In other words, what’s your justification for this project?<\/p>\n
Conservative Evangelicalism was a political movement with religious muscle (not a religious movement with political consequences). Of course, we can’t know for another few years or so, but it seems that when one of our (supposed) own occupied the White House and bankrupted our moral resources, the movement died.<\/p>\n
Now there is a vacuum. Some of us have absconded for a still-ersatz Evangelical Left. Some still straddle the line as libertarians. Those who have stayed in the Religious Right continue to beat the same war drum of fear and pain. Not only is it not working, it’s hurting those that are least able to speak for themselves.<\/p>\n
I believe that we’re at a crossroads. We’re either going to circle the wagons and continue to brandish our tomahawks at imaginary monsters while our children quietly leave us and\/or the Faith (since we’ve so adeptly quilted our beliefs with our politics, rejecting the one clearly means they will have to leave the other). Or we’ll stop and try a new way. Still the Gospel way, of course, but one that isn’t stuck in the grooves we’ve worn into the prairie mud.<\/p>\n
I don’t know what that new way looks like. I want to imagine several alternatives. But not until I understand how we got here. How I <\/em><\/strong>got here as a daughter of conservative Evangelicalism.<\/p>\n So many of my Gen-X peers have left fundamentalism. Many of the Boomers still remain (changing their name to “biblicist” or some other essentialized term) or still defend the movement from the outside. The Gen-Yers are about to leave in droves. Those of us who have left too often believe the myth that we learned in fundamentalism that the real difference between them<\/em> and us<\/em> is music (“worship style”) or dress or even theology, only to embrace a nearly identical ethic within neo-evangelicalism that is as fearful, as striving, as sectarian, and as contradictory.<\/p>\n If we really want to leave behind the excesses of fundamentalism, we have to more clearly identify what those excesses are. We can’t believe the characterization we grew up hearing. We need to look at this from a different angle, and we need to start at the beginning.<\/p>\n Now I don’t plan on continuing this in any orderly fashion. I have to write it out, and as an “independent scholar,” in a motley fashion. With little snips of information here. Puking up thoughts I’ve digested there. It won’t be pretty, so consider yourself warned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In other words, what’s your justification for this project? Conservative Evangelicalism was a political movement<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,24],"tags":[184,290],"class_list":["post-1727","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-think","category-write","tag-conservative-evangelicalism","tag-fundamentalism"],"yoast_head":"\n