Do American Evangelicals Suffer ‘Second Class’ Status Among Political Conservatives?
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(OPINION) One reason the media often fail to “get” American evangelical Protestantism is that it’s a complex mashup of elements, not simply an alliance of conventional church bodies.
This overlapping empire of nondenominational parachurch agencies, colleges, freelance personalities, seminaries, publishing houses and, often, independent congregations is important, and over the decades it rallied prominently at trade shows for retailers and broadcasters and the annual National Prayer Breakfast.
The first Prayer Breakfast occurred when President Dwight D. Eisenhower spoke just after his 1953 inauguration. Every president has appeared each year since, joined by politicians and power brokers. The idea emerged from private prayer meetings for members of Congress organized by a Methodist minister, but the sponsoring organization evolved into the evangelical-toned International Foundation, aka “the Family” or “the Fellowship.”
Though pious participants luxuriated in mingling with the Washington elite at the large prayer assemblage, in evangelical movement work what mattered most was the networking and punditry at assorted workshops the foundation sponsored in and around the big draw of the Prayer Breakfast itself.
Last week that setup disappeared.
A new sponsoring foundation had President Joe Biden address a cozy gathering for bagel-munching members of Congress who were allowed only one guest apiece. Simultaneously, the older foundation mounted its glitzy gathering, where 1,600 enjoyed a ballroom breakfast, watched Biden’s talk by streamed video, then attended the usual array of evangelical breakout sessions. Here’s some Religion News Service background on this awkward two-way split.
The new arrangement symbolizes efforts to limit evangelical influence upon political leadership. By coincidence, the competing breakfasts occurred as new debate emerges on whether evangelicals actually have the political impact endlessly attributed to them by fearful opponents.
Pundit Rod “Benedict Option” Dreher raised that newsworthy question in a Jan. 30 post, and in doing so highlighted a highly debatable but significant 2021 article that most journalists missed, including The Guy. That one was by Aaron Renn, an Evangelical Presbyterian Church member who co-founded American Reformer (https://americanreformer.org; contact editorial@americanreformer.org), an online magazine that seeks to deepen conservative Protestants’ interaction with current sociopolitical issues.
Renn contended that evangelicals’ heavy support is all-important for conservative and Republican causes, yet they are relegated to “second-class status” in those same circles. He pursued that scenario in a December podcast, “Why Evangelicals Are Not Leaders in Our Society“. Renn contends that this situation parallels the actions of Democrats and liberals who grant African Americans limited leverage in practice despite their lopsided voter loyalty.
In Renn’s view, few evangelical “thought leaders” are prominent in political conservatism, with National Review’s Rich Lowry as a rare exception. Why? Founding conservative figures were Jewish or — especially — Catholic, more northeastern than southern, and disconnected from U.S. culture’s old-guard Protestant mainstream. In addition, evangelical activists joined late in the movement’s development.
At this point Dreher weighs in to say much of this is evangelicalism’s own fault. He says in his personal wanderings from nominal mainline Protestant to “functional agnostic” to Catholic to Eastern Orthodox, evangelical religion and thought were just not an interesting option. He admits that was partly snobbery but contends the Protestant conservatives still lack intellectual heft and need to substantially up their game.
Alongside current pundits, journalists may want to interview the evangelical authors of two significant books from the past:
* In 1994, historian Mark A. Noll’s (mnoll@nd.edu) “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind” explained what he lamented as the U.S. evangelical movement’s flawed impact due to intellectual and academic weakness.
* In 2007, sociologist D. Michael Lindsay (president@taylor.edu and 765-998-5200), now the president of Taylor University, differed from Renn’s later outlook in “Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite.”
By the way, journalists should keep an eye on other publicans and podcasts that Renn’s American Reformer colleagues come up with. For example, here’s a timely analysis of the “Christian nationalism” debate from a former Donald Trump administration official.
Richard Ostling is a former religion reporter for The Associated Press and a former correspondent for TIME Magazine. He’s also worked in broadcast TV and radio journalism covering religion and received a lifetime achievement award from Religion News Association. This piece first appeared at GetReligion.org.