it's a strange question to pop into one's head at night before bed, but here it is: are mainline christians not really christians?

i guess i'm thinking about this because of the brian mclaren thing. i haven't read anything substantial by him, just a couple of essays on doubt and the media. although i now attend a presbyterian church i can't fight the fact i was raised baptist - the type of baptist whose pastor was a tight, arid man from texas whose moral code was as upright as a ditch post. this was a man who thought the moon landing was faked. this is the voice i hear in my head when i'm caught in a moral dilemma. for me, God sounds like pastor jake. and i don't necessarily like that.

it is my hunch that mclaren is not saying that his own reading of the bible replaces its intrinsic holiness. that's just a hunch of mine. (this means, of course, that i will have a big 'whoops' when it turns out that's exactly what he's saying, but until then, feh.)

i was at the public library tonight (to check out the mclaren book and they didn't have it, damn them!) and caught the tail end of eric michael dyson's talk 'was bill cosby right?'. (in essence, no. bill cosby was dead wrong.) dyson had a wonderful bit about coming at a person where they are. in his words, cosby comes at poor people and sees 'they're not like me and need to be fixed'; rather, dyson said, why can't we come at people where they are and bring them to where they need to be? this is how i see my mainline faith (see? there was a point). we come at people where they are. but i can't help feel that this is perceived to be a cop out. like, there's someone much stricter out there who says, 'you're not being a good christian because you're not as strict as you can be. strict faith is faith.'

and so we come back to faith being like a dry, cracked ditch post in an arid texas landscape.

update: lutheran chik has an excellent post on faith and doing that's sort of related to this. it clarifies things.