Over recent weeks we have been peering into various crannies of American Christianity. While each little corner offers its own distinctive litter and unpleasant smells, it is not the distinctive parts that should concern us so much as the unsightly whole. Institutions come and—mercifully—go, but in all the coming and going we tend to overlook larger, unanticipated consequences.

We see in current fundamentalism a movement which flagrantly contradicts the sensibilities of earlier fundamentalism. It was bad enough the movement became unappealing to outsiders; it's worse that it became a contradiction of its own principles. It was not enough that its enemies hated it, the movement wanted to offer them a larger selection of things to despise. Imagine Machen attending a fundamentalist production of The Importance of Being Earnest or Francis and Edith Schaeffer showing up in a tux and opera glasses for a Steve Pettit "concert". The incongruity is lost on modern fundamentalists because they are preoccupied with The King James Problem or what is to be done about the effective ministries of conservative evangelicals. And the movement gives every promise of losing its institutions the way a leper drops off limbs in the last stages of his illness.

To hear the senior managing editor of "the magazine of evangelical conviction" tell it, the movement has become a "mood". That's right, a mood. As irritated as some of us are that guys like Harold Ockenga and Carl "Free Hand" Henry indulged in novelties which turned out worse than our fathers imagined, they would be frozen in horror to read that their movement was now a mood. It's just not polite to reject someone because she's in a mood, even if she's amusing herself with Sex And The City.

Seeker-sensitives are doing a new study to find out why their means and ends did not quite connect in the productive way their earlier studies claimed they would. And good luck to them with that.

Emergence promised all sorts of things like poetry and imagination, and in this climate of general hostility none was more attractive than "community". Ask an emergent what the general opinion is of Mark Driscoll to get a sense of a self-sacrificing fraternity and a taste of "a generous orthodoxy". Ask Dumb and Dumber what they think of "New Calvinism".

I recall the observation of one observer of American Christianity: "History should remind us that when a society begins to drift, doctrine is usually the last evidence of that drift. The churches must not suppose that professions of orthodoxy are proof against drift."

A drifting society is very much the problem, and to get another sense of that drift, you might want to read D. G. Hart:

By leaving the religious ghetto to right the mainstream society, the likes of a Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson undermined older taboos that had nurtured among evangelicals a sense of being resident aliens, pilgrims on a journey to a different homeland, enduring hardships now for untold future comforts. In effect, the politics of the Religious Right turned evangelicals from otherworldly saints into this-worldly citizens. The indication being, perhaps, that this transformation of born-again Protestants is no better for cultural life in North America than it is for the Christian religion.

Amidst all the innovations of our times it is good to think through this relevant point. And it isn't just Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. It's the Bakkers and Crouches and Siders and Campolos and Wallises and Halls & Slaters, Norths and Rushdoonys....

On Remonstrans we have spoken at some length about the abject philistinism of American Christianity. But beyond this cultural apostasy there has also been a failure to separate from the world along the lines addressed by D. G. Hart.

Despite what James 1:27 tells us, we have not kept ourselves unspotted from the world. In this regard we have been negligent and we are paying the price.

Professions of orthodoxy have not saved us.

What will?