Who’s an ‘evangelical’? Depends on who’s asking. And why. (And when.)

Who’s an ‘evangelical’? Depends on who’s asking. And why. (And when.) December 20, 2018

(The following is a bit inside baseball, sub-tweeting-ish, but I will try to pull back and fit this into a bigger picture too.)

We just witnessed an interesting (to me, anyway) variation on the endless and un-endable argument over who is/was and who is/was not an “evangelical.” This was one of those Twitter things — a bit of a snark-fest — between two people who know this subject very well, for very different reasons, and from very different perspectives.

As usual, the disagreement wasn’t actually about the definition of the term evangelical, or about the boundaries — doctrinal, theological, practical, historical, cultural, market-driven, political — of the term. The dispute, rather, was about who gets to set those boundaries and who gets to enforce them. That is almost always what such arguments are about.

Because of that, I didn’t come away from reading this latest kerfuffle impressed by the contentions of any of the contentious folks involved, but I did wind up more impressed with Molly Worthen and her argument that a “crisis of authority” is at the heart of American [white] evangelicalism. Authority asserted and authority contested seem to always be involved whenever anyone sets out to declare who is and who is not within the boundaries of the endlessly bounded and re-bounded and re-re-bounded category of evangelical, which is why the best summary of this dispute — written by John Turner over at the Anxious Bench — was titled “Who Defines Evangelicalism?

What happened was this: Historian Thomas Kidd referred to Phillis Wheatley as an evangelical; evangelical religion-beat reporter Jonathan Merritt responded that it seemed “weird” to him to include her in that category. And then, almost immediately, the particulars of that disagreement were abandoned and the back-and-forth devolved quickly into an unlovely, squirm-inducing bit of mutual Who Are You To Question Me On This Subject? theater.

“Aaaand in this corner …”

In their defense, both of these guys have very good reasons to react like that on this particular subject since they are both — in very different ways — experts on the boundaries of American evangelicalism.

Consider Tom Kidd first — Dr. Kidd, actually. He’s a professor and, thus, a certified expert on the subject. He went to very good schools and studied the topic for years. Then got hired at very good schools where he teaches classes on it. He’s written lots of books addressing this very question — serious, academic-press books where what he wrote was vetted by peers and editors. If you were a lawyer needing an expert witness on the subject of American evangelicalism, you could hire Dr. Thomas Kidd, confident that his c.v., his credentials, and his body of work would be more than enough to ensure any judge would accept his qualifications.

Kidd is also a religious historian, and historians who study evangelicalism have an added reason to be a bit surly and snippy when their expertise is questioned. As historians, they require some functional definition or set of boundaries to limn just who it is they’re studying when they study “evangelicals.” And since literally no one else has stepped up to provide such a definition, historians have had to do so themselves. If you’re looking for a widely used or accepted definition or outline of “evangelical” and “evangelicalism” you’re going to wind up turning to some historian to answer your question — David Bebbington or Mark Noll or George Marsden, etc.

This has to be burdensome and, frankly, annoying for any historian researching or writing about evangelicalism. Historians studying Catholicism or Presbyterianism don’t have to do all of that. And it’s a thankless, difficult, obstacle-laden task. It’s like when you’re the only one who ever does the dishes, but everyone else still feels qualified to complain about the way you’re doing them. (This is why I think one of my favorite historians, John Fea, was uncharacteristically off his game in jumping in to defend Kidd here.) It’s always going to be tempting for historians to respond: “Well, fine, you don’t like it? Do your own damn dishes and come up with your own quadrilateral and then I’ll sit over here and criticize you and see how you like it!” That’s understandable, but still not a good look.

So, yes, it was kind of dumb for Jonathan Merritt to question Thomas Kidd’s expertise on the subject. But it was also kind of dumb for Thomas Kidd to question Jonathan Merritt’s own form of expertise. Merritt, after all, is a white evangelical. He is almost (but — in significant ways — not quite) the stereotype or archetype of a white American evangelical in 2018.

Margaret Mead would almost always have been justified in saying “How dare you question my expertise on the Trobriand Islanders? I am the world’s foremost expert on Trobriand Islanders! I’ve written countless books and articles on the subject!” But if Mead had said that to an actual Trobriand Islander, declaring that their lived experience was nullified by her years of study, well, that would’ve been a different matter. It would have undermined Mead’s authority and expertise rather than underscoring it.

More to the point, Merritt is a working writer covering the evangelical beat for evangelical publications. The larger factor there is not the granular daily expertise of the beat writer, but the hard-won expertise that comes from having to regularly negotiate the ever-shifting boundaries policed and enforced by those evangelical publications. Jonathan Merritt is very, very good at negotiating those boundaries and playing that game. He is very, very good at knowing how to report what they will agree to publish and not to write what they will not publish.

This is not, at all, meant as a compliment, but it has to be recognized as a very particular form of expertise. The guy knows where the lines are. He walks that tightrope for a living.

Merritt also understands something about the boundaries of white evangelicalism that Thomas Kidd has never had to learn or been made to understand, because Kidd is not gay and Merritt is. That means Jonathan Merritt’s identity and membership within evangelicalism is constantly disputed, challenged, and questioned. Not a day goes by when he is not being informed — formally or informally, explicitly or implicitly — of the status of his status. He has no choice but to know more about the precise location of the boundaries of white evangelicalism than Thomas Kidd will ever have to know. He could provide you a minute-by-minute graph of those boundaries that would look like one of those Dow Jones graphs from the business page.

And such a graph would look exactly like that — which is part of what both Kidd and Merritt (and some of the others who have weighed in) seem to be overlooking in this whole tempest in a teapot. The boundaries of evangelicalism and of evangelical identity change. They change over time. They change all the time. White evangelicalism in the 21st Century is already very different from white evangelicalism in the late 20th Century, which was very different from white evangelicalism in the early 20th Century.

And what that means, at any given point in time, is that evangelicals from any other given point in time will seem a bit, well, weird.

“Weird” was, again, the word that set off this whole argument. Kidd referred to the tragic 18th-century African-American poet Phillis Wheatley as an “evangelical.” Merritt said it was “weird” to think of her in the terms of that category. They were both correct, but then one got snarky and the other got all Great-And-Powerful-Oz condescending and they both fumbled a chance to learn something and to teach something while simultaneously losing their grip on the correct thing they knew beforehand.

The actual conflict here — apart from the shouting-match aspects of it — involves the way that “evangelical” is a category the meaning of which involves both continuity and change. Merritt was focused on the change. Kidd was focused on the continuity. They managed to diss one another into becoming solely focused on those aspects, which is why they both ended up being mostly wrong despite having started out mostly right, and despite their considerable expertise.

For an excellent discussion of why it is certainly correct to say that calling Phillis Wheatley an “evangelical” is “weird,” see this December 14 post from the blog of … um, historian John Fea: “When WAS evangelical?” That post mostly compiles and commends a Twitter thread from Daniel Silliman tracing the history of the word itself and the significant, sometimes massive, changes in its usage over time. Silliman contends — rightly, I think — that it’s anachronistic and misleading to apply the term in anything like its contemporary sense to anyone before the 1840s, and probably even before the 1940s. Silliman specifically addresses the great proto-evangelical George Whitfield himself and his followers — a group that would include Phillis Wheatley.

On that point, John Turner helpfully suggests the term “Whitefieldians” to refer to these early evangelical-ish don’t-call-them-evangelicals. I like it. Today’s white evangelicals are clearly, in many senses, the spiritual heirs of the Whitefieldians. There is continuity, but there is also change. Big, big change.*

Here’s where Thomas Kidd really dropped the ball. He’s a professor and thus, among other things, a teacher, and by choosing to assert his authority he missed a teachable moment — not just for Jonathan Merritt, but for himself.

Again, this is understandable. Kidd has written books that address some of the very questions Merritt was raising, and it can be exasperating when someone asks you a Frequently Asked Question without bothering to first look at your FAQ. And also Kidd’s condescension was partly a response-in-kind to Merritt’s condescension. I get that. But, as Turner notes, “On the other hand, the recommendation of one’s books as an answer to a question rarely goes over well.”**

Because here’s the thing: It is, in fact, “weird” to refer to Phillis Wheatley as an “evangelical.” It is certainly not altogether wrong or incorrect, but it is weird. The meanings and boundaries of that word as it is currently employed, now, in 2018, do not fit well when applied to a New England African-American poet from the 1700s. Some parts of it fit: Wheatley’s faith was conversionist and revivalist after the style of Whitefield. That’s very much evangelical-ish.

But she was also a Congregationalist. And African. And a poet. She read the New Testament in Greek. Even more damning, she never even once voted for a Republican. She never criticized evolution. And she not only sometimes privately criticized slavery, she never once qualified that criticism by adding that, of course, slavery was not nearly as bad as abortion. All of which means that Merritt’s confusion is perfectly justified. The white evangelical gatekeepers enforcing the boundaries of evangelical identity in 2018 — the same gatekeepers perpetually hovering over him as someone they regard as existentially unacceptable — would never accept someone like Phillis Wheatley as a wholly legitimate member of their tribe.

I’m sure those gatekeepers would count her for some purposes. Like other black evangelicals, she would be counted when trying to pump up the numbers and thus the cultural deference due to evangelicalism, or when attempting to lessen the damning implications of that 81 percent figure they’re desperate to show doesn’t mean what it clearly means. And if someone criticized evangelicalism for failing to produce any great poets, they would surely trot out the name of Phillis Wheatley along with, um, with … give us a minute … (sound of riffling through the pages of Guideposts).***

But generally speaking: a black, woman Congregationalist artist who preferred the original Greek to an English translation would certainly not count when those same gatekeepers were updating their daily lists of who is and who is not a real, true evangelical. Pretending they’d welcome someone like her without qualification is, well, weird.

Wheatley, in other words, is an ideal subject for a conversation about how and why the boundaries of American evangelicalism have changed over the years. And if you’re a professor who studies and teaches this stuff for a living, then there’s no better person to engage in such a conversation with than somebody who has a huge social media following among American evangelicals. It’s bad enough to miss that opportunity and fail to answer that question. It’s even worse to get so caught up in defending your scholarly credentials that you wind up pretending it’s not a really good question deserving of a really good answer.

It is a really good question. It is a whole raft of good questions: In what ways can Wheatley be called “evangelical”? In what ways is that “weird”? How has the meaning of that category changed between 1773 and 2018? Which of those changes are doctrinal? Which are denominational? Cultural? Political? And do the self-appointed gatekeepers policing the boundaries of evangelicalism really have the authority to do that? Should some of the people disqualified by those gatekeepers nonetheless be included in the category? And should some of the people embraced by the gatekeepers nonetheless be excluded? Says who? Why? (Give three examples and show your work.)

If having really good questions posed in a really rude manner causes a professor not to answer them, that’s bad. If it causes that professor to stop recognizing his discipline’s urgent need to pursue accurate answers to those questions, that’s much worse.

– – – – – – – – – – – –

* Whitefield himself, for example, would have been horrified to learn that his spiritual descendants were all fiercely loyal members of a political party that was founded with the goal of abolishing slavery. Contemporary white evangelicals, I suppose, could reassure him not to worry — that Republicanism only became a defining central doctrine of their faith after the great reversal which saw the Party of Lincoln reshape itself into the Party of Calhoun. His bedrock conviction that black folks are souls to be saved but still not quite people the way white folks are remains an essential part of his spiritual legacy.

** General rule: If you’re an expert who wants your expertise to be acknowledged, then show, don’t tell. Corollary: If you’re an expert who comes across as wanting/expecting your expertise to be treated only with deference, then your reasons for acquiring that expertise — and thus that expertise itself — will seem suspect.

Merritt was rude and inappropriate toward Kidd, but Kidd’s response to him made me less inclined to read his books in the same way that Kevin Kruse’s frequent Twitter wars with far ruder interlocutors makes me more inclined to read his. When one historian tells me he’s an expert and another shows me, I’ll go with the latter every time.

Another part of the difference there, I think, is that Kruse is very good at recognizing when he’s being challenged in bad faith versus when someone is asking him even the dumbest of questions in good faith. A dumb question asked in good faith gets a cheerful, informative answer. A clever question asked in bad faith will make the person wish they’d picked a fight with someone closer to their own weight class.

That’s an important distinction when evaluating what went off the rails between Kidd and Merritt. It’s not about “civility” but about the fundamental respect of acting in good faith. “Tone” and politeness and “civility” are nice things due to people asking questions in good faith. They are not due — and it is wrong, immoral, unethical, and uncivil to grant them — to people who are asking questions in bad faith.

Kidd and Merritt got rude in part because neither appreciated that the other seems to have been acting more or less in good faith. And then they both got rude in a way that tends to be spectacularly ineffective even when a bad-faith inquisitor deserves such rudeness. They were both wrong, in other words, to treat the other like he was Dinesh D’Souza, but the actual Dinesh D’serves much, much worse than either of them was able to come up with.

*** They’d also riffle through the pages of Books & Culture, First Things, and (if no one was looking) the Christian Century. And they’d probably be able to rattle off plenty of additional names: C.S. Lewis, Madeleine L’Engle, John Donne, Wendell Berry, Denise Levertov, Czeslaw Miloscz.**** In every one of those cases, it’s at least a bit “weird” to attempt to place the poet in question within the bounds the gatekeepers themselves have drawn for evangelicalism. Acknowledging that and exploring why that is would be fruitful and instructive.

And if you’re a scholar of American evangelicalism, acknowledging that and exploring why that is should be part of your actual profession.

**** They’ll also probably try to get away with folks like Hopkins and Eliot and Auden. No. Buzzer-sound. No. Trying to include those folks as evangelicals wouldn’t just be weird, it would be flat-out wrong.


Browse Our Archives