“Inside our personal information bubbles, our assumptions, our blind spots, our prejudices aren’t challenged, they are reinforced and naturally, we’re more likely to react negatively to those consuming different facts and opinions – all of which deepens existing racial and religious and cultural divides.”
Barack Obama
Here we return to the final installment critiquing Dr. Alan’s Strange’s excoriating of Christian Nationalism (CN).
I open with the quote above because Strange at the 12:17 mark of his third installment on the subject says much the same thing. I can’t help but find it interesting that a putative conservative Reformed theologian agrees with a Marxist like Obama on critiquing the reading habits of Americans.
1.) It seems that Strange is trying to pry Christian people away from having convictions that he personally doesn’t like and so he says, “read from sources that don’t agree with you.” Now, I don’t have a problem with reading broadly. Indeed, I often read my enemies because in such a way I can more easily disembowel their arguments. However, this isn’t why Strange (or Obama) want you to read outside those who agree with you. Strange wants Christians to read outside of those who agree with them because only in such a way will people be pried away from positions that Strange doesn’t like.
I would encourage people to read broadly but only after they have anchored themselves in a Christian World and life view.
2.) Strange insists that “we have to put politics in its place,” but he does so via his own political jeremiad that insists that everyone salute his politics. Strange’s politics insist that Christians should not prioritize politics. The problem here is that the enemies of Christ has politicized everything. It is the enemies of Christ who have politicized life, sex, and death. As Christians are we not to respond to this pagan politicization by entering into the political sphere by pushing back? The enemies of Christ have taking politics as their theology and by the means of politics they seek to cover the globe with their anti-Christ theology. For Christians, at this time, to put politics in its place the way Strang envisions is to surrender the whole ball of wax. The consequence of Strange’s version of “putting politics in its place” is to be forced back into the catacombs. The consequence of Strange’s version of “putting politics in its place” is the final hegemony of polluted pietism in the place of a muscular Christianity that walks uprightly in the public square. The consequence of Strange’s version of “putting politics in its place” means that Jesus Christ takes a back seat to whatever god or gods is/are running the public square. I submit to you that Strange, however well intended the man may be, is issuing a call to treason against Jesus Christ.
3.) Strange pulls, the now tired claim, that CN is just WOKEism on the right as if ideas of CN or race didn’t long predate the rise of WOKEism. This claim, now made by many, is just idiotic.
4.) Strange makes a typical R2K move by insisting that Christians must return to the “spirituality of the Church,” where spirituality means “surrendering to the anti-Christ forces” in the culture wars. Strange, it seems to me, will only be happy when Christianity is not a force at all in the public square, when Christianity will be restricted to what happens during Worship on Sundays, when Christianity is publicly irrelevant. The man is petrified by the notion that Christianity may become once again militant.
Look, at the end of the day, the Christianity that Dr. Alan Strange is hawking is a different Christianity from the likes of John Knox or Puritan Pulpiteers in colonial American history. It’s not a Christianity in which I am interested. I find it to be cowardly and dishonoring to the Lordship claims of Jesus Christ.
