{"id":10581,"date":"2012-10-03T17:14:50","date_gmt":"2012-10-03T21:14:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/?p=10581"},"modified":"2012-10-03T17:14:50","modified_gmt":"2012-10-03T21:14:50","slug":"what-is-an-evangelical-part-3947","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2012\/10\/03\/what-is-an-evangelical-part-3947\/","title":{"rendered":"‘What is an evangelical?’ part 3,947 …"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Timothy Dalrymple, who oversees the evangelical channel here at Patheos, takes a couple good swings at the perennial question of who is (and thus who is not<\/em>) an evangelical.<\/p>\n

On Monday Tim asked \u201cWhen Do You Stop Calling Someone an Evangelical?<\/a>\u201d It\u2019s a thoughtful and generally constructive discussion of \u201cvarious attempts to provide a clearer definition of evangelicalism, from the famous Bebbington Quadrilateral<\/a> to pseudo-creeds like the Lausanne Covenant<\/a>.\u201d He\u2019s particularly \u201cleery,\u201d he says, of attempts to define evangelicalism according to whatever culture-war issues happen to be prominent at the moment:<\/p>\n

While it\u2019s true that evangelicals are generally inclined, for instance, to oppose abortion and support the traditional marriage covenant, there are interpretations and extensions of their fundamental commitments and not fundamental commitments themselves. I\u2019ve heard it before: \u201cI don\u2019t know how someone can be an evangelical and pro-choice.\u201d Well, you\u2019re going to have to trust me here: it can be done. Bebbington shows the way by focusing on essential theological matters.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>
If you want to reclaim the word \u201cevangelical,\u201d you\u2019ll have to take it back from the people who own it right now. And that means people like Pat Robertson, Tony Perkins, David Barton, Bryan Fischer and Cindy Jacobs.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

If \u201cevangelical\u201d is to refer to a part of the church, a part of the Christian community, then it needs to be a category defined or described in theological, not in political, terms. I agree with Tim on this point, although I\u2019m afraid that \u2014 in practice \u2014 most American evangelicals do not.<\/p>\n

Culture-war definitions of \u201cevangelical\u201d seem to be ascendant. We can see this most clearly from the sorts of people who tend to provoke hand-wringing discussions of, well, \u201cwhen do you stop calling someone an evangelical?\u201d When Jay Bakker fully affirms LGBT Christians in his congregation, we see a rush to rescind his membership in the evangelical tribe. He is quickly rebranded as \u201cpost-evangelical\u201d despite not having strayed from any of those \u201cessential theological matters\u201d or having rejected any of the doctrinal affirmations of Lausanne or abandoned any of Bebbington\u2019s four characteristics.<\/p>\n

But note that this hasn\u2019t happened with Jay\u2019s dad, the notorious televangelist Jim Bakker. The elder Bakker has, for decades, preached a lurid mixture of wild heterodoxies \u2014 from the prosperity gospel to various End Times manias. But since his theological innovations and departures did not clash with the essential partisan culture-war \u201cstances\u201d of socially conservative Republicanism, he has never been rebranded as a \u201cpost-evangelical.\u201d<\/p>\n

This illuminates the problem Tim Dalrymple discussed in a second post yesterday on \u201cThe Future of Evangelicalism Online<\/a>.\u201d That post reiterates his commitment to a primarily theological understanding of evangelicalism. Undergirding his recommended marketing plan for \u201cevangelicalism online\u201d is a vision of the kind of moderate, theologically cautious, Christianity-Today<\/em> evangelical perspective that characterized mainstream evangelicalism 20 years ago. He begins by lamenting the dominant public impression of evangelicalism in America:<\/p>\n

Evangelicals are neither loved nor respected in the American public square. This is due in part to our enduring and principled commitment to truths and values the rest of mainstream society rejects, and in part to a tendency in media and academia to present a caricature of evangelicalism that elides its virtues and exaggerates its vices.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The problem here is that what Tim identifies as the \u201cvices\u201d of evangelicalism are not simply a caricature. Those vices are embodied in the most visible and vocal representatives of American evangelicalism. For the general public, as well as for \u201cmedia and academia,\u201d evangelicalism is no longer primarily identified with people like Billy Graham, J.I. Packer, John Stott or N.T. Wright or with institutions like Christianity Today<\/em> and the National Association of Evangelicals.<\/p>\n

Those people and institutions were long ago eclipsed by people like Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Tony Perkins, David Barton, Tim & Beverly LaHaye, Bryan Fischer and Cindy Jacobs.<\/p>\n

Are those folks really \u201cevangelicals\u201d? Some would not be if we were to appeal to a primarily theological definition, but they all claim affinity with the term and because their culture-warrior bona fides are unquestionable, no one ever challenges their claim to it the way that such challenges are routinely directed toward people like Jay Bakker or Brian McLaren.<\/p>\n

When people like Robertson, Perkins, Barton, Fischer, LaHaye and Jacobs become the most prominent standard-bearers of evangelicalism then we can\u2019t complain that anyone is \u201cexaggerating its vices.\u201d The vices of folks like that really cannot be exaggerated. And that, more than anything else, is why \u201cevangelicals are neither loved nor respected in the American public square.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s another way to describe the same problem: Broadly speaking, American Protestantism is viewed as divided into two parts \u2014 evangelicalism and mainline Protestantism. The broader public perception of evangelicalism, then, is shaped in response to the words and deeds of American Protestants who are not mainliners.<\/p>\n

Evangelical gatekeepers tend, partly due to historical habit, to be most vigilant in patrolling the liberal border of their movement. Every Wild Goose Festival prompts a round of fretful discussion as to whether any of these troubling emergent types has strayed too far toward some hazily defined notion of liberalism and should thus henceforth be regarded as a \u201cpost<\/em>-evangelical\u201d \u2014 as a mainline wolf in evangelical sheep\u2019s clothing.<\/p>\n

But while these gatekeepers have been closely watching every word from the likes of Brian McLaren, they have utterly ignored the ascendance of the hyper-political right-wing machine that has come to replace the old CT<\/em>-mainstream as the central locus of evangelicalism.<\/p>\n

While the old guard was busy conducting a heresy trial for Tony Campolo to keep those liberals in line, the new guard was building a nationwide infrastructure and media empire that would, in short order, make the old guard irrelevant, obscure and all-but invisible to the larger public.<\/p>\n

That, I think, is where the greatest challenge for American evangelicalism lies. Tim Dalrymple\u2019s commendable goal of an evangelical community that represents \u201cthemselves, their views, and their vision of the Christian life in a manner that\u2019s intellectually compelling, meticulously informed, and suffused with charity and grace\u201d can\u2019t be fully realized without in some way differentiating that community from the Robertson, Perkins, Barton, et. al.,<\/em> crowd who now own the label evangelical.<\/p>\n

Right now, they own<\/em> that word. The only way to reclaim it \u2014 to redeem it \u2014 is to take it away from them.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The word “evangelical” no longer belongs to the old mainstream of Christianity Today and Billy Graham and Wheaton College. Today that word belongs to people like Pat Robertson, Tony Perkins, James Dobson, Bryan Fischer, David Barton and Cindy Jacobs. If the old mainstream evangelicals want to reclaim that word, they’re going to have to take it back by taking it away from Robertson & Co.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":141,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[65],"class_list":["post-10581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-evangelicals","tag-tribalism"],"yoast_head":"\n'What is an evangelical?' part 3,947 ...<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The word "evangelical" no longer belongs to the old mainstream of Christianity Today and Billy Graham and Wheaton College. 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark1\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"'What is an evangelical?' part 3,947 ...","description":"The word \"evangelical\" no longer belongs to the old mainstream of Christianity Today and Billy Graham and Wheaton College. Today that word belongs to people like Pat Robertson, Tony Perkins, James Dobson, Bryan Fischer, David Barton and Cindy Jacobs. 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark1\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/141"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10581"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10581\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}