At 82, the man who contributed more than anyone else except Ronald Reagan to the defeat of communism is gone. William F. Buckley, Jr. was found at his desk today, in all likelihood doing the same task to which he had devoted his life, crafting prose. You can sample his dialectical style in a compilation of Charlie Rose interviews here. The hour-long show features Buckley's wit, his caprice, his gift for friendship. There are some good features in the New York Times obituary, especially the audio backstory by biographer Sam Tanenhaus.

Buckley was that rare man whose example became deeper over time.

When I first started watching Firing Line in high school, it was his defiance of prevailing standards that captured me. I felt empowered to realize that the grey world of leftism could be dismissed, and that individuality was not dead.

But the longer I watched Firing Line, the more dependent I became. Buckley brought me not only deep discussions of politics, but of art, music, theology, novels, and foreign cultures. Buckley was more than a combative conservative; he was a partisan for the enjoyment of life.

In particular, Buckley's interview with Malcolm Muggeridge from the late 1970s showed me that Christianity was bigger than sentimentality. My grandpa first introduced me to it, and I watched it repeatedly, wearing out the videotape and practically memorizing the conversation.

Firing Line was a breath of air for a teenager in the intellectually suffocating culture of evangelicalism.

But the fall of the Soviet Union raised Buckley's significance -- and elevated his example for me. At the start of Buckley's career in the early 1950s, anti-communism was intellectually dead. It was tainted with isolationists, conspiracy theorists, and anti-semites. Buckley, then in his twenties, commandeered the talents of older men -- most prominently James Burnham and Whittaker Chambers -- who had been fellow-traveling Stalinists, and who had turned against communism. Buckley led these writers to articulate a new critique of socialism.

That was a feat of leadership that gets very little attention -- a feat of coalition-building.

Even further, Buckley rose above the fierce polemicism that characterizes political debate and formed deep friendships with many of his antagonists, like John Kenneth Galbraith. He knew how to have fun in the midst of a fight.

Buckley's example continues to inform me in my pastoral work.

The demise of evangelicalism, for me, is a disaster. I find evangelical populism  a completely inadequate mode for communicating the truths of God's word. I find the cultural degradation of churches into malls shocking. The disconnection of one generation from another is especially disturbing.

I often ask myself if we can come back from this dilapidated condition. Buckley's rich example tells me we can.

The old pastors like Joe Wiens, who fought modernist liberalism from a rural church in Montana, were either retiring or dying by the time I came into ministry. But I got a sense of who they were and what they experienced. Decades ago, Joe discovered that his denomination was sending missionaries around the world who didn't believe in the inerrancy of scripture, in the deity of Christ, or that Christ's death literally paid for sin. Joe was the mildest man you could meet, full of prayer and charity. But these discoveries were the beginning of the end.

He led his church out of the denomination.

This was not just an isolated misunderstanding. It was an experience repeated across the country, especially from the 1920s through the 1940s. Such conflicts may have been more decisive in casting the fundamentalist mindset than the rise of Darwinism. The average Christian witnessed a betrayal of his core principals not by unbelievers, but by hierarchies of the churches. Many took the lesson that interaction with the larger culture -- with its entertainment, education, and practices -- was a sure way to be unfaithful to the Bible.

The problem of how to influence the world without being poisoned by worldliness is one that evangelicals have not solved.

Fundamentalists have taught that believers must disavow not only outright sins, but also practices that lead to sin. Just this evening, I read a sermon outline from the pastor of a thriving suburban church in which he said that dancing, alcohol consumption, and movies were "slippery slopes," and called for "complete abstinence." Last week, Dale Fincher wrote about an incident at Cedarville that illustrates this mindset here. The university canceled an appearance by Shane Claiborne because Claiborne was seen as Emergent. Let one of their kind in, and what's next?

Fincher wrote that "anyone who is trying to live the good news of Jesus that has a different texture to mission than Christian fundamentalism will be suspect. There's little way around it. If you don't use the typical accepted vocabulary, then expect suspicion. I've been at the brunt of it myself with no good Biblical reason, but that I just don't fit the sub-culture."

In trying to preserve an alternative culture to mainstream America, fundamentalism kept out worldliness of a kind, but only by chaining itself to authoritarianism.

Broader evangelicals take a different view of interacting with the world. They have said that the only things wrong with non-Christian songs, movies, and educational institutions were the messages. We could use pop music and movies if we filled them with godly themes. So evangelicals have created an alternative universe of media, schools, and organizations devoted to copying the styles of secular offerings while delivering safe content.

I believe the effect on evangelical churches has been deadly. In the mimicry of secular pop culture, all the worst characteristics of American consumerism have been injected into the veins of corporate worship -- the passivity of the audience, the relentless me-focus, the suffocating sentimentality. And the mimicry has deprived evangelicals of the best aspects of pop culture: the creativity that takes art from the street and a shows it to a broader audience. Mimicry simply does not inspire.

When I say this result is deadly, I'm choosing my word carefully.

Evangelicalism does not present itself as a counterculture. It offers no contrast to the ways of vanilla suburbia, but insists that the blessings of Christ can be enjoyed without any sacrifices. Emergents are absolutely right in criticizing these aspects of evangelical culture, and in searching for deeper bonds. (See Len at NextReformation on a move toward missional orders here.) We are seeing the beginnings of a flight from the corpse of Christianity at the mall.

Both the fundamentalist and evangelical approaches seem to have had the same result. Believers have been taught only to shun the outside world, not to interact with it wisely.

For fundies, the shunning is literal. Evangelicals, for their part, try to shun with a smile, offering substitutes that taste just like the real thing. But a young believer stepping onto a college campus for the first time still has no idea how to present herself, still does not know how to articulate where she comes from, still cannot take what she has inherited and build a life in hostile territory. She knows that her cultural upbringing is simply not adequate.

We have to interact with the world without being poisoned by worldliness. This problem will not go away. So what can we do?

There are emergents who display biblical Christianity among people hostile to the gospel. They study and pray deeply, and they have found ways to communicate truth openly. These emergents don't need lectures on staying committed to God's word; they're living it.

There are conservative evangelicals -- even fundamentalists -- who also display biblical Christianity among people hostile to the gospel. They know how to interact with homosexuals, environmentalists, new agers of all stripes. They don't need lectures about openness; they're living it.

These two groups don't seem to agree right now. But if the majorities in the two groups can view each other outside the lenses of past antagonisms, they will start to talk. Their disagreements will become more specific, and their fellowship more broad.

Joe Wiens was no fighting fundy. He supported Billy Graham crusades from the early days when Billy would stop on the highway and pray with the local pastors -- pastors from many traditions. Joe knew how to interact with and learn from other Christians. He died a man of peace, not a man of bitterness.

By losing the fear of interacting with each other, even in disagreement, we may learn how to show wisdom to the world.

Here are two blogs that offer help for those trying to understand current evangelical divisions, and another blog that offers . . . well . . . Let's accentuate the positive.

Kingdomgrace takes up the question What is ministry? here, here, and here. Her gift is for spotting the right question, inviting comment, and summarizing the results. In this case, she sees that many evangelicals view the concept of ministry differently -- some as a profession, others as a way of life. She lays the differences on the table and lets people talk about them. When she infuses controversy into the discussion, she restores focus instead of inciting reaction. She is, in other words, a leader who helps a group get smarter.

I believe Spirit-led people will follow leaders like her.

Jollyblogger also offers help, commenting on the merchandising of Jesus here and here. Jollyblogger is onto the fact that marketing has worn out its welcome with the young. I think the division between generations of evangelicals is partly a result of older generations' love for the extravaganzas and bombast of the TV aesthetic. The young aren't buying.

The divisions are treated in a measured way at Jollyblogger, and he concludes that "the critics of the franchise church are spot on - this is an argument against the commodification of the faith and an argument to engage people as people, not prospects and to engage them as human beings, not as a part of an assembly line process."

Again, I think Jollyblogger is the type of leader Spirit-led people will heed.

The clashes of perspective shown in these posts help us understand why evangelicals are splintering. Many no longer hold common definitions of such basic concepts as kingdom work, compromise with the world, and evangelism. What is considered credible among some evangelicals, like marketing, is considered pathetic among others. The disagreements are often grave.

Which is why following these discussions can put a knot in your gut. Can we rebuild an evangelical consensus on these issues? If we're unclear on such basic matters, how can we form vibrant communities?

And then you read Josh Brown here.

Or rather, you read him if you can stomach his replacement of argumentation with scatology. Brown wants to deal with misconceptions about emergents, and deal with them he does. With flamethrowers. Brown not only blasts critics of emergents, but insults anyone who dares even pose questions in the comments.

The Lord has blessed evangelicals with an emergent conversation that is larger than Brown's rhetoric. If he really did speak for emergents, the prospects for rebuilding an evangelical consensus would be nil. But, while I wonder whether he speaks for Emergent Village, I can't believe emergents will listen too long to his rantings.

I believe evangelicals can become members of one another in Christ again -- in a way that is not merely notional but practical. I believe they not only can, but they will. The leaders are out there.

This joining will not take place, however, as a result of blogs, books, or conferences. It will not be organized by yet another national movement. It will grow as individual Christians commit to each other in local churches -- churches they recognize to be faulty. Their joining will come at the price of their complaints. Eventually, they will tire of nursing their wounds. They'll ignore the abstractions of zealots and seek strength from emotions other than anger. They will establish bonds with those communities that teach the Bible, and strive to live in the power of the risen Christ.

They will do this because they have the Holy Spirit, who sovereignly nourishes the body of Christ (Ephesians 4.1-6). The splintering of evangelicalism may be noisy, but it will prove temporary.

The faces I see each Sunday morning are often rigid from the week's tension, frozen against our society's assaults -- inhuman rudeness, aggression, and indifference. In their tension, these people yearn for a renewed emotional life. Their yearning is broadly shared. Quadrivium offers excellent comments (here) on the self-destructive behavior of celebrities. All the pampering money can buy does nothing to renew them. At the other end of the spectrum, Quadrivium notes that in one region of south Wales, thirteen young people have committed suicide over the past year.

When we see this kind of despair, we're tempted to extol the joys of life in Christ, the pure pleasures of the Spirit. But such generalizations won't help me minister to Sunday's faces.

Christian joy is not otherworldly. It is practical, a matter of investing time and focus.

Tim Challies gives a glimpse of one kind of investment here. He interviews Makoto Fujimura, a New York-based artist, about how his artwork is an extension of his faith in Christ. At one point, Fujimura refers to an international group he has formed and says, "We believe that God desires to re-humanize the world via the arts and creative expression, and we want to create a home for folks wrestling with deep issues of art, faith and humanity."

That got some comments.

One participant questioned the idea "that God desires to re-humanize the world via the arts." Is it biblical? We evangelicals are suspicious of creativity. So when we hear the phrase "re-humanize the world via the arts" we tend to smell liberalism. I wonder why. No one cares more about re-humanizing the world than the God of the Bible. He provided creativity as a tool for our emotional refreshment.

If evangelicals pushed the drab and stale things out of this world through the arts, they would be more potent evangelists. Fujimura's paintings took my breath away.

God has given us another tool for refreshment -- the Bible itself. His word was not inspired only to instruct our minds, or to command our wills. It was also inspired to change the way we feel. I say this because God chose to reveal his truth through high literary art. Take the Psalms.

Dale Fincher brings us a quote from Kathleen Norris here. She writes,

The value of this great songbook of the Bible lies not in the fact that singing praise can alleviate pain but that the painful images we find there are essential for praise, that without them, praise is meaningless.

Norris is right. We cannot express the greatness of God without reflecting on the depth of our sins, needs, and losses. That is why the most troubling moments in the Psalms can be the most edifying.

The emotional impact of the Psalms comes from several artistic devices.

The Psalms use structure to satisfy our emotions with balance and completion. On a broad scale, for instance, Psalm 103 both begins and ends with the words, "Bless the Lord, O my soul!" The words are bookends for the poem. On a small scale, Psalm 103 exhibits the classic parallel lines of Hebrew poetry: "He will not always strive with us, nor will he keep his anger forever." The second line is a reflective pool under the first.

The Psalms also use imagery to lift truth into liveliness. Psalm 103 says that in the Lord "your youth is renewed like the eagle." It pictures the greatness of God's love: "as high as the heavens are above the earth." It gives the power of God's forgiveness a spatial measurement: "As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us."

And much of the Psalms' imagery expresses pain. Psalm 103 says that God "is mindful that we are but dust."

Still another way the Psalms affect our emotions is through allusions -- references to other parts of scripture. For example, Psalm 103.8 is a partial quotation of Exodus 34.6. "The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in lovingkindness." The psalm summons the scene of God forgiving Israel for its idolatry with the golden calf.

We can gain this emotional power if we invest time and focus in God's word. The Bible is not only a source of truth, but a source of beauty. If we really believe the doctrine of inspiration, then we realize that God inspired the Bible's genres, forms, and images to impress his character on our feelings.

What people need on Sundays is to have their rigid emotional lives softened by the beauty -- the sometimes dark beauty -- of God's word.

I am dismayed to meet so many people who have felt abused by their church leaders. I regularly hear stories of pastors who lie, steal, manipulate, and commit sexual immorality, and the stream is too steady for me to dismiss the stories as slanders from a disgruntled few. Why is this kind of abuse so common?

The emergent conversation is tackling this question, but not, I think, from the right point of view. A leitmotif among emergents is the pompous preacher, the angry know-it-all who uses the Bible to control people. By heavy implication, those who practice biblical exposition are guilty of being Pharisaical and power-hungry.

This man, many seem to be saying, is the problem. The preacher has too strong a tendency to abuse people. He needs to be cut down to size.

To a large extent, I agree. But how do we shrink him?

I believe that the only way a pastor can avoid abusing his people is to submit himself to the authority of scripture. The reason abuse is so common in churches is not that biblical exposition is too prominent, but that the Bible has been systematically ignored in churches -- honored on leaders' lips but not in their hearts.

I try to implement several principles to constrain my heart as a leader.

• Let the text pick the topics. I often assume that I know "what my people need," but I really don't know. It's all too easy for my favorite practical issue, or my favorite doctrinal focus, to become "what my people need." To undermine my assumptions, I try to work in a strict exegetical fashion -- deriving topics from passages, not seeking passages for topics. For instance, if I pick the topic, "Jesus Provides For Our Needs," I might use the feeding of the 5,000 from Mark 6.33-44. But what would the topic be if I let Mark choose?
• Preach texts, not points. Too much of what passes for application today is actually generalization. For instance, the preacher goes from the feeding of the 5,000 to the sweeping principle, "Jesus provides." He then has to "illustrate" the principle, using "real life examples," because he's stated it too broadly. But the miracle is already a real life example. Mark was specific: the disciples were hardening in unbelief, and Jesus repeatedly confronted them (Mark 6.51-52). Preach Mark's text, and listeners will appreciate how Jesus teaches us to depend on him.
• Reason together. If I'm going to declare that Jesus teaches us to depend on him, I have to show not just that my declaration is consistent with Mark 6, but that the teaching is Mark's burden -- that it is Mark's point. Showing that crucial fact requires reasoning. It requires some analysis. It requires time. The tricks of salesmanship are simply not up to the task.

Sticking to these principles helps drain my preaching of willfulness. The principles bend me back into submission to the scriptures.

It is not a surprise that abusive leadership has followed the decline of biblical exposition. If leaders set the agenda for their churches, if leaders allow themselves the privilege of sloganeering rather than reasoning, if leaders feel they can lard their sermons with stories and call it being practical, then the leaders have freed themselves from accountability to God's word. Tyranny will follow.

The core of abusive authority is lawlessness in the leader's soul.

Eight women in Florida have given sworn depositions charging that a megachurch pastor coerced them into sex. The pastor, Earl Paulk, is being charged with perjury because he told investigators that he'd only had sex with one. (Local coverage here.) So here we are again, back in the zone of abusive spiritual authority. When a pastor's personal agenda is blatantly sinful, as Paulk's allegedly was, believers are devastated. But they also feel manipulated when the agenda is mixed -- when in the midst of pursuing godly goals a pastor doesn't seem to notice his own vanity.

There is almost a sense now that any exercise of authority is abusive, and many believers question the legitimacy of pastoral leadership. The issue was featured in a couple of blogs this past week (unrelated to the Paulk story).

Robbymac offered a rich portrayal of servant leadership and its implications in a tale of two men in dialog about spiritual authority in a pub. The gruff barkeep becomes their model. Says one, "I’d like to suggest that real 'apostles' don't need to trumpet their status or try to get people to agree to be 'under' their authority. They just serve and people recognize their authority based on character and not on their need to have people 'submit' to them." Robbymac's post gave me good ideas to feast on, and it was so evocative that I could almost smell the hops.

Kingdomgrace sparked some lively exchanges about pastoral authority with her usual clarity of expression. Reviewing a chapter in Pagan Christianity (Viola and Barna) about the history of the clerical tradition, Grace surveys the dubious mixture of contemporary ideas of pastoring with the ancient priesthood. She writes,

I don’t believe that one person should be responsible for the equipping of the body, but rather that you will find those equipping gifts among the body. The same is true with discipling, teaching, and mentoring. None of these things should be taken on solely by the leader.

Even if this is clear in your heart as the leader, as long as there is a full-time pastor, it will be an uphill battle to prevent passivity among the congregation regarding who is responsible for ministry.

An uphill battle indeed. In fighting the consumer mentality, a pastor will always face the question, "Why are you trying to get me to do your work?"

The intensity of the comments in response to Grace's post shows how dire the collapse of spiritual authority has become. Participants were not so much questioning the character of pastors, as the legitimacy of having a paid pastor at all. Commenting on the aging evangelical base, one participant named Jerry expressed a sense of crisis many share:

I don’t think people realize how desperate a state the American church is really in. We’re less than 10 years from being exactly in the same state as Europe (barring a medical miracle).

We need Frank Viola’s and George Barna’s (and many others) to really shake this thing up. There’s a disaster pending the likes of which the church world has never seen. All we have to do to get there is hang on to the status quo.

No question, we've got trouble.

Believers have lost a sense of how authority is supposed to work biblically. Those who remember when pastors had a recognized civic role fantasize about the recovery of Christendom, while emergents at times seem frantic in their search for an egalitarian church structure. There are those who want to trust their pastors, many of whom end up getting burned like the eight women in Florida. But there are others who long ago resolved never to trust another pastor again.

We witness a bitter scattering. The question is how to return to the Shepherd.

For me, a purely egalitarian church structure -- no leaders, no followers -- is fast-acting conformism. The herd never tolerates dissent from its stampedes. Furthermore, I believe egalitarian promises are fraudulent: all groups have leaders. The informal ones who lead from charisma tend to be the least accountable.

But the old institutional hierarchies assume a cultural consensus that no longer exists. Christendom, as a cultural force, is on life-support in the U.S. In Europe, it's dead. Pastors are not authority figures anymore. But they're still acting like it.

I am trying to implement several principles as a pastor:

• Model submission for other believers: submission to the Lord, to the scriptures, and to the other leaders of the church.
• Lead only from the trust gained by modeling submission. This practice is empowered by the Holy Spirit (e.g. Ephesians 5.15-21).
• Lead not by casting visions, but by applying narrowly defined biblical principles to the next decision on the congregation's horizon. Put another way, there's no grand plan, just point-to-point navigation.

These principles help me eschew the power game and nurture unity. They do not bring hyper-growth. They do not empower a great career path. They don't even eliminate conflict. But they do harness the forces of relationship, truth, and love to the work of change.

And in the bargain I will see my own soul saved -- an end I pray for the eight women in Florida and for Earl Paulk.

The storm that slammed California last Friday swept some shingles off our church's roof, leaving the women's restroom drenched. The carpet bubbled and the plaster ceiling wept. This, in addition to the usual leakage. Our building has a tower-like structure on the southeast corner, with a neon cross perched uneasily on top. The neon no longer lights. The tower can be relied upon to leak every year -- a tradition spanning eight decades. At some point, church leaders stopped trying to fix it. Someone just put buckets in the attic that catch most of the water, and no one remembers who.

Confession: The foregoing is bait to tempt readers into tired metaphors of churches' pomposity and ineffectiveness -- especially my emergent readers. (Cue crickets.)

Emergents and evangelicals generally have been disgusted with their churches -- the congregations, not necessarily the buildings. They've been disgusted for years, and have been hunting for the cause of all the dysfunction. From several emergent blogs I've seen, many blame the buildings for the sad condition of the people. Apparently the buildings' very existence is heinous.

This issue came up on a great blog I've been following, kingdomgrace. For a week or so, Grace has been writing intelligently about a book by Frank Viola and George Barna called Pagan Christianity, one of many books analyzing the evangelical mess. Their thesis is “that the church in its contemporary, institutional form has neither a biblical nor a historical right to exist.”

The chapter she treated yesterday (here) dealt with "the history of the church building from the first century through modern times."

Viola and Barna are not positive in their overview. Grace quotes them as saying,

"Somehow we have been taught to feel holier when we are in 'the house of God' and have inherited a pathological dependency upon an edifice to carry out our worship of God. The church building has taught us badly about what church is and what it does."

I can't relate to what Viola and Barna have written there. I was never taught "somehow" to feel holier when in a church building. Feeling holier has been impossible because most of the buildings where I've worshiped have been aggressively ugly.

Nor can I relate to their assertion that "we" have "inherited a pathological dependency upon an edifice." I feel sure that they liked how the phrase sounded, but didn't think about it too carefully. "Must . . . have . . . my . . . edifice!"

And I can't get into the ersatz liberal arts thing of saying, "The church building has taught us badly."

Grace gives more nuanced comments. Church buildings do contribute to such problems as "congregants as spectators," "lack of participation," "consumerist mentality," and "isolation." She writes, "The problem isn't necessarily the building, but rather our imagination and understanding of who we are and what we are called to be apart from the building."

I think she's right on. The design of large churches today deadens the acoustics, coerces the sight, blocks the world outside, and isolates the worshipper. It's a barrier to the restoration of community.

But how do we overcome such barriers?

I see two kinds of dialogue among emergents. One kind is epitomized by Grace. She is probing and measured. Her passion seems expressed by depth rather than bombast. Though I sense that she's seen the troubles of church life, she does not allow her experiences to embitter her writing. Many barriers can be overcome with this kind of dialogue.

The other kind is epitomized by Pagan Christianity. The rhetorical neon doesn't glow and the argumentation has continual leaks.

The Iowa caucuses today will officially begin the end of social conservatism as a force in American politics. But this gives an opportunity for local churches to refocus their energies. There may be surprises in Republican results by the end of the evening. Consensus this week has been that Mike Huckabee has been hurt by Mitt Romney's assaults, and that Romney has retaken the lead. But John McCain once again has a field operation in the state, and he was there for a last burst of campaigning, feeling energized by positive news from New Hampshire. There was buzz about a "late-breaking surge" for Fred Thompson at National Review Online yesterday (here).

For the evangelical project of recovering traditional values through political activism, though, none of this matters. I see three basic reasons why the grass roots social conservatism of the last two decades is done.

First, a generational split has undermined evangelical political unity. Emergents are far more likely to take liberal/progressive stands on the war, the environment, and economic issues. They treat their elders' project of restoring America's Judeo-Christian heritage contemptuously. I've written on this here.

Second, those who live by biblical sexual morality are in the minority in the nation at large -- and there is some question in my mind whether they even command of a majority of evangelicals. The presupposition behind social conservative positions on family policy, gay marriage, abortion, and the role of public education is that monogamous married sex should be normative. The proportion of Americans who accept that presupposition has been shrinking for the better part of three decades.

Few voters are open to social conservative policy positions anymore.

Consider Britain in the 1990s. Prime Minister John Major made family values a significant part of the Conservative Party's message in the years before he faced Tony Blair in a general election. But Major's government was hit with one sex scandal after another. His successor as party leader, William Hague, tried to rehabilitate the party's image in a number of ways. He made his position on morality clear by touring the country with his live-in girlfriend.

There is no political expression of traditional sexual morality in British politics today. Nor will there be. The populace will not tolerate it.

I believe we face a similar dark moment in America now. The sex scandals afflicting Republicans for the past year or more need no repetition. I believe the demise of biblical sexuality in American culture is an unmitigated catastrophe. But its demise is a fact. The outcome in Iowa will do nothing to help restore it. Biblical sexuality is now countercultural.

Thirdly, evangelical conservatives do not have a top tier candidate for the Republican nomination. Rudy Giuliani is not a social conservative in any sense, nor has he made any effort to appease the pro-life part of the Republican base. With Sen. McCain, evangelicals might be able to make peace, but they would remain a small part of his coalition. They would not figure in a McCain administration the way they have in Bush's.

Gov. Huckabee is certainly an evangelical. But even a win in Iowa will not make him a top-tier candidate. He does not have the money, the organization, or, frankly, the depth.

Which leaves Gov. Romney. Too many evangelicals know too much about Mormonism to have any illusions about a spiritual, or even a moral, alliance. They may vote for him. They know well enough that they're not selecting the nation's Sunday school teacher. But he's not their guy.

Without a top-tier candidate, evangelicals are reduced to bargaining for specific policy priorities at a nominating convention they will not control. And they are ill-positioned to do this sort of bargaining because of their own divisions and because of the larger culture's hostility.

Which brings me to what I think is the evangelical opportunity.

Evangelicals have an opportunity to see their role in America clearly. They are no longer mainstream. Their role is to build local churches that are countercultural in every way -- in their devotion to the Bible, in their demonstration of love, and in their vitality from the resurrected Jesus. Building more malls with good clean fun for the whole family is not going to be part of this role. Evangelicals are going to have to build a new, non-conformist way of life.

In order to take this opportunity to be countercultural, evangelicals will have to focus all their energies on the gospel -- the message that people's sin can be forgiven and their souls reborn. In the coming darkness, we will not have political strength. We will only have the Lord Jesus Christ.

  A church chairman discovers that his pastor has been lying to him. It's all very dark.

You can pre-order it here.