America is the country where everybody believes they have a redemptive plan for everybody else, including Christians. And somehow Christians feel like they have let the world down, have let God down, if they don’t meet their vision for the redemption of reality—whether it’s in politics or in relationships. For example, why is it that that segment of evangelical Christianity which puts the highest value and premium, the most effort and investment, into preserving family and marriage has the most dysfunctional families and the most divorces? Is it because they don’t put enough effort into it? Is it because they’re hypocrites? Or is it because they overidealize it? We overidealize everything. I think we need a little less idealism in this country because idealism very often leads to narcissism. And we have a real problem with narcissism the last two generations. The current generation, which is supposed to be the most idealistic generation since the sixties—the boomers were very idealistic—is, I think, one of the most narcissistic generations. It doesn’t have any sense of reality; it doesn’t have any sense of proportion. Neither did my generation; we just had a lot of bumps and hard knocks, and we finally learned, and we kind of went the other way. We need to learn balance. We need to learn how to respond appropriately in the situation in which we find ourselves.

-carl raschke in an interview with the other journal