Still Evangelical?

Insiders Reconsider Political, Social, and Theological Meaning

Mark Labberton

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780830845378
• eBook ISBN: 9780830880423
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

• 2018 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award Finalists - Religion

Evangelicalism in America has cracked, split on the shoals of the 2016 presidential election and its aftermath, leaving many wondering if they want to be in or out of the evangelical tribe. The contentiousness brought to the fore surrounds what it means to affirm and demonstrate evangelical Christian faith amidst the messy and polarized realities gripping our country and world. Who or what is defining the evangelical social and political vision? Is it the gospel or is it culture? For a movement that has been about the primacy of Christian faith, this is a crisis.This collection of essays was gathered by Mark Labberton, president of Fuller Theological Seminary, who provides an introduction to the volume. What follows is a diverse and provocative set of perspectives and reflections from evangelical insiders who wrestle with their responses to the question of what it means to be evangelical in light of their convictions.Contributors include:

• Shane Claiborne, Red Letter Christians
• Jim Daly, Focus on the Family
• Mark Galli, Christianity Today
• Lisa Sharon Harper, FreedomRoad.us
• Tom Lin, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship
• Karen Swallow Prior, Liberty University
• Soong-Chan Rah, North Park University
• Robert Chao Romero, UCLA
• Sandra Maria Van Opstal, Grace and Peace Community
• Allen Yeh, Biola University
• Mark Young, Denver Seminary

Referring to oneself as evangelical cannot be merely a congratulatory self-description. It must instead be a commitment and aspiration guided by the grace and mercy of Jesus Christ. What now are Christ's followers called to do in response to this identity crisis?

WILL EVANGELICALISM SURRENDER?

LISA SHARON HARPER

Brown knees kiss earth, head bends in contrition, elbows balance a hunched body at the altar as tears fall. The itinerant preacher warned of hellfire and brimstone that Sunday night, August 21, 1983. He preached for what seemed like forever. I barely remember a word of his sermon now, except that I was in danger of hell because I had not given my life to Jesus.

It had been a yearlong journey from autumn 1982 to August 1983—a journey with a single purpose: to know Jesus and God and figure out how to pray. I had attended two all-white local youth groups where I did walk-a-thons and sing-a-thons for Jesus and committed whole passages of Scripture to memory. I went to Michael Card, Amy Grant, Michael W. Smith, and even Stryper concerts. Yes, this African American fourteen-year-old cut bangs that stuck straight out from my forehead. I donned black eyeliner inside the eyelid, according to local Cape May fashion. It mattered not that my mother helped establish the Philadelphia office of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s. It mattered not that she dated the man who coined the phrase “Black Power.” No, I banged my head with extra passion during the heavy-metal Stryper concert. I made sure I belonged.

As the organ bellowed at that Sunday-evening camp church meeting, my friend Terry tapped me on the shoulder and asked whether I would go to the altar with her.

I nodded. I had wanted to go—had toyed with tapping her shoulder—but I was too chicken.

We both walked forward. We both knelt in the dust. We both wept. We were both surrounded and prayed for. She was already a Christian. I never knew why she wept. In fact, I never knew why I wept that night, except that saying yes to Jesus felt like surrender. The tears flowed.

That same year, evangelicalism was experiencing an orchestrated takeover by political operatives of the conservative movement.

The desegregation of public schools served as the backdrop for the conservative movement’s takeover and politicization of previously isolationist evangelicals. When black boys and girls began sitting at school desks next to white boys and girls, white parents pulled their sons and daughters out of public schools across the South and Midwest and established what they called “race schools”—all-white schools. Often these schools shielded themselves from government encroachment under the First Amendment protection of religious freedom.

In Michael Cromartie’s No Longer Exiles, a conservative operative and architect of the rise of the religious right in the late 1970s named Paul Weyrich explains that the political evangelical movement was a movement on the defensive against government encroachment. “What caused the movement to surface,” he said at an exclusive Washington, DC, meeting of religious-right leaders in 1990, was part of “the federal government’s moves against Christian schools. This absolutely shattered the Christian community’s notion that Christians could isolate themselves inside their own institutions and teach what they pleased.”1

After the foundation of the Fourteenth Amendment, the affirmation of judicial law established under Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954, and the legislative enforcement established by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, African American parents in Mississippi filed a class-action lawsuit in 1970 against race schools that had attempted to subvert desegregation while maintaining tax-exempt status. These Mississippi parents won their case: Green v. Connally. The same year, the IRS informed Bob Jones University that its tax-exempt status would be revoked because of its segregationist policies.

In Thy Kingdom Come, Randall Balmer recounts the meeting where Weyrich spoke in 1990. Balmer recalls that someone tried to make the point that abortion was the catalyst for the rise of the right. Weyrich voiced staunch opposition to the notion, insisting, “What got us going as a political movement was the attempt on the part of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to rescind the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University because of its racially discriminatory policies.”2

Weyrich explains in No Longer Exiles that the moment the evangelical movement consummated its covenant relationship with the conservative movement was the moment when the notion that they could isolate themselves in their own institutions “linked up with the long held conservative view that government is too powerful and intrusive.” Weyrich says this link made evangelicals active. “It wasn’t the abortion issue. That wasn’t sufficient.”3

The same year that my brown knees knelt at a dusty campground altar, the Supreme Court issued its verdict on Bob Jones University: it sided against the university and finally revoked its tax-exempt status—completely.

As tears of contrition fell from my African American eyes onto the old wooden altar in the center of the South Jersey Tabernacle United Methodist campground, white Southern and Midwestern evangelicals were rising in protest of government infringement on their religious liberties. Buzzwords of the conservative movement were adopted as battle cries of the evangelical revolt: “Small government!” “Religious freedom!” “Traditional values!” These words flew from the lips of the same women and men that only twenty years earlier might not have felt compelled to shroud their language in the niceties of political correctness. They might have yelled, “States’ rights!” “N----- lover!” “Segregation forever!”

The new language didn’t just appear. It was cultivated. Propaganda was distributed to evangelical churches during Reagan’s 1984 run for a second term. As I walked out of the white steepled tabernacle of my own Erma, New Jersey, church and into the crisp rural air one Sunday night, I was handed a tract. It looked like the tracts we handed out on the boardwalk—the kind with comic-strip illustrations that call sinners to repent, believe, and be saved. But this tract warned that Mondale was the antichrist. If Mondale won, all the little children would be rounded up in work camps, and Christianity would be outlawed.

It was brilliant. It hit every conservative note in the key of E-vangelical. Reagan won by a landslide, and political conservativism became the official ideology of evangelicalism.

The Justice Conference was established in Bend, Oregon, by Ken Wytsma in 2010. One evangelical church was attempting to help a new generation of evangelicals grasp the biblical call for justice in the context of the scandal-ridden fall of the religious right’s old guard in 2006 and the rise of the first African American president, Barack Obama, two years later. Justice was suddenly cool, but it had shallow roots.

What could one expect? Southern evangelicals had spent the first part of the twentieth century arguing to protect states’ rights and keep lynching legal.4 Evangelicals in the Midwest and South spent the second half of the century arguing for smaller government and wars on drugs that morphed into wars on black communities—complete with demands for law and order, mandatory minimums, and three-strikes laws that snatched 1.5 million black men and boys from their families.

The same evangelicals journaled self-centered prayers at Starbucks while pledging allegiance to conservative pacts with private prison companies and refusals to pass immigration reform. They controlled, confined, and exploited the labor of black and brown bodies behind bars as if they were antebellum chattel. Then, suddenly, after thirty years of refusing to pass immigration reform or an equal-rights amendment, declaring AIDS as God’s judgment on gay people and 9/11 as God’s judgment because of gay people, voting in tax cuts for the top 1 percent while cutting food assistance for those Jesus called “the least of these,” and after more than a century defending and securing white male supremacy, America elected a black president.

In September 2009, I watched, drop-jawed, as Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) yelled, “You lie!” during President Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress on health care.5 (He later said he had let his emotions get away from him.)

In March 2010, I watched legendary House members Rep. Emmanuel Cleaver and Rep. John Lewis pass through jeering crowds of white Tea Party members, flanked by capitol police. The crowd covered Lewis in racial epithets and spat on Rep. Cleaver.6 It reminded me of Elizabeth Eckford and the Little Rock Nine’s long walk to their high school—through the jeering crowd of angry white women, men, and children flanked by city police.

In this context, the Justice Conference was conceived and born. Justice was sexy to white evangelical millennials, but it had absolutely no connection to the ongoing struggles of African Americans, Native Americans, poor people, women, immigrants, and the LGBT community in their struggles for equal recognition and equal protection of their divine call, and capacity to help steward the world.

Now, seven years after the Justice Conference was founded, more millennial evangelicals have a value for justice. But evangelicals as a whole feel further from justice than ever before.

Evangelicals are the most cohesive voting block of any people group that voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election.7 Within Trump’s first one hundred days, he issued an executive order that prioritized all undocumented immigrants for deportation, regardless of criminal history or status.8 Within one week in early March 2017, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) picked up 161 immigrants on the streets of Los Angeles and deported them all within twenty-four hours without trial or legal representation.9 Advocates in North Carolina have reported that ICE agents followed school buses to arrest students on their way to school.10

Likewise, within days of being sworn in, Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a statement that his Department of Justice (DOJ) would prioritize the protection of law enforcement officers and stop monitoring troubled police departments.11 At the same time, he issued directives that instructed his office not to pursue the prosecution of police officers previously under DOJ investigation for the killings of black men, women, and children. Meanwhile, he announced that the Trump administration would reverse the Obama initiative to phase out the federal use of for-profit prisons.12

In addition, in response to the Supreme Court’s 2013 nullification of section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, previously leashed legislatures across the South and Midwest changed their voting laws and structures to block and suppress the access of African American, Hispanic, Asian, low-income, female, and Muslim voters to the polls. Nearly three hundred thousand voters in Wisconsin alone were blocked from voting in the 2016 election because they lacked the proper ID.13 In this context, Sessions recently issued directives to the DOJ to halt six years of Obama administration litigation against the state of Texas for its voter suppression laws.14

Also, President Trump has twice issued executive orders to prohibit travelers from seven, then six, predominantly Muslim nations from entering the United States. Twice federal ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Introduction: Still Evangelical?
• 1. Will Evangelicalism Surrender?
• 2. Why I Am an Evangelical
• 3. Recapturing Evangelical Identity and Mission
• 4. Immigration and the Latina/o Community
• 5. Evangelical Futures
• 6. Theology and Orthopraxis in Global Evangelicalism
• 7. Remaining to Reform
• 8. Looking for Unity in All the Wrong Places
• 9. Evangelicalism Must Be Born Again
• 10. The Importance of Listening in Today’s Evangelicalism
• 11. Hope for the Next Generation
• Notes
• Contributors
• Praise for Still Evangelical?
• About the Editor
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright