Rusty has some good comments on the issue of rights in the Constitution.

I’m starting to get a handle on this whole emergent church thing, and boy am I behind the times. At the ripe old age of 30, I am already a relic of the distant past.

No, seriously, go check this out. Or this. The Emergent Church is the Postmodern Church, and this means certain things like disdain for traditional power structures, worship and apparently also doctrine. You know, folks come along and say that there’s a lot of unbiblical accretions in the church these days, that have developed over the centuries (and they’re right) and they fight that by adding on a lot of unbiblical accretions of their own.

Tim Berglund has some excellent analysis over here about the Emergent Church movement (link from Joe– thanks!), and I’d check him out for a primer.

One thing I have a lot of sympathy for is the Emergent Church’s professed distaste for marketing. They rightly reject the Boomer church mentality of dividing people up into demographics, recognizing that doing this is for the purpose of marketing more effectively to them. Of course, the backside of this is that the EC movement does exactly the same thing- if not explicitly, at least implicitly. They say so often, “Boomers are like this, and Gen-X is like this”, and then spend a lot of time convincing you that “Boomer is bad, Gen-x is good.” There’s lots of references to Douglas Coupland and the like. And reading Douglas Coupland is a good way to get a handle on what they refer to as Generation X, especially the book actually entitled Generation X. And it’s a really fun read, for any purpose.


Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture

Funny thing about Generation X, though- everybody thinks it’s something different. Generation X was originally supposed to be people born from about the assassination of Kennedy through the middle of the 70’s, and then came Generation Y. During the time that this term became popular, really from Coupland’s book, these people were in their 20’s. Now, when people talk about Generation X, they mostly mean people in their 20’s, even though this is supposed to be Gen-Y. So the definitions have changed.

What’s more, the characteristics of Gen-X as opposed to boomers is that Gen-X is suspicious of authority, suspicious of marketing, in search of meaning and very interested in relationships. The boomers, natch, are the opposite of all that. But the boomers were the hippies! And when the hippies were in their 20’s they were… you guessed it… suspicious of authority, suspicious of marketing, in search of meaning, and very interested in relationships. And they were good, and their parents bad, and I seem to recall a lot of talk about how to get the hippies into church. So one can only come to the conclusion that all of this generation talk is really overplayed. Mostly, it just seems like people want to have young people in their church.

So then, to get back to the Emergent Church itself- it seems that what’s really going on is that people have taken a look at the culture, decided they need to be more ‘relevant’ and shape the church to match the culture. Now, I know they wouldn’t say they are doing this, but take a look at this “exegesis” of 1 Peter 3:1-7. The author’s method is to understand what Paul was doing to his cultural norms, and then to do the same thing to our own cultural norms. Actually understanding that Paul is teaching timeless truths about husbands and wives is entirely beside the point.

Look also at this “Emerging Church A-Z”. How much of it is driven by culture? The EC is defined by blogging? By DJ-ing? This is basically exactly the same thing that the Catholics did, when they chiseled the name “Odin” off the statues and chiseled “Peter” on, when they took the Feast of Lupercalia (basically a sex lottery) and renamed it St. Valentine’s Day. It wasn’t successful then, and it isn’t now. Christianity isn’t about taking stuff out of the culture and reinterpreting it in a Christian fashion. The Internet does not define the church. Christianity is about cultural transformation, among other little things like submission to God’s word and personal redemption. The Po-Mo’s have this attitude of helplessness in the face of a culture that defines all, that rules all. There is little analysis of whether or not the way people think and react today is a good or bad thing. It’s assumed to be good, and then co-opted. Here’s some stuff about using U2 for inspiration in worship! Check out this quote:

We can’t enter into worship on Sunday and embark on a pedestrian wade through a four-hymn sandwich without setting aside the ‘holy’ experience of a bar we spent last night in, listening to a funky soul singer, and sipping Irish coffee. We find worship an unconnected experience when we realise how alien it seems to recall the spiritual energy and gospel motifs we found in the latest version of Romeo and Juliet at the movies. And we often want to cringe in church when we sing a melodic jingle about loving Jesus, when we think of our souls soaring as we play U2’s complex ‘Pop’ album loud on our CD player at home.

This is like saying, “How can I be expected to enjoy sex with my wife, when pornography is so much more fun?” And yes, I’ll stand by my analogy- a spiritual experience to U2 is to church what pornography is to a marriage.

The world is absolutely rolling the church right now, at least in the modern Anglosphere world where most of this EC stuff is going on. This whole movement reminds me of a kid getting beaten up by a bully on the playground and saying Oh, it’s OK, we’re just playing a game.

Postmodernism has nothing to do with the church. Postmodernism is about destroying timeless truths, not repackaging them. The patron saint of Postmodernism is Pontius Pilate saying, “What is truth?” just before handing Jesus over to be crucified. The culture is NOT going to be transformed by listening to Bono, “creating new Christian rituals” or pandering to pagan religions. It will be transformed by the individual process of us being transformed, one by one, by the renewing of our minds by solid teaching and worship. And despite what they’d have us believe, that has everything to do with logic, the “logos”, our “reasonable service”.

For 2000 years, the church has built relationships, cared for the poor, driven social change, trained up the weak and transformed lives. Everything that the “Emergent Church” wants to do has been done, successfully, for millennia. But all of a sudden that’s not good enough, and we need new models. Just over the last 20 years, people have apparently fundamentally changed from what they were for the previous 2000, and so we need all new church models.

Of course, this isn’t what’s really going on. What’s going on is that people want to repackage, to take the good old church and wrap it up in a shiny new wrapper. In other words, it’s just marketing. Being a member of that crucial “Gen-X” demographic, you’ll have to excuse me if I’m a little suspicious.

For any of you wondering about ADD, ADHD, and Ritalin, check out this article at Policy Review.

My favorite quote: “How has it come to pass that in fin-de-siècle America, where every child from preschool onward can recite the “anti-drug” catechism by heart, millions of middle- and upper-middle class children are being legally drugged with a substance so similar to cocaine that, as one journalist accurately summarized the science, “it takes a chemist to tell the difference”? ”

Link via the Evangelical Outpost.

Update: By the way, on the ADD questionnaire at the end, I got a 60 out of 100, which will surprise no one who knows me.

Howdy Strangers!

Yes, I know I haven’t posted in a week. I had a week-long seminar-style class in Colorado Springs. It was an 8-hour class that met every day. So, doing that and keeping up with confirmation class, Bible study and at least a little bit of X-Box prevented me from blogging. I love blogging, but it has to fall a little bit down the priority list.

I actually intended to blog from class. It wouldn’t be live, but I could blog on what the professor was talking about and post it later. But the class proved to be interesting enough that I never wrote anything. Which was good- a class that can hold my attention for 8 straight hours a day for a whole week- well, that’s a good class.

But we’re back on the blogging bandwagon now. I’ve lost a good chunk of my regular daily traffic, which is unfortunate but not unexpected. I hope I can get it back faster than it took me the first time.

Fox News, in its continuing coverage on Janet Jackson’s lack of coverage at the Superbowl, says there may be a crackdown coming on indecency in broadcasting. Standards have slipped quite rapidly even in the last 10 years, and so I for one am in favor of it.

Some have been saying for quite a while that standards would only get looser and looser. The entertainment industry seems to think that broadcasting standards are just too prudish and restrictive. But if broadcasting standards are too restrictive, then that implies that there are standards out there that are sufficiently restrictive, sufficiently tight, to make them happy. But we never seem to find that point. In 50 years of television, it has progressively gotten worse and worse, with things once deemed unimaginable now routine. I expect that many of the libertines of yesterday, who thought the broadcasting standards were too restrictive, would have said at the time that they would never favor things going as far as they have, and maybe some would have meant it. But it’s become clear to me that what many on the so-called cutting edge of entertainment actually favor is not a less restrictive standard, but no standard at all. It’s not that they think the standard is too prudish, they think America is too prudish.

That leads to the conclusion that they are trying to change us, to mold us after their image. I can’t imagine that anyone would think that it would be a good thing to model their moral behavior after the Jacksons, Madonnas and Timberlakes of the world. And yet that’s what’s being attempted, is it not? Like the nobility of old, the celebrity of today seems to too often think that moral standards only apply to the little guy, and that the ideal world is one where there are no checks, no restrictions, or at least none on them. And while they may have been content 50 years ago with keeping their scandalous behavior behind closed doors, as time has gone on they’ve thrown off even secrecy as an unacceptable burden on their right to complete freedom. Therefore, we must be changed to accept them.

Think I’m being needlessly reactionary, or conspiratorial? Think they’re just after the money, and are just responding to what people want? Then why has the entertainment industry, for at least three decades or so, consistently been way out front of the public in terms of what was acceptable? Why would any of their product ever be described as ‘shocking’, if it’s just what people wanted?

But there is a limit- there has to be. Society bears the cost for their experimentation, and sooner or later (I think we’re rapidly approaching ‘sooner’) the bill’s going to have to be paid.

From the article linked to above:

Social historian Gabler doubts that there will be any long-term change in broadcast standards. The line between what is acceptable and not is always changing, but, historically, it never retreats, he said.

Social historians must have pretty short timeframes. The standards in Hollywood were looser in the 20’s and early 30’s than they were in the 40’s and 50’s, when Hays’ Code was implemented (which, incidentally, corresponded with what most describe as the “Golden Age of Hollywood“). And the standards even now must surely be more restrictive than those during the reign of Caligula, or the height of Sodom and Gomorrah. Standards during Cromwell’s protectorate in England had been more restrictive than the standards before, and so on. Many examples of the line “retreating” could be given. The fact that he refers to more restrictive standards as a ‘retreat’ shows you exactly where his preferences lie, and makes the point I was making earlier about their desire for ever fewer restrictions on what can be done in the name of “art” or “entertainment”.

I think the question that we need to face, the discussion we need to have in this culture, is whether or not we are going to let an elitist immoral few drive our understanding of what is acceptable and what is not, or are we going to take back control of our own country? Sure, they’ll complain and whine and call us prigs, but that will just be their distress at the loss of their privileged position.

Reason Magazine talks about the abuse of the child support system. One thing I didn’t know- the state gets a cut of child support payments, and also uses it to reduce welfare rolls and even pay back the state retroactively for welfare a mother has recieved. All of this frequently on the flimsiest (or even nonexistent) evidence that the father is even the father.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that this is not being done in the interest of the child, but in the interest of bureaucrats and the financial health of the welfare state.

It may be that you’ve heard all you care to hear right now about the Democrats, but if not, check out this article at WorldNetDaily by Hugh Hewitt about Terry McAuliffe, the DNC chairman, and his latest slanders of Bush. Apparently he’s decided that National Guard service isn’t really military service. The things he said were so loopy that even Katie Couric, that great bastion of mainstream sanity &lt/sarcasm&gt thought it was too much.

Here’s a great piece on what happened to the Dean campaign. Clay Shirky argues that it was a collapse of appearance, not substance, that the campaign was never there- it just looked like it was. It seems a brilliantly argued piece. Check it out!

Link via Instapundit.

Exploding Whales!

Thanks to everyone who voted for me for the BlogMadness tournament. I won the first round!

The second round is now going. Go take a look at my new opponent, and vote again! The fun continues!