Tag: christian nationalism

The church is a subversive society

The church is a subversive society

The president of Southern Seminary is on record as saying that government funding for religious schools is wrong, that Baptists “consistently oppose” the public reading of Scripture in public schools, and he even agonized over whether it would “subsidize religion” for churches to be tax-exempt.[1] This president is not Al Mohler, but his predecessor Edgar Mullins, writing in 1908. Some religious outsiders (and perhaps not a few Baptists) would be surprised to learn this. Yet, Mullins was no maverick—so why do his views seem so out of step with evangelical political discourse today?

Broadly speaking, church and state relations can be framed as four choices:[2]

  • Theocracy. The church controls the State. For example, Rousas Rushdoony, an architect of Christian Reconstructionism, believed the Great Commission was about the church’s mandate to remake society. He declared that focus on salvation of souls at the expense of this mandate was “heretical.”[3]
  • Constantianism. The State favors the church, which in turn accommodates itself to the government. This is a quid pro quo partnership.
  • Free church in a free state. Government leaves people alone to worship (or not) as they wish, and the church supports that aim so all can freely choose their own path—without implicit or explicit State sanction.
  • Isolation. Christians withdraw. They watch their own movies, listen to their own music, go to their own clubs, and effectively segregate themselves from society, culture, and the wider world.  

The third path is the historic Baptist position, and it is the one Mullins represented. This is a framework that can bring clarity in polarized times—and, as a bonus, it is enshrined in the 1st Amendment. The position is simple, and one can appreciate it regardless of its sectarian origins:

  1. Each person is responsible for her own relationship with God,
  2. In order to be responsible, each person must be free to make her own choice,
  3. So, the best model for church and state relations is “a free church in a free state.”     

Salvation is an individual affair. Jesus calls individuals to “repent and believe,” (Mark 1:15). The Apostle Paul tells believers to put away their old selves, and “put on” their new status as God’s children (Ephesians 4:22-23). The Scriptures speak of individual judgment (1 Corinthians 3:12-15; Revelation 20:11-15). That being the case, choosing God—loving Him with everything you have (cf. Deuteronomy 6:5; Mark 12:28-31)—cannot be based on implicit or explicit coercion. It must be a free choice, an intelligent and willful decision. You cannot force love in a marriage, nor can you compel love for Christ. God is interested in our hearts, which must be freely given. As one early Baptist wrote, “You may force men to church against their consciences, but they will believe as they did afore.”[4]

If all this is true, then it suggests Christians ought to support “a free church in a free state.” The two pillars of this position are codified in the 1st Amendment as the “free exercise” and the “establishment” clauses:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof …

Essentially, these two pillars say (1) government will not establish a religion, nor will it (2) prohibit people from freely exercising their religious beliefs. As Christians today survey the evangelical landscape and wonder what to think about the intersection of church and politics, the Baptist ethos is one worth considering. Here are some questions to make this less abstract—consider them in the context of “a free church in a free state,” and the “free exercise” and “establishment” principles.

  1. Should Christians support compulsory Christian prayer in public schools? This practice would compel all students to pray in a Christian manner, regardless of their own beliefs. This is coercion. It also violates the establishment clause. This is why Engel v. Vitale (370 U.S. 421 (1962)) went the way it did—not because “secularists” were on the march, but on principle.
  2. Ought a nativity scene be displayed on public property? Would this be favoring Christianity? What should you think if someone says, “This is a Christian nation, and while other faiths can worship as they wish, the nativity scene must go up!” If government cannot “establish” religion, then what is the solution, here?
  3. May a football coach employed by a public school be fired for engaging in prayer on a football field after a game? The Bremerton, WA school district thought this violated the establishment clause. The Supreme disagreed (Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, 597 U.S. ___ (2022)).

More examples could be given. The “free church in a free state” framework is a flexible model that eschews government coercion in matters of faith, while safeguarding a person’s right to exercise that faith. Government has struggled to fairly implement this framework in the messiness of real life; at times favoring accommodationist or separationist views to solve the muddle.[5]

The point is that there is no theocracy. There is also no church and State quid pro quo partnership. Nor is there a need to withdraw from public life and embrace isolationism. There are only houses of faith being asked to be left alone, declining special treatment, not lobbying for “access” and “power,” not pushing for an explicit or implicit establishment of Christianity—because one day the shoe may be on the other foot. It can do this because the church’s job is not to underwrite American democracy, but to be a counter-cultural community of “foreigners” waiting for the better tomorrow, witnessing for Christ and the Gospel.[6] To be this alternative community, the church must demand to be left alone—not cry out for special favors or long for sepia-toned nostalgia of a bygone de facto Christendom. This is what Howard Snyder called the “countersystem” or “subversive” model,[7] wherein the church is a community summoning people to leave the secular city and join a new society.

Thinking citizens cannot escape this sectarian discussion, because the post-Trump GOP is suffused with populist derivatives of Christian Reconstructionism. Those unfamiliar with the broader stream of Christian theology may assume Reconstructionism is Christianity. Indeed, the “free church in a free state” ethos has fallen on hard times in public discourse—especially at the hands of leaders who know better. Much of the popular uproar in evangelical circles about “losing our country” is because America has been disestablishing Christianity as its de facto civil religion for at least the past two generations.

This framework is sometimes dismissed as utopian or naïve. Somebody’s values will be legislated, why not make sure they are Christian values? There are good books which flesh out the framework I can only sketch here.[8] Suffice it to say that God’s community is not the State; “Church and State might in a perfect society coalesce into one; but meantime their functions must be kept separate.”[9] As one theologian observed, “the church is a colony, an island of one culture in the middle of another.”[10] Resident aliens never mistake a foreign country as their own.

For healthy civic discourse, to ensure a decision for Christ is freely made (whichever way it may go), so the church can be the church, and for a measure of sane pluralism in an insane world—both Christians and concerned citizens should champion the “free church in a free state” ethos.

[1] Edgar Y. Mullins, The Axioms of Religion (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1908), pp. 197-200.

[2] There are many helpful ways to frame this issue—this is merely one of them. 

[3] Rousas J. Rushdoony, Christianity and the State (Vallecito: Chalcedon, 1986), pp. 19, 35. 

[4] Leonard Busher, “Religion’s Peace, 1614,” from H. Leon McBeth, A Sourcebook for Baptist Heritage (Nashville, TN: B&H, 1990), p. 73. 

[5] Take the example of a nativity scene at the county courthouse. A separationist ethic would ban all religious displays at Christmas. An accommodationist view would allow any group to put up any display it wants at Christmas. 

[6] See Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, Resident Aliens, expended ed. (Nashville: Abingdon, 2014), ch. 2.

[7] Howard Snyder, Models of the Kingdom (Nashville: Abingdon, 1991), pp. 77-85.  

[8] See especially Hauerwas and Willimon, Resident Aliens. 

[9] Mullins, Axioms of Religion, p. 195.

[10] Hauerwas and Willimon, Resident Aliens, p. 12. 

The false “Christianity” of the Religious Right

The false “Christianity” of the Religious Right

I am not a fan of the the politicization of American Christianity. I view the blend of American exceptionalism with Christianity as a very toxic stew that produces nothing but drek. Many American evangelicals would bristle at that observation, but there it is. I have written briefly on this in the past (search the tags for “Christian Nationalism”). For some good context to understand my perspective on this, I’d recommend the following:

Just this past weekend, I received a fundraising letter from a creature of the Religious Right named Ralph Reed. He’s been around for a long time. He was a “whiz kid” of the Conservative movement in the early 1990s who powered the Christian Coalition to amazing success. He is now head of the “Faith & Freedom Coalition.” He personifies the false Christianity of the most fetid corners of the Religious Right’s dank basement. I speak so strongly because I believe this amalgamation of politics + alleged Christianity is nothing more than a witches brew that has sucked many into a cesspool. Just suggest you remove your American flag from the platform or dais inside your church building, and you’ll see what I mean.

Back in 1999, Cal Thomas and Ed Dobson wrote a book titled Blinded by Might (linked above). Both men were “on the ground” with Jerry Falwell during the heyday of the Moral Majority, in the early 1980s. They were key lieutenants in the movement. But, they became disillusioned. They wrote this book to warn evangelicals there was no pot of gold at the end of the political rainbow. All the effort, all the money, all the striving after House seats, Senate seats, Supreme Court seats has achieved … nothing.

In that wonderful book, Cal Thomas makes this observation:

That was in 1999, reminiscing about the good ole’ days from the early 1980s. Here is what I received from Ralph Reed this past weekend:

I used this loathsome correspondence in my sermon from this past Sunday, as I preached from Zechariah 8. Here are my excerpted remarks:

The End of White Christian America

The End of White Christian America

I originally wrote this review in October 2019 for publication at another site, but forgot to post it here.

Robert P. Jones wrote The End of White Christian America in 2016. He’s the founder of the Public Religion Research Institute, and holds a PhD in religion from Emory and an MDiv from Southwestern. He’s a clever and engaging writer, and opens with an obituary for “White Christian America” (“WCA”). In this “eulogy,” he explained that WCA had been ill for some time, but the disease became terminal after the 2004 presidential election:1

The cause of death was determined to be a combination of environmental and internal factors—complications stemming from major demographic changes in the country, along with religious disaffiliation as many of its younger members began to doubt WCA’s continued relevance in a shifting cultural environment.

Jones writes from a progressive Christian perspective, and he sheds few tears at the death of WCA. His thesis is that a particular cultural era has ended in America; an era largely shaped and defined by WCA.2

What is WCA?

This is the million-dollar question, but (for me, at least) the biggest initial stumbling-block is that Jones decided to use a framework that generalizes Christians of various theological stripes by the color of their skin.3 It’s these white Protestants, Jones argues, who have lost their grip on the culture and are fast fading into obscurity.

After about two months of reflection, I’ve decided that Jones wasn’t trying to broad-brush Christianity by skin color. Instead, he uses WCA as an update on the old “WASP” label; it’s a shorthand for a particular expression of cultural Christianity.4

In its heyday, a set of linked institutions reinforced White Christian America’s worldview across generations: the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), the Boy Scouts, the Masonic Lodge, and the local country club with limits or even outright bans on membership for Catholics, Jews, and ethnic minorities. White Christian America had its golden age in the 1950s, after the hardships and victories of World War II and before the cultural upheavals of the 1960s. June Cleaver was its mother, Andy Griffith was its sheriff, Norman Rockwell was its artist, and Billy Graham and Norman Vincent Peale were its ministers.

America has long been dominated by complementary religious visions, and although these visions had different theological content, they shared a belief in American exceptionalism. It’s white Protestants who had the cultural cachet to shape and influence American society in their respective ecclesiastical orbits. But, Jones argued, that time has now passed. He observed,5

There are, to be sure, pockets of the country where the spirit of White Christian America still seems alive and well—like midwestern and southern exurbs, where lively megachurches have followed the outmigration of whites from cities, and rural communities, where churches and pastors continue to have vital social roles. But even within these reassuringly insular settings, it’s no longer possible to believe that White Christian America sets the tone for the country’s culture as a whole. And that realization—both for those inside and outside WCA’s domain—marks something genuinely new in American life.

Jones builds his introductory chapter around three grand buildings that act as foils to tell his story:

  • The United Methodist Building in Washington D.C., which opened in 1923 (white, mainline optimism)
  • The Interchurch Center in New York City, which opened in 1960 (white, mainline ecumenicism)
  • The Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, CA, which opened in 1980 (white evangelical protestant resurgence).

Jones explained:6

At each building’s opening ceremony, white Protestant leaders spoke in prophetic tones about the indispensable place of Christianity in upholding America’s moral and political health. Today, though, all of these buildings have a different purpose from their founders’ ambitions. Each edifice has adapted—or even been transformed—to reflect the realities of a swiftly changing country. Indeed, through the life of these buildings, we can see the decline of white Protestant dominance amid the steady diversification of the American religious landscape.

An era has ended forever. America’s religious landscape will never again be dominated by white Protestants. It isn’t so much that the color of American Christianity has changed (though it has). Rather, it’s that an America-centric civil religion has passed from the scene and it will never return.

So what?

Jones has few solutions to offer a confessional evangelical. But, his description of the problem is invaluable. America is not what it once was, and Christians cannot operate as they once did – as if Ronald Reagan were still in the White House. Jones frames the spectrum of responses to this reality by drawing parallels to one psychiatrist’s description of the five stages of grief at impending death: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Jones argues (and I agree) that while mainline Protestants have long since adapted to the changed operating environment, white evangelicals have not.7

We see the spectrum of responses in our churches. Denial and anger are common, especially among the older demographic who remember a different America; one characterized by Ronald Reagan and the Moral Majority. It was, to paraphrase George Marsden, a dime-store civil religion – but it was real.

Throughout their history, white evangelicals have developed a rich lexicon of apocalyptic anger. Evangelical sermons and hymns are infused with martial imagery, and nostalgic “re-” words like “reclaim,” “restore,” “renew,” “repent,” and “revive” are staple fare. This vocabulary originates in the evangelical theological emphasis on human sin and divine judgment, but it’s bolstered socially by evangelicals’ self-perception as an outgunned minority struggling valiantly against outside powers.8

We see this in our churches in intense suspicion about Muslims, immigrants, and the sexual revolution. Pastors thunder forth with bombast about “America turning its back on God!” In these circles, there is little more than lip-service on bringing Christianity’s substantial theological weapons to bear to win these individuals to Christ. Rather, there is a pervasive fear of “them” and visceral anger that “America is under attack.”  

Bargaining is the stage at which Christians hope to reach an accommodation; an armistice of sorts. In practical terms, it usually manifests itself as a series of desperate moves intended to showcase WCA hegemony in an attempt to force a ceasefire. Jones highlights numerous cases, all in the South, where Republican legislators have attempted to introduce bills to make the Bible the “official state book.”9 He also notes Mississippi’s decision to add “in God we trust” to the State seal.10 Jones observed,11

The need to forcefully elevate their Christian status reflects white Christian lawmakers’ fear that for an increasing number of citizens the Bible and God are no longer a guiding cultural force. These efforts amount to little more than bargaining beside the deathbed of White Christian America.

Jones showcases two theologians who epitomize the depression and acceptance stages in WCA. The first is Stanley Hauerwas, whose 1989 book Resident Aliens was a clarion call to a mainline constituency to forsake civil religion and embrace its status as a colony of outsiders in a hostile world. This is one of the most profound books on ecclesiology I have ever read. Hauerwas wrote:

[W]e believe that things have changed for the church residing in America and that faithfulness to Christ demands that we either change or else go the way of all compromised forms of the Christian faith12 … A tired old world has ended, an exciting new one is awaiting recognition. This book is about a renewed sense of what it means to be Christian, more precisely, of what it means to be pastors who care for Christians, in a distinctly changed world.13

The other book is Onward, published by Russell Moore in 2015, who is at his best when critiquing the civil religion of the American South. “The shaking of American culture is no sign that God has given up on American Christianity. In fact, it may be a sign that God is rescuing American Christianity from itself.”14

It’s in his last chapter where Jones’ analysis mercilessly rips the security blanket off our evangelical consciences and forces us to realize that America has changed. This chapter has some of Jones’ best writing and his most apt illustrations:

Today, White Christian America’s faded cultural map is increasingly inaccurate. Like retirees setting out on a trip with their 1950s AAA road atlas, the graying descendants of WCA find themselves frequently pulling off the road in disbelief and frustration as they encounter new routes and cities that are not on their map. The slow death of WCA has left many with a haunting sense of dislocation.15

What a picture! What pastor has not experienced this whirlwind sense of dislocation, as if he were a latter-day Rip Van Winkle and had awoken in another era? What Christian over age 65 has not felt the same – and said so at prayer meetings?

Today, confronted with a range of shifts—from changing neighborhoods to gay marriage attitudes—the descendants of White Christian America are confronted with a diversity-and-youth-driven country that seems alien to their sense of what it means to be American.16

“Christian America” was a reality for so long, but it isn’t a reality any longer. To be “American” is not to be a Christian – certainly not a Republican.

Confronted with the psychic discomfort that results from a lack of cultural confidence and security, the greatest threat to White Christian America’s descendants is the siren song of nostalgia. Faced with an unfamiliar cultural landscape, today’s white mainline Protestants may find it easier to skip excursions altogether, preferring instead to huddle in their homes and churches around yellowing photo albums of journeys past.17

Who has not sat back, trying to recapture a little of the glory of those days from long ago? But, as the song goes, time slips away and leaves you with nothing but boring stories …

Jones sees a bright future, but a different one. His progressive theology allows him to see hope in LGBTQ inclusion and a particular expression of racial reconciliation. “The death of White Christian America marks the end of an era in the nation’s life. For many, it is a cause for considerable grief; for others, relief or even celebration. But this much is clear: in the soil fertilized by White Christian America’s remains, new life is taking root.”18

For evangelicals, Jones’ book is a sober warning. It forces us to confront a rapidly changing America. Those of us who minister in secular contexts already understand this. What will we do? How should we re-calibrate our perspective, emphasis and expectations to exegete our culture as it is, not as it was during the Carter administration? Jones has few relevant answers to offer, but he sure pinpoints the problem. Along the way, he points us to two men who do have some answers – Hauerwas and Moore. Hauerwas noted:19

A few may still believe that by electing a few “Christian” senators, passing a few new laws, and tinkering with the federal budget we can form a “Christian” culture, or at least one that is a bit more just. But most people know this view to be touchingly anachronistic. All sorts of Christians are waking up and realizing that it is no longer “our world”—if it ever was.

Indeed. What will we do about it?

Notes

1 Jones, White Christian America, 1.

2 Jones spends considerable time discussing politics, family and race in WCA as a means to prove that WCA is, indeed, dead and gone. I chose to not discuss that in this review and restricted myself to his main thesis – WCA is dead and Christians are facing a new world.

3 Ibid, 31. “Throughout the book, I use the term White Christian America to describe the domain of white Protestants in America. In the twentieth century, White Christian America developed along two main branches: a more liberal mainline Protestant America headquartered in New England and the upper Midwest/Great Lakes region and a more conservative evangelical Protestant America anchored in the South and lower Midwest/Ozark Mountains region.”

4 Ibid, 38-39.

5 Ibid, 39-40.

6 Ibid, 7-8.

7 Ibid, 198.

8 Ibid, 203.

9 Ibid, 208-209.

10 Ibid, 209.

11 Ibid, 212.

12 Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, Resident Aliens, revised ed. (Nashville: Abingdon, 2014), 15.

13 Ibid, 14.

14 Russell Moore, Onward (Nashville: B&H, 2015), 7.

15 Jones, White Christian America, 229.

16 Ibid, 229-230.

17 Ibid, 230.

18 Ibid, 240.

19 Resident Aliens, 16-17.

On Christian Civil Religion

On Christian Civil Religion

Christian Nationalism, the tendency to conflate American patriotism with the Christian faith and message, came into its modern form in the Eisenhower years. It did so largely as a civil religious bulwark in the context of the escalating Cold War and domestic “Red Scare.” It was deliberately fostered by President Eisenhower. It morphed into the political arena in a meaningful way from the 1980s to roughly 2004; the glory years of Moral Majority and, later, the Religious Right.

Frances Fitzgerald wrote about this in her book The Evangelicals (which I previously reviewed):

Eisenhower and Graham did not agree on theology or foreign policy, but they agreed on the place of religion in what both considered perilous times. They agreed that America was fighting atheistic Communism and that national survival rested on the belief of Americans in God.

“A spiritual awakening,” Graham said, “will restore our spiritual heritage, create moral stamina and consciousness, bring back the sanctity of the home . . . strengthen the bulwarks of freedom and bring integrity back to the people of the world.”

They agreed that patriotism and religious belief were synonymous and that America had a moral and spiritual mission to redeem the world. “If you would be a loyal American, then become a loyal Christian,” Graham said in one sermon, and in another, “We are created for a spiritual mission among the nations.”

Graham, of course, did not believe that just any religion would do. In a sermon titled “Satan’s Religion” he offered five ways Americans could “most effectively combat Communism.” The first was “by old-fashioned Americanism”; the second “by conservative and Evangelical Christianity”; the third by prayer; the fourth by spiritual revival; and the fifth “by personal Christian experience.” “The greatest and most effective weapon against Communism today is to be a born-again Christian,” he said.

Despite his sectarian perspective, Graham’s position was closer to Eisenhower’s than to that of liberal Protestant leaders, all of whom objected to the conflation of Christianity with Americanism, and some of whom had a disconcerting tendency to call for nuclear disarmament and talks with the Communist Chinese.

It was also closer to the majority position of the day. In 1949 Graham had styled himself as Amos, the prophet crying in the wilderness, but in four years he had become a pastor of the national civil religion.

The Evangelicals, pgs. 185-186.

This is why this article by Michael Svigel is so helpful. He offers up a third way for Christians to engage the world. A way that isn’t isolationism or a bad marriage to politicians and their all too often crocodile promises. It’s a way Svigel calls the “Conscience of the Kingdom” approach:

In this approach, Christians uncompromisingly commit to the Lordship of Jesus Christ with regard to their priorities and values, morals and message. They surrender none of these to any other lord or any other leader. The Church is the community of their primary allegiance, which they will share with no other party or political organization.

However, Conscience Christians view their relationship to the world as analogous to the conscience of an individual. On the basis of God’s Word and in allegiance to the Lord Jesus Christ, Christians speak and act on behalf of righteousness.

Christians address political corruption, weigh in on social ills, take righteous action on behalf of truth, justice, and mercy, and do so in ways that refuse either to empower a “strongman” or take shelter in a bunker.

Svigel’s article provides a helpful corrective for Christians who may tend to conflate American nationalism with the Christian faith. They are very different. They should REMAIN very different. The hopes and dreams that fire a Christian’s heart and mind MUST come from Christ’s kingdom, not from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Read the whole article. Then, read Svigel’s wonderful book RetroChristianity.

Against Christian nationalism

In the latest issue of Christianity Today, one article deals with Christian nationalism by surveying three books on the phenomenon. The article offers up about as good a summary of the plague of Christian nationalism in America that I’ve yet seen:

… a movement committed to preserving its own privilege and power, favoring the interests of native-born white people over immigrants and ethnic minorities, and using legal authority to impose a Christianized moral order.

The article explains:

In the mid-2000s, it was fashionable among journalists and academics to worry that America was on the verge of becoming a theocracy. Conservative white evangelicals had fueled the election of George W. Bush and helped turn Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ into a box-office smash. They seemed poised for renewed political and cultural dominance. And so books and articles poured forth warnings about the peculiar dangers of “Dominionism,” “Christian Reconstructionism,” and various other movements conspiring to impose Christian beliefs on an unsuspecting populace.

This narrative came crashing down with the election of Barack Obama. Almost overnight, fears of America descending into a theocracy evaporated. Pundits began forecasting the death of the Religious Right, and the same evangelicals who had helped propel Bush to power spent the next eight years playing defense. More and more, they saw themselves not as ascendant governing partners but as targets of a crusading secularism.

And then Donald Trump broke everything. His surprising election, enabled in part by white evangelical support, reawakened fears that religious conservatives would mobilize underneath a theocratic banner. Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale, which imagines a fundamentalist dystopia where women are forced to breed, enjoyed a second life repurposed as a Trump-era cautionary tale (and a hit Netflix series).

Yet the idea of America descending into a genuine theocracy lacked the same surface plausibility it had during the Bush years. Though white evangelicals enthusiastically carried Trump into the White House, his lack of personal piety made him an unlikely candidate to preside over a thoroughly Christianized commonwealth. Nor, by and large, did his evangelical supporters mistake him for a godly statesman. Rather than King David, Trump was Cyrus, the pagan Persian emperor who, after conquering Babylon, allowed the Israelite captives to resettle in their homeland and rebuild the temple in Jerusalem.

Still, with Trump in office, the political fortunes of religious conservatives appeared to improve. This set the stage for a new journalistic and academic preoccupation: uncovering why white evangelicals flocked so fervently to Trump. The books and articles that typify this genre still feature concerns about conservative Christians manipulating the levers of power. But with the specter of full-dress theocracy having dimmed—and with Trump styling himself more as a champion of American greatness than a vindicator of the faith—attention has shifted to a distinct but overlapping phenomenon: Christian nationalism.

There is a generational shift in conservative Christianity. Older Christians, who lived through the heyday of the Religious Right, Jerry Falwell, Sr., James Dobson and the Moral Majority, are often confused about why younger Christians (including younger pastors) don’t echo the Christian nationalism that arguably had its last meaningful victory in the second election of George W. Bush. Some argue that Christian nationalism had its most grotesque perversion of principle in the election of Donald J. Trump.

Russel Moore explained some of this generational shift in his 2015 book Onward:

The typical younger pastor is less partisan than his predecessor, less likely to speak from the pulpit about “mobilizing” voters and “reclaiming Judeo-Christian values” through political action and economic boycotts. This is not because he is evolving leftward. It is because he wants to keep Christianity Christian. As a matter of fact, the center of evangelical Christianity today is, theologically speaking, well to the right of the old Religious Right.

It’s true that the typical younger pastor of a growing urban or suburban church doesn’t look like his cuff-linked or golf-shirted forefather. But that doesn’t mean he’s a liberal. He might have tattoos, yes, but they aren’t of Che Guevara. They’re of Hebrew passages from Deuteronomy.

His congregation’s statement of faith isn’t the generic sloganeering of the last generations’ doctrinally oozy consumerist evangelical movements, but is likely a lengthy manifesto with points and subpoints and footnotes rooted in one of the great theological traditions of the historic church …

He is pro-life and pro-marriage, although he is likely to speak of issues like homosexuality in theological and pastoral terms rather than in rhetoric warning of “the gay agenda.” Unlike the typical Bible Belt congregation of the twentieth century, the new kind of evangelical church has strict membership requirements, both in terms of what it takes to enter the believing community and what it takes to say there. There aren’t likely to be four-year-olds baptized after repeating sinner’s prayers in a backyard Bible club, and the unrepentant often face what their parents never seemed to notice in their red-and-black-lettered Bibles: excommunication. If this is liberalism, let’s have more of it.”

Onward by Russell Moore; Kindle Location 363-377.

Amen to all that.

Book Review: “The Evangelicals” by Frances Fitzgerald

Frances Fitzgerald is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist with a B.A. in Middle Eastern history. She has written numerous books. In 2018, she published The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America (730 pgs). This book is particularly interesting for several reasons. First, Fitzgerald is a responsible journalist and historian. Second, she does not appear to be an evangelical insider, which means she may have a more objective viewpoint. Third, the issue of the “Christian right” has become very, very relevant since Donald Trump’s election as President of the United States in 2016.

So, I picked the book up at my local library. Fitzgerald explains:1

this book is not a taxonomy or attempt to describe the entirety of evangelical life, but rather a history of the white evangelical movements necessary to understand the Christian right and its evangelical opponents that have emerged in recent years.

Fitzgerald begins with the first Great Awakening and moves rapidly through the American religious scene until arriving at Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority by page 291. The remainder of the book (340 pages of text) chronicles the Christian Right over the past 40 years.

Rather than offering a blow by blow account of the work, I’ll confine myself to some brief remarks.

Comments on the book

Fitzgerald’s survey from the Great Awakening to the mid-20th century is outstanding. Very helpful, relatively brief, but comprehensive.

It appears Fitzgerald relied heavily on secondary sources. Time and time again, I turned to the endnotes to trace a particular quote or fact, and saw a secondary source cited. For example, Fitzgerald even cited a secondary source when describing Calvinism (pg. 15)! Likewise, when I looked for primary sources for quotations from Billy Graham’s publications I found in her text, I also saw secondary sources. This is very disappointing. Fitzgerald knows better.

I found a few misspellings in the earlier part of the book. Fitzgerald also, for some bizarre reason, consistently misnamed the Southern Baptist Convention’s publisher as “Boardman & Holman” (it’s actually “Broadman and Holman”).

The chronicle of the modern Christian Right is encyclopedic. In fact, it’s rather overwhelming. Some readers might be fascinated with moment by moment accounts of James Dobson’s advocacy efforts in the 2004 election. I am not! Fitzgerald would likely have done better to survey the era with a lighter touch and save room for analysis. Robert Jones, in his The End of White Christian America, covered the same ground in a little over 30 pages.

Indeed, the book is very light on analysis. Fitzgerald has a meager 11-page epilogue where she tries to pull some threads together. Some of this analysis is very insightful. For example:2

The Christian right was an equally forceful reaction, not against liberal theology, but rather against the social revolution of the 1960s. Its dominant theme was nostalgia for some previous time in history – some quasi-mythological past – in which America was a (white) Christian nation. But which time exactly? Would its leaders have been content with reversing the Supreme Court decisions made since the 1960s? Or would they have insisted that America must be by law a Christian nation? Naturally there were differences among them, but by failing to specify how far they would go to reverse the process of separating church from state, men like Pat Robertson and James Dobson allowed their opponents to charge that they wanted a theocracy.

And this:3

In the 1990s the Christian right was a powerful movement, but mainly because of those who had lived through the Long Sixties. Later generations had absorbed some of the shocks of the women’s movement and the gay rights movement, and were less fearful and angry about them. After the turn of the century, the Christian right maintained its power largely because of the further shock of same-sex marriage. In other words, the decline of the Christian right began earlier than assumed. Then, by allying themselves with the unfortunate George W. Bush, they created a backlash among evangelicals as well as among others. Emboldened, the ‘new’ evangelicals broadened the agenda, and in a sense came full circle with a return to the reformist imperatives of the antebellum evangelicals, such as Lyman Beecher and Charles Finney. The Christian right tried to resist, but the younger generation was not with them except on abortion. the death or retirement of the older leaders was a sign of the changing regime

And this:4

Presidential election votes might seem to belie it, but evangelicals were splintering. For more than thirty years Christian right leaders had held evangelicals together in the dream of restoration and in voting for the Republican establishment and policies that favored the rich in exchange for opposition to abortion and gay rights. No more. Evangelicals no longer followed their leaders.

Fitzgerald would have immeasurably strengthened her book if she had gone lighter on the encyclopedic history, and heavier on the analysis. In that respect, she made the same error Larry Oats made in his otherwise outstanding The Church of the Fundamentalists. Lots of details, facts, names and dates. Little analysis to pull things together. The book just … ends.

The most enlightening chapter, for me, was entitled “Billy Graham and Modern Evangelicalism,” particularly Fitzgerald’s discussion of President Eisenhower’s attempts to use civil religion as a unifying force in the face of the Communist threat. I’d never heard this before. I wonder how much of the simplistic ‘Merica! rhetoric you see so much of in some evangelical circles stems from Eisenhower’s efforts?

Fitzgerald succeeded in deepening my disgust with the Christian Right as a political movement. I do not believe America is or was a “Christian nation,” though it was undoubtedly influenced by Christian thought (see Christian historian John Fea’s excellent Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?). I vehemently disagree with all flavors of American nationalism mixed with the church. I think Falwell, Dobson (et al) are kind, decent men who wasted their talents in the political realm.

The more I read about the history of Christian Right’s engagement in the public square, the better context I have to frame my heretofore unfocused distaste for political action in the name of Christ. Here, two mainline scholars have something to teach us:5

Whenever Christians think that we can support our ethic by simply pressuring Congress to pass laws or to spend tax money, we fail to do justice to the radically communal quality of Christian ethics. In fact, much of what passes for Christian social concern today, of the left or of the right, is the social concern of a church that seems to have despaired of being the church. Unable through our preaching, baptism, and witness to form a visible community of faith, we content ourselves with ersatz Christian ethical activity—lobbying Congress to support progressive strategies, asking the culture at large to be a little less racist, a little less promiscuous, a little less violent.

Falwell’s Moral Majority is little different from any mainline Protestant church that opposes him. Both groups imply that one can practice Christian ethics without being in the Christian community. Both begin with the Constantinian assumption that there is no way for the gospel to be present in our world without asking the world to support our convictions through its own social and political institutionalization. The result is the gospel transformed into civil religion.

Hauerwas and Willimon wrote their book nearly 30 years ago and explained it “could be read as an extended reflection on politics in the name of Jesus.”6 Falwell looms large in their discussion, and the book seems (in part) to be a reaction against the political activism of the Reagan years. Writing only three years ago, Robert Jones interpreted Resident Aliens (and Russell Moore’s own work Onward) as a recognition by Christians that they’d lost the culture and must re-frame expectations from “this is our world” to “we’re a people in exile.” Indeed, Jones likened Hauerwas to a “hospice chaplain, dispensing a critical palliative care theology for a mainline Protestant family struggling toward acceptance as WCA [white Christian America] faded from the scene.”7 My own thoughts are that Hauerwas and Willimon can teach evangelicals a thing or two about cultural engagement. Their vision of the church is deeper than a good deal of what I’ve read from the evangelical-fundamentalist tradition. It’s certainly a healthier alternative than the Falwell-Dobson-Robertson model.  

Fitzgerald views the “Conservative Resurgence” in the Southern Baptist Convention as a “fundamentalist uprising” (see ch. 9). This will irritate my fundamentalist brothers and sisters who still insist on applying the old, tired appellation of “neo-evangelical” to the conservative evangelicals. Nevertheless, Fitzgerald is correct. John MacArthur, Al Mohler, Mark Dever, James White, Ligonier Ministries (et al) are fundamentalists. They might not identify themselves as such, but they are. Baptist fundamentalism, in contrast, is a small and struggling movement that hasn’t deserved the title of “fundamentalist” for a long while. The conservative evangelicals are the ones who engage the culture and confront apostasy, and Fitzgerald rightly recognizes them as “fundamentalists.”

Final thoughts

Fitzgerald wrote an outstanding book. I give it 4/5 stars. Essential reading for any evangelical pastors who want to understand where their movement came from and where it’s going. We need to know history. It helps us not make the same mistakes every generation. Read it!

Notes

1 Frances Fitzgerald, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017), 3.

2 Ibid, 626.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid, 635.

5 Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony, revised ed. (Nashville: Abingdon, 2014), 80-81.

6 Ibid, 7.

7 Robert P. Jones, The End of White Christian America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), 214.