This rather insightful reflection on civil religion popped up on my Twitter feed. I have to admit, I really don’t use twitter like it was intended – for communication and bumper sticker wisdom. For me, its a better rss feed to articles, blogs, and podcasts with a 144 character descriptions of content. Works for me.
Jonathan Martin hits the nail on the head with thoughts on how the Protestant mainline has ceased to be prophetic and has become polite, comfortable, or innocuously politically correct and how Evangelicalism has likewise lost its way, turning theology into a political categories of conservative or liberal.
This quote gives you a flavor of the whole blog and I highly recommend it. It points us in the direction that many of us have been saying – we need to rethink what it means to be church in light of what it has become.
We don’t care what anybody believes about the trinity, because we don’t believe what a person believes about the trinity makes a difference in real life. More potently, we don’t believe the trinity can change the world. Who cares whether or not a person partakes of the eucharist, because the body and blood of Jesus is of course trite in comparison to our political platforms–that is where the power is.
“We don’t care about theology anymore because we are no longer concerned about being Christians in any particular sort of way. Jesus is unable to save the world, thus the best hope we have now is to embrace across theological lines in service of the true god of conservative civil religion. The stakes are too high to be concerned about doctrine when there are far more pressing matters at hand.”