How Evangelists Are Using 'Church Planting' to Retake Secular Boston | Alternet

There is a line burried deep within the article that explains it all. "When intellectualism falls out of Boston, the whole nation will be swept into revival.” They are admitting that to be evangelical you can't be intellectual.; we don't need another go at the Dark Ages, once was enough.

The business of evangelism is old, but its methods are constantly changing. In recent years, evangelism in America has undergone a little-noticed but profound change in its organization, tactics, and culture. There is no better illustration of the new way of doing business than the appearance of evangelical activists in Boston, of all places.

Boston isn’t a likely candidate for missionary activity, but evangelicals have long dreamed of capturing the birthplace of the American Revolution. Only in the past few years have they found an efficient means to launch their long hoped-for revival.

They call it “church planting.” Missionary preachers create and house new congregations, often in inexpensive or state-subsidized locales. Sometimes the church planters establish their own worship services at existing yet underused church buildings. Other times, they rent out or borrow space in community centers, movie theaters, hotels, and other facilities. One relatively new tool of the church planting strategy is the public school system. In public schools across the country, the new evangelists have discovered facilities that can be made available to churches at relatively low or no cost—except, presumably, to local taxpayers. In some places, including New York City, the churches have not paid any rent at all.

Church planting is happening across the country, and it is organized on a national scale. Its presence in Boston is evidence of its efficiency even in the toughest markets. It has been enabled by pivotal shifts in the interpretation of constitutional law. And it is driven by a subtle yet profound transformation in evangelical culture in America—a transformation in both the religion itself and in its organizations forms.

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In many instances, church leadership promotes a Christian Nationalist version of American history that denies the Enlightenment roots of American democracy. The concept of “male headship,” found in the theological position papers of many of the religious organizations and sometimes referred to as a “complementarian” understanding of gender, underwrites a view of gender as Biblically based and hierarchical. (One such evangelical church document states, “Husbands should lead in the home, with wives intelligently submitting; likewise, in the Church, men alone should lead as the shepherds, that is, as Elders, with women diligently serving and leading in many other capacities.”) Church leaders overwhelmingly oppose abortion rights, and many reserve a special opprobrium for same-sex relationships. But in progressive areas such as Boston, pastors are often careful about how they convey controversial theological positions; many congregants may be unaware, especially at first, of the positions taken by church leaders.
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 Of course, religious entrepreneurship is an American tradition. But turning public schools and other government facilities into houses of worship is a recent phenomenon. The process was made possible by a 2001 Supreme Court decision, Good News Club v. Milford Central School, in which the court ruled that a ban on an adult-led after-school religious club infringed the group’s first amendment speech rights. The decision dismissed Establishment Clause concerns and the idea that young children might falsely perceive the private speech of the religious group as coming from the school itself. As a result, approximately 4,000 fundamentalist clubs targeting kids in their earliest years of learning, called Good News Clubs, have been installed in public elementary schools in just over a decade. The decision also helped pave the way for church planting initiatives in public schools.

How Evangelists Are Using 'Church Planting' to Retake Secular Boston | Alternet