Yeah, well what about World Relief? World Relief is good, right? You’ve got to admit that World Relief is a good agency full of good people doing good things. And you’ve got to admit that it’s evangelical!
This is an argument I’ve encountered dozens of times over the past decade as a defense of American evangelicalism. It is, to be sure, a modest defense — a negotiation similar to Abraham’s argument with God in Genesis 18, pleading for the tradition to be spared if it can be established that there are still five righteous men in Sodom.
This defense of evangelicalism is made in the context of an internal debate. It’s an intramural conversation among Christians — among white Christians in America — over whether or not there remains anything redemptive or redeemable about white evangelicalism in the 21st century.
Sometimes this arises in the specific context of the historiography wars — with the older white evangelical historians who used to write for the Anxious Bench rejecting the more critical perspectives of the younger historians of white evangelicalism writing for that blog nowadays. Even more specifically, some variation of the Yeah, Well What About World Relief?!? argument has been how those older historians have responded to Matthew Avery Sutton’s tectonic essay “Redefining the History and Historiography on American Evangelicalism in the Era of the Religious Right,” in which Sutton wrote this:
Post–World War II evangelicalism is best defined as a white, patriarchal, nationalist religious movement made up of Christians who seek power to transform American culture through conservative-leaning politics and free-market economics.
I’d have written “described” instead of “defined,” and I’d add some complicating caveat about how the commitment to “free-market economics” is contingent on the extent to which that economics serves or challenges the deeper commitment to “white … nationalist” sentiment, but otherwise I see nothing inaccurate or misleading in Sutton’s argument.
I am free to evaluate Sutton’s description with some detachment because I was freed and detached from the category he is describing.
I was involuntarily freed and detached from that category — officially and publicly, right here on this platform when this here blog that you’re reading right now was removed from this site’s “evangelical channel” due, explicitly, to the concern that readers might be confused to encounter a blog advertised as “evangelical’ that turned out not to be supportive of “a white, patriarchal, nationalist religious movement made up of Christians who seek power to transform American culture through conservative-leaning politics and free-market economics.”
So now I’m one of those “ex-evangelicals,” but I didn’t jump. I was pushed.
Thirty years ago, I was still a card-carrying evangelical (literally — I kept my Evangelical Press Association card in my wallet). And as such I would have responded differently to someone offering a description of evangelicalism like Sutton’s. I would have taken it personally and responded defensively with something like the #NotAllOfUs exasperation of that Yeah, Well What About World Relief? response.
What about the organization I worked for, Evangelicals for Social Action? And what about the “evangelical left” — Tony and Jim and Ron? They were all still alive and active back then, at the end of the 20th Century, and were all still (conditionally) accepted as legitimately belonging to evangelicalism.*
My defensiveness back then was partly due to the fact that our status as legitimate evangelicals was perpetually contested. The pushing that eventually pushed me out was something we had to push back against, constantly. And we did, constantly, because we were evangelicals, gosh darn it. We loved Jesus and the Bible and we wanted everybody to be saved. That was who we were, above all else, and wasn’t that what being an evangelical Christian was all about?
Nominally, yes. Every new “statement of faith” handed down from Lausanne and every then-contemporary historiographic attempt to define “evangelicals” included us and proved we belonged, right? But none of our personal testimonies or our doctrinal stances turned out to matter nearly as much as the bottom-line fact that we were not sufficiently* a “white, patriarchal, nationalist religious movement made up of Christians who seek power to transform American culture through conservative-leaning politics and free-market economics.”
I empathize with the touchy defensiveness of Sutton’s evangelical critics because I lived through what they’re living through. I remember what it feels like to identify as an evangelical because loving Jesus and loving the Bible was the most important thing to me only to be told, constantly, that this did not matter at all — to constantly have the gatekeepers of evangelicalism reminding me that loving Jesus and loving the Bible wasn’t nearly as important as voting Republican no matter what. And then seeing “no matter what” ratcheted into something ever more extreme.
I remember what it was like to constantly strain against those gatekeepers, insisting that they don’t speak for me and they don’t get to speak for all of us. And I remember what it felt like when somebody like Sutton came along and said that, yes, actually they do — that those white-nationalist patriarchy-defenders seeking power to “transform American culture through conservative-leaning politics and free-market economics” really do define who is and who is not an evangelical and that they were correct in saying I didn’t belong. It feels like a betrayal and an attack to see Sutton’s descriptive language match so closely with those gatekeepers’ normative language.
So I completely get the prickly defensiveness of the Yeah, Well What About World Relief? response.
More than that, I’ll concede that it makes a fair point. World Relief — the humanitarian aid and refugee resettlement agency linked to the National Association of Evangelicals is undeniably evangelical, right? I mean, what could be more evangelical than the NAE? And the work that World Relief does is undeniably a Good Thing — certainly according to the Matthew 25-ish “inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these” standard so frequently invoked by those of us in the Tony and Jim and Ron crowd.
If you’re not familiar with World Relief, you’re not alone. Most white evangelicals in America are not familiar with them either. This recent report from ProPublica’s Anna Maria Barry-Jester and Brett Murphy details some of the crucial good work that agency is doing: “Trump Officials Celebrated With Cake After Slashing Aid. Then People Died of Cholera.”
Let me correct that. That ProPublica article details some of the good work that World Relief used to do. That work was ended by Trump and Marco Rubio and Wheaton-graduate Russell Vought — all with the full support of MAGA evangelicals.
Part of the reason you may not be familiar with the good work that World Relief had been doing is that it has always needed to fly under the radar of those white, patriarchal, nationalist gatekeepers of white evangelicalism in order to avoid being labeled as “controversial” and getting pushed out of the tribe. That same under-the-radar approach is what enabled World Relief to assist and resettle tens of thousands of refugees here in America over many years.
That work was done in conjunction with evangelical churches all over America — good people doing a Good Thing, driven by what they believed was their evangelical faith. And that work is now over thanks, again, to the politics of MAGA as enthroned and supported by the vast majority of white evangelicals in America.
Robert P. Jones attempts to measure and to describe that white evangelical support for the dismantling of everything World Relief has ever stood for:
I continue to be deeply alarmed by the attitudes of white Christians generally and white evangelical Protestants in particular. I continue to be struck, as a social scientist, that it has become virtually impossible to write a survey question about immigration policy that is too harsh for white evangelicals to support.
The numbers he cites are damning: two-thirds of white evangelicals support ICE; 57% favor internment camps for “illegal aliens” with no criminal record; “52% of white evangelicals favor the U.S. government deporting undocumented immigrants to foreign prisons in El Salvador, Rwanda or Libya without allowing them to challenge their deportation in court.”
That’s all quite hideous. I’ll note that these percentages are all lower than the infamous 80-ish percent of white evangelicals who voted to elect Trump twice over, and that perhaps there is some tiny basis for hope there that this gap suggests some erosion of the lock-step white evangelical support for this administration.
But that ain’t much to go on.
Still, think back to Abraham’s original hashtag-Not-All argument in Genesis 18. Abraham failed to find even five righteous men in Sodom, but it’s still true that almost one fifth of white evangelicals may not have yet wholly accepted that their religion requires them to be nothing more than the “white, patriarchal, nationalist” political movement sketched in Sutton’s grim description. Nearly one-out-of-five is a lot more than five.
Doesn’t the persistence of this small, but substantial, righteous remnant suggest that the city can be spared?
I don’t think so, but it’s too soon to tell.
I think the presence of that remnant is a temporary artifact of 20th-century evangelicalism that will gradually be reduced and removed. The churches that work with and support World Relief, the Lausanne-affirming theologians, the Ned Flanders types, and all the rest of that almost-20% may be pushing back to stay within “evangelicalism,” but they won’t be able to push back forever. If the weight doesn’t get them, the reps will. There may have been a place for them within 20th-century white evangelicalism, but there no longer is within the white evangelicalism of this century.
Almost exactly 10 years ago I wrote with great concern about how the candidacy of an extreme right-wing Republican running for president was receiving such vehement, mandatory support from white evangelical gatekeepers that I feared “A Ted Cruz win could further Bartonize ‘mainstream’ white evangelicalism” — forcing moderate white evangelicals to embrace Barton’s white, patriarchal religious nationalism or else to be sidelined or expelled from the tribe like some apostate Wallis or Campolo.
In one sense, that post didn’t age well because Cruz didn’t win the Republican primary. He lost to an even more extreme right-wing candidate, and the gatekeepers obediently and immediately shifted their allegiance to the new standard-bearer of their party and their religion. The white evangelical “mainstream” went well beyond merely being “Bartonized.” And it’s still heading in the same direction.
Does an agency like World Relief — or even something like the NAE — still have any place within 21st-century white evangelicalism? I don’t know. Probably not, but maybe. Ask me 10 years from now.
* Sutton acknowledges the late-20th-century existence of that faction and summarizes the reach, influence, and legacy of our movement as follows:
In the 1960s and 1970s, younger evangelicals fought to broaden the movement, to make it more inclusive and less racist, nationalist, patriarchal, and wedded to free market economics. They mostly failed. See Swartz 2012 and Gasaway 2014.
Harsh, but fair. And, again, I say this as a first-hand participant in that history — as someone who is literally a footnote in both of Sutton’s footnotes.
Although still I would paraphrase a line from one of my favorite Rob Reiner movies and note that there’s sometimes a big difference between mostly failed and completely failed. We sowed some seeds. Those that fell on the rocky soil of our own white evangelical ground mostly failed or were choked out by thorns. But I think/hope that maybe some few of them took root elsewhere.
And also too I would say that while we were not sufficiently “white, patriarchal, nationalist, free-market” etc. to satisfy the gatekeepers, we were still enough like that to hobble our attempts to create or suggest something radically different or better.
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