How David Brooks, Peter Wehner And Others Fail To Address Evangelical Divisions
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(OPINION) The American evangelical world is divided, but being divided is almost its normal state. Yet what perhaps is new is the depth of ruptures and animosities it has engendered. Some recent careful articles have tried to analyze and illuminate this breakdown, but they are often one-sided, which means that they may simply exacerbate the very tensions they lament.
In a much-discussed New York Times article, “The Dissenters Trying to Save Evangelicalism From Itself,” David Brooks suggests the analogy of 12 old, close friends and imagines the situation of one side: “If six of those people suddenly took a political or public position you found utterly vile … (and) those six people think that your position is utterly vile. You… had actually been total strangers all along.”
Brooks suggests this illustrates what has happened to American Christians, especially evangelicals. This divide is very much more than simply pro- or anti-Trump positions, although this can function as a handy shorthand, since support for Trump may have revealed the cleavages that were already there.
He chooses several people he describes as wanting to save evangelicalism from its frailties and failures — from itself. However, the people he interviews — such as Russell Moore, Tim Dalrymple and Kristin Kobes Du Mez — largely represent only one side of the division. We are told about but do not hear from their separated brethren, such as Al Mohler or Robert Jeffress, who might also have something to say from their opposite side of this gulf. Might they have correctly anticipated some of the perils and failures that have arisen with the Biden presidency? Sadly, they appear not as discussants but as objects of discussion, like Prufrock, “formulated, sprawling on a pin.”
An earlier important article by Peter Wehner in the Atlantic, “The Evangelical Church Is Breaking Apart,” addressed these same divisions in a similar manner. His range of interviewees was wider than Brooks’ and included several of my friends and others I admire. Still, it didn’t include people from the 80% of White evangelicals who supported Trump.
Both articles are like reading a description of a marital breakup that quotes only one of the broken parties.
Each writer cites Du Mez, author of “Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation,” who outlines the very real and all-too-frequent macho evangelical culture as a form of enculturation. But might those who criticize John Wayne theology also reflect on whether they too might simply be reflecting a common enculturated stance — but one that pervades not fundamentalist churches but faculty common rooms?
Peter Berger, the late great sociologist of religion, often expressed surprise about the many sociological studies of “fundamentalism.” He suggested that, when all is said and done, fundamentalists are simply the ordinary folk who comprise the vast majority of people on the planet. Berger asked whether what might really be useful was a study of those unusual people who find fundamentalists to be weird folk in need of examination. Instead, he suggested that we should investigate how faculty and journalists — including Christian faculty and journalists — have themselves been shaped by their local culture.
Might such an investigation illuminate the unthought secular currents in America, especially among faculty, that might undercut any Christian or even traditional understanding of the world? One problem is, as Berger noted, you likely wouldn’t get a grant for such a study, since its focus would be on those people who decide who gets grants. Nobody wants to be the object of systematic investigation. Instead, we much prefer to study them, the others.
The thoughts of John Wayne and others remind me of a statement wrongly attributed to George Orwell but one that certainly expressed his mature view: “People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” With the invasion of Ukraine, the John Wayne types are starting to look rather better.
I am sympathetic to Brooks and Wehner, and the views of those whom they interview, but there is nothing to be gained and much to be lost by treating those with whom we differ as if they were tribal objects in a quasi-anthropological investigation. Are those who differ from us merely stupid, or perhaps venal, or even evil? Were they simply dropped on their heads as infants? Or do they have something to say to us? Are they people to whom we should listen?
As John Stuart Mill noted, “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. … Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers. … He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them.” Jesus also spoke about taking the beam from our own eye before we castigate the spots in others’ eyes.
Unless we hear from, as distinct from study, those with whom we differ, we might simply worsen the wounds we seek to heal.
Paul Marshall is Wilson Distinguished Professor of Religious Freedom at the Institute for Studies of Religion, director of the Religious Freedom Institute’s South and Southeast Asia Action Team, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom, and author of over twenty books on religion and politics.