Wyatt Reynolds addresses the heated argument over historians’ definitions of “evangelical” by, in part, attempting to define evangelicalism as, itself, an ongoing heated argument. This is reminiscent of my recurring joke here that an “evangelical” is anyone who has a strong opinion about who is and who is not an evangelical.
This is all part of the ongoing challenge to the prior consensus view posed last year by Matthew Avery Sutton’s pot-stirring article in which he argued that “evangelicalism” was not a coherent, enduring theological category that could be traced back to George Whitefield or to Jonathan Edwards, let alone to Pentecost. Rather it was, Sutton argued, a late-20th-century development within American Protestantism with “no multi-century throughline.”
What really got some folks’ knickers in a twist was this bit from Sutton’s article:
I argue that 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. Contemporary evangelicalism is the direct descendent of early twentieth-century fundamentalism, North and South. Both movements are distinct from Antebellum forms of Christianity.
Sutton, in other words, is reserving the term “evangelical” for the movement begun in the 1940s by Billy Graham and Carl Henry et. al., which certainly and unambiguously branded itself as “Neo-evangelical” as a means of distinguishing itself from early 20th-century fundamentalism.
Some of the pushback against Sutton is simply the indignation of those who consider themselves to be evangelicals but who do not think of themselves as part of a “white, patriarchal, nationalist religious movement” dedicated to “conservative-leaning politics.” So a big part of the response to his argument seems like basic hashtag-Not-All defensiveness.
Reynolds’ response is interesting partly due to its lack of such prickly defensiveness. His defense of the consensus view is, instead, based on the insights that this view provided:
The consensus historians got something fundamentally right: theology matters. The continuities they traced between Edwards and Hopkins and Dwight and Finney were real. The shared commitments to scriptural authority, conversion experience, and activist faith did shape a recognizable tradition with intellectual coherence across time. Their work demonstrated that evangelicalism was not just a sociological phenomenon or a political coalition, but a theological inheritance with its own internal logic and generative capacity. Noll’s America’s God and Hatch’s The Democratization of American Christianity remain among the most sophisticated accounts we have of how theological ideas moved through early American culture.*
I think it’s always possible to rock-hop your way through the past, seeking out such “continuities” and deciding to regard this patchwork of stepping stones as the Alcántara Bridge. So I’m a bit more skeptical about what’s really continuous here, but let’s grant Reynolds’ point and thus grant David Bebbington’s point that his theological(-ish) “quadrilateral” describes some mostly coherent thing and that this thing has, in various forms, persisted among English-speaking Protestants ever since mass-produced English translations of the Bible first became widely available. And since we have to call this thing something, we may as well call it “evangelicalism.”
But even if we wholly accept all of that “consensus” view of what “evangelicalism” meant prior to the late 20th century, that would not mean that the term “evangelical” means anything at all like the same thing for the white American Protestants who have chosen to identify themselves by that name over the past 40 or so years. Tracing continuities and shared commitments between Edwards and Hopkins and Dwight and Finney does mean that we can draw a straight line through all those dots and logically have that line continue through Pat Robertson and Lance Wallnau and Pete Hegseth and Paula White.
Nor does anything about the “consensus view” of historians like Noll, Hatch, Bebbington, and George Marsden suggest that Sutton is not wholly correct in describing the existence of a thing that is, in fact and in reality, 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” that seems wholly “distinct from Antebellum forms of Christianity.” This is an accurate description of a very real, observable and measurable thing with its own set of continuities and shared commitments. Sutton chooses to name this thing using that same word: “evangelical.” That puts him at odds with the consensus historians’ prior use of the term, but it has the benefit of being the preferred nomenclature of the people he is accurately describing (if not only them).
For his part, Reynolds offers a critique of the consensus view that also holds as a critique of Sutton’s argument. The consensus view, he says: “tended to narrate evangelicalism as though it were fundamentally consensual — a tradition people agreed on — rather than fundamentally contested—a tradition people argued about.”
What would it mean, he asks, to consider “evangelicalism” as an ongoing argument — as a “discursive tradition”?
This means understanding the category not as a checklist of beliefs or a political coalition, but as a shared theological grammar that generates ongoing conflict about what that grammar demands of the individual and community. What gives evangelicalism continuity from Edwards to Graham is not agreement on politics or identical doctrinal formulations, but a set of theological commitments — scriptural authority, the centrality of conversion, activist faith, the doctrine of the image of God — which different inheritors have applied differently based on their social position, their historical moment, and their encounters with power.
Or, as he puts it in his final line: “Evangelicalism isn’t an identity. It’s an argument.”
Reynolds makes an attractive case for this approach, and I’m sympathetic to his aim here, which is explicitly intended to include people from the margins whose perspectives were neglected by the consensus view and would be excluded by Sutton’s definition.**
But that attempt to include these marginalized voices and perspectives reminds me again of reading Donald Dayton’s Discovering an Evangelical Heritage. That was a key text for us back at “Evangelicals for Social Action” in the 1990s, with Dayton’s profiles of various 19th-century “evangelicals” who had been at the forefront of the struggle for social justice in America. We could hold up Dayton’s book and say, “See? There have always been evangelicals advocating for social justice!” and we could point to the dozens of examples he provided of such people who came from within what the consensus view calls “evangelicalism.”
The problem with this “evangelical heritage,” however, was that most of these heroes of the faith who came out of evangelicalism were not allowed to remain within evangelicalism. They were all part of Reynolds’ “discursive tradition” — all vocal participants in his great “argument.” But they didn’t win that argument or win over many of their fellow evangelicals. And so they were pushed out of the community of that argument or else they left it behind, shaking the dust off their feet (as commanded by scripture). I mean, so much of Dayton’s history revolves around those connected with Oberlin College. That’s why the “evangelicals” of that time came to anathematize Oberlin. (And why “evangelicals” today still do.)
One cannot help but notice a similar pattern in the centuries-long “argument” that Reynolds sees as the definition of evangelicalism. One side always wins that argument and is permitted to remain within the community. And the other side always loses the argument — by popular vote, if not on the merits — and is not just excluded from continuing to participate in it, but has its voice expunged from the record.
Thus while Reynolds’s account of the devout, against-all-odds faithfulness of people like William Apess, Elias Boudinot, and Phillis Wheatley is inspiring, it’s also depressing. It shows that — contra Sutton — there is something very much like a “multi-century evangelical throughline” and that 21st-century “evangelicalism” shares many “continuities” and “shared commitments” with its Antebellum antecedent. And it shows that one accurate way to described those continuities and shared commitments would be that the argument has always been refereed by those committed to “a white, patriarchal, nationalist religious movement made up of Christians who seek power to transform American culture through conservative-leaning politics.”
Reynolds laments that the consensus historians’ work “did not fully account for figures like Lemuel Haynes, Phillis Wheatley, David Walker, William Apess, or Prince Saunders: people who were deploying the same scriptural arguments, operating within the same theological grammar, and arriving at political conclusions that followed at least as logically from the shared premises as anything their white contemporaries produced.” I agree (see: “The hole in Noll.” from — yikes! — 12 years ago).
But I don’t think those people and their perspectives were excluded by the consensus historians as much as they were excluded by the unwritten ground rules of the “argument.” It didn’t matter if their “political conclusions” followed logically from their principled application of the purported “shared premises” of “scriptural authority, the centrality of conversion, activist faith, the doctrine of the image of God,” etc. Their political conclusions were regarded as politically unacceptable. To reach such conclusions was to forfeit one’s future participation in the argument.
This bit, from Reynolds, is lovely writing that I wish I could wholeheartedly agree with:
Neither a purely theological definition nor a purely political one can account for what Walker, Apess, and Saunders were doing. They were not operating outside the evangelical tradition. They were applying its deepest premises — scriptural authority, the image of God, the universality of redemption — more consistently than most of their white contemporaries were willing to countenance. The ongoing argument about what those shared commitments demand is not a problem the category needs to solve. It is the category’s defining feature.
But the community can also be defined by what it is and is not willing to countenance. And when the community — or “argument” — draws its own boundaries according to political conclusions regardless of its purported “deepest premises,” then we must conclude that its actual deepest principles are not those theological premises it claims to hold, but the political conclusions it actually enforces.
The consistent, devout application of “scriptural authority, the image of God, the universality of redemption” was not sufficient to secure ongoing membership and participation in the community/argument for non-white “evangelicals.” Sharing the political conclusions of the majority of white contemporaries might have been sufficient.
One side of this argument sets the terms and polices the boundaries, and those boundaries involve the political conclusions that side regards as either acceptable or unacceptable. That suggests that those political conclusions, and not anything else, must be the category’s defining feature. It suggests those political considerations trump what might otherwise seem like theological shared commitments.
* I’ve seen several historians heatedly defending the “consensus view” of Noll, Hatch, Marsden, & Co., but haven’t yet seen much response to Sutton’s argument from those consensus historians themselves. The little I have seen from some of them suggests that they’re enjoying this renewed debate and, unless I’ve missed something, they seem to be far less defensive than their defenders.
** I’m not wholly persuaded, though, that including these folks within “evangelicalism” is beneficent. Is this even a club they wanted to join?
Certainly all of the folks Reynolds discusses regarded themselves as Christians and wanted to be regarded as such by others. It would certainly be unfair and inaccurate to exclude them from that category. But the category of “evangelical” — whether it be the construct of the consensus historians or Sutton’s construct or the alternative construct proposed by Reynolds — wasn’t one they would necessarily recognize or have desired to be included within.
I mean, Reynolds notes David Walker’s theological debt to Bartolome de las Casas. Las Casas certainly would have been offended by any suggestion that he was not a Christian but, as a devout Dominican friar, he also would have been offended by the suggestion that he was an “evangelical.” He also notes that the 1832 abolitionist gathering that anchors the beginning of his essay was also attended by William Lloyd Garrison, Lydia Marie Child, and Louisa Park. None of that Unitarian trinity would have felt honored to have been claimed as an “evangelical.” (Although I’m not sure how far along Garrison was yet on his Baptist-to-Unitarian-ish journey.)
I’m particularly leery that we don’t seek to include Christians as “evangelicals” as a way of affirming the legitimacy of their Christian faith. The unspoken premise of that is the idea that evangelicals are the truest, most legitimate (most orthodox, most pious, most committed, etc.) category of Christians. That claim may be a central tenet of evangelicalism, but it’s also not true. And, in any case, if would have been a bewildering suggestion to any Christian in 1832.
If our aim is to persuade 21st-century white evangelicals to listen to the voices of people like “Lemuel Haynes, Phillis Wheatley, David Walker, William Apess, or Prince Saunders,” then those contemporary white Christians might be marginally more receptive to that appeal if we could convince them that these people were all also “evangelicals — just like you.” But it would be better if those contemporary evangelicals learned to listen to such people regardless of what category we cram them into. And if they would also listen to more of their fellow Christians past and present who are adamantly not candidates for inclusion as “evangelicals.”
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