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The Evangelical Surprise

Interesting, in-depth article about the resistance within the larger Evangelical movement to the machinations of the Christian Right. Articles like this should serve to remind readers here that the Evangelical movement in Christianity is not a monolithic institution, and that it is very easy to tar more progressive Evangelicals with the brush of the Religious Right. Here's some excerpts from the article:

Pollsters and political scientists— who create the statistics we rely upon —define evangelicals as those Protestants who emphasize the authority of the Bible, salvation through a personal relationship with Jesus, and the need to share their faith with others. The definition is a vague one, and necessarily so, for there is no bright doctrinal line separating evangelicals from other Protestants, and the group is theologically diverse. For example, evangelicals include Pentecostals, who believe that the Holy Spirit continues to work miracles among us, as well as members of the Christian Reformed Church (which holds that "the biblical teachings of predestination and election give us comfort because they assure us that no one and nothing, not even our own bad choices, can snatch us out of God's hand"). The denominations include the sixteen-million-member Southern Baptist Convention, as well as numerous smaller groups such as the Mennonite Brethren, who are committed to nonviolence. But many evangelicals belong to nondenominational churches, and these range from fundamentalist groups with high doctrinal walls to "seeker" churches, which aim to attract people with little religious background and have low doctrinal requirements. Pollsters in fact differ in their classification of some churches, and they put African-American evangelicals in a separate category not only because they vote differently but because their religious traditions are different.

Mark A. Noll, a distinguished evangelical scholar, writes of evangelicalism as a set of impulses: "Biblicism," "conversionism" (the emphasis on "new birth" as a life-changing religious experience), "activism" (concern for sharing the faith), and "crucicentrism" (a focus on Christ's having redeemed mankind on the cross). "But these evangelical impulses," he writes, "have never by themselves yielded cohesive, institutionally compact, easily definable, well-coordinated, or clearly demarcated groups of Christians."[2] Further, evangelicals express these impulses in different ways. According to polls, some 60 percent are biblical literalists, who believe, for example, that God created the universe in exactly six days a few thousand years ago, and who insist that their interpretation of the Bible is the eternal and only true reading of it.[3]

The others believe, as most mainline Protestants do, that the Bible should be read in light of the rest of human knowledge and that its interpretation is not a simple matter. Evangelicals tend to be more active than mainline Protestants in their efforts to propagate their faith, and most of their churches support missions abroad. But many evangelicals are content with "lifestyle evangelism"—that is, setting an example of Christian behavior to others. If there is a single characteristic that sets pious evangelicals off from most mainline Protestants, it is surely the depth of their involvement with the supernatural: the sense they have that God is at work in the world all around them and speaking to them personally. "God wants me to do this," evangelicals say. "God told me."

Many mainline Protestants find much about evangelicals exotic—not least their tendency to speak as if only they were Christians. But then, evangelicals are closer to the historical roots of Protestantism in this country. Evangelicalism dates from the revivals of the mid-eighteenth century led by men such as Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley, and its key ingredients have not changed since then. For most of the nineteenth century, almost all American Protestants were evangelical Protestants, and their religion the dominant cultural force in the country.

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For many years now, Republican political strategists have counted on religious right activists to bring evangelicals to the polls for them. The Bush White House has assiduously courted their leaders,[7] and Republican contenders for the 2008 presidential election, among them former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, are now trying to do the same. In his last run for the presidency in 2000, John McCain called Falwell and Robertson "agents of intolerance"; last June he gave the commencement address at Falwell's Liberty University. "The Republican Party does not have the head count...to elect a president without the support of the religious right," Falwell said in 2004. McCain, among others, has clearly come around to this view.[8]

Republican politicians, in other words, have come to believe that the religious right speaks for most evangelicals—or, more precisely, that religious right activists will continue to bring the great majority of white evangelicals to the polls. If one message of last year's election was that moderate voters rejected Republicans in part because they adopted the extreme positions of the religious right, Republican strategists face something of a quandary. But are they correct in assuming that the religious right now represents evangelicals generally? Much about the political future turns on the answer to this question.

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During the past two years, a half-dozen prominent evangelicals have published books denouncing the religious right for what they said was its equation of morality with sexual morality, its aggressive intolerance, its confusion of church and state, and its unholy quest for political power. Some of the authors, like former president Jimmy Carter and Jim Wallis of Sojourners magazine, had already been dismissed by religious right leaders as liberals or "pseudo-evangelicals." But two of them, Reverend Gregory Boyd and Dr. Joel Hunter, were pastors of very large conservative churches, Boyd's in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Hunter's in Orlando, Florida.[10]

In his book, a collection of the sermons that he gave the year before— sermons that caused a fifth of his congregation to leave the church—Boyd challenges the idea that the United States was, and should be, a Christian nation. Taking his text from the gospels, he reminds evangelicals that Christ's kingdom was "not of this world" and that Jesus rejected Satan's offer to make him ruler of all the principalities and powers of the earth. There can be no such thing as a Christian nation, he argues, because worldly kingdoms are the domain of fallen man, and they are by their nature coercive. What do evangelicals mean, he asks, when they say they want to "take America back"? The Constitution says nothing about a Christian nation, and the United States never was one—certainly not in the days of slavery or in those of segregation and Jim Crow laws. Many evangelicals, he charges, confuse the power of the cross and the power of the sword, and many in the name of fulfilling biblical prophecy are "actively supporting stances that directly or indirectly countenance violence, possibly on a global scale." In Boyd's view, Christians should bear witness to injustice, as Jesus did, but they should not try to enforce "their righteous will on others."

Such polemics surprised many observers because in the past a sense of communal solidarity, or a fear of ostracism, had made public criticism of the right all but taboo among evangelicals. Yet for some years a number of centrist leaders have been expressing discontent with the right, some directly, but most by departing more or less radically from the right-wing agenda. Rich Nathan, for example, the senior pastor of the Vineyard Church of Columbus, Ohio—a megachurch not many miles from Russell Johnson's—preaches that the Christian message cannot be reduced to issues of sex or private morality, and that the emphasis should be on Jesus' teachings about the poor and about peace-making. "Our focus in this church is on racial reconciliation and issues of poverty," he told me. "The Vineyard association has 650 churches in this country, and you won't find any one of them that's not involved with the poor." Nathan believes that churches should stay out of politics—that they shouldn't campaign for candidates or lobby for legislation—but he speaks his mind on what he considers the moral issues. After the revelations of Abu Ghraib, he preached against torture, and last fall he called the Iraq war "a senseless slaughter" and asked how Christians can claim to follow the Prince of Peace and yet "be led so easily into war."[11]