Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Monday, September 4, 2023
The church is the place where people should treat each other as people, not as things, where they freely give of themselves to others because they know that Christ has freely given himself in grace to them. As the church is increasingly marginalized in America, she will become a stronger community. But the danger of marginalized, strong communities is that they become insular and protective.

Seven years on from her defeat in the 2016 election, it seems clear that Hillary Clinton has still not come to terms with her loss to Donald Trump. In a recent article for The Atlantic, she now blames the widespread problem of loneliness in America for her failure at the polls. The left’s analysis of 2016 tends to operate with one of two scripts whereby Trump’s supporters were either diabolical scoundrels or stupid dupes.
That Clinton herself might have alienated support by insulting a large portion of the American people, or simply did not offer anything in the way of an attractive vision of what her presidency might look like, would seem to be questions she should at least find worth asking. But no. Once again Trump is the fault of deep sickness in American society, not her own policies or campaign strategy.
Nevertheless, in highlighting loneliness she may be excusing, rather than explaining her loss, but she is still touching on something of importance. All the evidence does suggest that America, and perhaps the West in general, is moving into an era where loneliness and isolation might well be the norm for more and more people.
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The one who believes God’s moral standards can be known, that they are not above the struggles with sin, and believes that reproof is an act of love, will be able to avoid the judging Christ is speaking of in this passage.

It is difficult to think of a verse more misused than “Do not Judge” (Matt. 7:1). The number of times it has been used to censure Godly reproof would be impossible to count. If you are in the habit of reading the Word of God and upholding Godly standards, then you have most likely had this verse thrown your way while commenting on some behavior or trend of which God disapproves.
To many people, this verse means that no one is ever allowed to reprove or correct someone’s behavior or beliefs. If you speak, even in love, against things like sexual deviancy, drunkenness, or false religious beliefs, then according to these people, you are judgmental and therefore violating Christ’s command. Of course, they are making a judgment about you, which means if their interpretation is correct, they are also being judgmental in their reproof of you. If they believe correcting people is judgmental, they should stop correcting judgmental people.
With only a tiny amount of exegesis, we will see that Christ is not saying it is always inappropriate to correct someone with the word of God. In fact, this is something Scripture commands us to do, and reproof and correction are two proper uses of God’s word. 2 Timothy 3:16 says, “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.”
So what is Christ telling us when he commands us not to judge? He is telling us of people who correct others but do not hold themselves to the same standard.
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Written by Aaron M. Renn |
Wednesday, September 13, 2023
The negative world is almost defined by institutional incompatibility or hostility to historical Protestantism. This necessitates a countercultural approach and bars the door to a mainline relationship of the church to culture. 

Jake Meador wrote a recent interesting piece on a topic of great interest to me, namely about a call to attempt to create a new Protestant mainline. He says:
So to bring the discussion to reformed catholicity and what reformed catholic churches can do in our current context, here it is: The old Mainline is dead. American Catholicism is likely terminal as well, even prior to the plausible turmoil to come under Pope Francis’s successor. American Evangelicalism is now encountering its own dechurching crisis and loss of influence. The Christian movement in America is thus at a crossroads. Something new will need to be built. But I do not think we should build a new evangelicalism; I think we should build a new mainline.
That mainline should be centered around the EPC, PCA, and ACNA with room for the possible addition of Lutheran, Methodist, or Baptist denominations, should denominations interested in this project emerge from those streams. The old mainline encompassed Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Methodists, Lutherans, and Baptists. We currently have Presbyterian and Anglican communions that might plausibly grow into the “continuing church” vision once articulated at the PCA’s founding. It remains to be seen if the Global Methodists can join this movement, let alone if the LCMS can stave off its own demographic collapse or if a strengthened Baptist commujnion can emerge from the chaos and corruption currently vexing the SBC. These are the institutional pieces to watch, then: the PCA, EPC, ACNA, Global Methodists, LCMS, maybe WELS, and SBC.
I agree that America lost a lot with the decline of the mainline denominations. Attempts to at least salvage or reclaim some of that is of great interest to me, and also others as well. I think you can see Tim Keller’s plan for the renewal of the American church through this lens, and I might be collaborating on an article about that in the future.
Lind’s Four American Republics
Before digging in, however, I thought it was interesting to see Meador lay out a “four Americas” framework from Michael Lind that was very similar to my own version. I did not draw from Lind, though had heard he had something like this. But I think this sort of division of American history is one very obvious way to do it, so I’m sure it has recurred many times.
Where I differ from the framework Meador gives is that I see the “fourth republic” or “America 4.0” as less emerged than he does (or at least that’s my impression). I see us as in a liminal period where we can’t yet see the contours of what the future system will look like, just as those in the Depression didn’t know what postwar America would be like. The old is passing away but the new has not yet been born. Hence we should be cautious about over fitting solutions to the present movement.
Through Catholic Eyes
Meador is also influenced by Joseph Bottum’s An Anxious Age, which I actually read after I saw him make a previous reference to it. It’s an interesting book in which Bottum makes the common argument that contemporary elite morality and culture is a form of secularized mainline Protestantism (a view with some degree of truth). In his telling, Catholics (with evangelicals in a supporting role as public mouthpiece for Catholic natural law arguments) were the would be replacement for the mainline role in society, but that project failed because America ended up being too Protestant to submit to a Catholicism that was weakened at the time by internal issues.
You won’t be surprised to hear that Bottum himself is a staunch Catholic. That is, like 90% of the people I read who center America’s problems in mainline Protestantism, he himself is not a Protestant. Invariably in these readings, any role Ellis Islanders (like my family) might have played in contemporary America’s failings is minimized or avoided altogether. Just once I’d like to see a Catholic writer say something like, “The WASPs handed over the keys, but we ran the car into a ditch.”
This is one reason I have been arguing that Protestants must stop outsourcing their thinking to Catholic intellectuals. Invariably this leads to us repeating essentially Catholic serving talking points, as Bottum himself basically says in his book (e.g., of George W. Bush).
Meador’s Mainline Restoration Project
With those preliminaries, what does Meador’s mainline restoration project look like?
Institutionally, he sees it centered in the conservative “shadow denominations” of the mainline, mostly splinter groups (EPC, PCA) but some which are not (LCMS). He goes on to say:
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