Evangelicalism, R.I.P.

Back in 1988, in the wake of  televangelist Jimmy Swaggart's fall from grace due to his hiring of a prostitute--itself coming on the heels of the even more ridiculous Jim Bakker's dalliance with Jessica Hahn--I overheard a fellow member of our church in Richardson, Texas both shocked and worried about the consequences of his fall for "us," i.e., "evangelical" Christians. At the time, I thought her concern ridiculous. These weren't "our" people, or so I imagined. In my way of thinking at the time, the "evangelicalism" to which we adhered was different. It was "respectable." Its leaders, at least in the circles I then associated with, were highly educated, culturally astute, and dismissive of the anti-intellectual Pentecostalism and Prosperity "theology" promoted by these disgraced men.

So I thought then. Now is another matter entirely. Evangelicalism, in my reckoning, is dead. And, considering my own personal history, that is not an easy or palatable thing to concede.

You see, I am a Christian, and have been as long as I can consciously remember. I am what many would consider a "cradle evangelical." I am the son of an evangelical--indeed, by his own preferred nomenclature, a fundamentalist--theology professor of some local repute. I grew up in a "Bible-believing" fundamentalist church. I attended a Missouri Synod Lutheran primary school for four years. I graduated from the same evangelical/fundamentalist Christian college where my dad taught. I attended and earned a terminal degree in New Testament from a famous nondenominational evangelical seminary. I taught Greek at that seminary while earning my doctorate, and subsequently taught New Testament, Greek, hermeneutics, and theology at a proudly evangelical college in my home state of Pennsylvania. I have been a member of the Evangelical Theological Society for decades. I have, as it were, evangelicalism in my blood. Given this history, you can understand why it gives me no pleasure to render the diagnosis of the movement's death. Nevertheless, I find that verdict inescapable. As a result, I must likewise confess to a long-term myopia, if not an ostrich-like sticking my head in the proverbial sand, on this matter.

Part of the problem is linguistic in nature. "Evangelical," as I explained years ago, is a slippery term, amenable to various definitions. As much as I would like to understand the term historically and theologically and take refuge in the term's origins in the Protestant Reformation's putative "recovery" of the biblical "gospel (euangelion)," its later application, both in Britain and in America, to a trans-denominational, conversionist Protestant orthodoxy, and especially in the attempt, in the 1940's and 1950's, to rescue such orthodoxy from the black hole of inter-war Philistine Fundamentalism, to do so is, in my view, sadly no longer defensible.

It is a truism of linguistics that word "meanings" develop, and often change, over time--a lesson I learned well from reading the King James Bible in my youth. Consequently, to rely on, assume, or insist on historical meanings of terms is precarious at best. Words also, as any students of "fundamentalism" can attest, have both denotations and connotations, both of which must be acknowledged and taken into consideration.

The fact that, beginning in the 1970's, so-called "conservative evangelicals"--people who, for all practical purposes, were nothing more than only slightly reconstructed fundamentalists of the old sort--began self-designating this way may have felt a tad disconcerting, but it unmasked the fact that fundamentalists all along had been a subset of the larger group known as "evangelicals." It was in fact the "New" Evangelicals of the '40's-'50's who had purposefully driven a wedge between the two groups. And this further brought into relief the nasty fact that evangelicalism--despite its commendable legacy (if only partial) of social action in the 19th century and renewed emphasis on intellectually- and culturally-responsible engagement with the world in the 20th--has always had a healthy strain of anti-intellectualism within its ranks, the religious element of classic American Know-Nothingism.

Ask anybody on the street--or in a factory like the one in which I used to work--what an "evangelical" is, and they will respond by referring to some iteration of what has, for the better part of four decades, been called "The Religious Right." Whether old school Southern Baptists like Jerry Falwell, Sr., or Pentecostalists like Pat Robertson, or fundamentalist legacy "leaders" and organizations like Franklin Graham and Liberty University, or ever more fringe elements of neo-charismatic and Prosperity "theology," "evangelicalism," in common parlance, is associated with rigid, politically conservative Protestant Christianity, with all the corresponding connotations of anti-intellectualism and self-righteous, culture war-style moral judgmentalism that go along with it. Such linguistic realities cannot simply be waved away.

Indeed, if anything, matters have grown ever more dire during the past four years. In 2016 I was shocked when it was reported that 81% of self-professed white "evangelicals" had voted for Donald Trump, a famously cretinous and racist failed businessman--six bankruptcies!--with a decidedly unchristian penchant for adultery, divorce and, in his words, "grabbing" women "by the p*ssy." Four years later, after 30,000 lies, separating migrant children from their parents at the border, coddling white supremacists, obstruction of the Mueller probe, impeachment due to his extortion of the Ukranian president, obsequiousness to foreign dictators like Vladimir Putin, and an unconscionable malfeasance in dealing with a pandemic that has killed almost 400,000 Americans, some 76% of them still voted for him over Joe Biden, many even indulging the delusional fantasy that Trump was a Christian himself. In the days since his weeks-long firehose of lies about "voter fraud" led to the seditious assault on the U.S. Capitol, many, like faux historian Eric Metaxas, still defend him and hold out hope for a second term in the White House. Worst of all, as I wrote about last week, many "evangelicals" actively participated in the insurrection, flying "Jesus" flags and banners while Christian music blared from speakers on the capitol grounds.

What to do? Some optimistically hold out hope for the continued viability of the term. Reformed theologian Richard Mouw, the retired former President of Fuller Theological Seminary, just two years ago wrote his winsome little book, Restless Faith, in the attempt to rescue the label while navigating the rough waters of needed change. Another to do so is the Anglican New Testament scholar, Oxford's N. T. Wright. In an interview published in The Atlantic in December 2019, Wright said the following:

Part of the problem here is the word evangelical. I know a lot of people who have basically abandoned it since the whole [Donald] Trump phenomenon.

In England, people are a bit embarrassed about the word. But I’ve taken the view that the word evangelical is far too good a word to let the crazy guys have it all to themselves, just like I think the word Catholic is far too good a word for the Romans to keep it all to themselves. And while we’re at it, the word liberal is too good a word for the skeptics to have it all for themselves. It stands for freedom of thought and exploration.

More recently, in response to the terrible events of January 6, Wheaton College's Ed Stetzer wrote an op-ed in USA Today in which he called for "an evangelical reckoning" and repentance for being "fooled" by Trump, tolerating his misbehavior and ignoring matters of justice and genuine political discipleship. 

To be sure, as Stetzer maintains, evangelicals have largely (80%!), to their shame, been fooled by Trump. But--and this is the point--this gullibility is a long-standing one, one which raises the pressing question as to whether or not this gullibility is a motivated gullibility, whether or not this susceptibility to falsehood, authoritarianism, white supremacy, patriarchalism, and idolatrous Christian nationalism is indeed a manifestation of rottenness and theological declension at the core of the movement. When I read or hear words from the mouths of Franklin Graham, Falkirk Center/Liberty University's Jenna Ellis and Charlie Kirk, Metaxas, First Baptist Dallas pastor Robert Jeffress, or even more "respectable" academic conservative evangelicals like Southern Baptist Seminary President Al Mohler and theologian/former President of the Evangelical Theological Society Wayne Grudem, this suspicion is inevitably reinforced. Indeed, listening to them and reading horrifying books like evangelical anti-Trump historian/Messiah University Professor John Fea's Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump, makes it clear to me that what such people represent is a fundamentally different understanding of what being a Christian means from that which I have always, as a professed evangelical, held.

Thus, as much as I admire men like Mouw and Wright, and appreciate the outspoken disapproval of Trumpism and Christian nationalism by people such as the Southern Baptist theologian Russell Moore and the Presbyterian journalist David French, I now maintain that, at least as far as I am concerned, holding on to the label "evangelical" is a futile endeavor. And this breaks my heart.

I am a Christian. I stake my life on Jesus as the crucified and resurrected Lord, and seek to follow him and his teachings with all that is in me. I am an orthodox, Protestant theologian in the Reformed tradition. I gladly stand in the tradition of New Testament scholars such as F. F. Bruce, I. Howard Marshall, George Ladd, Don Hagner, Harold Hoehner, Darrell Bock, Scot McKnight, Craig Keener, N. T. Wright, Richard Bauckham, and Mike Bird. But I can no longer accept the label "evangelical." I am a Christian. Full stop.