the Empathy List #123: Healthy Christian Impotence

Touch rocks for perspective.

Hello friend, Liz here.

This week, the news has been abuzz with the outcomes of yearly denominational conferences, especially the PCA and SBC gathering (see this surprising coverage in the New Yorker). In addition, another abhorrent abuse scandal in another abhorrent Texas megachurch made headlines.

And paired with this ongoing conversation online, I’ve been furiously composing another Very Important Essay (I believe?) about the beginnings of white American Evangelicalism’s culture of ideological purity.¹ So, I’ve been knee-deep in the records of the Moral Majority, Dallas Theological Seminary, Christianity Today, and The Gospel Coalition in order to discern exactly how these black-and-white binary thinkers managed to shift the culture of my inherited faith toward fundamentalism.

In other words, over the past two weeks, my heart and mind have been full of Christian failure. We, the White American Evangelical church, have failed to care for the vulnerable, to welcome the stranger, to incl…