“Everything great done in this world is done by passionate people”: Rick Warren Likens the Contemporary Jesus Movement to Leninism, Maoism, and the Hitler Youth Movements

In the video clip above, hearing Rick Warren appeal to mass totalitarian movements as MODELS for passionate mass organizing, I couldn’t help but think of W.B. Yeats’s poem, “The Second Coming,” specifically this line:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Rick Warren has it completely reversed.

Passionate intensity stirred in mass audiences is precisely not what the 21st century world needs (lest our century match the tragic history of the 20th century).

The contemporary world needs greater respect for science and universities—and for book reading, reason, critical thinking, irony, humor, and calm deliberation.

What the world does not need more of is personality-driven mass movement messianism—secular or religious.

We need people who are more like cats, difficult to herd—rather than wolves who run in packs.

About Santi Tafarella

I teach writing and literature at Antelope Valley College in California.
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1 Response to “Everything great done in this world is done by passionate people”: Rick Warren Likens the Contemporary Jesus Movement to Leninism, Maoism, and the Hitler Youth Movements

  1. joysome says:

    May I remind Mr Warren that Jesus didn’t have a church, I wonder why,they were trading in then and he threw them out. Its not the church who will move its Jesus and the two are not necessarily the same thing. Mr Warren is full of opinions and thats about all and they will surely be the one thing that get him in trouble. Maybe thats what he wants, headlines ! He has little love only rhetoric and a passion for blowing his own trumpet. Jesus saves and only he, always remembr that for he wore the fathers mantel. Do you thing Mr Warren does?

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