interesting

I am working on a major series of posts, but thought I’d give you a link to an article I found today.

The article comes from the Associated Baptist Press. This is the more left wing news service connected to Southern Baptist types, at least as I understand it.

The article points to a generational change where the younger set is at odds with the values of the older set.

In an opinion piece entitled, “Evangelicals and the Obama era“, author David Gushee begins with these paragraphs:

I began this election year with The Future of Faith in American Politics, a book arguing that there is an emerging political center in the white evangelical community.

This center breaks with the evangelical right in that it is more politically independent, prioritizes a wider range of moral issues than the traditional family values concerns, eschews the right’s mood of angry nostalgia and seeks consensus solutions to advance the common good.

I suggested the right was losing its hold on younger white evangelicals, who were moving in this more centrist direction (and sometimes further left) and that it never really had a hold on a majority of nonwhite evangelicals.

These words seem eerily familiar, don’t they? I wonder if the unrest we are seeing among young FINOs isn’t symptomatic of the age rather than simply a trend within fundamentalism. In other words, we are living with the product of the television/computer game/internet generation. It holds to an entirely different culture than the post-war radical / baby boomer generation. Could it be said that the baby boomer fundamentalists are in their own way a 60s radicalist sort of people? In some ways I think that is so.

Today’s generation is definitely cut from a different cloth.

don_sig2

Comments

  1. Can’t wait to read the series, Don. Keep up the good work.