CHRISTIAN INFLUENCE IN AMERICA
(Monday) We should worry less about America's Christian conservatives. They are more American than they are Christian or conservative. -- Alan Wolfe

More from Wolfe: The most extreme form such radical individualism takes is the home church movement. Like those conservative Christian parents who remove their children from public (and private) schools in order to instruct them by themselves, home churchers take Protestant distrust of theologians and clergy to its logical conclusion. "It was so dead for me," writes a believer named Jenny Orr about her experiences in church. "I watched as people were going nuts and dancing and shouting and I felt like I was looking at this through some kind of soundproof and feeling-proof glass... I could feel the flow become a trickle, and then nothing at all." One day, as she was praying, her five-year-old daughter Katy came up to her and handed her a cup filled with dirt, which she took as a sign that the faith she had been practising was impure. "That was it for me," Jenny declared, for she knew at that moment that God had released her to find her own way of worshipping. When Jenny recalls what she calls the "Sunday morning dog and pony shows," she wonders how she ever could have been a regular churchgoer. "Nine o'clock," she realises, "is no holier or more apt to put you in touch with God than any other hour." God does not want his believers to be "weak and co-dependent on a structure or a man to tell us how to think or what to say or to define who we are in Christ."

And more: No other aspect of their faith is as important to conservative Protestants as worship: prayer, visible and frequent, is what attracts them to church. But worship in conservative Protestant America rarely involves introspective efforts to honour a supreme being whose concerns are other-worldly. "Lord, give me a clean X-ray when I go for a mammogram next week" or "God, help the search committee find a new pastor for the church," are some of the forms taken by prayer at one Baptist church in New Jersey. At an evangelical church women's group in the suburbs of New York City, each participant has a chance to ask God to respond to her concerns, and, as she does, others take notes so that they can pray for their friends during the week. Those concerns, moreover, are anything but other-worldly: most involve health, money, and real estate, along with issues facing the church. We should not doubt the meaning that worship has for conservative Christians. But nor should we ignore the fact that, judging by how many believers express themselves in prayer, these are people who believe that God helps those who focus on themselves.


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