We leave the gentrified culture of the printed word and tramp into the jungles of the blogosphere.

What we surveyed from Brian McLaren's book, A Generous Orthodoxy, was some of the formal structure of his thinking. McLaren is influential, but not omnipotent, in the diverse emergent world. To find problems in McLaren's theology is not the same as finding all emergents problematic. They may have different thoughts about all the subjects we covered. And few are engaged in formulating a system of thought as he is.

To get a vivid sense of emergent culture, you have to go to their blogs, which we will do for a while in this series. I have no particular method or point in selecting first a post from Keith Giles (October 19^th) called, "Destroy the (Christian) Subculture!" The title just jumped off the screen.

What Giles promises with his title, he delivers in his opening paragraph. "I've come to the conclusion that the Christian Subculture is evil. I want to destroy it. I want to choke the life out of it and watch it die. I want to strip the skin from its bones, shake the life out of it and break it into tiny pieces."

The subculture to which he refers is the alternative universe evangelicals have set up for their own entertainment -- music, books, TV, radio.

More: "The Christian Subculture prevents the breaking in of the Kingdom. It inhibits the Gospel message. It paralyzes the followers of Christ by isolating them from the people they are supposed to love and interact with on a deeply intimate level."

Giles has planned a conference called the Non-Con (non-conference), at which he wants to have a "Burn Our Christian Crap" session. Non-conferees would "sing ‘Kumbaya' together while we tossed our ‘Lord's Gym' tees and ‘Carman' Cd's and other idols to materialistic spirituality into a giant bonfire, in homage to those horrible youth group parties where teens were forced to burn their Van Halen records and Rush albums (because they were ‘secular')."

Frankly, for me, reading that paragraph was a joy. I have a weakness for satire. And I am broadly sympathetic to the whole post.

And at the core of what Giles writes is some biblical truth. He notes that Jesus prayed not that the Father would take the disciples "out of the world," but that he would protect them (John 17.15). Giles also notes that Paul's clarification (1 Corinthians 5.9-10) that if you were never to associate with immoral people from the world, "you would have to leave this world."

Giles writes that "there is nothing secular. There is only the world we live in."

What we have in Giles is a measure of how infuriating the evangelical flight from reality has become to many. Our isolation from the world has not prevented any sins from erupting inside the bubble -- sexual, financial, or theological. It has merely narrowed the horizons of God's people.

These things need to be heard.

The trouble is, destroying the subculture accomplishes nothing. Giles' rage is awfully generalized, and even if he sated his appetite for violence upon "Jesus Junk" it's not clear what he would replace all of it with. Standing on a bulldozer in the burned-out ruins of the Trinity Broadcasting Network, would Giles feel himself better positioned to reach the lost?

We cannot reach the world merely by living in it. Christ reaches people when his disciples have a countercultural way of life -- together. Emergents are reaching for this, trying to do more works of compassion and justice, for instance. But this movement will not renew a sense of community among believers by arranging chairs in a circle and turning church into Starbucks. Anger and sarcasm are sufficient to get a little attention; they are not substitutes for leadership.

In emergent blogs, I find endless repetitions of the sentiments in "Destroy the (Christian) Subculture!" I've been reading virtually the same sentiments, in fact, for years. I have not yet found a serious effort to move beyond them.