Why I Don’t Hate Evangelicals: Part I

We in the UU church have a low tolerance for evangelical Christians. In our intolerance, we tend to lump all orthodox Christians[1] into one category and then dismiss them as deluded and morally inferior. This means that evangelical Presbyterians are painted with the same brush as tent revivalists. We fail to make important distinctions and to see nuances that exist not only among individual Christians but also in broad groups of “evangelicals”. There is a word for ascribing negative characteristics to broad swaths of people – prejudice. We suffer from this type of prejudice and it gets expressed in the same way prejudice expresses itself in any other group – demonizing, fear mongering, “us versus them” thinking and so on. As always, the antidote to prejudice is understanding.

In the interests of full disclosure, I hold a Masters of Divinity from Fuller Theological Seminary (the intellectual center of the Evangelical left) and before “loosing my faith” in 1984 considered myself to be an Evangelical Christian. Much of what follows reflects my insider’s understanding of this from a relatively sophisticated level – I was at the heart of the intellectual engine of neo-evangelicalism and therefore keenly attuned to the nuances and differences within the conservative wing of Christian church in America. My current information is admittedly a bit out of date, but hopefully not so much so as to undermine the usefulness of this post and the next.

This blog entry will come in two parts. The first will trace the history of the evangelical movement in the United States and try to tease out a number of key components and lineages that help us to place the overall conservative religious movement in a broader context of religious history. The second will attempt to assess the evangelical movement from a perspective of human development by looking at social and cognitive lines of development and their interplay with belief systems.

So let’s start with a little history….

Evangelicalism

The strands of Evangelicalism in America has parallel but different roots. However, all of these strands trace their deepest roots to the Great Awakening of the 1730s and 40s. During that time, the Anglican Church in England was deeply entrenched and wedded to upper class interests. This was true both in England and the Colonies. The religion was largely civil and had become depersonalized in many respects. It was a sterile, intellectual faith that was articulated by a church which, by its very mandate, was an extension of the state. Against this backdrop arose the Methodist movement initiated by John Wesley. This movement emphasized personal experience of the divine, personal piety[2] and social justice. There was a strong emphasis in this movement on the notion of free will and the commitment (conversion) to the saving work of Christ. Soon another stream arose from the Calvinist tradition, represented by George Whitfield in England. Both of these movements swept through the urban lower classes. The Methodist movement in particular emphasized a keen interest in social change through the betterment of society. The Calvinist tradition (with its post-millennial [3] point of view) also believed in progress of humanity towards an eventual kingdom of God on earth in which justice and mercy would be available to all. These groups were far from separatist. They were deeply engaged in social reform and held deep convictions about the importance of social justice.

In the United States a Calvinist preacher, Jonathan Edwards, was preaching a message of personal conversion in Northampton Massachusetts which began to spread throughout the urban areas of the north. The movement swept the colonies in the 1730s and 40s through the work of both Wesley and Whitfield. among others. Much of this Great Awakening occurred in northern urban settings though Wesley rode into the south and found success there. These plantings of Methodists in the south lead to the second Great Awakening in the early 1800s primarily in the Appalachian region and tidewater states. This time the religious movement largely took the form the tent revival meetings and focused on personal conversion and personal piety (particularly abstinence – alcoholism on the frontier was epidemic).

The Third Great Awakening began in the 1850s and had a strong social gospel component. This was a largely urban movement spawned by opposition to slavery and then to the exploitation of labor and the excesses of the gilded age. It was largely populist in its message and post-millennial in it understanding (i.e. that Christ would return when peace and justice had been established throughout the earth). While many rural areas were touched by this movement, it was largely urban in its focus. The Universalist movement was an outgrowth of this time of religious ferment. (Note: See Jeff's comment for a well taken correction to this last sentence.)

Fundamentalism

Fundamentalism takes its name from a twelve volume series of essays entitled “The Fundamentals” published between 1910 and 1915. These essays reflected a number of specific tenets and advanced one important new belief. The main impetus of these essays was to affirm the validity of Christian scriptures in the face of Biblical criticism that had emerged in Germany and was beginning to be felt in England. These schools of criticism questioned the accounts of Biblical miracles based largely on reason and the scientific world view that had emerged in the Enlightenment. The Fundamentals were written as a defense against this “encroachment” of modernism. As such, these writings defended the inerrancy of scripture, the virgin birth, the substitutionary atonement and the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Infused into this concoction was a heavy dose of something that had been only peripheral in Christan dogma until that time. The Fundamentalists espoused pre-millennialism or the belief that Jesus would be returning to earth to set up an earthly kingdom sooner rather than later. This pre-millennialism held to a view that the world was on a dark path of increasing sin and degradation and would only be saved by the advent of Christ. This view was distinctly contrary to the entire history of Christianity in America (and indeed the most generally accepted doctrine of both Catholic an Protestant churches). Until this time, the dominant view had been post-millennial – the view that the world would, with the efforts of good Christian people – improve until it was worthy of Christ’s reign.

The post-millennial view had lead to deep commitments to social progress and reform. This pre-millennial view led, perhaps inevitably, to a very heavy dose of separatism. The leaders of the fundamentalism movement launched a two prong offensive against modernity. They attempted to fight it in the marketplace of ideas and they attempted to protect their flocks from its “dangers” by instituting a profound separation from secular society. The Scopes trial is perhaps the most famous initiative of the first effort. The social prohibitions (no dancing, no drinking, etc.) and imperatives to flee worldly pleasures was the most obvious manifestation of the second.
Early Fundamentalism was primarily a phenomenon of the south and of rural areas. The importance of this rootedness of Fundamentalism in rural, non-urban populations in Tidewater and Southern states cannot be overstated. Even today, the political divide in the United States is not between blue states and red states, but between rural America and urban America.

The Advent of Billy Graham

In 1949, Billy Graham held revivalist tent meetings in Los Angeles and struck a chord. The movement he started has been called by some the Fourth Great Awakening. Graham was, at the time, a fundamentalist. He had grown up in a Tidewater state but lived in an urban area. His family had been liberal Christians, but he himself was converted by an evangelist named Mordecai Ham from Kentucky. Ham could trace his spiritual lineage from Fundamentalism back to the Second Great Awakening. Graham, who had been raised in Charlotte, North Carolina, was able to take the message of fundamentalism and shape it to be heard by a new audience. While Graham himself was intellectually a pre-modern fundamentalist by religious confession, he was in every other important way a modernist. He understood corporate structures, was motivated by success and achievement (albeit for “God”) and was thoroughly comfortable with using the structures of the modern world for his ends. Unlike his fundamentalist forebears, he was not socially marginalized or inept. He proceeded to strip fundamentalism of its separatism, but retained the anti-intellectual and pietistic aspects. He poured pre-modern mythic religion into modern wineskins. As was true of the Second Great Awaking, Graham’s message was highly quietist – it spoke of personal salvation without a specific social agenda (except for vague patriotism and culturally inspired anti-communism). He borrowed much from the successful revivalist techniques but combined those with remarkable marketing and preaching skills. This combination managed to reach the growing hoards of post-war suburbia.

Thus a profound new force in American religious history came to the fore – the Evangelical – doctrinally conservative, highly pietistic, non-separatist and, most importantly, politically quietist. This largely suburban movement from the 1950s to the early 1970s was markedly apolitical. It stressed personal piety and conversion. While undoubtedly conservative on the whole, it did not espouse an overt political agenda. At the core of this movement was a belief that “saving” people by initiating personal conversion was the only thing that ultimately mattered. This required that individuals be “in this world, but not of it” and there was therefore a sense that one participated in society in order to save individuals.

And so in the 1960s, all major orthodox lineages in the United States could trace their roots to the First Great Awakening, but from there they fractured into four main streams:

• Politically active and socially assimilated liberal movements of
  mainline churches found in urban and suburban areas, (having been influenced by the
  Third Great Awakening and fundamentally modernist in their perspectives),
• Politically marginalized, socially separatist, highly pietistic fundamentalist churches found mostly in rural areas and in the deep south, (influenced by the Second Great Awakening and galvanized by the Fundamentalist Movement and deeply pre-modern in their perspectives),
• Politically quietist, socially assimilated and personally pietistic suburban churches, (who were pre-modern in their beliefs but modern in most other ways), and
• Politically liberal but socially oppressed and personally pietistic urban black churches (shaped mostly by oppression, but in part by the social gospel of the Third Great Awakening and the religious revivalism of the Second Great Awakening.)

The 1960s.

In the 1960s, post-modernism crashed into modernism and exploded in a way few cultural shifts have done in recent history. The importance of pluralism was reflected in the civil rights and feminist movements. The failures of capitalistic imperialism were reflected in opposition to the Vietnam War and the rise of the ecological movement. The culture wars were fully engaged. Those cultural creatives who embraced postmodernism moved to a progressive social agenda that admitted large scale change. Those who remained modernists were shell-shocked and huddled in suburbia (though suburbia ended up having its share of postmodernists as well). Those in rural America thought the modernists and postmodernists alike were at best crazy and at worst of the devil.

The Rise of the Christian Right

The Moral Majority came to the fore in 1978 with the rise of Jerry Falwell. Falwell had started Thomas Road Baptist church in the 1950s and had grown that church over the succeeding decades. As part of his work, he did a radio broadcast entitled “Old Time Gospel Hour". At first, this radio show was distinctly fundamentalist. It preached a separatist message and focused on personal conversion and piety. It was distinctly pre-millennial in its eschatology – emphasizing that the secular world would continue to deteriorate into sin until the eventual return of Christ.

However, Falwell was moving away from a purely fundamentalist perspective. (In the end, he renounced the term Fundamentalist and took on the label Evangelical). He was increasingly disquieted by the marginalization of fundamentalism and the separatism that spawned it. Seeing the tremendous evangelical inroads made into suburban American and also seeing a complete absence of political agenda, he realized that there was a tremendous vacuum in the movement Graham had inspired. (While himself politically conservative, Graham had assiduously avoided politicizing his movement – it was about saving individual souls be they white, black, Asian, American, Soviet, Republican or Democrat.)

From his fundamentalist roots in its original opposition to modernity and now post-modernity, Falwell saw the opportunity to capitalize on the religious faith of suburbia and fill the vacuum that had been created. He went on to interject a fundamentalist soco-political agenda that was, at its heart, aggressively anti-post modernist. It struck deeply at the relativistic moral value structures of post-modernity and pushed hard on the demographic that Billy Graham had created. However it scrupulously avoided offending modern sensibilities. ( This is reflected in Falwell's moving from "Old Time Gospel Hour" - a Fundamentalist title - to the "Moral Majority" - a distinctly modernist name.) This emergent created a new force in the religious landscape.

Suburban Christians, who had a pre-modern religious belief, were personally pietistic and socially assimilated with a modern political ideology but strongly opposed to post-modern pluralism were vulnerable to this move. This group was primed for political action – and the agenda of the Fundamentalist stream became one of all out assault on the post-modernist advances of the 1960s with a few of the old fundamentalist attacks on modernity thrown in for good measure. This rise of essential fundamentalism stripped of separatism and with a revived political mission provided the basis for the Christian Right. This movement has fed largely on the fact that suburbia sits pulled between the poles of urban and rural America and, because it holds the balance of political power between the two different world views held by those segments, it has had a profound impact on the partisan political balance of power. Falwell's understanding of this strategic importance made it his prime battleground against post-modernism.

It is this disproportionate influence coupled with the virulent anti-post-modernist agenda that concerns most UUs. If all of the suburban Christians simply believed in a mythic god and went quietly to their Bible studies on Wednesday night, we might write books on the virtues of atheism and the idiocy of faith, but we would not hate them so. However their fight against the post-modern political agenda is what raises our hackles and causes us deep concern. We are, to our bones, post-modernists and this assault threatens our most cherished beliefs.

It is interesting to note that the movement stands outside of the mainstream of the evangelical heritage in the United States. The Evangelicals of the First and Third Awakenings were profoundly progressive. These movements were rooted in urban movements that shaped the rise the liberalism in this country. What happened in the recent Culture War was a highjacking of this tradition by a southern revivalist movement with its roots in Fundamentalism which played on the shock and fears generated by a post-modern worldview and the inability of many in suburban America to assimilate that perspective. The modernists in America, those living in the suburbs, retreated in the face of the onslaught of post-modernism and sought something to “conserve” their sense of the world. For some, they regressed to take on pre-modern religious beliefs. Their fear and existential dread was exploited and turned into a virulent and aggressive anti-post-modern movement. This highjack of the Evangelical movement resulted in a huge confusion of the distinctions between Evangelicals and Fundamentalists as they had emerged historically. Indeed the leaders who coopted the Evangelical movement intentionally conflated those movements in very unfortunate ways. As a result, the landscape today is confusing. In the "Evangelical" movement we now have:

• Rural fundamentalists (those who have pre-modern beliefs, separate from the world and are not active politically)
• Rural evangelicals (those who have pre-modern beliefs, don’t separate from the world and are not politically engaged but are personally pietistic)
• Suburban fundamentalists (those who have pre-modern beliefs, seek not to live a lifestyle of modernity and are not active politically)
• Suburban Evangelicals (those who have pre-modern beliefs, live a modern lifestyle, tolerate post-modernity and are not active politically – think orthodox Presbyterians)
• Suburban Evangelical-Fundamentalists (those who have pre-modern beliefs, live a modern lifestyle, are actively opposed to post-modernity and are active politically – think anti-gay, anti-abortion, prayer in school charismatic and bible church types)
• Urban Evangelicals (pre-modern belief systems, personally pietistic, working on progressive political agendas – think black churches and groups like Sojourners)

What leaps out from this is that conservative political activism doesn’t seem inexorably tied to pre-modern belief systems. This strongly argues against the notion that it is the Christian belief structure that is motivating the conservative political activism. It is my contention that the Christian Right is more a function of sociological trends related to post-modern incursions on the social and belief structures of modernity than it is about religious ideology. Our "fight" is with one group of evangelicals - those who are Evangelical/Fundmentalists - and our fight is not about religious belief systems but the clash of post-modernism with the popular culture.

This shifts the “battleground of ideas” from one of religious perspectives to one of sociological development. It is my hope that, as UUs, as we come to understand the nuances of these various groups and the sociological forces in play, we will come to find more skillful means in addressing the real issues involved. Demonizing “evangelical Christians” paints the world with a very broad brush and causes us to miss the underlying dynamics of the forces at work. This makes us singularly ineffective. Indeed the spate of books that have come out in recent years decrying religious belief structures as the problem miss the point almost entirely. The problem is not one of intellectual belief but of the development of human consciousness as expressed in sociological development. The belief structures are a symptom or manifestation of this underlying issue of cultural development - not its cause. To think we can argue our way to sociological development by harranging people about their premodern belief systems makes about as much sense as harranging an 8th grader to do differential calculus. They simply aren't ready developmentally to hear it and will not hear it until they are. There are more skillful ways to address this although they don't allow for the same sense of self-righteousness. (This will be the subject of the second post.)

Interestingly, there is a growing movement of Suburban Progressive Evangelicals. This group has a pre-modern belief system, but a progressive social agenda involving stances that are anti-war, pro-environment, pro-human rights, pro-feminism, but also pro-life. This group is being led by people who understand the great traditions of American progressive religious thought pioneered in the First and Third Great Awakenings. They are attempting to build bridges with modern society and not engage in the destructive culture wars of the past forty years. they are actually our natural allies in changing cultural values - provided we can graciously allow them to continue to hold to a premodern belief structure. This group is proving remarkably flexible in allying itself with postmodern feminists and envirnonmentals to achieve joint political aims. We risk marginalizing this emergent group if cannot develop the tolerance to give them the space to intellectually hold the beliefs they hold.

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[1] I am differentiating orthodox from liberal and heterodox. An orthodox Christian, roughly speaking, would be one who would subscribe to the literal truth of the Nicene Creed (a benchmark of orthodoxy for both the Catholic and Protestant churches). Those who don’t believe the literal truth of this creedal statement would either be liberal (seeing the creedal statement as metaphor, archetype or meaning making myth) or heterodox (not believing one or two specific creedal statements to be true but ascribing literal truth to the remaining statements.
[2] By pietistic I mean committing to a lifestyle of personal integrity in line with scriptural injunctions and engaging in a strong devotional practice.
[3] The post millennial and pre-millenial views are extremely important to this discussion. Post-mileniallists believe that the church’s mandate is to create a just and equitable society (the Kingdom of God) on earth that will be fit for Christ to reign over. Pre-millenialists believe that Christ must come back to set straight a world lost in increasing sin and depravity. The post-millenial view has been the historic orthodox doctrine of the Catholic and virtually all mainline Protestant churches. Contrary to many assumptions, the pre-millenial view was not a force in Christian theology until the early 20th Century.

© 2008. Matthew Wesley. All rights reserved.