Wild Goose Festival

Ex-Evangelicals & Chili Cornbread Eucharist

on August 15, 2013

Last week witnessed a rain-soaked gathering centered upon “the intersection of music, justice, spirituality and art” in Hot Springs, North Carolina. The muddy campground attracting an estimated 2,200 participants at times resembled Yoda’s swamp world of Dagobah, complete with Evangelical Left luminaries espousing theologies similar to the aged Star Wars character’s new age pronouncements.

The Wild Goose Festival — named after the Celtic imagery for the Holy Spirit—draws in aging Protestant Mainliners and disenchanted ex-evangelicals. The festival highlights what its apologists call “emergence Christianity,” but Wild Goose certainly does not shy away from liberal politics. This year’s event featured both in spades.

Emergence Christianity, popularly known as the Emergent Church movement, springs primarily from 20th century deconstructionism. In his public interview with Krista Tippett, emergent guru Brian McLaren described the movement as “postmodern…post-colonial…and post-Holocaust.” He contended that modernism is a “colonized…European form of Christianity” which crumbled away under the postmodern uncertainties of globalism and relativism.

McLaren thought the Holocaust frightened believers away from the idea of a “Christian nation,” all the while tyranny became associated with a faith in absolutes. “We’re probably at our worst when we present our faith not as a story but as a system,” he argued. “We need to give up the crazy European idea of monoreligious cultures.” Of course, opponents to such wondrous post-everything progress are none other than conservative evangelicals “with the audacity to say that homosexual people are ruining marriage” and Catholics “more concerned with keeping women out of the priesthood as the world is destroyed by carbon gases.”

Featured speaker Frank Schaeffer (outspoken critic of his father Francis’ legacy) was more direct: “Certainty is the enemy of the truth.” Indeed, many wild goslings boasted they were “seekers who haven’t found the answers,” but were “looking for companions on each of our respective faith journeys.” Wild Goose “elder” Vincent Harding addressed the opening invocation to “Mother-Father God, Benevolent Being,” “the spirits of those who came before,” and “the spirit of the earth.” Observers might not know where this flock is headed, but it’s definitely not north.

This loosey-goosey theology allows for a panoply of beliefs and practices. This year especially, the festival highlighted issues of sexuality. While organizers tout Wild Goose as a “safe space for dangerous conversation,” the festival benefited for the first time from sponsorship by the homosexual advocacy organization the Human Rights Campaign. In one presentation, openly gay Roman Catholic priest James Alison likened church leaders with Italian traffic cops: well-dressed figures who occasionally feel the need to emerge from their booths and direct traffic, causing more problems. Asher Kolieboi, who was born female and now embraces a male identity, demanded a “trans theology” of affirmation in all congregations.

Such ethics require a tolerant God. Thankfully, the “Benevolent Being” is quite nonviolent! After all, the texts of violence, divine punishment, and judgment stand for “the people sharing how they understand themselves and God,” according to Pastor Amy Yoder McGloughlin of the infamous Germantown Mennonite Church. “Whether or not it’s [historically] true doesn’t really matter to me,” she revealed. Of course, making space for a nonviolent God gives room for pacifism and universalism. If the Highest Power in the cosmos never inflicts pain to fulfill the demands of justice, who are human governors to carry out war? Moreover, if God does not punish sin, does He send anyone into Hell? Such unenlightened concepts typical of traditional American Protestantism should be thrown away with coal mining and offshore drilling.

Perhaps the perfect encapsulation of Wild Goose was its chili cornbread Eucharist. Touted as an example of “bioregional discipleship,” the service featured a “good old fashioned altar call tonight at communion,” where supplicants would repent of their “consumer lifestyle” and “petroleum-based investments.”

Wild goslings enjoyed a feel-good narrative of healthy eating and locally-grown ingredients. “I have grown this corn on our land in the [New Mexican] mountains. I ground it by hand…used rainwater from North Carolina to make the batter,” the presenter boasted. He added, “It’s mountain corn. It tastes toothy. This isn’t a white cornbread. It also has great chili and cheese we’ve added to that cornbread tonight, and it tastes meaty. It tastes like a body.” Opportunities for scatological humor aside, this insipid “Stuff White People Like” vibe resembles a Portlandia sketch more than a religious service. Apparently, the most important questions surrounding the sacrament aren’t about Christ’s presence and substance, but instead whether or not the ingredients are certified fair trade organic.

The size and longevity of the emergent movement remain questionable. During a Darkwood Brew live broadcast, one minister begged for advice since the conservatives had been scared out of her church and the congregation was on the brink of collapse. At the Alison lecture, a married lesbian from the Archdiocese of Detroit was struggling with “new, young conservative leadership.” Participants tended to be raised in the church; few if any converted from another religion (or cared to evangelize, since that is a “colonialist” endeavor).

Ever the contrarian, Frank Schaeffer observed in one of his workshops, “The mission of progressive Christianity is odd. It’s a bunch of people who realized their wagon is hitched to something supremely uncool, and so they try to hitch their wagon on something cool instead. The problem is that what is cool today is determined by a s*** culture.” Emergents do hitch their cart to such falling stars as environmentalism, pacifism, the Moral Monday protests, wealth redistribution, and “laughter yoga.” Like liberal Protestants before them, the Evangelical Left may also slip into irrelevance and lost vitality.

Ironically, for all their talk of misty uncertainties and multiculturalism, emergents remain assured that orthodox Christianity and conservative politics are erroneous. It seems that, in reaching out to theological misfits, the Wild Goose Festival has picked up all the heretics.

This article first appeared on The American Spectator website and was reposted with permission.

  1. Comment by Adrian Croft on August 15, 2013 at 5:41 pm

    So glad to see that Franky Schaeffer V (or whatever he is calling himself this week) still finds venues to spout his nonsense. I find it amusing that he bashes “certainty,” because we can safely assume that the participants of this Wild Goose Chase festival are absolutely dogmatically certain about:
    – gay ordination
    – gay marriage
    – women as clergy
    – global warming
    – pacifism
    – capitalism
    Don’t ever let a leftie tell you he doesn’t believe in dogma or certainty. He does. He just wants to change your old dogmas for his new ones.

  2. Comment by Gabe on August 15, 2013 at 8:41 pm

    Bingo!

    Franky seems pretty certain that “certainty is the enemy of truth”. I wonder if that’s true. It doesn’t take too long to show their fortune cookie pithy statements are absurd and make no sense.

    And just when I think Brian McLaren can’t say anything dumber, he opens his mouth and proves me wrong.

  3. Comment by CKG on August 19, 2013 at 11:15 am

    When FS5 says, “certainty is the enemy of truth,” one is tempted to ask if he’s sure about that. . .

  4. Comment by Greg Paley on August 20, 2013 at 11:30 am

    You have to “translate” Franky. He meant “people like my dad, who believed in the Bible and Christian tradition, are idiots.” Those same people didn’t buy Franky’s earlier books the way they bought his father’s books, and Franky has never gotten over that. He has the mentality of a divorcee who will never cease dissing his ex-wife, which is why he’s very tiresome.

  5. Comment by Ray Bannister on August 15, 2013 at 9:03 pm

    Let’s see, this sounds so spiritual… corn from New Mexico, rainwater from North Carolina, followed by a heartfelt repentance for “petroleum-based investments.”

    Hey, don’t let anyone tell you that the religious left is shallow or trendy, it just ain’t so! I got choked up just reading about “bioregional discipleship.” I’m counting on this sort of thing to fill liberal churches to capacity.

    Pardon the sarcasm, folks. It’s just hard to read this poppycock without laughing.

  6. Comment by cynthia curran on August 15, 2013 at 10:03 pm

    Well, Frank isn’t all bad, he is against human trafficking like the Empress Theodora, another Eastern Orthodox person against that in her day.

  7. Comment by cynthia curran on August 15, 2013 at 10:10 pm

    I don’t know about that, liberal protestants shared some things in common with the free spirits during the middle ages, and later the Anabaptist radicals at Munster. Groups against the status quo in the Church go back to the middle ages. Evangelicals are very ignorant of the past which means that when confront something they don’t understand, they sometimes lose their faith.

  8. Comment by gary on August 16, 2013 at 2:16 pm

    why did you include that last sentence Cynthia? No need for it. You made your point with your first two sentences. A sweeping statement such as “Evangelicals are very ignorant of the past…” is a falsehood because some of us know the past very well and cling to the past – that is- the words of the Bible. When you included that last sentence you nullified your credibility.

  9. Comment by Kay Glines on August 16, 2013 at 8:02 am

    There is all kind of spiritual looniness going on. Someone sent me a link to a religious group whose pastor is a lesbian who refers to herself as a “congrepentebaptist.” This group is (big surprise here) committed to “social justice,” which has nothing at all to do with justice, it just means pushing the radical gay agenda.

    There is something very sophomoric about all this, almost like a group of atheist college kids got together to do a spoof of religion. Maybe that’s what it really is.

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