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Evangelicals Really Dislike Lent

My friend Krista Dalton tweeted last week:

Was told Lent was “stupid” by a fellow Christian at school. Good reminder why I am not evangelical!

I had to fes’ up to her that I used to say crap like that and I repented.

So what is it about Lent that evangelicals hate so much? I have a two-tiered theory. 

The first involves a Theology of Glory. The second is not a cause – it is an effect – but it is born our of strangeness and suspicion.

Theology of Glory

Back in Christian history, back to the roots of evangelicalism in the Protestant Reformation, are two major approaches (if you will). The first is a Theology of the Cross held up by Luther. The second is a Theology of Glory brought forward by Calvin.

I don’t have time to get into all the sorted details, but suffice to say … that the American evangelical church has not just majored in a Theology of Glory but almost to the near neglect of a Theology of Cross.

Here is a really helpful article on the differences:

“Theologies of glory” are approaches to Christianity (and to life) that try in various ways to minimize difficult and painful things, or to move past them rather than looking them square in the face and accepting them. Theologies of glory acknowledge the cross, but view it primarily as a means to an end-an unpleasant but necessary step on the way to personal improvement, the transformation of human potential. As Luther puts it, the theologian of glory “does not know God hidden in suffering. Therefore he prefers works to suffering, glory to the cross, strength to weakness, wisdom to folly, and, in general, good to evil.” The theology of glory is the natural default setting for human beings addicted to control and measurement. This perspective puts us squarely in the driver’s seat, after all.

It’s not that we don’t like the cross – oh we love the Cross – we sing about it (the wonderful cross) and we wear them around our necks!

It’s so bad that Dallas Willard has coined the phrase “Vampire Christians” for us. He says that we love Jesus for his blood and little else. Ouch – that one stings.  Wooden Cross

It shows up in other ways too. We are almost completely ignorant of the apophatic tradition. We are so kataphatic (speaking of God in the positive) that we have no idea that there are other options! We have no negativa or posteri – it is all presence all time.

Look at our worship services. Just ask yourself: what would it take to lift your hands and sing “Shout to the Lord” at the top of your lungs … and then ask if that seems compatible with fasting or Lent.  They are just two different muscle groups. Unfortunately, those who use the one often neglect the other and vice-versa

Strangeness and Suspicion  

I’m not saying that this element causes the unfamiliarity – but once there is alienation this next element adds fuel to the fire. The suspicion is syncretism.

Think about it this way: Lent isn’t in the Bible. Historically evangelicals have been a sola scriptura bunch (don’t look into that too much) and Lent is a foreign concept. It doesn’t’ take long to dig up some dirt on Lent and find out that it has its roots in Egyptian-Pagan worship borrowed by the Roman cults. Isis lost a son for 40 days so we mourn for 40 days and then have Isis eggs that are colorfully decorated is the story that come to me.

So, I’m not saying that explains all of the animosity that evangelicals have toward Lent, but I just wanted to offer up my two-tiered theory.

It starts with neglect and ends with accusations.

It’s same reason that we kinda try on Good Friday … have NO idea what to do on Saturday … but LOVE Resurrection Sunday!

 

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Hipsters and Zombies: the end of civilization

Ballard says in Kingdom Come

Consumerism rules, but people are bored. They’re out on the edge, waiting for something big and strange to come along. … They want to be frightened. They want to know fear. And maybe they want to go a little mad.
– Ballard, Kingdom Come

When we live in a time when like ours, where the as-is structures are assumed and there is a certain giveness to the system, we view them as final applications. Nation States and capitalism are just two areas where this can be seen (Tripp explains this well in the interview).
In this consumerism as culture humans are defined by their external signs and symbols. These become signifiers that form more than our image, they project our identity. It is in this cul-de-sac and the end of the wide road of consuming that the monotony of round and round sameness becomes soul-numbing. You can see why things on the fringes, that lurk in the dark and just below the surface begins to titillate and become attractive.

We are bored.

Alasdair MacIntyre (who asses the situation so well in After Virtue – even though I disagree with his solution) says this about what the church becomes

nothing but a meeting place for individual wills, each with its own set of attitudes and preferences and who understand that world solely as an arena for the achievement of their own satisfaction, who interpret reality as a series of opportunities for their enjoyment and for whom the last enemy is boredom.

Our fractured and contentious societal situation is inflamed by (at least) three cultural elements: consumerism, globalization, and pluralism. The first is the disposition of individuals within a society, the second impacts the proximity of different communities, and the third affects the posture when approaching a disparate series of relationship for communities.

Consumerism is hyperbolized in an examination of Hipster ‘culture’ by Douglas Haddow entitled “Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization”.* Haddow provides a vicious critique when he says:

An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the “hipster” – a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society.

It this both the dislocation of generational continuity and the isolation of consumerist aesthetics that are troubling about the brand obsessed and all too self-aware ironic sensibilities that alert one to the incredible disenchantment and disassociation of the youth culture. It is these very same consumerist influences and institutions that give rise to their embodied expression and vague angst that manifests in such irresponsible yet elaborate demonstrations of the Hipster’s intentionally senseless displays.

Ironically, we have more stuff and access to more toys, information, and treats than ever before … but we are soul-numb bored. This is the danger of thinking that what we have is everything in it’s final form. That our representative democracy, that our free-market economy, that our United Nations are the pinnacle and the end of history.

This is why that Zizek quote about living in the end times is so great – that it is easier for most Christians today to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine living in some other economy beside capitalism.

Hipsters and the suburban fascination with zombies and vampires … are trying to tell us something.

* The subtitle of this article says “We’ve reached a point in our civilization where counterculture has mutated into a self-obsessed aesthetic vacuum. So while hipsterdom is the end product of all prior countercultures, it’s been stripped of its subversion and originality. “
Mark Douglas Haddow, “Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization | Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters”, n.d., http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html

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