Every Sunday, flights of lunacy from pulpits make sober Christians cringe. I guess, sooner or later, a maniacal statement was bound to go viral. For one thing, lunacy in preachers is so common. For another, the presidential campaign this year demanded a Republican sacrifice to balance Jeremiah Wright. And for another, the reliable men who provided self-satire in the past have either retired or gone to their reward. So, in the providence of God, John Hagee became the guy who took evangelical lunacy to the next level.

Major news organizations had been eying him suspiciously ever since he endorsed John McCain for president, principally because Hagee has described Roman Catholicism in the pungent terms of whoredom. But his elaborate support of Israel had been in his favor, at least freeing him from the taint of anti-Semitism. Alas, there was a sleeper.

Hagee had preached that the holocaust was part of God's plan to get the Jews back to the land. As reported in the New York Times, he said,

How is God going to bring them back to the land? The answer is fishers and hunters. A hunter is someone who comes with a gun and forces you. Hitler was a hunter. . . . That will be offensive to some people. Well, dear heart, be offended: I didn’t write it. Jeremiah wrote it. It was the truth and it is the truth. How did it happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said, "My top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel."

Late last week, McCain dumped him.

By Monday evening, Joe Liebermanwas pushed to answer whether he would speak to Hagee's group supporting Israel, becoming the latest politician to wish he hadn't consorted with preachers. (Lieberman said he will speak to the group.)

Hagee's comments about Hitler provoked debate that almost reached theology. There was, for instance, a post by Claire Hoffman on Sunday about the many "plans" God seems to have for the world.

The offense Hagee gave was in making God the author of Hitler's genocide. His statement as reported is exegetically indefensible. Jeremiah (the prophet from Jerusalem, not Chicago) never wrote that the murder of six million Jews would bring the Israelites back to the land. That idea is pure Hagee.

Doctrinally, Hagee's statement is loose -- at best. While he did say that God allowed, rather than caused, the holocaust, Hagee still explained the holocaust as God's calculation that Israel's return to the land was more important than six million lives. That explanation is, as theologian John McCain might say, "crazy and unacceptable." (Necessary qualifier: it is possible that Hagee makes other statements elsewhere in the sermon, or in other sermons, that clarify his understanding of God's wisdom and justice.)

But a neglected aspect of Hagee's offense is pastoral. His statement minimizes the unspeakable human cost of Hitler's genocide, a cost that is still within living memory. It's a clichéd spiritualizing of loss to say to the grieving that God had better things in mind for them than living with the ones they love. God does not call his pastors to glorify him by trivializing human suffering.

Inhumanity is entirely human. God has no complicity in it. The only reason there are not holocausts in every nation, every day, is that the good hand of God restrains human malice.

It is tempting to pronounce woes against the gotcha culture that has claimed Hagee. But I think the current animosity against preachers could be part of God's plan. Preachers must now remember that we can be YouTubed, and that our fulminations can reach those who won't interpret us charitably. We may learn how significant our words really are. We may discover a godly caution that is appropriate to teachers (James 3), and may find boldness in truths instead of self-indulgent abstractions.

But that, of course, will require us to study.

Three weeks ago, my dad gave me a book, which the old man almost never does. From the early seventies, when he devoured The Lord of the Rings, to the mid-nineties, when he discovered that Calvin and Luther agreed with him about predestination, Dad was not a reader. Even now that he has books going much of the time, he doesn't talk about them much. So, for him to haul off and give me The Root of the Righteous by A.W. Tozer -- not just recommend it, but hand me a copy -- was urgent enough that I started it immediately. That night, I sat in the orchestra pit during the dialog of the Sondheim show I was playing, and devoured page after page -- only putting the book down when the conductor insinuated that a downbeat was headed my way.

I have been writing in a meandering, bloggish sort of way about evangelical populism. I have described it as a mindset of suspicion and resentment, of "us versus them," that has shut down cultural interaction between evangelicals and other Americans. I have also noted populism's emotional shallowness, as well as its conformism and corruption.

To close this theme (and the blog's readers sighed with relief), I sum up my problem with evangelical populism: it has fostered a damning self-complacency.

When we present Christianity as a social program, as one side in a protracted culture war, we commit several crimes simultaneously. We mistake the cultural legacy of biblical faith, Judeo-Christian civilization, for the gospel itself. It is a well-worn heresy, though wrapped now in the old red, white, and blue. We also take a rhetorical posture that is alien to the New Testament, that of the debater who scores points off the gaffs and weaknesses of his opponent. This vandalizes the office of preacher.

But most alarmingly, we teach ourselves by rote, election after election, that we stand for the truth, that we defend God's holiness, that we are the Lord's people doing the Lord's work. That is to say, we teach ourselves a lie. A mere glance into the family lives of church-going people these days confirms their utter lack of spiritual power.

To foster such self-complacency is to freeze souls against the grace of God.

Which brings me back to Tozer's book. The Root of the Righteous is a collection of editorials he wrote for his denominational magazine during the 1950s, and their dated quality as artifacts gives them, for me, a kind of prophetic unction, as if the Spirit makes the dust of the decades say amen.

Take the very first sentence of the book:

One marked difference between the faith of our fathers as conceived by the fathers and the same faith as understood and lived by their children is that the fathers were concerned with the root of the matter, while their present-day descendants seem concerned only with the fruit. (p 3)

That alone is a lot to ponder. Tozer meant that, in the 1950s, believers regarded a "serious-minded approach to sacred things" as something to smile at. He said, "Much that passes for Christianity today is the brief, bright effort of the severed branch to bring forth its fruit in its season." (p 4)

Take this blunt assessment: "Probably the most widespread and persistent problem to be found among Christians is the problem of retarded spiritual progress." (p 7) Or this observation about "the inordinate attachment to every form of entertainment" in the 1950s:

The average man has no central core of moral assurance, no spring within his own breast, no inner strength to place him above the need for repeated psychological shots to give him the courage to go on living. He has become a parasite on the world, drawing his life from his environment, unable to live a day apart from the stimulation which society affords him. (p 31)

Churches in the 1950s surrendered to the consumer mindset. Tozer says (p 33) that they "have become little more than poor theaters where fifth-rate 'producers' peddle their shoddy wares with the full approval of evangelical leaders who can even quote a holy text in defense of their delinquency."

Tozer also makes the striking observation that religious life in the 1950s showed "a lack of integration in the religious personality. There seems to be no vital connection between the emotional and volitional departments of the life. The mind can approve and the emotions enjoy while the will drags its feet and refuses to go along." (p 56)

Tozer fed people with an exalted view of Christ that nurtured reverent fear, not prim judgmentalism. He wrote and spoke with authority about the God who had won his submission.

Imagine strong words like his in a denominational magazine today. It's impossible: such publications have become mere public relations pieces. They would never warn Christians against dead spirituality, or its specific symptoms. That would be way too preachy.

This is a measure of how much leaders flatter us, and how deeply we need their flattery.

It's also a measure of my old man's good taste. Calvin, Luther, Tolkien, Tozer.

Evangelicals are hard to understand without reference to populism (as we've discussed here). So let's delve into the populist aesthetic and see how it works. Consider the usefulness of ugly emotions. The quintessential populist speech was delivered by William Jennings Bryan in 1896, at the Democratic convention that nominated him for president. The issue that year was the gold standard, which Bryan opposed because he said a limited money supply harmed farmers and laborers. His speech bristles with at least two kinds of resentment.

On the surface, Bryan expresses resentment of wealth. He turns to the pro-gold delegates in the convention hall and says, "When you come before us and tell us that we are about to disturb your business interests, we reply that you have disturbed our business interests by your course." Populism is often reduced to this formulation, that the rich are too rich. But Bryan is talking about something deeper.

He targets the issue of status, asserting a new definition of a "business man." Notice the socially explosive contrasts:

The man who is employed for wages is as much a business man as his employer; the attorney in a country town is as much a business man as the corporation counsel in a great metropolis; the merchant at the crossroads store is as much a business man as the merchant of New York; the farmer who goes forth in the morning and toils all day, who begins in spring and toils all summer, and who by the application of brain and muscle to the natural resources of the country creates wealth is as much a business man as the man who goes upon the board of trade and bets upon the price of grain . . . .

That's powerful stuff, not because it's about money, but because it's about status -- the relative worth of rural and urban people. The paragraph expresses people's resentment when their culture fades under the dominance of something alien. Here's another explosive moment from Bryan's speech:

You come and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard; we reply that the great cities rest upon our broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms, and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.

This rhetoric aims at the gut. It pits one way of life against another.

The populist aesthetic of resentment has not changed after 112 years of campaigning. Here is Governor Mike Huckabee, the evangelical former-candidate, in a speech at an Elks Lodge in Cedar Rapids, Iowa before the caucuses last January:

If you go to caucus Thursday night and give me an opportunity to come out of here winning this caucus, I am going to tell you, it will stun the political chattering class — all those folks out there in the Wall Street to Washington axis of power who love to predict what you are going to do, who have it all figured out, because after all, money is what makes politics. It is all about the money.

It's only "about the money" for Huckabee to the extent that money is a symbol of status. Notice his word choices, aimed at the guts of the Elks Lodge members. There is an "axis of power" -- power over you -- that runs from "Wall Street to Washington" -- not the locations but the class markers. The rich people in the axis "love to predict what you are going to do."

More from the same speech: "Well, I know I have been outspent in this state 20 to 1. I understand what that means. Just like some of you understand that your whole life you feel like you have been outspent 20 to 1 in about everything you have ever tried to do." See the heads nod vigorously. "That's right. Everything I have ever tried to do."

On Super Tuesday, after winning several southern states, Huckabee linked his constituency's anger at the party establishment to the obvious biblical images. As reported in the New York Times he said, “Tonight, we are making sure America understands that sometimes one small smooth stone is even more effective than a whole lot of armor.” He took a specific shot at Mitt Romney: “And we’ve also seen that the widow’s mite has more effectiveness than all the gold in the world.” Gold again.

On some other blog, they can argue about the economics of the middle class. I'm not saying that everything's financially rosy in the average household.

I am saying that evangelicals now use a political rhetoric that flatters "true believers" and creates whole classes of enemies they can blame for their woes. Wall Street wants to buy the Iowa caucuses. Washington bureaucrats are conspiring to destroy the family. Hollywood elites are imposing their values on The People.

I have two questions:

1. Does populism leave the evangelical soul softer or harder?

2. Does an agnostic bond trader on Wall Street know that there's a difference between crucifying Jesus on the cross of Calvary and crucifying farmers on a cross of gold? Will the farmers be able to help him distinguish the two?

By the way, in 1896 William McKinley won the presidency and Bryan lost.

Decades ago, evangelicals and their hard-bitten brethren, the fundamentalists, rode off the cultural cliff, and the flag that snapped in the wind all the way down bore the stripes of populism. We've discussed here and here how believers are afraid of interacting with American culture. Fundamentalists shun the larger culture because they fear the contamination of worldliness. The position of evangelicals is softer. They adopt the forms of the consumer culture, using TV and pop idioms freely, but only in a parallel media universe that mimics the secular originals.

Believers have many historical models for participating in contemporary culture while living out pure doctrine, ethics, and spirituality -- models like the Princeton theologians we sketched last week. But both evangelicals and fundamentalists have rejected these models. We no longer produce leaders with the cultural depth of a J. Gresham Machen. The exceptions, like Francis Schaeffer, are glaring.

I believe we have rejected our historical models because we now see them as elitist. To hold the attitudes that education and the life of the mind should be important values in the local church, that the arts should be a vibrant part of church life, or that genuine scholarship in the pulpit is the least a congregation should expect, is to incur many evangelicals' wrath.

Regular people don't see the point of such fancy talk. And if regular people don't see the point, then there is no point. (I'm not slamming "regular people" here. I'm articulating what I think has become an ethos. I happen to think "regular people" will provide ways forward for evangelicalism.)

This expectation that spiritual leaders will set everything according to the standards of "regular people" is new, and distinctly American. It results from the evangelical embrace of populism.

I use the term populism in a specific sense. I refer to the political and cultural aesthetic that traces at least as far back as Andrew Jackson. This aesthetic transcends parties and factions, and has expressed itself across the ideological spectrum. It has these basic characteristics:

1. Populism is agrarian, southern, and western.

Jackson was from Tennessee, and was far removed from the aristocracy of Virginia and Massachusetts. He cast the aristocratic John Quincy Adams out of the presidency, and the shindig after Jackson's first inauguration left the walls of the White House smeared with cheese. Other populist figures in American history have been William Jennings Bryan (born in Illinois, moved to Nebraska), and Huey Long (governor of, and later U.S. senator from, Louisiana.)

The fact that evangelicalism is strongest in rural, southern, and western regions is not coincidental. Evangelicals have deeply anti-urban attitudes.

2. Populism feeds on suspicion of corporate, academic, financial, and cultural "elites."

Jackson was bent on destroying the Bank of the United States. Bryan made his career opposing the gold standard. Among this year's presidential contenders, the most virulent populists were John Edwards, pitting the "two Americas" against each other, and Mike Huckabee, pitting evangelicals against Republican insiders. Populists hate power "in the hands of a few."

Evangelical fear of "cultural elites" needs no elaboration. Used as a money-raising appeal, its effect is primal.

3. Populism is animated by resentment.

One of the things that makes populists so compelling is that they feel the resentments of a particular class personally. Jackson seemed to draw life from anger. Bryan identified closely with the plight of agrarian people in an increasingly industrial society. George Wallace was not compelling because he was a racist, as people outside the south imagine, but because his hostility to northern liberals was completely sincere. (Gay Talese is enlightening on this point about Wallace in his memoir, A Writer's Life.)

I may be flirting with controversy here, but . . . evangelicals thrive on their own cultural resentments. The Hollywood elite. The scientific establishment. The Ivy League elites. Evangelicals both cherish and resent their status as outsiders.

4. Populism can evoke positive emotions only through sentimentality.

As rhetoricians, populists gain quick and questionable access to wells of loyalty through cheap symbolism. The flag. "And I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free." Jimmy Carter (not James E.) in his cardigan sweater, carrying his own luggage. Bill Clinton's suddenly thickening accent.

Evangelical sentimentality is egregious. The juxtaposition of the stars and stripes with the cross. The happy-clappy music. The weepy testimonies. The southern pronunciation of CHEE-zus. Our dependence on these tricks is an embarrassment.

Line up Machen against these characteristics and he fails on every count. He was from the northeast. He was an Ivy League elite. The notes he hit in his rhetoric were not resentment and sentimentality. He made his case with scholarship, and based his appeals on principled reasoning.

This is probably why the Princeton leaders lost influence among fundamentalists, as the voices against modernism became less theologically informed and more populist. Like William Jennings Bryan, who turned the Scopes trial into a media frenzy and lost the cultural contest to Clarence Darrow -- lost it big time.

Over the next several weeks, I'll examine such issues as how the populist aesthetic works, how specific evangelical leaders like Mike Huckabee use it, what populism does to local churches, and why populism will always fail. I will not argue for a return to elitism. Still less will I argue that we need "another Machen," or "another Princeton."

But I will argue that evangelicals are deluded about the flag they carried off the cultural cliff. Their flag did not proclaim, "Jesus Saves!" Their flag said, "Small Towns Forever!"

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.