Rant of the Week

Blue Like a Sweetheart Like You is Jazz Purple Sweet

"Blue Like Jazz" is another one of those books by an evangelical Christian that describes a long, exotic path through an allegedly real and intellectually credible world that-- eureka!-- ends up exactly where it began, in a traditional, evangelical Christian faith.  The message is-- I am like you.   I have the same standards for intellectual and scientific credibility that you thinking people do.  I have just as low a threshold of tolerance for bullshit, deceit, distortion, and glibness as you do.  And I know that many high-profile evangelists appear to be smarmy corrupt charlatans.  And by golly, that don't mean that what they're preaching is wrong....

Donald Miller may not be conservative politically, but his discussion of Christianity itself, what belief means, who Jesus was, and how God operates in the world, is alarmingly like Billy Graham's.  In fact, I doubt the two would really find much to disagree about, even if Miller once protested against Bush.  I can see "Uncle Billy" smiling indulgently and saying, "shucks, you young folk!  Why, I'm glad you're concerned about global warming.  It's better than having promiscuous sex." 

In fact, it's quite striking how conventional his faith life is.  He goes on and on about how he re-examines some major political or psychological idea and turns it upside down and learns that he is so humble that he was very mistaken when he had previously thought he was not humble enough.

If the issue is that most evangelicals don't really have the passion to really live out the requirements of their beliefs... he's scaring me.  That is precisely what makes some evangelicals most like Jihadists: the absolute conviction that we are right, because God told us we were right, and nobody else can prove otherwise, and therefore we must take control, for God.

But Miller doesn't really discuss the content of his faith very much.  He talks a lot about going to church or not going to church and tithing or not tithing and how he hangs around with people who cuss and watch "South Park", leaving one to wonder why he accepts the idea that he should tithe.  It might be a perfectly good idea.  It might be an irrelevant relic of a completely different time and place.  But he doesn't explain why, other than to say that God wants him to.  How does he know this?  Because his friend Rick tells him?  How does Rick know?  What authority decreed this?  Well, of course, probably scripture.  But here we get a  blank: how does he know what scripture means?  Any searching intellect would ask these questions. 

Why does Donald Miller's brain seem to suddenly lose it's curiosity when it comes to actually discussing the content of faith?

Miller seems to regard an evangelical faith as something hermetic and isolated.  You either accept it or you don't.  That appears to me to based on the assumption that the Christian faith is a mysterious but insular little thing that is not affected by your actual behavior.  Or is it that your faith is not necessarily indicated by your actual behavior?

 

 

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