Arthur Hunt on the Alliance

Over at the increasingly promising and impressive online journal, Second Nature, there is a reprint of an article by Arthur Hunt on the influence of Neil Postman on evangelicals.  The Alliance receives a thoughtful mention.  Hunt differentiates between evangelicals broadly considered and a tiny subset who are Calvinistic in soteriology and -- crucially -- confessional in the true sense of the word (committed to churches which affirm historic, elaborate confessions).  This paragraph in particular is noteworthy in that regard:

Like Postman, they [the confessionalists] are cultural conservatives who have come to realize that older social traditions should not be sacrificed on the altar of progress. They are more backward looking than forward, desiring to preserve what they see as the permanent things in the culture. Confessionalists are troubled with capitalism's excesses, especially the Church's harnessing of market techniques to procure converts. In this sense, they belong to neither the Protestant left, which devalues doctrinal certainty, nor to the Protestant right, which today is tempted to trivialize doctrinal certainty under a banner of relevance.

For me, that is what distinguishes the Alliance, small and irrelevant as we are, from the various Evangelical Industrial Complexes out there.    It guarantees our irrelevance, I suppose.  But relevance is not exactly a biblical category.