What's Wrong With Contemporary Evangelicalism?

KEVIN HARRIS: Bill, I had a lot of people send me this article from The Atlantic, and saying, You guys have just got to talk about this. This is an article[1] from Michael Gerson, who was a speechwriter for George W. Bush. He was named by Time magazine as one of the 25 most influential evangelicals in America. He graduated from Wheaton College. I know that some of that immediately gets your attention. A couple of things here that I think deserve your comment. He gives, I think, an interesting brief history on evangelicalism in America, and he goes all the way back to early America. He says most evangelicals were largely postmillennialist and he indicates that then seemed to make them more positive because they’re working for a better world and the world is gonna get better and better and Christ will come back, rather than premillennial which is the world’s going to get worse and worse and worse and worse and then Jesus is going to come back. He seems to lament that we were initially postmillennial but then premillennialism came in and it had a demoralizing effect. Do you think that that’s true?

DR. CRAIG: I’m very skeptical of this claim. This article is a sort of rant, if you will, against contemporary evangelical subculture and politics. It’s not documented well with any sort of proof or evidence. It’s just Gerson’s assertions, and one of these assertions is that premillennialism leads to a decline in social activism because Christ is coming again soon and so why work to help the world become a better place? He says, “social activism was deemed irrelevant to the most essential task: the work of preparing oneself, and helping others prepare, for final judgment.” I’m very skeptical of this claim. I would love to see a sociological study published in a peer-reviewed journal that documents that premillennials are, as a group, less concerned about social issues than postmillennials are. I am very skeptical that any such study would be forthcoming.

KEVIN HARRIS: He says that the Civil War kind of took the air out of the utopian view of the postmillennialism. Then he mentions another movement came along – the higher criticism of the Bible out of Germany. I guess he’s saying that this kind of caused a knee-jerk reaction among fundamentalists. Bill, you know all about this higher criticism that came out of Germany.

DR. CRAIG: This is biblical criticism that came out of Germany and against which certain persons reacted in defending biblical inspiration and inerrancy against the attacks of the higher critics. At the end of the 19th century these higher critics could be extremely radical. German critics like Bruno Bauer denied that the historical Jesus ever even existed, the Gospel of John was dated at some time in the second century. Many of these claims of the 19th century biblical critics have now been exposed as false and the Gospels are today once again taken as serious historical sources for the life of Jesus. So while there certainly was the threat and cultural influence of this nascent higher criticism of the Bible, that’s not to say that the higher critics were right.

KEVIN HARRIS: He says that he thinks that evangelicalism was a better movement in that it was more widely accepted then but then after postmillennialism kind of went away and higher criticism came in there was a knee-jerk reaction to that including some firings at seminaries.

DR. CRAIG: The theory of evolution he mentions.

KEVIN HARRIS: All these things began to cause a retreat of evangelicalism back into more fiery fundamentalism.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. I think here his narrative lacks nuance and could certainly be called into question. It is true that in the early part of the 20th century that the primary educational institutions in our country became secularized and the evangelical Christians were forced to retreat and found their own seminaries like Westminster, for example, leaving places like Princeton and elsewhere.[2] That’s certainly true that there was that secularization that took place on the academic level from which we are still struggling to recover. But I don’t agree with his narrative on the popular level. According to Kenneth Scott Latourette, the great Yale church historian, in his multi-volume series on A History of the Expansion of Christianity, in fact Christianity during the days of the American frontier was a minority movement and it was not until following World War I and then World War II that evangelicalism really became a prominent belief that was held by large numbers of people. I noticed that Gerson himself mentions that at the same time that these schools were retreating from the public institutions that he says the country was actually becoming less secular and more welcoming of religious influence. He gives a statistic: the church membership in 1920 in the US was 43 percent; by 1960 it was 63 percent, and it’s continued to go up since then. So there’s something funny going on in this article that isn’t giving us the full story here. It’s true that there was a retreat from academia and the intellectual life in these public institutions, but it’s not true that fundamentalism or evangelical Christianity became hunkered down in its own bunker without increasing its numbers and influence.

KEVIN HARRIS: Because he’s saying on the one hand that the evangelicals seem to be in exile and then on the other hand there’s this church memberships exploding. I mean it’s accepted everywhere in the 1950s, 1960s – if anything, flourishing. And yet I guess he’s saying that that is going to start going away because of the intellectual retreat.

DR. CRAIG: Well, one of the things that he doesn’t mention, and I would like to see addressed, would be the distinction between the old mainline denominations like the Presbyterians and the United Methodists and the Episcopalians and the Catholics as opposed to these evangelical denominations like the Southern Baptists and the Church of the Nazarene and Christian churches and free Methodists and so forth. He blames the current decline in Christian influence on the waning of evangelicals. I noticed that near the end of his article he says, “More than a third of Millennials say they are unaffiliated with any faith, up 10 points since 2007. Count this as an ironic achievement of religious conservatives: an overall decline in identification with religion itself.” That is very misleading. When you look at the statistics on religious affiliation released by the Pew Research Foundation, what you discover is that there has been a virtual collapse in these liberal mainline denominations. They are bleeding membership. Their seminaries are closing or coalescing. It is the mainline churches that have collapsed in recent years. They are the ones that are to blame for the decline in the identification with religion itself. At the same time, the percentage of evangelicals in the American population has remained constant. The absolute numbers of evangelicals are growing or kept pace with the population growth in the United States. The percentage of the US population has remained roughly constant in contrast to these liberal denominations. So I think Gerson needs to take account of the fact that these liberal denominations which have embraced things like higher criticism, evolutionary theory, social justice, and all the other causes dear to his heart, these are the ones that are losing membership and becoming more and more irrelevant in American culture and are to blame for the increasing secularization of American culture.[3] As these mainline culturally dominant churches of the 50s have lost their place of influence and importance in the United States, the country has drifted more and more into a secular mode, and the best hope for renewal is that the evangelical churches will continue to grow and will eventually take the place of these mainline denominations as the principal spokespersons for Christianity in our culture.

KEVIN HARRIS: Some of these big churches seem to be nondenominational, though.

DR. CRAIG: Yes, very much so. I think part of the reluctance of the younger generation is a reluctance to affiliate with specific denominational labels, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t believe in God or that they don’t pray or even believe in Christ. I remember we saw a statistic in one of our earlier podcasts that there was a significant percentage of “nones” who believe in hell, which makes no sense at all if you think that these “nones” are atheists.

KEVIN HARRIS: There’s a confusion, too, about who the “nones” are. Some of them are theists and even Christians who were just not affiliated with a particular denomination.

DR. CRAIG: Right.

KEVIN HARRIS: Anyway, he says something kind of interesting here. In the middle of page three he says because of all these things – the Scopes trial, and then he comes all the way up to the sexual revolution which put a big damper on things – he says,

In a remarkably free country, many evangelicals view their rights as fragile, their institutions as threatened, and their dignity as assailed. The single largest religious demographic in the United States—representing about half the Republican political coalition—sees itself as a besieged and disrespected minority. In this way, evangelicals have become simultaneously more engaged and more alienated.

That, I have to say, I kind of see that phenomena. There’s always a complaint on conservative talk radio about how oppressed we are. He’s saying, no, that’s not the case. We live in a free country, and you guys have incredible political power. Why are you having this persecution complex?

DR. CRAIG: Well, because religious liberty is often threatened by court decisions. One of my good friends at Talbot School of Theology has a wife who is a wonderful cake maker. Her wedding cakes and so forth are artistic creations, not just something to eat. She had to close her business because she didn’t want to engage the danger of any kind of suits that would be brought against her by same-sex couples who would want a wedding cake which she in good conscience could not make. Similarly, photographers who don’t want to go to these same-sex ceremonies and take photographs. Wedding photographers have been fined thousands of dollars for not doing that. Remember the Little Sisters of the Poor, the group of nuns, was being forced by the government to offer contraceptive care in opposition to their beliefs until they won the case. The fact is that the preservation of religious liberty in American society today is something that needs to be fought for and not just assumed. You can’t just take it for granted or you will find that it has been taken away by some court decision while your back was turned.

KEVIN HARRIS: I hear that. I see that. I’m wondering what America or what evangelicalism Michael Gerson is looking at when he says that.

DR. CRAIG: He himself, in his own article, which is a kind of screed against evangelical subculture, I think does say that evangelicals are alienated and disrespected. Right? He says that – that the culture looks down on evangelicals as buffoons and so forth. So if evangelicals see themselves as a disrespected minority and alienated then their perceptions are correct, according to Gerson’s own article. So what’s the problem?

KEVIN HARRIS: Yeah, and then he says that we’re all seen as having a,

. . . public voice, which can be off-puttingly apocalyptic. “We are on the verge of losing” America, proclaims the evangelical writer and radio host Eric Metaxas. . . . Franklin Graham declares, a little too vividly, that the country “has taken a nosedive off of the moral diving board into the cesspool of humanity.” Such hyperbole may be only a rhetorical strategy, employing the apocalypse for emphasis.[4] But the attribution of depravity and decline to America also reflects a consistent and (so far) disappointed belief that the Second Coming may be just around history’s corner

DR. CRAIG: I don’t buy it for a minute. I don’t think that concern about the moral decline in American culture is precipitated by belief in the second coming of Christ. I’ve lived long enough to remember what it was like in the United States during the 1950’s, say, Ozzie and Harriet days, if you know what I mean. When you compare, for example, films from the 1950s with the films that are made today, the violence, the foul language, the graphic sex. It’s just like night and day between the film industry in the 50s and what it is today.

KEVIN HARRIS: Are you saying those were the good old days?

DR. CRAIG: I’m saying that there has been an incredible moral decline in American culture that is evident in film. It’s evident in music with certain kinds of music that advocates violence against women and other sorts of sexual behavior that Christians would regard as immoral, and that our culture at large has become more promiscuous, more secularized. I would say when he says evangelicals are more engaged and more alienated, honestly, I think that if you are a Christian living in American culture today and you do not feel alienated from American culture then you are not living the life of a disciple of Jesus. I don’t see how anyone living the life of a disciple of Jesus could not feel alienated from American culture today.

KEVIN HARRIS: Do we want to change the culture? I mean, isn’t the idea to eliminate persecution rather than foster persecution?

DR. CRAIG: I think we want to change American culture but in such a way as to make it more amenable to reception of the Gospel. And here I want a second what Gerson, I think, is implying. We need Christian professors at our universities who will do first-rate scholarly work in history, science, literature, philosophy, and so forth, and yet who are radically committed to Christ. If we can change the university by helping Christianity to once again have a respected, if minority, place at the university, we will change culture by affecting those who shape culture. Because it is at the university that our future teachers and lawyers and judges and so forth will be trained and will form the worldview that shapes their lives. So we need to help young people to see the value of a calling from God to become, for example, a scientist or a professor in some other academic discipline or to become a judge or a lawyer. These are professions that are culturally strategic and which we need to once again reclaim for the Kingdom.

KEVIN HARRIS: He ends on a positive note. He lists some evangelical leaders who he thinks are doing this – who are going to restore evangelicalism to a better place of prominence. He lists Tim Keller, Russell Moore, the president of Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. He says he realizes that evangelicalism is hardly a monolithic movement but he does lament a lot of the leaders and says that we need more, well, at the end of the day, more love.

DR. CRAIG: It’s ironic here, after bashing Franklin Graham for his apocalyptic statements, he says he runs an admirable relief organization.

KEVIN HARRIS: Which I’ve seen in action. It is.

DR. CRAIG: He’s sort of speaking out of both sides of his mouth there, I think.

KEVIN HARRIS: He says, “Christianity is love of neighbor, or it has lost its way. And this sets an urgent task for evangelicals: to rescue their faith from its worst leaders.” So I guess that’s kind of a positive note there.

DR. CRAIG: I don’t think that the urgent task for evangelicals is to rescue their faith from its worst leaders. I think it is to forge a new generation of leaders which will carry us forward into the remainder of this century.[5]