The Revealer: One Way (Or Another)

A daily review of religion and the press

One Way (Or Another)

17 February 2004
Republican, Democrat; red state, blue state; "Christian," non-Christian... to this list of fuzzy distinctions beloved by the press, add this new dichotomy: "Great Command" vs. "Great Commission."

Writing in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Rev. N. Graham Standish labels the former -- Christians guided by the Golden Rule -- as "progressives" and the latter -- gospel spreaders -- as "evangelicals."

"Increasingly," he writes, "we have two sets of Christians polarized by a Great Divide."

Standish sounds like a peacemaker, so it is with some regret that The Revealer places his inadvertent culture war volley in the same drawer as the simplistic "God gulf" lately embraced by political reporters.

Donald Sensing, a born-again Christian who maintains a smart conservative blog about God, politics, guns, and curiousities called One Hand Clapping, presents a helpful deconstruction of Standish's argument, with some intriguing sociological data as back-up. He predictably concludes that Christ is the Way, etc., but he also effectively demolishes the alleged division Standish describes -- leaving the nature of that "Way" more open to question than he may have intended.