Today, TGC carries my big post-election analysis on the future of America and of evangelical Christianity within it. I don’t sugarcoat it:

After this election, how do I look my neighbors in the eye and tell them that, as an evangelical, I’m an ambassador from an invisible kingdom ruled by love and righteousness? That might have been credible if the church had resisted both candidates forcefully. But now?

American evangelicalism has sold its birthright for a bowl of bean soup. It remains to be seen whether it will get the bean soup; I’m skeptical. But the birthright is gone either way.

My favorite review of my book on Calvinism included the observations that “there is no beating around the bush with Forster” and “Forster nailed his colors to the mast.”

There is, however, hope – there always is with this Forster guy:

We need to face this crisis not with fear, but with confidence in God and the gospel. This emphatically does not mean we should only talk about the gospel and never talk about politics or other public matters. It means we participate in public life in a way shaped by our gospel transformation.

We need confidence not only in God and the gospel, but also that godly life is possible—here, now, in the present age, in our nation and culture. Yes, even in 2016.

My six-point plan to build a responsible evangelical political witness (darn it, it should have been five points!) makes a brief appearance.

As always, your comments are very welcome!

Today EdChoice runs the last installment in my series on the future of education and school accountability in a pluralistic society. I argue the contemporary challenge can be met with a focus on school choice, local polity and – perhaps hardest and most important of all – a new description of what education is and is for, something reformers are uniquely positioned to provide.

I particularly stress the need for the school choice movement to go beyond – without repudiating – its rhetoric about markets and competition:

The most important argument for letting parents hold schools accountable (through choice) is that parents are allowed to know what is true, good and beautiful. The whole point of education is to cultivate the power to achieve and appreciate these transcendent things. The whole challenge of education in a pluralistic environment is that we disagree about them, so there are major limits to government’s ability to act upon them. Empowering parents does not by itself make the whole problem of pluralism go away, but it must be at the center of any viable solution…

Schools of choice are allowed to know what they believe, and can therefore have both freedom and community. This is why federal data show private schools already outperform public schools dramatically across a wide variety of measures of school culture, including cooperation among staff, shared understanding of school mission, consistent enforcement of rules, administrative support of teachers, lower ethnic tension and satisfaction with working conditions…

Establishing a strong connection between parents and schools is another key benefit. This is probably a major factor in a notable fact that researchers struggle to explain: School choice produces very impressive increases in important outcomes that are non-cognitive and character-related—like high school graduation rates—even as test score improvements, while consistent, are more moderate. In one of the most important educational books of our generation, sociologist James Davison Hunter shows how the formation of the child is critically hindered when children perceive a disconnect between key authority figures in their education—especially parents and teachers.

This series has been a big challenge but a lot of fun to write. As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Not really, no. But at The Green Room I kick off a new blog series with some thoughts about how Greg Thompson’s paradigm of three inadequate models of the kingdom could be used in a new way:

Each of these types exist because it is responding to a real and important theological impetus. For this reason, each type has strengths that are theologically and missionally important. However, because each type tends to pay attention to its own pet concern to the detriment of other concerns, each type develops characteristic weaknesses.

Doesn’t this point a way forward? What if, instead of running around in circles trying to build a perfect church in the sky, we focused on the concrete models of godliness we find in other kinds of churches around us?

The disadvantage is, nobody gets to say they invented the new model of how to do church. The advantage is, we actually get the new model!

As always, your thoughts are much appreciated.

EdChoice has posted Part 4 of my series on education and pluralism, in which I focus on the individual, the family and the American experiment:

What is distinctive about pluralistic education is the view that the individual does not make the fullest use of these capacities unless he or she is aware of multiple possible alternatives – different visions of what is best and highest in human life – and free to pursue the ones that seem best to him or her, but responsible to choose rationally and wisely, not just on a whim or in obedience to raw emotions. We hold this view because we have a particular understanding of human nature, one that has always been central to the American experiment.

As always, your comments are welcome!

This is just unbearably sad. I’m not sure which would be worse, if this were coming from her or from her parents.

Please, please, for the love of God, I’m begging: Grow a soul and walk away.