Were the "Good Old Days" Really So Good?

I came across this interesting observation from George Marsden’s Understanding Fundamentalism and Evengelicalism. It speaks to ssomething I have suspected for a very long time. Marsden refers to the period from roughly 1865 - 1890 as the “gilded age” of American evangelicalism:

Discussion

"It is time to abandon the evangelical quest to be 'relevant.' We need to be more cautious about letting cultural trends..."

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“We have an unfortunate tendency to chase what is cool in our culture and make it the centerpiece of our ministry (often denigrating other ministries that don’t share our vision). Meanwhile, we don’t realize that we are really about 10 years behind the cultural trends anyway. We are perennial late-comers to what our world thinks is hip.” The Arrogance of the Urban, Part 2

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