pendulum

The Supreme Court is back in the news again, after releasing its newest judgments regarding courts and Ten Commandments and Christmas scenery. And the evangelical community responds with its predictable bellyache as though it were waiting just offstage reading a copy of the script. As I said, it is a respondent bellyache to a situation way out of control rather than taking some initiative to induce change and make the situation right.

After some thought on this particular situation it has occurred to me that we have the proverbial pendulum at swing. If we take this image to be a fixed weight hung so that it can swing freely back and forth (say, a clock pendulum which swings anywhere between the 9 and the 3), then we can envisage how trends and ideology moves from one extreme to another. This is largely based upon action and reaction. What if the points between 3 and 9 were submerged, as though it were underwater? This would mean that both extremes were rather shallow and that the correct balance of both could be the deepest option.

This is not true in all things, mind you, but it can be a very important axiom to have in mind. Evangelicalism has popularized itself into an extreme of Christianity (mostly refered to as 'Christianize') which is very shallow, displaying its intellectual depth in various bumper stickers and abounding "self-help" books (RABBIT TRAIL: why self-help and not Spirit's guidance?). One of the effects of this pop-Christianity is that it has disengaged the message of Christ from the arena of public ideas. And then it becomes easier for churches to gripe about the situation than working to offer alternative, biblically based solutions.

However, if we swing the pendulum to the other extreme we find an overly fundamentalist view that reads Scripture only as a condescending and judgmental. This position seems only to view the biblical text as a list of rules to be followed and spends little time reaching society on its own level - in terms it can understand. Our culture often refuses to see this situation as valid (can we blame them?), even though many of the positions can be viewed as biblically accurate in its foundation.

Where is the pendulum right now. I suppose it depends on who you are; it is quite subjective. While there are pockets of both extremes in our own evangelicalism today, most persons fall under the easy (lazy?) position of popular Christianity, with more CD liner notes memorized than Bible verses and more reading devoted to Christian dating than how we can be the most effective salt and light as possible.

Let the pendulum swing when it must and rest when it can. That might be a :micverb (I think I'll send it to clave on a bumper sticker).