Interesting bit on Rick Warren and the "cellular" church

Hat tip to Anglican for this extended take on Rick Warren and his style of church. There is a lot here. Some I hate, like Warren getting his entire church together in a baseball stadium (complete with hot dog vendors) and then hamming it up in front of tens of thousands of people. All of that bugs me--the mixing of commercial and the sacred; the sense that it is just more entertainment; and the huge sense of the "cult of the personality" that people like Warren cultivate and embrace. I don't trust that particular "cult" especially when it comes to religious issues.

But there are aspects here that are intriguing. The sense that (like the Communist party) these huge mega-churches split into smaller cells--small groups of community. Warren facilitates and encourages that. These small groups meet together, pray together, and become very close friends for emotional and spiritual support. I like that idea, but don't like the idea of being directed by a giant ego like Warren to accomplish that.

For all the positives, I am just not sure this is church. They give a lot of money. They raised money to feed the homeless in Orange County for 40 days. That is a good thing. But, like the rest of evangelical Christianity, their theology seems pretty thin and their willingness to address the roots of poverty (beyond some vapid statement that poverty is caused by people's spiritual sickness) is non-existent.

But this caught my eye the most--for obvious reasons. Let me quote extensively:

Not long ago, the sociologist Christian Smith decided to find out what American evangelicals mean when they say that they believe in a "Christian America." The phrase seems to suggest that evangelicals intend to erode the separation of church and state. But when Smith asked a representative sample of evangelicals to explain the meaning of the phrase, the most frequent explanation was that America was founded by people who sought religious liberty and worked to establish religious freedom. The second most frequent explanation offered was that a majority of Americans of earlier generations were sincere Christians, which, as Smith points out, is empirically true. [not sure I buy that. The "majority" of Americans in Colonial America ignored indigenous peoples and overlooks how those "sincere" Christians were enslaving Africans] Others said what they meant by a Christian nation was that the basic laws of American government reflected Christian principles-which sounds potentially theocratic, except that when Smith asked his respondents to specify what they meant by basic laws they came up with representative government and the balance of powers.

"In other words," Smith writes, "the belief that America was once a Christian nation does not necessarily mean a commitment to making it a 'Christian' nation today, whatever that might mean. Some evangelicals do make this connection explicitly. But many discuss America's Christian heritage as a simple fact of history that they are not particularly interested in or optimistic about reclaiming. Further, some evangelicals think America never was a Christian nation; some think it still is; and others think it should not be a Christian nation, whether or not it was so in the past or is now."

As Smith explored one issue after another with the evangelicals-gender equality, education, pluralism, and politics-he found the same scattershot pattern. The Republican Party may have been adept at winning the support of evangelical voters, but that affinity appears to be as much cultural as anything; the Party has learned to speak the evangelical language. Scratch the surface, and the appearance of homogeneity and ideological consistency disappears. Evangelicals want children to have the right to pray in school, for example, and they vote for conservative Republicans who support that right. But what do they mean by prayer? The New Testament's most left-liberal text, the Lord's Prayer-which, it should be pointed out, begins with a call for utopian social restructuring ("Thy will be done, On earth as it is in Heaven"), then welfare relief ("Give us this day our daily bread"), and then income redistribution ("Forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors"). The evangelical movement isn't a movement, if you take movements to be characterized by a coherent philosophy, and that's hardly surprising when you think of the role that small groups have come to play in the evangelical religious experience. The answers that Smith got to his questions are the kind of answers you would expect from people who think most deeply about their faith and its implications on Tuesday night, or Wednesday, with five or six of their closest friends, and not Sunday morning, in the controlling hands of a pastor.

Interesting. This does suggest that many people follow Bush because he speaks the code, but does not explain why they continue to follow him. And, I must say, I am not sure I buy that these answers reflect deep thinking. If studying the socially radical NT as much as these people do doesn't call you to at least question capitalism, then I don't see much depth. That it calls them to have concern for their fellow humans? I like that. And I respect that these people are dedicated to their church--hell, they are willing to pay a lot to have a giant church that looks like a college campus. But I am just not sure that is church.