Many today are predicting the (even imminent) collapse of evangelicalism. Others, like Brad Wright, show that evangelicalism is flourshing, while others, like Chris Smith, show that while it may be flourishing it is not what it used to be. At work here are two questions that I want to deal with before we go another step:
What is evangelicalism? I have been, am and will stand by David Bebbington and Mark Noll. Evangelicalism is a movement in the Protestant church shaped by differing but clear emphasis on four beliefs: the centrality of the Bible, the centrality of the atoning death of Christ, the centrality of the need for personal conversion, and the centrality of an active mission to convert others and to do good works in society.
Who decides who is evangelical? No one, really. Others, mostly. There is no one who decides who gets to carry the evangelical card but there is a a general conviction on the part of others who is “in” and who is “out.” I have an opinion, and you may have an opinion, and the one with the louder voice or the bigger voice might be the most compelling but … let this be said: God does not equate “Church” with “evangelical.” But because it is a movement, and for some the movement is so important that it is nearly the same as the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church, it matters deeply to some.
So to you: What is an evangelical?
But what does matter is that evangelicalism is a longstanding movement, it seems to unite millions of Christians in the world, and it is contested.
David Fitch, in his new book, The End of Evangelicalism? Discerning a New Faithfulness for Mission: Towards an Evangelical Political Theology (Theopolitical Visions), thinks evangelicalism’s influence is more or less over, that it needs to reexamine itself, and that it needs to rediscover what it could be in our world. This book by David Fitch could be one of the most significant studies of evangelicalism in the current academic climate. In some ways, he is doing deconstruction from the inside out.
To begin with, David Fitch believes evangelicalism’s social, cultural and political influence have waned to the point of being a minimal cultural presence.
The theory he will explore in this book is that belief plus practice (of that belief) shapes a community’s disposition in the world, and that means he can infer back from the lack of influence and viability of evangelicalism that it’s beliefs (or its practices of those beliefs) are no longer viable.
So David Fitch is seriously questing for what can be called an evangelical political theology, but he isn’t talking about political parties — instead, he’s talking about how to be a body, a present body, a body of influence for the gospel, in our world.
He believes evangelicalism has become an empty politic, and here’s why: the four (he blends two and three above) beliefs of evangelicalism were fashioned to be a “politic” in modernity and modernity is corroding and eroding and fading. He thinks those four beliefs, framed as they are, are to our culture what “Caffeine-Free Diet Coke” is to a drink: “a drink that does not fulfill any of the concrete needs of a drink” (xxi). So, let me state how David frames the three (blended four) beliefs:
1. Inerrant Bible.
2. Decision for Christ.
3. Christian Nation.
These are “ideological banners” but really are a “semblance of something which once meant something real” (xxii).
When evangelicalism began calling for defining and affirming propositional statements about “truth” and ceased being a vibrant contrast culture in terms of *way of life,* it became another entity tolerated by a pluralistic culture. The powers that be don’t mind what propositions evangelicals fuss about among themselves, but when evangelicals live in a way that threatens (not violently) the way life is supposed to be in “the American dream” society, let’s say, then evangelicalism has once again become salt and light. Evangelicalism is now degenerating into the 21st century Pharisees, Sadducees, Herodians, Zealots and lots and lots of Essenes hunkering down in their cultural Qumrans ’til Jesus comes back.
Best line – God does not equate “church” with “evangelical”
Nor does God equate “Christian” with “evangelical.”
It seems to me that there is one more characteristic of the old evangelicalism and that is “generous orthodoxy”. Thus evangelicalism was not limited to Arminian or Reformed or other particular disputable understandings of scripture. Evangelicalism was not separatistic as I see many are who now call themselves evangelicals. Fundamentalism was a descriptive term rather than a movement unlike the old evangelicalism which was a movement.
Time for evangelicals in the old sense to move on and find a new descriptive term for themselves and leave the term evangelicalism to the fundamentalists.
Dave W
I don’t know what Fitch’s training is, but my impression is that non-social scientists (e.g., historians, religion/theology scholars) seem to think that movements and societies change really quickly and dramatically. But when people look carefully at data they find that this is rarely the case. Social and religious change is usually very slow and incremental and has to do with things like one generation with slightly different beliefs slowly eclipsing another.
MEASUREMENT:
One interesting thing is that to my knowledge, neither Brad Wright nor Christian Smith mainly use the Bebbington/Noll markers of evangelicalism in their research. Pretty sure Wright uses denominational labels (the standard practice for social scientists) and Smith either uses denom labels or simply whether people identify with “evangelical.”
DECLINE:
But by whatever way you measure “evangelicals,” the best data shows that there’s no steep decline of evangelicals in America. There may be a slight decline (probably due to lower fertility), but its really small. So Wright is right. Smith’s view is probably right, but there’s mixed evidence on whether younger evangelicals are changing their beliefs on salient issues (see Byron Johnson’s research).
INFLUENCE:
There may be something to the lack of influence thing. The question for me is whether evangelicals are gaining or losing positions of institutional influence (Hunter “To Change the World”). If Michael Lindsay’s work is accurate, there are quite a few evangelicals in institutionally influential positions, but many of these people don’t think about how their faith might influence the shape of their work. …many evangelical influencers compartmentalize.
Gingoro #3 brings up some good points.
I think it is interesting that the picture used is Falwell (who I don’t necessarily think of when I think of an evangelical), instead of someone like Billy Graham (“old evangelicalism).
My last point was that beliefs don’t necessarily influence practice because people can compartmentalize. So in other words, some sort of belief in compartmentalization may mute the influence of another belief on people’s behavior.
Jason,
I’m with Wright and Smith on decline though I do think there’s something about losing “influence” — but then again the media really does seem concerned to talk about evangelicals.
Fitch’s book ultimately does not rest on the decline hypothesis so much as on the fact that it’s master signifiers were fashioned in a culture that has changed significantly. That’s where his use of Zizek comes in. More of this as the series develops.
The modern version of Evangelism depends on effort and event. The reexamination of God’s truth reveals that both are undependable.
If we see conversion/salvation embedded in the transformation process, then we don’t shoot for closing the sale and walking away. Authentic community and relationship may possibly result. Such a novel idea, eh?
scot#7:
I’m sure he sheds some interesting light … sounds like a thought-provoking book. I’ll keep reading this series.
But if we take the Bebbington/Noll signifiers, its hard for me to see how things like scripture, conversion, and mission don’t have fairly timeless relevance. Now maybe evangelicals have adopted stunted versions of these signifiers or there’s something muting their relevance… …maybe evangelicals are in bed with violence, “success,” or the allmighty dollar and such things are muting the influence of evangelical signifiers. This is certainly plausible.
Evangelicals make up roughly 1/4 to 1/3 of Americans, helped elect G. Bush, overwhelmingly supported McCain, and identify as Republican at around 70%. That’s probably why the media is focused on evangelicals. Evangelical’s influence on electoral politics still appears strong. Keep in mind that it’s older adults who vote and Americans are living longer than they used to.
On Fitch you said, “The theory he will explore in this book is that belief plus practice (of that belief) shapes a community’s disposition in the world”… and that “evangelicalism’s beliefs (or its practices of those beliefs) are no longer viable”.
I believe the frequency of these conversations on evangelicalism keeps pointing to the fact that evangelicalism and Evangelical theology—that is, theology as it endeavours to ground the identity and purpose of the church today in the teaching of the New Testament about Jesus—has arrived at a fork in the road. There is, for instance, the neo Reformed paradigm and its derivatives which, in my mind, may be a return to a friendlier fundamentalism. But there is also a movement towards a convergence of missional church and the New Perspective.
With regards to practice, the missional church movement has challenged traditional patterns of church life with new, fresh, innovative and incarnational ways of being church. With regard to theory the New Perspective has challenged the traditional rationalized presentation of evangelical beliefs, arguing that the New Testament is not simply an allegory of personal salvation. What these two developments offer might be an alternative to an understanding of “church” as (simply or only) the accumulation of saved souls, and scripture just a massive, dense way of saying that God so loves you (singular) that he gave his only Son.
And, yes, this has all been a great oversimplification, but maybe the future of the church after Christendom lies not entirely with the reactionary neo-Reformed folks (for all their good intentions) but, partly, in the convergence of these two powerfully creative forces.
This section “he can infer back from the lack of influence and viability of evangelicalism that it’s beliefs (or its practices of those beliefs) are no longer viable.” makes it appear that the viability of beliefs are dependent upon influence. I assumed political influence when I first read it, but pretend that it is any kind on influence.
If the evangelical movement isn’t having enough influence, even though it was credited with all of the things Jason Lee listed in (10) then what could we say about the rest of Christendeom. Whether evangelicalism is having too little influence or not, it is unquestionably having more than mainline protestantism and the rest of American Christianity. Are we to conclude that all of American Christianity has beliefs that are “no longer viable.”
Bob #11-
While there may be some separation between neo-Reformed and New Perspective, I don’t think you can necessarily separate neo-Reformed and missional. A missional mindset is found in many of the neo-Reformed churches.
Responding to Bob (11) I know in this age of the internet it is tempting to think that the American church boils down to the voices we hear the most on the internet, but that is not the case. By far the largest group within evangelicalism is traditional arminians. The only large evangelical group that people can even pretend is reformed is the Southern Baptist Church and survey after survey shows that less than 1/3 of the SBC, the largest evangelical denomination, is reformed. They might not make a lot of noise in online discussions, but all those “evangelical voters” that put George W. Bush into office, they are almost all traditional, southern, arminian evangelicals. So we need to do away with the notion that the “future of evangelicalism” is going to be defined solely by what some minor groups (neo-reformed and emergent) choose to do in the next decade.
Robin,
You nailed it in #14. I’m persuaded that many people equate “what I am hearing” with “what is.” 7 yrs ago the NeoReformed voice was quiet in the internet/blog world, and some of its leaders were against the focus on blogs. Then about 3-4 yrs ago they began to be a presence and now they may well be the majority of voices in the blog/internet world.
But blog/internet world is a slice of the pie, and not all that big or representative. And I wish some sociologist would compare blog reality with “real” reality and tell us about it.
I would agree that the biggest chunk of evangelicalism is probably southern, though there are many in the north tool; they are softly “Cal-minian” in thinking that salvation is assured but strong on free will and very avoidant of classic themes like election and divine sovereignty (except in praying to God to make a different); and they are both politically and theologically conservative.
Jason @9 said: its hard for me to see how things like scripture, conversion, and mission don’t have fairly timeless relevance. Now maybe evangelicals have adopted stunted versions of these signifiers or there’s something muting their relevance… …maybe evangelicals are in bed with violence, “success,” or the allmighty dollar and such things are muting the influence of evangelical signifiers. This is certainly plausible.
I think’s that it. Evangelicals as a political force in terms of their ability to determine the outcome of elections is not on the wain. But evangelicals as a faithful witness to the kingdom of God is certainly on the decline. I think the focus should be on practices. Evangelicals–perhaps old line evangelicals–are having a hard time relating belief to practice. They function as practical atheists. In fact, the younger evangelicals who want their lives to count for something, understand better than their elders how the American church project supports the modern liberal democratic state. My guess is 3/4 of evangelicals have no problem with war (in fact, take no thought for whether a war is just or not–it just is a fact of life which we have to support as good Christian americans). Same for capitalism and the pursuit of the American dream. So that, in looking at these evangelicals, one who is not a Christian might ask themselves why they’d want to be a Christian. What real difference does it make to follow Jesus when the shape of your life has no discernible connection to Jesus’s teaching.
So maybe it’s the “influence” thing, understood to mean “credibility.” Evangelicals have no credibility because the things Jesus taught are rarely reflected in the way Christians live.
I’m a bit split in what I think of this. To begin with, I don’t really believe in predictions of catastrophic failures of social entities. So, decline of Evangelicalism? Probably. End of Evangelicalism? Probably not for a very long time.
But also, I grew up SBC and my family is staunchly rooted in the SBC but I know longer identify with that group. I see in my own family evidence that the SBC is becoming more and more disconnected with the world around it. And this, to me, marks the decline. People like me are leaving the Evangelical banner and fewer and fewer are going back to it because it doesn’t seem to match reality.
re: What is an Evangelical, I still like John Stackhouse’s definition on the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada’s website – his definition is a superset of Bebbington’s (and Marsden’s).
question: Does Fitch look at Evangelicalism globally? My impression is that it is exploding outside of North America (growth & influence) eg. China house church movement, Evangelical Anglican’s in Africa, Pentecostalism in Latin America. Comments so far seem to be focused on the US Evangelical church.
Anyways, looking forward to this series.
Does anyone have any number on the number of emergent churches or persons who identify as emergent in the U.S.?
Robin, I don’t have numbers. Two observations: Gibbs and Bolger did a study of major churches, and Tony Jones’s dissertation did some sociological analysis. Tony might have numbers. But my second observation is this: it’s a movement and a trend, and some good ideas about how big it is can be gleaned from readership of books (which always represents a percentage of the movement) and sales of books. But I won’t guess on numbers.
A couple of weeks ago a member of this “dying group” released a book about the nature of the after life. The story about it has reached all the major newspapers and is on the cover of a significant weekly news magazine.
People have been predicting the end of evangelicalism for, oh I don’t know, about 85 years now. Ever since the end of the Scopes Trial, then it was the challenge against Al Smith, then it was the NEA, then it was…
Seems evangelicals are more robust than too many social scientists realize.
# 13
You said, “While there may be some separation between neo-Reformed and New Perspective….” Some separation? While I get your point and things may be improving, I think that might be an understatement…for instance (if you haven’t) read “Justification” by Wright.
And yes, there is a connection between neo Reformed and missional. Mars Hill in Seattle, especially early on, is an example. But that’s not my point. My comments have to do not so much with the nature of missional church as with the underlying theological model that shapes our understanding of mission. A Reformed missional approach is fine, but it is a praxis developed independent of the NP and is not the convergence I’m talking about; one I think a valid alternative.
Does sales of Rob’s book say who is emergent?
I wouldn’t use Rob’s book since it was so controversial, but I would be intrigued by other book titles that would have had wide influence within emergency christianity. Possibly MacLaren’s ANKOC?
DRT and Robin,
Sales are a good indicator — but remember that critics buy books too. But regardless, sales more or less indicate value of the perspectives in the book.
In the original post David’s three framing beliefs are:
1. Inerrant Bible.
2. Decision for Christ.
3. Christian Nation.
Question – What is Christian Nation? If it is having Christians forming their Christian nation then it is inherently not evangelical, but to say that the Nation should be Christian is inherently condemnatory of others. I think that is a problem of arrogance that directly leads to the problems of and because of evangelicalism.
What’s wrong with simply stating something like Bring Jesus to Others, without the arrogant baggage?
If you define anything using shallow and time-local terms it will vanish as culture changes, time moves, thinkers interact.
David Fitch here has use three very time-local concepts to define evangelicalism (inerrancy, personal decision, and christian nation). Given this definition I agree that it is vanishing and becoming insignificant.
But the general movement existed before and will continue to exist and adapt.
Evangelism needs to change if it’s to flourish. The old hokey, twangy ways no longer go in this society. We need to be more dignified and dare I say, more educated in our approach. Also, we need to separate politics from evangelism. American Christianity took a huge hit in credibility when people like Falwell, Robertson, etc. allied themselved with politicians. We also need to embrace the changing (improving)role of women in society. We won’t get very far if we say, “Follow Jesus, but you women are easily deceived and can’t do this and can’t do that,” and so on.
The misleading thing about using readership as an indicator of the size of a movement is you’re mainly looking at how it’s a movement among people who have enough money/time to read/buy Christian books … or what books small group Bible studies like to assign … or what books make nice-looking Christmas presents.
I’m not aware of anyone having any reliable numbers on emergent/emerging congregations.
I looked up the amazon religion and spirituality top 100. The only emergent book I can recognize is Love Wins (and I will assume that is due to the controversy and the TIME cover). There are no books in the top 100 that have calvinism as a primary focus.
There are 3 versions of RADICAL, 2 versions of Crazy Love, 2 versions of some Joyce Meyer book, a book by Tozer, The Case for Christ, the Case for Easter, a handful of christian romance novels, a handful of bibles, and a TON of spiritual fiction (like The Shack and The Secret)
My conclusions: (1) explicit theology has no popular readership (2) stuff that says “get of your butt for God” (Crazy Love and Radical) has some readership and (3) most of the literary religion that people get comes from romance novels and quasi-Christian fiction.
All in all it was a pretty depressing survey.
Scot, will future posts deal with who is not an evangelical and what evangelicalism is not? While I would agree that much of evangelicalism has been the endorsement of the four beliefs that Bebbington and Noll mention, it seems that part of evangelicalism’s identity has been stating what it does not believe, and that this palpable boundary of denunciations has been key to its self-understanding.
Quick note to say that “The End of Evangelicalism?” (with a very intentional question mark) is a very worthwhile read. Most of the questions that are posed here were a.) answered in the book, but b.) Scot will likely answer through his review. In his book, Fitch addresses most of the questions I saw head on. I have used the content of the book to discuss Evangelicalism with co-workers as a sociological phenomenom as a bridge to then talking about Jesus himself!
“He believes evangelicalism has become an empty politic, and here’s why: the four (he blends two and three above) beliefs of evangelicalism were fashioned to be a “politic” in modernity and modernity is corroding and eroding and fading.”
This is the issue. The current debate over heaven, hell, salvation, the Bible, orthodoxy, and who we are as a church is actually about the corrossion of modernity. The debates we are having within Christianity can nearly always be reduced to one’s (perhaps unseen) epistemology. We need more education on this front, especially among those who speak loudly via blogs, twitter, pulpits, etc.
Until Christians understand the epistemic deminsion of their theological commitments (and where the serious traps are–both for foundationalists and anti-foundationalists) they will continue to get very upset and speak past each other, never actually conversing about what matters. “Sound and fury signifying nothing.”
“dimension” (that is).
Jeff Cook#33, are you just saying that people are starting with different unexaminied assumptions, or are you saying more?
(35) DRT. I am saying the debate can be reduced to our presuppositions. Nearly all the controversies at hand within evangelicalism are really about divergent epistemic starting points. The two camps (foundaqtionalists and anti-foundationalists) articulate truths and question falsehoods in fundementally different ways–this seems to me to be the primary problem.
Appreciate Jeff’s #33 comments re our foundations and foundationalism. As we reject the religious version of modernity’s foundationalism then many of our forms and systems will inevitably crumble. And that’s what we’re seeing and its long overdue. But it will take a looonnnnggg time for evangelicalism to “die”. Here in the Bible-belt south we’re up to our necks in “folk religion” – the picking and choosing of some Christian bits to ornament the status quo. Removing all prophetic tension with the status quo. In fact the status quo is the real religion.
How about Kevin VanHoozer’s “fallibilism” as an alternative to foundationalism?
Jeff (#33), it seems like you’re saying something important here:
“Until Christians understand the epistemic deminsion of their theological commitments (and where the serious traps are–both for foundationalists and anti-foundationalists) they will continue to get very upset and speak past each other, never actually conversing about what matters. “Sound and fury signifying nothing.””
Want to explain it in simpler prose so you don’t risk talking past us non-philosophers who aren’t up on all the debates over foundationalism?
A simple observation from outside the USA: Fitch’s focus, title question, and threefold framework are intentionally American. That’s fine but American evangelicalism is a small and perhaps decreasingly significant segment of a global evangelicalism which is now predominantly African, Asian and Latin American. Maybe the book would better have been called “The end of American evangelicalism?”
From the outside looking in. I run with with that one, holy..hmm not always, catholic and apostolic crowd.
I can’t distinguish what is evangelical, from fundamentalism. To be honest I use the terms interchangeably.
I have assumed that much of the movement was a “pushback” response to academic exegesis that prioritized historical sources above revelation. As the pursuit of more and more “authentic voices” took hold, more and more conflicting hypotheses emerged.
Evangelicalism/Fundamentalism as I am hypothesizing then, becomes the natural counter reaction. People hunger for what is literal, what is pure.
Dru – That nails it!
The most important thing is if you are agreeing with them. Jesus would have carried a gun to church service too.
P.@#28 says, “Evangelism needs to change if it’s to flourish. The old hokey, twangy ways no longer go in this society. We need to be more dignified and dare I say, more educated in our approach. Also, we need to separate politics from evangelism.”
In my understanding, this was the rationale of the present Evangelical movement back when such as Carl Henry and Billy Graham started it to distance themselves from Fundamentalism which had become synonymous with Obnoxious in the public mind. I would suggest that this whole process is repeating itself with Evangelical and Obnoxious becoming ever more equated in the public mind.
Two institutions that arose with Evangelicalism in the modern sense were the magazine Christianity Today and the book store Christian Book Distributors. Both are still alive, tho CT is struggling along with many magazines. CBD listed Rob Bell’s Love Wins for sale pre-publication but it disappeared without a trace when the firestorm hit. That was my first bitter disappointment with this mainstay of my Christian education in something like 35 years of dealing with them.
Curiously, they also are not listing Fitch’s title under discussion here and I wonder if not for the same reason. To me these are signs of modern Evangelicals starting to circle the wagons. My guess would be that they might consider themselves like the camp of God’s people surrounded by Gog and Magog at the end of the thousand years.
Fundamentalists never entirely went away, they just became irrelevant to most people. Perhaps the same will happen to modern Evangelicals. The name may have become tainted beyond reclamation and perhaps a new name will arise out of the ashes along with a newer way of thinking and seeing.
(37) Dru. Excellent post. “Here in the Bible-belt south we’re up to our necks in “folk religion” – the picking and choosing of some Christian bits to ornament the status quo.” What a challenge!
(38) Jason. Yes. Sorry. On one side we have thinkers who believe that if you just think hard enough and are honest, the “absolute truth” will emerge. They (of course) think they are both hard thinkers and honest, and as such the “absolute truth” is in their hands and as such everyone else must be either dishonest and/or not thinking hard enough.
On the other side, you have those who believe that all truth claims are conditioned by outside factors: the language we use, the experiences we have had, the theories we believe prior to experience, etc. For example, when I say “God is our Father” – I am speaking truly. However, the image that will come to your mind and my mind will be VERY different, for you and I have different fathers and we have different intial understandings of God. As such the claim “God is our Father” may be good news for some and quite depressing for others depending on our experiences, unspoken definition, and presupposed filters.
The debate at hand, it seems to me, is between these two staring points, and if I may, they are characterized perfectly by the two Mars Hill churches.
Driscoll speaks to young people in the first way; Bell speaks to people in the second way. This is where the debate begins–with how we assume “Truth” works, how it is accessed, and what kind of claims we can make that are applicable to all.
To go further, I would highly recommend Stanley Gretz “a Primer on Postmodernism”. Grenz was a Christian theologian who does an excellent job setting the stage in an accessible way for this dialogue.
Much love.
Jeff#43, the 2 Mars Hills’s are a gift to all for study.
I also find it ironic that Falwell’s picture was used to illustrate the post. ISTM that one of the big drivers in this problem (to whatever extent it is a problem) is that in recent years many who in terms of doctrine and attitude might be more properly called “fundamentalist” (Falwell, MacArthur, Mohler) have elbowed their way into the Evangelical tent and put themselves at the center of the movement, at least as popularly perceived.
Maybe another angle is to ask the question whether “fundamentalist” and “evangelical” are two distinct groups, or whether “fundamentalist” is a subset of “evangelical”. I think 40-50 years ago it was more the former (as evangelical founders distanced themselves from a strident and anti-intellectual fundamentalism), whereas nowadays it seems to be the latter — leaving many of us who find fundamentalism repulsive uncomfortable in the Evangelical tent.
Robin and Scot, forgive me if it takes me a minute to get to my point but as to your your comments (#’s 14 and 15), Robin you said, “you know in this age of the internet it is tempting to think that the American church boils down to the voices we hear the most on the internet, but that is not the case. By far the largest group within evangelicalism is traditional arminians”. That may be so, but what about influence?
Scot, you told Robin, “You nailed it in #14. I’m persuaded that many people equate “what I am hearing” with “what is”.
This confused me. Scot, it doesn’t seem to jive with your impassioned piece back in October of last year, “Shifting Evangelicalism”. I thought that article provided a timely response to this lurch to the right we are observing with what appears to be a neo-fundamentalist resurgence. Your argument seemed to be that as a result of the influence of Al Mohler and of the reshaped SBC the word “evangelical” now overlaps to an unprecedented degree with the word “fundamentalist”, regardless of size.
From your article I got the idea that maybe generous big-tent evangelicalism was losing ground to an intellectually rigorous advancement of a neo-Reformed four or five point Calvinism, anti-evolutionism, and a complementarian disenfranchising of women. You said, “Today’s scene is not what it was. It’s a new era. When Al Mohler is on the cover of ‘Christianity Today’ when he represents the shrewd and powerful takeover of a former liberal-to-moderate seminary, when he has publicly claimed any form of evolution is inconsistent with the gospel, and when he is seen as the voice of American evangelicalism, a new world stands before the American evangelical.”
At any rate, I might be totally misconstruing your argument/comments so please tell me if I am. But it concerns me that a possible resurgence of fundamentalism in America may mean the longer term impact of the progressive marginalization of the church in the West and the crisis of irrelevance that is looming down the road.
“That may be so, but what about influence?”
Al Mohler is a calvinist and has turned 1 SBC seminary into a calvinistic seminary. I’ve gone back 10 years and cannot find where a single, solitary SBC presidents was a calvinist. Several were virulently anti-calvinist. Only 10% of SBC pastors would self-identigy as calvinist (29% of seminarians).
So there is some influence within the SBC for calvinism, thanks primarily to Mohler, but they can’t get a majority of seminarians, pastors, or even convention voters to agree with them. And that is the denomination that has been supposedly “taken over” by the calvinist resurgence.
Sure, Piper, Keller, Sproul, Duncan, etc. have influential books and lots of people come to their conferences, but can you name one single denomination that didn’t start out explicitly reformed that is now majority calvinistic?
“what “Caffeine-Free Diet Coke” is to a drink: “a drink that does not fulfill any of the concrete needs of a drink” (xxi).”
What? No comments on this bit? It doesn’t even tell me WHY it doesn’t qualify, and hence I can’t tell how it’s an analogy to the actual topic.
the comment, “why falwell’s picture, and not Graham’s” is an interesting point. before i really knew anything about evangelicalim (i live an Canada), i was a member of a church board. there was some talk of joining some evangelical church network. i strongly spoke against it because i just assumed that evangelical = unhealthy political associations. i was afraid the church would get overrun with this ridiculous political crusade mentality and lose its focus. (i was actually the one that initiated networking with other churches in the first place, and being more available toward social issues within the commununity)
@ 43. the irony of mentioning Stanley Grenz is that many evangelicals disassociate themselves from him.
Mark,
Given that Caffeine-Free Diet Coke is liquid and quenches thirst … it clearly fulfills the most concrete need of a drink. Therefore Fitch’s whole argument falls apart right here.
Following up on #47,
I think the lack of denominational shifts regarding calvinism has highlighed one salient feature of the neo-reformed, at least from my perspective.
I’ve been a Christian for 11 years and a calvinist for around 10. I attended SBC for a while, and I have always attended churches that were at least tolerant of calvinism, if not explicitly reformed.
Of all the calvinists I have ever met and known, and I am assuming at least several hundred if not a thousand, almost all of them were converts later in life, and here I mean at least 16 years old when they came to Christ. And I think this is where you are seeing the real influence of reformed thinkers and why it isn’t really showing up in denominational statistics. And it also goes for all age groups. All of the people I have known my age (32) that are reformed came to Christ late in high school or college, usually out of non-religious backgrounds. [Interestingly enough, the group right behind "non-religious" for calvinist converts usually seems to be "former catholics"]
Almost ALL OF THE PEOPLE that I have known that came from church backgrounds but “rededicated their life” or “came back to the church” after boozing it up in college have stayed whatever they were growing up (arminian Baptist in my area).
So that is one are of influence calvinists have had in large degrees in my area, they are very good at reaching the lost with the gospel and bringing people to Jesus. I always think about campus ministries along these lines. Campus Outreach is almost exclusively calvinistic, and extremely evangelical, they went from having a handful of people at their founding in 1978 to 6,000 or 7,000 in attendance at their 2001 Christmas Conference (the last one I attended). The navigators, which I believe is the second largest campus ministry group in the US behind Campus Crusade, has signifcant calvinistic leanings. On top of that you can throw indelible grace, RUF, and a couple of other quality campus ministries to help account for their influence among young people that come to Christ.
“I have an opinion, and you may have an opinion, and the one with the louder voice or the bigger voice might be the most compelling…” Certainly this is true in America. We have always been a nation of democratic religion.
But I note the absence of the Gospel in your definition (and that of Noll/Bebbington) of “Evangelical.” That’s a shame.
Robin@51 Maybe so I have never kept track of new converts vrs those reconnecting to a church attended during their childhood. My wife (an artist) and I started out as arminian Baptist at a young age. Both of us ended up as moderate Reformed. Our time of falling away came after university when we moved to New Jersey and bought a house next door to Negros. It seemed that none of the evangelical churches would accept our neighbors and so we went to a liberal Methodist church and things went downhill from there.
Dave W
Gingoro,
Was that supposed to be an insult? I’m telling you about my experience. I grew up in the bible belt (Kentucky), in the catholic church. Most of the people that I grew up with attended some evangelical arminian church and they spent their lives from age 14-25 getting hammered and sleeping with their boyfriends and girlfriends, while at the same time attending their local evangelical church faithfully. In my highschool they even had a group called “All to Thee” which was composed mostly of athletes and cheerleaders that would perform skits at youth rallies and then be at wild parties with the rest of us.
Lots of them did this for a decade, became deacons in their local arminian evangelical churches, and now just explain it as “falling away during college” or something like that. Whenever someone gives their testimony at my current church there is a nervous grin and laughter every time that comes up. It is known and accepted.
By contrast, most of the calvinists I know either didn’t grow up in religious homes, hated their traditional church even while they were in it, or grew up Catholic and fled the second they could. I fall in the last category, my wife’s family never went to church, not even on Easter or Christmas. We would have never come to Christ, let alone any institutional church, if it wasn’t for reformed churches reaching out to us showing us something different than the cultural, arminian evangelicalism we grew up despising.
If you want to fire back with some other backhanded accusation of racism have at it.
Scot, regarding my comment (# 46) what say you? Thanks.
Robin (#47):
I’ve never seen any data on the % calvinists across denominations. I don’t think anyone knows this.
Anecdotally, my sense is that Piper is widely popular among SBCers (and many others). People are digesting Piper without even knowing its calvinism. If data on belief in calvinist doctrines existed, it’d be interesting to see what percent of SBC’s are now de facto calvinists.
Robin Huh. I was just indicating that for us the falling away happened after university while I was still an arminian and that at the end of the process of returning we ended up reformed and not back where we started. Where we lived at the time we began to fall away, had both arminian and reformed churches and both seemed to have the same kind of segregationist tendencies. By the way this occurred back in the 60s. I was just indicating that my personal experience was opposite yours as I understood your original comment. No insult intended!
Dave W
Bob, I’ve had my plate full today…
The post today is about Fitch’s thesis, not mine.
But I am unpersuaded that strength of voice on internet measures fullness of reality.
I do think there is a strong voice that is recapturing evangelicalism for fundamentalism, and Fitch’s book in parts supports that because it would say that resurgence is an attempt to reclaim a culture that is passing.
Is this what you are asking?
The more time spent on getting self-definition right, writing declarations, ‘positioning’ and all that stuff is, I think, time wasted. The problem in all that activity is the production of a brand name, rather than a product. Activity without action, if you will. When evangelicalism rediscovers evangelism – living and sharing the gospel, then there will be some level of change. Until then, I guess we’ll just see the dance of demarcation – moaning about Big Tent, complaining about how shallow one’s (oops, another’s) view of hell is, whether dominion is destructive.
Let’s try and get on with being engaged Christians – engaged with our WORLD, not with constitutions, definitions and identities.
Very interesting conversation. I’ll be looking forward to “the series.”
I’m not up to spec with all the research or polls and whatnot, I can only ansewr from my personal experiences and observations (which I understand can be very limited), but it seems to me that the terms “Evangelical” and “Fundamental” are becoming synonymous.
I suppose it’s a tired (or re-tired) phrase but I saw the split very markedly when it was “evangelical” vs. “emerging/emergent.” I use to classify myself as evangelical, yet not anymore. I would rather be labeled (if I had to be) under the emerging/emergent banner.
I think the books (and their authors) like Love Wins, The Sacredness of Questioning Everything, Velvet Elvis, A New Kind of Christian, etc. fly in the face of those who are considered evangelical. If that’s the case, I would agree with the idea that Evangelicalism is on the decline as I know more and more people — at least in my peer groups — are trending towards ideas and beliefs that are more in tune with those books/authors than leading evangelical ones.
I guess time will tell, but it seems to be — at the least — a very probable reality, no?
Robin, what didn’t you like about the Catholic Church?
Patheos needs to improve your comment section. You need a comment section that allows people to reply to others comments. Just sayin, that would be awesome. I generally think the dialogue on blog’s has gotten horrible but this seems to be the one place it stays somewhat sane. It would be nice to have a better system that helped the process along a bit.
Always odd when an author says evangelicalism is…everything I don’t like about evangelicalism. Hardly fair or true.
DRT,
This might be too late, but I simply was not a Christian in any of my 20 years in the Catholic church. I was an altarboy and a lector, but I didn’t believe anything that I was taught and I didn’t care about God, even a little bit. When I came to love Christ I was immediately convinced that justification by by grace, through faith, apart from works.
I was content in the Catholic Church for a while, until I started to see some things that were very different from the gospel as I was learning it. The first straw was our local church’s staunch universalism. When I asked by the apostles would, almost to a man, suffer martyrdom if the ends of the earth would be saved anyway, even without the gospel, our priest said that sometimes fervent believers do irrational things (like preach the gospel).
The next straw was the sacrifice of the mass, and the teaching that Jesus is sacrificed continually for forgiveness of sins. I believe that he gave his life ONCE, for all time, and is now seated…his work is finished. There is no longer a need for a perpetual sacrifice.
A third straw was extra-biblical doctrines…stuff like priestly celibacy, the immaculate conception of Mary, her sinless (virginal) life, her status as a co-author of salvation.
I suppose if I found a local catholic priest who preached justification by faith alone I could fit in for a while, but I couldn’t participate in the mass, which by definition is a mortal sin that would condemn me to hell if it went unconfessed…so it is pretty safe to say there is no room for me in the Catholic Church.
If you are interested in Catholicism it is pretty easy to pick out some parts you like and try to discard the others, but if you take Catholicism seriously as a unified framework it is pretty difficult to remain a Catholic and have any theological system that resembles protestant theology.
Sorry, one last comment…it isn’t that I didn’t like the Catholic Church, it is that I came to have beliefs, and the more I grew into those beliefs the clearer it became that I couldn’t remain Catholic.
When you, as an adult Catholic, come to believe that baptism is a sacrament to be entered into upon repenting from your sins and believing in Christ, then requesting to be baptized (if you were baptized as a infant) is a repudiation of the church’s entire sacramental system. It denies the church’s understanding of original sin, church membership, etc. In order to remain a faithful catholic you would have to willingly suppress your belief in believer’s baptism to keep from getting excommunicated.
Robin, tit-for-tat, I too was very involved, would lecture, clean, do lots of stuff in addition to school. For me there were two big fallings out.
First, I never knew god when I was a Catholic. Yes, I was in awe of the majesty and everything else, and frankly would gladly welcome it today, but that is something good in-addition-to the faith and numinous feeling that I think people should have in connection with their god. I would be willing to be that you would not agree with me in this, but I did not find that connection until I undertook the meditative practices of Buddhism and started to realize that I shouldn’t simply learn what I was taught, but should experience what I learned.
The Catholic Church inherently intermediates the experience. But, once you have the experience, I think their experience enhances it.
Alas, the dichotomy of my new found touch of god also convinced me that discriminating against women was inherently demeaning. So I left.
I am tempted to go back. Thanks for telling your story.
@#3 (Dave)… very important point. I second it. Evangelicalism as a term is confusing. To me evangelicalism now is more than those three qualities listed. And those three listed can be too broad filled with nuances that I’m not even sure I would be evangelical in a strict sense (though my training and network says I am one).
Besides, when people begin to define themselves too narrowly, it leaves little room for personal growth… what if evidence of minor errors in the Bible to emerge? Then you have a whole community of people that you become disassociated with, people in your network, ministry, community. I don’t find the rigidity too helpful. Will the day ever come that “love” will be a defining quality of a group…? I’ll take “mere christianity” all day, however. But then, for too many, that is still too broad.
Makes me wonder why movements and labels are so important to so many. They create a false sense of security that one has the “truth” because a big group of people follow it and adhere to it religiously.
Hey Scott, how would you define an evangelical or a liberal? Or do we need to find new theological categories in which to describe ourselves??
Thanks for your time,
Hans