Theologically speaking -- ish
Back to evangelicals and their debate about re-branding. While browsing the website (always worth a browse), I came across by the American historian Philip Jenkins about how the media may shape ideas about religion and culture. Here's the executive summary:
The largest area of religious life under-represented by the mass media is normality. Given conventional priorities, the customary and unsensational is not news, so that media stories about Islam are likely to expose terrorism and subversion rather than everyday piety, while according to most media accounts, the Roman Catholic church is either engaging in moral crusades or picking up the pieces after the latest sex scandal.
Jenkins is clearly incensed by the way media coverage "of any topic" can involve the reduction of complex movements and ideas to "a few selected code-words", which purport to act as guideposts to the perplexed, but which almost inevitably muddy up the meaning of things:
One such demon word is fundamentalism, originally a description of a particular approach to reading Christian Scriptures, but now a catch-all description for supernaturally based anti-modernism, repression, and misogyny. Within the past few years, evangelical has been similarly debased, gaining its popular connotations of white conservative politics. Most pernicious of all, perhaps, is the benevolent-sounding word "moderate," which equates to "the side that we (the media) agree with in any religious controversy, no matter how bizarre their ideas, or how bloodcurdlingly confrontational their rhetoric." In this lexicon, likewise, theological is an educated synonym for nitpicking triviality.
Comments
The real debasement of "evangelical" has not been brought about by the liberal media, as Jenkins seems to think, but by the appalling behavious of evangelicals. Particularly, American evangelicals. If you engage in racist, mysogynistic, homophobic and xenophobic behaviour over a period of a century, you shouldn't be upset if your very name becomes a by-word for racism, mysogeny, homophobia and xenophobia. Don't change your name, change your attitude.
The problem is that people assume that evangelical means white, in the first place. They do that so they can minimize the fact that what is being said by evangelicals is biblical. They are appalled by the fact that evangelicals actually believe the bible that they read. Even worse they actually trust in the God of the bible, and take him literally. Well I am one african american evangelical, and I take the bible, and the God of the bible just as literally as the evangelical whites. I ought to after all, they are my brothers and sisters in Christ. And we african american evangelicals are many. Truth is truth and no matter what the world screams that won't change, and true christians are not going to back away from truth to please the world or receive less scorn. Women have an honered place in the church and christian home, and where you do find them disrespected you find misinterpritation of the word. Which will be spoken out against by mainstream evangelicals. The charge of homophopia, is a lie that tries to shove wordly values down the throught of christians. It also tries to ignore that the bible speaks against it in the old and new testament. The charge of xenophobia is laughable. As far as worship is concerned, people like to worship within there culture do to styles of worship, and every now and then you have the urge to worship outside you culture. As to what this may have to do with immigration, there just is a right way and a wrong way to deal with things. And breaking into someone else's house and saying I have just as many rights in your house as you is obserd. Just as it is obserd to go to someone else's country with that attitude. Not to mention that no one here could turn around and go to any of their countries of origin and do the same.