Crouch’s observation is excellent. In my evangelical days in New England I saw a number of my fellow Christians who seemed to be obsessed with the notion of being cool–so cool that the lost would want to get a piece of the cool action in Jesus. That was the driving force behind the early days of CCM (back when we just called it “Christian rock”).

I later began the practice of referring to evangelical thinking as “groovier than thou.”

I also saw a lot of evangelical stereotyping of fundamentalism–the assumption, for example, that anyone on the right was necessarily in the “Condemn culture” camp (something that Crouch seems to fall into above). I found that to be very much untrue in my personal journey from evangelicalism into fundamentalism. In fact, my fundamentalist colleagues were in the “Create culture” camp decades ago, as a careful reading of Ron Horton’s *Christian Education: Its Mandate and Mission* (http://www.bjupress.com/product/058586) will show.

I’ll quickly admit that fundamentalists have done relatively little to create culture on a noticeable scale; reasons for this would be worth investigating. But some of them, anyway, were philosophically in that boat long before it was being actively expressed on the evangelical side–perhaps even before evangelicalism became distinguishable from fundamentalism in the 1940s.

Alden Taylor