I'm going to begin by quoting myself. I'm sure there's something wrong with that. I wrote the Pages (as opposed to the Posts) with the idea that they would be an introduction to whatever ideas I would post later. Let's see if it works. Here's a cut from my Page, "Christian Praxis."
TEAM The first is that Christianity is a team sport. Solitary Christians labor under extraordinary burdens. We need to be part of a team or an ensemble or a group in order to ask the right questions of ourselves. There are two such. The first is “are we winning;” the second is “am I playing my position the way it ought to be played?” I probably should confess that I like team sports and “team” is my own first language, but I intend these questions to be available to people who have other first languages, as well, so I will meddle in other metaphors, say, drama and music, as a gesture of good faith.
Today, I am making my first reference to a very good book, American Grace, by Robert Putnam and David E. Campbell. It is a sort of "sociology of religion" approach to contemporary America. I'll put the crucial paragraph here, but I want to paraphrase it myself, because I want to feature something that I think is only hinted at in the analysis. I think what they mean is that a substantial number of Americans have walked away from the current religious debates because they think the debaters are disgusting.
Putnam and Campbell say, in the Hess version of this paragraph, that the sexually permissive 1960s upset the cultural apple cart. This development in the 60s was like an earthquake and it produced three aftershocks. In the first one, it brought conservatives out of their self-exile from politics and made them part of a new and very powerful Republican movement. In the second one, it brought the liberals into the new cultural wars, where they played to win. In the third, large numbers of young people walked away in disgust.
An unprecedented number of young people, who might, under other circumstances have been interested in questions of faith and life turned out to have very little interest in ecclesiological mud-wrestling. There are now more people in the United States (17%) who say "none" when they are asked what religious tradition they identify with than there are mainstream Protestants of all denominations combined (14%).
In my view of the Putnam and Campbell narrative, the "nones" have an idea of what people do when they are committed to the kind of life to which their religious values point. The Nones know how hard it is to walk by an obnoxious opponent so that you can attend to the things you yourself feel are more important. Feeding the hungry, for instance, is more important than instigating a court suit to remove the religious exemption from the IRS file of an opposing church. Providing good prenatal care is more important than a constitutional amendment that establishes that the health of the mother really isn't a concern in abortion cases.
People who claim to be patterning their lives after Jesus of Nazareth just don't do that. So the Nones, who might really have been interested in what Jesus taught about being forgiven a huge debt and being, as a consequence open to forgiving a small debt, found no interest at all in what looks, from the outside, like an intramural spitball war. In this version, "none" means, "If it means acting the way THEY are acting, I don't want any part of it.
And why would they?
The good news for Christians is that what we might do to re-engage the Nones in the kind of life we think is worth living is to start living that kind of life ourselves. This isn't a call for Christians to be better people. This is a call for Christians to get their public priorities straight and to refuse to follow leaders who promise no more than beating up on your opponents.
In the excerpt from my Page, I said the first question had to do with winning. I still like that emphasis. But the "we" I had in mind was Christians and the "winning" I had in mind is doing what has to be done, in public and in private, in public policy and in private conscience, to follow God's call in our lives. I am aware that following God call is going to look like different things in different contexts. And by "playing my position," I meant that the things liberals do ought to make conservatives more authentic Christians and more effective Christians. And vice versa.
I'm not talking about "the evangelical agenda" or "liberation theology." Topics like that are like an offensive lineman asking why HE has to do all the blocking when the running back is going to get all the credit for the touchdown? The answer is that if you win, each of you gets the same ring.
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