THE COOL CHRISTIAN
thinking went, carried sin like a virus, and the point of following Jesus was to remain as pure as possible. Christians established their
own communities, educational
institutions and music festivals,
separate from the rest of the world.
The rise of the religious right,
led by Jerry Falwell and the
Moral Majority in the 1970s and
‘80s, represented an acknowledgment by evangelicals that
their retreat from culture was
not working. America and the
West in general were moving so
far away from their point of view
that they needed to fight back.
“For many Christians cultural
engagement simply meant opining on politics … or denouncing
a slouching-toward-Gomorrah
view of the culture around us,”
said Russell Moore, the recently
installed head of the Southern
Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.
The crucial miscalculation
made by Falwell and his followers was believing that they
had the upper hand, that they
outnumbered their culture war
opponents. It may have been
easy to think that when many
Christians lived in conservative
states, surrounded by others
HUFFINGTON
03.09.14
who thought like them. But in
fact, the country was changing
— demographically, ethnically
and culturally — in ways that
have now made religious conser-
“WE TALK ABOUT BEING
REVOLUTIONARY AND ABOUT
BOB MARLEY AND THE LEVEL
OF HIS INFLUENCE AND
WHAT THAT LOOKS LIKE AS
A MUSICIAN. AND IT WASN’T
JUST DONE BY SAYING GREAT
THINGS OVER MEDIOCRE
MUSIC. IT WAS DONE
BY SAYING GREAT THINGS
OVER GREAT MUSIC.”
vatives increasingly a minority.
America is a more pluralist, urbanized nation now than ever.
EVEN DURING THE DAYS when
fundamentalist thought dominated
evangelicalism, there was a resistant, if minority, strain that insisted there was a different way. Wellknown author C.S. Lewis captured
it succinctly in a 1945 essay.
“What we want is not more lit-