A Reality Check

When I was studying the rhetorical characteristics of Evangelical churches in Portland, I came across a scholar from Columbia University named Randall Balmer, who quickly became an inspiration to my work. I read pockets of his book, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America, to help guide my limited studies and was fascinated with his quasi-journalistic but still scholastic approach to the faith culture.

Balmer goes from state to state cataloging interviews with evangelical leaders and lay-people within certain states. Since I was studying the churches in suburban Portland, I combed through his section on Oregon. Now, I'm re-reading the entire book in hopes to get a new perspective on this movement many of us find ourselves sitting in and wrestling with.

One of the best things we can do as humans is to read or listen to those outside of our own little stories. This book, if you so choose to tackle it, will certainly humble you as an evangelical Christian.

Balmer grew up in a fundamentalist Evangelical household and he does not claim to have an "objective" view on the culture as no good historian can, he says. Objectivity is an impossibility. But somehow while he gives up his objectivity, he does not surrender his scholarship. The book is such a brilliant twist of journalism and scholarship; I love it and recommend it, especially if you work within the evangelical subculture. So much of the gospel can get lost in normalized language and practices that only help us identify with one another instead of God.

I just write this post to recommend this unique work, but also to share this quote, which compares evangelicalism to adolescence (like I said, humbling) in an interview with the scholar Douglas W. Frank:

"No stage of life is more prone to hero worship than adolescence. An adolescent is strongly influenced by group conformity and the expectations of other people; it's a stage in which self-consciousness is at its height. 'I see [evangelicals]...constantly comparing themselves to the standards of spiritual behavior they've established and asking "How am I doing?" and "Am I good enough?" and "How do I appear to others?"' Spiritual appearances are very important to evangelicals, just as an adolescent spends a lot of time in front of the mirror."
            -Randall Balmer, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory, p. 269

As Liz Lemon would say, "Ya burnt!" This hurts only because I see a lot of my own journey in this passage.

I celebrate a lot of what Evangelicalism has brought to Jesus followers everywhere, heck I've worked in Evangelical churches since I graduated from high school. This is not a picture of 100% of the Evangelical movement, but you have to admit it's pretty spot on for a lot of our experience, huh?

We must lead ourselves and our people away from self-obsessed spiritual adolescence.