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Redstate
Idols
of Awesome and Shibboleths of Community
By Erick Erickson
Every
once in a while I stumble over something
that opens my eyes wide to a lot of the silliness of secularism that
pervades
evangelicalism and, in turn, warps the whole of generations. Anthony
Bradley
points out that there is a crazy movement going on right now within
young
evangelical circles to shun the suburbs and engage in a “new legalism”
of
radical faith.
The
best I can figure is that somehow suburbs
are just bad. (Read Keith Miller on this point) I think there is
something
bigger than that and it goes beyond evangelicals to, particularly,
millenials
and those who close out the tail end of Gen X and Y. We’ve made idols
of the
awesome in our lives. All of us.
Each
of us forms in our head an ideal. Instead
of enjoying our present where, as CS Lewis noted, we are closest to
God, we
either look to a future that may or may not be, or we hold on to a past
that
maybe was not as shiny as we think. Then we surround ourselves with
others and,
in a culture of Baby Boomer grandparents and their offspring, decide
our life
will not be fulfilled unless it is in some way awesome.
Back
in March, Matthew Lee Anderson wrote about
the new radicals in Christianity. These preachers are on an evangelical
mission
to change the world. They’re wooing in millennials and wayward souls to
give up
on their mundane existence and surrender all, as the song goes, to
Jesus. They
want to live like the early church — communal, working in the cities to
share
God, bending over in a radical faith to do great work for the church.
It’s
the same symptom of — and let us be honest
— rich white society we see elsewhere. Kids play soccer without score,
but
keeping one in their heads. Parents compete to get their kids in fancy
schools
to do fancy things. Mom X brags that her son is going to be a doctor
and mom Y
brags her son is going to be a high priced lawyer. We have taken on our
parents’ dreams for us, added our own dreams to it, and decided that if
we
don’t do something unique, novel, or mind glowingly awesome we are
somehow not
fulfilled. This fretting is a luxury of the upper incomes.
For
the rest of this article, go to Redstate
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