If you really want to follow the development of conservative Christianity, track its musical hits. In the early 1900s you might have heard “The Old Rugged Cross,” a celebration of the atonement. By the 1980s you could have shared the Jesus-is-my-buddy intimacy of “Shine, Jesus, Shine.” And today, more and more top songs feature a God who is very big, while we are…well, hark the David Crowder Band: “I am full of earth/ You are heaven’s worth/ I am stained with dirt/ Prone to depravity.”
So says the “new” Calvinism. I prefer to be fearfully and wonderfully made.
There’s just something about a systematically rigid, utterly self-deprecatory worldview that riles up the kiddos these days. (And this from a Presbyterian.)
Does Time Magazine ever learn?