Fallon and JT Do the History of Rap

I think that if two white guys attempted to mash up the history of rap, it would have to be done by guys like Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake. Oh, and with the ROOTS backing them up. I'm OK with this mainly because I think there was like one slip up in the whole thing and because of Jimmy Fallon's flawless 2Pac. Enjoy here or watch it at NBC.

Pledge to See a Great Movie and Help NY Charter Schools, Fools

I meant to mention this in my previous post regarding the movie, Waiting for Superman, but for some reason I forgot to include the information.

If you go to this website and pledge to see the movie (it takes two seconds), you'll support the charter schools of New York, which need more cash and better teachers.

Thanks for the reminder from my old high school classmate, Mera, who happens to teach 2nd graders in a New York Charter School.

Pledge! It's going to be a greeeeeaaaaaatt movie.

Where Do Good Ideas Come From?

There are a lot of great books coming out this fall, but I think I'm most personally excited for Steven Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation.

Here's the book trailer for it. I'm not sure which I like more, the concept of the book or the concept of the trailer. While we're at it, how rad are these book trailers that are coming out lately? Me likey this trend.

You'll have to watch it on YouTube because my blog template is being sups lame. But come back for my comments, you guys! C'mon!

Yeah. That's what's up. The more research we come to, it's becoming increasingly clear that success, innovation, and advancement rarely come in isolation, but rather in community over a decent period of time.

My two loves - education and ministry - certainly need this truth implemented. The "Senior Pastor" model is done, the dictating principal/superintendent must be dethroned. More so, what Johnson points out is that we need to give more room for creative spaces (or places where new pieces of new ideas can come from) so that these hunches and small ideas can form. Why do you think Google rocks so much face? Something like 20% of your time is just for inventing and putting others' ideas together with yours.

What if ministries gave more time to pastors to roam their cities, meet people, and pray. Then they could come together to let the ideas collide for how to better minister to and seek the peace of their said city? Or what if teacher inservice days were totally rethought?

I like the idea of the Internet becoming what the coffee house was in the 18th century. It's funny to go to a coffee shop now and see everyone quietly tapping their laptops; same space, different way to communicate.

A Common Gap of Atheism, Part 3: Marilynne Robinson, the Truth and Tozer

My hero, the author Marilynne Robinson, wrote a great new book called Absence of Mind about a lot of this stuff. Christianity Today interviewed her last week and she said this in regards to the separations we make both as atheists and believers:

"[Atheists] have more or less accepted the notion that the more people know, the less inclined they will be toward belief - a central assumption of atheism. With this comes the idea that whatever is most toxic from religious point of view must therefore epitomize science. And all sorts of nonsense goes unchallenged. Christianity has abandoned its intellectual traditions, ceding that ground to anybody in a white coat. Where it has tried to muster courage, it has too often tended to become irrational and shrill. Meanwhile, a great age in true science, an absolute catalog of wonders, passes by unnoticed."

I’ll be the first to admit that Christians are horrific with their use of the word “true.” But it also must be noticed that the Atheists and physicists of our day make similar mistakes. When we categorize truth as only that which we may observe physically, we are in danger. Similarly, if we say that the Bible includes everything that is true and if it’s not in the Bible then it’s not true, we are in serious intellectual danger.

2 + 2 = 4 is not in the Bible and it is empirically true. Perhaps, then, there are things that are not physical that are only witnessed in the reality of our consciousness that are also deeply true.

Christians historically are people who desire truth. I am concerned with some of modern Evangelicalism because there is an irrational fear of science as if it might disprove God himself. What little faith we must have if we only see our God in the Scriptures and not in the entirety of his lovely creation. No, my God is living, active, speaking, moving.

If you are scared of science and physics and mathematics, then you have created for yourself a small god who isn’t even found in the Bible. My God made physics and lives and breathes in it, as he does in the very pages of his Holy Scriptures. When we discover a new scientific fact, we celebrate for now we know more about how God has invented his universe.

“For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things” (Romans 11:36).

A.W. Tozer’s theology was that “God’s Word” is not just the written word (the Bible), but “the breath of God filling the world with living potentiality.” In Tozer’s mind, the Word of God is bigger and more complex than a leather-bound Bible (although that is certainly a piece of it). To him, it is a universal and timeless Word of power and truth; so God has not only spoken, but he is currently speaking. Here’s a taste from The Pursuit of God:

“The Bible will never be a living book to us until we are convinced that God is articulate in his universe. To jump from a dead, impersonal world to a dogmatic Bible is too much for most people. They may admit that they should accept the Bible as the Word of God, and they may try to think of it as such, but they find it impossible to believe that the words there on the page are actually for them. A man may say, 'These words are addressed to me,' and yet in his heart not feel and know that they are. He is the victim of a divided psychology. He tries to think of God as mute everywhere else and vocal only in a book.”

Marilynne, would you like a last word?

“Christians should care for what is true in every sense of the word true. This emphatically includes good science – understanding always its necessarily hypothetical workings.”

Walk boldly into what is true and even what could be.

Some Days, Dilbert Speaks Great Truth

Dilbert.

A Common Gap of Atheism, Part 2: Hawking's New Book

Stephen Hawking is, in my mind, one of the most brilliant people on the face of the planet. His quest for truth is admirable, but it is his ability to communicate some of the universe's most complex sciences that is his greatest talent.

His latest book is called The Grand Design and is the next step after his now-22-year-old book, A Brief History of Time.

In just reading the first chapter online, it's clear to me that this is another shock-book. Hawking's last book claimed that we were so close to understanding everything about how all things were made. This book was supposed to be the answers to those questions, but apparently falls short, even with the co-authorship going to Leonard Mlodinow, physicist from California Institute of Technology.

While I haven't read it entirely, Hawking's work is getting similar (and in some places more harsh) criticism as Dawkins. The Economist was frank:

"Their [historical] account [of physics] appears to be based on unreliable popularisations, and they cannot even get right the number of elements in Aristotle’s universe (it is five, not four)."

Yikes. Go on….

"It is hard to evaluate their case against recent philosophy, because the only subsequent mention of it, after the announcement of its death, is, rather oddly, an approving reference to a philosopher’s analysis of the concept of a law of nature, which, they say, ‘is a more subtle question than one may at first think.’ There are actually rather a lot of questions that are more subtle than the authors think. It soon becomes evident that Professor Hawking and Mr Mlodinow regard a philosophical problem as something you knock off over a quick cup of tea after you have run out of Sudoku puzzles."

They end the review like this:

"Once upon a time it was the province of philosophy to propose ambitious and outlandish theories in advance of any concrete evidence for them. Perhaps science, as Professor Hawking and Mr Mlodinow practice it in their airier moments, has indeed changed places with philosophy, though probably not quite in the way that they think."

The book begins with the bold declaration that "philosophy is dead." Yet in all actuality there is still so much to know and to speculate about and the authors end up philosophizing.

The issue is that we are continuing to separate science and philosophy, and even more so science and theology. What we should be busying ourselves with is the word Truth, which is a combination of the disciplines and a greater awareness of the conscience.

Next: Christians making the same mistake and perhaps a way out with help from Marilynne Robinson.

A Common Gap of Atheism, Part 1: Simple Mistakes

For all of the press, accolades, and book sales Richard Dawkins and the New Atheist Movement gets, it is one of the least respected intellectual movements amongst modern scholars. These scholars I speak of range from fellow atheists to deeply religious people who have come together to agree that there exist massive holes at the foundations of the New Atheist movement’s arguments.
The first to stand up to guys like Dawkins was Marxist scholar Terry Eagleton, England's foremost literary critic. He wrote this about Dawkins' The God Delusion in the London Review of Books, October 2006:

"Reason, to be sure, doesn’t go all the way down for believers, but it doesn’t for most sensitive, civilised non-religious types either…We hold many beliefs that have no unimpeachably rational justification, but are nonetheless reasonable to entertain. Only positivists think that ‘rational’ means ‘scientific’. Dawkins rejects the surely reasonable case that science and religion are not in competition on the grounds that this insulates religion from rational inquiry. But this is a mistake: to claim that science and religion pose different questions to the world is not to suggest that if the bones of Jesus were discovered in Palestine, the pope should get himself down to the dole queue as fast as possible. It is rather to claim that while faith, rather like love, must involve factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it."

The large issue scholars seem to have with the New Atheist movement is two-fold: Dawkins and others believe that you can either have faith or you can have reason - that because you have faith, you are therefore unreasonable. The two cannot live together. Secondly, many New Atheists see the answers to all of life’s questions residing under the scientific disciplines, namely the physical and biological sciences. The majority of today’s most respected scholars find those two claims dangerous.

The same month of that same year Eagleton published his article, Atheist professor of Philosophy at NYU, Thomas Nagel, wrote a review of Dawkins' book in The New Republic. In it, he denounced the idea that all of our answers to life can be found in the physical, because the question of life itself is a metaphysical question of our own consciousness. He writes:

"The reductionist project usually tries to reclaim some of the originally excluded aspects of the world, by analyzing them in physical - that is, behavioral or neurophysiological - terms; but it denies reality to what cannot be so reduced. I believe the project is doomed - that conscious experience, through, value, and so forth are not illusions, even though they cannot be identified with physical facts."

Next: Who's still making this mistake and who's not buying it.

Waiting For Superman

As a Christian, I live in two cities - two kingdoms, if you will. I live in Portland, my home and wonderful city on earth; but I also live in the unseen peaceful city of God. St. Augustine's classic Christian text, The City of God, explains that Christian people belong to both cities. They belong to their society/physical city as well as the unseen peaceful city/kingdom of God.

The city of God is the spiritual place believers understand and know. Jesus told us that this kingdom would not be able to be seen, but that it is "in the midst" of us. It is the sphere in which God reigns and rules. My heart, some churches, families, and the whole collection of believers from China to Europe. This is the great city of God.

In The City of God, St. Augustine argues that Christians who belong firstly to the city of God should be the best citizens of their own physical city. Because I belong to the city of God, I should be the best citizen in the city of Portland.

To me, education is the silver bullet of modern society. I use the term broadly: schools, yes, but also better education in churches, hospitals, community centers and homeless shelters. Teaching the next generation the value of the mind and its relationship with the heart is essential. I've dedicated my life to it through Jesus. I believe so deeply in the power of good teachers, good administrators, and good schools.

Nonetheless, I know that better education is possible. I know that it is possible to provide many children all over the world with a better education than they are getting now.

Specifically, Portland has one of the trashiest public school systems in the nation. As a citizen of the city of God, it's important to me to see our kids in Portland succeed.

This film, Waiting For Superman, exposes some of the possibilities that are out there for our kids. I think it could be one of the more important films for the fall. Spread the word!

This next video was made by the producers/directors of the movie and it gives you a little run-down of our education situation here in America:

When You Don't Get a Bad Joke

In Starbucks today...

HER: "Well my daughter's in the car waiting, so I'll go..."

BARISTA: "Oh, How old is your daughter?"

HER: "She's 12."

BARISTA: "Oh wonderful!"

HER: "Of course, I had her when I was twelve."

BARISTA: "Oh my word that's incredible; good for you. Wow."

HER: "-"

BARISTA: "-"

HER: "Oh. Um. It was a -"

BARISTA: *laughs*

The One Time I Wish I Had a Vote for the Stark County Treasurer

Jonathan Franzen on 'Freedom' and Growth

Say what you will about Jonathan Franzen, who TIME proclaimed to be today's "Great American Novelist," this is a pretty dank (and I mean that in a good way) quote and probably one of the better articulations of gospel-living. People who don't claim Jesus as Lord often times utter some of the most convicting statements I've ever heard.

Here's what Franzen said last Friday on APM's MarketPlace:

"We have this notion in this country, not only of endless economic growth but of endless personal growth. I have a certain characterological antipathy to the notion of we're all getting better and better all the time. And it's so clearly belied by our experience. You may get better in certain ways for 10 years, but one day you wake up and although things are a little bit different, they're not a lot different. And I think if one can get more accustomed to that somewhat more tragic view of life, that people would think yeah, 'We don't actually need to have a bigger and bigger house, and a bigger and bigger car, and more and more things in the house.' That there might some way to think of the world in different terms, so it was more about being and less about growing."

He's on to something there...

(HT: The Mockingbird)

How Can We Know God? Part 2: Primates, the Divine, and Christopher Hitchens

This month's issue of Vanity Fair includes yet another reflection from contributing editor Christopher Hitchens. Titled, "Unanswerable Prayers," Hitchens is continuing to reflect on his recent diagnosis of prostate cancer.

The writer and agnostic has been receiving great attention as of late because his prognosis isn't good and many are claiming, hoping, and wishing that Hitchens would recant his belief that we live in, "a splendidly godless universe."

His precise statement of belief is actually agnostic, but his writing and speaking gives little room for the consideration of the divine.In this month's Vanity Fair column, Hitchens responds to an unnamed radical blogger who claims that Hitchens' cancer is "God's revenge for him using his voice to blaspheme." He spends much of his column mentioning the many calls, emails, and letters he has received, informing him that churches of all types are praying for him.

His response to this blogger is in four points: 1) What "mere primate" can really "know the mind of god?" 2) Does this author really want these things read by his children? 3) Why not a thunderbolt to take him down, or something more "awe-inspiring." 4) "Why cancer at all?" Cancer is one of the most random diseases contracted by humans.

I am, of course, most concerned with the blogger and secondly concerned with Hitchens' common claim: how can a primate know such a god?

This is a common threat and a place I'm afraid many Christians fumble in answering. If God is so great and so big, how can you - an insignificant human - know him? I've been called prideful, arrogant, and many other things for claiming to know the things of God.

The claim of many religions is summed up in one word: revelation. God, in his might, made himself accessible to one or a group of people so that they might tell everyone about him. These people are called "prophets" or "founders" or "forefathers" of the faith.

Christianity agrees with this in part, but goes further. Christianity claims that all Christians are not Christians unless God himself reveals who he is to an individual through the person and work of Jesus Christ.

As Peter Jensen says in his brilliant book The Revelation of God: "The gospel is a gospel of grace precisely because it regards human beings as unable on their own to seek and find God."

It's not that God just revealed himself to prophets and apostles, but he revealed himself to me and is revealing and will reveal himself to whomever he so chooses.

A.W. Tozer goes further, saying that the pursuit of such a God is contingent upon that God pursuing us: "We pursue God because, and only because, he has first put an urge within us that spurs us to the pursuit."

Jesus Christ, who is Christianity, stated himself in Luke's gospel: "All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows who the Son is except the Father, or who the Father is except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him" (Luke 10:22).

To Hitchens I would say this: What mere primate can know God? The ones that Christ has shown himself to, and they are few (Luke 13:22-30).

Lastly, to the blogger, who is of great concern to me: if you knew God, it would be clear that he is not such a cause-and-effect type of God. We know many things of God, but it is a mystery how he exactly works and relates in our world.

Hitchens is incorrect when he says we cannot know God, but he is fully in line with Christian Orthodoxy when he asks, "Which mere primate…can know the mind of god?" You might be surprised, but this agnostic repeats verbatim the Holy Scriptures:

"For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor" (Romans 11:34)?

We can know God - he is good, righteous, fair, and loving - but how he works on earth is not as easy to detect. Many are concerned with the latter when missing the first can be deadly.

How Can We Know God? Part 1: Truth and Possibilianism

David Eagleman is a writer and neuroscientist. I'm very fond of his work as he writes extensively on the brain's relationship with the afterlife and death. Most of his stuff is fictional, using short stories and parables to unload some of the most complex science that's out there.

He has a respectable humility as a scientist and claims that we're not at a place where we can understand much of anything about the universe - at least not enough to make many absolute claims.

I just want to expose this quote of his, which appeared in the New York Times back in July 2009:

"Our ignorance of the cosmos is too vast to commit to atheism, and yet we know too much to commit to a particular religion. A third position, agnosticism, is often an uninteresting stance in which a person simply questions whether his traditional religious story (say, a man with a beard on a cloud) is true or not true. But with Possibilianism I'm hoping to define a new position -- one that emphasizes the exploration of new, unconsidered possibilities. Possibilianism is comfortable holding multiple ideas in mind; it is not interested in committing to any particular story."

This quote by Eagleman is a common claim in today's academic and non-academic circles. But there is a huge problem in committing to something like Possibilianism.

The problem with saying that you are not fixing to any belief or claim is that the statement just made is actually an absolute claim. Possibilianism and other stances similar to it, make the mistake of dismissing truth claims with a truth claim.

See the problem with Eagleman's claim? He is "comfortable holding multiple ideas in mind," and is "not interested in committed to any particular story."

But he IS committed to a particular story. He's committed to his story, to this newly defined educated pluralistic agnosticism, which he calls, "possibilianism."

Singular truth is unavoidable. You cannot go on saying you're noncommittal to particular truths, as you have just then committed to your particular truth. And you can call it whatever you want.

I've been trying to figure out this quote from Lewis forever and all of a sudden it seems appropriate:

"But you cannot go 'explaining away' for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation away. You cannot go on 'seeing through' thing for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too?…a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To 'see through' all things i the same as not to see."

-C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, pg. 81

Committing to not committing can only take you so far. I believe there can be a beautiful area of grey, where the mind is accepting of the unknown and committed to a story that has not ended yet.

Christianity gets hated on for claiming truth in order to get power, but so often the criticisms are in themselves truth claims in an attempt for power. Truth exists, so let's begin asking not, "can there be truth?" But rather "what is most true?"

This Morning, at a Coffee Shop

SHE: "That's odd."

ME: "I'm sorry, what's that now?"

SHE: "Nothing. Well, I've just never seen a hoodie underneath such a fine sports coat."

ME: "Oh, really? I'm not terribly fashio-"

SHE: "Looks terrible."

ME: "-"

Steadfast

The English Bible is certainly overwhelmed with translations. And while many will get up in arms about which one is the "best," the reality is that each one has its issues and they are all quite far from the original text. One must read the Bible this way.

I use the English Standard Version (ESV) for the most part, but I'm not here to fight about it.

I'm writing to talk about the word, "steadfast." Each of my mornings as a now married man of routine begin this way: make coffee, shower, get coffee and a bite to eat and sit down to read my Bible. I once heard someone say, "Seek the face of God before you seek the face of man," and I liked that.

In my daily reading of the Christian Scriptures, I gravitate toward the Psalms. Along with the Epistles, these holy songs were meant to be read and sung over and over again. They were written with a heart for them to last generations, that many people would sing and read these words for a long time. I like to start my day with a Psalm and something else that I've been reading in the Scirptures.

In the ESV translation of the Psalms, the scholars use this English word, "steadfast," constantly. In a quick word study, I found that for most of its uses, it is inserted in order to modify the word, "love," when describing God's capacity for love.

Honestly, this was an issue for me when I first started reading the ESV about 4 years ago. However, in studying the Hebrew and the Greek and even the English word itself, I've begin to wait for that word in the Psalms.
Resolute. Loyal. Constant. Dependable. Dutifully firm. Determined. Solid. Unwavering.

The Hebrew word can be separated into two words: "sure/enduring" and "statute."

It's probably best to read the Scriptures with a solid English vocabulary. Most ancient languages worked like this: use as little amount of words to say as much as possible. That's why we have so many issues with translating ancient documents. One word could mean so many things.

If you approach repetitive words with a better understanding of that particular word, you understand that God's love is not just steadfast. It is Resolute, Constant, Dutifully firm, and Unwavering. It is a determined type of love, fixed in perfection for eternity.

Singing Groomsmen

As my bride walked down the aisle, she was walking to the harmonious sound of my best friends singing a capella. Here's a video of the boys warming up before the ceremony.

A Capella Groomsmen, A Boy's Choir from Chris Nye on Vimeo.

Conquered Words: August

This is my monthly post where I tell you what I have read and (ever so briefly) what I thought about each work. If you haven't read these books, then read this blog and pretend that you did!

Well I'm a month plus into marriage and I couldn't be happier. A little less reading this month, but enough has been conquered to write home about.

1) Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead (Anchor, 352 pages). I did NOT finish this book, mainly because after high hopes and 63 pages I discovered it was very tough to read. Not like, "I can't read your language little boy!" unreadability, but more like, "I don't get your voice because it is at times inconsistent" type of thing going on. Whitehead comes highly recognized and recommended, but I'm afraid the voice and slow moving plot was simply not enough to keep me. It's probably because I'm not civilized enough to get it. It's not you, Whitehead, it's me.

2) Revival by Dr. D. Martin Lloyd-Jones (Crossway Books, 316 pages). Simply called, "The Doctor," Lloyd-Jones is one of my intellectual mentors. He was perhaps the most influential preachers in all of Europe in the 50s and 60s and he held the Westminster Chapel in England for most of his life as a minister. Before stepping into preaching, the Doctor was exactly that, a physician. His writing and preaching is some of the best and he has such a unique way of describing the things and commands of God I am consistently astonished. I had already read part of this work, a study on revival (duh), in previous years, but only have recently picked it up in order to understand more fully what God does when he works immediately and deeply at the same time. Finishing his series and closing the last chapter, the Doctor is profound in his charge to his church: "Seek him, stir yourself up to call upon his name. Take hold upon him, plead with him as your Father, as your Maker, as your Potter, as your Guide, as your God. Plead his own promises. Cry unto him and say, "Oh that thou wouldest rend the heavens, that thou wouldest come down!" He was a true man of God and a true scholar, one of the few people I can safely call a passionate genius.

3) Selected Stories by Andre Dubus (Vintage, 496 pages). Ali and I are both reading the short stories of the great Andre Dubus and we're both floored. You might have heard of his more famous novel, In The Bedroom. These stories in Selected are simply phenomenal. They have a strange calming madness to them, where the emptiness of sin is astonishingly prevalent. Dubus has a pen for the lonely. I've never read anyone who can capture as much emotion as he can is such few words and, at times, such simple prose. It certainly has to do with his own experience, Dubus was diagnosed with multiple psychological disorders including deep clinical depression from an accident that left him unable to walk. He was assisting some disabled people on the side of the road, trying to help them to safety, when an oncoming car hit him and one of the disabled persons. The disabled man was killed and Dubus lost the use of his legs. The woman was saved because Dubus pushed her out of the way. His own story and mind tend to bleed through the pages of his short prose work and it's humbling. I'll be reading his novels in the future.

Well, that's what's happening.

Keep reading, my friends.

God Don't Need No Camp

If you're unfamiliar with current evangelical church ministry, let me bring you in for a second.

For the most part, a youth ministry's great crescendo is summer camp. We work all year to disciple and build up students, but we get a huge surge of energy and momentum when we all go to camp. Camp is just awesome and things really happen there. In fact, it's normal that the most movement we see in students' lives happens over our time at summer camp.

Because of our change in leadership at Willamette Christian Church's high school ministry, we ended up not going to camp. A huge bummer. I was getting married and wasn't really in full leadership capacity when planning needed to happen. It sucked.

But what has been refreshing about this summer, is that I learned that God can move when he wants. He doesn't need a camp. In fact, he doesn't even need any person in particular.

During this summer, I have been continually amazed at what this God has done. I know many of you who read this blog do not know this God personally or closely, and so my desire in this post is to point you over to our ministry's blog to show you that God does change lives and renew communities and families.

If you so desire, take the time to look over here at what my God has done amidst his kids this summer. Without camp.

Russell D. Moore, You Gentlemanly Scholar!

Dr. Russell D. Moore is a one of a kind Christian scholar. For the most part, I've tried to get through his books and his lectures, but they're just too boring. I've often had trouble with current Christian scholarship and Dr. Moore is no exception.

EXCEPT FOR HIS AMAZING BLOGGY.

That guy is an ace. When Moore needs to be concise (or as he puts it, "Moore to the Point." Hilarious!), he is a dream to read. For all of the blog posts and sermons that helped the church recognize how to think about 9/11, Moore was there to put it into words so perfectly. When we were confused by the earthquake in Haiti, Moore was helpful in dismissing the thoughts of Pat Robertson and elevating the God of the Bible.

Here, yet again, Moore respectfully and profoundly dismisses the political church of America: both the Left and the Right.

His post, "God, the Gospel, and Glenn Beck," is suuuuuuch a goooooood read. Why are so many Christians following Beck? Do we blame Beck like so many on the Left do?

Ahem:

Beck isn’t the problem. He’s an entrepreneur, he’s brilliant, and, hats off to him, he knows his market. Latter-day Saints have every right to speak, with full religious liberty, in the public square. I’m quite willing to work with Mormons on various issues, as citizens working for the common good. What concerns me here is not what this says about Beck or the “Tea Party” or any other entertainment or political figure. What concerns me is about what this says about the Christian churches in the United States.

It’s taken us a long time to get here, in this plummet from Francis Schaeffer to Glenn Beck. In order to be this gullible, American Christians have had to endure years of vacuous talk about undefined “revival” and “turning America back to God” that was less about anything uniquely Christian than about, at best, a generically theistic civil religion and, at worst, some partisan political movement.

I honestly have no idea how else to say what Moore says here. Let's have another, shall we?

Rather than cultivating a Christian vision of justice and the common good (which would have, by necessity, been nuanced enough to put us sometimes at odds with our political allies), we’ve relied on populist God-and-country sloganeering and outrage-generating talking heads. We’ve tolerated heresy and buffoonery in our leadership as long as with it there is sufficient political “conservatism” and a sufficient commercial venue to sell our books and products.

Too often, and for too long, American “Christianity” has been a political agenda in search of a gospel useful enough to accommodate it.

Glenn Beck is a brilliant entrepreneur, but he is in no way a representation of what it means to live life in the Kingdom of God. In his message that is filled with vague rhetoric of "restoring America" and "restoring honor," I hear nothing of the gospel. So why are there so many Christians following him?

Where there is no gospel, something else will fill the void: therapy, consumerism, racial or class resentment, utopian politics, crazy conspiracy theories of the left, crazy conspiracy theories of the right; anything will do.

It’s sad to see so many Christians confusing Mormon politics or American nationalism with the gospel of Jesus Christ. But, don’t get me wrong, I’m not pessimistic. Jesus will build his church, and he will build it on the gospel. He doesn’t need American Christianity to do it. Vibrant, loving, orthodox Christianity will flourish, perhaps among the poor of Haiti or the persecuted of Sudan or the outlawed of China, but it will flourish.

And there will be a new generation, in America and elsewhere, who will be ready for a gospel that is more than just Fox News at prayer.

Read the whole thing here.