David Brooks:

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.)

From George Hunsinger’s 1980 essay, “Karl Barth and the Politics of Protestant Sectarianism” (emphasis added):

There is an important sense for Barth in which the church is not to be seen as more sanctified than the world, nor the world as less sanctified than the church. The church shares with the world a solidarity in both sin and grace. This inclusive solidarity meant that Barth found what the church had in common with the world to be always more fundamental than any polarity which might arise on the basis of the church’s human response to Jesus Christ.

Or, as Hunsinger quotes it in Barth’s own words:

[The church] manifests a remarkable conformity to the world if concern for its purity and reputation forbid it to compromise itself with it. . . . As distinct from all other circles and groups, the community of Jesus Christ cannot possibly allow itself to exist in this pharisaical conformity to the world. Coming from the table of the Lord, it cannot fail to follow his example and to sit down at the table with the rest, with all sinners.

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I often ask myself why a “Christian instinct” often draws me more to the religionless people than to the religious, by which I don’t in the least mean with any evangelizing intention, but, I might almost say, “in brotherhood.”
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer –

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Something I intend to reread this year is James Davison Hunter’s To Change the World. I was very late in reading it, but few books have more perfectly and fairly summarized—by the second chapter alone—my entire experience of “evangelical” political engagement. And Hunter’s early description of evangelical politics could not have closed with a more simple, accurate critique: “This account is almost wholly mistaken.”

This has been the ever-increasing sense for me over the past 10 years (again, late to the party): that what I have usually been shown/sold as Christian civic duty is almost entirely a sham.

Hunter:

Though the tactics have expanded to include worldview and culture more broadly, the logic at work—that America has been taken over by secularists, causing harm to America and harm to the church, that it is time to “take back the culture” for Christ through a strategy of acquiring and using power is identical to the longstanding approach of the established Christian Right. The leading edge of such initiatives is still one of negation. To use words and phrases like “enemy,” “attack,” “drive out,” “overthrow,” “eradicate the Other,” “reclaim their nations for Christ,” “take back” influence, “compel, “occupying and influencing [spheres] of power in our nations,” “advancing the kingdom of God,” and so on, continues to reflect the same language of loss, disappointment, anger, antipathy, resentment, and desire for conquest. This is because the underlying myth that defines their identity, their goals, and their strategy of action has not changed. The myth continues to shape the language, the logic, and script for their engagement with culture. Circumstances might change as might the players, but if the myth that underwrites the ideal of Christian engagement does not change, then very little has changed at all.

Probably no question than this is more prescient for “evangelicals” right now: How do we change the myth?

For Christian believers, the call to faithfulness is a call to live in fellowship and integrity with the person and witness of Jesus Christ. There is a timeless character to this all that evokes qualities of life and spirit that are recognizable throughout history and across cultural boundaries. But this does not mean that faithfulness is a state of abstract piety floating above the multifaceted and compromising realities of daily life in actual situations. St. Paul, in Acts 13:36, refers King David having “served God’s purposes in his own generation.” This suggests, of course, that faithfulness works itself out in the context of complex social, political, economic, and cultural forces that prevail at a particular time and place.

To that effect, Michael Gerson recently offered a brief analysis, lament, and general way forward, one that seems to me both timeless and, to some extent, specific to our own generation. And it’s one that fits well into what Hunter calls “affirmation and antithesis” (or what I call incarnation and cultivation qua witness):

There is a perfectly good set of Christian tools to deal with situations such as these: remorse, repentance, forgiveness, reformation.

The collapse of one disastrous form of Christian social engagement should be an opportunity for the emergence of a more faithful one. And here there are plenty of potent, hopeful Christian principles lying around unused by most evangelicals: A consistent and comprehensive concern for the weak and vulnerable in our society, including the poor, immigrants and refugees. A passion for racial reconciliation and criminal justice reform, rooted in the nonnegotiable demands of human dignity. A deep commitment to public and global health, reflecting the priorities of Christ’s healing ministry. An embrace of political civility as a civilizing norm. A commitment to the liberty of other people’s religions, not just our own. An insistence on public honesty and a belief in the transforming power of unarmed truth.

This seems quite obviously right to me, and it seems very closely related to Hunter’s “theology of faithful presence.” But there is one problem with it. Hunter points out in his book what Peter Berger calls “plausibility structures”: the social conditions that make certain beliefs credible and intelligible to a person who holds them.

Right now the bulk of the evangelical vox populi, at least among white evangelicals, is dominated by a plausibility structure that bears very little if any resemblance to a Christ-like social/political engagement. Put simply: remorse, repentance, forgiveness, and reformation are not its hallmarks, if they even make the fine print anymore. Shamelessness, self-assurance, retribution, subversion—these seem to make up the new quadrilateral for “evangelicals.”

I truly do not know a way to change this, and if I’m being honest, I’ve given up trying to find it. My own plausibility structure for Christian faith consists, in part, of a small handful of friends, a list of which I could count on one hand. The rest is almost entirely made up of books by authors who, if they’re even still alive, I have never met or spoken with and who almost no one else I know reads. (These include George Hunsinger, Mark Noll, Gilbert Meilaender, Miroslav Volf, Marilynne Robinson, Frederick Buechner, Flannery O’Connor, Christian Wiman, Alan Jacobs, and David French to name a few.)

More than anything, these folks seem to me to see their role as Christians not as promoting some ethic or denouncing another, but as primarily seeking to display God’s faithful presence in Jesus. As Hunter describes it:

Pursuit [of], identification [with], the offer of life through sacrificial love—this is what God’s faithful presence means. It is a quality of commitment that is active, not passive; intentional, not accidental; covenantal, not contractual.

Hunter also points out, in at least a partial echo of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together, that “we must be fully present to each other within the community of faith and fully present to those who are not.” I’m no expert on Bonhoeffer, but it seems like in his later years he was more focused on the second half of that objective.

If the “community of faith” seems more intent on loving itself—while, of course, it fights valiantly against its (often self-created) enemies in the (often self-created) culture war—then are Christians justified in, to some extent, turning their backs on the church—or, less dramatically, turning their attention from it— in order to live among and love those “outside” the community of faith—to “affirm” their neighbors while living out the “antithesis”?

I don’t know the answer to that question, but it’s where I’m at.

Garry Wills in 1990 (first three lines are from Milton’s “Lycidas”):

The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,

But, swoll’n with wind and the rank mist they draw,

Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread…

The problem with evangelical religion is not (so much) that it encroaches on politics, but that it has so carelessly neglected its own sources of wisdom. It cannot contribute what it no longer possesses.

John Halldorf:

It seems like churches that are at arm’s length from power and the cultural mainstream are in a better position to develop the Christian virtue of hospitality. As a majority religion intertwined with the state, Christianity often becomes more rigid, less hospitable, and at times hostile—even to other Christian minorities. Pluralism is seen as a threat, since it might mean that Christianity will lose its privileged position. In contrast to this, a minority can never expect to set the rules for any encounter. Instead they must find ways to negotiate and live with difference. Accordingly, they become well equipped to live as a creative minority in a pluralistic society.

This explains why Swedish evangelicals are less threatened by immigration, pluralism, and the growth of Islam than are their US evangelical counterparts, to say nothing of the Swedish secular majority. To a minority, pluralism is not the big threat. In this case, diversity is a step up from the traditional homogenous secular-Lutheran society. It levels the playing field, and makes clear that there is no neutral ground, only competing perspectives. The development of what Jürgen Habermas called the post-secular society is a welcome development to a minority. Swedish evangelicals are aware that any attempt to homogenize the culture would marginalize them.

Wesley Hill is one of those extraordinary writers whose words always manage to inspire. Even the use of a word like “exvangelical”—a word that I’m a little too excited to add to my vocabulary—becomes an opportunity for genuine insight, for the encouragement of a critical thought life that is always also longing for and returning to its “naive” faith. From his recent essay on the novels of Chaim Potock:

Even so, the Evangelical faith in which I was nurtured continues to beguile, inspire, and compel me in ways I am still discovering. I can’t be the Christian I used to be, but I want still, very much, to be a Christian. Potok’s characters help me understand my complicated feelings. They are not only interested in the deconstructive moment, in which childhood certainties are relinquished. They strive also for the chastened second naiveté, on the far side of the desert of criticism, that will make it possible for them to go on being faithfully Jewish.

The eighteenth-century aphorist G. C. Lichtenberg says there is “a great difference between believing something still and believing it again.” The novels of Chaim Potok show us what the latter looks like, and in doing so, make believers like me feel much less alone.

“He who has ears let him hear.” With that admonition, a Christian leader in the region of central Maine (who shall remain nameless) recently posted a link to a call for churches to defy government mandates, which comes from John MacArthur and the elders at Grace Community Church. Putting aside the fact that, according to said leader, this 2000-word blog post is too lengthy for most of us and too truth-laden for anyone but the elect to appreciate, and putting aside the cringe-worthy problem of equating “what the Spirit says to the church” with what is, despite MacArthur’s disclaimer, ultimately a defense of the First Amendment masquerading as biblical authority, and also putting aside the enormously problematic argument from MacArthur that government limits on large gatherings “in principle” prevent the church from being the church—I see little connection between anything MacArthur says and the scripture he references; and I see no connection between the scripture he references and our current situation. None.

I don’t deny that there can be problems with government mandates. Nor do I deny that the church “must obey God rather than men.” But what that obedience looks like and what it requires of us as citizens is not easy to nail down, and certainly hasn’t, to my understanding, been well represented here by MacArthur. I also affirm the truth of every verse MacArthur links to. But as I see it, these scriptural passages, rather than being representative proofs, seem more than a little politically abused and parenthetically imprisoned on the page: open them up and they fly far, far away from MacArthur’s exhortation, as the context of Acts 5:29 alone should suffice to show.

Perhaps most alarmingly, MacArthur makes a point of saying that “the Lord may be using these pressures as means of purging to reveal the true church.” Maybe. It could very well be a chance to reveal the “true church.” Who knows. But if it is, I highly doubt that the litmus test will be the refusal of the true church to consider public health (i.e. love of neighbor) over its accustomed form of “worship.” More likely, the reason will be that the true church knows how to meet and to worship and to serve its Lord outside of a building, and it will likely be too concerned with emulating the true spirit of Christ in the world to be very concerned with signing some confused petition or to complain about the church’s “right” to meet in large, medium, or small numbers.

That said, I think this response from Jonathan Leeman is eminently (if not excessively) gracious. I really do envy the humility in his grammatical voice and his meekness in simply saying, “Four things are worth mentioning.” They are. And they are certainly worth reading, which is more than I can say for MacArthur’s clarion call.