There is a sad—even macabre—fact about fundagelicals: they have very little interest in culture for the sake of its virtues. They can speak at length about the virtues of sport, cars, airplanes and guns, or movies about sport, cars, airplanes, and guns, but you can't ask them which subway line will get you to the museum or the best place to park for the concert hall. You can visit their churches, campuses and homes and find nothing but kitsch. Seriously, everything on their walls is merely decorative, devotional or commemorative; like their hymnbooks, they really don't reward scrutiny.

Of all the professors I've had, only one paints. Not one composes (unless he's being paid to), none writes poetry. One plays a guitar and one yodels. I did visit the office of an art professor on Wheaton's campus which had an original painting hanging on the wall.

So it is a little disturbing when the media bring to our attention the outrages of Robert Mapplethorpe or Lisa Miller or Dan Brown or Ray Boltz or some new, provocative movie, and all of a sudden they have something trenchant to say about culture.

Very odd, this ad hoc expertise.

But my point, or at least my main point, is not to knock their skills. Maybe most have no skills and hanging their work would only be vain and offensive. But it never strikes them as vanity or effrontery to speak as though they possessed an understanding of culture.

This may seem like nit-picking to you, and no doubt, as some have already noted, my "attitude" requires stricter oversight, but I think it's more important than you might suppose. We are now watching the suspenseful transmogrification of Emergence, or the Emergent/emerging, missional community/movement thingy.

What we were promised was "goodness, experience, questions, mystery, community, and humility". What we are getting is shrill intolerance, hate and profanity.

For those of you with the stomach for a philistine shrew, I recommend you take the time to read this. Some of you may want to give it a pass: Makeesha hardly has the intellectual discipline (or a vocabulary) adequate to the expression of her resentments, but read it to make sense of the reaction of her readers. What they admire in her bad prose and blunt profanity is her directness, authenticity, honesty, and openness.

Someday I hope to be admired for my directness, authenticity, honesty and openness, but for health reasons I am not going to hold my breath.

I mention this not only because it is relevant to an understanding of the snake oil we call emergence, but because of the affected indignation of people like Rick and X. Don't be bullied by people like Makeesha or Tony Jones or the nakedpastor. This sort of coarse tribalism has nothing at all to do with culture.

Don't be a sucker for this game of three-card monte.

Walk right by.