The End of Evangelicalism? Discerning a New Faithfulness for Mission

Towards an Evangelical Political Theology

Fitch

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781621892373
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

In The End of Evangelicalism? David Fitch examines the political presence of evangelicalism as a church in North America. Amidst the negative image of evangelicalism in the national media and its purported decline as a church, Fitch asks how evangelicalism's belief and practice has formed it as a political presence in North America. Why are evangelicals perceived as arrogant, exclusivist, duplicitous, and dispassionate by the wider culture? Diagnosing its political cultural presence via the ideological theory of Slavoj Zizek, Fitch argues that evangelicalism appears to have lost the core of its politic: Jesus Christ. In so doing its politic has become empty. Its witness has been rendered moot. The way back to a vibrant political presence is through the corporate participation in the triune God's ongoing work in the world as founded in the incarnation. Herein lies the way towards an evangelical missional political theology. Fitch ends his study by examining the possibilities for a new faithfulness in the current day emerging and missional church movements springing forth from evangelicalism in North America.

chapter 1

The End of Evangelicalism?

“Most people I meet assume that Christian means very conservative, entrenched in their thinking, anti-gay, anti-choice, angry, violent, illogical, empire builders, they want to convert everyone, and they generally cannot live peacefully with anyone who does not believe what they believe.”

—David Kinnaman, President of Barna Group1

There is never a shortage of soothsayers willing to call for the “end of” something. The current times are no exception. In the recent past, we have been told that we have arrived at the “the end of history” (Fukuyama), “the end of modernity” (Fatima), and even more famously, the “end of metaphysics” (Heidegger). We are living in a whole series of post-worlds including the post-Enlightenment, post-modern, post-Christendom, and even “post-American” worlds.2 We are asking what comes after Christendom, after modernity, or after metaphysics. All of these phrases refer to an ending of sorts to a previous era’s undergirding structures of thought, politics, or economic life. Seeing that evangelicalism in North America is closely aligned with many of these same structures, is it not also time to ask about “the end of Evangelicalism”? Should we be asking what comes after evangelicalism in America?

There are signs within the American culture that evangelicalism—the movement—is arriving at an “ending” of sorts. Evangelicalism’s influence within American society is painfully on the wane. As recent as just this past decade, evangelicalism had carried a significant amount of political influence within American society and seemed confident of its identity as a church in America. Today, many evangelicals seem confused as to what the label “evangelical” might even mean. There are indications that evangelicalism as a social entity has passed a “tipping point” concerning its own place in North American society and culture. We can observe this taking place in several different ways.

Most obviously, evangelicalism’s presence in American politics has declined precipitously. As a group, we once carried enormous influence on American political elections—particularly in 2000 and 2004. Today that influence has diminished. Evangelicals became the single biggest voting block in getting George Bush elected to the presidency in 2000 and 2004.3 Yet in the 2008 political campaigns, evangelicals disappeared almost entirely from the political arena as Barack Obama ran for the presidency. Obama then entered office with a stratospheric 78 percent approval rating.4 Evangelicals by and large did not approve and were strangely silent. For those evangelicals who did join in the Obama campaigns, such as social activist Jim Wallis of Sojourners, they exerted a new kind of evangelical influence that was small and inclusivist. For Wallis, leader of the progressive evangelicals, it was the beginning of “a Post-Religious Right America.”5 Whatever one might think of the progressive evangelicals and their aid in getting the new president elected, it is remarkable how little influence and role any evangelical people (including progressive ones) played in the 2008 election compared to the prior elections of George W. Bush.

Likewise, evangelicalism’s place of cultural influence in both the American economy and Hollywood, once strong, has fallen on hard times. Just a few years ago, James Dobson’s Focus on The Family, as well as other evangelical-based groups, led surprisingly successful boycotts against Fortune 500 companies, changing their corporate behavior.6 Evangelicals influenced directly the marketing of films in Hollywood as several evangelical megachurches became the focal point for marketing Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, making it a huge blockbuster hit in 2004. Many more films followed.7 Riding the crest of the Bush presidency, evangelicals exerted unprecedented influence in abortion and stem cell research policy-making of Washington. In the aftermath of a failed Bush presidency, however, along with a broken economy and a culture hostile to evangelicals, these once courageous voices of evangelicalism sit strangely mute.

Perhaps the most disturbing “tipping point” of all for evangelicals, though, is the manner in which the perception of evangelicals in American culture at large has turned for the worse. American media had generally showed courteous appreciation for evangelicals since WWII. Billy Graham was regularly listed among the most admired men in America, and this was no surprise. Beginning with the second term of the Bush administration, however, a stream of NY Times best-seller books negative towards evangelicals started to flow through American media.8 Aimed squarely at the evangelical “religious right,” these books painted conservative Christians with a broad stroke, characterizing them as angry, intolerant, hateful, fascists, religious profiteers, hypocrites, sexually duplicitous, and worshipers “on the altar of free enterprise.” The American culture industry supported these images by producing unflattering images of evangelicals via the cinema, such as the judgmental zealot Hilary (played by Mandy Moore) in the 2004 movie Saved or the constant caricatures of evangelicals put forth by Bill Maher on his own HBO talk show. Scandals involving some of evangelicalism’s most visible cultural figures only served to reinforce these cultural stereotypes. When NAE president Ted Haggard confessed his sexual impropriety, or evangelical broadcaster Pat Robertson unleashed his condemnation upon New Orleans during its most vulnerable time, evangelicals could only cringe. We could no longer easily dismiss the cultural caricatures drawn of us as just another piece of disingenuous secularist diatribe put forth by the “liberal media.” In the latter half of the Bush presidency, despite some counter-balancing efforts in the media,9 evangelicalism’s cultural credibility passed a “tipping point” and began to turn sour.

For most evangelicals, our worst suspicions proved true in the survey work compiled by David Kinnaman, president of the George Barna research firm, in his 2007 book UnChristian. In an infamous quotation, Kinnaman relayed the opinions of the typical non-Christian about Christians in American society: “Most people I meet assume that Christian means very conservative, entrenched in their thinking, antigay, anti-choice, angry, violent, illogical, empire builders, they want to convert everyone, and they generally cannot live peacefully with anyone who does not believe what they believe.”10 Kinnaman then proceeds to outline statistical evidence showing how specifically evangelical Christians are perceived by the public at large as being negative, hypocritical, too focused on people as targets for their conversion, anti-homosexual, sheltered, too political, and judgmental.11 No doubt, these statistics, and others like them, can be debated as to whether they have been exaggerated.12 Nonetheless, they have received so much attention among the American public that it is now almost a moot point as to whether they are reliable or not. They have become ensconced as part of the popular culture. They are a sign of the decline of evangelicalism’s cultural presence in America.

During this same time period, many new church movements rose to criticize evangelicalism. Most of the ones doing the criticizing were former evangelicals. The emerging church, for example, led by figures such as Brian McLaren, the former Plymouth Brethren evangelical, arose to protest evangelicalism’s narrow gospel and lack of a compassionate social presence. Likewise, evangelical leaders among the missional church movement engaged what they saw was a socially walled-off evangelicalism that had become incapable of reaching an increasingly post-Christendom society.13 Neo-monastic expressions of church, led by Shane Claiborne—who had attended evangelical stronghold Wheaton College and worked at the proto-type evangelical megachurch Willowcreek—came alongside the missional movement to emphasize community and a just social presence over against the individualism of American evangelicalism. Liturgical renewal movements, and movements calling for a revival of Christian spiritual disciplines, were led by evangelicals Robert Webber and Dallas Willard as well as several emerging church authors. They pushed for a renewal of spiritual formation practices to replace the lifeless legalistic versions of evangelical discipleship. All of these movements represent a disenchantment that was rising from within evangelicalism. They could be read as a further sign of deterioration within traditional forms of evangelicalism.

This decade-long list of observations portrays a movement in upheaval. It only makes sense then to inquire whether evangelicalism has entered a crisis.14 As we observe a large majority of our youth not returning to our churches after college,15 we rightfully ask whether evangelicalism has a future, indeed whether it is imploding as a viable cultural force. Given the cultural signs, evangelicalism looks like a church groping for a place to stand. It appears to lack confidence in its own understanding of its mission amidst the new hostilities of post-Christendom America. How should evangelicals respond?

Evangelicalism as a Political Ideology in Crisis

Many evangelicals have already responded to this gathering malaise. Some, for example, have challenged evangelicalism to return to a purer Protestant orthodoxy. David Wells, a prime spokesman in this regard, decries the “market-driven” assumptions of American evangelicals showing how they undercut the doctrinal foundations of evangelicalism in North America. He criticizes evangelicals for their loss of a sense of absolute biblical truth associating them with the emerging church and other movements that engage postmodern issues as part of their church strategy. The answer for Wells is for evangelicals to have the “courage to be Protestant.”16 Similarly, The Gospel Coalition organization, headed by professor Don Carson of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School—along with prominent reformed evangelicals John Piper and Tim Keller, has coalesced a gathering of evangelicals for the purpose of renewing a more balanced Protestant orthodoxy among evangelical churches and their church plants.17 They prescribe a more holistic gospel under the Reformed banner.

Others have responded in the opposite direction addressing evangelicalism’s exclusivist and closed-off version of Christianity. The British Anglican Dave Tomlinson, for example, has asserted that evangelicalism is overly pragmatic, control oriented, and suffocating to discipleship. He proposes a “post-evangelicalism” that is more open, confident in its stories, and engaging with surrounding culture.18 Several “emerging church” and “missional church” authors push similar concerns. In addition, evangelical s...