Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Why Don't Liberals Love Megachurches?   [Peter Suderman]

Responding to an excerpt from Dan Gilgoff’s book on James Dobson and evangelical politics, The Jesus Machine (NRO reviewed it here ), Ezra Klein makes what I think is a pretty astute point about the liberal disconnect from religion, specifically from one of its most powerful current incarnations: the megachurch.

I've made this point before, but so many of us experience James Dobson in his political incarnation that we forget that his prominence and power comes precisely because millions of Americans don't. The megachurches, with their remarkably innovative techniques for constructing social capital and a feeling of connectedness, have been fairly explicit responses to greater geographic dispersal, weakened family ties, and increased insecurity, and so forth. Many of us who don't experience the megachurches as anything but occasionally malign actors on the national stage are quite poor, I fear, at understanding why they are important and why their influence is proving durable. Which is odd, given that the very foundations of the liberal critique of contemporary society — increased economic risk, civic deterioration, etc — are exactly what the churches help address.

I’ve spent considerable amounts of time in and around large, modern, community-centered churches, and one thing that has always irked me about mainstream media coverage and liberal criticisms of megachurches is that the people making the criticisms have rarely spent much time in them and, consequently, just don’t seem to really understand them. They’re treated as bizarre cult centers, or, at best, opportunities for curious sociological examination by bemused liberals (who we're supposed to understand are above all this religion stuff), rather than the fairly mainstream centers of modern suburban life that they are in many areas. And, as Ezra smartly points out, megachurches actually provide a lot of the social and community support that progressives claim to care about—and even better, from my perspective, they tend to do it privately.

The church I grew up in, for example, provided significant financial support for needs in the local community, regardless of whether they were members/attendees, as well as a gym, basketball court, plays, classes, clubs, and various other community events and facilities—most open to the public, not just members. Many megachurches provide exactly the sort of facilities and programs you see progressives arguing should be provided by government, and they manage to do so largely without public funding. Progressive activists , however, tend to be suspicious of—if not outright hostile toward—religious groups that perform these services, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

This is also one of the reasons why calls from liberal Christians for various government-run social programs have always bothered me: churches can (and do) do that sort of outreach on their own, without reaching into taxpayers' wallets.

03/27 03:48 PMShare