color me baffled by...

...Christians who are stridently vocal about avoiding "legalistic", "ritualistic", "systematic" Christian practices and express their iconoclastic impulses through...the usage of very old, very traditional, rituals.

Moralistic Therapeutic Deism

Color me behind-the-times, but somewhere in the Web commentary about USA Today's American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) I learned about a cogent label and description of the religious (i.e. "spiritual") beliefs held by many people in the U.S.: Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. "Moralistic" refers to the common-sense notion that people should be good and nice, and to the assumption that good people will experience a good afterlife. "Therapeutic" refers to the purpose of spirituality, which is enabling people to live better and more pleasant lives, through learning to love oneself and others enough to carry out constructive, beneficial actions like forgiveness. "Deism" refers to the perceived remoteness and intangibility of the Creator God, whom people acknowledge and beseech from time to time but mostly isn't involved in one's life. The actual perspectives of people I've met are so well captured by this set of ideas that it hurts.

As I've written before on many occassions, I consider Moralistic Therapeutic Deism to be incomplete rather than starkly wrong (although parts of it unmistakably are). God is holy, and it would be great if people followed His lead, so Christianity has its moralistic side. God is overflowing with the power and desire to mend people, so Christianity has its therapeutic side. God is mysterious and perfect in His actions and plans, so Christianity has its deist side. However, it's also true that righteousness is by faith and grace, no person nor the universe itself will be completely restored until the End, and the Spirit who is God's own person is as close and intimate as anyone wishes.

I'd also note that Moralistic Therapeutic Deism isn't necessarily Christian. When God and morality are sufficiently vague, doctrinal distinctions are quite pointless (and impossible). For some, mushy doctrine is part of the allure.

A sampling of the past entries that pertain to the topic:

• cultural accomodation through appeasement
• middling morality
• just be yourself
• all you need is love
• pursuit of happiness
• why a Holy God?

looking for a new spiritual experience?

No, I don't mean trying out incense or chants. I'd be far more impressed if you try fasting (responsibly, following guidelines).

wholes in Christian thought

My increasing belief is that the best intellectual approach for Christianity is a collection of wholes. Controversy and infighting partially result from a failure to appreciate these wholes. To elaborate:

• Faith. Wherever people profess beliefs, other people who think similarly but differently might choose to respond indirectly (i.e. creatively/laterally) with the "pragmatic parry". The pragmatic parry consists of refusing to raise or attack a point of contention, and instead insisting that endless debate over ideas and "semantics" is pointless on principle because actions and attitudes are what affect reality (it's possible to view the history of philosophy as a series of cycles of returning its subject matter to relevance). Among Christians, the pragmatic parry expresses a reaction to established theology, especially the excessively academic kind that seems to spin round and round on conceptual definitions and ignores issues in the surrounding society. The Christian's pragmatic parry to all doctrines is "Faith is what you do and are; the Pharisees of the Gospels were laser-focused on mapping out the parameters of the Law and its various prohibitions but our Lord's focus was on the inner condition of hearts, exemplified by overflowing love to all people". And this assertion is clearly biblical! The danger is treating this as a justification for overlooking the whole of faith. For faith is right belief translated into right actions. Consider the epistle of James, and the Lord's teaching that a man's actions (and speech) flow out of his heart - in modern language, follow the evidence. Only right belief will consistently produce right actions, and of course right actions are fruitless if we haven't been born again as new creations who are sons of God, known personally by Him. Whole Christian faith assumes a whole "model" of human actions: people ascertain or know what reality is, then they respond to this understanding. This is neither "do whatever you want if your spirit is pure" nor "results are infinitely more valuable than intentions". As others have said, since human relationships experience love as both affection/intimacy and generous gestures, to understand saving faith as a relationship is to also require both.
  
• Interpretation. It's hard to overstate the importance of sacred texts such as the Bible. Thus, the questions that naturally arise from reading it are also of great importance. How trustworthy is it, and in what sense is it of divine authorship? What is the intent and style of the human writers? What is it communicating, and where can this content be reapplied to contemporary concerns? Moreover, who answers these interpretative questions and on what (whose) authority? Christian history bursts (not always proudly) with distinct answers to the aforementioned questions. Aside from the well-known guideline of interpreting the Bible as a contextual whole rather than ripping out isolated verses, viewing interpretation as a whole involves the now-somewhat-trite observation that any occurrence of Bible reading or study, like all communication, involves multiple "participants" such as the writer, the writer's (historical, social) context, the actual text, the translator, the reader, the reader's context, past interpretations and commentaries, numerous biases, etc., etc. It's far, far overreaching to claim that each occurrence of Bible reading "creates" a new Bible, yet it's also plainly ridiculous to claim that the writers of a centuries-old text aren't separated from the present readers of the text by gaps in thought. For one thing, language itself is continually changing - this fact doesn't at all invalidate Bible translations but it does warn Christians of the need to bridge that gap through good (intense) scholarship. A whole view of interpretation negates the false dilemma that either the writer or text is all-powerful - "the Bible speaks for itself for God did not stutter" - or the reader is all-powerful - "the Bible contains nothing more than what the reader or Spirit-mediated revelation brings to it". Communication is admittedly imperfect but it still works well enough. The Lord commented that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. Can't the Church comprehend and communicate the meaning of this sentence to an audience that doesn't know about camels or needles?
  
• Grace. Unbalanced notions about grace in Christianity bedevil too many, and judging by the letters in the Bible this temptation has been present since early on ("Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase?" wrote Paul to Rome). Just as faith is more than right personal beliefs/doctrines, grace is more than the assurance that sins don't and won't separate the devoted from God. Grace is freely offered, but Christians exhibit coarse misunderstanding when they take this to mean that it's free. Perhaps it's more accurate to state that grace doesn't cost anything "up-front". As anyone will repeat, nobody earns grace, by first definitions. However, grace is applied through faith, the whole faith previously explained. The Lord never promised that grace alone would save everyone (look up the metaphor of the wide and narrow gates and compare the quantity of people for each). He forgave sins everywhere He went, but in addition He instructed the forgiven to stop sinning and in His discourses He set up changed-heart rules stricter than the Law! The whole perspective on grace is not merely "God excuses every sin" and not merely "Christians must never sin again after conversion, once they know better". The deeper someone's awareness of sin, the clearer someone's perception of grace, which is God's merciful response. Such a person will find it almost literally unthinkable to repeat a confessed and forgiven sin (although he or she may in fact stumble later due to not dwelling and relying fully enough on God). After being reminded that sin is reprehensible yet rooted deep within, the very preciousness of grace will deter the sinner from treating it cheaply. People cannot presume that they in their sin can please God apart from His loving grace; why would they presume to "stretch" this grace any further and thereby displease their merciful savior?
  

subtle arrogance

If someone preemptively emphasizes that he or she is "just a person" or "doesn't know much", then perhaps this is a subtle arrogance: why would one feel the need to do this when precisely nobody, in point of fact, has yet made those mistakes?

"I might be wrong", "don't put any blind trust in me", and so on. Well, yeah. Who said we were in the first place, buddy? Thank you so much for being so careful in your anxiety that people around you will fall into the trap of exalting you more than they should. Yeesh. Such ostentatious, overdone humility is strikingly similar to what the Lord spoke of when condemning loud, public displays of giving or fasting, wouldn't you say?

God and invisibility

Of all of God's attributes, His "invisibility" should be seldom mentioned if ever. Christians act in faith of a God who is real. They trust that the good God is neither passive nor silent, and they pray accordingly. To say that God is invisible is to focus on the ways in which He seems...well, unreal: unseen by eyes, unheard by ears, unfelt by fingers. This focus on lack of evidence can't be beneficial or encouraging, especially for believers who have difficulty maintaining consistent confidence in Him.

God may be "invisible", but Christians see Him through His actions and His promises. Why should they proclaim the fact that He doesn't project His form physically for gawkers?

what "bromance" signifies about culture

Undeniably, language changes, and as it does it exposes the intangible trends and forces that shape culture. Specifically, the onset of the lighthearted word "bromance" (I apologize upfront for any misunderstandings or misinterpretations about the word's meaning) is symptomatic of ongoing shifts in attitudes about a range of topics:

• community. The first cultural clue of any word is that it exists at all, implying that the word 1) serves a distinct purpose and/or expresses a unique concept, 2) differs from other words and concepts sufficiently to facilitate clear usage. In the case of "bromance", the caring and mutually beneficial male relationship it denotes must be significantly peculiar to people for them to need or appreciate the word. Thus, the notion of a normal human community, or at least one composed of men, doesn't include the support, loyalty, and commitment defined by "bromance". For years, sociological observers have commented on the progressively isolated and impersonal nature of cultures such as the USA's. In a different culture with a stronger sense of community, bromances would be too common to merit a specific label, due to a communal expectation of relational closeness.
  
• homosexuality. Having just linked characteristics of bromance to community, let me hasten to emphasize that my impression of "bromance" does not include homosexual desire. If it did, then people wouldn't be applying it exclusively to heterosexuals. Nevertheless, the formation of the word, clearly a portmanteau of "bro" and "romance", reveals the droll intention behind it; it's designed to indicate a blurring of the distinction between male friendship ("bros") and passionate desire for someone ("romance"), as in "those two heterosexual men have a curiously...intense relationship, i.e., bromance". The mere possibility of this wordplay could be related to several trends: 1) greater awareness of homosexuality (actual romance between men), else people wouldn't think to compare it to other kinds of male relationships, which are much more prevalent; 2) greater acceptance of homosexuality, else people would be hesitant to use jokey words like "bromance" that hint at it in mainstream media; 3) greater identification with homosexuality, else there could be none of the supposed emotional "confusion" or "middle ground" that the word conveys (if heterosexuals and homosexuals were viewed as fundamentally dissimilar then someone couldn't be between the two states).
  
• love. The essential assumption behind bromance is that differences in love are differences in degree rather than in kind. The trend is to increasingly view love as a continuum, with romance toward one end, the friendship of "bros" some distance away in the other direction, and bromance presumably in-between. This perspective perhaps makes sense when one presumes that love is equivalent to overall attraction and overall attraction is inextricably tied to sex. In other words, someone stipulates that love is no more and no less than the battle of basic drives answering basic questions (in an encounter, should I fight or flee or submit or dominate or cooperate or procreate or nurture?). But the complexity of how people feel, think, and act discredits a simplistic one-dimensional scale of love. Frankly, people can appreciate and help and communicate with others without there being a shadowy undercurrent of desire for the recipient. Even people performing purely secular charity work wouldn't argue that they're so motivated. Indeed, part of what distinguishes virtuous charity from other giving is that its targets are often unlovely. Moreover, one kind of love is the ability to appreciate something just for the sake of acknowledging its excellence (and here, I'm borrowing from C.S. Lewis still more than usual, this time The Four Loves). Men can appreciate each other's strengths and weaknesses without there being "more to it" than that. And this should be obvious, but not all physical contact, whether a handshake or the dreaded full-body hug, is necessarily sexual, no matter how obscurely considered (when a reader thinks that David and Jonathon were lovers because they were close, that reflects more on the reader's frame of mind than theirs). As a word that typifies a regrettable trend of losing the intricate disparities of love within human relationships, particularly men's, the humorous word "bromance" is weightier than it seems.