My latest on how to tighten up loosey-goosey churches is at The Green Room:

One of the things America needs most, and that we most need in order to reconnect the church to American culture, is a narrative of the American experiment that does justice to both the role of Christianity and the role of the Enlightenment’s rationalism and Romanticism – to recognize the religious ambiguity of the American experiment, and the consequent fact that Christians and non-Christians need each other if we’re interested in avoiding a perpetual cycle of culture wars and fundamentalisms.

Accommodation paradigm churches, with their mastery of the culture’s system of symbols and their desire to help interpret grace to a graceless world, would be supremely positioned to supply us with such a narrative. They need only rouse themselves to slough off the pseudo-pragmatism they have imbibed from the culture sufficiently to realize that the past matters.