Evangelical Superstitions?

I love how Carl Trueman writes and thinks.

I find him both helpfully provocative and solidly biblical in his writing. The provocative side of his writing often broaches topics that really need to be addressed, yet often go either neglected or ignored, largely because they are not all that pleasant to think about. In a new post at the Reformation 21 blog, he is at it again. Trueman points out some Roman Catholic religious practices that Protestants would scorn, and shows that there is a conceptual similarity to some evangelical practices that should receive equal scorn. Here is one example:

What I do now believe, however, is that evangelicalism has its own set of fetishes which are also superstitious and just as potentially harmful. Evangelicals too imbue objects with a power which they do not possess. Celebrity conference speakers would be one such category. Few conference speakers are actually any better than many unknown men who faithfully fill pulpits in unknown churches week by week; but the evangelical culture ascribes to them great power. That is why people pay to go and hear them and would often rather talk about hearing them than about the unknown local man who faithfully ministers to them every Sunday. Aesthetics is another. Some evangelicals seem to think that there is a peculiarly sanctifying, protective power involved in dressing their daughters in denim pinnies and their sons in plaid shirts; or, on the other side of the evangelical world, wearing black, having rather short haircuts and engaging in acts of body piercing.

I recommend the rest of the post, as well as many other things that Trueman writes.