1. What is Evangelicalism?
The Political Takeover
9. Most religions have their "fundamentalists." A fundamentalist is somone who is zealous for what they see as the fundamentals of their religion. In itself, this sounds pretty good. In fact, it's something like what I'm arguing for in this book.
But the word has a tone -- words aren't just what they say. Their meaning is really in what they do, and this word has a tone.
As we currently use it, it has a militant tone. It's a fight tone. It's a rigid tone in the sense that it refuses to consider that it might be wrong about the way it understands the fundamentals. It's anti-modern in the sense that it fights to preserve its traditions and imagined past. [7]
10. In the 1950s, "new" evangelicals like Ockenga and C. F. H. Henry wanted to distance themselves from groups they deemed "fundamentalists." They regarded those groups as less intellectual. These were groups like holiness revivalists, dispensationalists, and Pentecostals.
They also saw these groups as separatists, Christians in retreat, while they wanted to "engage" the culture. One might say that they were ambitious to have a seat at the public table.
Seventy-five years later, the groups they considered inferior have taken over their movement. Eventually, the majority of "traditional" Christians would rule over the intellectuals. If you flash forward to today, mainstream "evangelical" thinking has become thoroughly political and extensively loosed from its intellectual and "respectable" beginnings. In my view, politics has become more central to the movement than theology, opening the door for the rank blasphemy pictured at the beginning of the chapter.
11. Jerry Falwell in the 1980s is as good a place as any to begin tracing this shift. Originally, he would not have identified himself as an evangelical, nor would evangelicals of that time have identified themselves with him. He deemed his movement, "The Moral Majority."
He rose to national prominence through the anti-abortion movement. Before that, his original fight was to preserve tax exemptions for segregated Christian schools. Suffice it to say, that is a less powerful origin story.
The Reagan presidency saw the fusion of Republicanism with conservative Christianity. The result is that, even today, many evangelicals aren't sure that a Christian can vote for a Democrat. This has to be one of the most impactful developments in American religious history in its fusion of politics with religion. The result is that, as the Republican Party goes, so goes evangelicalism.
Here are some examples of issues where you might expect some spectrum of thought among evangelicals, but you don't really get it. Most evangelicals oppose gun control. The single most significant indicator of whether someone will be opposed to climate change is if someone is a white evangelical. Opposition to universal health care, pro-immigration? You could easily argue that these are biblical values.
Yet evangelical Christians not only tend to be monolithic on such issues. They tend to line up strongly on one side. Why?
Arguably because of the fusion of Republican politics with evangelical Christian faith.
The Latest Evangelical Pillars
12. Bebbington, in effect, has proposed evangelism, the authority of Scripture, the centrality of the cross, and engagement with the culture as the cornerstones of historical evangelicalism. Let me suggest that these have largely morphed into club, culture war, conquest, and control.
Of course, not all evangelicals fit these descriptions. My claim is that the flavor of evangelicalism has nevertheless shifted dramatically in these directions in the last few years.
Club. We see a big emphasis on getting people baptized, but how deep does the transformation go, and what are people being transformed into? Might the prophets call out some of our baptisms the way they called out sacrifices once upon a time (Micah 6:6-8)? To what extent have our efforts to convert become tribal inductions rather than heart conversions? We are getting people in the club, but are we getting them in the kingdom?
Culture War. We are witnessing an amazing thing in this moment. You can talk Bible all you want to evangelicals, but the values of their subculture trump the real Bible. There is still talk of the Bible, of course. But it is a banner, a symbol. Get into the actual values of the Bible, and shields go up. Ironically, after thinking for so long that evangelicalism was pushing back against ungodly culture in a culture war, it is unable to see that its own subculture is in the driver's seat -- not the Bible.
Conquest. Ironically, the cross showed that losing one's life could be gaining it. Suffering could be victory. Losing could be winning. But evangelicalism is presently at war. It has no interest in "milquetoast" Christianity. It wants Bonhoeffer the assassin, not the real Bonhoeffer, who the vast majority of the time was a pacifist.
Control. The activism of evangelicalism wants to take over the state. It rejects and hates the very notion of the separation of church and state. It wants a theocracy, a Christian nation of its imagination. It is no longer Niebuhr's "Christ the transformer of culture." It is pure "Christ over culture" -- as in take over the culture.
Not sure you agree? Keep reading. In the pages that follow, I want to call evangelicalism back from the brink to its roots. I want to call us beyond the club to true conversion. I want to pull the rug out from under the culture wars by going back to the Bible itself. I want to suggest that conquest and control are the opposite of Christ's values. We will transform the world by becoming its servants rather than its lords.
Won't you join me on this journey to the roots of the "evangel," the good news of Jesus Christ?
[7] I realize my approach to fundamentalism is in some tension with some prominent names in this area of history, namely, Mark Noll (see n.5) and George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture (Oxford University, 1980). We'll have that conversation later.
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