Just came across an interesting story on National Public Radio recently, about an evangelical activist who is attempting to identify unregistered Christians in the United States and get them registered to vote by using data-mining techniques. This story does tend to reflect the habitual blind spots of NPR when it comes to Christianity (namely, associating Christianity solely with American ‘conservative’ evangelicalism and fundamentalism), but it does end up being somewhat edifying. Some of the variables used by the evangelical activist organisation ‘United in Purpose’ are relatively straightforward: being on an anti-abortion list, for example. But others of them are a bit stranger: Home schooling? Being an angler? Being a NASCAR fan? How do one’s sporting or entertainment habits or educational preferences have anything to do with one’s faith? Are Christians not to be found either in state or in private schools?
This is one of the major problems in American Christianity, and one of the major roadblocks to recovering and reasserting the latent, radical-orthodox Jacobitism and suspicion of unrestrained capital and empire which undergirded much of the early discontent of the American colonies. Our civic religion runs completely at cross-purposes with classical Christianity; instead of destroying idols and interrogating the uses of both state power and private wealth, we have come to a point where we are mostly apathetic about accumulations of private wealth and pathological in our relationship to state power (enthusiastic about using it abroad to enforce an ideological hegemony, but mortally afraid of using it at home to regulate moral issues - whether ‘economic’ or ‘social’). And we have erected idols in place of Our Lord. I read the comment by one of UIP’s volunteers with great irony: she prays that America will face ‘a Red Sea experience’, but it seems to me that her invocation of the Mosaic tradition is misplaced. The Hebrews, being led about in the desert for forty years, were later subject to ‘a Mount Sinai experience’, though instead of accepting the laws of the God of Israel, they erected in his place the image of the Golden Calf. That UIP could mistake NASCAR fandom for strength of Christian faith as such, or that they would seek out Christians acting in accord with the Gospels or with the Pauline exhortations in gated communities and amongst people who home-school their children, is actually quite mind-boggling to me.
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I have relatives who have left both Catholicism and High Church Lutheranism for evangelical megachurches and from what I have seen there is indeed this strange combination of right-wing politics and consumerism that I find very disturbing.
ReplyDeleteThese churches are blatant in their mimicry of whatever trendy corporate gobbledygook is being bandied about at the moment, so it does not surprise me that UIP is using market research techniques in their quest to find unregistered Christians. Self-identifying as a Christian is now becoming essentially the same as self-identifying as a Pepsi fan or a Nike loyalist.
John, you have my sympathies.
ReplyDeleteThankfully, though several members of my own extended family are quite conservative and evangelical, they do still have a good sense of aesthetics. They don't attend megachurches, and (if memory serves me correctly) when the pastor introduced pop music into the liturgy, my uncle (bless his heart) complained that his rotary saw sounded better...
I would like to believe that religious affiliation at this point means something a bit more substantive than consumer preference, though the moralistic therapeutic deism of all-too-many mainline Protestant churches does not help matters. But even the MTD outlook does express a certain set of values; the problem is merely that they have not been well-developed enough, and lack the creative capacities of more baroque or more orthodox theologies.