I want to push back, if ever so slightly, on the bolded part. Growing up as I did, in a charismatic-lite LMC church in the 80's-00's; I never got the sense that the epithet of "legalism" was thrown at conservatives for being conservative as such. Indeed, our church was almost uniformly, theologically conservative and held on to some traditional Mennonite positions related to women in leadership, divorce and remarriage, and church discipline. When certain folk, often those from a Mennonite background and raised in LMC/FMC settings in the 50's & 60's, used the term legalism; they meant traditions and rules and rituals that they felt, were deadening, held back the Spirit and kept NMB folk from being able to fully join our community. Their aversion to acapella hymn singing fit then with that analysis.Josh wrote: ↑Thu Jan 25, 2024 7:55 amThanks for sharing your perspective, Sudsy, and I see something interesting here.I guess I would call what you are talking about as one's spirituality based on certain ways they believe and practise their beliefs. To me, legalism is more a trait that some of the most conservative forms of Christianity fall into that requires very spelled out ways of believing and strict living requirements.
“Legalism” is a term reserved for criticising people who are more conservative. That seems to literally be all it is. The fact there are very legalistic structures inside charismatic circles doesn’t matter - well, unless you’re like an old friend of mine who grew up in such circles, and now claims she grew up with just legalism and works (she identifies as lgbt/nonbinary these days and is very big into “grace”).
This means accusations of “legalism” really are just a way to say that another person is more conservative than I am, and I don’t like it. It has no substance at all as to whether someone believes in salvation via faith and grace, and so on.
I think they were ultimately wrong and the tragic trajectory our church took can, in large part, be laid at their "fleeing of legalism" and embracing fad after fad simply because it was new. To your original point, their pursuit of newness because it felt like "being led by the Spirit" became our tradition, a deadening one, and one that turned many of the young people off to Christianity altogether, drove them toward High Church traditions or, in the case of a few of us, drove us towards a fuller Anabaptism.
My church's story is emblematic of something I've been reading the past 2 weeks. If I could put a title to the various essays I've been reading it might be something like: "What happened to Evangelicalism?". Something I read yesterday in Hedgehog Review seemed to really jibe with your analysis and my own home Church's history:
In our Church, in the name of freedom, we threw over much of our Mennonite tradition, rules and culture and became slaves to the whims and reactions to American culture.Evangelicalism is one example of such a flood. And the conditions that caused this deluge are the distinct set of products that make up “American culture,” including especially secularization, consumerism, and economic trends that have driven religion into the sphere of the marketplace—and into a condition wherein religious beliefs are valued for their cultural relevance. The phenomenon we call evangelicalism, in short, cannot be extricated from American religiosity.
Put another way, evangelicalism is the form the Christian religion tends to take within modern American culture. It is impossible to be an American Christian without being heavily influenced by evangelicalism—I would even say that it is nearly impossible to be a white, American Christian without being an evangelical. This is why even many who strenuously protest again the shape of contemporary evangelicalism—criticizing, for example, its penchant for toxic masculinity or white Christian nationalism—still often benefit from and unwittingly perpetuate its existence. As the proliferation of the so-called “ex-evangelical” online community shows, leaving evangelicalism isn’t always as easy it looks—even when you are keenly engaged in the process of religious deconstruction.
That’s not to say that evangelical is a static identity. Because it is so easily influenced by popular culture, evangelicalism readily adapts to the wider scene, but we can identify shifts in it that each remain identifiably and largely the same even as they take shape in opposition to a previous iteration of the identity. This, again, is because evangelicalism is not a form of voluntary association—like a political party, a social organization, or even another sort of religious institution like the Roman Catholic Church. As historian Molly Worthen argued in her 2013 book Apostles of Reason, evangelicalism has always suffered from a “crisis of authority”—and abortive attempts on the part of pastors, intellectuals, and denominational institutions to insulate the movement from the winds of change. Freed from institutional trappings and guardrails, evangelicalism is free to change and adapt but remains always a deeply cultural phenomenon.
