Two Insiders' Writings Should Be Weighed Carefully By Evangelical-Watchers In The Press
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(OPINION) As U.S. Protestant evangelicalism copes with internal divisions and problematic status in the broader society — along with the usual brickbats from the left — nonpartisan journalists and evangelical strategists alike should carefully monitor the thinking of knowledgeable insiders who are not wedded to customary loyalties and assumptions. There are two in particular: David French and the lesser-known Michael F. Bird.
Preliminaries: (1) The media should indicate when they’re talking about WHITE evangelicals, who are so distinct from the Hispanic and Black subgroups in sociopolitical terms. (2) Contrary to the customary media story line, it’s important to acknowledge that grassroots evangelicalism remains the LEAST politically involved of U.S. religion’s major segments, as seen in the National Congregations Study.
Attorney-turned-pundit David French is, yes, a critic of Donald Trump who even flirted with a quixotic third-party run against him in 2016. Therefore, his journalism is ignored if not despised by legions yearning for a second Trump term — which would end when he’s age 82.5. Yet consider that though a Harvard Law product, French is a conservative’s conservative and an evangelical’s evangelical.
The Tennessee-based writer, who worships in the conservative Presbyterian Church in America, is a senior editor of The Dispatch and former National Review writer. During his prior legal career, he was a senior counsel with two top evangelical shops — the American Center for Law and Justice and the Alliance Defending Freedom — and president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Perhaps no attorney has labored more effectively to defend Christian voices and organizations on U.S. campuses — harassed local churches, conservatives and anti-abortion activists exercising Bill of Rights freedoms.
Additionally, he served with the U.S. Army in Iraq, winning the Bronze Star for combat service. His importance as a conservative thinker was depicted in this 2019 New Yorker article.e His wife, Nancy, was a Sarah Palin ghostwriter and founded Evangelicals for Romney in 2012.
With that background, you’ll understand why The Guy keeps thinking about the contention in French’s weekly column on religion Feb. 13 that “the seeds of renewed political violence are being sown in churches across the land.” He frets about incendiary rhetoric at “extremist” events being hosted, in most cases, by independent, nondenominational churches. Some are part of the ReAwaken America tour starring Gen. Michael Flynn and sponsored by Stephen Strang’s Charisma Media, the major voice for America’s vibrant charismatic movement.
For French, this flock follows a simple formula: “When Trump wins, America wins and the church wins. The man, the nation, and the church are the movement.” He believes an extreme faction is creating “a potentially insurrectionary subculture” with church support.
What churches? Though some figures like Eric Metaxas do not fit the mold, French says “MAGA Christian nationalism” is “concentrated in the churches most removed from elite American culture, including from elite evangelicalism” and those not long ago who were recognized leaders of “Bible-believing” Protestantism. Few Christian nationalists are found in evangelical seminaries and colleges, affluent suburban megachurches, denominations or prominent “parachurch” ministries.
Rather, he explains, the movement especially builds upon independent, nondenominational local congregations, often part of the charismatic movement with its coterie of “prophets” who pronounced Trump’s election as a divinely willed necessity and certainty.
This does not characterize Pentecostalism or the charismatic movement as a whole, much less the mass of evangelicals. But “fanatical religious subcultures can do an immense amount of damage to the body politic.” That makes sinful “the deafening silence from so many Christian leaders about the threat to the church and the nation from the far right,” French insists.
With Michael F. Bird, the issues raised are more theological than political. He has emerged as an evangelical pundit who observes fellow believers in America from afar as the academic dean of Australia’s Ridley College seminary and as an Anglican priest stylistically removed from the hurly-burly of U.S. independent churches. He does have a past U.S. link as a visiting professor at Houston Baptist University.
Bird’s Feb. 24 Substack column analyzes a lecture by Jason Allen, president of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Missouri. Bird never drops the F-bomb — fundamentalism — but lurking underneath is how many in U.S. evangelicalism may be evolving toward that hard-shell mindset.
Bird agrees with much Allen said but worries that doctrinal and cultural lines are drawn too narrowly. He questions ignoring Christianity’s great creeds while promoting Americanized platforms such as the Danvers Statement against egalitarianism for women, the Chicago Statement defining the Bible as error-free, the Nashville Statement on gender and sexuality disputes or the 2000 rewrite of the Baptist Faith and Message.
To him, there’s rising danger of “mixing Christianity with culture,” the very temptation that used to worry U.S. evangelicals. Doctrinally orthodox dissenters are anathematized as everyone joins “some weird race to be the most conservative guy in the room.” And unless Americans listen to fellow believers in the Global South and other nations, he asserts, “they’ll be nothing more than chaplains to a political culture.”
Onward this story marches. Don’t miss this much-discussed Daily Wire response to French from conservative Megan Basham, and keep a close watch for other such movement critiques.
Richard Ostling is a former religion reporter for The Associated Press and former correspondent for TIME Magazine. This piece first appeared at Get Religion.