After Evangelicalism

The Path to a New Christianity

David P. Gushee

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781646980048
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Christentum

A building crescendo of developments, culminating in evangelical support for the Trump presidency, has led many evangelicals to question the faith they inherited. If being Christian means rejecting LGBTQ persons and supporting systemic racism, perhaps their Christian journey is over.

David Gushee offers a new way forward for disillusioned post-evangelicals by first analyzing what went wrong with U.S. white evangelicalism in areas such as evangelical identity, biblical interpretation, church life, sexuality, politics, and race. Gushee then proposes new ways of Christian believing, belonging, and behaving, helping post-evangelicals from where they are to a living relationship with Christ and an intellectually cogent and morally robust post-evangelical faith. After Evangelicalism shows that it is possible to follow Jesus out of evangelical Christianity, and more than that, it's necessary.

PART 1

Authorities: Listening and Learning

1

Evangelicalism

Cutting Loose from an Invented Community

Ah, evangelicalism. We can’t move on without a serious look back. We can’t think clearly about where to go next without thinking deeply about where we have been—and who we have been. At least I can’t. And so, once more, we plunge into the effort to understand evangelicalism. It is no small task.

For twenty-five years I described myself as a centrist or progressive evangelical ethicist. In several previous books I offered my own brief take on evangelicals and evangelicalism,¹ always dissenting from conservative evangelicalism but until 2017 happily claiming the evangelical label on its progressive side. Now that I have left, I offer a final interpretation, at greater length and depth. Perhaps it will be helpful to other post-evangelicals. I hope so.

My core claim is that the modern American evangelicalism that so many of us are now abandoning was a brilliant social construction, an invented religious identity, that over decades yielded something like an actual religious community.

This is a provocative claim, because most observers have been treating this the other way around all along, as though an evangelical community existed, and the definition of its identity was the needed project.

My claim is indeed just the opposite.

The modern evangelical identity was invented through a historical retrieval and rebranding move undertaken by an ambitious group of reformers within the US Protestant fundamentalist community of the 1940s.

The modern evangelical community was the eventual product of their entrepreneurial efforts, with an assist over several decades from journalists, historians, pollsters, marketers, consumers, congregations, denominations, parachurch organizations, and regular Christians that all intersubjectively decided to accept the existence of evangelicalism or to identify as evangelical.²

The fallout of the invention of modern American evangelicalism has been profound. As a critic I know that by now I mainly notice what has gone wrong, which will be detailed painstakingly in this book. But it would be unfair not to acknowledge at the outset much that has also been good. This includes considerable Christian evangelism, personal discipleship and spiritual growth, church building, education and research, child care and family counseling, relief and development, public policy advocacy, and cultural production including books, music, and art. And the very achievement of modern evangelicalism—the creation of a religious identity that came to dominate the perceived landscape of not just American Christianity but also much of world Christianity—is truly staggering.

EARLIER EVANGELICALS

The term “evangelical” was by no means created out of whole cloth in 1942 when the National Association of Evangelicals was created, which is the beginning point of the main story that I want to tell.

Usage of the word “evangelical” does have a long, traceable history.³ It once had distinguished Protestants from Catholics in Europe, Puritans and Methodists from Anglicans in England, and revivalists and Pietists from nominal, rationalist, and formalist Protestants everywhere.⁴ Numerous specific groups of considerably different character called themselves, or were labeled, evangelical (an adjective), or sometimes evangelicals (a noun).

Despite these usages, I side with the scholarly skeptics on the question of whether there really was anything that could fairly be described as “evangelicalism,” or an “evangelical community” before the term was retrieved and reinvented by the “new evangelicals” in the 1940s. Certainly there were groups that described themselves, among other ways, as being evangelical, or having an evangelical character, and in turn they have often been described by historians as evangelical, or as evangelicals, or as part of an evangelical “movement” or evangelical “coalition.” But I think what happened in the second half of the twentieth century in America was the purposeful creation of a new religious identity and community, which was gradually embraced by all kinds of people, including academics, missionaries, pastors, media, pollsters, and regular believers.⁵ Complexities about these historical and definitional matters abound, and I send you to the sources listed in this endnote for more.⁶

THE NEW EVANGELICALS

The Greek etymological origin of the term “evangelical” offers a clue to why the reformist fundamentalists of the 1940s turned to it for self-definition. Derived from the New Testament term evangelion, meaning “gospel” or “good news,” evangelical is (or has been, or once was) an appealingly laudatory self-description. To be evangelical was (is) to be a gospel Christian, a good news Christian, a New Testament Christian—basically, one of the good, true, authentic Christians. It has almost always been deployed as a contrast term against other versions of Christianity—Catholic, Anglican, scholastic, liberal—viewed as less than ideal.

With polite skepticism, mainline scholar Gary Dorrien argues: “There is an element of presumption in the attempt by any group to claim the term [evangelical] exclusively for itself”⁷—and, I would say, any attempt to contrast our group as gospel Christians over against those lesser Christians. This has not prevented its use for precisely that purpose, historically and today.

There were certainly appealing qualities to many of the Christian groups that had been identified as evangelical in the past. Especially because the groups claimed as evangelicals were so very diverse, one could reach back into history for any number of examples matching one’s preference in launching a new movement. If what was wanted was doctrinal rigor, belief in a completely error-free Bible, warmhearted evangelistic fervor, sacrificial missionary service, personal moral commitment, social-justice reformism (or quiescent social conservatism, take your pick), one could find it.

Both the etymological and the historical appeal of the term help explain why the terms “neo-evangelical” and “evangelical”⁸ were deployed by that small but talented and determined group of Protestant fundamentalists in the early 1940s to advance what amounted to, in that moment, a new religious identity, and in the end yielded something like a new religious community. These men (and they were almost exclusively male) had profound ambitions for rescuing Christian witness in a world, and a church, in crisis. The world in which they emerged was torn by catastrophic global warfare and genocide. The onlooking churches had been divided and weakened for decades and had been powerless to prevent a second world war just two decades after the first. These leaders wanted to contribute to renewing American, Western, and human civilization. They went back into history for the best examples they could find.

These leaders who eventually called themselves evangelicals—including Carl F. H. Henry, J. Elwin Wright, Harold John Ockenga, E. J. Carnell, Charles Fuller, and eventually Billy Graham—distinguished themselves as gospel/evangelical Christians from three other types of Christians, some of whose versions of Christianity were believed to be so deficient as not to qualify as Christian at all.

They self-defined as faithful evangelical Christians by contrast with what they viewed as the terrible errors of Roman Catholicism. Evangelical anti-Catholicism once ran very deep, and sometimes still does.

They self-defined as faithful evangelical Christians by contrast with the mainline (and/or) liberal Protestants who then dominated the Protestant and much of the American scene.

And they self-defined as faithful evangelical Christians by contrast with the militant Protestant fundamentalist movement.

Let’s go a bit deeper on the two main Protestant groups from which they were trying to distinguish themselves.

Mainline (sometimes also called ecumenical) Protestants then and now are generally understood to be those Protestants found in denominations that are a part of the National Council of Churches (NCC) and the global ecumenical movement as expressed in the World Council of Churches. In the United States, the membership of the NCC has grown to include the United Methodist Church, the United Church of Christ, the American Baptist Churches, the Brethren in Christ, the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Reformed Church in America, the Friends (Quaker) churches, most historically black Protestant denominations like the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) churches, most Eastern Orthodox communions, as well as immigrant church groups from Korea, Syria, Poland, Moravia, Hungary, Egypt, and Armenia.⁹

Some of these churches are among the oldest in the United States. Each has its own complicated institutional history, usually involving multiple splits and mergers. Representative congregations are found all over the United States. The beliefs of members and clergy could, and can, vary dramatically. Today, they represent around 14 percent of the American population, down from 24 percent just twenty years ago.¹⁰

At the time of the engineered birth of modern evangelicalism, these denominations, their seminaries, their top theologians, and the National Council of Churches itself were perceived by fundamentalists to be both ascendant in US religion and culture and dangerously compromised by liberalism.

Mainline Christianity was viewed as liberal methodologically, having adopted biblical criticism and modern evolutionary science and now testing biblical claims according to these sciences, rather than the other way around. It was viewed as liberal theologically, having abandoned in some cases core beliefs like the virgin birth and the bodily resurrection of Jesus in its effort to modernize and rationalize Christianity. And it was viewed as liberal politically and ethically, having embraced reformist politics of a Progressive movement, social gospel, and later New Deal type. This latter worry signaled a grave misunderstanding of the main thrust of biblical teachings about economic and political life, which survives to this day in much of US evangelicalism.¹¹

But fundamentalist concerns over mainline theological method, and its doctrinal results, were not ungrounded. While my own current theological thinking will be unpacked later in this book, here I will say that taking modern biblical studies and science seriously, as mainline Protestants did, did not have to result in the abandonment of belief in the inspiration and truthfulness of the Bible, the veracity of miracles, the virgin birth, Jesus’ resurrection, or the reality of the Holy Spirit. But it often did. The fundamentalists were worried that the liberals were modernizing Christianity to death. Though mainline Protestant theologians varied considerably in their approaches, the broad fundamentalist concern about the direction of liberal theology was not unreasonable.

So much for the liberals. What about the other side, the fundamentalism that the new evangelicals were also concerned about?

Conservative Protestant Christianity, of course, has its own long history, and in America you never had to go far to find some expression of it. Zeroing in on the late nineteenth century, it is fair to say that the US religious coalition that became fundamentalism began as a motley array of movements emphasizing, among other things, global evangelism and revival, personal holiness (and eventually, for some, the “Pentecostal” experience of outpourings of the Holy Spirit), dispensational premillennialism, and a resolute defense of biblical inerrancy.¹² It included Calvinists and Arminians, Wesleyans and Baptists, Congregationalists and Pentecostals, and many others. Whatever their differences, these groups noted with growing concern the rise of Darwinism, biblical criticism, and theological liberalism in the seminaries and churches, and threats to shared Protestant values in the public arena and public education. (Of course, some historians group all of these toget...