London, then RootsCamp April 13, 2008
Posted by Zack in DC | 1 commentSorry I haven’t posted much over the last week. I was in London working on an IT project. And then there was RootsCamp DC.
At RootsCamp, I did a presentation on the Revolution in Jesusland. I played audio excerpts from sermons and we talked about them. It went really well. One Democratic campaign staffer in the group outed herself as an evangelical Christian and talked about the urge to keep her sometimes-ridiculed identity secret in Democratic professional circles. The group cracked up at some parts of the audio clips, such as when a preacher spoke against pornography, helping to make her point.
Here are some pictures of RootsCamp:
You can see the sign for my session in the picture above. The full subtitle was:
Have all the fundamentalist Christians become anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist revolutionaries?
No, just a few million of them.
PS: if you’re confused about RootsCamp, it’s like Foo Camp or Bar Camp.
Tag: rootscampFaithful America starts petition to stop ridiculous exit poll practice February 20, 2008
Posted by Zack in DC | 7 comments
The newly relaunched group Faithful America has started a petition to stop exit polls that ask only Republicans about their religious affiliation and church attendance:
The presidential primary exit polls, sponsored by ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox and the AP, must stop stereotyping people of faith. We call on the media pollsters to ask all voters — Republicans and Democrats — the same religion questions on the exit poll surveys.
What’s also incredible, by the way, is that the same exit polls only ask Democrats about union membership.
Do TV ratings depend on telling a meta-story of an America divided into two completely separate cultures or something? Why do they run their polls this way?
Faithful America is a project of Faith in Public Life, the organization that commissioned its own exit polls that showed that religion and political parties do not match up. A whole lot of people have been complaining about this polling issue, and it’s great that Faith in Public Life and now Faithful America are standing up and doing something about it.
Tags: 2008, exit polling, Faith in Public Life, Faithful AmericaByron York on the GOP’s “Huckicide” December 19, 2007
Posted by Zack in DC | write a commentMy buddy Byron York at the National Review seems to be one of the only Republican pundits to be comfortable with Huckabee’s populist appeal:
Mike Huckabee was on the “Today” show this morning. Meredith Viera asked him to react to Rich’s remark that nominating Huckabee would be suicide for the Republican party. Huckabee began with his standard line about how he is not part of the “Wall Street-to-Washington axis, this corridor of power.” “They don’t control me,” Huckabee said. “I’m not one of theirs. I’m not one of those guys that just owe my soul to the people on Wall Street. I’m not a wholly-owned subsidiary of them. I don’t live in the circles of power in Washington. I really do come right up from the people.”
Fine. Then Huckabee got into what is really the basis of his appeal for many voters. He’s tapping into that new sort of evangelicalism, that Rick Warren-style worldview that David Brooks and others have been writing about for a few years now. It is real, it is different from older-style evangelicalism, as well as from economic or national-security conservatism, and Huckabee has his finger on it.
Young Evangelicals getting uncomfortable December 7, 2007
Posted by Elizabeth in DC | 2 comments
I recently got on a kick that involved buying a couple of Bible studies. One of the first ones I saw was titled: Get Uncomfortable: Serve the Poor. Stop Injustice. Change the World… In Jesus Name.
It took me a while, but I started reading it tonight. I can’t really comment on the content yet, though, because I couldn’t get past the first page: “Meet the Author: Todd Phillips.” As I read about him, I learned that he is the pastor of Frontline, a generational church within a mega-church (i.e., a huge gathering of about 3,000 young people every week that’s part of a larger mega-church).
This whole thing was so surprising to me because, when Zack and I lived in DC (before I met him), I heard about Frontline from someone I met randomly, and I attended it—once. I was disheartened—to say the least. Yes, there were tons of people there, and it seemed really fun. Yes, the music was great. Yes, the people were so nice. But I looked and looked for any sign of social justice work (which was always the way I chose a church community), and I didn’t find any. So I never went back. (Yes, maybe I should have given it another chance, but it has been my experience that if you can’t find a sign of social justice in a church within the first hour, then it’s probably not a big deal for them. So just know that my reading of the church at the time could have been all wrong…)
In the 4.5 years since I visited, though, it seems as though things have changed. In particular, Frontline hired a new pastor, Todd Phillips. Although Todd admits that he didn’t have a social justice focus for the first twelve years that he “followed Christ,” he says that he became convicted of the Biblical madates to help others by reading the Bible.
“My passion for this topic of poverty, injustice, suffering, and God’s heart for the poor came by reading Scripture. The Word of God transformed me as I read, reflected, memorized, and then acted upon God’s truth. I began to see people through God’s eyes as He revealed both His heart and the true condition of our world.”
And so now he’s authored a Bible study for teens/young adults on the topics of serving the poor and stopping injustice. He’s trying to ignite the same passion in his congregation, as well.
I don’t really know what to say about all of this, except that I am amazed. Even though I didn’t have anything bad to say about Frontline, when I visited it, it seemed as though — if there really was a Revolution in Jesusland — that this church might be a stronghold against the revolutionary powers. Not so.
Here are a couple of sentences from the first few pages of the book as he’s talking about the church’s history of not dealing with justice issues:
Many of us have turned the Bible into a self-help program rather than a life-long process of self-denial.
So what do we do? We can sit idly by and hurl accusations at the preachers of our churches. We can judge the country-club mentality of some of our congregations. We can even blame the publishing industry for leading us in the direction of self-indulgence. What will come of that criticsm? Nothing. The only option we have for profound change is to re-engage in the Word of God and then do what it says.
