Evangelicals Bring The Noise And Complain About It

Every so often I get exposed to the modern American Christian experience, which seems to me to be a sanitized version of a rock concert. Morality, despite being very important does not actually have much to do with your spiritual life. It is kind of like a ground floor deal- if you are behaving yourself, congratulations; now get about the business of prayer, meditation, etc... So what I think I am seeing is the removal of morally objectional material from a secular (or it could be argued, pagan) experience. The mere presence of a bunch of people in one place seems to produce elation in some people, and apparently it is assumed that wherever two or three amplifiers are gathered in one place, there also is Christ.

In this particular case I was struck by one song, which had a line saying to the effect of 'I am trying to hear over all the noise.'
I do believe this is true. You, my dear, usually female, American Christian, are trying to hear over all the noise that you generate. You can't stand the sound of silence, so you want music playing non-stop, or the television on, or friends over. The still small voice has a lot to compete with, because you are too afraid to sit in silence. The Christian branding of this stuff just means it is, usually, morally inoffensive- to you anyway, since it is very often morally offensive to me because there is a lot of un-admitted feminist dogma masquerading as Christian in these things. So what does this mean? Whatever spiritual effect you get out of this stuff is highly similar to the same spiritual effect you'd get from a secular rock concert. The sexual undertones would just be more explicit in a normal rock concert.
One of these Christian songs actually had the line 'take me all the way' in it. I don't know what that line means when sung to God, but I do have a strong urge to remind you that God is not your boyfriend, husband, etc..., nor it He particularly happy when you view him in this way. He wants you to be fruitful and multiply, which means you need to find a human husband. In 1st Timothy, St. Paul actually says women are saved through motherhood. Obviously, this is said in the context of a pre-existing belief in Christ, but there are some serious implications in that letter. Why must that young widow get married again, but it's just peachy for the average American Christian woman to go to college and start a career in the midst of her most fertile years?

The outcome of these events? What does the secular world come up with when it is trying to be generous? Random acts of kindness. Remember the movie Pay It Forward? There's also the Emperor Julian, who decided Christianity was bad, but he did think the charitable thing was a good idea. But this is the crux of it- you end up with a random morality and little to no knowledge of God. Prophecy is pretty suspect in America. There are certainly Christian people who know things are going badly with America, but the people actually putting together the systems we will need to survive tend not to be Christian. They may be deceived about the nature of God, but they are not deceived about the nature of entertainment.