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His Excellency Arnold Williams's avatar

We have been trained from a young age that the questions of God were not to be discussed in public. Our popular culture, all of it, only invokes God when they want us to do something: God is a lash for the peasants. This leads to those hilarious descriptions of Jesus Christ as a non-judging socialist. It also leads to young men and women being clueless about themselves and their purpose as husbands and wives, because Genesis describes them, echoed by Christ, in that way, and no cultural or political institution does so without contempt.

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Scott Delaney's avatar

"Why are Christians, of all people, so shy about advancing religious arguments? Are we afraid they won’t hold up? Or—more alarming still—have we lost the knack for talking about God as if he were real?"

Ok. I think I have a pretty good response.

1) We totally made caricatures of ourselves by exploding this pyramid-scheme-Cutco-knife-sales-style evangelism in the 1990s. The people with whom we were sharing the good news were the ones doing the ministering by putting up with these weird soul winning sales tactics. We started to be Biffs for the Bible, committing social faux pas, and commoditizing salvation. The evangelical church lost its taste for peddling evangelism at the same rate the public felt like they were customers more than friends.

2) We've watered-down the gospel to make up for how obnoxious we were. In the neo-con Evangelist church era. However, the seeker-sensitivity movement has been a component of rapid church decline. Your old man has ranted about the desperate habits of dying churches with greater clarity.

3) We, the Church, allowed the divorce of higher education from Western Civilization. Simply put, we've forgotten our ideological inheritance. This is your wheelhouse. I’m sure you’re well aware of the consequences.

4) Finally, I think we’ve come to realize “That people don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care.” Certainly, true empathy is more valued than information at the moment. We are mired in the world of knowledge, but we’re longing to spend time with people we love. In this particular regard, I think the Church has improved. Anecdotally, it seems like we’re getting better at showing up in hard moments and caring for people, before we awkwardly throw a tract at them and hit ‘em with the brimstone.

“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.”

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