Evangelical Protestants
Evangelicalism
Evangelicalism, also called evangelical Christianity or evangelical Protestantism, is a worldwide, interdenominational movement within Protestant Christianity that emphasizes evangelism, or the preaching and spreading of the Christian gospel. The term evangelical is derived from the Koine Greek word euangelion, meaning "good news," in reference to the message of salvation through Jesus Christ. Evangelicalism typically places a strong emphasis on personal conversion, often described as being "born again", and regards the Bible as the ultimate authority in matters of faith and practice. The definition and scope of evangelicalism are subjects of debate among theologians and scholars. Some critics argue that the term encompasses a wide and diverse range of beliefs and practices, making it difficult to define as a coherent or unified movement.
The theological roots of evangelicalism can be traced to the Protestant Reformation in 16th-century Europe, particularly Martin Luther's 1517 Ninety-five Theses, which emphasized the authority of Scripture and the preaching of the gospel over church tradition. The modern evangelical movement is generally dated to around 1738, influenced by theological currents such as Pietism, Puritanism, Quakerism, and Moravianism—notably the work of Nicolaus Zinzendorf and the Herrnhut community. Evangelicalism gained momentum during the First Great Awakening, with figures like John Wesley and the early Methodists playing central roles.
It has had a longstanding presence in the Anglosphere, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States, before expanding globally in the 19th, 20th, and early 21st centuries. The movement grew substantially during the 18th and 19th centuries, notably through the series of religious revivals known as the Great Awakening in the United States and various revival movements and reform efforts in Britain. Today, evangelicals are found across many Protestant denominations and global contexts, without being confined to a single tradition. Notable evangelical leaders have included Zinzendorf, George Fox, Wesley, George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, Billy Graham, Bill Bright, Harold Ockenga, Gudina Tumsa, John Stott, Francisco Olazábal, William J. Seymour, Luis Palau, Os Guinness, and Martyn Lloyd-Jones.
As of 2016, an estimated 619 million people identified as evangelical Christians worldwide, accounting for roughly one in four Christians. In the United States, evangelicals make up about a quarter of the population and represent the largest religious group. A growing number of individuals, often referred to as exvangelicals, have left evangelicalism due to discrimination, abuse, or theological disillusionment. Evangelicalism is a transdenominational movement found across many Protestant denominations, including Reformed traditions such as Presbyterianism and Congregationalism, Anglicanism, Plymouth Brethren, Baptists, Methodism (especially in the Wesleyan–Arminian tradition), Lutheranism, Moravians, Free Church bodies, Mennonites, Quakers, Pentecostal and charismatic movements, and various non-denominational churches.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelicalism
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Evangelical Religion in America
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In her review of the book “THE KINGDOM, THE POWER, AND THE GLORY: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism,” for the NY Times (12/2/23), Jennifer Szalai says that the author, political journalist Tim Alberta subjects his faith’s embrace of right-wing extremism to critical scrutiny. What would Jesus do? It’s a question that Alberta takes seriously in his brave and absorbing new book, pressing the evangelicals he meets to answer a version of it — even if a number of them clearly do not want to.
Alberta, a staff writer for The Atlantic, asks how so many devout Christians could be in thrall to a figure like Donald Trump, whom he calls a “lecherous, impenitent scoundrel.” According to one of the scoops in the book, Trump himself used decidedly less vivid language to describe the evangelicals who supported Senator Ted Cruz in the 2016 Republican primaries, telling an Iowa Republican official: “You know, these so-called Christians hanging around with Ted are some real pieces of shit.” Many of Cruz’s evangelical supporters eventually backed Trump in 2016; in the 2020 election, Trump increased his share of the white evangelical vote even more, to a whopping 84 percent.
This phenomenon, Alberta says, cannot simply be a matter of evangelicals mobilizing against abortion access and trying to save lives; after all, they have kept remarkably quiet when it comes to showing compassion for refugees or curbing gun violence, which is now, as Alberta notes, the leading cause of death for children in the United States.
What he finds instead is that under the veneer of Christian modesty simmers an explosive rage, propelling Americans who piously declare their fealty to Jesus to act as though their highest calling is to own the libs. No wonder the popular image of evangelicalism, according to one disillusioned preacher, has devolved into “Mister Rogers with a blowtorch.”
Alberta’s previous book, “American Carnage” (2019), detailed Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party. His new book reads like a sequel, tracing the Trumpian takeover of American evangelicalism, but this time Alberta begins with his very personal connection to his subject. He is “a believer in Jesus Christ,” he writes, “the son of an evangelical minister, raised in a conservative church in a conservative community,” a suburb of Detroit.
In the summer of 2019, just after “American Carnage” was published, his father died suddenly of a heart attack. At Cornerstone, his father’s church, some of the congregants approached the grieving Alberta not to console him but to complain about his journalism, demanding to know if he was on “the right side.” One church elder wrote a letter to Alberta complaining about the “deep state” and accusing him of treason.
The experience was so surreal that Alberta decided to find out what had happened to his religious community. During Trump’s presidency, his father had moved farther to the right, but despite their differences their love for each other was undiminished. Alberta interviewed his father’s handpicked successor, Chris Winans, who is “not a conservative Republican” and spoke candidly about how “God’s people” have always had to contend with worldly temptations that could lead them astray: “I want to be in power, I want to have influence, I want to be prosperous, I want to have security. ”Many of Winans’s congregants left for a church down the road that preached the kind of “blood-and-soil Christian nationalism” they wanted to hear. “The church is supposed to challenge us,” Winans says. “But a lot of these folks don’t want to be challenged.”
“The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory” charts a transformation in evangelicalism, from a midcentury moment when white American Christians were such a dominant force in the country that many could “afford to forget politics” to a time when many more feel, as one prominent pastor puts it, “under siege.”
Alberta suggests that this panic has less to do with any existential threat to American Christianity than a rattled presumption of privilege. “Humility doesn’t come easy to the American evangelical,” he writes. “We are an immodest and excessively indulged people.”
A crisis of leadership has compounded the problem. Alberta offers a deeply reported account of the cascading scandals that have consumed Liberty University, an “insular, paranoid family business” coupling authoritarian rules with “flagrant misconduct.” (Jerry Falwell Jr., the former president of Liberty and the son of its founder, was already indulging his “tyrannical instincts” long before “he became ensnared in a love triangle with his wife and a Miami pool boy,” Alberta writes.) Another chapter describes the struggle to bring to account pastors who victimized congregants in a church that has become “institutionally desensitized” to sexual abuse.
Alberta takes heart that new congregations are springing up in unlikely places. Attending a service in an Atlanta distillery, he sees people who are there “to be discipled, not demagogued.” But his reporting keeps leading him to opportunistic impresarios who realize that the painstaking work of building a congregation can be made infinitely easier with expedient shortcuts. Political mudslinging offers a “dopamine rush.” Exaggerating threats and calling the other side evil means that whatever you do, no matter how outrageous or cruel or contrary to Scripture, can be defended as righteous.
In 2021, at a rowdy protest against pandemic shutdowns hosted by FloodGate Church in Michigan, a few miles from Cornerstone, Alberta saw a lot of American flags in the sanctuary but not a single cross. “I couldn’t suppress a feeling of absolute disgust,” he writes about the spectacle that followed. To get a fuller picture, he returned repeatedly to FloodGate and talked to its pastor, but the church was committed to political warfare at all costs. “I never ceased to be aghast at what I heard,” he writes.
For the most part, though, Alberta hangs back, letting the people he interviews say what they want — or refuse to say what they don’t. The most belligerent culture warriors tend to shy away from talking about helping immigrants and the poor, since bashing the left tends to stimulate conservative passions more reliably than trying to teach Jesus’ example of good deeds and turning the other cheek. The dynamic turns out to be mutually reinforcing — or mutually destructive. One preacher, a “former Southern Baptist,” says that pastors are now “afraid of their own congregants.”
It’s a situation that recalls Alberta’s account in “American Carnage,” in which establishment Republicans naïvely thought they could use Trumpism to their advantage while maintaining control over their party and constituents. “Those fabled gatekeepers who once kept crackpots away from positions of authority no longer existed,” Alberta writes in “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory.” Instead of issuing guidance, too many “so-called shepherds” resort to pandering — and their congregants end up even more wayward than before.
At an event organized by the Faith and Freedom Coalition, Alberta meets a man selling T-shirts emblazoned with “Let’s Go Brandon,” the conservative chant that stands in for a four-letter expletive directed at Joe Biden. The T-shirts include the hashtag #FJB as a handy reminder. The proprietor explains that his merchandise is responding to the fact that “we’ve taken God out of America.” Alberta asks the man whether the #FJB is an appropriate way to bring God back. “People keep on asking for it,” he replies with a shrug. “You’ve got to give the people what they want.
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The Evangelical Church is Breaking Apart
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In an article in the Atlantic (2021) The Evangelical Church is Breaking Apart (10/14/21), by Peter Wahner, wrote, “The election of the elders of an evangelical church is usually an uncontroversial, even unifying event. But this summer, at an influential megachurch in Northern Virginia, something went badly wrong. A trio of elders did not receive 75 percent of the vote, the threshold necessary to be installed.”
“A small group of people, inside and outside this church, coordinated a divisive effort to use disinformation in order to persuade others to vote these men down as part of a broader effort to take control of this church,” David Platt, a 43-year-old minister at McLean Bible Church and a best-selling author, charged in a July 4 sermon. Platt said church members had been misled, having been told, among other things, that the three individuals nominated to be elders would advocate selling the church building to Muslims, who would convert it into a mosque. In a second vote on July 18, all three nominees cleared the threshold. But that hardly resolved the conflict. Members of the church filed a lawsuit, claiming that the conduct of the election violated the church’s constitution.
Platt, who is theologically conservative, had been accused in the months before the vote by a small but zealous group within his church of “wokeness” and being “left of center,” of pushing a “social justice” agenda and promoting critical race theory, and of attempting to “purge conservative members.” A Facebook page and a right-wing website have targeted Platt and his leadership. For his part, Platt, speaking to his congregation, described an email that was circulated claiming, “MBC is no longer McLean Bible Church, that it’s now Melanin Bible Church.”
What happened at McLean Bible Church is happening all over the evangelical world. Influential figures such as the theologian Russell Moore and the Bible teacher Beth Moore felt compelled to leave the Southern Baptist Convention; both were targeted by right-wing elements within the SBC. The Christian Post, an online evangelical newspaper, published an op-ed by one of its contributors criticizing religious conservatives like Platt, Russell Moore, Beth Moore, and Ed Stetzer, the executive director of the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center, as “progressive Christian figures” who “commonly champion leftist ideology.” In a matter of months, four pastors resigned from Bethlehem Baptist Church, a flagship church in Minneapolis. One of those pastors, Bryan Pickering, cited mistreatment by elders, domineering leadership, bullying, and “spiritual abuse and a toxic culture.” Political conflicts are hardly the whole reason for the turmoil, but according to news accounts, they played a significant role, particularly on matters having to do with race.
“Nearly everyone tells me there is at the very least a small group in nearly every evangelical church complaining and agitating against teaching or policies that aren’t sufficiently conservative or anti-woke,” a pastor and prominent figure within the evangelical world told me. (Like others with whom I spoke about this topic, he requested anonymity in order to speak candidly.) “It’s everywhere.”Michael O. Emerson, a sociology professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told me that he and his research team have spent the past three years studying race and Christianity. “The divisions and conflicts we found are intense, easily more intense than I have seen in my 25 years of studying the topic,” he told me. What this adds up to, he said, is “an emerging day of reckoning within churches.”
The aggressive, disruptive, and unforgiving mindset that characterizes so much of our politics has found a home in many American churches. As a person of the Christian faith who has spent most of my adult life attending evangelical churches, I wanted to understand the splintering of churches, communities, and relationships. I reached out to dozens of pastors, theologians, academics, and historians, as well as a seminary president and people involved in campus ministry. All voiced concern. The coronavirus pandemic, of course, has placed religious communities under extraordinary strain. Everyone in America has felt its effects; for many Christians, it’s been a bar to gathering and worshipping together, sharing Communion and performing baptisms, and saying common prayers and participating in rituals and liturgy. Not being in community destabilized what has long been a core sense of Christian identity.
But there’s more to the fractures than just COVID-19. After all, many of the forces that are splitting churches were in motion well before the pandemic hit. The pandemic exposed and exacerbated weaknesses and vulnerabilities, habits of mind and heart, that already existed. The root of the discord lies in the fact that many Christians have embraced the worst aspects of our culture and our politics. When the Christian faith is politicized, churches become repositories not of grace but of grievances, places where tribal identities are reinforced, where fears are nurtured, and where aggression and nastiness are sacralized. The result is not only wounding the nation; it’s having a devastating impact on the Christian faith.
How is it that evangelical Christianity has become, for too many of its adherents, a political religion? The historian George Marsden told me that political loyalties can sometimes be so strong that they create a religious-like faith that overrides or even transforms a more traditional religious faith. The United States has largely avoided the most virulent expressions of such political religions. None has succeeded for very long—at least, until now. The first step was the cultivation of the idea within the religious right that certain political positions were deeply Christian, according to Marsden. Still, such claims were not at all unprecedented in American history. Through the 2000s, even though the religious right drew its energy from the culture wars—as it had for decades—it abided by some civil restraints.
Then came Donald Trump.
“When Trump was able to add open hatred and resentments to the political-religious stance of ‘true believers,’ it crossed a line,” Marsden said. “Tribal instincts seem to have become overwhelming.” The dominance of political religion over professed religion is seen in how, for many, the loyalty to Trump became a blind allegiance. The result is that many Christian followers of Trump “have come to see a gospel of hatreds, resentments, vilifications, put-downs, and insults as expressions of their Christianity, for which they too should be willing to fight.”
Tim Schultz, the president of the 1st Amendment Partnership and an advocate for religious freedom, told me that evangelicalism was due a reckoning. “It has been held together by political orientation and sociology more than by common theology,” he said. The twin crises of the summer of 2020—COVID and a heightened awareness of enduring racial injustices—exposed this long-unnoticed truth.
Some of the most distinctive features of the evangelical movement may have left it particularly vulnerable to this form of politicization. Among religious believers, evangelicals are some of the most anti-institutional, Timothy J. Keller, the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church, in Manhattan, told me. The evangelical movement flourished in this relatively anti-institutional country at a particularly anti-institutional time. Evangelical ministries and churches fit the “spirit of the age,” growing rapidly in the 1970s, and retaining more of their members even as many mainline denominations declined.
At the same time, Keller argues, that anti-institutional tendency makes evangelical communities more prone than others to “insider abuse”—corruption committed by leaders who have almost no guardrails—and “outsider-ism,” in which evangelicals simply refuse to let their church form them or their beliefs. As a result, they are unrooted—and therefore susceptible to political idolization, fanatical ideas, and conspiracy theories.
“What we’re seeing is massive discipleship failure caused by massive catechesis (religious instruction given to a person in preparation for Christian baptism or confirmation, typically using a catechism) failure,” James Ernest, the vice president and editor in chief at Eerdmans, a publisher of religious books, told me. Ernest was one of several figures I spoke with who pointed to catechism, the process of instructing and informing people through teaching, as the source of the problem. “The evangelical Church in the U.S. over the last five decades has failed to form its adherents into disciples. So there is a great hollowness. All that was needed to cause the implosion that we have seen was a sufficiently provocative stimulus. And that stimulus came.”
“Culture catechizes,” Alan Jacobs, a distinguished professor of humanities in the honors program at Baylor University, told me. Culture teaches us what matters and what views we should take about what matters. Our current political culture, Jacobs argued, has multiple technologies and platforms for catechizing - television, radio, Facebook, Twitter, and podcasts among them. People who want to be connected to their political tribe - the people they think are like them, the people they think are on their side - subject themselves to its catechesis all day long, every single day, hour after hour after hour.
On the flip side, many churches aren’t interested in catechesis at all. They focus instead on entertainment, because entertainment is what keeps people in their seats and coins in the offering plate. But as Jacobs points out, even those pastors who really are committed to catechesis get to spend, on average, less than an hour a week teaching their people. Sermons are short. Only some churchgoers attend adult-education classes, and even fewer attend Bible study and small groups. Cable news, however, is always on. “So, if people are getting one kind of catechesis for half an hour per week,” Jacobs asked, “and another for dozens of hours per week, which one do you think will win out?” That’s not a problem limited to the faithful on one side of the aisle. “This is true of both the Christian left and the Christian right,” Jacobs said.
“People come to believe what they are most thoroughly and intensively catechized to believe, and that catechesis comes not from the churches but from the media they consume, or rather the media that consume them. The churches have barely better than a snowball’s chance in hell of shaping most people’s lives.” But when people’s values are shaped by the media they consume, rather than by their religious leaders and communities, that has consequences. “What all those media want is engagement, and engagement is most reliably driven by anger and hatred,” Jacobs argued. “They make bank when we hate each other. And so that hatred migrates into the Church, which doesn’t have the resources to resist it. The real miracle here is that even so, in the mercy of God, many people do find their way to places of real love of God and neighbor.”
The way our sensibilities are shaped determines who we are, including the order of our loves. For many Christians, their politics has become more of an identity marker than their faith. They might insist that they are interpreting their politics through the prism of scripture, with the former subordinate to the latter, but in fact scripture and biblical ethics are often distorted to fit their politics.
Scott Dudley, the senior pastor at Bellevue Presbyterian Church in Bellevue, Washington, refers to this as “our idolatry of politics.” He’s heard of many congregants leaving their church because it didn’t match their politics, he told me, but has never once heard of someone changing their politics because it didn’t match their church’s teaching. He often tells his congregation that if the Bible doesn’t challenge your politics at least occasionally, you’re not really paying attention to the Hebrew scriptures or the New Testament. The reality, however, is that a lot of people, especially in this era, will leave a church if their political views are ever challenged, even around the edges.
“Many people are much more committed to their politics than to what the Bible actually says,” Dudley said. “We have failed not only to teach people the whole of scripture, but we have also failed to help them think biblically. We have failed to teach them that sometimes scripture is most useful when it doesn’t say what we want it to say, because then it is correcting us.” Teaching people how to think biblically would help, Dudley added, as well as teaching people how to disagree with one another biblically. “There is a lot of disagreement in the New Testament, and it gives us a template for how to listen to each other to understand rather than to argue,” he said.
Many Christians, though, are disinclined to heed calls for civility.
They feel that everything they value is under assault, and that they need to fight to protect it. “I understand that,” Dudley said. “I feel under assault sometimes too. However, I also know that the early Christians transformed the Roman empire not by demanding but by loving, not by angrily shouting about their rights in the public square but by serving even the people who persecuted them, which is why Christianity grew so quickly and took over the empire. I also know that once Christians gained political power under Constantine, that beautiful loving, sacrificing, giving, transforming Church became the angry, persecuting, killing Church. We have forgotten the cross.”
Dudley said, my high-school and college classmate, left me with this haunting question: How many people look at churches in America these days and see the face of Jesus? Too often, i fear, when Americans look at the Church, they see not the face of Jesus, but the style of Donald Trump. The former president normalized a form of discourse that made the once-shocking seem routine. Russell Moore laments the “pugilism of the Trump era, in which anything short of cruelty is seen as weakness.” The problem facing the evangelical Church, then, is not just that it has failed to inculcate adherents with its values—it’s that when it has succeeded in doing so, those values have not always been biblical.
But of course, Trump did not appear ex nihilo. Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a history professor at Calvin University and the author of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, argues that Trump represents the fulfillment, rather than the betrayal, of many of white evangelicals most deeply held values. Her thesis is that American evangelicals have worked for decades to replace the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism. (She defines Christian nationalism as “the belief that America is God’s chosen nation and must be defended as such,” which she says is a powerful predictor of attitudes toward non-Christians and on issues such as immigration, race, and guns.
Du Mez told me it’s important to recognize that this “rugged warrior Jesus” is not the only Jesus many evangelicals encounter in their faith community. There is also the “Jesus is my friend” popular in many devotionals, for example. These representations might appear to be contradictory, she told me, but in practice they can be mutually reinforcing. Jesus is a friend, protector, savior—but according to one’s own understanding of what needs to be protected and saved, and not necessarily according to core biblical teachings.
“Evangelicals are quick to label their values ‘biblical,’” Du Mez told me. “But how they interpret the scriptures, which parts they decide to emphasize and which parts they decide to ignore, all this is informed by their historical and cultural circumstances.” That’s not simply true of this one community, she added, but of all people of faith. “More than most other Christians, however, conservative evangelicals insist that they are rejecting cultural influences,” she said, “when in fact their faith is profoundly shaped by cultural and political values, by their racial identity and their Christian nationalism.”
Gender plays a role here as well, according to Du Mez. Over the past half century, evangelicals have tended to depict men and women as opposites. “They believe God ordained men to be protectors and filled them with testosterone for this purpose,” she said. Women, on the other hand, are seen as nurturers. The fruits of the spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, and self-control—are deemed appropriate feminine virtues. “Men, however, are to exhibit boldness, courage, even ruthlessness in order to fulfill their God-appointed role,” Du Mez explained. “In this way, the warrior spirit and a kinder, gentler Christianity go hand in hand.”
Du Mez pointed out that even men who embrace a kinder, gentler version of masculinity— servant leadership, for example—may tip into a more rugged, ruthless version when they deem the situation sufficiently dire. And for more than half a century, she said, evangelical leaders have found reason to deem the situation sufficiently dire. They rallied their congregations against the threats of communism, secular humanism, feminism, gay rights, radical Islam, Democrats in the White House, demographic decline, and critical race theory, and in defense of religious liberty. “Evangelical militancy is often depicted as a response to fear,” she told me. “But it’s important to recognize that in many cases evangelical leaders actively stoked fear in the hearts of their followers in order to consolidate their own power and advance their own interests.”
Du Mez is somewhat more sympathetic toward ordinary evangelicals than she is toward powerful evangelical leaders. She acknowledges that many evangelicals have genuinely sought to follow God’s will; they were directed to believe what they do by pastors, Bible-study leaders, Christian publishers, and Christian radio and television programming. “Many have sought certainty in turbulent times,” she said, and they know that challenging these narratives may well involve the loss of meaningful communities.
Fear has played a central role in the explosion of conflict within American evangelical churches. “Dwelling on fear and outrage is spiritually deforming,” Cherie Harder, president of the Trinity Forum, told me. “Both biblical wisdom and a large body of research holds that fear and grace, or fear and gratitude, are incompatible.” She quoted from one of the New Testament epistles: “Perfect love drives out fear.” There are moments, of course, when fear is an appropriate and necessary response, but there are risks when it becomes a constant presence. “Fear and anger should presumably function as alarm systems—and an alarm is not supposed to stay perpetually on,” Harder said. It is not the onset of fear or anger that is most dangerous, she said, “but stoking it, cultivating it, and dwelling within it that distorts and deforms.”
And then there is a regional component to the crisis of evangelical Christianity. Claude Alexander, the senior pastor of the Park Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, told me we must come to terms with the “southernization of the Church.” Some of the distinctive cultural forms present in the American South—masculinity and male dominance, tribal loyalties, obedience and intolerance, and even the ideology of white supremacism—have spread to other parts of the country, he said. These cultural attitudes are hardly shared by every southerner or dominant throughout the South, but they do exist and they need to be named. “Southern culture has had a profound impact upon religion,” Alexander told me, “particularly evangelical religion.”
The conservative writer David French, who lives in Tennessee, has written about the South’s shame/honor culture and its focus on group reputation and identity. “What we’re watching right now in much of our nation’s Christian politics,” he wrote, “is an explosion not of godly Christian passion, but rather of ancient southern shame/honor rage.” Pastors now find themselves on the front lines of this conflict, their congregations splitting into warring camps. I spoke with 15 of them, and what I heard was jarring. They told me that nothing else they’ve faced approaches what they’ve experienced in recent years, and that nothing had prepared them for it.
Scott Dudley of Bellevue Presbyterian Church said he knows of several pastors who have not just quit their churches but resigned from ministry, and that many others are actively seeking to switch careers. “They have concluded that their church has become a hostile work environment where at any moment they may be blasted, slandered, and demeaned in disrespectful and angry ways,” he said, “or have organized groups of people within the church demand that they be fired.”
Several months ago, I spoke with one such pastor, who had not only resigned from his church, a congregation of the Presbyterian Church in America, but had also decided, at least for now, to leave the ministry altogether. He told me that he felt undermined by people in his congregation, including by some whom he had trusted but who, it turned out, were less animated by spiritual matters than by political agendas. This former pastor used the word betrayal in our conversation; he talked about the pain this episode has caused him and his wife. In his words, “The gentleness of Jesus was utterly discarded” by those who felt he wasn’t championing their cultural and political agendas aggressively enough. “They don’t care about the relational collateral damage,” he said.
In a similar vein, I recently had a conversation with a senior pastor who is planning to leave his position soon; he’s not yet sure where he’ll land, or even whether he’ll stay in the ministry. He has simply been worn down by the divisions within his church. He has not been the target of outward hostility, but he can feel the ground shifting beneath his feet. He feels that he is growing apart from people in the congregation; there’s no longer the same sense of common purpose. He is watching the collapse of an evangelical movement to which he has devoted much of his life. At one point, as we talked about what is unfolding within American Christianity, his eyes welled with tears.
Bob Fryling, a former publisher of InterVarsity Press and the vice president of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, an evangelical campus ministry, has been part of a weekly gathering of more than 150 individuals representing about 40 churches. He’s heard of conflicts “in almost every church” and reports that pastors are exhausted. Earlier this year, the Christian polling firm Barna Group found that 29 percent of pastors said they had given “real, serious consideration to quitting being in full-time ministry within the last year.” David Kinnaman, president of Barna, described the past year as a “crucible” for pastors as churches fragmented.
The key issues in these conflicts are not doctrinal, Fryling told me, but political. They include the passions stirred up by the Trump presidency, the legitimacy of the 2020 election, and the January 6 insurrection; the murder of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter movement, and critical race theory; and matters related to the pandemic, such as masking, vaccinations, and restrictions on in-person worship. I know of at least one large church in eastern Washington State, where I grew up, that has split over the refusal of some of its members to wear masks.
“There have always been mean people who cloak their unkindness in religious devotion,” one minister in a conservative denomination told me. “The New Testament itself is pretty clear about that.” But, he added, the conflicts have grown more widespread and more intense. “Without doubt you’ll see - you already are - a ton of pastors quitting,” he said. “Most pastors actually hate conflict. So, if you’re going to pay me one-quarter of what I could make on the market, why put up with this?”
In his own church, some of the elders are devoted to culture-war politics. “These guys can be a special kind of relentless, and I don’t think I’ve had it as bad as many,” he said. “But when we’re stressed out, trying to be public-health experts without the training to do that, trying to keep our own families from blowing up with COVID stress, getting criticized from both sides at once, and then having folks doing whatever they can to ruin us and get us run out of town— we’d love to just be trusted as friends and shepherds. I understand why many folks have just said, ‘I’m done.’ I’m not there yet, but I hardly think I’m above it or guaranteed not to. I just pray to Jesus to not let me throw in the towel.”
The historian Mark Noll’s 1994 book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, will be rereleased next year. In the forthcoming preface, which Noll, himself an evangelical, shared with me, he argues that in various spheres - vaccinations, evolutionary science, anthropogenic global warming, and the 2020 elections, to name just a few - “white evangelicals appear as the group most easily captive to conspiratorial nonsense, in greater panic about their political opponents, or as most aggressively anti-intellectual.” He goes on to warn that “the broader evangelical population has increasingly heeded populist leaders who dismiss the results of modern learning from whatever source.” And he laments the “intellectual self-immolation of recent evangelical history.”
“Much of what is distinctive about American evangelicalism is not essential to Christianity,” Noll has written. And he is surely correct. I would add only that it isn’t simply the case that much of what is distinctive about American evangelicalism is not essential to Christianity; it is that now, in important respects, much of what is distinctive about American evangelicalism has become antithetical to authentic Christianity. What we’re dealing with—not in all cases, of course, but in far too many— is political identity and cultural anxieties, anti-intellectualism and ethnic nationalism, resentments and grievances, all dressed up as Christianity.
Jesus now has to be reclaimed from his Church, from those who pretend to speak most authoritatively in his name.
Too many Christians have “domesticated” Jesus by their resistance to his call to radically rethink our attitude toward power, ourselves, and others, Mark Labberton, the president of Fuller Theological Seminary, told me. We live in “an era of acute anxiety and great fear,” he said. As a result, too often Christians end up wrapping Jesus into our angry and fearful distortions. We want Jesus to validate everything we believe, often as if he never walked the face of this Earth. What we’re witnessing can be explained “more by sociology than Christology,” he said.
Unlike in the Sermon on the Mount and the parable of the Good Samaritan—unlike Jesus’s barrier-breaking encounters with prostitutes and Roman collaborators, with the lowly and despised, with the unclean and those on the wrong side of the “holiness code,” with the wounded souls whom he healed on the Sabbath—many Christians today see the world divided between us and them, the children of light and the children of darkness. Blessed are the politically powerful, for theirs is the kingdom of God. Blessed are the culture warriors, for they will be called children of God.
For many of us who have made Christianity central to our lives, the pain of this moment is watching those who claim to follow Jesus do so much to distort who he really was. Those who deform his image may be doing so unwittingly—this isn’t an intentionally malicious enterprise they’re engaging in; they believe they’re being faithful—but it is nonetheless destructive and unsettling.
I believe the portrait I’ve painted in this essay is accurate, but it is also, and necessarily, incomplete. Countless acts of kindness, generosity, and self-giving love are performed every day by people precisely because they are Christians. Their lives have been changed, and in some cases transformed, by their faith. My own life has been immeasurably blessed by people of faith who have walked the journey with me, who have shown me grace and encouraged me in difficult moments. But I can recognize that while also recognizing the wreckage around us.
Something has gone amiss; pastors know it as well as anyone and better than most. The Jesus of the Gospels—the Jesus who won their hearts, and who long ago won mine—needs to be reclaimed.
About the author: Peter Wehner is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He writes widely on political, cultural, religious, and national-security issues, and he is the author of “The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.” Christians must reclaim Jesus from his church.
(https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/evangelical-trump-christians-politics/620469/)
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The Exvangelicals Searching for Political Change
In her article for The New Republic, “The Exvangelicals Searching for Political Change - Former evangelicals are growing in number. But are they a movement?” 3/15/2024, Sarah Jones, writes, “When Sarah McCammon was a child, the evangelical church was her world, and the world was on fire. As she writes in her new book, The Exvangelicals, her parents married in 1976, which was, Newsweek reported, the “year of the evangelical.” She was born five years later, not long after white evangelical Christians helped elect Ronald Reagan. Despite that victory, evangelicals were afraid - of persecution, and irrelevance of losing. After watching a dramatic reenactment of the Crucifixion at church, she remembers coming to understand that, of course, the violence I believed I was witnessing.
Still, she took the intended lesson. The violent scenes, she saw, were “meant to illustrate a deeper reality”: that lurking beneath the veneer of our comfortable, suburban, midwestern American lives was a threat so severe that God had to send his only son to brutally suffer and die to save us from it. The blood might be fake, but the danger was not.
By the time McCammon became an adult, evangelicals had won unquestionable power. They wielded great influence over the George W. Bush administration, and the presidency of Barack Obama was a temporary defeat. But white evangelicals had always believed they were under assault from the forces of progress, and now they had fresh proof, in the form of a liberal Black president and the legalization of same-sex marriage. McCammon, an NPR reporter who covered the Trump campaign, knows what happened next, and at this point so does everyone else. In Donald Trump, white evangelicals found their strongman. They helped put him into power once and could do so again.
But there are signs of turbulence. If 1976 was the year of the evangelical, 2024 could be something else: the year of the heretic. Though a majority of Americans are Christians, the religiously unaffiliated, or Nones, are on the rise. A study from the Public Religion Research Institute says the Nones accounted for 27 percent of the American population in 2022, up from 16 percent in 2006. Major Christian traditions are declining. Twenty-three percent of Americans identified as white evangelical Christian in 2006, PRRI says, a share that declined to 14 percent in 2022. Ethicist David Gushee estimates that “some twenty-five million American adults who had been raised evangelical had left the faith,” McCammon writes.
Post-evangelical stories are becoming more common, and the publishing world has taken notice. Part-memoir, part-reportage, McCammon’s book joins an emerging genre. In recent books like “Heretic” by Jeanna Kadlec, or “Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism—and What Comes Next” by Bradley Onishi, the post-evangelical recalls life in and out of the church, and often warns of political danger. “The violence wrought by Trump supporters storming the Capitol is anti-epiphany. It is dark and based in untruth. The symbols of faith—Jesus’ name, cross, and message—have been co-opted to serve the cultish end of Trumpism,” argues political journalist Jon Ward in “Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Failed a Generation.” The Trump presidency whet an appetite for post-evangelical stories. Liberals still want an explanation for his popularity among white evangelicals; in theory, the heretic can offer one.
Cue McCammon. In “The Exvangelicals,” she capably describes the fear and shame that trammeled her for years. When light does break in, she follows it. She embraces LGBTQ rights against her parents’ wishes and forges a relationship with her grandfather, a gay man. She later writes movingly of the end of her marriage to a man she had met at her evangelical college. These personal reflections are broken up by interviews with other post-evangelicals, whose experiences often resemble her own. McCammon depicts a subculture that merits careful attention. By the end of “The Exvangelicals,” though, that portrait is far murkier than it should be. Exvangelicals may share many distinctive experiences, but are they a movement?
Like McCammon, I was raised by devout parents who named me Sarah Elizabeth and educated me mostly at home or in Christian schools. McCammon describes her mother as a follower of Phyllis Schlafly, who campaigned against the ERA and founded the conservative Eagle Forum; my own mother was not so political. As I grew up in the 1990s and early 2000s, I did not protest abortion clinics or volunteer at crisis pregnancy centers, the way McCammon did. Ours was a quieter conservatism, though it was still all I knew. Then the Bush administration invaded Iraq. I opposed this and began to move left. Soon political conviction gave rise to religious doubts. Halfway through my time at an evangelical college in the Midwest, I stopped attending church. By graduation, I was an atheist. Not just a heretic, then, but an apostate, and perhaps something else, too: an exvangelical.
McCammon borrows the term “exvangelical” from Blake Chastain, a podcaster who also grew up evangelical and later left the church. The term “particularly resonates” for McCammon, she writes, as it signals “that the culture and identity of our communities of origin shapes each one of us, and the active decision to separate and leave that world behind.” Exvangelicals, in McCammon’s portrayal, are united by past upbringing and present trauma, rather than by any shared conviction. Some are still religious, others are not, and their political views are rarely specified.
In an evangelical upbringing, McCammon notes, there is an overwhelming emphasis on what a person truly believes. Of her sister’s infant dedication, she writes, “In our belief system, while my sister’s dedication was important, it was only a symbol. For us, the central question was what we believed in our hearts, not whether we’d participated in the proper rituals.” She adds, “There were frequent warnings against insincere belief, reminders to look deep within and be certain, certain, that your ‘heart is right with God.’” McCammon was “saved” at age two and a half; I was “saved” at the relatively advanced age of five. Afterward, I asked God to “save” me many times over because I feared my initial prayer would not stick. Fear shaped everything we did, and everything we thought. Childhood, for McCammon and her subjects, is “characterized by the push and pull of fearing eternal punishment from God while embracing his love, which was the theme of every church service, every prayer meeting, every hymn.”
Fear can be a useful political tool, and a vehicle for hatred. McCammon reflects on the racist fear that shaped her own education in a Christian school, one of many “initially opened by white churches in the 1960s and 70s in a revolt against school integration.” The Christian homeschool movement went a step further, as it cut off “white Christian students from the outside world and reinforced a nostalgic vision of an America once dominated by (mostly white) Christians,” McCammon writes. By the late 1970s, a robust media network conditioned the evangelical mind. Media juggernauts like James Dobson of Focus on the Family taught evangelicals how to educate their children, how to have sex in a God-honoring way, and how and whom to fear. Over time, evangelicals constructed a predominantly white and exclusively heterosexual country within a country, whose territories they sought to not only defend but expand.
Youth were key to this mission. McCammon herself was a foot soldier in training, interning for the Eagle Forum and becoming a page for a Republican senator. As I learned in my own upbringing, worldly interests—in politics, or culture—were suspect among evangelicals, especially when they appeared in girls, so they were weaponized rather than nurtured. A girl could never preach, but she could be political as long as her role models were women like Phyllis Schlafly or Margaret Thatcher. She could write like Elisabeth Elliot, a former missionary who was known for her anti-feminism. A well-funded infrastructure existed to train her. Historian Molly Worthen describes “Christian worldview” material promoted through “publications, camps, and curricula focused on evangelical youth,” McCammon writes, adding that the men behind this material “approached this endeavor by framing their vision of a ‘Christian worldview’ against any secular one that might challenge it”—for example, by popularizing a revisionist American history. As Worthen writes, evangelicals could thus “dismiss opposing interpretations of the evidence…. They insist upon their own worldview as the only clear window on reality.” (Worthen has since converted to evangelical Christianity.)
McCammon writes that she may have been an “exvangelical” before she knew it was a word. I suppose that is also true of me, although I dislike the term. It assumes that I define myself primarily against what I used to believe. Nevertheless, exvangelical writers have produced valuable work, much of it informed not just by experience but by research and reporting. Does that mean exvangelicalism is a “loosely organized, largely online movement of people,” as McCammon says? Movements can be loosely organized, they can even be largely online, but they require shared conviction and purpose. An ideology, even. Without that, “exvangelical” is just a hashtag.
Because exvangelicalism is defined only by what it is not, it offers a fitful counter to evangelicalism itself, which is as much a political movement as it is a religious tradition. Ideology is baked into the theology. There is a lot of money, for example, invested in efforts to keep evangelical youth in line. But the question of class goes unexamined in The Exvangelicals. Holy war is class war, too, waged by far-right wealth against the rest of us. The alliances evangelicals have built with right-wing Roman Catholics and other conservative activists funnel millions into institutions, organizations, and think tanks like the Council for National Policy, the Heritage Foundation, and the Alliance Defending Freedom.
Yet communal trauma, not ideology or power, remains McCammon’s principal subject. This is a mistake. The pain experienced by exvangelicals is more potent if the perpetrators are fully understood. It would be easier, also, to grasp the rise of Trump, whose campaign McCammon covered in 2016, had she considered the financial and ideological interests behind his successful campaign. Instead, her observations about Trump can feel shoehorned in, and ultimately that is a disservice to her subjects.
Exvangelicals are experts on what evangelicalism taught us, but we are not necessarily experts on everything else. One exvangelical artist says that she had expected her former peers to break with Trump. When they did not, she explains, “That brought into crystal-clear focus that a lot of this evangelical culture has been about political power since the beginning. And I did not even realize that.”
Exvangelicalism seems nearly as white as the movement it rejects, and as a subculture, it may be ill-equipped to address or critique racism in the church. That requires ideology, or at least a shared sense of history. Support for slavery—and Christian slave owners—helped give white evangelicalism its distinct political identity. Take the Southern Baptist Convention, which formed in 1845 “to safeguard the institution of slavery,” as Eliza Griswold wrote in a 2021 piece for The New Yorker. Founders claimed that “slavery was ‘an institution of heaven,’” she added, and they backed the Confederacy.
McCammon writes that the SBC approved a resolution apologizing for its past in 1995. As the election of Trump shows, however, there is still a chasm between white evangelicals and many Christians of color. There are other evangelicalisms, though McCammon and I were cut off from them as children, and the white variation still dominates headlines. In part, this is because white evangelicals could help reelect Trump, for whom racism is an important selling point. When Trump won the presidency, Jemar Tisby, a historian of race and religion who is Black and Christian, did not feel comfortable attending his white evangelical church the following Sunday. As he recounts to McCammon, “it’s clear that this church I have been going to, they clearly don’t understand my reality if they are celebrating the election of Trump.”
Exvangelicals may not understand that reality any better. Though several Black Christians have left white evangelical churches since the election of Trump, they aren’t necessarily exvangelicals, Tisby tells McCammon. “There’s a sense in which we were never evangelical because of race, so the hashtag and movement is a very white one,” he says, adding, “I think there are a lot of people who call themselves ‘exvangelicals’ who have also erased the Black church. Because what they are essentially saying is, the only way to be Christian is the way white evangelicals have been Christians, and I don’t want any part of that, without ever deeply considering Black Christians.” While exvangelicals speak, often, of “deconstructing” their faith, or unlearning what they once thought they knew, McCammon says that Tisby’s circles speak instead of decolonizing it. Tyler Burns, a Black pastor, tells her that by turning so often to white, progressive theologians, exvangelicals are “kind of replacing one problem for another, the problem of whiteness at the center.”
I’m not convinced, however, that there is a center to exvangelicalism. If it exists, McCammon has not discovered it, which is unfortunate. The heretic has a critique to offer, and a critique is not the same thing as a complaint. Anyone can come up with the latter; the former requires politics. Pain has a role, even a central one, in any post-evangelical awakening, but it is not the end of the story. Evangelical Christians hurt me deeply before I left the faith, and I considered suicide. Leaving evangelicalism was as difficult as it was necessary, and the fallout lasted a long time. A prominent fundamentalist said he hoped my parents “went to be with Jesus” before they learned of my leftist politics. Because of my pain, and the pain I saw inflicted on others, I sought a liberatory alternative to far-right Christianity. Leaving was not enough, nor was “deconstruction,” a nebulous term for a process seemingly without end. I had to arrive somewhere, too. That arc is common among the post-evangelicals I know, even if they have not landed precisely where I did. But it is rare in The Exvangelicals.
What emerges instead is a rudderless subculture. White evangelicalism is strong stuff, political to its core; exvangelicalism can appear pseudo-therapeutic in contrast. McCammon interviews a former evangelical named Rebekah Drumsta, who, she says, offers life coaching and “deconstruction” services. Here is what McCammon does not mention: Four 50-minute “mentoring calls” with Drumsta cost $400 out of pocket. If this is deconstruction, who can afford it? Moreover, why should anyone buy it?
Drumsta is not alone. McCammon mentions Joshua Harris, a celebrity pastor turned ex-evangelical who offered a “Deconstruction Starter Pack” priced at $275 until outrage shut him down. But McCammon leaves a broader ecosystem untouched. Less-famous “life coaches” and “deconstruction coaches” are becoming somewhat common in the exvangelical world, where they operate with little oversight or transparency. (At least Drumsta openly lists her prices.) Onishi, the author of Preparing for War, offers coaching on his website. Some coaches are trained mental health professionals, but many are not, and the definition of “coaching” varies wildly from practitioner to practitioner. Professional therapy is no panacea. But when personal experience is the only credential a coach needs, clients are vulnerable to grift and abuse. A skeptical edge is in order. Without it, exvangelicals - including McCammon -will remain in the wilderness.
We cannot afford the lack of clarity. “To be an American evangelical is to be often at war - a Christian soldier, moving ever onward into an invisible battle with the highest possible stakes,” McCammon writes, and she is correct. White evangelicals are at war, and they are formidable. The courts are packed with far-right judges who will shape law and policy for decades to come. Roe v. Wade is already gone. Conservatives have their sights set on the abortion pill, birth control, and civil rights for LGBTQ people. Trump may win a second term. Although that context haunts The Exvangelicals, I do not know what McCammon believes about any of it beyond her generic acceptance of LGBTQ people.
A bullet-point list is not necessary, but in a work that is also a memoir of belief, the ambivalence is misplaced, and leads to odd places. In purity culture, which teaches women and girls that they are dangerous sexual objects, McCammon somehow finds a silver lining. “When purity culture was at its worst, it left many young women feeling distant from our bodies, and ashamed of our natural sexual desires,” she writes. “But at its best, it could offer a vision of a woman’s body as something more than an object for men to use. In a culture where women lacked power, it also provided a framework for women to insist on more than a transient physical connection with men.” Feminism does that, too, without the cultural and political restraints of purity culture. Surely that’s worth consideration.
The alternative is authoritarianism. As a child in the church, I heard adults speak of our “witness,” the way we showed Christ to the fallen. Later I saw the truth: They had long ago sacrificed whatever witness they possessed. Now is the time for heresy, and truths plainly spoken. That may come from exvangelicalism, or not. The blurriness of The Exvangelicals can be explained in part by the subculture’s youth; it is still taking a shape. But it will have to work faster, and much more decisively, if it is going to matter.
(Sarah Jones is a senior writer for New York magazine).
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