continued from last week
___________________
Neo-Evangelicalism
5. Jump forward to the 1950s. With great intentionality, "neo" evangelicalism is born. [3] It loosely combined these two previous streams. On the one hand, you have Billy Graham the conversionist. For over fifty years, he channeled D. L. Moody and Charles Finney in his crusades around the world. Millions came forward to accept Jesus. (The follow-up at first was less stellar.)
Representing the other stream were the likes of Harold Ockenga and C. F. H. Henry, watchdogs of evangelical orthodoxy. The century before had seen the rise of biblical criticism and evolution. Traditional Christianity was in defensive mode. These "new" evangelicals aimed to go on the offense.
Fuller Seminary was founded. Christianity Today was sent for free to pastors everywhere in America, financed by oil tycoon J. Howard Pew. The "National Association of Evangelicals" (NAE) was born. Graham took it on the road. A movement was born.
6. David Bebbington has tried to systematize evangelicalism over the centuries. [4] This is a somewhat artificial task, because the meaning of words changes over time, and groups change over time. The values of the Democratic Party in the 1850s were quite different from its values today. In that sense, his four pillars of evangelicalism run the risk of flattening and imposing a system on people and movements from different times.
The four key emphases he identified were 1) conversionism, 2) biblicism, 3) crucicentrism, and 4) activism. The first was an emphasis on evangelism. The second referred to the authority of Scripture. The third was the centrality of the cross and the necessity of atonement. The final commitment was to change the world rather than withdraw.
We have already seen broadly how these played out over the last three centuries. Conversionism is probably the most longstanding characteristic. Then in the late 1800s and early 1900s, a focus on the authority of Scripture and the necessity of the cross became more important in reaction to modernism.
In the 1950s, activism was key to the neo-evangelical rise. People like Harold Ockenga strongly criticized those Christians whom he saw as retreating from the world. Soon they were calling these individuals "fundamentalists." Mark Noll later identified such "retreaters" as dispensationalists, holiness folk, and Pentecostals. [5]
I'll have some thoughts on that later.
Blind Spots
7. Neo-evangelicalism was mostly white and aspiring middle class. It was "color blind" in the sense that it didn't much see those who weren't white. Like so many of the day, Graham advised Martin Luther King Jr. to move slower and avoid disruption. Evangelicalism has never had a large black demographic, and most white evangelicals did not participate in the Civil Rights movement.
In fact, the ancestors of the evangelicals today in the South were known for their flight to "segregation academies" in the mid-twentieth century. The government said to integrate. So they left the public schools to stay with their own kind.
Perhaps it's no coincidence that evangelism "exploded" in the 1970s. [6] This seems to be a predictable pattern. When white evangelicals get uncomfortable with social critique, they shift hard into conversionism -- which has a heavy focus on our insides, distracting from social injustices. (The same pattern has arguably also taken place in the last few years.)
As a quick note, a number of evangelicals over the centuries have healthily combined both evangelism and social action. John Wesley certainly did in the 1700s. Many evangelical reformers of the mid-1800s certainly did, playing significant roles in the abolitionist and women's rights movements. There were evangelicals like Ron Sider who were deeply engaged in the civil rights movement. But it is more a feature of modern evangelicalism to sever the two.
8. Another critique of this neo-evangelical movement is that it used the tools of modernism to argue against it. To fight modernism, it largely adopted its rules. You might argue that this undermines the critique. It hardly seems a winning strategy. We can wonder if a number of young people have lost their faith over the years as a result.
There are other options, as we will see.
[3] I found Mary Worthen very helpful here, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (Oxford University, 2013),
[4] Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1970s (Routledge, 2004).
[5] Mark Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Eerdmans, 1994). Nevermind that a series of writings called The Fundamentals had been produced by intellectuals.
[6] Evangelism Explosion was the mantra of D. James Kennedy, pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The church would become an epicenter in the culture wars of the late 1900s.
No comments:
Post a Comment