Russell Moore on Bugs Bunny and the ‘Emergent’ Phenomenon

Russell Moore takes an interesting angle on the ‘Emergent’ church movement in an article posted at the site of the Carl F. H. Henry Institute for Evangelical Engagement. In “Bugs Bunny Meets Brian McLaren: Christianity, Pop Culture, and the Quest for Hip,” Moore makes some interesting points. As he sees it, “the problem is not simply with the postmodern fuzziness of Brian McLaren and his devotees. The problem instead is that American evangelicalism long ago sold out to cultural accommodation to the consumerist, therapeutic ethos of contemporary American society. Now that side of evangelicalism is as “lame” in the eyes of the culture as a Looney Tunes cartoon from the 1960s. And so, evangelicalism ‘reinvents’ itself—in the image of a brooding, angst-ridden twenty-something coffeehouse culture.” More: “Of course, there is more than one expression of the ’emergent’ phenomenon—and not all of it is bad. The call to community and authenticity in life together are as old as the New Testament. Some of the worship practices that are emerging from the emergent church are an improvement on the canned infotainment of standard evangelical fare. But within the McLaren wing of the ’emergent’ church, the simultaneous rejection of propositional truth and Christocentric revelation—-coupled with a suspicion of authority in general-—result in a Christianity that just happens to coincide with the cynical milieu of reality television, NPR-style religious pluralism, and the postmodern fads of the local university English department.” What does all this have to do with Bugs Bunny? Go here to find out.