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By Root 1472 0

was intensified by what was happening in the Christian community in America during the 1980s and 1990s. A large number of both Protestant and Catholic leaders had aligned with a neoconservative political ideology, trumpeting what they called “conservative family values,” but minimizing biblical community values. They supported wars of choice, defended torture, opposed environmental protection, and seemed to care more about protecting the rich from taxes than liberating the poor from poverty or minorities from racism. They spoke against big government as if big was bad, yet they seemed to see big military and big business as inherently good. They wanted to protect unborn human life inside the womb, but didn’t seem to care about born human life in slums or prisons or nations they considered enemies. They loved to paint gay people as a threat to marriage, seeming to miss the irony that heterosexual people were damaging marriage at a furious pace without any help from gay couples. They consistently relegated females to second-class status, often while covering up for their fellow males when they fell into scandal or committed criminal abuse. They interpreted the Bible to favor the government of Israel and to marginalize Palestinians, and even before September 11, 2001, I feared that through their influence Muslims were being cast as the new scapegoats, targets of a scary kind of religiously inspired bigotry.

Their stridency and selectivity in choosing issues and priorities at first annoyed, then depressed, and then angered me. They had created a powerful, wealthy, and stealthy network dedicated to mobilizing fighters in their “culture war.” I began referring to the new religious establishment they had created as radio-orthodoxy because it depended on radio (and TV). They had turned the way of Jesus, I felt, into the club of the Pharisees, and they didn’t speak for me, even though their spokesmen dominated the dialogue night after night on cable TV. The terms “Evangelical” and even “Christian” had become like discredited brands through their energetic but misguided work.3 I increasingly understood why more and more of my friends winced when the name “Jesus” was mentioned in public. It wasn’t due to a loss of respect for Jesus, but for those who most used his name. In spite of all this, few of my fellow pastors and leaders had the courage to speak out for fear of losing members or their contributions. For a while, I’m ashamed to say, I was among their silent number.

Morning after morning I woke up in the brutal tension between something real and something wrong in Christian faith. The sense of something real kept me in ministry and in Christian faith; the sense of something wrong kept me looking for a way out. Somehow, by the grace of God, I held on to the something real long enough to begin to figure out what the something wrong might be. And eventually I began to get some sense of what to do to disentangle the one from the other, to hold on to the something real and let the other go.

But the process was slow, two steps forward and one back, it seemed. For about five years, I felt I was standing in a deepening welter of theological fragments. My spirituality was intact—because I was learning that there is a kind of faith that runs deeper than mere beliefs—but my belief system was in shambles. Little by little, though, a new coherence began to emerge. That coherence was more a new way of believing, less a rebuilt system of beliefs, and I felt compelled to try to share what I was learning and experiencing. So I began to write, and from that time of theological collapse and spiritual recovery, my first book took shape, The Church on the Other Side.4

“The other side” referred to a position after the beginning of what I called the “postmodern transition.” On the past (“before”) side of the transition, in the modern era, nearly all our Protestant denominations had been formed. They were institutional children of the era of Sir Isaac Newton, the conquistadors, colonialism, the Enlightenment, nationalism, and capitalism. Each denomination