Is This Really What is Wrong with the Churches?

The Epoch Times misses the point.

“Are American Churches Failing Their Mission?” asks the Epoch Times, featuring an interview with Lucas Miles, author of a new book, Woke Jesus.

Yes, is the answer. The churches most certainly are failing their mission. But this interview has nothing to do with its title. This interviewee says nothing about why the churches are failing — at least not the self-styled traditional, orthodox, conservative churches. Instead, he uses the opportunity to lambast leftist churches for their “Marxism” — and their success. Worse, he indulges in excoriating the Left precisely into order to avoid addressing the failures of the Right.

In doing this, he borrows a clever technique from his counterparts in secular conservative groups, who know that inveighing against the Left brings more attention and donations than examinating the many defeats of the Right. Nothing does more to explain the triumph of the far Left in the last few years than the stubborn refusal of the Right to examine the “sin within” itself. In fact, those who do are quickly ostracized (excommunicated?).

This stubbornness (“hard-heartedness”?) is especially ironic and inexcusable in a Christian context, where repentance is the first step toward reform. The Left has long practiced rigorous “self-criticism”. While they may have learned the idea from Mao, it is actually a Christian principle. But today it seems foreign to conservatives who claim to uphold “Judeo-Christian values”, which explains a lot about why they always lose.

The silliness, recklessness, indeed heresies of leftist churches do not explain the failures and defeats of orthodox churches. After all, the Left does win.

I have already explained some of those failures and defeats in an earlier post. (And for years, I and others have described more profound abdications of responsibility by the churches, especially deserting families.) The point here is that this sleight-of-hand fools too many into thinking that our professional leaders are doing their job when they are really deflecting criticism for not doing it. Many comments on the interview seem favorable, because the interviewer and interviewee say all the right things about the evils of “Marxism”. But as with the secular version, the trick offers no remedies.

Here I am commenting only on the interview, not the book, which I have not read. Perhaps the author is more constructive there, but either way, it reflects poorly on the media organization that features him. Especially troubling, the interviewer is one of the Epoch Times’ better reporters.

If we are going to turn the present situation around, we must all better scrutinize our own leaders in the media, publishing houses, and other conservative institutions, as well as ourselves.