Evangelical Landscapes

Facing Critical Issues of the Day

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• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780801025945
• eBook ISBN: 9781441241887
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Evangelical Landscapes presents a wide-ranging discussion of evangelical growing pains as the movement confronts a variety of challenges in the new millennium.

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Perpetual Adolescence

The Current Culture of North American Evangelicalism

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“When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child” (1 Cor. 13:11). This apostolic testimony ironically has been the experience of many of us in a Christian church even as adults, not just in our literal childhoods. Many of us know what it is like to think and act like a child, and to be treated like one, in a religious community. In such a community, a certain select few function as “parents.” Usually they have clerical titles and credentials, but they also may be important laypeople. Sometimes they are theological professors or Bible teachers; other times they are popular authors who live far away or long ago but whose writings continue to exert unquestioned authority. These “parents” have all the status, all the knowledge, all the wisdom, and all the power. The rest of us do as we’re told—if we’re good children—or perhaps resist and suggest changes, acts that stigmatize us as bad children.

Life is clear, starkly clear, for “children” in such a situation. Rules govern all of life, and rewards and punishment are meted out in strict proportion to one’s dutiful observance of them. Originality is not sought; creativity is feared; and initiative in any direction other than compliance with the established patterns is condemned as downright subversive. It is also true, to be sure, that in this system one always knows where one stands. At the end of each day, you can measure yourself against the parental standards, and if you’ve been a good boy or girl, you can rest easy—that is, at least until tomorrow morning, when you’ll have to get up and behave yourself all day all over again.

This is the world of fundamentalism, of sectarianism, of certain kinds of conservative Christian religion. And, for many Christians, it is a world they are happy to have escaped. Now they don’t have to kowtow to authority figures. Now they don’t have to mindlessly agree and joylessly obey. Now they are free. They are free from an authoritarianism that kept them in perpetual spiritual childhood. But this freedom marks only a beginning, an opportunity. What are they free now to become and to do?

There are signs all around us that such Christians are in a state of adolescence. Adolescence is an appropriate phase to pass through, but many are not just “passing through” it. As certain Christians—even whole communities of them—have left behind the childhood of fundamentalism, many have opted for a perpetual adolescence and therefore are dangerously poised to conform completely to much of contemporary popular culture, a culture that has made a virtual cult of adolescence.

In the book Dancing in the Dark, a provocative study of contemporary youth culture, Quentin Schultze and his colleagues describe the emergence of the concept of adolescence.[1] At the turn of the century, American psychologist G. Stanley Hall popularized the concept of adolescence as a way of understanding the condition of young people in a state between childhood and adulthood. This transition was given a special status and a special task: Adolescents were people preparing for adulthood, and they were to do so through vigorous physical exercise, vocational as well as classical courses in high school, training in social skills, and so on.

From the 1920s onward, however, as Schultze and company point out, “adolescence became less a time to prepare for adulthood than an attempt to delay or prevent it.”[2] Physical exercise became the worship of the body—from the adulation of sports heroes to the quest for a beautiful physique to the pursuit of sexual pleasure. The opening up of the curriculum to include “practical” skills gave way to a preoccupation with earning money and the neglect of disciplined thought about anything other than financial success. The original concern for social skills became perverted into intricate, enslaving codes of conspicuous consumption and one-upmanship: who’s in and who’s out, who’s hot and who’s not—all based on the ephemeral qualities of good looks, big bucks, cool clothes, hot music, and the accelerating merry-go-round of fashion. And ironically, a whole new group of authority figures arose to give order and direction to this disoriented multitude: rock stars, athletes, actors, MTV producers, and columnists in youth-oriented magazines.

Perhaps the worst dimension of this process was that the legitimate concerns of adolescence—to escape from parental dominance, to discover an individual identity, and to begin an independent life—became stuck in a whirlpool of self-centered introspection and self-indulgent behavior. I matter most. What is good is what pleases me and helps me and stimulates me; what is bad is what annoys me or restricts me or bores me.

We aging baby boomers have made a cult of adolescence. We still want to be eighteen or perhaps twenty-five, and we have transformed popular culture around us as we always have, through the power of our numbers and our wallets. So radio stations keep playing the music of our youth—not of today’s youth—even as one wonders how appropriate it is for a fifty-seven-year-old executive to be listening to hours of adolescent love songs. So jeans companies let us stay in our Levi’s or khakis by bringing out “relaxed fit” pants to suit our ever more relaxed bellies and bottoms. So the ordinary necessities of the middle decades of life become glossed and airbrushed and jazzed up to let us maintain the façade of perpetual youth: Minivans are sensible for this time of life but terribly dull, so we buy impractical SUVs instead.

So now, instead of there being one generation of adolescents at a time, we have at least two! Might this trend of arrested adolescence continue indefinitely? It seems to be continuing in modern evangelical Christianity.

What’s hot and what’s not nowadays in the church? Music can serve as one example—a very important example for almost every churchgoer. What’s hot—at least in some churches—are electric guitars, synthesizers, and vocalists backing up Scripture songs and choruses. What’s not are pipe organs or pianos accompanying hymns. Is there anything wrong with that?

What’s wrong with that is what’s wrong with—or at least limited about—pop music in general. Except for the very best, it generally hits you hard with a shot of pleasure, and then it leaves you physically and emotionally stimulated but intellectually and spiritually malnourished. Most of it is junk food: You don’t need teeth to eat it, and there is nothing to digest. The moronic “Baby, baby, love, love” of MTV gets baptized into “Jesus, Jesus, love, love” with approximately the same effect: warm fuzzies.

Now, I welcome my share of warm fuzzies, and I like a wide range of popular music. The best of it expresses basic feelings in primary—even neon—colors of the soul. The same can be said for the Christian versions of it. But Christians are not growing when their worship music is restricted to five-chord pop tunes, endlessly repeated choruses, and lyrics that—at best—contain interchangeable bits of Scripture with no obvious progression of thought. “Precious Jesus, Rock of Ages, / Holy Great I Am, / Friend of Sinners, Our Messiah, / Worthy Is the Lamb”—oh, dear! (I would now warn readers that this impressive lyric of my very own composition—indeed, composed right here on the spot—is protected by copyright if I believed that one could actually remember it for more than two minutes.) There is more to Christ and the Christian life than such simplicities, no matter how sincerely expressed, and other music, other worship styles in general, are needed to express this “more.”[3]

What’s hot also includes problem-solving sermons and therapeutic pastoring. We want sermons about us: how to be happy, how to have a happy marriage (my wife’s personal teeth-grinding “favorite” was a women’s group curriculum called “How to Be the Wife of a Happy Husband”), how to raise happy children happily—and, of course, the twelve steps to follow in each case. Again, these are important parts of life, and pastors properly address them. But adolescents tend to exaggerate the scale of their problems and to distort reality around their own self-importance—and nothing, nothing, matters more than their feelings. Every crush is the Greatest Romance of All Time. Every personal setback is a crushing defeat. Nothing is more important than my relationships, my successes, my well-being, my happiness.

But what about doctrine? What about politics, and art, and literature? What about self-control, and discipline, and stewardship, and patience? What about oppression and injustice, liberation and peace—not just the healing of our own wounds and the actualization of our own potential? What about disappointment, failure, and betrayal? It is as if these things almost never cross our minds, as if they are off in another dark category somewhere marked “For Grown-ups.”

Let me be clear that I am not critical of Christians who go out into popular culture and try to meet people where they are. I am not critical of Christians who hold services in their churches that are designed entirely to welcome seekers. In fact, I am supportive of efforts to make these contacts, and I frankly think we need more initiatives like them. What I am concerned about is the matter of where we go from here. Do we ever help our seeking friends progress toward spiritual depth? Or do we instead stay happily splashing in the shallows?

Another adolescent theme is the veneration of heroes. Just as popular culture has its trendsetters, its Madonnas and Michael Jordans and Steven Spielbergs, so do evangelical Christians have their authority figures: speakers such as Charles Swindoll and Josh McDowell, televangelists such as Pat Robertson and Robert Schuller, singers such as Carmen and Twila Paris, authors such as Tony Campolo and Tim LaHaye, and, perhaps above all nowadays, James Dobson. Many Christians, acting like adolescents generally, look up to all of these, it seems, without a critical thought in their heads, and once a figure has been embraced, he or she is embraced with powerful, unquestioning devotion. Wendy Kaminer, in her book on the recovery movement, I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional, characterizes the discourse among such people as “instructing and witnessing. Experts, with their books, tapes, and lectures, instruct. Group members witness (tell their stories of abuse, addiction, victimization). No one discusses. No one asks for clarification, analysis, evidence. No one inquires about the implications of a statement or challenges its validity.”[4] This is a far cry from the New Testament example of the Bereans, who “examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true” (Acts 17:11).

Adolescents typically have trouble with responsibility. Able to accomplish a great deal because of their talents and energies, they also often disappoint by dropping out of things when the novelty wears off and the demands mount up. Or when they make mistakes, damaging other people’s property or feelings, they can madden with their blithe self-centeredness that sees things only in terms of their own advantage and happiness. “I promised to show up early to help with the Sunday school and then didn’t show up at all? Well, I was at the mall late on Saturday night, and I must have slept in.” “I held a party while my folks were away and the house got trashed? Sorry, Mom and Dad.”

But adult “adolescent” evangelicals act the same way. Many of my acquaintances have worked for evangelical organizations and have been mistreated along similar lines. “Sure, we promised you that much money at the end of your summer’s work with us, but we didn’t have as many campers as we thought we would, so we won’t pay you as much as we agreed on. After all, this is the Lord’s work, right?” “Sure, we signed a contract, but things didn’t go very well, and we’re not going to honor it—and we know you’ll understand because this is, after all, a ministry.” “Yes, we borrowed your equipment and put a hole through it—here it is, back again [unrepaired], sorry. (Hey, why do you look so unforgiving? I thought you were a Christian too!)”

In all of this there is the horrible weightlessness of cheap grace, a perverse detachment from responsibility. Pelagius, Erasmus, and Kant rise up from their graves and say, “Aha! We told you this talk of free salvation would make antinomians of you! We told you that people would take advantage of God’s generous forgiveness! We told you that if people got what they wanted from God without earning it they would run with it into self-indulgence!” It is not just the hypocrites on TV that embarrass evangelicalism. We encounter them in the stories of many friends who all seem to have met at least one “born-againer” who lied to them, cheated them, or otherwise sinned against them with—and this is what galls each one—this apparently impervious insouciance, this infuriating effervesence of already-forgiven bliss, this insular attitude of “I’m-cool-’cause-Jesus-loves-me-and-so-I-don’t-owe-you-a-thing.” This is evangelical adolescence at its most scandalous: when other people start to predict dishonesty and unreliability on the basis of how loudly one proclaims one’s evangelical faith.

Schultze and his colleagues point to one final characteristic of youth culture today. Adolescents (and their baby boomer elders) know a great deal about international celebrities: The media track the lives of Britney Spears, Julia Roberts, Michael Jackson, and so on with ruthless tenacity. But we don’t know much about local musicians, local artists, local politicians—or local pastors. Adolescents (and their baby boomer elders) are deeply attached to their favorite musical groups, sports teams, TV shows, and soft drinks. But we are not deeply attached to our local churches, clubs, or—in the all-too-common worst cases—families. We are lost in space and time. We are communicating with multinational media and entertainment corporations, drawing our sense of identity and purpose and meaning from them rather than from our families, neighborhoods, and churches. Indeed, adolescents typically move in and out of romances, friendships, clubs, and other relationships with little deep commitment. They are “loyal” only as long as they “like it,” as if these relationships were consumer products to be purchased and discarded at will.

In the same way, contemporary evangelicalism has been fragmented a thousand ways through the proliferation of congregational, denominational, and parachurch options. Loyalty to a group, especially a local congregation and denominational tradition, is now regarded as a quaint heirloom from Grandpa and Grandma’s day. We are loyal to those organizations that suit us individually, whether World Vision, Moody Monthly, Mennonite Central Committee, Awana Clubs, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, and so on. And when they don’t suit us any longer, we move on to another option, another “brand” or “product.”

As I suggest elsewhere in this volume in greater detail, parachurch organizations cannot provide the full-fledged alternative cultures that Christian families, Christian small groups, and Christian churches can provide. Caring, ongoing, integrating Christian communities—what sociologists call “mediating structures” between the individual and the massive impersonalities of state, mass media, public education, big business, and so on—are necessary to meet the challenges of our time. When Mr. or Ms. Evangelical try to cope with a problem or succeed in an opportunity, InterVarsity and Focus on the Family and World Vision cannot talk with them in their living room, but local Christians bound to them in covenant will be there.

If we cannot—and would not—go back to a fundamentalist childhood and we seek to go beyond an arrested adolescence, what is the alternative? Some evangelicals have gone through fundamentalism and this popular style of evangelicalism and have “gotten beyond all that.” Now they are (1) high church types, “into” sacramental worship and the early church, with heroes such as Robert Webber and Peter Gillquist; or (2) social action types, “into” ecology, civil rights for minorities, food for the hungry, and so on, with Ron Sider and Jim Wallis as models; or (3) feminist types, “into” moderate evangelical feminism such as that of Christians for Biblical Equality or perhaps more radical alternatives offered by Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, Rosemary Radford Ruether, or Mary Daly; or (4) spiritual types, “into” spirituality, whether strongly Christian varieties as offered by Richard Foster, Henri Nouwen, or Eugene Peterson, or more experimental sorts, such as those proffered by Thomas Moore or Joseph Campbell; or (5) intellectual types who used to love Josh McDowell and Francis Schaeffer but who now explore a wide range of theologians and philosophers, enjoying the arcana of Hermann Dooyeweerd, the massive work of Karl Barth or Hans Urs von Balthasar, the excitement of liberation theology, or the pillars of Reformation orthodoxy.

Are these concerns, each of which has enriched my life to at least some extent, in fact bad things? Again, it depends on the attitude. One must ask whether these pursuits are essentially self-centered, focused on one’s own growth and satisfaction. Are these pursuits in fact serving as grounds for conceit and, particularly, self-righteousness—the odious, false superiority of the slightly older adolescent sibling? Or do they connect Christians together in love as each brings God’s gifts to the other? Do they cause us to rejoice in the diversity of the body of Christ and to strengthen one another for worship and for service to the world God loves? If these pursuits do not move us out of ourselves toward God and God’s whole church and God’s whole world, then we have just traded one narrow-minded, self-serving adolescent fad for another.

So what’s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Perpetual Adolescence: The Current Culture of North American Evangelicalism
• 2. The “Parachurch”: Promise and Peril
• 3. A Double Copernican Revolution: Leadership and Membership in the Church
• 4. Evangelicals and the Bible: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow
• 5. A Complicated Matter: Money and Theology in North American Evangelicalism
• 6. The Christian Church in the New Dark Age: Illiteracy, Aliteracy, and the Word of God
• 7. A “Paradigm Case”: Billy Graham and the Nature of Conversion
• 8. Women in Public Ministry: Five Models in Twentieth-Century North American Evangelicalism
• 9. Why Johnny Can’t Produce Christian Scholarship: A Reflection on Real-Life Impediments
• 10. Evangelical Theology Should Be Evangelical: A Conservative, Radical Proposal
• 11. Speaking in Tongues: Communicating the Gospel Today
• Index