New Religious Middle

Here is the promised whatever it is. (It is back in the archives but I do not know how to link that way yet.)
Whoee -- Maybe I do - click on "it" above and scroll down. Nevermind my childish exhuberance, just read it below:

A History of the New Religious Middle
(How to find the Right party without being Left out in the cold.)

It was the time before time. Well, that may be a bit too dramatic but it has all the catch of "it was the winter of our discontent." Say, come to think of it that was it; The Winter of Our Discontent. On the other hand that phrase is one of those that used once exhausts its power so I decided not to open this piece with it which as the reader will note I did not although I have pretty sneakily tossed it in so now I've effectively rammed this whole introduction about six feet under. So as I said, It was the time before time.
We wanted to start a whole new political concept. The old continuum from liberal to conservative was too uncomfortable, like being in a shooting war as an enemy and an ally of both sides. We tried for years to carry on the battle from between the armies in no man's land but got awfully tired of fighting the flack shot by both sides. It was like being caught in the center of a Chicago street with two rival gangs trying to even a score neither side could really add up.

We held to values that in a two party system seemed mutually exclusive. We believed there were absolutes; principles that would never change. To us there was such a thing as unchanging truth. Absolutes made sense because we all believed in God who revealed that He would never change. When He said love was good it would always be good. When He said I Am, He would always be I Am, the God who is, present tense, forever. So when we entered the public forum we always found ourselves saying conservative sounding things like, "We hold these truths to be self evident that all men were created equal..." And then we found that it was a pretty Liberal stance in its original context. Some of us were a little more blunt about our conservative values: "My Bible says that God will judge a people who oppress the poor!" And then, lo and behold as we espoused our conservative absolutes (like caring for the poor) we discovered that all of them fit over on this century's liberal side. Consternation and confusion!
Ah but then over time we realized a mediating principle: We were to be always calling the nation back to the faith of our fathers but not necessarily to the ways of our fathers. We denied the post-modern conclusion that truth is relative to the times but espoused their observation that the interpretations and applications of truth are tied to time. The eternal, absolute principles were to be fresh to us every morning. They never changed but the way they applied to each new culture changed. Over time the Lords Table became the altar rail, became the anxious bench, became the arena floor became the side prayer room, became the "would you like to pray?" after the Four Spiritual Laws. Now it is, “IMHO Jesus Saves.” The principle that a man needs to have a face to face hand-shaking kind of experience of God is an absolute that has never changed. But different cultures, denominations, personalities, revivals of religion, have found the experience in different ways. So then we were often like the Right, valuing the old values, looking backward for our definitions of right and wrong, believing that they did not change. And we were also often like the Left, calling for new ways, new applications recognizing that many behaviors could cover one Truth, and that one Truth could have many applications even in one society.

So, there we were. What to do? Suddenly we saw the answer on the computer screen before us. Just a small adjustment and the whole political world as we knew it would change. We took the center of the Liberal - Conservative spectrum about twenty rows straight down (on the PC) to a safer spot. There was a collective sigh from the group around the terminal. The artists loved the triangularity, and the theologians thought it looked so . . . trinitarian. As usual the apologists reserved their praise noting a certain cabalistic element in the design. It was a "contrinuum," or a "spectrime" if you please. The "two's company" ole buddy days of "right" and "left" were over. All hailed the stability of the third leg. And then somebody said, "How are we going to let the other two legs know we're here?"

A name! That's it, a name. Something pithy that says it all.

So here we are still needing some help. We have boiled our ideas down into five names that might fit. (There were five of us in the discussion.) Here they are: the Versatile Immobile Party, the Protean Permanence Party, the Evolutionary Immutablity Party, The Quicksilver Stability Party and the Chameleon Leopard Party.

What do you think?

Back in Chicago

We are back in Chicago for a few days. We have been working on blogability for Bushnell office so it should be possible to blog from there when we get back. I do go blotto over work sometimes so it is not surprising to miss a month of blogs, like last month but check back, sanity always returns.

I have been thinking a lot about adjusting the gospel presentation to communicate to our changing cultural climate. I do believe we as Christians will always be revisiting the gospel stories and teachings to see if there is something we have missed or misinterpreted. This always going back is not an innovation of post-Christian thought. On the other hand, we often sound as if we do not constantly reassess our theology. We talk about "time honored truth" or "absolute truth" as if that is what is coming out of our mouth. It is not a relativization of truth to recognize that we all are finite creatures who come short, very short, of real-izing ultimate truth. No one of us, not individually or in a group (read denomination) has a perfect grasp of ultimate truth. But saying that is an to actually propose that there is such a thing as ultimate truth.

A lot of Christians are rightly afraid of accommodating our Christian beliefs to worldly pressures. Culture is a powerful thing. We all want to be accepted. Or at least we desperately want our witness for Jesus to be accepted. I am reading a book, Chameleon Christianity by Dick Keyes. In the first few chapters he argues that the Chameleon Christian "will bend to the currently respectable viewpoint on each ethical issue. . ." He also suggests there is another reaction to the culture which he labels Christian tribalism. "Christian tribalism -- the protective containment of Christian distinctiveness within the Christian ghetto or subculture. It entails christian tribal dialects, tribal education, tribal music, tribal television, and even the Christian tribal yellow pages. . ." Having set the two poles, tribalism and chameleon Christianity Keyes notes that there are powerful forces that force people from one end to the other. Young people in a tribal situation think, "Help! This cannot be what the Christian faith is really like.. I need to find some group that offers an alternative to this rigidity!" The only alternative is at the other end of the spectrum. Those in a Chameleon Church think, "Where can we find other Christians who will help us stand against the tide of relativism and moral passivity?" Suddenly the Tribal Christians are looking good.

Tomorrow I will look up a piece I wrote when Cornerstone Magazine staff was agonizing over this very issue. Where the rubber met the road was our seeming liberalism in certain political stands such as caring for the poor verses our seeming conservatism in others such as abortion.