The Kingdom of Christ

The New Evangelical Perspective

Russell Moore

• Publisher: Crossway
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781433517655
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Kirchengeschichte

In this scholarly work, Russell D. Moore relates the history leading up to the new "Kingdom" consensus among evangelicals from the time theologian Carl F. H. Henry called for it fifty years ago. He examines how this consensus offers a renewed theological foundation for evangelical engagement in the social and political realms.

While evangelical scholars and pastors will be interested in this sharp, insightful book, all evangelicals interested in public policy will find it useful in discovering how this new Kingdom perspective works out in the public square.

1

AN UNEASY CONSCIENCE IN THE
NAKED PUBLIC SQUARE:

EVANGELICAL THEOLOGY AND
EVANGELICAL ENGAGEMENT

I N T R O D U C T I O N

“Modern conservatism owes much of its success to the aggressive political activity of evangelical Christian churches,” observes commentator Russell Baker. “In Goldwater’s era they stayed out of politics; now they crack whips.”¹ Despite the exaggeration of this statement, it illustrates a key problem in constructing a basis for a theology of evangelical engagement. For much of the American news media, if not for large sectors of the American public as a whole, evangelical churches seem at times to be caricatured as not much more than Sunday morning distribution centers for Christian Coalition voter guides. The postwar evangelical project called for a vital presence of evangelicalism in the public square, but it did so in terms of a theologically cohesive foundation for cultural and political interpenetration. For the pioneers of contemporary evangelicalism, the political isolationism of conservative Protestantism was not problematic because it sidelined fundamentalists as a voting bloc; it was problematic because it pointed to underlying theological problems, centered on an inability to come to terms with the most central theme of Scripture—the Kingdom of God. And so, the task of evangelical engagement was about a recovery of Kingdom theology—not simply a mobilization of evangelical voters. In the years since World War II, however, the kind of theologically informed engagement envisioned by Carl Henry and the movement’s other early theologians has not often been reflected in the most visible efforts at evangelical sociopolitical action. And, as with the fundamentalist isolationists before them, the failure of evangelical politics is often, at root, the failure of an evangelical theology of the Kingdom.

AMERICAN POLITICS AND EVANGELICAL ENGAGEMENT

The perception that evangelicalism is primarily a political movement is partially understandable since, for much of the nation, evangelicalism seemed to emerge ex nihilo in the mid-1970s, largely in relation to political happenings of the time, namely, the conversion of Republican Watergate felon Charles Colson and the very public evangelical identity of Democratic presidential candidate Jimmy Carter, with each announcing that he had been “born again.”² Shortly thereafter, widespread publicity was given to the mass organizing of evangelicals and fundamentalists to oppose Carter on issues such as abortion rights, the Equal Rights Amendment, and the Panama Canal Treaty.³ Since then, the evangelical presence on the national scene has been closely linked to evangelicals as a political constituency. Thus, the most widely disseminated analyses of American evangelicalism have seemed too often content to trace the movement in terms of the progression from Moral Majority to the Liberty Federation, from the Pat Robertson presidential campaign to the Christian Coalition. Even grassroots revivalist movements such as Promise Keepers are often considered part of an electoral constituency.⁴

Historians rightly identify the first visible rumblings of evangelical social engagement with Carl F. H. Henry’s 1947 jeremiad, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism.⁵ Still, Henry could not have foreseen the way in which evangelicals would in fact lift their voices in the public square in the generation after Uneasy Conscience. After all, the National Association of Evangelicals of the 1940s and 50s deemed it necessary to plead for fairness for evangelicals on the public airwaves. With the onset of Moral Majority and other activist groups in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, the mid-century urgings of Henry seemed dated, if not inconceivable, to a new generation of politically savvy evangelicals. The impetus to evangelical engagement included the emergence of an evangelical left, including an “Evangelicals for McGovern” organization formed to oppose Billy Graham’s friend Richard Nixon in the 1972 presidential election.⁶ While the evangelical sociopolitical left continued to exist throughout the rest of the century, most sectors of its influence seemed to drift away from any semblance of evangelical theological commitments.⁷ Instead, the most vigorous evangelical forays into the sociopolitical arena have come from the right side of the cultural and political spectrum.

The most significant move toward evangelical engagement did not come through a reflection on the philosophical appeal of Henry or any other theologian. Instead, it came through the mobilization of the Christian right following the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, an act that served as the opening shot of the “culture wars.” In 1976, the Jimmy Carter campaign cleared the path for religious conservatives through Carter’s self-disclosure of a new-birth experience, a disclosure that called for rigorous “spin control” from the campaign to convince the public that, among other things, Carter did not hear audible voices from God.⁸ By the next election cycle, evangelical conservative activists would have a forum to question Republican primary candidates about their personal regeneration, or lack thereof.⁹ By the end of the century, few eyebrows were raised when the Republican presidential frontrunner spoke in terms reminiscent of Jimmy Carter of “recommitting” his life to Jesus Christ through the ministry of Billy Graham.¹⁰ The public discussions of evangelical piety were not limited to candidate autobiographies. Appeals to religious conservatives infused much of American political discussions, especially during the Reagan administration of the 1980s. After all, even Reagan’s historic denunciation of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire,” it must be remembered, was delivered before the National Association of Evangelicals. Even more remarkable, and relatively unnoticed, is the fact that this geopolitically significant statement was set in the context of Reagan’s prayer that those behind the Iron Curtain might be born again, a comment that would have been unthinkable, even for Jimmy Carter, only a few years before.¹¹

The emergence of politically active evangelicals, led by populist figures such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, received a mixed reception among their political cobelligerents. Conservative theorist Robert Nisbet denounced the evangelical conservatives as not conservative at all because they rooted their ideology in a theological underpinning, “a characteristic they share more with those Revolution-supporting clerics in France and England to whom Burke gave the labels of ‘political theologians’ and ‘theological politicians,’ not, obviously, liking either.”¹² Most of the Republican conservative establishment, however, received the evangelical constituency as a key voting bloc, especially in the South and Midwest. One Jewish neoconservative theorist, for example, wrote that most of his fellow Jewish conservatives, “however bemused they may be by styles of evangelical piety—a bemusement, I might add, shared by a number of non-evangelical Christians—still have no problem counting Christian conservatives as staunch cultural and political allies.”¹³

The emergence of the Christian right, however, was not about crafting a united evangelical theology of sociopolitical engagement. Instead, evangelical political activists practically celebrated the fact that their entrance into the public arena was more of a forced conscription than a purposeful engagement.¹⁴ Even many nonevangelicals, who shared some of the same cultural goals as the Christian right, supported the defensive nature of evangelical engagement.¹⁵ As Yale University law professor Stephen Carter notes, “The more that a nation chooses to secularize the principal contact points between government and people—not only the public schools, but little things, like names and numbers and symbols, and big things, like taxes and marriage and, ultimately, politics itself—the more it will persuade many religious people that a culture war has indeed been declared, and not by the Right.”¹⁶

Thus, the political activism of twentieth-century evangelicals was not an essentially theological movement, even though many of the activists were reliant on the kind of worldview formulations provided by evangelicalism’s theologians and philosophers.¹⁷ Some of this had to do with an American public ignorant of and uninterested in the theological nuances of evangelical theology. ¹⁸ Much more had to do, however, with the motivations and public statements of the politicized evangelicals themselves. Evangelical political action, to begin with, often failed to see the larger social and political nature and the interrelationships of the issues over which they were so energized.¹⁹ Moreover, the Christian right often deliberately sought to avoid theological commitments, for fear that they could not sustain the traditionalist coalition of evangelicals, Roman Catholics, conservative Jews, Mormons, and even right-leaning secularists. As Jerry Falwell explained, “Moral Majority is a political organization and is not based on theological considerations.”²⁰ Similarly, the Christian Coalition’s Ralph Reed contended, “This is not a vision exclusively for those who are evangelical or Roman Catholic or Greek Orthodox or Jewish. This vision makes room for people of all faiths—and for those with no faith at all.”²¹

Even so, the lack of an overarching theology of evangelical engagement did not save the Christian right’s political coalition, but instead unraveled it. The ad hoc nature of the religious right left evangelicals without the theoretical tools to evaluate political priorities theologically, and thus to articulate the issues in terms of an overarching evangelical worldview.²² This further alienated some in the evangelical constituency, who began to wonder if evangelical political priorities were being negotiated according to the platform of the national Republican Party, rather than according to biblical revelation.²³ Moreover, at the century’s end, evangelical optimism about their place in the “silent majority” of the American mainstream was replaced in many sectors by a sober pessimism that American culture was “slouching towards Gomorrah.”²⁴ Religious conservatives would then broach the subject, not only of whether Christians should engage the public square but also of whether they could any longer support the American regime at all, or whether the American project was irreparably broken.²⁵

EVANGELICAL THEOLOGY AND EVANGELICAL ENGAGEMENT

While the precise definition of evangelicalism may be hotly debated among evangelicals themselves, all sides agree that the term does not refer primarily to a voting bloc of the Democratic or Republican National Committees. This does not mean, however, that sociopolitical activism is incidental to evangelical identity. Evangelicalism, at least as originally conceived by the theologians at the helm of the postwar evangelical renaissance, is first of all a theological movement. Indeed, even the postwar call for sociopolitical engagement was cast in terms of a self-consciously theological agenda. As a result, the evangelical attempt to engage politically without attention to these prior questions of theological self-identity and underlying philosophy has served only to frustrate the kind of evangelical engagement envisioned by the movement’s founding theologians.

Henry’s Uneasy Conscience, after all, was not first of all a sociopolitical tract. Instead, it served in many ways to define theologically much of what it meant to be a “new evangelical,” in contrast to the older fundamentalism.²⁶ Along with Ramm, Carnell, and others, Henry pressed the theological case for evangelicalism in terms of a vigorous engagement with nonevangelical thought.²⁷ As articulated by Henry and the early constellations of evangelical theology, such as Fuller Theological Seminary and the National Association of Evangelicals, evangelicalism would not differ with fundamentalism in the “fundamentals” of doctrinal conviction, but in the application of Christian truth claims onto all areas of human endeavor.²⁸ Henry’s Uneasy Conscience, which set the stage for evangelical differentiation from isolationist American fundamentalism, sought to be what Harold J. Ockenga called in his foreword to the monograph “a healthy antidote to fundamentalist aloofness in a distraught world.”²⁹ Thus, the call to sociopolitical engagement was not incidental to evangelical theological identity, but was at the forefront of it. Henry’s Uneasy Conscience, and the movement it defined, sought to distinguish the postwar evangelical effort so that evangelical theologians, as one observer notes, “found themselves straddling the fence between two well-established positions: fundamentalist social detachment and the liberal Social Gospel.”³⁰

Such “straddling,” however, is an inaccurate term if it carries the idea that Henry and his postwar colleagues sought to find a middle way between fundamentalism and the Social Gospel. The evangelicals charged the fundamentalists with misapplying their theological convictions, but they further charged the Social Gospel with having no explicit theology at all. “As Protestant liberalism lost a genuinely theological perspective, it substituted mainly a political program,” Henry lamented.³¹ The new evangelical theologians maintained that their agenda was far from a capitulation to the Social Gospel, but was instead the conservative antidote to it.³² This was because, Henry argued, evangelicalism was a theology calling for engagement, not a program for engagement calling for a theology. The Social Gospel theologians, Henry claimed, “exalt the social issue above the theological, and prize the Christian religion mainly as a tool for justifying an independe...