Saturday, October 07, 2006

Megachurches Without God

Primary Democratic netroots mover Markos Moulitsas, who runs the Daily Kos website, has a new project in mind: megachurches for liberals. Or at least, large churchlike objects in the Midwest where liberals can go and have cafes, child care, community events, and the other things that those Christians have. Among evangelicals, there is some suspicion that the independent churches Kos wants to imitate are a mile wide and an inch deep spiritually, but that stereotype is probably tinged with some jealousy on our part. And even the most disapproving of us don't believe that they are purely social-political organizations.

There's just so many directions to go here. First, the nondenominational megachurches are strongly Republican, but not unanimously so. I think that's a serious misread of what's going on there. Secondly, what does he think is going to be the draw for people to actually show up? How long does he think people will provide free babysitting for an amorphous progressivism? And what day will they come? This looks like Air America all over again.

There are SNL routines just waiting to be written about this.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The problem is that left wingers are cheap when it comes to supporting stuff like that with their OWN MONEY.

They'd gladly bankrupt someone else though.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

As well as could be. My second son is taking a job in Houston, and I drive him down starting the 14th. A long haul, but not knowing when he'll be back is harder. He will actually be working as a filmmaker at one of those megachurches - a Methodist Church, no less. I didn't know the Methodists went in for that. They certainly don't in New England. But in Texas, things are different. But it's a good example of the lack of conservative unanimity I referred to in my post. UMC headquarters tends to be pretty liberal politically. Even if that's different in Texas and in big churches, I still don't see that their 6500 members is likely to be 6500 guarranteed conservative Republican votes.

Thanks for asking.

Anonymous said...

Air America indeed. As with the new Faithful Democrats website, they simply don't get it. How they can, with a a straight face, work to banish faith from the public sphere while simultaneously embracing faith in their politics is simply incomprehensible. It demonstrates just how badly they misunderstand the problem they have. They are antithetical to faith and no amount of effort will change that. Only a change of heart will help but should that happen, they would not longer be moonbats and their current efforts would be unnecessary.