Struggling with Evangelicalism

Why I Want to Leave and What It Takes to Stay

Dan Stringer

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780830847679
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

When evangelicals make a mess, who cleans it up?Many today are discarding the evangelical label, even if they still hold to the historic tenets of evangelicalism. But evangelicalism is a space, not just a brand, and living in that space is complicated.As a lifelong evangelical who happens to be a biracial Asian/White millennial, Dan Stringer has felt both included and alienated by the evangelical community and has wrestled with whether to stay or go. He sits as an uneasy evangelical insider with ties to many of evangelicalism's historic organizations and institutions. Neither "everything's fine" nor "burn it all down, " Stringer offers a thoughtful appreciation of evangelicalism's history, identity, and strengths, but also lament for its blind spots, toxic brokenness, and complicity with injustice. From this complicated space, we can move forward with informed vision rather than resignation and with hope for our future together.

1

STRUGGLING WITH EVANGELICALISM

EVANGELICALISM IS MY SPIRITUAL HABITAT. I graduated from Wheaton College and Fuller Seminary. I work for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. My local congregation belongs to the Evangelical Covenant Church, the denomination that ordained me to pastoral ministry. I read publications like Christianity Today, support the work of agencies like World Vision, and can rattle off the lyrics to just about any worship song in the CCLI Top 100. For better or worse, my spiritual zipcode lies deep inside evangelicalism. In many ways, I benefit from the evangelical status quo. And I am conflicted about that.

Maybe you’re struggling with evangelicalism too. If so, it could be for any number of reasons. Perhaps you’re disillusioned with the political platform that’s been conflated with Christianity into a package deal. Or you’re grappling with how a seemingly Christ-centered apologist like Ravi Zacharias could have sexually abused so many victims by using his ministry as leverage. Even if you’re not surprised when famous Christians get caught doing terrible things, your revulsion may stem from a particular church environment that turned you off from evangelicalism by the way someone close to you was treated. The dissonance you feel could also stem from how the evangelicals you know have (mis)handled subjects like science, sexuality, singleness, or supernatural gifts. Perhaps it’s all of the above.

You’re not alone.

My struggle with evangelicalism began shortly after I graduated from Wheaton College in 2003. During the presidential primary races of 2004, I worked as a news intern for WGN Radio in Chicago. That was the year George W. Bush ran for reelection. When I began my internship in January, the field of candidates vying to be Bush’s Democratic challenger numbered about half a dozen. In addition to answering the newsroom phone (I never had to fetch coffee, strangely), one of my duties was curating sound bites from the campaign trail to be used during newscasts at the top of every hour. To gather these audio clips, I’d listen to live feeds of stump speeches and press conferences each day, choosing segments that captured a candidate’s tone and content but with enough variety to avoid redundancy. Over the next few months, I became quite familiar with the speeches of John Kerry, John Edwards, Wesley Clark, Howard Dean, Al Sharpton, and of course, President Bush.

Crafting news copy around those speeches not only put me in touch with the American political scene at that time, it also sparked an interest in how faith and politics shape each other. Bush’s reelection victory reflected the Religious Right’s influence within evangelicalism, and by comparison, the Religious Left’s lack thereof. This disparity troubled me, so I began asking questions about why so many evangelicals supported funding for the occupation of Iraq and the torture of enemy prisoners using methods like waterboarding but opposed funding for food stamps, public education, and medical care.

In 2005, I read Jim Wallis’s book, God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It, which gave voice to the disconnect I felt between the Religious Right’s brand of Christianity and the teachings of Jesus. Wallis further piqued my interest when he told Jon Stewart the following on The Daily Show:

We need a better conversation about moral values. Are there only two: abortion and gay marriage? I’m an evangelical Christian. . . . I would say that fighting poverty is a moral value. I’d say protecting the environment, God’s creation, is a moral value. I’d say how and when we go to war—and whether we tell the truth about it—is a moral value. Is torture a moral value? Let’s have a better conversation about this.1

From there, I started reading Sojourners, the magazine Wallis founded, alongside Christianity Today, The Economist, Relevant, and the late Books & Culture, rest its soul. Up next was Shane Claiborne’s 2006 book The Irresistible Revolution, followed by Greg Boyd’s The Myth of a Christian Nation: How the Quest for Political Power Is Destroying the Church in 2007. In early 2008, I started a blog to process my thoughts on everything from gender roles and pop culture to presidential politics (it was primary season again) and theological trends within evangelicalism, like the growing rift between New Calvinism and the Emerging Church.

Did I mention my blog was eclectic? The first twenty posts included a book review, a music review, a piece about calls to boycott the Beijing Olympics, a five-thousand-word analysis of Honolulu’s proposed rail transit project, and a thirty-nine-word poem with each line shorter than the last—resulting in the shape of an upside-down triangle. I also wrote an hour-by-hour recap of my first day in grad school, a reflection on the deadly sin of envy, two posts about basketball (college and pro, respectively), and one each on evangelism, Earth Day, capital punishment, and the doctrine of common grace.2

Speaking of common grace, it was through the exploration of these eclectic interests that my appreciation grew for the writings and public voice of Richard Mouw, who was then Fuller Seminary’s president. I was especially drawn to the astounding ease with which Mouw could find theological common ground with almost anyone, not in spite of his Calvinist convictions but because of them. I had first heard him speak when he gave the 2003 commencement address to my graduating class at Wheaton. A couple years later, while browsing the shelves at Honolulu’s Logos Bookstore, I stumbled upon his little book Calvinism in the Las Vegas Airport. It was such an unexpectedly enjoyable and compelling read that I devoured it in a couple sittings. Shattering my stereotypes of Calvinism as a rigid, Puritanical system committed to preserving male authority, Mouw introduced me to the world of his favorite theologian, Abraham Kuyper, also a fervent Calvinist but one whose seemingly strongest point of overlap with John Piper was that their last names rhymed. Everything else between Kuyper and Piper was a case in contrasts, not only in tone and focus but also politics and cultural engagement. Apparently Calvinists don’t all agree! Dating back to my undergrad days at Wheaton a few years prior, I had until then assumed that Piper’s interpretation of Calvinism was authoritative and uncontested. And yet in Mouw’s Kuyperian version of Calvinism, women could be pastors, wars could be protested, and through the idea of common grace, the scope of God’s care extended to all areas of creation and society, creating the basis for redemptive collaboration across any number of differences.

After hearing Mouw speak at the Hawaiian Islands Ministries conference in 2006 on “How to be a Public Christian,” I found myself reading as much of his work as possible, from columns on Beliefnet.com to his Fuller blog, Mouw’s Musings. When I started blogging in 2008, I was reading He Shines in All That’s Fair, Mouw’s lectures on culture and common grace, titled after a phrase in the hymn, “This Is My Father’s World.” At last, here was a Calvinist who valued both God’s sovereignty and social action! As my Kuyperian horizons broadened, I discovered magazines like Comment and think tanks like The Center for Public Justice. It’s no coincidence that after finishing my social work degree in 2011, I promptly started online classes at Fuller Seminary, in large part due to Mouw’s effect on me.

As my seminary years began, I remained interested in conversations around the church’s role in public life. Thus began my struggle to navigate the dissonance between who evangelicals purport to be as followers of Jesus, and who evangelicals are when capitulating to idolatries like Christian nationalism and injustices like white supremacy. Where was my place in all of this? Was it more problematic to identify as an evangelical or not? My time working in that election year newsroom may have started the ball rolling, but I soon realized that the struggle went deeper than candidates, campaigns, and cable news. Even if we could remove partisan politics from the equation, evangelical Christianity has supplied ample cause for mixed feelings about this particular expression of faith.

Blogging about evangelicalism helped clarify some of my ambivalence. At the same time, it stoked a stronger curiosity to find out why this topic mattered so much to me and a deeper longing to make sense of the mess. Entering my thirties stirred up new questions: How many possible meanings does evangelical have and how do we distinguish between them? If this label causes such a reactionary ruckus, why can’t we seem to stop using it? When we get pulled into the cycle of debating the word’s usefulness and proper usage, what effect does that have on our capacity for constructive conversation about cultivating a healthier evangelicalism, without minimizing either its brokenness or beauty?

I was initially dismayed to learn that Mouw’s time as Fuller’s president was ending in 2013, the year before Rebecca and I planned on moving our family from Honolulu to Pasadena so that we could both be full-time seminarians. However, shortly after we arrived there in 2014, I was delighted to discover through his fabulous assistant, Tammi (who just so happened to be my pre-assigned vocational formation small group facilitator during my first quarter on campus), that since Mouw’s schedule was no longer packed with running the seminary, he now had more time to connect with students! Almost immediately, I gathered some classmates from the MDiv program and set about forming a “Kuyper Club” in the hopes of enticing Mouw to meet with us on a regular basis. Thanks to Tammi’s influence, we made it onto his calendar, and our little reading group had a blast getting to know Dr. Mouw in person over the next several years, eventually reaching the outer orbit of those who call him “Rich.” Living in seminary housing surrounded by classmates from around the world, I learned that Fuller is neither shy about identifying itself as an evangelical institution nor reluctant to name and address evangelicalism’s shortcomings. This willingness to engage gray areas was part of what drew us there.

In 2015, Fuller’s magazine devoted an entire issue to a one-word theme: Evangelical.3 That issue served up a feast’s worth of food for thought from a diverse cross-section of scholars and practitioners. I read it from cover to cover, but one article stayed with me, “Confessions of a Reluctant Evangelical,” in which theology professor Dr. Erin Dufault-Hunter describes her struggle with both the label and the entity to which it points. She confesses that she often wants “to be cool more than I want to be Christian” yet chooses to claim and be claimed by evangelicalism because “I need my crazy kin. Just as I did not choose my blood family, I did not decide who would also come into this space of open gifts of grace and peace through Christ. . . . Despite our sometimes tense and important divergences, we are all claimed by the good news of what God has done in Christ, enticed by what God reveals in Scripture, and invigorated by the Spirit for engagement with a creation beloved by the One who created it.”4

By articulating her struggle with evangelicalism, Dr. Erin, as students affectionately call her, had put her finger on something I hadn’t yet realized about my own struggle: I wanted evangelicalism to claim me. I wanted to belong. Well, at least that’s how I felt for an hour until the next time evangelicalism did something irksome (sigh).

Still, that article marked a tipping point. I began tracing the struggle back to a desire for belonging. I wanted to fit somewhere, not just in Christianity (too big) or my church’s denomination (too small) but tethered to evangelicalism as an interdenominational, multiethnic space distinct enough to be its own faith stream yet broad enough to include a range of role models and kindred spirits. The struggle was far from over, but I began approaching it differently. I could no longer look the other way and remain at peace. It was time to face the quandary. And if Dr. Erin’s reluctance persisted after many years of discipleship and deep reflection, perhaps mine would too.

By the end of 2015, I had started a Google document compiling links to articles about evangelicalism that resonated with me. I wasn’t trying to write a book at that point. I just wanted to find patterns that might help make sense of my confusion. Amazed by how much was being written about the label’s baggage alone, I separated the articles that grappled with the label from those that did not. That’s when I began noting contrasts between what I now call the brand and the space. If an article was insightful, I’d summarize it and make note of key themes. Even in a non-election year, it felt like evangelicalism was making news every day, with opinions swirling from every direction. So many articles came across my radar that I only had time to save the links, hoping to read them later.

By the time I graduated from Fuller in mid-2016, presidential campaign season was in full swing, complete with the usual attention given to white evangelical voters’ preferences. Coverage of non-white evangelicals was scant at best, if mentioned at all. Donald Trump surprised many pundits by securing the Republican Party’s nomination, even as his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton appeared to be leading in most polls. Trump’s supporters would prove those polls wrong, electing him as America’s forty-fifth president.

In January 2017, I attended InterVarsity’s national staff conference in Orlando. While there, I saw an announcement for a meet-up with IVP staff to learn about writing opportunities; I decided to go. By that point, I was considering writing a book about evangelicalism but wanted to learn more about IVP’s proposal process. The staff were very informative, and I left the meeting with a sense that I needed to develop my ideas by writing something shorter first.

Over the next year, I continued working on that Google doc, compiling articles and making notes on how the evangelical brand differs and overlaps with evangelicalism as a space. As the election’s anniversary approached that fall, an opportunity arose to write for Missio Alliance, thanks to an unexpected coffee meeting in Pasadena with Missio’s then-director, JR Rozko. Missio Alliance is a parachurch network that organizes conferences and online content, providing theological and practical direction for North American church leaders in the vein of the Lausanne movement.5 Its resources have been a breath of fresh air for evangelicals seeking an alternative to “New Calvinist” complementarian networks like The Gospel Coalition and the Acts 29 Network.6 JR liked my contrast between brand and space, so I worked on an article that was eventually published in January 2018, one year after President Trump’s inauguration.

Part of me was hoping that writing an article or two would get the topic out of my system so that I wouldn’t have to continue contemplating whether or not to attempt a book proposal. As 2018 unfolded, however, it became clear that even if the proposal wasn’t accepted, I felt a sense of urgency to at least follow through. If it was rejected, I would know I tried. But if it was accepted, it would be worth putting my struggle into words to help someone else find hope.

Our family moved from Southern California back home to Honolulu that fall, which delayed things a bit, but in February 2019 I finally submitted the proposal. It had been over two years since Orlando, four years since reading Dr. Erin’s article, eleven years since starting a blog, and fifteen years since my internship in a radio newsroom. Did I mention this was just the proposal? Even after its acceptance, my struggle with evangelicalism persisted.

Why tell you this if it won’t eliminate the struggle?...