Modern evangelicalism is a day-old doughnut, but this may require further explanation.
We flatter ourselves by saying that evangelicalism is over here doing its thing, and American culture is over there marching to a different drummer entirely. If we are convicted by our sins and inconsistencies, we like to think that they are self-contained sins and inconsistencies. And we think that we cannot rebuke the outside sins and inconsistencies of American culture until we clean up our own act first. And of course there is an important truth there, but the way we apply it tends to overlook the organic connection between the Church as soul of America and the general culture outside as the body. (Incidentally, I am not saying the Church is the soul of every culture — I am saying this only of Christian cultures and apostate cultures. And also, not so incidentally, the soul and body thing is a metaphor. Work with me.)
So this means that America, having the heritage and past that it does, is caught in a double bind. In order to be put right with God, the culture must return to Christ and to the Church. But whenever they think to do so, it occurs to them that the Church is the source of all her problems. Evangelicalism is not the solution to America’s problems; evangelicalism is America’s problem.
Next time you are in a grocery store check out line check out (no, I don’t mean check out) the partially dressed female on the cover of the nearest women’s magazine, the kind my kids call a day-old doughnut. Right, the one with the fake bake tan, the abs of a sixteen-year-old boy, the boobs of a wet nurse, and the knock-your-eye out bottle blondisity. The one who was assembled by an ironic and detached photo shop gay guy the same way your kids play with Mr. Potato Head. Oh, and she also has cancer, non-operable and, more to the point, non-photographable. We can therefore afford to overlook that part.
That is evangelicalism. Fake, shiny, wealthy, attractive, alluring, and diseased. And the reason we have magazines like that in our grocery stores, presenting such wares to the public, is because of the way we assemble before the Lord on the Lord’s Day. As we come to present our wares.