From an interesting site, The Other Journal, which I found via linkage from Harbinger:

Finally, the Anti-Manicheist drew my attention to The Other Journal, which looks excellent, if you’re interested in Christian reflection on culture and politics. A recent issue has interviews with Stanley Hauerwas, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and Tony Campolo.

An Interview with Stanley Hauerwas by Dan Rhoades

And I think also, George Bush, his Christian faith, is the Christian faith of Alcoholics Anonymous. You can quite understand that. It never seems to occur to him what it would mean to be a part of a Church and under ecclesial authority, and to have your language tested by ecclesial authority. I mean, I’m sure he’s very genuine in his religious faith, I just don’t think very much of his faith. For someone like me to say that, you think well that’s very arrogant. And its true, it is very arrogant. And I think that one of the things that we suffer from in America is that religious people thinking secularity is such an enemy, that any religious faith is better than no religious faith. That is a deep mistake! There are very perverse forms of religious faith, that, give me a secularist any day compared to some of the forms of religious faith. And I must say, I think that Evangelicalism bares the brunt of a lot of this. I think that it is far to a-ecclesial and Evangelicals tend to turn the gospel in a system of belief rather than a body of people through which we are embraced through God’s salvation that makes us different.

That last statement is important: “a body of people through which we are embraced”. This is the glaring omission of the Church; even when all political/economic relations are left out of the equation; before I was politically aware, I was longing for the kind of place that took call seriously; took each other seriously; and lived our Church’s corporate life as a journey toward finding our call; and helping one another toward that quest. Here, the minimum requirement is some sort of a radical commitment to be on a journey TOGETHER.

To find that, that is the first step. And then to find a place and a community that stands apart from the culture and sees commmon assumptions about life for what they are: fantasies; false ideologies; idolatries; quick fixes. Violence, materialism, idolatry of lifestlye. What’s the Bible talking about when it talks about “Darkness”? It’s part of that whole deceptive, seducing settling for the most popular ways. The true alternative, radically different, alternative life that Jesus called “abundant” is far different than the “American Dream”. It is a new kind of community, living under a different reality.