food for thought from Nancy Pearcey

Instead of critically challenging the emerging culture of modernity, populist evangelicals were reshaping Christianity to fit the categories of the modern experience.

We can make this more concrete with a word picture suggested by sociologist Gary Thomas. In post-Revolutionary America, Thomas says, a Calvinist minister might stand in the pulpit on a Sunday morning and preach to his congregation that they were morally corrupt by nature and slaves to sin, that they did not have the capability to choose salvation, that God has chosen some and rejected others, and that there was nothing they could do about it. The trouble is, this Calvinist message would not fit the congregation's actual experience. They were no longer born into a static society, where people had no choice about their status, and where virtue was defined in terms of the duties attached to one's unchanging station in life. instead, they were active participants in a mobile society, which they were creating by their own choices. They were self-made men and women in an expanding economy where success rested largely on their own choices, drive, and ambition. A Calvinist message, says Thomas, :would run counter to the individual's self-determinism in the everyday life of market and polity: and as a result, the sermon simply would not seem plausible. It would not make sense.

On the other hand, a traveling Methodist revivalist might ride into town and address the same people that night in an open-air revival meeting. He might preach that they had the power to choose God, that their salvation hung upon their own decision, and that night in an open-air revival meeting. He might preach that they had the power to choose God, that their salvation hung upon their own decision, and that salvation was open to any who chose to call upon the Lord. Given their everyday experience, this message would make sense. An Arminian message and a free-church ecclesiology fit with their experience as independent, autonomous actors in a democratic polity and an expanding capitalist economy.

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i'll post the rest later. try to swallow that first. i'm running out of time....