Tried With Fire

I have a lot of questions regarding how we got to where we are today, which can only be answered by examining history and not relying on vague memories and urban legends from grade school. So I read books that could potentially raise some eyebrows. I just started One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America by Kevin Kruse. Did your eyebrows go up at the title? If his thesis is true, the push for an increase in civil religion in the 50's was not just a response to the Cold War but a fear of Roosevelt's New Deal. Big business did not like the way the country was headed, so they promoted an amalgam of the independent self, Christianity, and capitalism to get the backing of ministers and, in turn, their congregations. In my words, you can worship God and Mammon. 1 I am troubled by what I am reading, not because I think Kruse got it wrong but because he might be right. The church shouldn't be the dupe or the pawn of any political agenda whether ri...

It's been interesting and rather sad, at the same time, to witness the divide between professing Christians over the 2016 election. It's true that social media may not be the best tool of observation, but even among people I know, there are folks with strong convictions and very different opinions. If I was a sociologist, this would be worth studying. But since I am not, it seems like a good time to start reading Christian America? What Evangelicals Really Want  by sociologist Christian Smith. In the introduction, he mentions several fallacies that must be avoided to understand evangelicalism. This is the first and one worth noting. The Representative Elite Fallacy - A most common error that observers of evangelicals make is to presume that evangelical leaders speak as representatives of ordinary evangelicals. In fact, evangelical leaders do not simply give voice to the thoughts and feelings of the millions of ordinary evangelicals. Nor do ordinary evangelicals simply fo...