What Ails American Evangelicalism And Where Is This Movement Headed?
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(OPINION) It’s hard to imagine a print article more eye-catching than a lead item in The New York Times Sunday Review that sprawls over three pages — or to imagine a more prominent scribe than columnist David Brooks. The Feb. 6 Brooks opus lionized “the dissenters trying to save evangelicalism.”
Save from what? “Misogyny, racism, racial obliviousness, celebrity worship, resentment, and the willingness to sacrifice principle for power” — that last phrase targeting disciples of former President Donald Trump.
We’re at the publicity apex for what Brooks — and movement outsiders and insiders — is calling a “crisis” for this conservative Protestant movement. In recent months, The Guy has, less elegantly, pondered a “crack-up.” Thus:
— “Are we finally witnessing the long-anticipated (by journalists) evangelical crack-up?”
— “Latest angles on Trump-era ‘evangelicals,’ including questions about the vague label itself.”
— “Concerning evangelical elites, Donald Trump and the press: The great crack-up continues.”
— “Journalism tips on: (1) Evangelical crack-ups, (2) campus faith fights, (3) COVID exemptions.”
This struggle will continue to need fair-minded journalistic attention, simply because this loosely-organized and variegated movement remains the largest and most dynamic segment of American religion. To a considerable extent, as evangelicalism goes, so goes the nation. Both are polarized, troubled and scandal-ridden.
On this topic it’s always necessary to remember we’re talking about White evangelicals because Black Protestants, though often evangelical in style and substance, form a distinctly separate subculture — which mainstream media typically ignore alongside their fixation on the White variety.
A related preliminary point: What is an “evangelical” anyway?
The Guy immodestly suggests a look at his two treatments of this classic conundrum in 2013 and a 2021 update. Our own Terry Mattingly has been wrestling with these issues in syndicated columns for several decades, creating a string of “define evangelicalism” takes. It’s also helpful to search nearly two decades worth of GetReligion commentary work for references to historian David Bebbington, creator of a frequently referenced doctrinal definition of this church history term.
Less noticed than Brooks, Scot McKnight of Northern Seminary in Illinois blogs this week with similar verbiage, joining thinkers who contend that “evangelicalism needs to get saved.” Saved from what? “Its corruption and theological goofiness and its entanglement with American culture, power and politics.”
While Brooks and McKnight express fondness of evangelicalism and its valuable potential, this moment invites predictable contempt from long-time critics. John Stoehr of Religion Dispatches says the discussion is missing “something obvious: a bad religion.” And Anthea Butler, author of “White Evangelical Racism,” wields a broad brush, asserting that evangelicals “believe that violence to restore the social order is the way” and that “racism is a feature and not a bug of American evangelicalism.”
As the Twitterverse heated up, the two most significant conservative responses to Brooks came from Southern Baptist seminary President R. Albert Mohler Jr. and Eastern Orthodox author Rod Dreher, a longtime friend and associate of Brooks. With a hint of old-school separatism, Mohler interpreted the Brooks piece as the latest “demand to abandon evangelicalism” and “change our convictions and get with the cultural program.” Dreher, no Trump fan, said that while hailing anti-Trump evangelicals, Brooks “doesn’t dig into the core theological issues.”
True, Brooks was not championing evangelical doctrine, and media outlets regularly hail the virtues of leftward-shifting evangelicals and “exvangelicals.” But many reformers of the type Brooks highlighted have not broken from Christian orthodoxy or conservatism on, say, abortion or same-sex marriage.
Dreher perhaps gets to the heart of the matter when he says this is chiefly about “the widespread collapse of authority within our culture,” including religious authority.
Chiming in at First Things magazine, Aaron Renn of the conservative Christian site AmericanReformer.org chides evangelical leadership for failing to frame an effective strategy when, since roughly 2014, American elite culture has shifted from neutrality to active hostility toward the Christian religion, particularly over moral traditions.
If so, the most important articles amid the media maelstrom may be this November op-ed in USA Today and substantially the same last week in The Wall Street Journal. What if evangelicalism is merely the biggest victim in a war against religions and religionists overall?
Peter Rex, a tech entrepreneur and a Roman Catholic, describes “elitism and disdain for morality” in extremely influential and heavily secularized Silicon Valley firms, which results in a corporate culture of “quiet hostility” toward all traditional religions and employees who believe. That raises the question as to what evangelicals and other devout young adults may be facing in college, grad school admissions and career searches.
Now there’s a story to pursue. And here’s another one with current news pegs, from GetReligion’s own Julia Duin, a Newsweek contributing editor, about divisive fury as religious colleges foster discussion of White Christians’ past and present racial sin and are accused of embracing the “Black Lives Matter” movement.
Sample tidbit: A new Christian and “pro-family” website recommends 58 colleges as safe, excluding many of America’s most-respected evangelical campuses.
Richard Ostling is a former religion reporter for The Associated Press and former correspondent for TIME Magazine. This piece first appeared at Get Religion.