No Significant Difference

I’m reading through a book I’ve been asked to use in a series of sessions, in which I will be leading a men’s discussion group. We were warned it was not the best, but a decent place to start. The name of the book isn’t important, because it’s just one of dozens you could order from the same few publishers.
These books all present a mythology of recovering Christian manhood. They presume to push the envelope, engage in a bit of cultural warfare, reacting to what they regard as an attack, an overt politically correct progressive cultural assault. Here’s the crazy part: The books are produced by the same commercial entities which publish and profit from these perceived attacks.
This particular book comes from writers participating in making some of the hit films from Sherwood Pictures Ministry, which is based at Sherwood Baptist Church, Albany, GA. Having been a Baptist myself, nothing in this whole thing offers any surprises to me. It is wholly and utterly predictable. That is, everything is a reflection of socially conservative, middle-class American culture. Worst of all, they do not understand how this is merely another flavor of the same culture they claim to despise. (From what I can see of their marriage books, they have zero understanding of Game.)
Would it surprise you to discover nothing about Sherwood BC indicates they aren’t Dispensationalist Christian Zionists? The vast majority of Southern Baptist churches are. Those who aren’t usually say so because they want no part of that garbage. Churches are the religious Zionist propaganda machine, and Hollywood the secular version of the same thing. The manipulative message is pretty much the same when you strip away the flavoring. It’s the same Neocon imperial message we have come to expect with all sorts of disguises. These are good Baptist folks who want Americans to die attacking countries who’ve done us no harm, for whatever reason the NWO has, but seldom reveals. The main difference here is they at least are willing to send their own sons for cannon fodder, because they are true believers.
I can’t fault the authors of this book for offering the best they know. They sincerely believe this is godly. They can’t imagine how very far it is from what the Bible actually says. The can’t imagine how utterly foreign is the Ancient Hebrew intellectual background to their dreams of a perfect world. So in this book, the authors keep coming right up to the doorway of truth, but never passing through it.
This should not surprise anyone who so much as visits their websites. You’ll be bombarded by the same despicable intrusive advertising, the same tracking cookies and web bugs, the same manipulative garbage we expect from Hollywood. They are associated with Sony Entertainment, for goodness’ sake. With each successive movie they produce, Sherwood is more and more exactly like the sleazy Hollywood they claim to attack, using the same head games, the same money grubbing “artistry” and in every other way just like the sinners they say they want to convert.
As Jesus said, it won’t matter what architecture you use, if you build in the same sand as those you ridicule, your structure will collapse for the same reason.