IT'S THE ECONOMY, FATHER Part Two: A Friendly Response to Dr. Toon

http://www.virtueonline.org/portal/modules/news/article.php?storyid=7801

[Virtue Online] 26 Feb 2008--In the 70s the Church did not so much search its store of doctrine for a theological response to pressing social issues as seize upon the historic forms of the Christian religion to package an altogether new product -- "saving" the world through political correctness, a new parlor game for aging Baby Boomers who still savored the righteous self-absorption of the 1960s. That this was a game is borne out by the fact that the world was not "saved" during the period that followed, nor brought nearer to salvation or enlightenment. In general our diverse society is not more trusting or more tolerant than before the relentless liberation of 1960s, but more hostile and polarized than ever, with a new social pathology lurking behind every tree. The culture of obsessive righteousness and the secular puritanism of the bourgeois Left have helped create the rigid adversarial society of the present, both inside the church and out.

American mass culture was born in the 1960s and immediately proved itself to be market driven to the core. One of the casualties of the new mass market was Old World religion. Christian denominationalism in the New World had been an adaptation from an Old World political economy. With the advent of the modern European nation-state came the modern established church. In Protestant countries each national church reflected a local vision of the "catholic" church -- what local reformers envisioned as a "true" replica of the New Testament and early Christian communities. In countries where the Roman Catholic Church became the state religion national churches took on an ethnic character, particularly when transplanted in the New World. From the beginning each of these groups had its own "market". Each of the national churches paid lip service to the idea of a worldwide church, but the "universal church" was more a myth than it was a part of anyone's experience. Perhaps it always had been.