Welcome to Jesusland September 8, 2007
Posted by Zack in South Carolina , trackbackA couple weeks ago, Elizabeth and I threw all of our stuff into storage and began a cross-country writing project about local leaders who are fixing America’s biggest problems. We’re writing about those leaders at HeartlandInnovators.org.
Right away, as we began meeting with local leaders in North and South Carolina, we realized that there was another story to tell out here: the story of a mass movement among American Christians to redeem their communities. They’re setting insanely big goals—goals like “eliminate homelessness in our city” and “raise everyone above the poverty line in our county.” And they’re working toward them with reckless, innocent abandon. They’re coming out of churches that are poor and wealthy; black, white and Latino; rural, urban and suburban. They are sometimes pastors or other leaders inside their churches, and sometimes ordinary congregants who are dragging their churches, often kicking and screaming, outside of the safety of the “four walls.”
Therefore, we decided to start up this additional blog, “Revolution in Jesusland,” where you’ll be able to read all of the stories of leaders that we’re gathering for HeartlandInnovators.org—PLUS, absolutely free:
- A running chronicle and analysis of the radical—dare we say, revolutionary—spirit that is right now taking American Christians by storm; and also,
- Our amusing and insightful stories from the road.
I have spent my whole life in left-wing, progressive circles. Elizabeth has spent her life in Republican, conservative circles. I left college to become a union organizer and was first mentored by communists. She left college to become a missionary. My posts on here will mostly take the form of letters back to the left, the “progressive movement,” usually going something like this: “Holy misunderestimation! Look at what the American people are up to out here! You guys have got to see this…” (I think Elizabeth will probably be coming from a different angle, but she’ll explain that herself.)
Right after the 2004 elections, a cynical map made the rounds of lefty inboxes everywhere that separated “Jesusland” from the “United States of Canada” (in later versions, “The United States of Liberty and Education” and other self-righteous riffs). Part of the reason we started this project to gather counterstereotypical stories of leaders in the “Heartland” was to help undo that cynicism toward the American people not only among progressives, but also the whole political-media elite, both left and right. Nowhere is that needed more than when it comes to perceptions of Christians, who just happen to make up something like 90% of the population.
Here on Revolution in Jesusland, we’ll step back and try to flesh out the larger context of this movement that is producing so many exceptional leaders, and do it in terms that any outsider can understand—by simply asking the Christian revolutionaries that we meet to explain themselves to those outside their culture.
Revolutionary Christians comprise the fastest growing and most surprising of American social movements right now. From mega churches to tiny country churches, evangelical Christians (as opposed to mainline or liberal Chrsitians) are rediscovering the “gospel of the God of the oppressed.” In the millions, white suburban evangelicals are stepping outside of their comfort zones to get “into relationship” with the poor, the oppressed, the homeless, prisoners — the people whom Jesus said,
Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me….Whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me. —Matthew 25
They build houses for and teach job skills to homeless people, they create tutoring programs for kids in failing schools, they pay health care bills and rent for people living on poverty wages—and there’s even a movement afoot among these people to move their young families out of wealthy suburbs and into forsaken inner city neighborhoods, putting the kids into broken and violent public school and the whole nine yards.
I realize that it seems almost impossible to believe that “fundamentalist Christians”—–i.e. people who believe that Jesus actually walked on water, is coming back to Earth and so on—could be doing all this. I grew up with the same stereotypes as you did about these folks. And so on this blog we’re going to be going out of my way to explain the inner logic of this culture’s narratives, theologies and passions.
So—welcome to Jesusland. We hope you enjoy the tour.
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