The Banner shifted with Kuyvenhoven and this was the shift now referred to as the “post-war consensus”.

The name is imperfect but the dynamics are quite evident. Everyone felt the cultural shift, the last major vibe shift before this one perhaps.

Look at the pushback the Bananer received. Pretty tame stuff by Internet meme standards. Anyone who has been on the internet and gone to adulthood has seen FAR worse than The Bananer” every dared to deal out. Now President Spoelhof working hard to confiscate all the paper issues to shield young CRC impressionable souls…

Calls to expel the students, calls for church discipline. Any of us old enough to remember, or remember our parents stories understand the “climate” of the CRC in those days.

Those who created the Bananer (partly because of the pushback) became cultural heroes within the CRC. They were the new young leadership who would blaze the trail for the application of THAT vibe shift for that generation.

It’s a different world. Many interpret what happened at Synod as “we’re going back to those days…” but really? Hardly. There’s not putting THAT back in the bottle.

That’s why I had Rod tell some stories.

Synod 1955 could hardly imagine Synod 2025. Even the CRC “conservatives” have no problem working with women. They might be complementarians but they’re not instituting the Handmaid’s tale. https://youtu.be/dVLiDETfx1c?si=Y1Ak_LL4ngJF6QiI

The CRC today would be difficult even for my grandparents to understand.

Kuyvenhoven felt the shift and adjusted. He did so dramatically with “burning the wooden shoes”. That cultural regime ruled between 1980 and 2024. Not a bad run.

Why the shock that it ended? It’s always a shock.

A dominant coalition, if not THE dominant leadership coalition in the CRC has been displaced and its trajectory has been forked. The Banner was the biggest symbol of that for this Synod and perhaps the last element demonstrating this transition.

I respect Chong for resigning. He didn’t seem able to “read the room” at Synod. After Synod did what it did he could see and adjust.

What will The Banner become?

The truth is that 99% of what has come through the Banner over the last decade wouldn’t have difficulty with the revised mandate. The question was increasingly “tone”.

This puts The Banner in a very difficult position because it has been reinforcing the 1980 to 2024 tone with its readers and now if there is a shift they threaten to alienate the most loyal and faithful readership they have.

The most glaring challenge, however, is the question of what place does a monthly magazine have in the overall strategy of the CRCNA?

When The Banner was put under the ministry share umbrella and became a “every household” magazine it was changed. It appeared to be a subtle change but actually it was a foundational change. Almost all analogous denominational magazines have died. The Banner was supposed to replace the promotional mailings that agencies and ministries had been sending to households.

Chong’s point to Synod (both through his spoken presentation and the COD “right of comment” statement in the Supplement mostly crafted by him) was “The Banner needs to have independence from the Institution to be the voice of the people.”

This was a classic 1960s counter-culture vibe-shift posture where the journalist, the youth, the activist stands up to the Institution, to speak truth to power, etc.

What was missing was that over the last 2 decades many in the denomination felt that The Banner (and The Network) was more akin to Pravda, the mouthpiece of the Communist party in Russia. The “people’s” voice (of the conservatives, and now the young conservatives) were suppressed BY the institution. The blocking the ad from Abide and taking the ad from Better Together was just validation of their suspicions.

There are dark inverted ironies here where the revolution is now conservative rather than “progressive”. I personally think all these labels are near worthless but they’re the lenses we see through today.

The Banner imagines itself to be a “kitchen table” with Archie, Edith, Gloria and Meathead when we’re living in Everything All At Once. https://youtu.be/wxN1T1uxQ2g?si=wOYR0tZFwtQSs6ld

Now the really difficult work begins. Finishing off an already toppled regime is one thing. Figuring out what to do next is on an entirely different level.

Kuyvenhoven got to “follow the script” already well worn by a broader, unified culture. “Keep 20 steps behind the mainline, add some neo-Calvinism, you’ll be OK.”

There is no script for the CRC to follow, really. People will look to the PCA, or some other post-progressive ideas.

There is no HJ Kuiper right now, which is a good thing. As many here have noted Kuiper and Vanderploeg were gone before many now in CRC pulpits were born. Kuyvenhoven class Banner editors (Canadian, moderate-progressive) had a pretty amazing run. It’s hard, however, to not remember John Suk’s journey. https://faithisntwhatyouthink.blogspot.com/2022/10/is-yahweh-god-who-never-was.html

I came into Synod not asking “Should Chong still be the editor? Should we adjust The Banner mandate?” but rather “What really are we doing with that thing?”

Part of the problem with what passes today for CRC Conservatism is that they don’t have too much of a template beyond “we should undo the post-war consensus.”

Fill the Banner with what exactly? Sermons? Devotionals? Movie reviews?

More Rod Hugen if you ask me. 🙂

But the question is serious. Imagine the CRC decided to buy a retired commercial airliner so that it wouldn’t have to pay United or Air Canada to shuttle people to our meetings. We’d howl at the silliness of that.

We are awash in communication. If you want to listen to “CRC Voices” there is no end of places from here, to Facebook, to Twitter, to the RJ, to Abide website, to substacks, etc. etc.

Today I wanted some news about the Democratic mayoral primary. Do I go to the NYT? Is it still a “city paper”? Sort of, but not really. What are Newspapers today? What are magazines? Why are we reselling vinyl records?

I suspect we will find a new editor and “The Banner” will continue, but when everything around something changes that thing changes too. I’m not sure much thought has gone into how our Internet everything-all-at-once world changes what a denomination is or what it decides to commit to paper and to pixels under a domain name.

pvk