Ones Like The Ones On My Car! (Part Two)

I was talking to a Russian friend recently about American culture, explaining to him my fascination with other peoples and other cultures. I was telling him that American culture has been developed into a tool the sole purpose of which is to make people buy things. It has no enduring value because it is ever going out of style, and must ever re-invent itself in order to continue to grow the profits and sales of its masters. It is a culture of advertising jingles. To prove my point, I asked him (he is an avid watcher of TV) to name at least five ad jingles that he knew by heart. He laughed and said that he could easily name twenty.

American culture is intrinsically tacky, being nothing more than a marketing tool. And this culture has infected the American evangelical church something fierce. When I say this, I know that such a statement attracts a heartfelt Amen from many who are just as disgusted as I am. Yet there are some out there whose “Amens” scare me to death. These are people who say, “TH in SoC, we are just like you in your disgust toward the modern American evangelical church. We also reject it. But we have a solution...” They begin describing their “solution” by saying that the Church has fallen away from true Biblical principles. Then they state that through deep and intensive Bible study (combined, in some cases, with a few visions), they have rediscovered God's true pattern for church order or for marriage, and that I too can experience the fulfillment, joy, etc., that they have found if only I will join their outfit. Of course, those who sign on with these people are usually warned fairly soon that no other church holds the truth the way they do, or sees the light the way they do, or upholds the standard the way they do, and so forth.

I was reminded of people like this a while back when I read a short article on Gene Edwards on the Assembly Reflections website. Gene Edwards was a preacher who had been infected with some weird Exclusive Plymouth Brethren teachings, and went around to conferences teaching people that he alone truly understood God's pattern for the Church. There were those who signed on with him to be part of his ministry, yet they frequently experienced the self-destruction of churches founded by Mr. Edwards, due to cultic practices and Mr. Edwards' tendency to be a control freak.

Mr. Edwards had a protege named Frank Viola, who went on to become a well-known teacher and author in his own right. When Gene Edwards began to be discredited, Frank Viola publicly distanced himself from Edwards. Yet Mr. Viola continued to teach many of the things taught by Gene Edwards. Among these are that people don't have any right before God to just get together and decide to start a church. In the view of both Edwards and Viola, the only true legitimate churches before God are those churches started by an “anointed church planter.” By an extremely odd coincidence, both Edwards and Viola believe that they themselves are such “anointed church planters,” and that God has not raised up very many others. I guess means that if I go to Christmas Eve service at the Lutheran church a few miles away from my house, I haven't really “gone to church”! (For corroboration, see: FAQ - Letters to a church planter)

Now Frank Viola has teamed up with George Barna, a hyperkinetic “expert” on church trends and statistics, and they are both publicly pushing the idea that the Church needs to change to fit their vision of what it ought to be. Yet they sound just like the wacked-out Plymouth Brethren nonsense I used to hear from George Geftakys, nonsense about how so few people really saw the vision of the Church, how hard that vision was to obtain, and how we must slavishly follow only those who had the “vision.” Frank Viola teaches that church should be free-flowing and non-hierarchal, yet he elevates the office of the “church planter” to the position of royalty. This sounds like the same “talk of freedom contradicted by the experience of slavery” that I lived as a member of a Geftakys assembly.

But I don't mean to (just) beat up on Frank Viola. Some other folks are also in need of a whoopin'. I was reading a news report a week ago about some woman who was a former member of the Quiverfull movement, who left the movement (and her husband) because the family's involvement in that movement drove one of her daughters to attempt suicide. The Quiverfull people are those who teach that God's clear commandment is that married women should have as many children as they can. Thus a Quivefull can mean as many as twenty children!

The Quiverfull people are just as strict and regimented as some of the Plymouth Brethren, and their strictness is probably on a par with some of the more hardcore Mormons. They are really big on pushing their idea of the Biblical commandment that wives should submit to husbands. Now I want to tell you that I am definitely not a radical feminist. I believe that the Bible literally commands a woman to submit to her husband. But the Bible also commands a man to love his wife. The kind of “submission” I saw when I was a member of a strict, high-demand, cultic group was frankly degrading (and I'm a guy!). May God keep me from ever again pushing that nonsense on a woman.

All of this is to say that the fact that the prevailing American evangelical culture is a vast wasteland of commercialism leads to a certain vulnerability among those who call themselves Christian. In our search for authentic community, we can easily be led into groups with great appeal, because they have a well-defined culture, and that culture is definitely not mainstream. Yet once the novelty and the sense of the exotic have worn off, the culture of too many of these groups becomes plainly visible as dysfunctional. The dysfunction is not due to novelty, but due to the fact that the culture of these groups is controlled by autocratic heads with a self-serving agenda, a serious lust for control, and a desire to persecute those who don't suit their tastes. Joining one of these groups in order to escape the evangelical wasteland is like going to a doctor because your head hurts, and having the doctor say, “Then why don't I smash one of your thumbs? Then at least you won't be thinking about your head!” Uh, no thanks.

When therefore I talk of church and say that I want “ones like the ones on my car!”, I am not talking about groups like these.

Scary Halloween Guises

I'm sitting in my house right now with most of the lights out, hoping that no trick-or-treaters bang on my door, because I didn't buy any candy this year. And I'm thinking about how it's sometimes interesting in a wryly funny way for me to look back on the time I spent in a strict, aberrant church and to see the similarities between that group and many other group settings I see in the broader society. One thing our head honcho seemed to want is to make sure that we were known for all the things we didn't do, as a means of setting ourselves apart as holier than our fellow men.

One of those forbidden things was to celebrate religious holidays such as Christmas or Easter, because this was supposed to be “worldly.” So it was that a few years after I left that church, while I was still living in So. Cal., I decided to put up Christmas lights on my house as a gesture of rebellion against my past. Trouble is, it does sometimes rain in California – especially in the winter. Being the electrical engineer that I am, I worried that rain might short out my Christmas lights. So one Sunday after the worship service, I talked to the associate pastor at the Lutheran church I was attending at the time. He knew some of my history and we had often had conversations about the disaster of modern American evangelicalism. This time, I had a very important spiritual question: “Pastor, er, um...how exactly do you keep Christmas lights from shorting out in the rain?” (The answer involves plastic bags and duct tape.)

One big thing that we didn't (with a capital D) do was Halloween. The reason given was that the origins of Halloween are satanic, and that as Christians we don't want to acknowledge or celebrate the lies of the enemy. To this day I believe that this is an accurate statement. However, we carried it to a ridiculous extreme, especially in the workplace, where our leaders often encouraged us to go out of our way to be self-righteous sticks in the mud, disapprovingly wagging our fingers at anyone who dressed up as anything other than themselves on Halloween.

This caused many of us to miss a great deal of humor. I remember how, a few years after I had gotten out of the Army, I was working at a defense plant. One Halloween I had to go to work late because of an appointment of some kind or another in the morning. Once I arrived at work, I went to a parts crib on the second floor to get something or another, and I was greeted by a couple of nuns working the parts counter. Taken aback, I wondered aloud if our company had decided to hire members of a South American Catholic society...then I recognized the faces of a couple of co-workers wrapped up in those nuns' habits.

Now that I'm an engineer, I find it refreshing to meet my co-workers from time to time in a guise other than the ones they normally wear. (Engineers can be so straight ;) ) Last year, our office had a Halloween potluck in which lead engineers, assistant department managers, project managers and others let themselve act just a bit silly. One guy dressed up as a geek who had gotten some of his limbs caught in an industrial machine. A project manager dressed as a rock dj, and a project engineer dressed as a folk singer. A couple of women engineers, along with some with designer/draftswomen and secretaries, dressed like kids going to a slumber party. I must say, they all looked cute. (FYI, when a guy says “cute,” he frequently means, quaintly, ridiculously, endearingly funny. That's how I mean it here.)

This year, I dressed up as myself. That's probably scary enough for most people, I think. But as I am reminded of all the nit-picky ways in which our church tried to differentiate itself from the rest of Christendom, and how this nit-picking is characteristic of legalistic, totalist groups – especially some of the Plymouth Brethren (Darbyite) variety and its many offshoots, including those people who run around telling everyone that they are God's deputy authorities on earth – I have come up with an idea for next Halloween. I think I'll dress up as one of the stricter Plymouth Brethren. Now that should be scary!

The Party Of Godliness (?)

Go ahead and hate your neighbor,

go ahead and cheat a friend;

Do it in the name of Heaven,

justify it in the end.

There won't be any trumpets blowin'

come the Judgment Day;

on the bloody mornin' after...

one tin soldier rides away.

– One Tin Soldier, by Dennis Lambert and Brian Potter; orginal recording by The Original Caste

Sometimes I'm slow to pick up on emerging political developments. So forgive me if you've already heard that Republican U.S. Senator John Ensign was recently found to have had an affair with the wife of one of his staffers, or that in order to cover up this affair, the Senator found a high-paying position in a lobbying firm for that staffer, or that in 2008, Senator Ensign's parents paid the staffer's wife $96,000 as “hush money.”

This is interesting because of the fact that in 2008, as in several previous elections, the American “Christian” right exhorted evangelicals to support the Republican party because the Republicans were the “party of godliness,” and were thus America's last best hope for preservation as a “Christian” nation. Of course, their definition of “Christian” was somewhat narrow, consisting only of the following:

• Respect for the American flag and the Constitution

• Supporting our troops!

• Opposing homosexuality and abortion

• Upholding traditional marriage

• and supporting unhindered capitalism

(Why did I put the word Christian in quotation marks in the paragraph above? Because it's my way of saying, “You may call this 'Christian', but you overlooked a few things!” Or as a movie character once said, “Finding a mouse in a cookie jar doesn't make it a cookie.”)

2009 seems to be the year for imploding Republicans, as 2006 was. Not only do we have Senator Ensign's immoral and illegal acts, but we have South Carolina's Republican Governor Mark Sanford, who was caught in an adulterous affair and who used taxpayer money to try to cover it up. Then there's California Assemblyman Mark Duvall from Orange County who was also caught “kissing the wrong woman.” I could go on and name former Congressman Chip Pickering, or Charles Jensen, Paradise Valley Mayor Vernon Parker and Arizona conservative talk show host Mike Broomhead. Jenson, Parker and Broomhead were leaders of an Arizona Republican political organization. There are other names, of course. If you are reading this and you think your name should be here, please forgive me if I failed to mention you.

Funny thing is, all the so-called “Christian Coalition” and “family values” groups that condemned people like former President Clinton and former attorney general Eliot Spitzer have been quite silent about recent Republican meltdowns. These people have been extremely quick to condemn the moral degeneracy of the Democrats. Why are they silent now? (Hey, James Dobson and Tony Perkins, I can't hear you!!!) Is it because the threat of moral degeneracy is no longer important to them? And why have so many Republican politicians refused to resign from office after being outed?

Could it be that their real agenda has nothing to do with Christian morality? Could it be that their professed “godliness” is simply a ploy to get votes from gullible people? What do they actually support, beside economic, political and military domination of the world, and the securing of an extremely lavish lifestyle for a small minority of the world at the expense of the rest of the world? Don't get me wrong – homosexuality and abortion are in fact sin. But so are greed and murder and the violation of the poor.

Yeah, yeah, I know – you've heard me say this time and time again. But I just found out about Senator Ensign. Thinking about how hard the Republicans have fought to tear apart all of our social safety nets, I just had to get this off my chest. Thanks for reading.

If you want to read more, check out these links:

Republican sex scandal meets spirituality on C Street, regarding the so-called “Christian” shared housing inhabited by mostly Republican lawmakers, and the code of silence which prevents their talking about housemates who commit high crimes and misdemeanors;

And Another GOP Sex Scandal, whose title is self-explanatory,

And lastly, Audra Shay Wins Young Republican Race Despite Facebook Racism Controversy, which shows something of the Right's real agenda.

Ones Like The Ones On My Car! (Part 1)

As anyone who has read my blogging can attest, I have a rather low opinion of modern American evangelicalism. (Here's a sample of my thoughts: The Warrens of the Purpose-Driven.) It's probably not surprising then to know that I don't usually visit modern American evangelical churches – especially not the elder-led or staff-led, praise band-driven, “seeker-sensitive” outfits modeled after the guidelines of the “Purpose-Driven Church.” I keep looking for something like the churches I was used to as a kid, where the Lord was worshiped, the Bible was preached, and the pastor was not trying to become some hip, trendy “star” of a religious empire. In my search, I often feel as frustrated as a character in a radio commercial from a couple of decades ago who was shopping for replacement tires for his car. The tire store salesmen kept trying to sell him all sorts of innovative, cutting-edge tires, while he kept repeating “I just want ones like the ones on my car!!!” in an exasperated voice.

Lately I had begun to wonder if perhaps I was not being just a bit narrow-minded, unwilling to give the modern megachurches and wanna-be's a fair hearing. So today I dropped in at a church meeting at an elementary school. Their trendy-looking banner proudly proclaimed, “One True Life Church,” or something like that, and listed their Web address at the bottom. I laughed a bit at the sight of their ultra-cool banner, then worked hard to keep a straight face as I walked up to one of their greeters.

“I already know the answers to my questions,” I told myself, “but just to be fair, I'll ask anyway.” The greeter, an elderly gentleman, eyed me and said “Hello!” in a bright, friendly voice.

“Hi,” I said. “I have a question about your church. Is it a Purpose-Driven church?” The greeter looked at me, puzzled. “Well, we're Christ-driven,” he replied. “What I mean is,” I answered, “are you staff-led or elder-led? Does the congregation pick the leaders, or do the staff? Do you have a praise band that just sings modern worship songs and no old hymns? When you sing your songs, do you have to pay royalties to the CCLI?” The greeter pondered these questions for a few seconds.

While he was thinking, a youthful, burly guy with a goatee walked up and stuck his hand out. “Howdy!” he said, and told me his name. I asked him about whether the church was staff-led or elder led, and who chose the pastor and elders. He looked puzzled. “Gosh,” he said, “well, we've always had the pastor.” “How did you choose your elders?” I asked. “Well, the pastor went around to people who were qualified and asked them if they were willing to be elders,” he replied. “Did the congregation vote on these elders?” I asked. He answered, “No! That's a strange question. Why would the congregation vote on elders?”

“Well then, does the congregation vote on how your money is spent?” I asked. “No, we have a special finance committee that does that,” he said. I asked, “Who chooses the members of the finance committee? Does the congregation?” “No,” he answered. “The pastor and the elders do. Who ever heard of a congregation voting on these things? Why is it such a big deal? You never read of congregations voting on things like that!” “Yes you do,” I said. “In Acts 6, the congregation chose the first seven deacons. The apostles merely laid their hands on those the congregation picked. But I have one last question. Do you have to pay royalties to the CCLI every time you sing a worship song?”

“Who's the CCLI? ...I never heard of them,” he answered. “Do you show your song lyrics on some sort of projection screen?” I asked. “Have you ever noticed at the bottom of the screen, for each song, there is something saying CCLI Number Thus-and-Such?” “Oh...yeah,” he said. “But I never pay attention to those things.”

“Thank you,” I replied. “You've answered all my questions.” Then I walked away, down the street a couple of blocks to a small Korean church whose service was in progress. I sat in the back of their meeting hall and listened. I could not understand a thing. Yet they seemed simple and sincere, without all the show-biz trappings of modern American evangelical churches, and I actually recognized the tunes of some of the hymns they sang. I sang along quietly, in English.

How the LASIK Surgery Went

Several weeks ago, I posted a prayer request regarding an appointment I made for upcoming LASIK vision correction surgery. It has now been over a month since I had the surgery, and I owe a bit of an explanation of how things went. Thanks to all of you who prayed for me. I do apologize for not filling you in on the details sooner.

Everything went quite well. My uncorrected eyes were not that bad. My right eye was the worst, requiring a perscription of just over -4 diopters. The surgeon's office had me eating flax oil and using lubricant eye drops for a few weeks before the surgery, to make sure my eyes were not dry. The surgeon informed me that he had done LASIK for some members of the Portland Trailblazers. They advanced to the first round of this last season's NBA playoffs (although they lost the first round), so I figured they must be able to see well enough to hit the basket. My confidence in my surgeon was helped by this news.

On the day of the surgery, I was given a few eye tests, then a dose of Valium. It wasn't enough to knock me out or even to diminish consciousness that much. Instead, it just made me a bit apathetic. I was glad when it wore off. (Prescription drug addiction isn't one of my besetting sins, I guess.) After the Valium, they led me into a rather ordinary looking room with some sort of apparatus whose details I didn't bother to notice. They laid me into a reclining chair, put a suction cup device on my right eye, and did their business. Then they switched to the left eye. I noticed a profound difference in my vision after they were done.

The first afternoon was the most uncomfortable, although by evening my eyes felt normal. I had to sleep with an eye shield for the first week, and I was told to refrain from rubbing my eyes for the first month. I did notice both glare and haloes around lights at night, although this has gotten quite a bit better.

My left eye seems picture-perfect right now, with vision of 20/15. The vision in my right eye is still settling down, and fluctuates between 20/20 and 20/15, with occasional days where my vision is slightly worse than 20/20. Using lubricating eye drops definitely seems to help. I've been told that the complete healing process takes around three months.

All in all, it's quite liberating to not have to find my glasses when I wake up in the morning, to be free from the terror of losing my glasses should I ever have to travel, and to be free from having to stock up on contact lenses and cleaning solution. Thanks again for your prayers!

The Triumph Of The Love Of Money

Physics is a fascinating subject, although the fascination can only be sustained by mastery of increasingly complicated mathematics as one delves deeper into it. Otherwise, one soon reaches a point where the subject matter goes entirely over one's head. As a kid, I was fascinated by physics, but was too lazy to dive deeply into the associated math. One very interesting topic was the comparison of forces at scales ranging from the smallest distances (the space within an atom, for instance) to the largest (the space between stars and galaxies).

When we think of forces acting at a distance, electrostatic or magnetic forces often come to mind, because they are very easy to see. Stick a cow magnet into iron-rich dirt and you'll see the dirt clump into a hairy fuzz on the magnet's surface. Put silk or nylon clothes into a dryer in the wintertime and run them through a drying cycle, and when you pull them out, you'll see clothes sticking together and attracting lint because of electrostatic forces. The same forces will give a cat a shock if you rub its fur the wrong way in wintertime, or will give you a shock if you shuffle across a carpet while wearing socks and no shoes, and touch a brass doorknob.

Gravity is another force that's easy to visualize, especially because each of us has to deal with it. Electrostatic and magnetic forces are fun to play with, because they either attract or repel depending on the polarity of the agent producing the electrostatic or magnetic field. Gravity isn't as much fun to play with – unless you're a downhill skier or a skateboarder or a kid building a “land luge” or (do they even have those things anymore?) a soap box derby racer. Otherwise, we relate to gravity primarily by spending most of our lives trying to keep things (such as ourselves) from falling down.

Gravity seems all-pervasive, yet it is actually the weakest force of the the four forces known to physicists as the “fundamental interactions.” As a force, gravity has an infinite range, although the strength of a gravitational field decreases as the square of the distance from the object causing the field. The next strongest force is a very short-range force that acts between subatomic particles, and is called the weak force. It causes certain forms of radioactive decay. It is called “weak,” yet it is 1.67 x 10³² times as powerful as gravity. (That's a lot!) After that comes the electromagnetic force, which is around 7300 times as strong as the weak force, and has an unlimited range with strength decreasing as the square of distance, just like gravity. Lastly, there is the strong force, which is 137 times as powerful as the electromagnetic force, and which has a very short range, just like the weak force. (If you want to know where I got these numbers, look here: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/HBASE/forces/couple.html)

The other three fundamental forces are the foundation for the structure and behavior of matter at scales familiar to everyday life. At these scales, gravity plays a negligible role. For instance, a freeway overpass does not have to be built to withstand its own gravity (although it does have to be built to withstand everyday use within the gravitational field of the Earth). This is true even though the mass of the overpass creates its own gravity, which tends to pull all the parts of it toward its center. But its self-generated gravity is so tiny, and the electromagnetic and nuclear forces of the atoms of its components are so strong, that the gravity of the overpass plays no part in its design. The electromagnetic force, which holds the electrons of an atom in close proximity to its nucleus, is so strong compared to gravity, that if an atom were scaled up to the size of the sun, its electrons would be 400 times farther from it than the sun is from the earth.

Gravity is so weak that one must gather a lot of mass to generate enough gravity to be felt. There are huge rocks (asteroids) in space that are many miles across, but their gravity is so weak that if you stood on one of them, you could put yourself into orbit around it just by taking a running jump. Yet if one accumulates enough mass into one place, gravity can become so strong that it is stronger

than the weak force

than the electromagnetic force

than the strong force;

and that it becomes so strong that it crushes large masses of rock into spherical planets; crushes large clouds of gas into stars;

and given enough mass, crushes everything within its grip into a black hole

from which nothing can escape.

Impressively unexpected for such a weak force, isn't it?

Gravity is just one example of seemingly mundane things with unexpected dimensions. There are moral phenomena that seem quite mundane, yet have the same unexpected, darkly triumphant twist possessed by gravity. One of these moral phenomena is encapsulated in a statement from the Good Book: “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil...” (1 Timothy 6:10, World English Bible.) I quote the World English Bible because it is a modern public domain translation. Yet its rendering of this verse is a bit wimpy. The King James version of this verse is more literal: “For the love of money is the root of all evil...” The most literal rendering of this verse reads, “For the love of money is root of all the evils...”

The love of money as the root of all the evils? Is this simply hyperbole, an exaggeration on the part of the writer of these words? Or is it really true?

Back in the day, as the Cold War was entering its terminal phase, a lot of alarmist books were published by members of the American “Christian” media. These books warned against the dangers of various humanist ideologies that were perceived by prominent American evangelical leaders as a threat to the identity and survival of America as a “Christian” nation and as a powerful and rich nation. Many of these books warned against the threat posed by secular humanism, the threat of post-modernism, the threat of multiculturalism, the threat of the New Age movement, and so forth. One particular book comes to mind, namely, Peace, Prosperity and the Coming Holocaust, by Dave Hunt. There were many others like it. The preoccupation with “threat” ideologies carried over into “Christian” fiction as well, as exemplified in Frank Peretti's novels. The focus on “threat” ideologies really kicked into high gear after 9/11.

This focus on ideology as a potential threat really grew out of the major conflicts of the 20^th century, which were largely motivated by ideology. World War II was the world's first modern ideological war, in which the Allied good guys fought against the evil ideologies of Nazism and Fascism. Later, during the Cold War, it became a battle against the Western good guys against “godless Marxist Communism and totalitarianism.” Our relatively lengthy experience of modern ideological conflict convinced many in the West that the deepest evils and the most dangerous moral threats were ideological. This was easy to believe when one saw the insanely fanatical lengths to which ideologues would go to promote their ideologies – from the Chinese “human wave” attacks of the Korean and Vietnam wars to the suicide bombings of the Islamic jihadists. One could also see it in the severe measures taken by ideologue states to enforce their ideology on their citizens, including things that we would call brainwashing.

Against the backdrop of these frighteningly colorful ideologies and the colorful conflicts engendered by them, greed – the love of money – seemed like a wimpy, chump-change sin. How could the love of money really be the root of all evil when we had such obvious, in-your-face evils as atheistic Communism or Islam or the Satanic New Age Movement? Surely the coming empire of the Antichrist would be at its core an ideological empire embodying an ideological evil. Greed would simply be one of its lesser sins.

Yet as I have studied world events over the last two years, I have come to believe that the love of money actually is the root of all evil. I have seen that the world at this time is predominantly owned by a handful of extremely rich interests, who have robbed the poor, have stolen from the needy, have begun to destroy the earth, and have enslaved the powerless – all for the sake of the love of money. And they have invented handy, high-sounding ideologies to justify what is basically an exercise in pure greed. Their ideologies are broadcast over mass media owned by the rich and swallowed unquestioningly by the many gullible sheep among the poor, like Kool-Aid eagerly swallowed on a hot day. Yet it is the greed of the rich that is now driving world events, such as the takeover of world governments by the banking sector and the finance “industry”, the tearing apart of social safety nets for the poor citizens of the world, the invasion of other countries in order to take their natural resources, the persecution of poor ethnic minorities, the defrauding of the Third World via “free trade” agreements, and so forth. The atrocities committed by ideologues in decades past – for the sake of ideology – are now being done by the rich – solely for the sake of greed.

Greed has become the supreme ideology, the real soul behind all the worldly ideologies now pushed on the world, and pushed especially on the American public by America's right wing. And the Good Book seems to indicate that greed – especially mercantile greed – will be one of the chief characteristics of the empire of Antichrist, an empire based on a capitalist economy, as shown in Revelation 18:9-19, which I quote below, for a little bit of light reading:

The kings of the earth, who committed fornication and lived wantonly with her, will weep and wail over her, when they look at the smoke of her burning, standing far away for the fear of her torment, saying, ‘Woe, woe, the great city, Babylon, the strong city! For your judgment has come in one hour.’ The merchants of the earth weep and mourn over her, for no one buys their merchandise any more; merchandise of gold, silver, precious stones, pearls, fine linen, purple, silk, scarlet, all expensive wood, every vessel of ivory, every vessel made of most precious wood, and of brass, and iron, and marble; and cinnamon, incense, perfume, frankincense, wine, olive oil, fine flour, wheat, sheep, horses, chariots, and people’s bodies and souls.

The fruits which your soul lusted after have been lost to you, and all things that were dainty and sumptuous have perished from you, and you will find them no more at all. The merchants of these things, who were made rich by her, will stand far away for the fear of her torment, weeping and mourning; saying, ‘Woe, woe, the great city, she who was dressed in fine linen, purple, and scarlet, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls! For in an hour such great riches are made desolate.’ Every shipmaster, and everyone who sails anywhere, and mariners, and as many as gain their living by sea, stood far away, and cried out as they looked at the smoke of her burning, saying, ‘What is like the great city?’ They cast dust on their heads, and cried, weeping and mourning, saying, ‘Woe, woe, the great city, in which all who had their ships in the sea were made rich by reason of her great wealth!’ For in one hour is she made desolate.

As far as sins go, greed may well triumph over all other sins. This is something that American evangelical culture seems to have overlooked.

What The Left Gets Right (And What It Gets Wrong)

I consider myself to be a Biblical Christian. I believe that the Bible actually is the Word of God, and I believe what the Bible teaches about the holiness of God, the fallenness of man and the remedy for our fallenness in the Lord Jesus Christ. I believe in the Trinity of God (for anyone who thinks the Bible teaches otherwise, let me refer you to Matthew 28:19; John 1:1 and John 10:30, among many other verses). I can recite the Apostles' Creed and mean it, without having my fingers crossed behind my back.

Yet there are many elements of modern American evangelicalism that I can no longer accept. My movement away from its toxic ecclesiastical elements began in 2003. My movement away from its toxic political and economic elements began a bit later, around 2005, as gas prices first soared above $3 a gallon and I started to see just how hard it was for people in America to break free from our predatory economic system. As my movement progressed, I found myself reading and listening to many writers and thinkers on the political Left, people whom I had previously rejected during my flag-waving, Frank Peretti novel-reading, Christian talk-show radio listening, vote-Republican, let's-hang-out-at-the-Christian-bookstore days.

What I found in listening to voices from the Left is that while we usually disagreed on cosmogony (that is, how the universe and the people on earth came to be) as well as matters of personal (especially sexual) morality, there were many matters in which we were in strong agreement. I agreed with the Left's fear that godless, predatory capitalism was destroying the poor of the earth, and that it was destroying the earth itself. I agreed with the Left that the Iraq war was all about oil, and was illegitimate. I agreed with the Left that the world could no longer sustain a society such as ours, that depended on ever-increasing consumption and materialism, and that we would have to change our ways very quickly.

I also began to see the truth of the Left's accusations against the leaders of the Right, namely, that the Right seemed to be nothing more than a bunch of shills for the rich who are the owners of the major pieces of our economic and political systems. Thus I began to listen with new ears when I heard things that I had previously accepted unthinkingly, such as when prominent members of the Religious Right spoke against government-sponsored safety nets for the poor, or opposed the providing of public resources like libraries and mass transit, or railed against attempts to protect the environment. Usually these leaders would denounce such things by calling them “examples of Marxist socialism!!!!” or “governmental intrusion into the (God-given!) free market system.” Now that I was listening with new ears, I noticed that the statements of these leaders sounded like the tantrums of children.

I also noticed how the Left sought to use the discrediting of the Religious Right in order to discredit the Christian faith itself. I talked about this a bit in my post, A Dude In Bedlam. While I agree with many of the criticisms made by the Left, this is going too far. For one thing, it is intellectually dishonest. But the Left has made a further mistake, which, while not a direct attack on Christianity, is yet a result of rejecting one of the central teachings of Christianity. I'll explain it thus:

Many of the writers and thinkers on the Left have correctly diagnosed the present threats and dangers to our modern society and our world, and that these threats and dangers are the result of our greed and exponentially increasing consumption. They have accurately seen the role played by the leaders of our present system in perpetuating that system even though it is destined to break down. They have seen the stubbornness and determination of our leaders and powerful people at all levels of government and economic power in hanging on to their breaking system. They have also seen how many ordinary people are willingly enslaved to that system and its false promise of ever-increasing prosperity.

Yet many of those on the Left continue to believe that humanity is evolving into something better, and that our present difficulty is primarily an evolutionary struggle. They believe that mankind is capable of controlling its destiny in the sense of choosing a better evolutionary path, if only we can be educated to choose it. Thus, when they see the propensity of our society and its leaders to choose a self-destructive path, they propose solutions that don't take the full scope of the human condition into account.

Therefore, there are people who think that if we only teach humanity the proper values, we will all magically start acting differently, and the world will be a better place. There are others who look to evolutionary theory for some key, that if found, would help humanity make the jump to a higher state of being and a more sensible existence. Indeed, there has recently sprung up an entire discipline of “evolutionary psychology,” along with the even more impressive-sounding “evolutionary cognitive psychology,” which attempts to explain destructive and maladaptive human behavior entirely in biological terms. When some of these people give way to cravings they shouldn't indulge, they blame it on their “corpus callosum,” or the remnants of their “reptile brain.” When they see their fellow humans and the people in power making destructive choices, they believe the solution to be education and discussion. So they say things like, “Our leaders and people in power don't seem to understand the threats posed by Peak Oil, climate change, and environmental destruction. Their decisions would be different if they did understand. Therefore we must educate our society. Once they are educated, they will respond differently.”

As a Christian, I see things quite differently. When I see our leaders and the prominent figures of our society choosing the things they choose, I don't blame it on a failure of evolution or a lack of education. I blame it on indwelling evil. The Bible calls certain behaviors evil – and holds these behaviors as evidence that those who practice them are evil. Take the case of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney – both the supposed products of thousands of years of “evolution” if you accept the cosmogony of the Left. I don't think that it was a defect of the corpus callosum or an asserting of the remnants of the “reptile brain” that made Bush and Cheney start an unjustified war against a country that had done nothing to us. It's not like they woke up one day and said to each other, “Man, I got a jones on! I've got to have me some Iraqi oil!” No, rather, they manufactured the most elaborate justifications for what they did. This is the nature of evil. Mere biological craving is one thing, but true spiritual evil acts on that craving even when it knows that in doing so, other lives will be violated. And true evil fabricates all sorts of justifications for its actions. The villains of the Right know good and well that what they are doing is wrong, yet they still do it.

Thus we see the failure of the Left – a failure to acknowledge the reality of evil in the world. It's not hard to see why the Left refuses this acknowledgement. For if the Left acknowledged evil as evil, it would also have to acknowledge the existence of an objective, righteous standard that measures good and evil and that exists independently of humans, by which each of us is measured, and which is the product of a righteous Standard-Maker. Acknowledging that the rich and powerful are in violation of the righteous standard of the Standard-Maker would force the members of the Left to look at their own lives and their own violations of that standard. That acknowledgement would force a further acknowledgement of the evil within each of us, our indwelling sin that is untamable by mortal man. Realizing this would lead to the realization of humanity's need for a Redeemer.

Such a realization is too frightening for the Left, whose members cling to standards of their own making suited to their particular quirks, who reject objective morality and an objective God, who blame humanity's present problems on a lack of evolutionary development, and who actually believe that it is possible for humans to create, by their own power, a utopia on earth.

As for me, I don't think we will ever be able to create a utopia by our own power. My views tend to line up with Reinhold Niebuhr, who once said, “It is because we had so completely miscalculated the character of human history that we are so frequently threatened by despair in this day of frustration and disappointed hopes. Our modern culture moved from a too simple optimism to a too deep despair... An adequate faith for a day of crisis will contain what modern men have completely dismissed, namely, a tragic sense of life and a recognition of the Cross as the final center of life's meaning...” (Source: “An Adequate Faith for the World Crisis,” Reinhold Niebuhr, 1947). Left entirely to ourselves, I fully expect that instead of creating utopia, we would create the sort of mess depicted in Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz. That book is a unique depiction of original sin, devastatingly funny in places, and in other places, simply devastating.

Prayer request - August 2009

I just have a short post today (although there are many longer posts that are waiting to be born). It consists of a prayer request. I am going in on Tuesday to get LASIK surgery. Please pray that everything goes well, that my recovery would be swift and without complications, and that I'd see clearly afterward. Thanks much, and thanks for all your readership. (Margaret, I just want to say that I enjoy following your "Assembly Reflections" site. May you have many opportunities to enjoy your children and grandchildren.)

A Dude In Bedlam

It has been interesting to track the recent reputation of Christianity in America, especially the Evangelical “brand” of Christianity. What has made things especially interesting is my awakening to the great issues which now threaten the global economy and the modern industrialized societies of the First World.

In pondering these issues, I have frequently been arrested by the reaction of many spokespeople for the American Religious Right when they have been confronted with these issues. I think of people like the late Jerry Falwell who said that global warming as an issue was a tool of the devil to distract the Church from the work of proclaiming the Gospel, or James Dobson, who tried to censure the president of the National Association of Evangelicals for speaking out against manmade pollution. I think of the Bible-thumping Republican politicians who have recently bitten the political dust, people like Mark Sanford and Paul Stanley. I think of Monk and Neagle and their pro-Iraq War song, “That's What Soldiers Do.” I think of the flag-waving cheerleaders for the Republican Party who held up John McCain and Sarah Palin as paragons of American godliness during the last election. Then there's the arresting spectacle of Sarah Palin herself, and all of her recent pronouncements against that evil “Muslim,” Barack Obama ;) .

Those on the Left have quite rightly ridiculed many of the things they have seen coming out of the American evangelical community, including its materialism, war-mongering and hypocrisy. But they have gone farther, holding up our examples of idiots as a proof that all of Christianity is therefore idiotic and therefore invalid. To me, such a conclusion is intellectually dishonest; yet there are so few public examples of people who are both reasonable and Biblical, who might be able to refute the conclusions of the Left.

This is a shame. The Good Book itself says, “Therefore I urge you, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service.” (Romans 12:1, World English Bible) The word rendered “spiritual” is logikos (Greek), and literally means “agreeable to reason, reasonable, logical.” By this “reasonable,” “logical” service, we are to “... be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what is the good, well-pleasing, and perfect will of God.” – Romans 12:2. In other words, Christians are to be a display of the goodness and reasonableness of the perfect will of God.

I would like to be an example of that reasonableness, though I must admit that I'm not always willing to bear the cost of such reasonableness. I look at the antics of many of my so-called “brethren” and feel at times like one of the few sane people in a madhouse (a “dude” in Bedlam, if you will, with all due apologies to the long-deceased author of the song “A Maid in Bedlam” and apologies to the John Renbourn Group). Yet as much as in me is, I will try by both word and deed to prove the reasonableness of the Faith. Hopefully some of that proof will be seen on this blog. So I proceed, cast upon the grace of Christ, to Whom I come again and again to be cured of the same insanity I so often see in my brethren. “For all have sinned...”

Mourning The Death Of Saul

I fininshed reading Luke a while back and am now in 2 Samuel. There are some interesting passages there about David's reaction to the death of Saul, the death of Saul's commander Abner, and the death of Saul's son Ish-bosheth (see 2 Samuel 1, 3 and 4). David had been anointed king by Samuel, who was obeying God's command to anoint David to replace the disobedient Saul. When Saul saw that the Lord was with David, he feared and envied him, and made his life miserable for over ten years, driving David out into the wilderness and repeatedly trying to kill him.

Eventually Saul died in battle. When David heard the news, he wept. In fact, when the remaining men of power and influence in Saul's house were removed by trickery, David reacted with grief and anger toward those who murdered them.

I found this to be very interesting. When I first left the abusive church I described in my blog, TH in SoC, there were some others who left at the same time who were constantly talking about the need to pray for the leaders of that church, that they might repent. The concern of those who were urging prayer was not that our leaders might otherwise continue to do harm to anyone or pose a danger to anyone, for at the time we left, our church disintegrated, along with many of its satellite churches. It largely ceased to be a danger to anyone. Our “leaders” were neutered, having become “ex-leaders.”

But those who were urging prayer for these men did so out of a genuine care and concern for them. Now there was something. I found that I really couldn't work myself up to any kind of care and concern for them, having been jacked, led astray and continually humiliated by them over a period of many years. And in fact, most of them haven't really repented in any true sense of the word. They haven't come clean about their behavior toward those they led, their abuse of power, their cover-up of abuse and of activities that were probably criminal and that they probably knew to be criminal, and their high-handedness toward the rest of us.

Based on their track record to date, I don't really expect our leaders to become repentant while they are still alive on earth. I certainly don't expect our former head honcho to become repentant. What I expect instead is that on the day of judgment, they all will be basted with napalm and set on the great barbecue grill of eternity. I have to confess that I have derived quite a bit of satisfaction from that thought, especially when I consider the ongoing costs I am still bearing from my involvement with them.

Yet here's David, who had a right to be angry at Saul, yet who mourned over his death. David's mourning is an indicator that he had longed for Saul's repentance and restoration. David had longed to have Abner as a friend, and even to reconcile Ish-bosheth to himself. David is an early example of Christ-likeness. I, on the other hand, have a long way to go. Guess I'd better take the first step...

P.S. Borz Loma Nal has also written a blog post about forgiving abusive church leaders. It can be found here: Forgiving Others.

P.P.S. I still believe that although we are commanded to forgive others, that doesn't mean that we are to associate with people who are abusive, yet unrepentant. Before they can have companions, they must show themselves to be safe. "Bring forth fruits in keeping with repentance..." as the Good Book says.

California Prison Reform Opportunity

Some readers of my blog The Well Run Dry may have followed my posts on private prison abuse and the prison-industrial complex. The posts are these: Money and Filthy Hands, Our Least Resilient Neighborhoods, Tarnish On The Golden State, Homeboy Culture And The Solari Index, and The Replacement of Petroleum Slaves. For those unfamiliar with this subject, these posts drew on a number of sources who documented how the prison lobby and the private prison “industry” have pushed for harsh sentencing of nonviolent offenders in order to boost the incomes of prison guards and private prison corporations. This lobbying, and “targeted enforcement” by police, have resulted in a disproportionate number of minorities who are locked up in prison.

There is an upcoming opportunity to remedy this situation. On 5 August 2009, the California Rehabilitation Oversight Board will hold a hearing on expanding the Honor Program now operating at California State Prison, Los Angeles County (CSP-LAC). The Honor Program has yielded impressive results in reducing prisoner violence and boosting prisoner rehabilitation, as well as saving taxpayers at least several hundred thousand dollars. A program that heals offenders and sets them straight is a boon to society, even if it means a loss of revenue for private prison corporations and prison guard pensions. Such interests will of course oppose programs that help people escape the prison system. Prison industry lobbyists seem to have a friend in Governor Schwarzenegger, who vetoed a 2007 bill that would have mandated expansion of the Honor Program, and whose proposed 2009 budget would increase California's use of private prisons (Sources: http://www.youthradio.org/news/schwarzenegger-talks-private-prisons-and-budget-cuts; and http://reason.org/blog/show/solving-the-ca-budget-governat)

However, not all Californians (or ex-Californians like me) are so evil that they want to profit from breaking the lives of others. Therefore, supporters of the Honor Program will be out in force at the meeting on the 5^th of August. Their goal is to expand the Honor Program to all California prisons.

I was invited to go, but I don't know if I'll be able to make it. If any readers are available on that date, feel free to attend and help make a positive difference. Here is a link to the Honor Program website: http://www.prisonhonorprogram.org/. I have also included the invitation e-mail below:

Dear Honor Program Supporter:

We are closer than ever to achieving official support of the Honor Program by the CDCR. In recent months, we have been very successful in gaining the attention of CDCR Secretary Matthew Cate and Inspector General David Shaw, who have indicated their interest in the program. There are very positive signs that the CDCR plans to take action in the near future to fully support and implement the program.

However, we need your help to ensure this actually happens! Especially at this time of fiscal crisis, when so much attention is being given to California's state budget (to the exclusion of other important matters), we must remind Secretary Cate of the importance of the Honor Program.

Please plan to attend the upcoming C-ROB (California Rehabilitation Oversight Board) meeting in Sacramento on Wednesday, August 5, 2009. Secretary Cate attends these meetings, which are a perfect opportunity to advocate directly with the decision maker.

We want to see as many Honor Program supporters as possible attend the August 5 meeting to provide public testimony and encourage Secretary Cate to follow through on his plans to support the program. (If you are not comfortable with public speaking, your physical presence alone will send a message to Secretary Cate of the degree of public support for the program.) Please reply to this e-mail if you would like to attend the meeting and have questions or need more information.

For more information on the C-ROB meeting, go to http://www.oig.ca.gov/pages/c-rob.php.

Thank you very much for your support.

Sincerely,

THE FRIENDS AND FAMILIES FOR THE HONOR PROGRAM

Newspapers, Church Culture and Bad Breath

(I want to give due acknowledgement for this post to ideas I read on Brant Hansen's blog Letters From Kamp Krusty, particularly his post FAQ #24: Shouldn't We Just Stay Where We Are, and Work for Change, Rather than Abandoning the Church? These ideas mirrored ideas that had also occurred to me, but it was nice to see confirmation by Brant and those who commented on his post.)

Let me tell you the story of a ficticious acquaintance of mine, named Fred, who found himself involved in an interesting and rather awkward social situation a while back. Fred was hired as a high school music teacher and band coach. At the school which hired him, music and band had traditionally been the most popular classes, with many more kids wanting to sign up than there were spaces available. But when Fred began teaching, he noticed a curious change.

During the first few weeks of his first teaching term, a number of students dropped out of his classes. Others begged to be let in, yet upon meeting Fred, they quickly changed their minds. The band began to shrink alarmingly, as a number of of trombone players and drummers dropped out. Even the flugelhorn player quit. Fortunately for the school, Fred had been hired at the start of the winter term, so the band's participation in the football season wasn't immediately threatened. Fred also noticed that as he made his rounds on campus, both students and teachers tended to avoid him and to keep their interactions with him as brief as possible.

Now Fred had minored in psychology while in college, so he began to formulate various theories about what was happening at his high school. He thought at first that he was experiencing a simple “generation gap” in which teens felt that they couldn't relate to adults like him. But as he watched students talking with other teachers he was forced to abandon this hypothesis. Then he began to think that maybe there had been a secret shift in Myers-Briggs personality types among both students and faculty – that maybe society as a whole had become decidedly more introverted. Yet as he saw students clowning around during lunch, he had to abandon that hypothesis also. Lastly, he theorized that the rise of “social electronics” such as MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, texting and i-Pods had conditioned students and faculty to interact with each other virtually, and that they were uncomfortable with face-to-face interactions with their fellow flesh-and-blood humans.

But one day the town dentist showed up at school to give his daughter a ride home. The daughter was a tuba player in Fred's band class. As the dentist talked with Fred, he suddenly blurted, “Man, your breath stinks! I can tell just by looking at your teeth that dental hygiene isn't one of your priorities. Your teeth look like they haven't been brushed in six months!”

Now Fred doesn't really exist (at least as far as I know), yet his rationalizations and his social blind spot are typical of some large-scale American social institutions that are now failing. Over time, these institutions have adopted a view that they are indispensable to American life, and they can't believe that they are now declining. One of the evidences of their disbelief is the invention of imaginative theories to explain or rationalize that decline.

Take newspapers for instance. Many articles have been written recently about the death of newspaper journalism in America. Those articles I have read have blamed such factors as rising American illiteracy; the increasing prominence of electronic journalism such as radio, TV and Internet news; and the rise of social media such as blogs, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and podcasts. (See http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/03/31/080331fa_fact_alterman for instance.) Many pundits who focus on the impact of social media also talk of the changing tastes and culture of young adults. Of course, all these articles have been written by newspapers or other mainstream media outlets. The main point of all these articles can be summarized as saying that the newspaper as an American institution is dying due to large-scale societal and technological shifts that are beyond the control of newspapers.

Yet newspapers (and by extension, mainstream media in general) are neglecting the real possibility that their breath stinks. Let me tell you why I don't regularly buy newspapers. It's because most American papers are now owned by a handful of extremely rich corporations, whose aim is to present a view of the world most conducive to maximizing profits. The fact that this view of the world frequently doesn't match reality doesn't seem to bother them too much. One example is the coverage of the protests at the G20 conference in London earlier this year. Fox News, CNN, USA Today and others uniformly portrayed the protesters as a handful of crazed anarchists and the London police as virtuous professionals who were simply doing their jobs. Yet it took citizen journalists broadcasting video on YouTube to show the reality – that the London police were guilty of savage brutality and provocation. Another example is the recent violent clashes in Peru between indigenous peoples and the Peruvian military and international oil companies who had been granted permission by the Peruvian government to go into indigenously inhabited areas to drill for oil. The indigenous people were rightly upset that their homelands were about to be ruined for the sake of oil company profits. I'll bet that this story wasn't widely published on page 1 of most major papers.

Why should I therefore pay money to someone to lie to me? Why should I spend my money to be dumbed down? When a major event like a hurricane impacts the U.S., why should I rely on American media, who shy away from a rigorous presentation of the strategic impacts of such an event, and who focus instead on “human interest” stories? (An example: instead of saying, “The hurricane is a Category 3 storm with a diameter of XX miles, and will impact the following industries in these regions, etc.” we get something like this: “We're here at the Last Chance Catfish Bar and Grill with Bo and his two dogs, Cletus and Fred. Bo, you fixin' to ride out this storm?”)

This blindness and stinkiness also applies to the present state of American evangelicalism. But here it's a bit harder to get at the truth of what's going on. We do know that there has been an explosion of interest in “church growth” since Rick Warren's Purpose-Driven books and seminars were introduced. There are also examples of impressively-sized megachurches throughout America, as well as anecdotal accounts of increased church attendance during our present economic crisis. Yet there is also evidence of a decline in church membership overall, as well as a decline in evangelical influence within the broader American public.

For instance, a 2007 Church Solutions Magazine article stated that the number of “unchurched” Americans had risen to nearly 100 million. (Source: http://www.churchsolutionsmag.com/hotnews/74h293758.html) This article cited a study performed by the Barna Group, which also found that of that 100 million unchurched, ten million were born-again Christians. An October 2008 article in the Oregonian described the fall in church revenues due to the economic crisis. (See http://nacba.net/Article/Churches_money.htm). And a recent USA Today article stated that megachurch growth is now stalling. (Imagine that!) (Source: http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2008-09-08-megachurches-numbers_N.htm. See also Megachurch - The Megachurch Future.pdf as well as this from the Suburban Christian blog: Suburbia and the rise and fall of megachurches.) One megachurch pastor cited in these studies mentioned a “back door problem”: “We have over 500 people joining our church every month, but just as many are leaving each month. Our back door is as big as our front door!”

There are various theories floated by pastors, church-growth “consultants” and other members of the evangelical intelligentsia in order to explain these phenomena. The theories sound very similar to those cited to explain the death of newspapers: changing demographics, the rise of social media, changes in culture, and so on. There are also some added, highly creative explanations, such as the rise in a “post-modern” mindset. Some evangelical thinkers have even come up with their own term for this, shortening “post-modern” to “po-mo.” There are also those who talk of how we're in the midst of some new spiritual movement that will result in the appearance of an “emergent” church. Others talk of how we're failing to “meaningfully engage the culture.” But these theorists conveniently ignore the specific ways that modern American evangelicalism is turning people off.

Consider megachurches again. According to a study performed by the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, megachurches collect healthy revenues, yet half of their income goes to staff salaries and benefits. (Source: http://hirr.hartsem.edu/megachurch/megastoday2008_summaryreport.html). Modern evangelicalism has bred a veritable mob of pastors who want to have their own megachurch. Church growth movements such as the Purpose-Driven movement have formulated a body of techniques designed to make church attenders into unquestioning supporters of their pastors and of their pastors' desires to build religious empires, as I documented on my blog TH in SoC under the post, The Warrens of the Purpose-Driven. I have recently been reading Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford, and in reading his description of how white-collar organizations try to program their employees into organizational drones, I couldn't help but think of the Purpose-Driven movement.

Consider also how the issue of abusive churches has been raised over the last two decades through such excellent books as Churches that Abuse and The Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse, as well as by means of many websites. Yet in reading of the shenanigans practiced by some large evangelical churches, it seems to me that their pastors have read all the material they could find on abusive churches, then tried hard to perfect the abusive techniques they read about. (In much the same way, I think that Western growth capitalists and Chinese authoritarians are doing their best to steal tips and techniques of control from each other – but that's another subject, for another blog.)

Consider how American evangelicalism and its support structures have become simply a machine for collecting money and political power from a certain sector of the population. Consider how many Americans are turned off by a politicized Christianity that supports consumerism, empires and wars of conquest with talk of “God and country,” yet neglects the charity commanded by the New Testament.

I'd like to suggest that Americans are rejecting the institutional evangelical church because the institutional church has become an exploitative place. They are searching for alternatives to the institutional church, yet institutional church leaders are still bent on building large empires for themselves. In a Barna group study on alternatives to conventional church experience, the church explorations of average Americans were discussed, as well as the reactions of mainstream pastors. Significantly, while two out of three pastors agreed that “house churches are legitimate Christian churches,” less than half of these said that they would ever recommend a house church to anyone. Resistance to house churches was highest among pastors who earned more than $75,000 a year. (I wonder why...) (Source: http://www.barna.org/barna-update/article/19-organic-church/47-americans-embrace-various-alternatives-to-a-conventional-church-experience-as-being-fully-biblical)

The American evangelical church needs to repent. Pastors in particular need to repent. If this means getting counseling for egotism, greed and sociopathic tendencies, or even resigning the pastorate, so be it. I have no intention of becoming part of someone's religious empire. Been there, done that. I didn't go to church today (although I would really have liked to). It's not because of some mysterious, inexplicable spiritual/socioeconomic shift in American society. But pastors, it's because man, your breath stinks! You need to brush your teeth!