There is an interesting discussion at The Revealer – well, it was an interesting discussion until a gentleman named Dan Krauss came in and used 10 dollar words to make some kind of point.
I’m all for learning, but lord love a duck, I find ponderous speech in a comment section foolish. I’d ask him to speak clearly, but to him he is.
Krauss dampens down the conversation, up until then it is quite informative.
Breaking it down.
Jeff Sharlet wrote an interesting piece in Rolling Stone on virginity called The Young and the Sexless. Sharlet’s strength as a writer is focusing in on people like the religious studies student(s) in his article.
With real people he takes us into the virginity movement.
Good read.
This is where it got interesting for me.
Sharlet gets a lengthy response from R. Albert Mohler Jr. I’ve seen the name around. Apparently he is president of Southern Baptist Seminary.
(yes, I had to look it up – it is in Kentucky)
Moheler’s response has been printed in The Christian Post.
(page not found)
R. Albert Moher has a blog at Crosswalk.(part of a religious media conglomerate) His response to the Rolling Stone article is his June 27th entry.
Here is where I begin to tread on foreign ground. Yet, it is not foreign. The evangelical concepts I’ve heard for years are all there…right/left/mainstream culture, the usual word suspects.
The telling paragraph to this outsider is:
The most interesting part of the Rolling Stone article is the reporter’s fundamental assumption that the real agenda behind the campaign for sexual abstinence must be political. Early in the article, Sharlet makes this claim: “Chastity is a new organizing principle of the Christian right, built on the notion that virgins are among God’s last loyal defenders, knights and ladies of a forgotten kingdom.” When Dunbar describes sexual abstinence as a form of rebellion, Sharlet jumps to the political sphere. As he sees it, conservative Christians are now pushing the issue of sexual abstinence in order to make “every young man and woman part of an elite virgin corps.”
I think (correct me if I’m wrong) that the language of cultural war comes into play with the entry of Mr. Mohler. And that is extremely relevant to someone such as R. Albert Mohler. It remains an alien concept to this Canadian.
Sharlet responds over at The Revealer.
(you’ve gotta love blogging)
Before I get into the detail, I had to get my head around:
Mohler wants conservatives to engage and defeat Hillary’s ideas, not her character. What are the ideas he finds alarming? Her “ideological feminism, her early work developing a radical concept of children’s rights, [and] her ‘it takes a village’ approach to raising children.”
I’ll be the first to admit it: This is news to this Reagan-era child of the ’50s generation. I don’t think I ever fully understood the principled opposition to Hillary as based on, among other things, the “it takes a village” idea.
I’ve never heard/read why Clinton is such a threat to Christians so succinctly before.
To me however, the person that nailed the essense of this discussion and gave the aha! moment was Ted Olsen in the comment section.
It’s more than an aha moment, there is a fair bit to think about.
But here’s my fear: evangelicals (properly understood in their historical context) have long had this desire to “speak the language of the culture” and “meet people where they are at” for evangelistic purposes. But there seems to be a growing feeling in the movement that the dominant language of the culture isn’t sexual, it’s political. (Today’s identity politics is less about the former that than it is about the latter.) So the evangelical movement starts couching its ideas in the language of politics, the language, that is, of power. And what may have started as an attempt to be culturally relevant becomes an end in itself. The evangelistic purpose is abandoned as the movement is co-opted. The language we used is now using us.
I think Mr. Krauss is trying to say that US evangelicals…never mind, you tell me. It seems disjointed to the rest of the discussion and I’m having difficulty finding his key graph and idea.
I’d say most Christian and Evangelical political organizations are satisfied to work for the reinstatement of a political culture of laws and courts with a more classical conception of liberal republicanism that is rooted in an anti-materialist but not necessarily Christian conception of humanity that takes the transcendent as a given. Some might like more than that; many articulate the same basic goal in more distinctively Evangelical/evangelistic language–but this is the perceived necessary minimum.
I’m not about to actively enter the debate/discussion for I am indeed a foreigner and I’d rather observe.
But to me, Mr. Krauss inadvertently hammered home Mr. Olsen’s final point.
“it takes a village” is indeed the whipping boy of conservatives discussing hillary, although i always understood it as a problem of stinginess among fiscal conservatives, not a matter of fear among religious conservatives.
it’s certainly much nicer to have the village that is our country raise well-educated, kind, strong children than to have our village spend hundreds of billions of dollars to kill people.
in my opinion.
I really liked the Krauss part and the Sharlett part. I feel that we can address moral failures in all of its forms equally. We can address the poor and uneducated, as well as address the problem of an oversexed society equally. It doesn’t have to one or the other. I think that is the problem of the left and the right. They feel they are mutually exclusive.
However, I wonder if some on the left use this mutual exclusivity to condone behavior that God says is clearly wrong (except within marriage and between only a man and a woman). I guess the same can go for the right to condone not giving as much to the poor and needy. I feel both can pursued equally and with no detriment to either issue.
Thanks, Bene. I agree with you about Ted Olsen’s remarks — I urged him to draft them up into a cover story for Christianity Today, where he’s an editor.
Oh — no harm done, but I’ve only one t to my name. Believe it or not, it stands for “Torah.” My last name began as an acronym — shin, reysh, lamed, tov — peace to all who study the torah.
No excuse, lost in thought.
Fixed.
Spelling someone’s name I respect shouldn’t get lost in the ideas.:^)
BD, you and I have had this discussion about people having academic-level discussions like Dan Krauss before, and I’m a little disappointed that you feel compelled to take him down for using vocabulary appropriate to the topic. Krauss was not the one who mentioned power as the real issue behind the discussion of Hillary. Ted Olsen did that. Krauss’s contribution took up that aspect appropriately, albeit in somewhat academic and postmodern, deconstructionist terms by my way of thinking. I had no problem understanding him, and your distaste for that type of discourse is no reason to treat him like he’s out of line.
We have had this discussion Mike, and I need to remember it.:^)
It is not distaste it’s annoyance.
A good academic will speak his/her language well to other academics. And a very good academic can convey the ideas to the rest of use.
What good is post modern deconstructionist language in a clear discussion if most of us don’t know what the heck he is talking about?
…vocabulary appropriate to the topic?
Excuse me Rev. Mike, it may well be, but is the venue the appropriate place to be using it?
I didn’t say what he contributed had no merit so
how about you breaking down what he said with clarity for the non-PhD’s?
I have to admit I read Mr Krauss’s comments twice (notwithstanding that it is much more tiring to read on screen then on paper) and then had to google up a few terms. Like “chattering classes”.
To get this
The “chattering classes” may have originated with T.S Eliot or perhaps Huxley (my online search was inconclusive) to describe a middle-class elite incessently talking about the irrelevant.
Which only leads me to say that those talking in postmodern deconstructionalist terms probably don’t realise how irrelevant – and unintelligible – postmodern descrontructionalism is to average Jo and Joanne down at the pub and on the net. Or even to any academic who is conversant in another field.
OK I am being a bit cheeky (used in the Australian sense of the term).
Anyway, good post Bene. And an interesting discussion from Jeff et al. I think Ted Olsen nailed one reason for the discomfort some Christians outside of the U.S. feel when looking at American evangelicalism from the outside. And that also has some bearing on countries like Oz where Christians are taking their lead from their American counterparts. I hope he does do a cover story on that.
I honestly don’t know if our American friends are aware of how uncomfortable our countries are with the import of some of the import of some aspects of US evangelicalism is.
Destiny in NZ, Family First in Oz and in Canada more obvious groups such as Focus in The Family, the SBC and others.
I also hope Ted Olsen follows up, but I don’t think the international aspect will be included.
We are not the target Christianity Today audience.
I think what he has to say is informative.
It’s such a catch 22. We can learn from each other, but aggressive importing with agendas using US models is disconcerting.
On the flip side, US evangelicals sincerely believe our countries are mission fields and I have no idea how in the quest for political power and the language groups use, we’ll find common ground with the importation.
I don’t understand the problem with FOTF? What is so wrong with looking at nations as mission fields as well as our own (in this case the US)? FOTF is multi-faceted. Within the US there are political issues but out side the US they focus on that but more on Evangelism for Christ. We all know there is nothing wrong with “the Great Commission”. The body of Christ is made up of many members and some have giftings that include Evangelism and there is nothing wrong with that. We shouldn’t say as a hand “…to another hand, I have no need of you”. Just because it doesn’t feel “comfortable” to a particular culture. Sometimes as Christians we have to stand up to the culture rather than conform to the culture. “Be in the world but not of it.”
Doug: I’ve made it no secret I don’t have much use for FOTF Canada. I think they are a political lobby group selling US goods and using US marketing techniques.
On the other hand I’ve seen them do half decent and more culturally sensitive work in Singapore.
My complaint isn’t about room to operate. It’s the how and it has little to do with God. I hope our culture doesn’t get comfortable with the techniques. It isn’t the US’s or US believers problem. It’s ours for consuming it.
I don’t get it. I have read much of their work and don’t see at all what you are talking about. I think it is strange for people to support things that are contrary to Scripture but I understand that much of the world is anti-God. 96% of Germans don’t go to church, 98% Danes, etc. To me I could care less about marketing. God never says that marketing is wrong. They aren’t US goods but books that are founded on the Gospel that happen to come from the US. THey do happen to have some political literature but that is not the main focus. What is wrong with “consuming” it? The Bible doesn’t say consuming is wrong except if you put the consumption above God and that is not the case with the people who support FOTF. Maybe your own political disposition predisposses you to be against FOTF without focusing “no-pun intended” on the good that this organization and the books it provides encourage the body of Christ.