There is No Post-Evangelicalism

Evangelicalism as a Movement, An Institution, An Undercurrent, A Livable Problem

On why evangelicalism-as-border-wars limits our view of the issue. Due to work obligations, this will be the only essay this week. We’ll resume with John Cassian next week.

There is Only The Network

As a theological entity, evangelicalism has been criticized most recently as a series of gatekeeping ventures, insular spaces in which male leaders create little fiefdoms. To be sure, these descriptions have truth: insofar as there are networks that elevate some figures, which create proteges in their own image, evangelicalism is guilty as charged. For every John Piper bidding Rob Bell farewell, there is Rob Bell packing up his surfboard for the coast.

The question, however, is whether this is the core feature of evangelicalism. Regardless of how one tells the origin story, evangelicalism is a British innovation, a 17th century development from Reformation pietists, or perhaps some kind of subset of the American Great Awakening. But that it has multiple entry points to the story is part of what constitutes evangelicalism not as a series of interlocking gates, but as a network.

Evangelicalism’s defining features, as described by the classic work of David Bebbington organizes around four marks which are, importantly, always in motion: the authority of Scripture, conversion, a theology centered in the cross, and activism. These four marks together offer a hermeneutic (the authority of Scripture read cruciform) which comes into focus with its emphasis on conversion and mission. But these four features are living marks, subject to debate and interpretation: for every John Stott, there is an Orlando Costa, for every Billy Graham, a Jim Wallis.

As such, evangelicalism begins not a series of gates, but as water moving around.

There is no Dana, only Zuul. There is no firm institution, only the ethos.

Let’s consider two different examples here. If one looks to a historically older version of evangelicalism—to the ethos underlying the Great Awakening—what becomes immediately apparent is that evangelicalism has always been something of a moving target. Churches came alongside the insurgent revivalism happening during the 18th and 19th century, but notably, ecclesial and institutional frames did not create the revivals. Rather, an evangelical ethos became infused in the institutional ones already present. If we shift our gaze to a more recent iteration—that of the Billy Graham era of the mid-20th century—a similar phenomenon appears. Graham’s revivals were attended and participated in by numerous churches and traditions, but the revivals themselves were their own thing. They were not properly institutional extension, but infused any number of institutional bodies.

After the revivals became more prominent, however, evangelicals began founding institutions to capture the evangelical ethos: Wheaton College, Fuller Theological Seminary, Christianity Today, parachurch ministries such as Intervarsity and Campus Crusade. That these parachurch entities were all birthed at the same time as evangelicalism—as a theological movement—was emerging provokes a number of interesting question, but for our purposes, it highlights one important point: evangelical as a movement, as a mood or an ethos precedes evangelicalism as an institutional reality.

And so, when evangelicalism is described as an institutional reality or as a gatekeeping phenomenon, it should immediately strike us that—for better or worse—evangelicalism creates institutions to preserve an ethos, but that the institutions themselves are alien to evangelicalism in an important way. By emphasizing, as Bebbington does, evangelicalism as a hermeneutic which gives rise to particular actions, evangelicalism is always in search of a home, but is not itself the home.

In this sense, evangelicalism cannot have a “post”, because the influence, institutional shape, and additional commitments of evangelicalism beyond the core ones of 1) personal conversion and 2) cruciform hermeneutics of Scripture remain undefined. It’s why both Jim Wallis and Billy Graham could lay claim to the mantle, in that both lived in those waters, and though their institutional form was different (Christianity Today v. Sojourners), this was always going to be the way this story went. One could claim, as with Wallis, to be taking the cross seriously when advocating more strongly for social transformation, as could Graham when speaking of the need for heart transformation first with social transformation a nebulous after-effect.

You Never Get Over Evangelicalism

Insofar as one wishes to distance yourself from the current institutional forms and networks of evangelicalism, that’s certainly fine to do. But it’s akin to saying that one prefers to go to the Florida beaches instead of the Everglades: the water is always the thing, even if the form that water takes is different. That the institutional forms operate in boys’ clubs or in insider-outsider networks is what happens when an ethos existing as an ethos is channeled into a long-term sustainable form of an institution: the center will inevitably give birth to other centers and to other institutions.

That we are seeing struggles over the identity of historic evangelical entities like Christianity Today, Fuller Seminary, or Wheaton College is, on this reading, part of the deal. Their changes cannot be read as “falling away” or as “deviation” but as what happens when the ethos of evangelicalism begins to configure its marks differently. It’s no fault to say that Wallis isn’t truly evangelical, but rather than Sojourners has always understood personal conversion to happen through social transformation, and likewise, that Graham understood personal conversion happens before social transformation. But when these two configurations exist in the same institutional house, the sparks will fly.

But, again, this is just what evangelicalism does. Institutions are containers here, not the generators of meaning. Turf wars which conflate the fluidity of the ethos with the not-so-fluid nature of the institution are where you get something like a John Piper v. Rob Bell, and it’s how Bell can just move on to start a new network, and how in time, both networks will struggle with their own internal crisises of identity and purpose.

This fluidity is not something that I think you can actually get away from now, though: whether one leaves a more identifiably evangelical church for a more identifiably denominational one neglects how evangelicalism is always and ever finding homes in new denominational spaces precisely because it’s an ethos and not an institution. It is, in a very real way, inseparable from the water which is drawn up into every church now, and I remain skeptical as to whether or not there’s a thick version of church which could be removed from it. I’m all for thick ecclesial identities, in which our theological reasoning, ethics, and common life are ordered around a shared vision; it’s another thing to suggest that a church outside this ethos—which found its way into every corner of the Christian world, except for arguably the Orthodox—could be possible.

This is obviously a big claim, and one subject to great scrutiny. I welcome a more careful examination of this, but I don’t think that I’m wrong, insofar as the major denominations which have birthed new versions of themselves in the last twenty years have done so broadly because of the dynamics which evangelicalism put front and center: ACNA, the ECO Presbyterians, Evangelical Lutherans, new iterations of Baptists—the list goes on here¹.

The Question You Live With

It’s here that I propose a simple solution to the question of evangelicalism: stay put. If there is nothing outside the common water which Christian shared, and if that water is deeply infused with evangelical presumptions—such that it positively and negatively shapes what Christianity there is—the way forward is not out, but through².

If there is no outside, then stay put. Deepen the readings of Scripture from within where you are. Trade in purely private devotional practices for ones which are shared, informed and rooted in God’s movement across time. Work with leadership to introduce deliberations which patiently and slowly draw from the wisdom of Scripture, the teachings of the faith across time, and the charity of other Christians in other fields. To be sure, there is place for departure when the community has become abusive or heretical, but as I’ve written here before, we have to bring down the rhetoric about both such topics. For the most part, the way is through.

To sum up, if evangelicalism just is a movement, then that movement and its ethos are always already with us. In this way, there can be no “post” or “ex” evangelicalism, and arguments about gatekeepers are simply beside the point of what’s at stake. For wherever you go, the articulations and commitments of evangelicalism—the personal commitment, social transformation, taking the Bible “seriously” and reading it through the cross—have infused the waters³. That evangelicalism has become a politically unintelligible term is not to say that its theological ethos is ultimately false, even if it has its own problems. In any event, trying to distance ourselves because of politics is, I think, an evasion of the question. That there is scandal in the associations of evangelicalism is true. I wonder, though, if trying to avoid the scandal just negates that which is true about the scandalous, in ways which are both impossible and undesirable.

1. I am unpersuaded that this is strictly a Protestant problem, though describing it within Catholicism and charismatic groups would require more time: the family resemblances are different enough that it requires parsing out how charismatic movements within Catholicism are related to evangelical impulses, or how those moving into Catholicism do so because of evangelical dynamics regarding Scripture, personal conversion, etc.

2. It’s here that the “exvangelical” motif finds itself running out of whatever gas it had as well. Many have noted that the habits by prominent exvangelicals are precisely evangelical ones: apologetic tactics against evangelical doctrine, reasoning from Scripture, appeal to personal experience, an aim toward social reform. The ends which are sought change, but the ethos is the same. As with post-evangelicalism, I have no interest in discussing “exvangelicalism”, except that I think both confuse the ethos with institutions, the function with the form, and in thinking they are leaving the house are just entering a different room.

3. These are, it is true, not particular to evangelicalism, but these are found (in the form that evangelicalism describes them) in far flung places. That Methodists and Presbyterians argue about the relation between personal identity and social transformation, or that Catholics have controversy about readings of Scripture, brought in through those influenced by evangelicalism as a movement, is part of my point here.