The Decline and Fall of the Protestant Sermon

From The National Review-

The Episcopal Church of my youth, in a memory now fading around the edge but still vivid at the core, was a place of binary judgments. In those days now long gone, there was right and there was wrong and never were the twain to be conflated. God’s Commandments, which concretized Christian principles, were not offhandedly suggestive. They were starkly dispositive. Old-school sermons pushed home the point that there was His way and the dark way and, pace the triangulators, not much at all in the way of a via media.

When it came to moral conundra, as some of you may recollect, the intellectual living was easy. Clarity had been pressed upon us. We all knew where we stood, which was on the wrong side of the bright red line dividing saint from sinner. And we all knew what we had to do. As John Kennedy put it unforgettably in another context, we had to do better. (You had to be there. JFK’s salty Boston accent gave eternal life to the mundane phrase.)

As even a casual student of human affairs might have guessed, we didn’t do better. In the increasingly politicized view of fancy-pants Protestantism, we began to do worse. And the Episcopal Church, with theatrical reluctance, seized the opportunity to gather more extra-cathedral responsibility into its own well-manicured hands.

More here-

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/decline-and-fall-of-protestant-sermon/