When Christianity is properly taught it transforms culture into its servant. Christianity is universally applicable to all peoples, and culture is adaptable. Christianity's trajectory is toward what it means to be human through knowing God both individually and communally.
The enculturation of Christianity is both inevitable and problematic; inevitable because not all understand the message and power of Christianity, problematic because Christianity is weakened by ignorance. If Christianity does not bring radically transformative change to a culture, a nation, a people, then it is lost to the enculturation of nationalism and loses its meaning to symbols of power. In the U.S. Christianity has been enculturated and symbols of power prevail over Christianity’s disruptive truth that challenges the world to be filled with the presence of God.
These symbols of power in the U.S. include the celebrity who replaces the exemplar. The exemplar is the saint, the one who lives the life of Christ in the present complete with the accompanying rejection. The exemplar makes living for Christ too challenging for the crowd who prefer mediocrity in their religion. The exemplar is without political compromise and holds the truth of the way of Jesus above all ideologies. The exemplar, like the prophets, reframes religious practice with radical calls to merciful justice and rejects religions collusion with the culture and the political.
In America, the crowd’s mediocrity is fed by religions bastions of ignorance; the preference for someday rather than today. These someday teachings are the fabric of American evangelicalism. Someday I’ll go to heaven, but Jesus calls us to bring heaven to earth in the present. Someday Jesus will return then everything will be alright, but Jesus is already with us (God does not seem interested in a quick end to the present, though Christians have pursued and sought after a quick end to the present throughout history).
Evangelicals will make bestsellers out of end-time books that are discarded as irrelevant in a short time; overnight in the case of Y2K. Yet, truly good books are ignored. Toni Morrison said that people who read books don’t buy bestsellers.
Yes, Christian faith has been capsized by foolish preachers of greed and purveyors of power, they all fall down. Yes, Christian faith has been capsized by the crowd whose love for country is inconsistent with love for God. American popular evangelicalism is a militaristic, nationalist, materialist manifestation of corruption and a gross display of arrogance that claims to know God.
