NRO ‘s Mike Potemra discovers that new elected Senator Scott Brown is quirkily ecumenical :
Brown is a member of a church affiliated with the Calvinist-rooted Christian Reformed Church in North America. If you go on the website of his congregation, New England Chapel in Franklin, Mass., you will read the following testimony from an attendee: “I have found a home, a family, friends, and most importantly, begun the journey to a REAL relationship with God. It is not one based on guilt or fear, but rather love, hope, and mercy.” The rest of the website has a similar tone. This is clearly not the Calvinism that lives on today chiefly in anti-Calvinist apologetics: the Calvinism of Salem and Hawthorne, that continues to haunt America’s dreams with a God who is best understood as a cruel despot. This new Calvinism is a development of the post-Great Awakening era, a religion that’s not afraid of sentimentality — yet it remains recognizably Calvinism, in its stress on the Bible and on the sovereignty of God.
And then one reads that Mr. Brown helped raise $5.5 million for the Cistercian nuns of Wrentham, who pray for him daily. (Brown himself is quoted: “When you have nuns praying for you three times a day and you’re not Catholic, anything that anybody can do or say about me, it’s Teflon . . . . It bounces right off.”)
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
The Church in the Age of Therapy
In 1966, Philip Rieff wrote in The Triumph of the Therapeutic that “Religious man was born to…
Canada’s Deadliest Blind Spot
On September 20, the Daily Mail ran a story with the provocative headline, “Our 83-year-old Christian grandmother…
The Faithful Joy of Dolly Parton and Fulton Sheen
Dolly Parton and Fulton Sheen seem to have had little in common. She favored rhinestones; he wore…
