The National Council of Churches’(NCC) Collapse
For decades, the NCC had hundreds of employees and large budgets, and the council commanded respect as a pillar of American civil society. It was for public religion what the American Bar Association was for lawyers. It still has 37 member denominations. But, like those denominations, it is a shell of its former self, with a small staff and budget. What remains of the NCC is nestled in a small suite in the Methodist Building on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. What happened?
What happens when churches go vague on theology and detailed on politics? With the National Council of Churches (NCC), currently celebrating its 75th anniversary, we have the answer.
Have you ever heard of the NCC? If you are under age 60, likely not. But for decades it was the premier liberal voice for Protestant Christianity in America. In 1958 President Dwight Eisenhower laid the cornerstone on the new building in New York that would house the NCC and other Protestant agencies, in a tribute to their wide influence. Newspapers boasted that the new 19-story Interchurch Center, built with help from the Rockefellers, would house 37 Protestant denominations representing 40 million Americans and 144,000 congregations. Occupants included the Methodists, Presbyterians, Reformed Church, and American Baptists, and a host of mainline Protestant agencies.
For decades, the NCC had hundreds of employees and large budgets, and the council commanded respect as a pillar of American civil society. It was for public religion what the American Bar Association was for lawyers. It still has 37 member denominations. But, like those denominations, it is a shell of its former self, with a small staff and budget. What remains of the NCC is nestled in a small suite in the Methodist Building on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. What happened?
An early slogan for the ecumenical movement at the 20th century’s dawn was “doctrine divides, service unites.”
Related Posts:
You Might also like
-
Why You Shouldn’t Use “Preferred Pronouns” and Other Ideological Language
The Daily Mail, the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, and others – all use female pronouns to refer to trans-identifying males, and vice versa. At times, readers are treated to the schizophrenic experience of reading an article making the case against gender ideology which uses the very pronouns that affirm the premises of that ideology. To call male swimmer Lia Thomas “she” while complaining that he is allowed to compete against women, for example, is to make your own argument ridiculous. Trans activists understand that, which is why they have placed such an emphasis on pronouns in the first place.
The forced evolution of language is a key aspect of the LGBT movement’s colonization of culture. Those of you paying attention will have noticed that all sorts of new terms have cropped up in the past few years – new pronouns, neo-pronouns, new genders, and more. These terms are not part of the natural evolution of language, but are a top-down imposition, dictated by ideologues to the elite class, who obediently begin using them in politics, academia, and the press.
One of the most succinct responses to this shift in language came from the late comedian Norm MacDonald, when he was attempting to explain to another comedian what the definition of the term “cisgender” is. “Cisgender” is a term used by activists to describe a male who “identifies” as male. Or as Norm put it: “It’s a way of marginalizing a normal person.”
I’ve written on aspects of this agenda before – especially the issue of preferred pronouns. By adopting someone’s “preferred pronouns” or agreeing to declare your own, you are granting tacit approval to an entire ideology. Pronouns are premises, and by offering yours, you are affirming theirs – that is why Jordan Peterson fought so hard over the issue and was ultimately willing to lose his job. He realized that this was, in fact, a very big deal. The activists who insist it isn’t a big deal to force us all to do this think so, too – it’s why they respond with such viciousness when someone politely declines.
Read More
Related Posts: -
Good News, Ladies! You’re Sons!
What an incredible promise: that we, men and women, who were enslaved to the world, have been purchased by the price of the Son so that we could be adopted as sons of God! And now God invites us, who were once estranged from him, to intimately cry out to him, “Daddy!” Oh, friends, what an invitation! What a reality! Can you believe that you are a son of God?
Here is an oddity: women are never referred to as “daughters of God” in the Bible. Kind of strange, especially given how often people use that phrase. “Daughter of God” nets over 1,000 books on Amazon. In the Bible, however, the seemingly clumsy term “sons of God” is used for men and women alike.
What gives? Is this a linguistic fluke? No, unlike the Greek word for brothers, adelphoi, which often means “brothers and sisters,” the Greek word for sons, huioi, rarely means “sons and daughters,” with the complete phrase “huious kai thugateras” used instead.[i] So, while we might be tempted to add “daughters” when we see “sons of God” in the Bible, it’s unlikely that is what the author intended.[ii]
Is the lack of inclusion of daughters a patriarchal blind spot in the Bible that we ought to rectify? On the contrary: the authors of scripture used the phrase “sons of God” to lift the status of women.
Let me explain: in the ancient world, Israel included, only sons received the family inheritance. Daughters received no inheritance. They were dependent on their husband or the care of their family. If the biblical authors referred to men and women as “sons and daughters of God,” their readers might have mistakenly presumed that only men received a spiritual inheritance from God.
By exclusively referring to all the children of God as “sons of God,” the biblical authors are saying something profound: men and women are equal recipients of the inheritance of the Father. Wow! What a vision for men and women in the Kingdom of God – and two thousand years old, no less!
With this in mind, let’s re-read two of the most beautiful passages in the Bible that offer us the hope of what our sonship entails.
Read More
Related Posts: -
Joe Rogan and the Search for Transcendence
As the process of re-enchantment continues, I believe we will see more and more people dissatisfied with the hollow cave of materialistic atheism and seeking experiences of the transcendent. Will the church be ready to offer compelling answers to their questions? And will the worship and fellowship of the church be so imbued with the presence and power of God that visitors stop and say “God is really among you” (1 Cor. 14:25)? May God move in mighty ways to not only draw the lost to Himself but to revive our churches to be vibrant outposts of Kingdom life.
Living in Montreal, I am used to encountering deeply secular people. No heaven above, no hell below, no God at all. Can you even show me one solid piece of evidence for your God? Why would you believe in old debunked myths? These are the kinds of questions they ask. How does one share the hope of the gospel with such people?
Depending on the particular stripe of unbelief, it may be to poke holes in the materialist fortress, to point out self-evident echoes of eternity in their own beliefs, to show the moral implications of atheism, or any number of similar approaches. All of these are types of pre-evangelism: tilling up the hard ground of unbelief so that the seeds of faith in Jesus might have a chance to grow.
Over the last few years, however, I’ve been bumping into another kind of person who is asking very different kinds of questions: Are the spiritual beings around us benevolent or malevolent? How can we more deeply connect to the spiritual realm? Or, like one young man asked me: Can I ever be free from the spiritual forces I opened myself up to by engaging in occult practices?
In another case, a new convert at my church shared with me how, soon before coming to Christ, she had travelled to Brazil to experience a shaman-guided experience with the psychedelic Ayahuasca. Thankfully the ceremony was cancelled at the last minute. These are people with a very different set of beliefs than the typical secular young person, and they lead to very different conversations.
What is going on here? It seemed to me that I was encountering a new wave of the New Age.
Growing up, the people I knew of who were into New Age beliefs and practices were generally middle-aged women. In high school, the mother of one of my friends had a room in their house where she “spoke to angels.” For a few bucks, she could even tell you what they had to say. I avoided that room – there were lots of strange things hanging from the ceiling.
Then there was Oprah, who symbolized the smiling non-threatening face of New Age spirituality. All of this seemed to me far more like wishful thinking, scams, and mushy sentimentality than anything engaged with serious spiritual forces.
So my assumption was that the appeal of the New Age was mostly for that demographic. The young people I encountered were either deeply secular or, if their families had not had a decisive break from organized religion, mildly theistic.
The Rise of Long-Form Podcasting and Joe Rogan
While New Age beliefs never went away, they certainly fell off my radar for a few years. Around the time of Jordan Peterson’s rise to fame, I became aware, like many others, of an online world where serious conversations were taking place in long-form podcasts and YouTube interviews. The format seemed to foster nuanced, open, and surprisingly deep conversations at a time when the content of primetime news shows was devolving into 90-second shouting matches between talking heads.
One strange little corner of that online world was Joe Rogan’s podcast. With marathon 3-hour episodes of – shall we say – wildly varying quality, no one (least of all Joe) expected it to become so popular. Rogan is vulgar and blunt, but he has a winsome personality, a good dollop of common sense, and perhaps his most dynamic qualities: an insatiable curiosity and a capacity for wonder. Listen to him and his guests talk about grizzly bears or ancient Egypt and you’ll quickly find your own curiosity and wonder awakened.
Recent controversies have continued to polarize opinion about him and, ironically, broaden his reach. To some he is a dangerous purveyor of misinformation who platforms discredited and dangerous fringe thinkers (and to be fair, he certainly talks to some strange folks); to others he is a voice of sanity and one of the few remaining spaces where free speech is defended. But one thing is for sure: his audience is massive, easily eclipsing other podcasts and cable news shows. And the lion’s share of that audience seems to be young men – millions of them.
These are the men facing the meaning crisis – the existential inheritance of postmodernism. Or, more simply, the meaning crisis is what happens to a soul when you teach it that everything is a cosmic accident and therefore nothing has any real or ultimate meaning. They have no interest in organized religion, but they love the masculine competence and self-respect that the podcast exudes.
To these young people, Rogan offers not only entertainment through interesting interviews but also a taste of re-enchantment through his curiosity and wonder, the promises of technology, and his experiences and endorsements of psychedelic substances as gateways to wisdom and knowledge. This is where I see a connection between Joe Rogan’s massive popularity and influence and the unexpected reappearance of New Age spirituality in young people.
In this article, I want to focus on aspects of Rogan’s project that I think the church should take note of because they are illustrative of much broader societal trends which present Christians with both challenges and opportunities. But first, let’s see how this fits within the broader cultural narrative.
Streams of Re-enchantment
In his book ‘Return of the Strong Gods,’ R.R. Reno, editor of First Things magazine, shows how the disenchantment – a kind of spiritual malaise – that has spread across the West is not simply a byproduct of secularization but the result of a specific strategy adopted in the aftermath of the two World Wars.
Traumatized by the horrors of Auschwitz, Western intellectuals embraced what Reno calls ‘the post-war consensus,’ the idea that strong beliefs, convictions, and claims to truth are what give rise to the passions that caused such atrocities. In order to ensure that such things never happen again, these ‘strong gods’ were cast out and replaced with weak ones: pillars of objective truth gave way to plastic values, solid moral virtues dissolved into liquid cultural preferences.
If this is the case – and I found the argument of Reno’s book to be, on the whole, persuasive – then the intentional suppression of the human hunger for transcendence in the West since the end of the second World War dovetailed with the natural effects of secularization to create a situation where souls have been starved for a taste of eternity as never before.
This dual process of secularization and suppression brought low the ceiling of the world and drained the vibrant colors of life to a paltry grey, leaving young people with a gnawing hunger to come into contact with something beyond what they can see and touch, to be swept up into something bigger than themselves.
Like a mighty river held back by a hastily-built dam, this God-given hunger was artificially restrained. But now it seems to be breaking forth as that dam comes apart in pieces. The wave of re-enchantment washing across the West manifests itself in various ways. In what follows, I select just three streams that have struck me as particularly relevant to Christians, the third of which will bring us back to Joe Rogan.
First, the spiritual shape of political ideologies.
Many seek and find an echo of transcendence in the crusader-like pursuit of political and cultural goals.[1] Invariably these beliefs take the shape of grand narratives that mimic the Biblical story, including some pristine Edenic state, a fall into sin, a path of righteousness, and an eschatological hope. Radical environmentalism, the LGBTQ activist movement, and the progressive Left all fit this pattern and hold increasing cultural and institutional influence in our day.
Some movements on the far-Right such as white nationalism take the same general shape and likewise require a whole-life commitment.
Read More