Live from Sarah's soapbox
I've been known to occasionally get up on a soapbox (shut up!). Here I go again, recommending the following program on NPR this weekend...
This week on public radio's national conversation about belief, meaning, ethics, and ideas:
Evangelicals Out of the Box
Speaking of Faith host Krista Tippett
In recent years American media and cultural observers have been
struggling to understand evangelical Christianity. This is indeed
important work, as approximately 40 percent of Americans describe
themselves as "evangelical." Any movement this large, in this country,
is bound to be diverse and fluid. But too often, journalism about
Evangelicalism resorts to generalizations and caricature based on a few
high-profile figures and events. Articles about megachurches, or
homeschooling, or evangelical students at Ivy League colleges often
carry a palpable undertone of menace. So I was intrigued a few months
ago when I received my weekly issue of Sightings a thoughtful
e-mail newsletter distributed by Martin Marty featuring a smart,
funny article about this phenomenon, written by a young evangelical
scholar, Jamie Smith. The title of Smith's essay was "It
Only Hurts When I Laugh."
"The May issue of Harper's magazine is, as usual, a feast,"
Smith wrote. "There is a distinct theme running through this issue,
which comprises an almost apocalyptic collection of editorials and
essays chronicling the dangers of evangelical Christianity The
writing is crisp and witty, the research is thorough, and the tone
sometimes even charitable. But I can't stop thinking about French
anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss Just as western anthropologists of
generations past trudged through island jungles in search of the exotic
'other' in 'primitive' societies, so today journalists depart from the
safety and civilization of Manhattan to the exotic environs of
Kansas! or Oklahoma, or Florida, or Colorado Springs. Their
articles read a bit like dispatches from strange lands. 'I've been to
red America,' they seem to say, 'and it's stranger and scarier than you
could have imagined.'"
Jamie Smith himself, as you'll hear in this program, defies every
stereotype at play in our culture now especially in "blue America"
about who evangelical Christians are, what motivates them, and how they
might change America. He is a young philosopher at Calvin College in
Grand Rapids, Michigan, one of the largest Christian colleges in this
country, a place of intellectual rigor. Smith finds his passion "in the
borderlands between philosophy, theology, ethics, aesthetics and
politics." He writes two blogs, where he reflects on the intersection
of religion, culture, and politics in what he calls our "post-secular"
world. He has published several books about an emerging idea called
"radical orthodoxy." Radical orthodoxy is more a sensibility than a
movement, he says, that would urge Christians to rethink every sphere
of life, including politics and economics, in light of core Christian
values. But it does not advocate the kind of partisan political
strategies at which some evangelical Christians have recently been so
successful. Jamie Smith believes that churches should exert their
innate political influence by modeling community and virtues such as
communal approaches to unwanted pregnancies, or just distribution of
wealth rather than agitating for legal mandates for all. He can't
imagine, for example, how our pluralistic public sphere could fail to
allow full civil rights
for gay couples. At the same time, he insists that churches could
and should have their own processes of discernment on such matters, and
those would often present a contrast or a "third way" over against
cultural norms.
From another direction, Nancey Murphy defies a growing assumption in
this country that evangelical faith is necessarily "anti-science." She
is an historian of science and also a philosopher. She teaches at
Fuller Theological Seminary, a leading global and national center of
evangelical learning, and she is a frequent participant in an expanding
international dialogue between scientists and religious thinkers. She
has written a book with a cosmologist, George Ellis of South Africa.
She advises the Vatican Observatory on its conferences on science and
theology. In this country, collaborative work between science and
religion is currently overshadowed by the furor over Intelligent
Design. Nancey Murphy makes the striking case that most Christian
adults in this country today grew up learning simultaneously about
evolution and creation, and sensing intuitively that it is possible for
both of these ideas to be bearers of truth. We have to be taught,
Murphy says, to experience science and religion to be irreconcilably at
odds.
These two intelligent, refreshing individuals impress me with their
humility and humor qualities too often lacking in religious people of
every stripe, especially those who make headlines. Jamie Smith still
reads Harper's with great admiration, and he finds as much to
fault in the evangelical movement itself as in secular media when he
sees the faith he loves misunderstood, maligned, and feared. Both Smith
and Murphy feel a responsibility to help inform and reframe our
cultural understanding of evangelical Christianity. For our part at Speaking
of Faith, we'll continue to explore and illuminate the nuanced and
evolving character of this immensely important sector of American
religious life.
Krista
Recommends Reading:
This week I'm pointing back to our Web site, speakingoffaith.org.
The program page on "Evangelicals Out of the Box" is a rich trove of
history, links, background, and definition. There are reading
recommendations embedded throughout the "particulars" section that you
can tailor to your own curiosities about the vast subject of
evangelical Christianity both in and out of the box.