My Faith Can Beat Up Your Faith

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The following is by Adam Ellis in his review of Rachel Held Evans’ Evolving in Monkey Town.  I think he defines well the problem of Christian polarization in America and then sees Evans’ book as a practical theology in how we deal with this polarization. 

This truly resonates with a lot that I have going on internally.  I struggle with the fences that we put up, the barriers between ourselves and those who think or act or behave differently.  We seem to define ourselves as Christians–what we are–by what we are not.  We’re sure that, whatever we believe, it’s not what that other person or group believes.  I just don’t think that this is helpful and I really don’t think that it’s how Jesus was defined…primarily.

Anyway, the quote is below.  It’s a good one.

The problem with polarized arguments is that both sides end up arguing for something stupid…against something equally stupid…with no way forward.  One of the major problems with Christianity in our day is that, in many ways we have begun to let polarized arguments define us.  We are in love with labels, and with categories of “us” versus “them”.  We proudly identify ourselves as “conservative” or “liberal” in terms of politics and theology and claim that if you don’t apply the same label to yourself, you must be one of “them”, and thus not a “true Christian”, like us.  We ratchet our categories ever tighter, to the point that if you even question any point of our collective unspoken creeds, we question your faithfulness and intentions.

This phenomenon has become particularly obvious in the dominant approach to Christian apologetics in America.  Having “faith” has come to mean having certainty about a particular set of beliefs.  It’s a sad situation in desperate need of a fresh perspective that dares to imagine a way forward.