"As a friend of mine once said, the day came where he realized he could be Protestant or Christian, but not both."
Great post, Mark. Please publish this. Oh. You just did? OK.
I like your reponse. Sorry if I was a bit snippy. I think I was a bad mood 
It's the Gen X tendency to look over the heads of their parents to the glories of their grandparents--being played out in Evangelicalism. Not a few young Emergents are attracted to the Catholic Church because they want to be *rooted*.
Amen, that's one of the things that drew me out of a former mainline denomination infiltrated, turned into a hippy-dippy kum-by-yah denomination.
"It's the Gen X tendency to look over the heads of their parents to the glories of their grandparents--being played out in Evangelicalism."
Oh. My. God. Shea, you're pretty poorly informed if you actually believe this. The evangelical world has been tossed and turned for the last 40 years on every conceivable wave: from the Jesus People to the third wave/charismatic movement to Church Growth and now this Emergent bullshit, plus a million other things in between. Why the constant churning? Because there's nothing Evangelicals do as well as killing their past, and there's no better sign of how a group treats it's past than how it treats it's old people.
There's no "looking over their heads to their grandparents" happening here. I mean, have you ever seen an "Emergent Church" service? There are tattoos and nose rings and "pastors" who spend a good part of their day trying to look like they haven't spent a good part of their day trying to look like something. There's the hauling out of rosaries when they want to get really funky and the oohing and aahing around an icon when they want to make some college-freshman point about tradition. There's the showing of movie clips in the middle of Sunday "worship" because movies are the the idiom of the idiot young and somehow a 2003 Sundance winner is as incarnational as a reading from fourth chapter of John (which will be read from "The Message" version, by the way). When the mood strikes they'll create some flaky liturgy and say "that's how the ancient Christians did it" and everyone will congratulate themselves on not being stuck on stupid, irrelevant things like pulpits and choirs and such.
So from week to week you'll get the kitchen sink at an Emergent church gathering, but you know what you won't see? Old people. Because in modern Evangelicalism old people are either ghettoised into the 8:00 am "traditional" service or they're bullied into embracing the non-sensical lyrics and banal hooks that constitute modern evangelical worship, usually in the name of "evangelism (whoops, I mean "mission") but mostly because 40 years ago Larry Norman asked why the devil had all the good music and no evangelical has had the brains or the balls to point out that a lot of the devil's music sucks.
I mean, for goodness sake, Shea, you're reading the tea leaves upside down here, buddy. The Emergent Church isn't some "f-you" to Baby Boomers: it's the natural consequences of Baby Boomer anti-establishment logic, writ large by people who were grew up in an environment - thanks to their baby boomer parents - without the benefit of real catechesis and solid worship! It was started by and nurtured by baby boomers (c.f. Brian Mclaren, high priest of the "emergent movement" and Tony Campolo, pet prophet), and it's narcissism and self-indulgence and shopping-cart worship and shameless self-congratulation is the epitome of everything that sucks about baby boomers. Evangelical baby boomers worked hard to destroy anything that actually made the Evangelical "evangelical", except, possibly, for evangelism itself. They attacked the common evangelical culture; they attacked the traditional forms of evangelical worship; they attacked evangelicalism's theology; they attacked evangelical church governance. The evangelical distinctives of 50 years are well buried, and once the evangelical church had eaten its old people and grown sufficiently contempuous of its fathers, what we're left with is the void of the Emergent movement, where nothing really means anything except, you know, what you want it to mean.
Oh, sure, at first glance it kinda looks good to a Catholic. The Emergents really dig some of that cool Catholic or Orthodox stuff. When you start seeing some Protestant fingering a rosary or saying nice things about the Virgin Mother or criticizing the confrontational tone of Protestant apologists or wringing their hands about the poor it's tempting to see some sort of proto-Catholic trend.
But ask an emergent about their ecclesiology. Or about tradition. Or about authority. Or about discipline in worship. Or the importance of dogma. Or the importance of life and family issues when they vote. Or about a life informed by something more than pop theology. You'll get general squishiness and evasion, retarded Christianese jargon of the kind made popular by Episcopal bishops, whining about your lack of charity, and, possibly, a pithy quote from "The Simpsons" (the edgy ones substitute an obscure line from a Wes Anderson movie). Their criticism of the "religious right" (a very, very popular theme for Emergents, and not one untinged by a certain adolescent tone) is myopic, lacking empathy and awareness. Whatever the failings of the evangelical push into politics, at least it reflected a willingness to pick a side in the culture war. Not only will emergents not pick a side, they don't even want to acknowlege there's a war.
Here's an interesting experiment: ask an emergent how they feel about the current Anglican troubles. The response will be a little bit of hand-wringing, some moaning about dialogue, a lot of consternation about the tactics used by Orthodox Anglicans, a few conflicted comments about Africa (hooray, Bono!), and they'll usually wrap up with something about how God is really above this sort of thing and shouldn't we all be more concerned about volunteering at the soup kitchen. That's because there's no way that an Emergent wants to even look like they might be on the same side as James Dobson. The emergent isn't lined up during the battle: they're fleeing it, all the time congratulating themselves on their bravery. Does this sound vaguely familiar? Scratch an emergent, find a liberal.
So no, Shea, there's no reaching back to the past here. Like most modern evangelicals the past is explicitly dead to the Emergent movement, except where it can be strip-mined for some nifty liturgical trick to spice up a Sunday morning or Wednesday home-group ("meeting this week at the funky fair trade coffee place downtown!"). These are people who are consciously contemptuous of not just their own tradition, but any tradition. The goal isn't to enter into the great stream of Christian history, because that great stream isn't nearly as important as looking at the plus side of Liberation Theology or using Derrida's theories to critically engage The Gospel of Matthew or deciphering the hidden theological meaning in a Seinfeld episode. I mean, really: why do you think they'd like your tradition if they won't even try to like their own?
Oh, and let's be clear that when we speak about "Emergent" churches the imperative, as it is in most modern evangelicalism, is still a dogmatically pragmatic, cynical evangelism (whoops, I mean "mission") that would jettison anything faithful, stable or - gasp - "traditional" in the interest of "relevance". For the past forty years Evangelicals have been pre-occupied with "engaging" modern culture. From the Jesus People to the Moral Majority, from megachurches to the small group movement, from home churches to Emergent no-churches, Evangelicals have tried to figure out where they are in the big scheme of things. The Emergents represent just one more attempt at engaging culture, whilst failing - like all the rest - to elevate it.
Commenting by HaloScan
