Sublime

three foundational metanarratives in the world: historic Christianity, Western Naturalism, and traditional religion.

we are heading closer to the world Bellah predicted would arise “if the whole God symbolism requires reformulation.”24 He argued, “There will be obvious consequences for the civil religion, consequences perhaps of liberal alienation and of fundamentalist ossification.”

It is not surprising that the dechurched indicate higher levels of anxiety, depression, and loneliness than those who immerse themselves in their faith community.

Our task is to display the richness of what Jesus offers his people in believing a gospel that creates a sense of belonging we can experience nowhere but in the church and a behavior that will allow us to live in line with and more fully experience the God who created us.

At the University of California at Berkeley, for instance, only 38 percent of the blacks admitted as freshmen in 1983 had graduated by 1988, as compared with 72 percent of the whites.

these two Americas are increasingly isolated from each other,

My brother and I (aspiring young theologues at the time) often discussed the need to confront the white “Christians” of Bearden with the demands of the gospel by invading their Sunday worship service with our presence, making them declare publicly that all are not welcome in “God's” house. But the fear of bodily harm prevented us from carrying out

existential crisis. But the school wanted to do better,

Real America has always needed to feel that both a shiftless underclass and a parasitic elite depend on its labor. In this way it renders the Black working class invisible. From its beginnings Real America has also been religious, and in a particular way—evangelical and fundamentalist, hostile to modern ideas and intellectual authority. The truth