Timothy Dalrymple argues that it’s simply due to caricatures and media hype that evangelicals have come to be viewed as “hyper-politicized.”
It’s all in my head, I suppose. And if I could just get over my own prejudices, I’d realize that most evangelical churches would welcome me as a full and equal member, without suspicion or hostility or condemnation due to my belief in evolution and my support for legal abortion and equal rights for GLBT people.
“You’re pro-choice? No problem,” they would say. “We’re not the hyper-politicized caricatures the media makes us out to be, you know! Would you like to lead one of our small-group Bible studies?”
I’ve just been incredibly unlucky over the years to encounter an unbroken string of outliers and exceptions. The local churches, schools, colleges, parachurch organizations, publications and other evangelical communities I’ve encountered who required — informally, formally, and sometimes contractually — that anyone associated with them comply with mandatory opposition to abortion, homosexuality and evolution, those groups were in no way typical of the not-at-all hyper-politicized evangelical subculture.
The church I grew up in was an exception. Every other evangelical church I’ve attended or visited? Also an exception. My family is an exception. My friends’ families were similarly atypical. The Christian school I attended was an exception. So were all the Christian schools it associated with in athletic and academic associations. The evangelical college I attended was an exception. So was the evangelical seminary I graduated from. The evangelical parachurch organizations I worked for were exceptions. The Evangelical Press Association is an exception. The National Association of Evangelicals is an exception. Christianity Today is an exception.
The people who write to me regularly, sharing their stories of their own exclusion or expulsion from evangelical communities due to one or more of those three positions — all exceptions.
Jonathan Dudley’s experience, described in the opening of his book Broken Words, describes an extremely rare and exceptional experience in American evangelical Christianity:
I learned a few things growing up as an evangelical Christian: that abortion is murder, homosexuality, sin; evolution, nonsense; and environmentalism, a farce. I learned to accept these ideas — the “big four” — as part of the package deal of Christianity. In some circles, I learned that my eternal salvation hinged on it. Those who denied them were outsiders, liberals, and legitimate targets for evangelism. If they didn’t change their minds after being “witnessed to,” they became legitimate targets for hell.
Dalrymple assures us that this hyper-politicized experience is not typical of evangelicalism. Dudley’s community in Grand Rapids, Mich., must be nothing like a typical evangelical community. He went to Calvin College, which must be nothing at all like the typical evangelical college.
Most evangelicals probably wouldn’t recognize what Dudley describes, Dalrymple says. His experience was not typical because real evangelicals are not really obsessed with those issues. And so Dudley — like me and all those people who write to me to share their exceptional stories — must be one of those awful “rational and progressive” types who is “propagating the caricature as a way of making himself look better by comparison.”
Here’s one more exceptional example. Dan Pearce’s friend “Jacob” describes the evangelical world that he dwells in:
You don’t know what it’s like to live here and be gay. You don’t know what it’s like to have freaking nobody. You don’t know what it’s like to have your own parents hate you and try and cover up your existence. …
I’m sure that Timothy Dalrymple genuinely doesn’t recognize the portrait Jacob paints of life inside evangelicalism. “My theologically conservative evangelical church very rarely speaks of homosexuality or gay marriage,” Dalrymple says. And:
Issues like abortion are tremendously important; they’re not merely “cultural” issues but deeply moral and theological issues; yet they are rarely addressed before the whole congregation.
And I think he genuinely feels that this quantitative infrequency of mentions matters somehow — that abortion and homosexuality can be made non-negotiable articles of faith and definitions of the very identity of the congregation, but that such binding political parameters for that identity do not entail a “politicized” nature as long as they’re only discussed “very rarely.”
From where Dalrymple is sitting, that might be what it feels like. For those who have never disagreed with those core political beliefs — and never been questioned, judged illegitimate, or evicted from the community due to that political disagreement — it might really seem possible to believe that this community has not become hyper-politicized. But it looks quite different for those of us who have not uniformly agreed to all of those core political beliefs.
And for someone like Jacob, whose very existence has been defined as an intolerable form of political dissent, I suspect Dalrymple’s description of non-political evangelicalism won’t be very persuasive.
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