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Heres something you often hear people say as they get older: I remember the last time that was popular. Fashions once considered outdated come back in style. Movements arise and subside, and then surge again. A benefit of age is the wisdom and perspective you bring to the current moment. History doesnt always repeat itself or move in predictable cyclical patterns, but the more you study it and the longer you live, the more you see how the present and the past rhyme.

I must be getting older, because ever since I turned 40 last year, Ive said several times, I remember the last time that was popular. Most recently, Ive been saying that about online debates over the proper posture for Christians seeking to engage the culture in this era. I see the resurgence of a neoReligious Righta return of the culture war mentality among many younger evangelicals who believe the need of the hour is for the church to jump into the fray of hardball politics and be bolder and louder in opposing leftward trends that are harmful for society.

I say neoReligious Right because its not exactly the return of the Jerry Falwell era, and there are some crucial differences that set todays thirst for culture warring apart from my parents and grandparents generation. Well get to some of those distinctions soon.

But this resurgence has piqued my interest because I came of age in the 1990s. My parents were part of the religious right. They followed state and national politics closely and got involved in local elections, with my father serving two terms on the city council. I remember the night of the 1994 midterms and the Gingrich-led Contract with America. In those crucial years of adolescence, Rush was on the radio, Jerry Falwell was sending out videos replete with right-wing talking points and conspiracy theories, Southern Baptists were boycotting Disney because of the companys leftist agenda, men were gathering in Washington, DC, for Promise Keepers, and the character flaws of Bill Clinton were on full display (and worthy of our disgust).

Fighting for the soul of the countrythe culture war mentalitywas the demonstration of faithfulness. Churches were asleep, and Christians apathetic. It was time to wake up. The moment was urgent. As Carman sang in 1992, The only way this nation can even hope to last this decade is to put God in America again!

Historians debate the zenith of the religious right. Was it in the 1980s with the election of Ronald Reagan and the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment? The 1990s when Bill Clinton was impeached? Or the re-election of George W. Bush in 2004, when voters made clear their disapproval of same-sex marriage? Whatever the case, the moral majority exerted considerable influence on politics and culture during these decades.

At the same time as many pastors and church leaders sought to bring their convictions into the public square, a countermovement was taking place, most notably in the rise of megachurches and the church growth movement. Evangelism was front and center for these congregations. Emphasizing politics made it harder to reach people with varying philosophical and political commitments. Political posturing was divisive and counterproductive; even worse, it distracted from the churchs main mission of winning people to Jesus.

Another countermovement also existedthe religious left, though it was never as large or influential as the religious right. Leaders in this group often chastised white evangelicals for their political idolatry, but too often the religious left was just a mirror image of the kind of engagement they so despisedthe only difference being the political priorities and positions aligned with the left rather than the right. As the Emerging Church movement got going in the late 1990s and early 2000s, some of the leaders who distanced themselves from the political postures of the right wound up walking in lockstep with partisans on the left.

By the time the Emerging Church conversation was at its height and evangelicals were cheering the Iraq War, I was a student at an evangelical university in Eastern Europe. My perspective on American politics had shifted considerablynot away from an underlying conservative political philosophy (which I continue to espouse), but due to my encounters with global Christianity, a wider range of reading, familiarity with different churches seeking to be faithful in various contexts, and seeing the American culture wars from the outside. Much of the attention the American church devoted to politics seemed wildly misplaced and misguided, out of step with churches in many other parts of the world.

So, I gravitated toward stronger distinctions that would help the church maintain its priority on discipleship and evangelism: (1) distinguishing between the church as an institution and Christians as individual believers and (2) prioritizing the mission of the church over the implications of Christians living out their faith. I tried to understand the cultural and historical reasons why many black Christians and white Christians who share confessional unity could be so divided on political priorities. I lamented the intrusion of political debates into every sphere of life.

The gospel-centered movement that arose in the late 2000s and into the 2010s was, in part, an answer to the Emerging Church movement, whose aversion to institutions and authority prevented it from building structures that could sustain its growth. Look at the foundational documents for The Gospel Coalition (written in 2006) and you get a glimpse of the challenges facing the church during that era, including postmodernisms effects on how we interpret Scripture.

The gospel-centered movement was also an answer to the prevalence of church growth philosophy. Leaders decried overly pragmatic approaches in the church, shared concerns about the decline of serious doctrinal instruction, and sought to reestablish the priority of the gospel itself as the unifying force for evangelicalism and the renewal of the church.

Gospel centrality, by nature of its spotlight on the fundamental message of Christianity, cut against the focus of many religious rightinfluenced churches. Political disagreements remained, but they were demoted. The excesses of the moral majoritys approach to politics were on display, and younger pastors turned away from that combative posture (although sometimes replacing cultural combat with intramural theological combativenesscommonly regarded as cage-stage Calvinism).

Synergy showed up in the gospel-centered movement and the missional conversations at the time because both rejected the politicizing of the church so often seen in the religious right as well as the leftward theological drift of the Emerging Church and religious left. This alliance made sense because the gospel and mission naturally go together, as the good news we spread is about the missionary heart of a God who seeks and saves the lost.

During this time, the old guard of the religious right appeared as more of a caricature of its former glory, with increasingly bizarre viewpoints put forth by gray heads with unmerited cultural confidence. For many younger pastors, the whole idea of taking back the country from godless forces felt like a lost cause. If older evangelicals thought of America as a type of Israela country chosen by God for special purposes in the world, younger evangelicals saw the country as a type of Babylona place where the true church will, for the foreseeable future, be a moral minority, prophetic from the margins.

The Israel/Babylon motif has shaped recent generational approaches to political involvement. The old religious right, in thinking of America as a type of Israel, reacted to current events as a betrayal of Christian heritage and prioritized politics as the mechanism for effecting change in society. Younger evangelicals, in thinking of America as Babylon, reacted to current events with a sense of resignation and prioritized pastoral help and counsel in a rapidly secularizing society.

But then, in the span of less than a decade, a series of convulsions reshaped the landscape. The Supreme Court decision redefining marriage for all 50 states in 2015, the rapid loss of political will to enact conscience protections and ensure religious liberty, and then the surprising victory of Donald Trump in 2016 (brought about by a resurgent religious right and widespread white evangelical support) changed the environment. The push for acceptance of gender theories that require a certain suspension of disbelief (not to mention the suppression of speech defining reality) only exacerbated the tensions.

The Israel/Babylon motif doesnt capture the concerns of this current moment. The neoReligious Right agrees with younger evangelicals that were in Babylon. The debate is about how the church should respond to this environment. What does faithfulness in Babylon look like?

The earlier sense of resignation, of being passive in the face of rapid political change, has come under fire from many younger pastors and leaders who believe this cultural moment calls for a rejection of the excesses of old religious right and the apolitical above the fray response so often on display among the leaders of the church growth and gospel-centered movements. You cannot focus on discipleship, they say, without dealing with politics because faithfulness in the public square is a part of discipleship. Overreacting to the religious rights problems has led to a widespread failure in addressing political questions in discipleship, creating a void that leaves the church vulnerable to all kinds of false ideologies.

History is rhyming again, and so were witnessing the rise of a neoReligious Right that seeks to recapture something of that movements focus on political priorities while connecting political thought to Christian discipleship. In forthcoming columns, I want to give some attention to this new development and then offer suggestions for how these resurgent culture-warring sensibilities can be properly channeled so as to result in a stronger church, without the collateral damage often associated with these kinds of battles. More to come.

This is the first column in a series. If you would like my future articles sent to your email, as well as a curated list of books, podcasts, and helpful links I find online,enter your address.

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The Return of the Culture War - The Gospel Coalition

A draft of the new map was released on May 16, with stakeholders having the opportunity to submit feedback throughout the week before a final map was produced on Friday. The newly drawn map features districts that are more compact, particularly in New York City, which is famed for its unusually apportioned seats. But opponents of the special masters draft map argued that the odd shapes of many current districts reflect the historic racial and ethnic makeup of those areas, thus giving those populations a voice in Congress.

It certainly is a fairer map from the partisan perspective than the one passed by the legislature, Michael Li, senior counsel for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center, told The New Republic on Friday. The bigger issue is whether the map gets the right balance with respect to various communities, and in particular, communities of color. Its unclear to me that the map violates the Voting Rights Act, which is not to say it doesnt necessarily adversely affect communities of color.

Cervas seems to have taken some of these considerations into account in the finalized map, reuniting some communities that he had divided. One such example was Sunset Park, a neighborhood in Brooklyn that was previously divided between the districts of Representative Jerry Nadler and Representative Nydia Velazquez. Sunset Park has significant Asian and Hispanic populations, Lerner argued, so it made sense for part of the neighborhood to belong to Nadlers district, which includes Chinatown in Manhattan, and part to Velazquezs district, which has a plurality Hispanic population. But under the special masters initial map, the entirety of Sunset Park had been drawn into a new district with Staten Island, with smaller Hispanic and Asian populations. Cervass initial map therefore significantly diminished their voice within the district, said Susan Lerner, the executive director of Common Cause New York, an advocacy group that opposed the new map.

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New Yorks Redistricting Has Caused a Train Wreck of Democrats Own Creation - The New Republic

A group of vulnerable House Democrats is warning of spikes in ObamaCare premiums this fall, saying that enhanced financial assistance from last years relief bill needs to be extended.

Rep. Lauren Underwood (D-Ill.) led the letter from 26 swing-district House Democrats to Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), calling for the enhanced ObamaCare financial assistance to be extended as part of any party-line economic package that Democrats put together.

If Congress does not act, experts note ObamaCare enrollees will receive notices of increases in their premiums in the run-up to the midterm elections, adding a political blow for Democrats at a time when the party is already facing major electoral headwinds.

The American Rescue Plan signed by President Biden early last year temporarily provided enhanced premium help for ObamaCare enrollees. But those extra subsidiesare slated to expire at the end of this year, leading to calls for Congress to act to make the enhanced help permanent.

These out-of-pocket cost increases are imminent: starting this autumn, when enrollees begin receiving notices of their premium increases for 2023 health plans, our constituents will find that the same high-quality coverage that they have been able to afford thanks to the American Rescue Plan will now be out of reach, the lawmakers write.

We cannot allow the progress we have made to be temporary, they add.We must make lower out-of-pocket costs and expanded coverage a permanent pillar of our health care system, and reconciliation is our only chance to get this done.

Extending the enhanced ObamaCare subsidies was part of President Bidens Build Back Better package that House Democrats passed in November.

But negotiations over the Senate version of thepackage have been stalled for months, and it is unclear if leaders will be able to reach a deal with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), the key swing vote if Democrats hope to use reconciliation to bypass a Republican filibuster in the Senate.

Manchin has expressed openness to the enhanced ObamaCare subsidies in the past, though their fate is tied up in the larger negotiations.

If the enhanced subsidies are not extended, premium increases could be substantial. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that premiums would have been 53 percent higher on average this year without the extra financial assistance.

The lawmakers are also calling for a provision extending health coverage to low-income people in the 12 states that have not expanded Medicaid to be included in the package.

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Vulnerable House Democrats urge action to prevent ObamaCare premium hike this fall - The Hill

Legislation sponsored by Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal supported by Connecticut's other senator, Chris Murphy, and Governor Lamont, Democrats all which was narrowly defeated in the Senate on May 11, titled the Women's Health Protection Act, isn't nutty just because it would authorize all abortions all the time, right up to birth. It's also nutty because, after its title, it doesn't mention women at all, not even once.

Instead, the text of the legislation substitutes "person" for "woman," apparently on a premise shared by all Democratic senators, except Joe Manchin of West Virginia, that there are no longer different genders and that men now can become pregnant.

The hallucination of transgenderism now rules the Senate Democratic caucus and Connecticut's Democratic Party.

After all, why title the bill the Women's Health Protection Act and then immediately cut women out of the text except to deceive and signal belief in transgenderism?

Since Connecticut's senators, the governor, and their supporters complain aboutRepublican extremism, they should be pressed about the implications of their legislation.

Do they really believe that men can become pregnant and need abortions?

Do they really believe that the law should be indifferent to the abortion of viable fetuses of full gestation?

Do they really believe that parents shouldn't necessarily know that their minor daughters are having surgery?

Last week the governor admitted that he opposes conditioning abortions for minors on the notification and consent of their parents, even though state law requires parental consent for mere tattooing. The governor argued that the law doesn't need to require parental notification because most minors seeking abortions tell their parents anyway.

Most may do so, but law is customarily enacted to apply to departures from the norm. Most people don't rob banks but, for good reason, bank robbery remains illegal, and a sensational case from 2009 provided Connecticut with everlasting good reason for requiring parental notification.

In that case, a 15-year-old girl who ran away from her home in Bloomfield and had been missing for almost a year was discovered living with an unrelated 41-year-old man in West Hartford. She had obtained an abortion at a Connecticut clinic after becoming pregnant from statutory rape of her by him, only to be returned tothe manand sex slavery because no one involved with the abortion asked critical questions.

While the age of majority in Connecticut is 18, for years now liberal Democrats in the state, starting with former Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, have claimed that young people are incapable of taking full responsibility for themselves until they are 25 or so and that, as a result, they should be exempt from serious criminal penalties. So how do 15-year-olds become competent to decide by themselves on surgery?

The Women's Health Protection Act, which the Democrats likely will keep submitting in Congress, would duplicate the horrible conflict of interest that Connecticut law creates with abortion. It would deprive minors of any true guardians at a moment of the most profound risk to their physical and mental health, instead giving guardianship to their abortion providers, even though, by definition, the pregnancies to be terminated are the result of statutory rape or worse and the failure to notify parents, guardians, or law enforcement may conceal the most abusive felonies and facilitate still more abuse.

You're supposed to know better than to ask the barber if you need a haircut. So who should ask the abortion clinic if she needs an abortion?

Connecticut Democrats are calling the Republican nominee for governor, Bob Stefanowski, an extremist for his position on abortion. But Stefanowski supports the abortion policy established by Roe v. Wade unrestricted abortion prior to fetal viability, state regulation afterward as well as parental notification, which Roe allowed.

With the Women's Health Protection Act, the governor and Connecticut's senators and most state Democratic candidates would go far beyond Roe. Thus, they have become the extremists here, and crackpots as well because of their legislation's suggestion that there is no biological difference between men and women and that biology itself has been a myth all along.

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The Day - In Connecticut, Democrats are the abortion extremists - News from southeastern Connecticut - theday.com

Democrats are bracing for a bad election night this November, and if they aren't worrying, the pundits certainly are on their behalf. The president's party usually loses seats in midterm elections, especially the first off-year election for a new president, and Democrats have no seats to spare in Congress. But this year, Democrats have the added headwinds of high inflation and worse, the dreaded specter of "stagflation," or the combination of rising costs and lower economic growth.

How might inflation affect the 2022 midterms?

The Consumer Price Index the benchmark U.S. inflation gauge rose 8.3 percent year-over-year in April, down slightly from 8.5 percent in March but still the highest inflation rate since 1982. "Inflation erodes living standards, and especially the kind of inflation we're talking about of basic needs food and shelter and energy, the three pillars of existence," Diane Swonk, chief economist at the consulting firm Grant Thornton LLP, tells The Wall Street Journal.

Inflation is high everywhere, not just the U.S. Britain's inflation hit its own 40-year-high of 9 percent in April, and the European Union reported annual inflation of 7.4 percent. But Europeans aren't voting in U.S. elections this fall.

It can be hard to get a good read on what actually motivates voters, but "at this point, the answer to what Americans are most worried about is pretty straightforward: inflation," Geoffrey Skelley and Holly Fuong write at FiveThirtyEight. "We asked Americans this question in a variety of ways, but regardless of how we asked it, the top answer was always the same: inflation."

So while "the fundamentals of the U.S. economy are solid, with households still in a strong position financially as more people get jobs and return to old habits like traveling, dining out, and going to concerts," and wages are rising and unemployment is at a historically low 3.6 percent, the Journal reports, people aren't necessarily feeling it.

"Democrats tend to point to and focus on unemployment, which is certainly important to the people that are unemployed and their families and communities," veteran political analyst Charlie Cook tells NPR News. But about 4 percent of Americans are affected when unemployment rises, while "100 percent of people are affected by inflation, and so you could actually argue that it's like 25 times more." And people are confronted with higher prices every time they buy groceries or fill up their car at the gas station.

The main causes, as Democrats will highlight, are enduring supply chain issues stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic plus rising fuel and food prices tied to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and its fallout. President Biden also argues that some companies are greedily raising prices even as they rake in record profits, while Amazon's Jeff Bezos recently joined Republicans in blaming high inflation on Biden's American Rescue Plan and previous (bipartisan) stimulus checks people had money to spend on scarce products, driving up prices.

"They're both right. And they're both wildly overstating their positions," Allison Morrow writes at CNN Business. "The truth is that inflation doesn't have any single cause," or an "easy cure." Along with the Ukraine war, Chinese COVID shutdowns, and other supply chain kinks, the Federal Reserve "unleashed a flood of easy money while cutting interest rates to near zero to prevent an economic collapse," she adds. "And just to pile on: There remains an unsolved, psychologically complex imbalance in the labor market that's forcing businesses to shell out more on wages and other benefits."

It doesn't really matter, politically speaking, analysts say. With inflation or other bad economic news, "the one thing certain is that an incumbent president will get the blame," Stuart Rothenberg writes at Roll Call. "Indeed, Biden already has." It "wouldn't matter how great a job President Biden is doing on handling Ukraine or the coronavirus," Cook tells NPR. "If voters are mad about the economy in general and inflation in particular, then that's the rifle-shot vote, and that's what Democrats have to really worry about."

Republicans are pretty open about using it against Democrats, too."We're going to continue to have inflation, and then interest rates will go up," Sen. Rick Scott (R., Fla.), who heads the Senate Republican campaign arm, told The Wall Street Journal last fall. "This is a gold mine for us." And, he told NBC News, "this is going to be devastating for them."

If Biden "stresses that the economy is still growing, he risks looking out of touch," Rothenberg writes. "And it he turns to a revised 'Build Back Better' plan, he has to call for more government spending during a period of inflation not exactly an ideal place to be." But "the president doesn't have a lot of options when it comes to trying to slow inflation," he adds. "It's the Federal Reserve, after all, that is tasked to assure price stability, and the Fed may well have already miscalculated."

Presidents can't do much to lower consumer prices, tamp down oil prices, stop Russia's invasion, or unkink supply chains, but political strategists say it is still important for Biden "to communicate empathy and action even in the absence of good options as an otherwise divided Republican party unites around attacking the president over 'Bidenflation,'" Reuters reports. The White House has also "developed a three-prong strategy: act as aggressively as it can on prices it thinks it can impact on the margins, stress the role of Russian President Vladimir Putin and the pandemic, and attack Republicans, suggesting their economic policies would be worse."

And in fact, Biden honed in on Scott's "Rescue America" proposal, which the president said would "raise taxes on 75 million American families" while doing nothing "to hold big corporations and companies accountable." Look, "I happen to think it's a good thing when American families have a little more money in their pockets at the end of the month," Biden said. "The Republicans in Congress don't seem to think so. Their plan is going to make working families poorer." He went on list actions he has taken to address inflation, "his No. 1 priority," including cutting the budget deficit and hacking away at gas prices.

In the end, said economist Jason Furman, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under former President Barack Obama, "I don't think there's any message that would make people feel good about 7 percent inflation."

"Interviews with a half-dozen Republicans showed that while the party is not yet unified around a specific plan," NBC News reported last fall, their "proposals include boosting domestic energy production, eliminating COVID-19 restrictions and vaccine mandates, and cutting shipping and trucking regulations," ideas experts said "amount to a mixed bag: Some could help alleviate inflationary pressures, while others would have little effect or no effect in addressing the cause of increased costs or would not materially affect the economy for years."

Ideally, Republicans would get creative and come up with "a comprehensive program to dramatically cut back government benefits and tax breaks for people and businesses in the top 1 percent of income for their age cohort or firm size," conservative commentator Henry Olsen writes at The Washington Post. "A program such as this would combine populist politics with conservative economics," shrinking the government in a politically winning way.

In reality, "there's no great mystery behind the GOP's strategy: It's rooted in the idea that Americans are upset about something; Democrats hold the reins of federal power; so voters should blame the governing majority," Steve Benen writes at MSNBC. "It doesn't matter whether it makes sense or whether Republicans have meaningful solutions." And honestly, "that strategy might very well work."

And if we get stagflation, that "obviously would be a nightmare for Biden and his party," Rothenberg adds "Of course, anyone who has been around for a while knows that predictions about the economy and the stock market are even less reliable than the promises of a snake oil salesman. The problem for Biden is that snake oil salesmen seem to be having a pretty easy time selling their snake oil these days."

Excerpt from:
What price will Democrats pay for high inflation? - The Week