Church shopping and cultural polarization
CNN.com has a blog post today exploring "How Church Shopping is Polarizing the Country". Written by law professors Naomi Cahn (George Washington University) and June Carbone (University of Missouri Kansas City) who have recently co-authored a book on cultural polarization, the particular focus on church shopping intrigued me. Heck, I was church shopping not all that long ago. I'm helping cause cultural polarization? I must know more.
Fascinating (and saddening) are their definitions of the two polarized camps: traditionalists, who "...believe in an eternal and transcendent authority that tells us what is good, what is true, how we should live, and who we are", and modernists, who "...would redefine historic faiths according to the prevailing assumptions of contemporary life". Modernists, they note, "...have become less likely to attend church at all."
In previous generations, they say, both modernists and traditionalists tended to attend the same churches, typically right in their community. Today, though, the ability to church-shop has the traditionalists seeking out churches that affirm their "personal values", and has modernists staying home.
The authors lament the decline of the mainline Protestant denominations that in previous generations housed both camps, and complain that today's evangelical churches (full of like-minded traditionalists) are self-reinforcing in belief, and that evangelicalism's close ties to the Republican Party serve to marginalize those who might be in agreement politically but not religiously (or vice versa). In the end, they say, traditionalists group together and talk only to themselves, and modernists leave church altogether, resulting in an increasingly polarized society.
There are certainly places where I disagree with the authors' views on the topic. I think that Protestants seeking churches where their beliefs are shared and reinforced is a good thing. And drawing rosy pictures of a post-WWII generation where everyone attended the same community church regardless of what they believed only serves to hide the fact that those weak, any-belief-is-OK churches in large part helped cause the modernist/traditionalist divide we see today, by valuing the form-over-substance mindset that was eventually cynically discarded by Generation X.
However, within the microcosm that is the evangelical church, there are good lessons to be learned here. We need to be vigilant to ensure that we limit our "distinctives" to the fundamental Gospel truths. As soon as our teaching, or even our church culture, becomes, even by way of unspoken assumptions, 'the gospel plus conservative politics' or 'the gospel plus homeschooling' or 'the gospel plus pre-millennial dispensationalism', etc., we will alienate those who either desperately need to hear the Gospel or who could be vibrant, participating members of our local body.
The good news that Jesus Christ is Lord of all is polarizing. We should not be surprised when law professors find it so. But there is still a lesson for us here: let the Gospel be polarizing, not the cultural things we are so apt to add on to it.
Fox News, knee-jerk reactions, and out-of-context statements
If my previous posts in which I declared my support for Obama and for civilly-recognized gay marriage weren't enough to convince my church friends that I have become a heathen leftist Commie pinko, I'll probably do it with this post. Why? Because I'm going to be mildly critical of Fox News and of those who blindly follow it.
Yesterday I linked to a Rod Dreher column entitled "I was wrong about Sotomayor speech". (Yeah, there's an article missing somewhere in that sentence, but live with it.) To catch anyone up who hasn't heard about it, the controversial statement from Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor was made in a 2002 speech at Cal Berkeley, where she said this:
I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her
experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.
There was (as one might expect) immediately a lot of noise made by conservative groups like the Judicial Confirmation Network and bloggers (I'll link Michelle Malkin here as just one example), and when I was on the treadmill at the gym for 30 minutes on Tuesday afternoon, Fox News host Glenn Beck had that quote up on the screen seemingly every minute of his show. And let's face it: as a stand-alone statement, it seems bad. It's not the sort of thing that a "judges apply the law, they don't make it" conservative like me likes to hear at all.
So back to that Dreher article I linked. Conservative columnist Rod Dreher candidly notes that after reading the full text of the speech in question, he says he is
...still a bit troubled by the remark, but not in any important way. Taken in context, the speech was about how the context in which we were raised affects how judges see the world, and that it's unrealistic to pretend otherwise. Yet -- and this is a key point -- she admits that as a jurist, one is obligated to strive for neutrality.
And then he quotes another passage from Sotomayor's speech, one that didn't ever make the screen at Fox News:
While recognizing the potential effect of individual experiences on perception, Judge Cedarbaum nevertheless believes that judges must transcend their personal sympathies and prejudices and aspire to achieve a greater degree of fairness and integrity based on the reason of law. Although I agree with and attempt to work toward Judge Cedarbaum's aspiration, I wonder whether achieving that goal is possible in all or even in most cases.
Now, that puts a whole different spin on things, doesn't it? All of a sudden Judge Sotomayor sounds a lot less like a radical legislate-from-the-bench sort of judge and more like an idealist who nonetheless understands the role of the judge in the three-branch governmental system.
At this point I have to put a disclaimer in, because just as my support of civilly recognizing gay marriage caused friends to think that I no longer believe homosexual behavior is sin, this post suggesting that Judge Sotomayor isn't quite as radical as Fox News suggests will cause some friends to think that I'm soft on abortion. So here's the disclaimer. Judge Sotomayor does not appear to be the type of judge I'd prefer to see picked for the Supreme Court. I much prefer the staunch conservative views of Justices Roberts and Scalia, and the late Chief Justice Rehnquist. And abortion remains a heinous sin. OK? Are we cool? So let's proceed.
Here's the thing I want to get to in regard to Fox News: if you watch it and for a minute think that you're really getting a "fair and balanced" view of the news, think again. Is it truly "fair and balanced" to hammer on Sotomayor for the one line that sounds bad, without bringing in the other line from the same speech that balances things out?
So next you'll say to me "OK, Chris, we'll admit that Fox News is biased towards the conservative viewpoint. But all the other networks are biased towards the liberal side, so why can't we have our one network?" And that's OK, I guess, as long as you recognize the bias. Because, let's face it: if your only news source is Fox News, you wouldn't even know they have a bias. (Me personally? I don't watch TV news at all. But my news sources of choice should really be the topic of a separate blog post.)
So my plea to my friends this morning: read, watch, and listen widely. Think about things and come to your own conclusions. Don't just assume that if it shows up on Fox News, it's the gospel truth. (Don't assume that it isn't, either.) Be willing to see shades of grey in areas where there isn't a black-and-white standard. And be gracious and loving to all as you do it.
