“As long as your faith is an ambiguous thing that’s determined by your culture and personality and the parts of the Bible that you like best—that’s fine with most liberals. But the moment your faith becomes grounded in a God that has revealed his opinions and principles in a document (the Bible) that people rally around, study, learn, and believe despite their personalities and personal convictions (which is the sort of “elite” evangelicals you hung around with at PHC)—you’re dealing with a united force with a relatively united voice. So if you believe that being open-minded, curious, and tolerant (which is obviously how David Kuo defines love) are the highest virtues—then that other crowd is pretty scary”

And the first thing I thought of was, in fact, maha’s ‘Wisdom of Doubt’ series.

Have to make dinner, so I’ll leave out the ‘but don’t forget (as the Dawkins, etc. folks have pointed out), the kind of sophisticated understanding of faith and religion represented by Tillich is a teeny-tiny minority/ but the understanding of faith and religion (all sorts) represented by the Dawkins, etc. folks is so stunningly tone-deaf and socially/sociologically naive . . .’ back and forth ’til later.. Just let me toss out two books I’m reading: Armstrong’s The Great Transformation, and Barbara King’s Evolving God, both of which are fascinating - King’s book is one of the recent crop looking at religion in the light of our evolutionary history, but as she’s an anthropologist, she actually has a sense of human nature and human life: as one of the amazon reviewers say:”The front cover of Barbara King’s “Evolving God” proclaims that this is a “provocative view on the origins of religion.” Perhaps, but this is not a deliberately provocative book. “Evolving God” is a gentle, respectful, and above all thoughtful book that searches for the origins of the religious impulse. King finds this in what she calls belongingness, “mattering to someone who matters to you,” a trait found in contemporary humans but also in our human and non-human primate ancestors . . .“

You are right about evangelicalism originating as a non-authoritarian movement. I am a Catholic, and I am well aware (as many are not) that one of the objections that the English had with Catholicism after the Reformation, and particularly in the 17th and 18th centuries, was the association of the institutional Catholic church with an authoritarian monarchy. This was one of the elements of the English Civil War in the 17th century, and it was one of the many reasons that James II wound up deposed and living in exile in France. It’s rather ironic that a religious movement that originated as a non-authoritarian movement has now adopted the authoritarianism its founders objected to.

In the 1950s and 1960s it was more open-minded on many issues than it is now, however. Think Bill Moyers and Jimmy Carter.