A Cordial Response to Rachel Held Evans’ Post “The Future of Evangelicalism”

Popular blogger Rachel Evans recently wrote a post entitled “The Future of Evangelicalism: A Twenty-Something’s Perspective.” Let me first say that I’m a fan. I generally find her insightful, balanced, and refreshing, which is why her blog is one of the select few I regularly visit. All the comments I offer below should be understood in light of that. That is, people shouldn’t read the heated rhetoric of the blogosphere into my words here. That having been said, as another twenty-something I strongly disagree with much of the content in the aforementioned post. Since she invited feedback, I wanted to offer my thoughts not as a rebuttal but certainly as a challenge. I hope she’ll read this and reply.

There’s a number of things I want to say that are rather disjointed in my head, so I hope readers will forgive the bullet point, stream-of-consciousness format:

• Question – Rachel asked, “Do you identify in any way with that community?” Yes. Although I openly acknowledge having strong reservations about the term, I do describe myself as an evangelical despite the great deal of emotional turmoil this has caused. If you’re interested in a better understanding of my perspective, here’s an old post that explains my journey coming to embrace that label.
• Paradigms – While Rachel says she dislikes binaries and us vs. them categorization–an accurate statement based upon my experience–her perception of evangelicalism seems premised upon that paradigm. A couple brief nuances don’t nullify that. I don’t understand why she doesn’t apply her usual thought processes to this area. As a friend of mine put it, “I don’t think that her inaccurate view of these ‘movements’ is a slight mistake. By perpetuating negative and inaccurate caricatures of the people she disagrees with, she only succeeds in contributing to the very problem that she identifies in her post: the increasing divide between the difference sides of evangelicalism.” Agreed. I wish she’d read a book like Roger Olson’sHow to be Evangelical without Being Conservative. Evangelicalism contains numerous figures offering similar perspectives. On a related note, Olson is passionate about being an evangelical yet classifies himself as “postconservative” rather than a liberal, moderate, emerging, or “young” evangelical.
• Delineation – She writes, “My third prediction is that the word ‘evangelical’ will go the way of ‘fundamentalism’…” Interesting wording: “go the way of.” Historians like George Marsden have written extensively on the difference between those terms. If she hasn’t done so, I think she’d benefit from reading a book like his Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism. Rather than saying evangelicalism will become a synonym for fundamentalism, I think she and other bloggers would do well to hop in the way-back machine and retrieve the distinction between the two. In my estimate, they’d benefit from knowing that a guy like Mohler actually represent an extreme fundamentalist form of evangelicalism.
• Understanding – I could be wrong, but she doesn’t seem to have a good historical understanding of the mainline denominations. Only when one understands their nature and origins can one distinguish between an evangelical who is, in fact, pretty moderate like a Greg Boyd from those in truly liberal denominations. Boyd is an Open Theist and is critical of the blurring between American evangelicals’ eternal and temporal citizenship while being firmly committed to historical orthodoxy.
• Dissension – I won’t divulge names, but I known from personal correspondence that there are significant voices within the Neo-Reformed Movement who have sharp disagreement with Piper & Co. They’re too busy living their faith to get embroiled in these online brewhahas, though. Has Rachel noticed that Tim Keller has remained conspicuously absent from the Rob Bell controversy, for example? Moreover, on the popular level, I have lots of friends who consider themselves part of that movement yet aren’t simple-minded goons nor do they behave like angry fundamentalists. They may strongly disagree with Bell to the point of wondering if he’s transgressed orthodoxy, but they’re not embroiled in the blog war and when they talk about the issue they listen intently and think critically.
• Perception – It seems that she, like so many writers, doesn’t get that blogs suggest a distorted reality. In many ways, blogs are like political primaries. The radicals come out in force, thus making the whole party look insane. I suspect it’s the same for the Neo-Reformed Movement. The civil, silent majority don’t show up in the traffic stats she referred to.
• Outliers – This is more a general criticism than anything directed at her, but, to quote the late great Chris Farley, “for the love of all that is good and holy” will someone please recognize not only the existence of but the preeminence of figures like Philip Yancey and Mark Noll within American evangelicalism? They hold huge influence–Yancey is one of the best-selling evangelical writers and Noll is one of TIME’s “25 Most Influential Evangelicals“–yet people see them as outliers. What?? They represent the absolute best of evangelicalism, yet they’re typically ignored from such discussions.
• 

  Billy Graham at Explo '72

  Symbol – Speaking of the absolute best of evangelicalism, religious historians are half-serious when they joke that the best definition for an evangelical is a person who likes Billy Graham. Beyond his preaching the gospel to more people than anyone else in history, Graham helped start publications like Christianity Today, encouraged intellectual rigor at seminaries like Fuller, Wheaton, and Gordon-Conwell, was a major player in the ecumenical dialogue between evangelicals and Catholics, supported the controversial Jesus People counter-cultural movement, decried apartheid in South Africa, and was the first evangelist let behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. He also avoided affiliation with either major political party and remained intentionally apolitical with one notable exception: the Civil Right Movement. There he put his full support behind the movement by refusing to preach to segregated audiences, personally bailing Martin Luther King, Jr. out of jail, inviting King to share his pulpit, and supporting civil rights legislation. He was basically the opposite of the boy who cried wolf. Graham so rarely weighed in on political matters that people took careful notice when he did. In all these ways he embodied the evangelicalism of the WWII generation. Yet his name never enters these discussions  because can’t think past our own parents, Baby Boomers like Franklin Graham, who sold evangelicalism to the GOP. How have we so quickly forgotten the face of evangelicalism even before he’s passed? This baffles me.

• Signposts – She says that evangelicals are being “associated with dogmatism regarding politics, science, women’s roles, homosexuality, salvation, and biblical literalism.” Really? Politics. What about Jim Wallis? Science. What about Francis Collins? Women’s roles. What about Scot McKnight? Homosexuality. What about Stanley Grenz? Salvation. What about N.T. Wright? Biblical literalism. What about Fuller Seminary? All of these are signposts for evangelicalism’s supposed shift toward fundamentalism, yet many of the most high-profile names associated with those issues don’t hold conservative perspectives. That’s a bit of a problem. There’s two related points I’d like make. First, regarding homosexuality specifically, can we please stop letting the media’s oversimplistic sound bytes frame our perception of the evangelical response? Check out Grenz’s Welcoming But Not Affirming. Second, two of my good friends are current students at Trinity Evangelical Divinity. Both are complementarians and will tell you it’s hard to find others who share their perspective even though Trinity is a conservative seminary. This uniform conservativism thing just don’t hold water.
• Institutions – It’s plain fact that preeminent evangelical colleges and seminaries are not uniformly conservative, especially to the point of blurring the line between conservative evangelical and fundamentalist. Evangelicalism has and continues to expressed a wide-range of perspectives at institutions like Wheaton, Westminster, Bethel, Trinity, Biblical, Dallas, Fuller, Gordon-Conwell, Moody, Southern, and George Fox.
• Creationism – Regarding the whole Young Earth thing, let’s keep in mind a few things. First, the whole shebang actually started with Ellen G. White, the founder of Seventh Day Adventists, in the 19th century (see: Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind). She clearly wasn’t an evangelical. Second, it’s hard if not impossible to take a step back and gain a historical perspective on the present, but people tend to freak out about major conflicts in the present that subsequent generations see only as the peak of a particular cultural view that later receded. Is that wasn’t going on? Third, it’s easy to obsess about Ken Ham’s Creation Museum while ignoring John Walton’s The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate, but remember that the ideas of academia tend to slowly trickle down into the pews. Fourth, the theological system within which YEC became so popular has been, in large part, discredited by the academic community. The Left Behind series is/was incredibly popular, but it’s hard to find a highly respected Dispensationalist even within evangelical scholarship.
• Science – It seems to me that, like so many people our age, Rachel suffers from historical short-sightedness. For example, she makes the evolution/science debate out to be this huge deal representing the movement’s growing internal rift. I wish she’d read Evangelicals and Science in Historical Perspective. These tensions are nothing new. They’ve existed for a long time. For example, what about the Scopes Monkey Trial there in her backyard of Dayton, TN? By the way, it’s worth noting that Francis Collins, one of the most high-profile, respected scientists in the country, is an evangelical.
• Theology – I find Rachel’s perception of evangelical theologians to be… limited. What about theologians like Kevin Vanhoozer who make conservatives uncomfortable yet don’t fit the emerging label, either? She references N.T. Wright in passing, but he’s probably evangelicalism’s #1 most influential and well-known theologian, and over the past year or so he’s been taken on Piper full steam. How can we say Piper represents evangelicalism’s future more than Wright? Also, it’s important to note that the former bishop of Durham has attained such a lofty place of theological influence that he’s tremendously respected by mainline denominations, which means that, unlike someone like D.A. Carson, Wright’s work transcends the evangelical readership. His work is read and interacted with even in mainline seminaries. While we’re at it, what other theologian has been featured on Nightlight, The Colbert Report, TIME articles, and the like? The world’s most famous theologian is an evangelical. That’s got to carry some weight.
• Umbrella – Without question the long-standing #1 evangelical publication, Christianity Today, is consistently sane on matters of theology, politics, culture, and the like. Contrast their 2005 article entitled “The New Monasticism” against the 2006 article “Young, Restless, Reformed.” CT sure isn’t being co-opted by either of Rachel’s polarities, but is rather seeing all these sub-movements part of the big umbrella of evangelicalism. I have the sense that in the same way both liberals and conservative try to define themselves as “true Americans,” so there are people in both the extremes that see themselves as true evangelicals. The reality, however, is that the ambiguous nature of the movement encompasses them all, and always has.
• Alternatives – She suggests that the Neo-Reformed Movement is becoming the dominant voice within evangelicalism and will eventually snuff out all the others. OK, but what about the whole Ancient-Future/liturgical movement within evangelicalism? That’s arguably just as influential as the Neo-Reformed Movement. Why isn’t it garnering the same press? That’s one of many examples. Seems to me evangelicalism just keeps on being a diverse, complexity, ill-defined convergence of reform movements.
• Inconsistency – A lot of people claim that the media has slowly but surely recast the term evangelical to mean “Christian Right.” Excuse me, but what about someone like Rick Warren, a guy who the media keeps trying to dub the next “America’s pastor” as the successor to Billy Graham? How quickly people have forgotten that Warren moderated a presidential election two and half years ago and was very balanced. When we’re talking about the present and future of the evangelical identity, one cannot downplay or ignore the role of guys like Warren. I find that inconsistent. This also isn’t a direct response to Rachel, but I do think it reflects the general perception to which she’s responding.
• Predictions – Lastly, this whole prediction business makes me uneasy. I’m remembering Mark Noll’s remark that “philosophers rush in where historians fear to tread.” In my opinion, prediction about the future is something we should all avoid. Case in point, in the late 1930s and early 1940s few would have thought evangelicalism would have made a comeback. Then came the events captured in Garth Rosell’s The Surprising Work of God: Harold John Ockenga, Billy Graham, and the Rebirth of Evangelicalism.

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