What’s Gone Wrong with Evangelicals? A Series.
Please note: I offer this series as a loving critique of my evangelical tribe. I remain an evangelical–albeit one in distress. There is a lot of good to say about my religious movement’s history as an early force for abolition, care for the indigent, children’s and women’s rights, conscientious objection to war, and social reforms. Today, evangelicals remain among the most generous donors to humanitarian causes. But over the last half-century, something terrible has happened to our movement, leaving it a belligerent, deleterious, and cynically politicized force in American life. In short, our movement has gone from salutary to toxic. I intend to examine that harmful phenomenon here, hoping to help my fellow believers find a path back to spiritual, ethical, and social wholeness.
Who Are American Evangelicals?
Based on the Greek word used in the early manuscripts of the New Testament, euangelion (pronounced oo-ahn-gay-lee-‘on, meaning “Good News“) the term “evangelical“ refers to the good news of God’s saving grace extended to those who accept it by professing Jesus Christ as their only Lord and Savior, and endeavoring to live a life that emulates His teachings. To be an evangelical, one does not need to belong to a certain church, religious organization, or denomination; it’s a matter of personal belief. Most evangelicals read certain verses in the Bible to mandate corporate worship and intimate fellowship with other believers, and failing to do so is strongly frowned upon. Still, it is not a prerequisite to living and identifying as an evangelical Christian.
The Big American Evangelical Picture
America’s 30-100 million Evangelicals (the number depends on how you identify them) are adherents of a religiously diverse revivalist movement rooted in Protestant Christianity, tracing our history back to the Great Awakening of the early nineteenth century. We emphasize personal faith, biblical authority, and active engagement in missions, evangelism, and international humanitarian relief efforts. Representing various non-denominational congregations, numerous denominations, and streams such as Baptists, Methodists, and Pentecostals, we reflect a wide demographic spectrum. However, the most influential group is overwhelmingly white, middle to upper-middle class, and socially and politically conservative. (As a progressive, I’m a real outlier!) Today, evangelical influence is significant in American society, especially regarding political engagement and cultural debates. Understanding our beliefs and history is crucial to grasping our role in shaping contemporary America. Explore more about evangelicals here.
Evangelicals: More About Consensus and Style Than Church Law
Evangelicals are “low church.“ We don’t have the “smells and bells“ of our Catholic, Orthodox, or mainline counterparts. This is evident in what our worship services look like and what guides and informs them. Many churches rely on liturgies, lectionaries, prayer books, creeds, confessions, and rubrics that direct the structure, content, timing, choreography, and length of a mass or prayer service. That’s not true for the vast majority of American evangelicals. In so many ways, we are liturgically improvisational.
Most evangelical congregations do use a more-or-less popular agenda for what we generally call a “worship service“:
- Opening prayer
- Praise and worship (singing of hymns and choruses)
- An offering (or “collection“ of contributions)
- A sermon (sometimes called a “message“ or “teaching”)
- An invitation to respond in some way (praying in place, kneeling at the altar, exiting to a side room for spiritual counseling), which often includes an appeal to accept Jesus Christ as one’s personal Lord and Savior
- Closing song and prayer
None of this is set in stone, though. A pastor or other church leaders can reorganize, abbreviate, extend, or set aside this agenda entirely, substituting something else.
Part of this flexible character is our being “non-creedal.“ Most evangelical churches do not recite or rely on ancient confessions of faith such as the Apostles’, Nicene, or Athanasian Creeds. Evangelical churches generally proclaim, “The Bible is our only rule for faith and practice.“
The Problem With the “Bible Only” Rule
The problem with claiming the Bible as your only statement of belief is that it contains 783,137 words—far too many to ever rehearse aloud in unison. It’s also a formidable challenge for anyone to read through the Bible’s 66 books. And, because evangelicalism has no centralized doctrinal authority, denominations, autonomous congregations, and even individual adherents get to interpret the Bible as they please.
And there is the rub—most evangelicals are not that biblically literate. The Southern Baptist publishing arm, Lifeway, found that less than half of regular church attendees routinely read their Bibles. Even if more did, they’d use one of 12 popular translations, some representing very different renderings of key passages.
An even greater failure, though, is the very little systematic Scripture or dogmatic study offered in evangelical churches. When such methodical approaches are present, they often reflect the bias of a particular movement, denomination, or even personality (celebrity “Bible teachers“ are prominent in American evangelical culture), which skews a student’s objective understanding of what the Bible says and what evangelicals practice when it comes to any given subject.
Over my nearly fifty years in evangelicalism, I’ve found that way too many believers approach the Bible and Christianity with preconceived ideas and cherry-pick passages to validate their already-held opinions—opinions formulated outside of biblical and even a Christian philosophy.
So, for the average evangelical Christian, it’s not what the Bible says that matters, but what we want it to say or believe it says. This makes all of us vulnerable to manipulation, exploitation, and deception, the consequences of which have historically been enormously damaging. Over the four centuries of evangelicalism on the American continent, we’ve used Scripture to justify all manner of heinous behavior, from beating wives and children to enslaving people of African descent to committing genocide against indigenous peoples.
“Not Understanding” May Be Better Than “Understanding”
The greatly admired German Nazi resister and martyr, Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer (a different kind of “evangelical”), reminds us, “The Scripture is a complex unity, and every word, every sentence, contains such a diversity of relationships to the whole that it is impossible always to keep track of the whole when listening to an individual portion of it. Therefore, it appears that the whole of Scripture as well as every passage in it far surpasses our understanding.“
This is a challenge for evangelicals. We never want to admit the Bible “surpasses our understanding.“ Yet, we have a tough time reconciling certain portions to other ones. The shortcut to resolving this is to force a reconciliation of texts, but this only distorts the sacred record.
I suggest there is a much better way—and the only way—to resolve this conflict is what I call the “Christ hermeneutic.“ Hermeneutic is a method for interpreting the meaning of a biblical text. The only way for Christians to discern the meaning and application of sacred writ is to view it through Jesus’ model, ministry, and message.
The implications of a Christ hermeneutic for today’s American evangelicals are enormously consequential–and the lack of it has been even destructive. I’ll address this point in my next post.
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