On Friday I posted on Brooks’s New York Times essay “The Dissenters Trying to Save Evangelicalism From Itself.” Shortly after I read the piece I got three wisdom teeth removed, so I am finally getting around to giving it a serious read. (Although don’t hold anything I say here against me due to the Vicodin) 🙂
Let’s break it down.
Brooks writes:
Think of your 12 closest friends. These are the people you vacation with, talk about your problems with, do life with in the most intimate and meaningful ways. Now imagine if six of those people suddenly took a political or public position you found utterly vile. Now imagine learning that those six people think that your position is utterly vile. You would suddenly realize that the people you thought you knew best and cared about most had actually been total strangers all along. You would feel disoriented, disturbed, unmoored. Your life would change.
This is what has happened over the past six years to millions of American Christians, especially evangelicals. There have been three big issues that have profoundly divided them: the white evangelical embrace of Donald Trump, sex abuse scandals in evangelical churches and parachurch organizations, and attitudes about race relations, especially after the killing of George Floyd.
I would add COVID-19 to Brooks’s list here.
I have talked about these things as an “unveiling.” Over the last five years white evangelicals have said the quiet part out loud. They are engaging in a politics of fear, power, and nostalgia, but they have been doing this for a long, long time. They are opposing anti-racism, but they have been doing this for a long, long time. They are privileging American liberty and individualism over love of neighbor, but they have been doing this for a long, long time. I first made this analysis in my 2018 book Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump. I don’t know how many of the evangelical reformers featured in Brooks’s piece read my book, but I am pleased to see people with bigger platforms and more influence in the evangelical world talking and writing about these things.
Brooks writes:
The turmoil in evangelicalism has not just ruptured relationships; it’s dissolving the structures of many evangelical institutions. Many families, churches, parachurch organizations and even denominations are coming apart. I asked many evangelical leaders who are wary of Trump if they thought their movement would fracture. Most said it already has.
Over the past few years, the atmosphere within many Christian organizations has grown more tense and bitter. As an evangelical friend of mine noted, what used to be open fields are now minefields. If you invite such and such a speaker to your Christian college, it means you’ve surrendered to the woke brigades. If you use this word in your sermon, you’re guilty of critical race theory. Pastors across the political spectrum are exhausted — partly because of Covid but partly because every word they use is scrutinized to see if it passes this or that ideological litmus test.
Is this a new Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy? I don’t think so. The divisions between white evangelicals right now have very little to do with the fundamentals of orthodox theology. They have much more to do with politics, race, gender, and Christian nationalism. One might perceive the people featured in Brooks’s article–Moore, French, Du Mez (is she an evangelical?), Thabiti Anyabwile, Tim Dalrymple, Russell Moore, David Bailey, Karen Swallow Prior, David French, Rachael Denhollander, Beth Moore, Lecrae, Justin Giboney, Eugene Rivers, Mark Labberton, Walter Kim, Tim Keller–as leading a reform movement not unlike the so-called “neo-evangelicals” of the 1940s and 1950s. These neo-evangelicals were former fundamentalists who no longer wanted to be associated with the cultural separatism, militancy, regional empires governed by powerful male leaders, and strict dogmatism of the previous generation.
Today, these evangelical reformers are open to learning from secular ideas like critical race theory and vaccine and climate science; they are calling out the abuses taking place in the regional fiefdoms of male leaders; they are challenging Christian nationalism (of both the hard or soft variety); and they are arguing that one’s Christian faith does not rest on one’s views of women’s roles in the church and the family, abortion politics, political affiliation, the meaning of biblical inspiration, or a specific approach to dealing with social justice, racism, and climate change.
As a historian, I am reminded that neo-evangelicals challenged fundamentalists on many of the same things, albeit in a very different time and cultural milieu. The neo-evangelicals at Fuller Theological Seminary in the 1950s, operating under the idea that all truth was God’s truth, wanted to engage (and perhaps even learn from) secular thought. As historian George Marsden showed us, the Fuller faculty eventually taught Christians that they could be faithful evangelicals without adopting biblical inerrancy. The neo-evangelicals did not hesitate to point out the dangers of fundamentalist empires. They were constantly critiquing the separatist and militant fiefdoms of Carl McIntire, John R. Rice, Bob Jones, Jerry Falwell, Billy James Hargis, and others. An entire generation of evangelical historians challenged the idea that the United States was founded as a Christian nation. Evangelical feminists such as Nancy Hardesty and Gretchen Gaebelein Hull organized against what would later become known as complementarianism. Carl F.H. Henry called-out fundamentalists for their lack of a social ethic in his book Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism. Evangelicals such as Ron Sider forced his fellow believers to think more deeply about poverty and justice. Neo-evangelicals such as Tom Skinner, John Perkins, and Frank Gaebelein were active in the civil rights movement. And for all these things, fundamentalists attacked them as somehow less Christian. Again, these neo-evangelicals were products of their time. They were asking different questions and engaging with issues such as race, gender, justice, civil rights in ways that modern-day observers might find insufficient. Moreover, they did not always agree on the aforementioned issues. But in the end, they were always challenging the fundamentalists mindset of their day. I see the people mentioned in Brooks’s article doing the same thing. In fact, some of them probably see their work in terms of continuity with the early neo-evangelicals, at least in spirit.
Historians have identified the early neo-evangelicals through their relationship with Billy Graham, Christianity Today, Fuller Seminary, Henry’s Uneasy Conscience , and the National Association of Evangelicals. There is a good chance that future historians might define this present-day reform movement by referencing Brooks’s New York Times article. (Let’s remember that Brooks, like him or not, is a culture-shaper. He popularized the idea of “Red States” and “Blue States;” “bourgeois bohemians,” and “organization kids.”)
Brooks does not focus on the differences among these reformers, especially in terms of their vision for a reformed or renewed evangelicalism. As I look at this group, I see what might be called evangelical pluralists and evangelical deconstructionists. Some of these men and women are calling for a more diverse or plural evangelicalism–a big tent that includes people with differences about politics, women in the church, scriptural authority, critical race theory, and the best way of addressing poverty, racism, and social justice. Others in this group want to forge a new understanding of orthodox Protestantism (I am guessing a lot of them would not call this new construction “evangelicalism”) that excludes inerrantists, complementarians, anti-antiracists, anti-vaxxers, and Trumpists of all varieties.
We’ll keep an eye on how things unfold.
This, like much of Brooks’ writing, is disingenuous. Evangelicals have always been extremely politically conservative, racist, and sexist, and absolutely convinced God is on their side.
Shawn: I would say that SOME (a lot) of evangelicals have been this way. On the other hand, 19th-century evangelicals could be quite progressive in their commitment to social reform. Most evangelicals have been racist by the standards of the 21st century–no argument here. But I don’t think they have been any more racist than non-evangelical white people. The problem here is that non-evangelical white people do not claim to follow the teachings of Jesus.
I think the folks Brooks mentioned in his piece would have little problem finding some exemplars to follow in the evangelical past. They might have to look pretty hard, but they are there.