I think it’s difficult to get a pulse on the evangelical culture because it’s more fragmented now than it has ever been. The sorts of names I hear in my church circles that are influential, to my chagrin, are NT Wright, Rob Bell, a number of Emergent Church Types. I even saw a book by Feurbach in my pastors office that made me want to groan.

On the other hand I am heartened that someone like Tim Keller seems to be as prominent as he is, though not at my church. I should mention I’m in Southern California so the sort of dynamics I am seeing may be very different than evangelical circles in red states.

However, my impression is that the evangelical community is going through a kind of identity crisis. The good new is that what comes out the other end of this process might be a better church. However, I know enough church history to know that that isn’t usually the way these things necessarily turn out.

The Catholic Church has a whole series of problems that consume their attention.

In the meantime the statist-progressivist take advantage of the separation in Christendom and work tirelessly to eliminate the Christian culture.

We’ll see who joins the Catholics, if there are any, at the barricades when Obamacommiecare forces the Catholics to either stand and fight or sin against God.

Thanks for the comments. I don’t know too much about what evangelicals do. I usually glance at World Magazine once a week, and take its content to be reflective of what engages evangelical political thinkers. I used to have a subscription to an evangelical publication called “Books & Culture” that seemed to be better than World.

Among evangelical churches that I am aware of, including my own, there seems to be a turn toward engagling with the local communities to reach out and help those who are struggling in their own neighborhoods. I think this turn is the result of the sort of political hangover that occurred after W Bush, and a renewed desire to express their christian faith in a way that is seems more authentically christian.

Personally I see problems with this admittedly appealing view, but I don’t blame them for wanting to opt out of a political culture that has simply turned very very poisonous.

Well, as they say, imitation is the highest for of flattery. Or maybe just an indication of a serious lack of imagination.

The answer to your question is yes. How do I know? Because I’m an evengelical.

Why the apparent reticence among evengelicals to participate? It’s not for lack of “nuance”. From what I am observing it has more to do with what I would describe as a kind of “post traumatic stress disorder” from the W. Bush experience. Over the eight years of his administration the popular culture has built up a caricature of the evengelical christian that has been pretty effective in initimidating believers from this segment from political participation. They are still conservative, just not particularly active, and their kids are doing everything they can to re-brand their christianity so it isn’t as culturally toxic. Hence the whole emergent church insurgence in the later years of Bush’s term.

If evangelicals are going to enter the fray again, they are going to have to have better cultural tools to deal with the new political landscape. But since the typical evengelical is middle class with a job and family, aka has a life, its not entirely clear to me how that is going to happen, at least with the same magnitude as previous decades.

Based on my facebook page the typical conservative evengelical friend is quiet, and the ones that do pronounce on conservative topics is progressive or aping progressivism.

These are just my observations, but I’m sure this site has plenty of contributors that can speak from their own observations.

Notably absent from the list are fora who contributors are largely evangelicals. And to be honest, I can’t think of any such forum, online or otherwise. I find it ironic that the most ardent adherents to social conservatism are the same folks who seem to have no interest in participating in discussions about where we go from here.

This thought occurred to me today as I read Marvin Olasky’s most recent piece on World Magazine. (Olasky is probably evangelicalism’s leading political thinker.) He was summarizing Ross Douthat’s Sunday NYT editorial. But in summarizing the editorial, he only pulled out the parts that were critical of liberals. The equally cogent criticisms of modern conservatism were stripped from Olasky’s summary, as though it was improper to allow his evangelical readers to consider that the Romney lost may have been about something more complex than the battle between “makers” and “takers.”

I would love to see the revival of the conservative intellectual tradition along the lines of what we saw in the 60s. But can we ever get evangelicals to participate? After all, it strikes me that evangelicals come awfully close to treating anti-intellectualism as a virtue and viewing any kind of nuance as implicitly heretical.