What should be the response when folks outside one’s tribe critique the tribe? Circle the wagons? Full speed ahead without torpedoes?
Churches regularly experience this. Someone from down the street or a guest who has an unpleasant experience in the parking lot lobs a critical grenade on your Facebook page or via the website contact page. The ones that are completely off base are easier to ignore than the ones with some amount of truth, no matter how critically stated or poorly packaged. We learn to “eat the meat and spit out the bones” so we can improve.
Critiques of movements are much the same. Critiques from the outside are rebuffed or rationalized away. Too often critiques from inside are ignored, if offered at all. As a result, needed correctives are rarely or never considered.
The American Evangelical movement is mature, by any measure. Newsweek magazine labeled 1976 the Year of the Evangelical, the same year Jimmy Carter was elected president. That was 45 years ago. Four years later, evangelicals helped deliver the White House to Ronald Reagan, a man who decidedly had not governed as an evangelical. It has been a long time since evangelicals longed in vain for access to the levers of American power. Now, a new class of historians is writing about the results (consequences?) of that access and the picture is not always flattering. But, it proves helpful to those with ears to hear.
Yet, who hears, Horton?
It depends.
Andrew Walker is the managing editor at World Magazine’s Opinion section and a prof at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Recently, objecting to historical critiques of modern American evangelicalism, he tweeted:
The reductive cynicism on display here is a good demonstration of why theology, left in the possession of historians and sociologists, reveals itself just as encumbered by Western categories of analysis as they accuse a two-thousand-year-old, non-Western faith of being. https://t.co/JMaZG1Atol
— Andrew T. Walker (@andrewtwalk) October 12, 2021
Leaving aside the reality that modern American evangelicalism itself does not directly equate to “a two-thousand-year-old, non-Western faith,” suggesting there is substantially rotten fruit from an ostensibly Christian tree does not automatically indicate “reductive cynicism.” At 344 pages fully dedicated to evaluating “worldview theory,” Worldview Theory, Whiteness, and the Future of Evangelical Faith, the book at issue, might be many things, but “reductive” is gonna need a witness.
Walker also objects to historians critiquing evangelical theology as “unduly subjecting theological arguments to sociological and historical analysis.” He is responding to Kristin Du Mez, professor at Calvin University and author of the highly regarded—in some quarters—Jesus and John Wayne (you can hear her on the Uncommontary podcast). Du Mez is a critic of evangelicalism, but she does it from nearby. She isn’t a Leninist taking potshots from an alley behind Southern Seminary.
Another contributor at World Opinion whisks his own broom against what he terms “sweeping charges of malice.”
Amazing to me that history now, for many, involves making sweeping charges of malice with little basis in fact https://t.co/6YUoGdUPpC
— Daniel Darling (@dandarling) October 12, 2021
Whether malice is afoot I cannot say nor how much amazement was registered, but “little basis in fact” is well wide of the dustpan.In an ever growing body of evidence, historians are showing heretofore unacknowledged social consequences from the American version of evangelicalism, consequences concerned Christians should evaluate—and be eager to do so.
Evangelicals of a certain theological stripe who reject not-the-right-tribe historical analyses of their movement due to perceived worldview differences, motivational suspicions, or disagreed on theological stances risk embracing the easy comfort of feeling right over the prickly challenge of finding right.
If historians cannot evaluate theology’s effects, what shall we say of historian and churchman Jemar Tisby whose review of Christianity in America (especially as practiced by white Christians) found support for racism at every historical opportunity for repentance? (See: The Color of Compromise: The Truth About the Church’s Complicity in Racism)
What of Tisby’s analysis of current evangelicalism and Black Christians in America:
Black Christians in evangelical churches and organizations must always face the issue of limits and control based on how explicitly they address the issues—such as racism, police brutality, economic inequality, and access to quality education—in their ministry and how comfortable the white majority is with their message.*
Tisby’s historical research helps us recognize the ethical failures of White evangelicals whose claimed orthodoxy has been and is insufficient to affect their praxis.
What shall we say of historian Mary Beth Mathews, whose research into why predominantly African-American and white churches in post-World War 1 America were divided despite agreeing on nearly every fundamental of the faith, found the pursuit of racial justice the chasm between the two? She writes:
I argue that fundamentalism itself was a racialized term. The men who coined the term were white, and in their worldview, and indeed in the worldview of most white Americans of the era, Christianity was defined by the goals and aspirations of white, middle-class, educated Protestants. For fundamentalists, Christianity represented the highest achievement of white civilization, and their understanding of the purest form of Christianity—conservative evangelical Protestantism—was a reflection of that viewpoint. (Doctrine and Race, p 5)
(Some might here complain that fundamentalism is not evangelicalism and that the latter was intended to be distinguished from the former. Of late, however, the similarities related to race are too close for the comparison to be easily dismissed.)
What shall we say of historian Aaron Griffith, whose research into evangelical influence on American criminal justice, led to ever-broadening “law and order” policies many feeding the Prison Industrial Complex? Griffith notes that emphasizing crime and delinquency leaders like Billy Graham and David Wilkerson
set the stage for later evangelical enmeshment with a new form of punitive politics in the 1960s and 1970s. As postwar evangelicals gained cultural cachet, they became more comfortable moving away from strict conversionism as the solution to social ills, and allying with the state. (God’s Law & Order: The Politics of Punishment in Evangelical America, pp 9–10)
What shall we say of historian David Kirkpatrick whose The Gospel for the Poor examines, among other things, the conflict between American and Central and South American evangelicals prior to and during the 1974 Lausanne Conference? What of John Stott, Billy Graham, and others—in response to Padilla, Samuel Escobar, et al—admitting that a global evangelicalism meant Western evangelicalism needed a course correction? As Padilla himself would write:
With the Lausanne Covenant, Evangelicalism has taken a stand against the mutilated Gospel and the narrow view of the Church’s mission that were defacing it, and has definitely claimed for itself a number of biblical features that it had tended to minimize or even destroy. (The New Face of Evangelicalism, p 15, italics in quote added)
As Kirkpatrick makes clear, far from being a recent turning from the gospel to secular theories, a more comprehensive view of the gospel required better theology: “Misión integral pushed evangelicals to move beyond implication language to include social action within the gospel itself” (Gospel, p 11). Padilla was a theologian, but it is Kirkpatrick the historian who excavates the history for a new generation of readers to evaluate.
What shall we say of historian Kevin Kruse whose research into the relationship between Christian leaders and business leaders opposing FDR’s New Deal found more influence from corporate American onto Christian America rather than the other way around so that a certain type of “Christian libertarianism,” a blending of Christianity and capitalism, arose? (See: One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America)
What shall we say of historian and political scientist Lauren Turek whose book To Bring Good News to All the Nations shows an outsized influence of evangelicalism onto American foreign policy from the 1980s on, some for good and some for bad?
What shall we say of historian James P. Byrd whose study of how Northerners and Southerners used the Bible before, during, and after the Civil War finds all kinds of scripture twisting by preachers in the Union and the Confederacy, particularly to arouse patriotism on both sides? The book serves as a warning against the biblical appropriation so common today: “In the Civil War, Americans rarely focused on ‘the Bible alone.’ Instead, they enlisted the Bible to lend divine sanction to other authorities, including political authorities (such as the Union and the Confederacy) and authoritative ideas (such as patriotism and various views on race).” (A Holy Baptism of Fire & Blood: The Bible & the American Civil War, p 17)
What shall we say of Billy Graham’s biographers and historians of his era who look not only at Graham as a revivalist, but as a citizen with extraordinary access to presidents? What about his attempts to influence policy? His being used by Nixon? Are these somehow beyond examining because Graham used “The Bible says…”? Darren Dochuk writes of Graham’s political influence, “[Graham] encouraged Bill Bright to bring ‘one way you’ to Dallas for Explo ‘72. At Graham’s urging, Nixon’s advisors sought a relationship with Bright in hopes of using Campus Crusade to mobilize Christian collegians for the GOP, much like they had already been mobilized for Barry Goldwater.” (From Bible Belt to Sunbelt, pp 333–334)
Grant Wacker, author of America’s Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation, writes of a 13-page letter from Graham and a group of missionaries sent to then-president Richard Nixon, encouraging him to use defectors to bomb the dikes in North Vietnam and thus destroy the economy. “But the plan made little sense morally, for it surely violated Christian principles of just war as well as the Geneva Conventions” as it was specifically aimed at civilians (p 236).
What shall we say of efforts by highly respected evangelical historians like Mark Noll and George Marsden who have their own critiques of evangelicalism that are not too far different than some leveled by their secular counterparts? It was Noll who charged evangelicalism with not having much of a mind. Marsden critiques below.
What shall we say of the work of Robert Ericksen who demonstrated certain major German theologians were influenced by, rather than influencing, the Nazi regime? Christian Nationalism was the Christian worldview embraced by Third Reich German “Christians.”
What about theologian Thomas Oden’s historical research proving European theological development post-dated that of Africa’s Christians, despite the claims of some that White Europeans saved theology:
The growing theological wisdom of Leo the Great, Cassiodorus, and Gregory the Great emerged later on north Mediterranean shores many generations after African Christian teachers had already hammered out their basic terms. Western Christian dogma was formed with precision in Africa before it became ecumenically received worldwide. (How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind, p 47)
The challenge faced by some corners of American evangelicalism is whether any critique can come from outside the tribe or must all critique be the result of evangelical leaders themselves or their approved critics. Must every critic hold an ETS card and be a signer of the Chicago, Danvers, and Nashville Statements? Should academic historians—even believers—be kept at arm’s distance while a few politically aligned, self-styled sociology critics are invited to guard the theological gate?
The current crop of historians are not a busload of hardcore atheists sporting Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins pinups on their bedroom walls, nor are they flaming exvangelicals burning the Apostle Peter in effigy. By and large these historians are either professing Christians, are friendly to Christianity, or are merely committed to accurate history, no matter what the history shows. And, at the moment, they seem more willing to talk about what ails the patient than the patient is willing to hear. This is not to say that these or any historians are infallible or that every critique should be blithely accepted. It is to say they should not be blithely rejected.
What history-allergic tribalism misses is this: examining the fruit of a belief system is a biblical way to understand whether the system is what it claims to be. Rather than falling into No True Scotsman fallacies, all the fruit of American evangelicalism should be inspected, rather than moving along after a cursory glance for Bebbington in the root-ball. If history, including biblical history, has taught us anything at all it is this: access to (or even claiming) the Word of God does not always lead to right practices. Mosaic law in hand did not lead to Mosaic law in heart nor does propositional truth in the Word inexorably lead to righteousness. Idolatry always waits in the wings; even the demons believe and tremble.
Another danger of tribal thinking is accepting what comes from the tribe as true and everything else is likely flawed if not fatally so. To be sure, this can happen with any tribe even academic ones. But the broad-brushing of historians who are unearthing uncomfortable realities about evangelicals in America as enemies of a “Christian worldview,” having impure motives, or being drooling hordes of Antichrist is both unwise and unhelpful. Marsden levels his own critique toward evangelical movements, warning, “These forms of Christianity have almost always featured popular movements guided by marketing instincts…and they have often carried out those adaptations without a great deal of cultural self-criticism” (Evangelicals, p 283, italics added).
What if white evangelicals have—even inadvertently—accepted even a gram of white supremacy.** Shouldn’t they welcome treatment even if they are not particularly fond of the doctor’s bedside manner? If American Evangelicals have supported political policies that caused suffering and death in Central America, should they not welcome the evaluatory opportunity to support just policies in the future? Following the difficult conversations around Lausanne, John Stott warned, “We shall never attain to maturity in Christ if we find some nettles too painful to grasp or, if we grasp them, pretend they don’t sting when they do.”***
Perhaps it is time for judgment to begin at the house of God after all. And maybe, just maybe, the Judge is using a few historians to gather the exhibits for trial.
*– Jemar Tisby, “Are Black Evangelicals Christians?” from Evangelicals: Who They Have Been, Are Now, And Could Be, (edited by Noll, Bebbington, and Marsden), p 263.
**-Here’s Dr Anthea Butler’s correction of my wording.
**– John Stott, from foreward to The New Face of Evangelicalism: An International Symposium on the Lausanne Covenant, (edited by René Padilla), p 7.
fides quaerens intellectum
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