[Dialogue] The "Religion in the US" debate

[frank bremner]

Dear colleagues:

G'day!

I've been "enjoying" the discussion about the role of religion in US 
politics.  There are some Australian resonances, but not always equivalents. 
  I'll post some information about this in te fulness of time.


I just want to mention a book I came across a few years back and which was 
useful to me.  Os Guiness, an English evangelical Christian, now working in 
the USA, wrote "Fit Bodies, Fat Minds: Why Evangelicals Don't Think".  It 
gave me an understanding of the frontier mentality of much US 
evangelicalism.

When towns developed suburbs and "going to church" became a matter of 
respectability, and being a parson lost its cutting edge - at the personal 
or social level - and became very pastoral and domesticated ..... some 
people hit the road or horse-trail  to be on the cutting edge (as they saw 
it).

The pastors back in the suburbs, or whatever, linked up with the 
universities and theological colleges etc, while the frontier folks eschewed 
intellectualising and preferred matters of the heart and conversion.  (We've 
recently seen the TV series "Carnivale" here.) Those slick city folks got 
more comfortable and respectable and full of long words and fancy-sounding 
ideas.  The frontier folks got more evangelical, and the suburban/city folks 
got more liberal.

That's a caricature, but it informed me of part of my Methodist heritage.

I once had to explain to a teaching colleague that "domestic" (matters of 
the home) was not the same as "domesticated" (especially in the way Nikos 
Kazantzakis used the word).

My concerns about Guiness' book:
(1)  He dismisses liberalism out of hand in one paragraph, pointing to some 
feminist liturgical gathering as something to pour scorn upon.  He doesn't 
seem to have any notion at all of what's going on there.  He's almost 
smart-arse in his comments.
(2)  He is worried about evangelicals moving to Catholicism or Orthodoxy - 
but he seems to be really ignorant of the attraction and of the riches of 
those traditions.  He displays appalling ignorance on this point.

Some of you may be able to offer more comments on his critique of 
evangelicalism.

I ran into him in Adelaide, South Australia, back in 1976 or so, when he 
spoke at a one- (or two-?) day conference at Nunyara, Belair (the site of 
our Australia Sunmmer 69, the first EI summer program outside the USA).  He 
used the phrase "newspaper in one hand, Bible in the other" and I learned it 
had come from Karl Barth.

That phrase first entered my consciousness in the second half of the 1960s 
when Rev Eric Nicholls, a Welsh Methodist of the radical stream, preached 
often at Westbourne Park Methodist Church (where we went one Sunday during 
S/69).  Eric would urge us to have "The Australian in one hand, and the 
Bible in the other".  This was back in the early days of that newspaper, 
when Rupert Murdoch was a newspaper-pioneer rather than an empire-ruler.  
Eric really shook up Westbourne Park, a "cathedral church" of South 
Australian Methodism, by publicly worrying about Australian foreign policy 
re "the dark peoples" and the Vietnam War and so on.

Best wishes

See ya

Frank Bremner

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