A reader writes:
I really appreciated the "Radical" David Platt video you posted. Some of us are already there. I've been following your blog daily for two or three years now and have appreciated your ventures into theology and discussions of Christianity. You are right on in your diagnosis of American Christianism and the Right's complete misreading of the Bible.
What you've probably missed is the extent that ideas like David Platt's Radical have already taken root in modern evangelicalism. I live in Boston, so maybe I'm an outlier in the nation as a whole, but in evangelical circles here you are about as likely to find a liberal evangelical as a conservative one with the majority self-described moderates or totally apolitical. The emerging evangelism is more concerned with social issues like poverty and healthcare than abortion or homosexuality. Certainly, we've already rejected the American Dream as orthodox Christianity and instead are discovering new ways of living simply and generously in a post-Christian wilderness.
I'm part a community of young evangelicals that live in the majority minority neighborhoods of Boston and who actively volunteer our time to the city's needy.
What's been amazing to me is how the community that is emerging in my neighborhood is being replicated all over the country in our major cities. The idea of forsaking the suburban life for the sake of living in commune with the urban poor was one I once thought was too radical for today's evangelical Christians. But every day I meet more and more Baptists, Presbyterians, and independent Christians forsaking a middle-class lifestyle in order to live more radically and more Christ-like.
It gives me hope that Christianity does not need to dissolve into Christianism but that a progressive, radical Christianity is possible in a world that no longer needs the Church as an institution. Perhaps when the Church fails as an institution, the Church can once again be like Christ.