Undeception

NPR has a rather good article up called “Evangelicals Question The Existence Of Adam And Eve” (sic — what the heck is up with the indiscriminate capitalization?). It vividly showcases how the tide is (finally) starting to turn in this culture war for/against evolutionary theory. Peppered with quotes from several key people, including Dennis Venema, Karl Giberson, Al Mohler, and Reasons to Believe’s Fazale Rana, the article points out that more and more self-described Evangelicals are coming to grips with the fact that the scientific evidence against a literal Adam and Eve is overwhelming.

Image via Wikipedia

Calvin College’s Dan Harlow underscores the importance of this discussion to the vitality of Evangelical Christianity when he says, “This stuff is unavoidable. Evangelicals have to either face up to it or they have to stick their head in the sand. And if they do that, they will lose whatever intellectual currency or respectability they have.” Respectability notwithstanding, conservative standard bearers like Al Mohler see nothing in Christianity worth holding onto sans a literal Adam and Eve. Despite Venema’s confident insistence that there’s nothing to be afraid of in accepting mainstream evolution (which decisively refutes two original progenitors), obviously there are some theological implications that remain in need of explanation. And although that end is not out of sight anymore, it’s still going to take a lot more work.

This reminded me of something I learned back in my linguistics program several years ago. (This isn’t a tangent: it’ll come back around!)

When two people groups speaking mutually unintelligible native languages come into contact and have need for communication, especially in a trade situation, they are likely to come up with some sort of compromise that will allow them to interact. Often they will form a sort of hybrid communication system taking elements from each of their languages. This communication system is called a “pidgin”: the vocabulary comes almost completely from the visitors who are seeking trade (historically, usually English or French) and the grammar (morphology, syntax) is taken predominantly from the native language. This system works well enough for trade, but pidgins are not classified by linguists as languages because they lack a number of grammatical features of natural human language. Because of its limitations, the pidgin is often spoken between the two language groups strictly in order to conduct business; the grammatical holes hinder much communication beyond such practical matters.

Yet in cases such as colonization in which the language of the traders makes an established presence, a pidgin may be spoken around young children who naturally adopt it as a native language rather than a limited communication system. In these cases, something very interesting happens: as part of the language acquisition process that comes so naturally to the young of our species, children fill in the pidgin’s holes. When children speak the pidgin to others, they unconsciously and effortlessly begin inserting new parts of speech, formulating verb tenses, bringing in missing vocabulary, and creating any other necessary language features that the pidgin lacked, so that the result is a robust, full-fledged language. This nativized pidgin is what is referred to as a “creole”.

Processes analogous to creolization recur outside language: quite commonly it’s in our children that thesis and antithesis are synthesized and for whom conflicts are likeliest to be resolved or otherwise fall away. Most of my peers in my generation grew up oblivious to and often incredulous of the traumatic struggle for racial equality that our parents and grandparents had to fight so hard for; I anticipate the same for my grandchildren in regard to the currently contentious issue of homosexuality.

I hope and expect this to happen also in the area of evolution and biblical literalism.

As a case in point, I had a conversation about woodenly literalistic interpretations of Scripture and evolution with my young daughter, a science nerd; at first, as a good Sunday School pupil (and my mother’s granddaughter), she was horrified to think about the possibility that what she’d heard wasn’t God’s truth (“But God doesn’t lie!” she once whispered desperately), but it was not too difficult to explain to her that the opinions of her creationist teachers hadn’t been taking all the important information into account. So in a relatively short conversation I was able to assuage her concerns and free her of some latent fears about her beloved science books so that she’ll be a part of the first generation of American Christians that tolerates some variation in the list of acceptable “vocabulary” for the origins question; in turn, theology/philosophy nerds (my son is already heading this direction) will nativize the “grammar” of how it all works and what it all means when taken together. Most importantly, they’ll now be able to look sympathetically at believers on both side of the question to an extent much more difficult for my generation and older.

I’m suggesting that we who have struggled in our exodus from conservative Christian theologies should not despair too quickly or fear too much for our children’s ability to retain and adapt Christian theology: this transition will not be nearly as difficult as it was for us who were more inculcated in our own native tongues before we made contact with those foreigners with their bizarre, barbarian languages. My hope is that, so long as we continue to stand by and tinker at the puzzle we’ve begun and teach our children to lay down their arms when dealing with those who disagree, we can trust that they will come in behind us and, relatively effortlessly, fill in the holes.

What interests me—and what I take to be demonstrable and important—is the particular ensemble of moral and imaginative values engendered in numberless consciences by Christian beliefs. That such values had political and social consequences I certainly do not deny; I feel fairly safe in saying, for instance, that abolitionism—as a purely moral cause—could not easily have arisen in any non-Christian culture of which I am aware. That is quite different, however, from claiming that Christianity ineluctably or uniquely must give rise to, say, democracy or capitalism or empirical science. It is to say, rather, that the Christian account of reality introduced into our world an understanding of the divine, the cosmic, and the human that had no exact or even proximate equivlanet elsewhere and that made possible a moral vision of the human person that has haunted us ever since, century upon century.

David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies, p. 202-203

Cover via Amazon

The above quote was called to my attention by the latest episode of the Unbelievable? radio show, in which Hart and Terry Sanderson, president of the UK’s National Secular Society, debate the potential results of the new atheist goal of secularization and the relegation of all religion to individual, inconsequential observance (at best).

I’ve been interested in David Bentley Hart since my friend Cliff Martin reviewed his book a couple years ago. The above quote is indicative of his approach, which is careful not to argue that Christianity is true because it does this or that for the world. As he says on the show, “The book is not an exhortation to ‘believe, because if we don’t, we don’t have moral rationales for behaving the way we ought to behave.’ ” In fact, “It’s not that anyone would deny that there is some natural promptings and desire for the good that is part of our human natures (if you believe in human nature); every faith says as much, that these are indeed human good and human values.” He finds it “silly” to suppose that we would have rationally deduced specifically the types of values that most of us, secularists included, find most important: ”It’s simply the lesson of history that what that desire for the good produces is not a particular set of values that are immediately rationally recognizable.” His point is that we cannot and should not ignore that Christianity has yielded felicitous impacts on society that he finds exceedingly unlikely to have occurred in a truly secular environment devoid of Christian influence—benefits which he insists are likely to dwindle in the thoroughly secularized society that’s been progressively more stridently advocated in recent years.

Sanderson, of course, disagrees, which leads to some stimulating discussion. Highly recommended.

This week someone reminded me of the Amish school shooting: in 2006, milkman Charles Karl Roberts IV went into an Amish community and shot ten girls, killing five of them, and then turned the gun on himself. Here’s part of the Wikipedia article (as it currently stands) on the aftermath of that horrific event:

On the day of the shooting, a grandfather of one of the murdered Amish girls was heard warning some young relatives not to hate the killer, saying, “We must not think evil of this man.” Another Amish father noted, “He had a mother and a wife and a soul and now he’s standing before a just God.”

Jack Meyer, a member of the Brethren community living near the Amish in Lancaster County, explained: “I don’t think there’s anybody here that wants to do anything but forgive and not only reach out to those who have suffered a loss in that way but to reach out to the family of the man who committed these acts.”

A Roberts family spokesman said an Amish neighbor comforted the Roberts family hours after the shooting and extended forgiveness to them. Amish community members visited and comforted Roberts’ widow, parents, and parents-in-law. One Amish man held Roberts’ sobbing father in his arms, reportedly for as long as an hour, to comfort him. The Amish have also set up a charitable fund for the family of the shooter. About 30 members of the Amish community attended Roberts’ funeral, and Marie Roberts, the widow of the killer, was one of the few outsiders invited to the funeral of one of the victims.

Marie Roberts sent out an open letter thanking the community for their response, saying, ”Your love for our family has helped to provide the healing we so desperately need. Gifts you’ve given have touched our hearts in a way no words can describe.”

This is Christianity. You can take all your supposed hallmarks of Christian orthodoxy – your atonement theories, your hell, your heaven, your Trinity, your bodily resurrection of Jesus – and you may as well hang them in a museum. Not because I think they’re all false (I do not), but because our preoccupation with affirming facts has been distracting us from focusing on being ”Christian” in the most meaningful sense: behaving as people born from above.

Now ask yourself, is the response of this Amish community the stereotypical Christian response? We certainly hold many of those ideals, and hold those who live them up as great examples of Christian virtue. But when the rubber meets the road, or when devotees of a competing religion strike us down, or when we get to see murderers finally “get theirs” — are we characterized by scandalous and reckless compassion?

It’s love like this that really confounds our minds. Most of us should be able to see the futility of harboring hate against anyone but the actual perpetrator; the truly magnanimous may be able to recognize, even through their pain, certain factors in the state of mind of the perpetrator that would grant him some level of absolution, even forgiveness, for his crimes. But to be truly moved by compassion for the perpetrator and his loved ones such that an entire community is able to see past their own pain and immediately mobilize to offer peace and comfort to “outsiders”…that is above and beyond, and bafflingly counter-intuitive. What motivates love like that?

One dear woman I know helped bring home to me the logic of it when she wrote this concerning the hollowness of retributive “justice”:

Would it have helped us at all, when our own son was killed by a careless and drinking driver, to see that young man made to suffer– or to die, to give us “justice” ? And how would it have helped that driver’s grieving mother, who, like our Father, ached and wept at what her child had done?

To be sure, I would ache and weep if my son were killed. I can hardly bear the thought of it. But would I not also ache and weep if my son became psychologically disturbed enough to shoot schoolgirls? Wouldn’t I ache and weep if he became so misguided that he bombed civilian targets to advance a religious or political agenda? And if God is Father, can we not be fairly certain that whatever “justice” was served bin Laden by his being shot through the left eye, God grieved both for bin Laden’s monstrous actions and the violent demise that came to him, even though he was undoubtedly defiant and defensive of his terrible ideals to the end?

Can you imagine if instead of reveling in our desire for vengeance upon those who harm us as though they were animals needing to be put down, we were compelled to weep for the waywardness of those people as we would members of our own family? No, we can’t expect to accomplish their repentance, and we can’t just let them off the hook without consequence. What I’m talking about is an attitude of the heart. Specifically, if we want our hearts to resemble God’s as much as we claim we do, we’ve got a lot of work to do in cultivating a sincere and deep-seated compassion for even our enemies. Sympathy, empathy, and kenosis would then become the hallmarks of our faith, and it would be the kind of faith that would finally begin to earn responses like that of Marie Roberts, in response to the bereaved but compassionate Amish community:

Your compassion has reached beyond our family, beyond our community, and is changing our world, and for this we sincerely thank you.

I think it’s safe to say that this is one post that most of my liberal Christian friends won’t be sharing with their friends.

I firmly believe that Christians should be preoccupied with the plight of the marginalized and the remediation of social injustice. I, too, have evolved considerably from my conservative Christian background and rejected the “Jesus is a Right Winger” presupposition characterizing the stereotypical American evangelical. However, time and again I am reminded that I am something of an anomaly among post-evangelical/liberal Christians (whatever you want to call me).  My theological evolution did not result in some sort of flipped switch that automatically turned me into a Democrat-supporting left-winger. I do not assume that the ideal way of going about addressing social concerns is through the government or that those skeptical of the state’s ability or moral authority to do this are selfish cretins who hate the poor and destitute. In fact, I think that the use of force that the government depends upon is often responsible for creating and perpetuating their plight.

At present I have no plans here at Undeception to debate the various and sundry reasons, both moral and practical, that I oppose wielding government mandates, the threat of publically sanctioned violence, in order to alleviate social problems. I intend this post to be a one-off statement, the kind of thing I might link to during other discussions in the future, but not any sort of opening salvo. I already tried doing the theology/politics thing on this blog, and I don’t think I’m going back.

However, in this one post, I wish to state for the record my belief that when people seek to influence voluntary interactions using involuntary power structures, particularly the kinds of structures run by power-seekers who have every reason both to promise the moon and to ensure that it stays within only their benevolent grasp (i.e. politicians), a vast array of unintended consequences, moral hazard, and artifacts of force will result, making truly voluntary structures wholly preferable. There is no end to the number of politicians who will seek and be granted power after promising to throw unending money at problems or propose attractive sounding schemes to address them, but one of the many devastating unintended consequences is that such publically funded charity has endangered inherently more calculated private endeavors by cutting away at our disposable income through confiscation and, more insidiously, by giving our society (and, indeed, the Church) the impression that voluntary forms of charity have been superseded by a superior broker of charity; truly it is said that no one competes with the government.

Our exemplar of social concern, Jesus of Nazareth, made a point to avoid placing himself in or ingratiating himself to the extant power structures, even though he ostensibly could have done one or either quite easily; rather, the powers-that-were recognized him as a threat to the very foundations of their coercive methodology, not just their refusal to use it to bring free healthcare and stabilize private industries. Statist Christians on both the left and right wing preach against theocratic tendencies: leftists decry the right wing’s attempts to restrict behavior not deemed to be Christian (such as homosexuality), but as a seemingly unquestionable principle they advocate using the state to enforce social justice and other such demands of godly morality that they believe in.

As I said, I don’t want to use this site to debate the particulars of political philosophy. What I would like is for socially conscious Christians to examine their assumptions about which political reality will best bring about their ideals and not simply adopt the political philosophy of the vocal progressive Christians they learned their theology from. I think there is much common ground that we can claim when we stand up for the disenfranchised and beg our evangelical brethren to not simply assume that “people are only poor because they are lazy” or the like; I agree that conservatives tend to turn a blind eye to the dangers of big business (but the Left also needs to recognize that the chief of these evils is their weapon of choice: inviting the government in to grant them all sorts of privileges and immunities). And you know, it doesn’t bother me so much when someone just happens to be gullible enough to trust government to do the most good because it has the most power (red flag!). But because they continuously broadcast their assumption that a socially conscious Christian will therefore vote a confiscatory, redistributivist political agenda, I feel compelled to ask, “Are you sure that the state really serves the interests of social concern in the way you think it does?” I invite you to read the news from a classical liberal/libertarian perspective from resources such as Reason Magazine or the Cato Institute. Suffice it to say that there is plenty of evidence that the more power we give to the state, the more we will all end up suffering.

(By the way, if you’re one of those people who believes that classical liberals/libertarians are un-Christian – or that Glenn Beck is a spokesperson for us – I invite you to read these rejoinders from a site I enjoy: 1, 2, 3.)

“God desperately wants an intimate relationship with you!”

Relax, I’m not going to spend the entire post bagging on this claim and those who make it. I will spend the greater part of this post explaining the problem that many Christians have with that statement, but you might be surprised where I end up — I certainly am.

Recently a friend pointed out how frustrated he was with this particular evangelical meme. I, too, have been annoyed by just such claims before. “Cerebral” Christians like myself are usually critical of those who simply trust what they think they know about God, since we have – not infrequently correctly – identified many of their beliefs as erroneous understandings that are sometimes counterproductive to the Christian mission. Surely no small part of the disgust that many feel toward those who typically speak of an “intimate relationship” with God issues from a sense that these evangelicals are stereotypically not as close to God as they seem to think they are: for these, daily prayer times, emotional worship services, and a commitment to avoiding “the world” seem to be the central components and hallmarks of a robust “relationship” with God, but this more often manifests as a general out-of-touch heaven-mindedness. In effect, it all sounds so make-believe, and a disappointing deficit of healthy fruit this type of “relationship” seems to produce bears that out.

Many of us shake our heads when we hear someone make the above “intimate relationship” claim because it seems so self-centered. In contrast, biblical worship consists of more than nice, positive feelings about God, immaculate and unquestioned doctrine, a disgust with grave moral sins, and the fond, firm conviction that we are buddies with Jesus. It is also characterized by a resolve to whittle away at the small niggling sins, such as bad attitudes, selfishness, gluttony, judgmentalism, etc. and to develop Christ-like attitudes such as a genuinely passionate compassion that begins with a profound awareness of the most tangible needs among humanity. The Gospels present Jesus’ teachings as preoccupied with righteousness, which, far from merely harping on the importance of some ritually distinctive and esoteric moral code, he instead fulfilled by spending the rest of his time meeting the physical needs of the destitute and railing against unproductive religiosity. Consulting the life of Jesus as displayed in the Gospels, we come away with the impression that both personal holiness and active participation in somehow bringing about God’s ideal world order of peace and love are the most recognizable characteristics of God’s kingdom. And yet evangelicals are, as a group, among the least concerned with meeting physical needs among Christians, due to an unnerving conviction that what sick, poor, and hungry people really need is to repent and get in on that “intimate relationship” with God.

Another important reason some Christians look askance at the statement in question is that the claim is being made that God is pursuing a relationship with us in a way that is not at all likely if we understand “intimate relationship” in the same way we mean that phrase in human terms. However immanent we believe He is, God is undeniably also transcendent, and not likely to engage in even the most metaphorical sort of “pillow talk” with us, except perhaps through media such as Scripture or through the encouragement of one another. He interfaces with us in a much less direct fashion than we are taught to approach Him; the statement should perhaps be more accurately phrased, “God wants you to pursue a relationship with Him in which you want desperately to be intimate with Him.” He is God, so if He really did “desperately” want a relationship with us, surely He’d be more successful at performing His side of the bargain. As a frank Catholic friend of mine likes to point out, “What’s up with this ‘personal relationship’ deal? I can’t pull up a chair and have a chat with Him like I can with a human being. I can’t hear Him talking the same way He can hear me.” It seems one-sided: He knows every thought, emotion, and unseen desire of ours, but we strain to discern His thoughts about everything relevant to the living out of our lives, our future plans, etc. There’s something about the “intimate relationship” expression that would have to be considered metaphorical in a way that doesn’t seem to be recognized among those who are wont to use the expression.

However…

Surely it is telling that some of the kindest and most godly people I know would speak of their relationship with God in just this way. As I become more convinced that Jesus modeled our ideal relationship with God, I begin to see that our pursuit of holiness and a singleminded determination to actualize the Kingdom of God through our righteous acts should indeed be motivated and characterized by a desire for “intimacy” with God in the sense of a oneness of purpose and a carefully cultivated love for His ways. I have come to the conclusion that there is something important missing when we go about doing good deeds and fulfilling righteousness without a personal dimension and a recognition of the initiative God takes with us, calling us to understand what MacDonald called God’s “fatherheart” and thereby motivating our actions beyond rote legalism. It’s not enough to either just believe the way God wants us to believe or to do what God wants us to do — our righteousness should be undertaken as a response to God’s love for us and an attempt to develop the love in ourselves that motivates God Himself.

I’m not really talking to anyone but myself in this post. I am a mostly “cerebral” Christian who has recently come under the conviction that God is indeed pursuing me in ways beyond the ethical or the intellectual. He wants us to participate in His plans for the world, behaviors and attitudes that aren’t simply a divine demand motivated by abstract principles, but are foremost an expression of His love for us. When I recognize God as the Father who revealed His Word to us in the person of Jesus, who desires all sin systematically and surgically purged from my life so that I can be ever closer to Him, how can I come to any conclusion other than that God does desperately desire for intimacy with us?

Yes, granted, it’s a less blithe and more costly brand of “intimacy” than is often conceived by those who use the expression above (and we are right to call them on this), but it’s the kind of relationship I recognize that I most desperately desire and need.

This installment of “Theologically Interesting Lyrics” features a song by the late Mark Heard, master lyricist, connoisseur of several stringed instruments, and pariah to the CCM (Contemporary Christian Music) industry of his time. Although widely acclaimed for his songwriting acumen, he was always an industry outsider: not only did he stand out as a “profane saint” who smoked, drank, and cussed, but because of his acute empathy for the outcasts of society and resulting social concerns, he even identified with the political left (whom he perceived to be more committed to those causes), setting him firmly at odds with mainstream evangelical culture. His lyrics are often melancholy, ironic, sarcastic, and rarely offer solutions.

Heard accused the Christian music industry of stifling the artists who strayed from the CCM norm of plastered smiles and facades of ethereal hope and who instead frequently deemed it necessary to use their lyrics to grapple with the problems of life and mourn the unfulfilled hopes that rightly plague us all, believers and unbelievers alike. On the last of over two dozen albums he released before his untimely death, he penned this song describing the plight of those artists like himself who felt exploited and whose not-always-pretty messages were essentially censored by what he considered to be a profit-seeking industry that held a seeming monopoly over Christian music.

(I’ve half a mind to leave the lyrics out so that you’ll just play the video and allow his expressive voice and the fitting music to carry you along. But nah, I’ll just post the lyrics below the video.)

(URL: http://www.youtube.com/v/N58edukzT8c)

The Orphans of God
written and recorded by Mark Heard on Satellite Sky

I will rise from my bed with a question again
As I work to inherit the restless wind
The view from my window is cold and obscene
I want to touch what my eyes have not seen

But they have packaged our virtue in cellulose dreams
And sold us the remnants ’til our pockets are clean
‘Til our hopes fall ’round our feet
Like the dust of dead leaves
And we end up looking like what we believe

We are soot-covered urchins running wild and unshod
We will always be remembered as the orphans of God
They will dig up these ruins and make flutes of our bones
And blow a hymn to the memory of the orphans of God

Like bees in a bottle we are flying at fate
Beating our wings against the walls of this place
Unaware that the struggle is the blood of the proof
In choosing to believe the unbelievable truth

But they have captured our siblings, they have rendered them mute
Disputed our lineage and poisoned our roots
We have bought from the brokers who have broken their oaths
And we’re out on the streets with a lump in our throats

We are soot-covered urchins running wild and unshod
We will always be remembered as the orphans of God
They will dig up these ruins
And make flutes of our bones
And blow a hymn to the memory of the orphans of God

To date there have been two tribute albums making flutes of Mark Heard’s bones. There’s a marked contrast between his essentially incarnational approach to life’s difficulties in which he stands among the sufferers to give them a voice and the tendency of the CCM industry to offer advice from an enlightened position outside. The greater CCM lyrical tradition rejections the lyrical tradition of the orphans of God for bitterly complaining and offering no answers, while the orphans of God criticize the CCM model for merely offering platitudes and purely emotional pick-me-ups as solutions that too often prove hollow and illusory in the harsh realities of life. Those who prefer Heard’s approach will likely feel that his remains have been somewhat desecrated by a recent song from the CCM camp using his title that somewhat illustrates this tension. In this “Orphans of God”, the Christian pop vocal group Avalon offers this answer to the hopeless:

There are no orphans of God
So many fallen, but hallelujah
There are no orphans of God

Oh, you just feel like an orphan. God has made everything wonderful, if only you have the eyes of faith to see it.

CCM has changed; it is no longer such a monolith of pop/inspiration, and the degree to which CCM was actually stifling his music rather than, say, reflecting a low demand among the buying public that didn’t want to hear his moody, Appalachian-twanged music is certainly debatable. Either way, there are many more artists within and a robust movement outside of the mainstream industry labels who speak from the rubble, in the voices of the “fallen”, than there were in Heard’s day. But the tendency Heard identified remains in American suburban Christianity to eschew negative observations unless prepackaged with the dressed up “church talk” answers that most who go through a real dark patch find essentially dismissive. Most who have lost a loved one to a tragic circumstance tell us later that the least helpful and often most offensive thing they heard was, “It’s God’s will, and He loves you.” Yet that cold comfort is still routinely offered by Christians in “the bubble”.

Now, it is absolutely clear that mere words in songs, however poetic they might be, can never themselves resolve crises of distress, despair, hunger, sickness, fatigue, etc. in the same way that crying out accomplishes nothing but an appeal for an actual response. So in the end, the effectivity of Heard’s empathetic and others’ sympathetic approaches to lyrics will be judged by their comparative abilities to stir up the resolve to find real-world responses beyond pat answers within those who listen. From what I’ve seen, simplistically offering disembodied theological explanations that amount to gnostic escapism (particularly when those explanations seem to fly in the face of the facts) is perceived by those dealing with problems as taking those problems none too seriously. Those the most committed to not ignoring the emotional and physical hardships of life recognize that the suffering often sincerely need a shoulder to cry on and an empathetic acknowledgment of their pain rather than a tear and a lecture. In this, and in the potential to increase dissatisfaction with an intolerable state of affairs among the unaffected who might otherwise remain oblivious, I think Mark Heard’s approach triumphs.

So ends my hymn.

My regulars know that I like podcasts, so I thought I’d give everyone a heads-up on a reboot of an old podcast (on which I once appeared) from LFAM.

The new version is called At the Well Radio. In this incarnation, the regular hosts are the podcast’s founder, a young Christian who’s traveled a path similar to my own, and a Canadian friend who self-identifies as agnostic.

The goal of this podcast is to help Christians and other seekers to navigate a “third way” between mainstream evangelical/fundamentalist Christianity and an absence of all faith in God, encouraging its audience to step back from unexamined dogmas and look at what — besides condemnation — our faith has to offer the world. By partnering with an agnostic, Travis is able to use this podcast to strip away the artificial barriers between those with faith and those without faith that unnecessarily exacerbate the Church’s isolation from our mission field (the world) which obstructs our accomplishment of anything useful in the world.

The show takes the approach of looking at a number of news items with their commentary. At times they obviously enjoy tipping evangelicals’ sacred cows, but not for the pleasure of it so much as to make those evangelicals aware of the dangers of having sacred cows in the first place.

Do check it out.