Reflection on Regression

I first noticed it while serving on the Program-Curriculum Committee of the Board of Education of The United Methodist Church. In an attempt to meet competitor David C. Cook head-on, contemporary issues illustrated with photographs of sixties settings began giving way to “Bible-based” curriculum with cartoonish representations of ancient peoples. Since that time the insidious march of fundamentalism in this country has all but taken over the popular perception of what Christianity is all about. Never content with the propagation of a literalistic hermeneutic, the fundamentalists—who, in a stroke of public relations genius, later called themselves evangelicals—shamelessly promoted that they alone knew the mind of God and what this Trinitarian deity thought and felt about everything from abortion to homosexuality. Rather than take a progressive stand against such nonsense, mainline Protestantism decided that “if you can’t lick them, join them,” and a convoluted neo-orthodoxy became the religion of the land. In an ironic twist, the “what would Jesus do” question revealed the hypocrisy and sacrilege of a consumer theology and its eisegesis. This little tirade came on as I contemplated what Christmas, sacred and secular, has become in our society. Being born of God’s love is an answer increasingly elusive to those who don’t even know enough to ask the question.