Douglas Haugen

“Andrew Willard Jones writes, Within the metanarrative of progress that underwrites liberalism, Christians are cast as the losing side and, I am afraid, there is no amount of maneuvering that can change that. In fact, our role in the drama is precisely this maneuvering. We are cast to fight a rearguard action: we steadily lose ground, but nonetheless put up a stubborn resistance. In the liberal march to freedom, we are the ever-retreating but completely necessary tyrants, the enemies of human rights against whom the freedom fighters heroically contend, the defenders of dogma against whom the courageous scientists struggle, the stuffy prudes against whom the free-spirited youth must battle. We have all seen multiple versions of this movie—in fact, this is the plot of nearly all our cultural productions. If this is indeed our role in the cultural narrative, new tactics will not save us. Devising new ways to “turn back the clock” or new arguments within the dominant discourse of freedom and rights, of religion and the State, is simply to continue to play the part of the loser in a liberal script acted out on a set constructed of modern concepts. To view ourselves as the retreating good guys is simply our role.”
― Douglas Haugen, In Pursuit of the Metaverse: Millennial Dreams, Political Religion, and Techno-Utopia

“We must develop a new narrative that supports an alternate set of categories that do not cast Christianity as a merely religious actor, but rather presupposes Christianity as the stage on which history itself is performed. We must come to understand our world through a larger narrative within which the liberal epoch is a diverting subplot. If we do so, Christians can come to view ourselves not as an embattled minority on the losing side of history, but as protagonists in a missionary insurgency.”
― Douglas Haugen, In Pursuit of the Metaverse: Millennial Dreams, Political Religion, and Techno-Utopia