Then there is the way partisan politics has swamped what is supposed to be a religious movement. Over the past couple of decades evangelical pastors have found that their 20-minute Sunday sermons could not outshine the hours and hours of Fox News their parishioners were mainlining every week. It wasn’t only that the klieg light of Fox was so bright, but also that the flickering candle of Christian formation was so dim.
Supposed to be a religious movement. Good thing for those accused, “it’s a relationship not a religion,” and, ipso facto, they cannot be guilty as charged.
But seriously, this is a thoroughly insightful article, both encouraging and discouraging to read. However, I’m going to be nit-picky just to make a few points, if only for my own sake and my sake’s clarity.
In 2020, roughly 40 percent of the people who called themselves evangelical attended church once a year or less, according to research by the political scientist Ryan Burge. It’s just a political label for them. This politicization is one reason people have cited to explain why so many are leaving the faith.
I have no idea what point Brooks thinks he’s making here. Politicization at large is a problem, yes. But people are not leaving the “evangelical” church because of the term’s political label for those who don’t attend. Much “ink” is utilized acknowledging the non-churchgoing who identify as evangelical. I 99% do not give a shit about this statistic—or, 99% of the time it’s talked about, at least. One thing I have not seen get much attention (though perhaps I’m not reading widely enough) is the way that churchgoing, praise-Jesus, never-late-for-Sunday-worship white evangelicals are exactly the same as the non churchgoing evangelicals. I don’t think this is what Brooks is doing here—in fact, I think his point throughout the article is the right one—but this particular statistic, while valuable from certain historical and political points of view, makes it seem as though “evangelicals” who don’t go to church are spoiling the name. They are not. And every single time this statistic is brought up in the context of evangelical deconstruction, or whatever, it is a complete distraction from the point. I know it seems relevant, but I have yet to figure out how, at least for anything but election polls or historical uses of the term. People leaving church, if they are anything like me, do not care about either of those. They care, among many other things, to be sure, that the very same people who taught them the faith—who still presume to teach them the faith—told them Bill Clinton was unfit for office and that they were foolish (if not demonically oppressed) for denouncing Donald Trump. The faith that produces that kind of disparity is doomed, or ought to be. Period.
Here’s another somewhat confusing use of statistics:
Roughly 80 percent of white evangelical voters supported Trump in 2020. But it is often a minority of this group who spark bitter conflicts and want their church to be on war footing all the time.
Again, I’m not sure what Brooks is saying with this, since he doesn’t seem to do anything with his own point here. (I love reading him, but much of Brooks’s writing has a certain “stream of thought,” but very readable, flow, making his paragraphs read like excerpts from another piece.) I know these people exist, but I can think of only one person I know who actively advocates for an ecclesial war footing. And again, I don’t think I’m disagreeing with anything Brooks is ultimately saying, but it seems to me that the extremes he calls a “minority,” and whatever disproportionate clout they carry, are not the problem in the hearts of those who are leaving. People can say what they want about a two-party system, but there is a dizzyingly pervasive binary aspect to politics that insists on its own importance. The “church,” by definition, exists outside of this binary—or is supposed to. In other words, there is a political spectrum within the white evangelical church which it is wrong to be anywhere on. The problem is not from a battle-ready group that sparks bitter conflict. It’s that so many have shown a near complete inability to “speak out clearly and to pay up personally.” And at this point, that characteristic inability has attached itself to so many different personality types that it has nearly become the definition of evangelicalism itself.
I would also add—and I could be way off here—that this seems like a time for quiet, steady-state hupomoné, not church planting. I’m a little surprised that that even made Tim Keller’s list for renewal. Again, I could be way off. But a focus on x,000 new church plants per year strikes me as business as usual for the activism of American evangelicalism. Better for now to abide, endure. As Karl Jaspers put it:
The truly real takes place almost unnoticed, and is, to begin with, lonely and dispersed. . . . Those among our young people who, thirty years hence, will do the things that matter are, in all probability, now quietly biding their time; and yet, unseen by others, they are already establishing their existences by means of an unrestricted spiritual discipline.
Personally, I don’t see as much cause for hope as Brooks manages to find, though I hope he is right. And I certainly hope that “in the decades ahead the American church is going to look more like the global church.” In the meantime, I do see a fair amount of quietly-brewing faith under the surface of things. That’s what I’m keeping my eyes and ears open for, anyway. (And nose. The sense of smell is a completely underrated spiritual sense these days.)