Today’s issue: the healthcare disaster in these United States of America.

As you can see from this news clip, health coverage has become so bad — so freaking inadequate — that one major illness is now a one-way ticket to bankruptcy. More than 60 percent of bankruptcies are the result of one thing: medical expenses.

And that leads me to two quick rants:

1. Evangelicals who get so self-righteous about people’s financial troubles (“they have only themselves to blame for their poor spending choices”) are, more and more, off-base in their criticism.

2. I don’t know about your church, but from my experience, issues like healthcare are never mentioned from the pulpit. There is a generic acknowledgment that things are tough (“it sure is a tough economy here in Michigan, but remember, God is in control”) but the overall tone is to keep things upbeat and happy and all that. After all, “seeker-sensitive” churches have to be happy shiny places all the time. Ugh. Would it really hurt to actually tackle a real issue?

I unashamedly support a complete overhaul of health insurance in the U.S., one which provides universal coverage and which protects people from economic ruin when they become sick. So yeah, I fit in reeeeeeaaaaaalllllly well with mainstream evangelicalism, which thinks any help for normal people is socialism. (Where is the eyeroll emoticon?)

“Then this Daniel was preferred above the presidents and princes, because an excellent spirit was in him; and the king thought to set him over the whole realm.” Daniel 6:3

I’m reading the book of Daniel in recent weeks. It has always been an amazing story of one man who followed God and thrived in the most secular of cultures; how much worse can it get, when your empire (Babylon) becomes the eternal symbol for decadance, naked power and purely temporal gain? Yet in the midst of that, Daniel was not only faithful, he was also a leader and a man who somehow succeeded despite having a slightly different playbook.

Today on a message board, the question came up: ”Are Muslims taking over the world?” I replied that I’ve heard this tune before; the hippies, Commies, liberals, gays, humanists and everyone else are also going to “destroy our way of life”, depending on what the bogeyman is at the moment.

I get a little baffled when I see evangelical fear-mongering. We seem to be shocked that people are gay, or that they’ve adopted a different religion. Really, though, does it change our role? Why do we draw lines in the sand and toss soundbites back and forth like hand grenades? Why do we need the “one man/one woman” bumper stickers? What purpose do they serve except to identify us as being on the “red team”, and thus opposed to the “blue team” which has a different agenda?

Daniel’s model of engagement is much different. Yes, his lifestyle and his worldview are different than the dominant culture. But I don’t see him “bumperstickering” his differences around like he’s trying to win some prize. He is what he is — a talented person, a person who serves his community, and who has put his skills to use for the benefit of a king who isn’t even on the same page as Daniel (however — and this is signifcant — he genuinely likes Daniel).

Daniel’s model of prayer and worship and lifestyle isn’t chest-pounding or showy. He goes to a private place and prays. It is matter-of-fact and habitual and part of an entire lifestyle that is foreign and threatening to others around him. And even when he’s called out for his lifestyle — and accused of a crime because of it — he doesn’t appeal to anyone’s sense of justice or fairness. He doesn’t try to win a culture war. He realizes he is in a secular whirlwind, and he can only appeal to God in this case anyway, and he does that. Fortunately for him, God works a miracle to prevent Daniel’s likely death at the hands of a pack of lions.

I hope in this culture I can have an excellent spirit. I don’t see the age as secular so much as it is “crazy.” America is too churched to be considered secular (we aren’t Sweden, for heaven’s sake), but the church is so strange to me that I hate to say our churchiness is even a great thing. America is going through a hard time right now, and our economy is not the only thing that we’re learning isn’t working right anymore.

One of my favorite Onion pieces is an irreverent article that ran a few years ago. Developmentally Disabled Burger King Employee Only Competent Worker (which I’m sure is offensive to pretty much anyone who understands disability, or who worked in fast food, but bear with me here) makes a very compelling point about the ways in which we allow the complexities of life to make us less than what we should be. The article shows a typical fast food restaurant, where the “normal” workers are shown to be lazy, insolent, and self-absorbed. The disabled person, by contrast, is actually an effective worker and positive influence — apparently oblivious to the common beliefs we all have about menial work, manual labor and low wages. The supposedly difficult environment of a low-prestige job, which produces negativity in many people, appears to be a joy to one person.

How much does our intelligence hold us back? A person of normal intellect is aware of what’s going on around him, he hears the Big Picture on the news, and he listens to the comments of friends and neighbors. All of that data can be crippling. If a child grows up in a home where menial labor is disparaged as undignified, how happy will this child be when he or she must begin a career by working a low-level job?

As adults, we do the same thing to ourselves. We want to achieve great things everywhere — at work, with our kids, in our homes, in our social networks. There can come a point where there are too many duties, too much to do, and too many areas where things aren’t going well.

The swirl of complexity causes us to freeze up. It is hard to meet an ambitious sales goal if you are too scattered to pick up the phone right now. We want to do large things but are afraid to do the small thing. Because what if we choose Door Number One and it takes an hour longer than we expect and thus Doors Number Two Through Fifteen are neglected? The fear of choice can cause a terrible passivity. The fear seems to be amplified in the intelligent person, who is aware of a lot more and thus distracted by a lot more.

Sometimes the answer is fairly simple. Like Peter choosing to take one step at a time, walking on the water toward Jesus, we need to take a step away from the static and complexity and just walk slowly, soberly and happily. Our calmness indicates a faith in God and His direction, our settledness proves we truly have faith.

Jesus told us to be like “little children.” In essence, He insists that we step away from the overly complex ways in which we entangle ourselves, with our attitudes and sense of entitlement and discouragements and perfectionism and competitiveness, and simply do those things that give life. Children eat when hungry and ask for help when stumped and ask for what they want without an ounce of self-consciousness. Our adult minds trick us out of such a direct, simple approach. And we are all miserable.

Here is one of the most telling quotes:

Evangelicalism has used its educational system primarily to staff its own needs and talk to itself.

I totally agree with that analysis, and that may be the key to the whole thing. It is hard to exert influence on a culture when you don’t understand anything about it. Evangelicals can go to movies, buy CDs, listen to the radio and buy books that are marketed only to them and which speak a language that is only understood by those who attend church regularly. The heaviest issues in the typical church are: having a great family, having a great marriage, stopping the gays from marrying, and donating to the new building campaign. There is an inability and unwillingness to engage in the culture (beyond being opposed to homosexuality and abortion) that is astonishing. 

To best make my point, I can point to one of the great moral debates of the last decade. This issue was debated endlessly on network news shows, National Public Radio, This American Life, major news magazines and newspapers, and yet was (to my knowledge) almost never mentioned in churches: waterboarding. It is, to many people, torture. And it was, the evidence is clear, practiced by the United States government.

The fact that U.S. churches (and Christian radio and Christian magazines and Christian TV) were silent on one of the  great moral issues of our day speaks volumes about our complicity with conservatism (which Spencer rightly points out) and our squeamishness about engaging in a dialogue about issues of basic human rights, human dignity and human suffering. It is just the latest issue in which evangelicals have been on the wrong side of history, or have arrived way too late to the party. Some other examples:

* Many Christian conservatives were wrong on the MLK holiday debate in the 80s.

* Wrong on South African apartheid in the 80s.

* Wrong on AIDS for nearly two decades, and horrendously slow to respond. Today, mega-pastor Rick Warren and his wife are devoting considerable resources to this issue, which should be commended. However, in interviews, Mrs. Warren talks as though she just learned about AIDS in the past five years. Honestly, that’s embarrassing.

* Wrong on the environment for what, 30-40 years? While “save the earth” was a college campus mantra back before the Beatles broke up, it is only in this decade that evangelicals have decided to give tentative approval to actually saving trees and rivers. Nice thought, but gosh, where have you guys been?

The list goes on, and on, and on. The church loves to position itself as an agent of change, but its track record suggests it is a cheerleader for the status quo. Which may explain why so many captains of industry and Chamber of Commerce folks feel so comfortable in today’s evangelical church. There is so little discussion of community and accountability, which makes the church little different than the consumer mentality that it ought to be redeeming.

Kudos to Spencer for the article. It’s a lot to think about. While I don’t see a collapse — I don’t see how such a thing is possible, given the mind-boggling numbers at megachurch services and the amounts of money that flows through churches and parachurch organizations — I do see important signs of cultural marginalization. There is no influence on a culture when one has nothing interesting to tell them. Perhaps this dire chapter will end when a new kind of church learns to speak a language that the world understands, and finds compelling. One model — and there are many others in Scripture – would be Paul’s eloquent lecture at Mars Hill. The Apostle knew not only doctrine; he also knew what it meant to be relevant in his culture.

That’s what we need today. While institutional evangelicalism collapses, perhaps a new relevance will be born.

I saw the new Watchmen film during its opening weekend. It was kind of a pilgrimage for any comic fan, as Watchmen is widely regarded as the greatest comic ever written.

For what it is, I liked the movie. It’s fairly slavish to the book, to the point of lifting entire lines of dialogue straight from Alan Moore’s original comic script and re-creating costumes and scenery so that they look as though they were ripped from the comic panels.

One of the themes of the movie and the book is the Cold War sense of dread. The book is set in 1985 (and was published only a year or two after that), and there is much talk of nuclear annihilation as the U.S. and USSR ramp up the aggression. This comes across in the book as well.

The book, however, is better at getting across the sense of angst and dread that is central to the modern mind. In the middle of the portion of the book, there is a quote from a character (a prison psychologist) who expresses some of the unease and despair that runs through the book:

“The horror is this: in the end, it is simply a picture of empty meaningless blackness. We are alone. There is nothing else.”

For the Christian, who believes something IS there (both in this life and after life is over), such an outlook is difficult to understand. Personally, I’m not threatened by it. However, the unnerving thing is that I may not believe in despair and existential meaningless as a concept, but I still manage to find myself in despair at times. And that creates a unique difficulty for me; my faith teaches me that life is not pointless, yet my current circumstances and difficulties are telling me otherwise. So what do I do with that disconnect? Supress it? Talk myself out of it? Or, do I roll with it and see where it takes me? That doesn’t seem to jive with my faith, either.

Perhaps we are on the verge of an era when the question of despair will have to be taken up with more seriousness and savvy by the church. We are watching people struggle as never before. Jobs have disappeared, savings are shrinking, and people are dealing with the reality of their lives uprooted and their life plans changing, often drastically. People who played by the rules may feel the rules betrayed them. For many, there will be a heavy temptation to conclude “life’s not fair”, and who are we to tell them different when circumstances have hit them much harder than they’ve hit us?

There is despair. And there is hope. And I feel like there is a large ground in between those two extremes. Perhaps that is where we experience God most intimately, when we are trying to navigate that middle ground, holding onto faith even when it seems like the faith has led us into a minefield. Being honest about those struggles gives us a common ground to commiserate with those who know only despair. If we can assure them that yes, we’ve been there, they’ll be more likely to listen to us. Watchmen has struck a chord with a generation of readers, and the movie may also strike a chord with millions of moviegoers. Hopefully we’re able to dialogue with these people in an intelligent way.