Frank Turek’s article from Townhall is right on target.
Excerpt:
Believers are God’s ambassadors here on earth, called to be salt and light in the world and to the world. When we follow our calling, individuals are transformed and societies with them. Our country is failing because too many believers have abandoned this calling.
They began abandoning it in earnest in the 1920’s. That’s when an anti-intellectual movement called fundamentalism led believers to separate from society rather than reform it, and to bifurcate life into two separate spheres—the sacred and secular. Reason was given up for emotionalism, and only activities that directly saved souls were deemed sacred. Everything else was considered secular. Careers in clergy and missions were glorified at the expense of everything else. That led too many believers to leave public education, the media, law, and politics in the hands of the unbelievers. Is it any wonder why those areas of our culture now seem so Godless? Take the influence of God out, and that’s what you get.
[…]So if you’re a believer who is upset that life is not being protected; that marriage is being subverted; that judges routinely usurp your will; that our immigration laws are being ignored; that radical laws are passed but never read; that mentioning God in school (unless he’s Allah) results in lawsuits; that school curriculums promote political correctness and sexual deviance as students fail at basic academics; that unimaginable debt is being piled on your children while leftist organizations like Planned Parenthood and ACORN receive your tax dollars; and that your religion and free speech rights are about to be eroded by “hate” crimes legislation that can punish you for quoting the Bible; then go look in the mirror and take your share of the blame because we have not obeyed our calling.
I went to church again last night. This time, instead of giving a sermon, the pastor answered questions from the congregants that were written out and submitted over the last 4 months. Unfortunately, none of the questions were about anything remotely important, except for one on same-sex marriage. The pastor said that the Bible was against it, but he gave no non-Biblical reasons or evidence to oppose SSM.
He presented nothing at all that could be used to influence the culture outside the church. His answer was useful only for those who assumed that the Bible was already true.
I thought that it was a good idea to have a question and answer time. Some of the questions were interesting. But the majority had nothing to do with life outside of the church. (E.g. – Can we clap our hands during worship? Can we raise our hands during worship? Can divorced people attend the singles group?) I think we need more people like Frank Turek speaking in the church because what he says can be used outside of church.
You can download Turek’s debate with arch-atheist Christopher Hitchens from Apologetics 315. Ever heard anything like Turek’s opening speech in all your years of going to church? Nothing he said in his opening speech depends on the Bible being inerrant. It could all be used to persuade people who do not believe in the inerrancy of the Bible. The kind of people you meet at work, at school, or in the legislature.
Ever thought that the church should equip you to do that?
WINTERY KNIGHT 
I would propose a few things for consideration:
1) I would suggest that fundamentalism was more about being anti-cultural instead of anti-intellectual, since it rejected essentially 1700 years of Christian Culture
2) It is not accidental that the rise of fundamentalism occurred around the time main-line Protestant churches began rejecting core doctrines and embracing theological liberalism (see Christianity and Liberalism, J. Gresham Machen, a very important book that is still relevant today).
3) I’m always willing to be very critical of Catholicism, I think honest self-evaluation is important. But a serious question should be asked: isn’t this the natural end for Protestantism? It is no accident that Protestantism gave rise to the Enlightenment (an intellectual rejection of any form of authority), which found its fullness perhaps in the French Revolution (and the utter persecution of anything that claimed any sort of authority other than the revolution itself).
For better or worse western Christianity created a complete intellectual and cultural synthesis. Isn’t a rejection of Catholicism ultimately going to end in a form of anti-culturalism of anything that has to do with that Christian synthesis of culture? I think it’s certainly a worthy consideration.
4) As a side note, it’s for these reasons that I respect what has become “Evangelical Christianity” far more than “Protestant Christianity” because it is not grounded in identifying itself by a rejection of Catholicism.
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Let me kick in some support for LCB. One of the interesting things about the last 5 years is that Evangelical churches have been forced to defend Catholic history – and the “evil” Constantine – as a result of Dan Brown and his like. Everything was copacetic when Evangelicals could use “adversus Catolikos” arguments to undermine Catholicism, but they didn’t realize that they were subtly undermining their own foundations, until Dan Brown began to apply the same arguments to Christianity as a whole.
I’m reading Paula Fredriksen’s Augustine and the Jews, which describes how Augustine was forced to respond to the Manichee co-opting of traditional anti-Jewish rhetoric by arguing in favor of the legitimacy of Jewish practices.
I guess my point is that we may be reaping the fruit of a lot of anti-Catholic polemic because for a long time the history of Western Civilization was the history of Catholicism and to undermine one is to undermine the other.
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I respectfully disagree. Please do not be offended.
I defend history because it is history, and for no other reason than that I abhor lies. Catholicism doesn’t enter into it.
I do not believe that Protestant arguments against Catholicism led to anything that Dan Brown is doing.
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Great post as always, Wintery!
I like Frank Turek and have read his book “I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist”. I think he’s right that the church has majorly failed in teaching apologetics (or simply teaching how to think logically at all!).
I think the types of questions offered during your church’s Q & A are unfortunately par for the course.
I currently teach apologetics to high school seniors and am constantly amazed at the parents who don’t seem to “get it”. Fortunately, the students get it and seem to love it! I’m blessed to be able to teach them and I can only hope that more Christian schools will follow suit and start a trend of well-informed courses on apologetics!
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I have to tell you that this is the biggest secret in church. Somehow, adults have totally misread the young people. The adults force young people to attend church for many years without ever bringing up the question of whether any of this is true. They also don’t really allow them to ask any interesting questions, or to resolve them in debates. This is where all these former-Christian atheists come from, and why 75% of churchgoing youth abandon the church as soon as they go off to university.
I don’t know what to say. How long must this go on until these well-meaning, Bible-believing pastors realize that it is not enough to say “The Bible says”? My pastor is actually pretty good and does an above average job of considering the alternatives among various denominations, and refers to academic literature to support his views, like David Wells and Calvin (gak!). But you can tell that he is intentionally avoiding the question of whether this is true and presenting it all as “what this church believes”.
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His book “I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist” is awesome, and I’ve found it very helpful in communicating with younger persons.
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Why, oh, why can’t pastors avail themselves of people like Turek? We’re getting killed on the field because of lack of training.
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We Catholics have a man named Fr. John Corapi– an absolute lion for the faith.
One thing he has hammered over and over again is that the truth is not being preached.
If you want a real ‘pump-you-up’ conversion story, listen to his. He went from millionaire sleeping with famous actresses and living in a mansion on the ocean (one of his oft repeated lines– “If your house is smaller than 2000 square feet, than my bedroom was larger than your house”), to homeless and drug addicted, and eventually a Catholic Priest and the most heard Catholic preacher in the world.
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“A man can’t be always defending the truth; there must be a time
to feed on it.” – C. S. Lewis
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I actually enjoy going to church to learn from this new pastor, but I keep thinking of how nothing of what he says has any practical value in terms of engaging the outside world, and that makes me sad. It also makes me sad that most of the young people (75%) will fall away from the faith because of the fideism and pietism that is so prevalent in the church.
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I feel this is an important place to recall the early Church martyrs.
Most of them were ‘kids’, in their teens, filled with so much faith that they would rather die horrible deaths than ‘curse Christ and swear by the genius of the Emperor’
We have a bit of a tyranny of low expectations. These kids are old enough to be heroic saints. If they aren’t becoming heroic saints it is we who have failed to form them properly. One more reason to smash the television and homeschool children I suppose.
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I don’t think I agree with this article. Fundamentalism definitely has its flaws, but I can think of much bigger problems than the errors in fundamentalist theology. Consider these problems:
1) The theory of evolution
2) The income tax
3) Popular election of senators
4) Women’s suffrage
Fundamentalists do often suffer from non-intellectualism, and I definitely agree that Christians should engage culture. (For the time being, I’m even still a postmillennialist!) But I think the problem with America is that *not enough* churches are fundamentalist. We’ve had idiot “Christians” running around denying the authority of scripture, the deity of Christ, the atonement, the creation of humans, the holiness of the Mosaic law, etc. What did we expect to happen to culture?
If you want someone to blame, blame the Episcopalians, Lutherans, Unitarians, and other liberal groups.
And as far as fundamentalists only emphasizing activities that directly save souls, I don’t think that’s accurate either. Fundamentalists tend to be traditional. They certainly like saving souls (which results in more spiritual *voters*), but the only people who emphasize that to the exclusion of other strategies are the “seeker-sensitive” types. And although the seeker-sensitive influence is corrosive, they’re a relatively modern phenomenon.
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What on earth can you imagine to be wrong with the popular election of Senators?
Why think that the problems of doctrinal slippage are not also due to anti-intellectualism? Postmodernism and feminization assume a hatred of reason and evidence, do they not? In my experience, theological liberalism is built on top of the dismissal of reason and evidence.
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“What on earth can you imagine to be wrong with the popular election of Senators?”
Everything. But that might be off topic :-D
I’m 100% serious BTW.
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Well, I’m stymied. Please tell me what the alternative is.
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Elected by the state houses, as the founding fathers intended.
It makes the senators actually accountable to the state, forces the senators to keep power flowing towards the state houses if they wish to keep their jobs, and causes those who are going to Washington as senators to have as their primary focus state politics.
Imagine, if you will, the senate ever threatening to withhold funds from a state for refusing to do XYZ when the senators are elected by state houses who are interested in preserving their own authority.
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The popular election of Senators almost completely destroys federalism, which should constitutionally be a strong check-and-balance against tyranny.
It’s possible that liberal churches originally developed due to non-intellectualism. I don’t know enough about American church history to comment. But regardless, that’s not who this guy is condemning. He’s condemning fundamentalists, who were actually a reaction *against* liberalism.
I do think you could maybe make the case that premillennialist eschatology is responsible for the retreat from culture. Premillennialism often assumes that the church can’t accomplish much on earth culturally until Jesus shows up and fixes things. (This pessimism isn’t entirely inherent to the theology, but it easily fits into the premill framework.) And of course, fundamentalists tend to be premill. So you could hold that against them.
Also, I think some of the dumb rules dreamed up by fundamentalists make them Pharisaical and obsolete. For example, rules against dancing, playing cards, drinking, smoking, etc. just make Christians look like anti-social prudes that no one wants to join up with. These restrictions were all well-intentioned — with the intention of building in a hedge against blatant sin — but that’s almost exactly what the Pharisees did before Jesus condemned them.
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You’re making a lot of sense. Now that I think about it, theological liberalism was a result of excessive rationalism that denied miracles, etc. But today I think that it is driven less by rationalism and more by postmodernism and feminization, which is more about letting everyone blieve whatever makes them feel good and not disagreeing about anything or using arguments and evidence authoritatively.
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Women’s suffrage is a problem? You don’t think women should have the right to vote?
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The argument here is that women’s suffrage grew government in order to provide security to single women. This reduced individual liberties and this made choosing a good man unnecessary.
Here it is presented by economist John Lott.
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It is certainly true that many mistakes have been made by different factions of Christianity in the US over the last 100 years or so. And we definately need to engage the culture and defend what we believe and why we believe it.
Most God fearing cultures of the past (OT Israel being the prime example) have fallen because of idolatry. Today we worship the god of Sex, Television, Sports, Money, Career, Politics, Music, Food, Internet, Comfort, Church, Vacation, Retirement, Image, Self, etc.
Could it be that our problem is simply that our hearts are far from God?
“You shall have no other gods before Me.” Exodus 20:3
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I have always loved the ending of 1st John, because it shows just how clearly he understood this root problem that humans have. I think it’s fair to say that all sin has at least one root in idolatry.
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