I'm having all kinds of thoughts about the falling apart of American protestantism (and Christianity in general) into two halves in the early twentieth century.

I think the fundamentalist/modernist controversy was a good deal more disastrous than I'd given it credit for, and that disaster has played itself out most thoroughly on the level of political theology and the Christian experience of the public sphere.

Hypothesis: the paranoia and deformation of political experience that stem from feeling like "Christians" as such are excluded from political power or from the center of the culture is really quite toxic. And I think it's unnecessary.

Dismissing Obama's and Hillary's Christianity as utterly fake, as Evangelicals tend to, is maybe not a great thing. And maybe we shouldn't dismiss Biden's either. IDK. Maybe we should. I certainly think we can say "they are wrong to support abortion." But...

Here's what each side needs from the other; here's what we lose if we continue this framework:

Evangelicals lose a sense of responsibility, agency, contact w/ wider trust networks outside their bubble, and a sense of the good of otherness, curiosity towards the strange.

The mainline loses lively belief in the propositions of the creeds, a heartfelt connection to the God who literally became a baby, actual hope for the resurrection of the dead, and ethical orthodoxy about sex.

p sure we need each other and should be praying for the reunification of these two branches of those who call on Jesus' name (more quietly in one case than the other but still). Thank God for the American mainline and may the Holy Spirit breathe into it.