James Moore, 46 year old theologian and prose stylist, delivers himself of some tacky thoughts on a simpleton's faith.

I am intrigued by emergence for many reasons. I haven't yet ranked all the reasons for my interest—my wife wants me to get started on that—but high on the list has to be its daft theology: things like Moore's thoughts on Mister Rogers, McLaren's daffy commentary on Resurrection & Digestion and Scandrette's pathetic beat poetry.

But I have noticed not just its discontinuity with orthodoxy, which leaps out at anyone who's read the Bible, but its continuities with American evangelicalism. Like the fundamentalists and the neo-evangelicals before them, emergents have nursed this provincial attitude toward "community". Take a look at any of the three movements and you are struck by the insularity of them all, and each successive eccentricity has been touted as a remnant's reach back to some pristine Evangel. Yet what survives is conspicuously unattractive, unsuccessful, and isolated from the whole. Fundamentalism didn't preserve orthodoxy, neo-evangelicalism didn't preserve orthopraxy, and emergence can't even preserve meaning.

Emergence is Storytime-Over-at-the-Asylum. It is a demand that the testimony of the Evangelists be overpowered by the telling of a unique personal narrative we'll dignify with the word journey. So now we can all pretend that James Moore has something relevant to tell us about what is "right and correct with the world".

In the fog of the culture war we have overlooked one of the most important gifts of culture.

In a democratic culture people are inclined to believe that it is presumptuous to claim to have better taste than your neighbor. By doing so you are implicitly denying his right to be the thing that he is. You like Bach, she likes U2; you like Leonardo, he likes Mucha; she likes Jane Austen, you like Danielle Steele. Each of you exists in his own enclosed aesthetic world, and so long as neither harms the other, each says good morning over the fence, there is nothing further to be said.

But things are not so simple, as the democratic argument already implies. If it is so offensive to look down on another's taste, it is, as the democrat recognizes, because taste is intimately bound up with our personal life and moral identity. It is part of our rational nature to strive for a community of judgment, a shared conception of value, since that is what reason and the moral life require.

Of all that might be said about the inadequate aesthetics of contemporary liturgy, probably the most immediately recognizable fault is its austere parochialism. It would not be at all unfair to observe that for the last century the Christian religion has lacked any community of judgment. Not in the pulpit and not at the altar.

Whatever new remedy comes down the pike, examine it to see if it gives a fig about preserving a community of judgment worth handing down to our children.