Liberals Fear the Godly in All Forms

The evangelical church is in bad shape. Our worship is shallow, our intellectual life scandalous, and our politics co-opted. But Lauren Sandler is frightened by our emerging power. In Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement (Penguin, 2007), she says there is something “terrifying and alluring” emerging from our ranks. People who should be growing up into enlightened defenders of Western progress are being drawn into what she calls the “Disciple Generation” of a hip, culturally engaged, profoundly irrational and politically dangerous new evangelicalism.

The book is somewhat sensationalist. Sandler, a self-described “unrepentant Jewish atheist,” wants to alert her secular liberal friends to this looming threat, but she also wants to sell books. So instead of providing a truly general survey of evangelical youth, she highlights the Goth church in the Queens bar, heavily tattooed skateboarders, and the power focused Patrick Henry College students.

In her trolling around the edges of evangelicalism looking for controversy, however, she makes an interesting observation. The “disenchantment with the modern experience, that has not fulfilled all that it promised” (p.239) is driving young people to Jesus, to spiritual discipline and to the agape love that is found in Christian community. That love “is the emotion that secularism, enraptured by its logic and empiricism, refuses to engage” (p.10). Addressing her secularist audience, she warns that, “their lives are in fact a criticism of our own.” In response to this, she suggests that enlightened people save this emerging generation from the lure of superstition and right wing nuttery by “the promise of love articulated within a genuine expression of youth culture” (p.33).

But can secular enlightenment top the resurrection? Because they have no risen, glorified, and life giving Savior, they will not have the "secular Great Awakening" that she sees is necessary to cobat what Christianity offers. Where there is no loving heavenly Father, there can be no movement-wide "promise of love," but only abstract causes and cultural power grabs.