as part of a "moral majority" was not started, or ended, by the political movement by that name. The idea was that most Americans shared common goals with Christianity, at least at the level of morality. This perception was helped along by the fact that it was, at least in some ways, true. Most Americans did identify with Christianity, and the goods of Christianity such as churchgoing and moral self-restraint were approved of by the culture as means toward molding good citizens, the kind who could withstand the ravages of the frontier or the challenges of global Communism. Mainstream American culture did aspire to at least the ideal of many of the things the Christian church talked about: healthy marriages, stable families, and strong communities bound together by prayer.

'God and Country' or 'Christ and Him Crucified'?

Politically and socially speaking, this is what a group is supposed to do: to attach itself to a broad coalition and to speak as part of a majority. The problem was that, from the beginning, Christian values were always more popular than the Christian gospel in American culture. That's why one could speak with great acclaim, in almost any era of the nation's history, of "God and country," but then create cultural distance as soon as one mentioned "Christ and him crucified." God was always welcome in American culture as the deity charged with blessing America. But the God who must be approached through the mediation of the blood of Christ was much more difficult to set to patriotic music or to "amen" in a prayer at the Rotary Club.

Now, however, it is increasingly clear that American culture doesn't just reject the particularities of orthodox, evangelical Christianity but also rejects key aspects of "traditional values." This is seen politically in the way that the "wedge issues" of the "culture wars," which once benefited social conservatives, now benefit moral libertariansfrom questions of sexuality to drug laws to public expressions of religion to the definition of the family. Turns out, they do smoke marijuana in Muskogee.

Path Forward

Read more from the original source:
Left Behind In America: Following Christ After the Culture Wars