{"id":1281,"date":"2007-09-06T11:21:24","date_gmt":"2007-09-06T11:21:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/godspolitics\/2007\/09\/american-christendom-rip-by-di.html"},"modified":"2007-09-06T11:21:24","modified_gmt":"2007-09-06T11:21:24","slug":"american-christendom-rip-by-di","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/godspolitics\/2007\/09\/american-christendom-rip-by-di.html","title":{"rendered":"American Christendom, RIP (by Diana Butler Bass)"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Rev. Dr. D. James Kennedy, the Christian Right leader Rolling Stone <\/em>magazine described as \u201cthe most influential evangelical you\u2019ve never heard of,\u201d died yesterday in Florida of complications from a heart attack. His passing, only months after the death of Jerry Falwell, signals the generational shift of leadership now occurring in evangelical Christian circles.
\nUnlike most people, I had heard of D. James Kennedy. In the early 1970s, he created the popular program \u201cEvangelism Explosion International\u201d to encourage churchgoers to be more assertive in witnessing to their neighbors. My then-congregation in Scottsdale, Arizona, used the program to great success. Kennedy was a hero to us\u2014helping us all to be grassroots Billy Grahams and to double the size of our small church.
\nIn 1979, Kennedy\u2019s interests took a turn. As a founding board member of Falwell\u2019s Moral Majority, he increasingly directed his preaching toward politics. His opinions on individual issues did not differ from other Religious Right leaders. His strongest contribution to the movement was his passionate belief that America was founded as a Christian nation and developing media to carry that message across the globe. \u201cOur job is to reclaim America for Christ,\u201d he proclaimed, \u201cwhatever the cost.\u201d His preaching, politics, and public ministry flowed from this central idea: to restore Christian America.
\nAnd it is at that very point\u2014the idea of a Christian America\u2014that evangelicalism, along with American Protestantism more generally, is changing.
\nBorn in 1930, Kennedy lived in a world so distant from our own that it may well have been possible to believe in a Christian America. Churches stood on every public square; members of the clergy shaped public opinion on every issue; schoolchildren uttered Protestant prayers and read Protestant scriptures daily. Many people from Kennedy\u2019s generation remember\u2014or imagine they remember\u2014a vanished Christian world, an ordered society with Protestant faith at the center. Much of the Religious Right\u2019s energy derives from a desire to restore that world, or to \u201creclaim America for Christ.\u201d To that end, Kennedy mixed evangelicalism with classical Reformed theology and a kind of soft Christian Reconstruction, creating the spiritual fuel for a right-wing political and media empire that meshed with the longings of a certain age.
\nWhile Kennedy\u2019s generation was ascendant, new Christian voices began questioning such nostalgia. \u201cSometime between 1960 and 1980,\u201d wrote Methodist leaders Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, \u201can old, inadequately conceived world ended, and a fresh, new world began.\u201d They recounted \u201cthe end of Christendom\u201d in Greenville, South Carolina (the home of Bob Jones University), when the local Fox Theater opened\u2014for the first time ever\u2014on a Sunday in 1963. \u201cThe gradual decline of the notion that the church needs some sort of surrounding \u2018Christian\u2019 culture to prop it up and mold its young, is not a death to lament,\u201d they claimed. \u201cIt is an opportunity to celebrate.\u201d
\nThe contrast between Kennedy and Hauerwas and Willimon is dramatic. Kennedy believed in Christendom, an American Christian nation divinely designed as the leader of a global spiritual empire, and in creating a Christian politics toward that end. Hauerwas and Willimon believe that Christendom, the ideal of a Christian nation, was historically wrongheaded from the start. \u201cThe church,\u201d they argue, \u201cdoesn\u2019t have a social strategy; the church is a social strategy.\u201d
\nThe contrast defines the generational shift regarding attitudes toward Christendom. Older evangelical leaders, for the most part, want Christendom back. Emerging leaders, influenced by theologians such as Hauerwas and Willimon, are less interested in \u201creclaiming\u201d Christendom and more interested in strengthening a confessing church based on the model of Dietrich Bonhoeffer\u2019s alternative community in Hitler\u2019s Germany. For younger Christians\u2014evangelicals and progressives alike\u2014Kennedy\u2019s nostalgic world bears no resemblance to their own. The vision of a post-Christendom church, a community of pilgrims joined together in practices of faith and justice, energizes their hope for the future. As the Christendom generation passes away, a post-Christendom faith will, most probably, take its place. That may take some time, but it will eventually recreate Christian political theology in America.
\nD. James Kennedy, RIP. And while we are at it, let us bury American Christendom, too.
\nDiana Butler Bass<\/strong> is the author of the award-winning Christianity for the Rest of Us: How the Neighborhood Church is Transforming the Faith<\/em> (Harper One). She holds a Ph.D. from Duke University\u2014where Hauerwas and Willimon taught\u2014in American religious history.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Rev. Dr. D. James Kennedy, the Christian Right leader Rolling Stone magazine described as \u201cthe most influential evangelical you\u2019ve never heard of,\u201d died yesterday in Florida of complications from a heart attack. His passing, only months after the death of Jerry Falwell, signals the generational shift of leadership now occurring in evangelical Christian circles.…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":379,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nAmerican Christendom, RIP (by Diana Butler Bass) - God's Politics<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/godspolitics\/2007\/09\/american-christendom-rip-by-di.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"American Christendom, RIP (by Diana Butler Bass) - God's Politics\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Rev. 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