The Colors Tell the Story
As I read this weeks book Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, I was awed by the author’s writing ability, not simply by his ingenious craftiness of sentence structure but by his incredible ability of synthesis – taking many historical facts both positive and negative and reconstructing in a few pages the veritable religious landscape of 60 some years. Upon the canvas of his pages Ross Douthat painted with broad strokes and yet with fine precision craftsmanship the beautiful portrait that is our nation’s religious past. With bright and flowery colors of a sun rising with hope and vigor Douthat traced the rise of evangelical charisma and anointing that shone brightly on the land whose God is their Lord. With great verboseness Douthat painted and drew the characters that were bigger than life – Barth, Henry, Niebuhr, Graham, Sheen, Murry, King, – who helped usher America into a Golden age of evangelical Neo-orthodox Christianity and the symbiotic relationship that saw ecclesiastical, political, and social entities as bed fellows all pulling, or pushing which ever the case may be, toward a common goal of some utopian culture were “all good things might go together after all: prophetic mysticism and political reform, ancient faith and modern liberalism, Roman Catholicism and the American experiment.”[1]
But as Douthat continued with his brush the colors grew darker. The same brushstrokes that shared the flowering and rise of Evangelicalism in America also painted the unfortunate demise of the symbiotic-bed-fellow-utopian culture. The rising sun rose to it’s zenith and dark foreboding clouds covered the canvas as the rapid decline of American religious fervor that filled the 50’s was portrayed as Douthat put it, “dissipated like a cloud of incense in a sudden breeze.”[2] The Christianity and church growth that was at an all time high and looked to have a promising future suddenly ended, as if someone had flipped a switch. Church attendance declined in most mainline denominations. Though there were a few groups that continued to grow in the 60’s and 70’s their bright colors could not eclipse the darkness that began to encroach across the America landscape. It was now the colors of the heretics that overtook the canvas. Though America grew to be more spiritual in its sentiments it was growing less pious in its practices.[3] Somehow the color of Christianity itself had been drained and what was left was no longer attractive nor credible. Some would pull the card – “They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us; but they went out that they might be made manifest, that none of them were of us.”[4] – to explain the simple veneer of religiosity and blamed the revivals of the 50’s for producing bad fruit, but this explanation was and still is to simplistic. Many colors came and collided at once to change the landscape of America to what we even see today. The options for us as Douthat lays out is accommodation or resistance but as religious leaders choses one or the other the age of heresy continued to rise and cast its diluted colors covering the canvas.
The conclusion to all this is that there is still a mighty river that cannot be covered. Beneath all these colors of self help gurus and the God with in, is that there is still a river whose streams make glad the City of God. The truth is still filled with the blood from Emmanuel’s veins. And it is us, us in the trenches of both higher religious education and grassroots servant-hood, that need to not just focus on recovering Christianity in America but to faithfully reflect Christ to a world both inside the American religious craziness and the globalized world where Christ has not been represented appropriately and to people who have yet to give Him praise. To this end let us march and seek to glorify the Christ who calls us out of darkness to vivid colors of Glory and Life found in a relationship with a loving Father. For God is not Dead He is surely alive!!
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