Friday, often the most hopeful of all the weekdays, was promising to fall well short of its potential: Nat saw Phil get out of his car and start following his Jesus Saves belt buckle toward the café. He gave some thought to the feasibility of shouting FIRE! and running from the building, but he feared that next time Phil might turn it into some personal evangelism schtick.

Phil: Beautiful morning, isn't it, Nat? Hardly a cloud in the sky.

Nat: And those no bigger than a man's hand. Did you give any more thought to our discussion?

Phil: Yes I did, and I think you're being unfair relating the things you despise with all of fundamentalism. It's not monolithic, you know.

Nat: So people keep telling me. You'd be surprised how many fundamentalists tell me there is nothing wrong with their culture until I show them some loathsome example; then all of a sudden that's not part of their fundamentalism. They don't have to answer for that! It's a very modular movement apparently. They can run radio stations, publishing houses and recording labels, and the only people truly responsible can't be touched because they are "God's anointed", and the people who scarf it up can deny their complicity.

Phil: So you deny their claims.

Nat: Nonsense; I don't deny their claims. I just know they aren't valid arguments and they won't distract me from what is important. These people were not especially eager to exercise this gift of facile distinctions when they condemned others. All their enemies were conveniently monolithic. If one of them sneezed they all had the Plague.

No, my point is not about the exceptions, it's about the rule. Anyone can try to give an explanation for a part, but it takes a certain level of integrity and critical acumen to explain the whole. I think this is where the movement really savaged itself. And as I said last time, this is why the movement is dead. It is not we who suffered from this adolescent evasiveness, ultimately it was the movement.

Phil: I don't see it that way.

Nat: How do you see it?

Phil: We were fighting to preserve essentials, non-essentials may have gotten lost in the scuffle. No one is perfect.

Nat: What essentials did you preserve?

Phil: The essentials of the Faith.

Nat: The Fundamentals.

Phil: Yes!

Nat: But that's really not true, is it? You attempted to preserve a small subset of those essentials; a thumbnail sketch of all that is necessary to preserve true faith during a particular moment of crisis. Were it not for Modernism those "essentials" might have been very different. A different enemy would have produced a different reaction. And that would have been a necessary thing! I'm not saying that those doctrines were not at risk, and I'm not saying that they weren't worth defending; I am saying that you succeeded in defining the conflict of a historical moment. What was not preserved was an entire orthodoxy. Look at your liturgy. Look at your entertainments. Look at your power structure. Look at the institutions that are unsympathetic to the sensibilities of their people.

Phil: That's very easy for you to say with the benefit of hindsight.

Nat: Yes and No; it is easy for me to say because many of these shortcomings didn't require my own observations, but neither do those observations come from hindsight. This is what people like Machen anticipated when they embraced your idea yet rejected your movement. This is what people like Tulga reported when these "essentials" began morphing to include things like pre-trib and pre-mill eschatologies, and when he noted the "dominating and domineering" spirit which was reading out of the movement people who nevertheless embraced those infamous "essentials".

This is what people like Tozer were talking about when they criticized this headstrong and spiritually inattentive strain of Christianity.

You felt very put-upon by critics outside your movement: you should have been more sensitive to the criticism of those who still embraced the "essentials". But that didn't happen. Now you are free to bicker over Bible translations, which schools tend to produce "neo-evangelical" graduates and which schools are too influenced by Calvinism or Finneyism.

And this just addresses the matter of your so-called "essentials". No, I don't think you preserved any essentials in a productive way. Furthermore I think that failure is just a rough schematic for the larger problem today. Even if you did enjoy solidarity on all those issues you presently squabble over, you still have the problem of a generation of fundies who don't begin to share the sensibilities of their forebears.

People don't love God because their doctrines pass muster. Look at this movement now being entertained by bad knock-offs of The Office, The Music Man, and any number of operas. Have you ever read a libretto, Phil?

Phil: Not really; I know some general storylines.

Nat: You dismiss all this as stylistic differences and non-essentials, but we know now in 2009 what you didn't know in 1925.

No, your vaunted "orthodoxy" is a necessary but insufficient ground for modern piety, and your leaders are oblivious to that fact; they even resent having it pointed out to them. Our kids will now grow up with Calvary's Blood and similar Steve Pettit fluff.

But tell me about your fundamentalism. Where would I go to find a culturally informed and aesthetically appropriate form of Fundamentalism? Bear in mind: it doesn't much matter what you like or dislike. I'm not asking what your family listens to around the dinner table. What matters is that larger set of shared virtues and ideas, that metaphysical dream that will shape the worship of the next generations.

Where would I find that, Phil?  Where does this Fundamentalist style come from? Greenville? Minneapolis? Detroit? Dunbar? Cedarville? Pensacola? Watertown? Clearwater? It is as easy to dismiss your critics today as it was yesterday, but I think the burden falls on you to a) show us an acceptable Christian culture for the 21^st Century, or b) explain why it has become unnecessary.