Here is an inchoate thought or two related to at least one blessing that has come out of the emergent church movement. I don’t have anything really specific yet, but I think there really is something to this. Summarize it this way: conservatives have a talent for taking over edginess. I’ll talk about the emergent forerunner stuff in a minute.
I can illustrate the pattern with talk radio. When I was a kid, and a somnolent Eisenhower conservatism covered America like three winter quilts, the edgy ones were the liberals, the progressives, the agitators, the angry young men, and so on. And the establishment was so stinking boring that this was not very hard, although the early forays into outrage seemed pretty outré at the time. But once the establishment mores collapsed (to be distinguished from establishment s’mores, which are still going strong), and establishment customs and standards went out the window, it turned out that those with a real gift for satire were the conservatives. Once they started fighting back with the newly permitted weapons, this aptitude became quickly evident. And, to make a long story short, this is why the conservative talk show types have far more appeal generally than the humorless Air America types. And of course, I am generalizing. There are shrillmeisters on the Right, like Michael Savage, and there are some on the Left with a genuine sense of humor — people like Garry Trudeau.
But still, the left is so full of relativism that its eyes are brown, and relativism is completely inconsistent with any kind of sustained indignation. The relativist, in order to keep up a sense of moral purpose and outrage, has to keep multiplying the nefariousness of the purported crimes against humanity being committed by those hardy blasphemers out there, who are denying and reviling, for example, the goddess of Global Warming. It is not long before the tirade becomes simple hysterics, and it is hard to do that and still be funny.
At any rate, the evangelical world (at least with regard to social customs over what is done and not done, said and not said) has been about forty years behind their fellow Americans. Then along come the edgy evangelicals, see poster above, who are more than willing to refer unflinchingly to sexual, um, relations beween, um, people . . . not to mention a willingness to affirm out loud certain incarnational realities about this gritty world, like dog poo.
And the evangelical world initially, and most satisfyingly, went ooo! and covered its mouth with both hands. “Hey, that was easy,” went the thinking, and they did it a little bit more, and then a little more, and pretty soon they were out there floating around in the weightlessness of epistemological ennui. And it got harder and harder to shock anybody. There was no place left to get a tattoo, and nobody seemed to care anymore. Now what? They fought for the right to be bad-boy evangelicals, and that turned into the right to be bad-ass evangelicals, and then that turned into anguished questions over what bad is even supposed to mean, not to mention questions over whether we can even find the other part of the compound word . . . even when allowed to use both epistemological hands.
But then came the really bad news. The bad-ass fundamentalists started showing up, wielding the new weapons that had now been okayed by the collapsing and collapsed establishment, but they were showing no sign of getting tired of them. This is because rootlessnes loses its power to shock in about ten minutes — like a failing stand-up comedian on stage resorting to dirty jokes because nervous laughter is better than no laughter. But the grounded satirist, who loves what he defends and is going to fight for it until he is dead (which is quite different than fighting for something until you are bored), not only has the sharpened blade, but he also has the Ronco Blade-Sharpener of Fixed Truth®. And when he settles down to his business, it never loses the power to shock. And, of course, the emergent types are . . . shocked.
This is, I think, almost impossible to explain to any evangelical born after 1980, but it was not only the monkeyshines of glued, screwed and tattooed evangelicals that were unthinkable back in the day. The conservative retorts were equally impossible . . . but they are far more potent.