Culture Friday - Evangelical fractures

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Friday, December 3rd, 2021. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Mary Reichard.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

We’ll get right to today’s topic: Is the Evangelical church breaking apart?

You can read about it pretty much across the spectrum: In the Atlantic by Peter Wehner and in a column called Mere Orthodoxy by Michael Graham, just to name two.

They argue several points. Contentious elections. Politicizing Covid. A bitter partisan divide. 

REICHARD: Well, it’s Culture Friday and John Stonestreet is here to talk about this. He’s the president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Morning, John.

JOHN STONESTREET, GUEST: Good morning.

REICHARD: Well, what’s going on?

STONESTREET: That's quite an open ended question you're asking about what's happened over the last couple of years in evangelicalism! I mean, this isn't the first time in history where people have predicted that evangelicalism is falling apart, or it doesn't have a future or it's being hijacked by politics. I mean, the same predictions were made under the Reagan administration and under the Bush administration and under the Trump administration, as well. So this isn't a new prediction. And part of that has to do with the way that evangelicalism historically has embraced cultural norms. We know whether it was newspapers in the first Great Awakening, whether it was these kind of big meeting houses and social justice causes in the Second Great Awakening, radio under Billy Graham and television. And now of course, the internet and Twitter and even Tik Tok evangelicalism is actually a thing.

But there are very real ways that evangelicalism is being shifted. I also would point to Ed Stetzer, who has also is increasingly trying to give some categories to actually what's what's going on. You can look at the beginning of the 20th century and talk about the conflict within evangelicalism, which is often called the fundamentalist modernist conflict. And it was really over theological points of conviction. Is the Bible true? Did Jesus rise from the dead? And now a lot of times the divide is over ideological implications of that theology.

So people who agree with a same theological position, you know, that the Bible tells me what is true, they might not agree on the nuances of that, but they agree on that point, and then have wildly different conclusions when it comes to some social issue, like abortion, or like sexuality, or, like, you know, political, you know, what, to what level of political pragmatism we can embrace without compromising our faith.

On one side, you've got bad theology, where theology is not really theology; it's ideology that's driving someone's deeply held convictions. On the other hand, you've got the failure to realize that, you know, there's no way to start with really, the Bible is true and get to a pro abortion stance on any in any sort of kind of rational, you know, logical flow. You just can't get there from here. Or look and deny the goodness of the human body as God created it male and female. In other words, you've got an ideology, replacing theology on one hand. You've got the failure of theology to lead to the right worldview conclusions, on the other hand. And then you put that in the tempest. All the things that happened in that one year, you know, an election, right, you know, the capital, a dramatic distrust of the dominant news sources, and good heavens COVID. And you put all that together and mix it up. And now, you go from a situation where the evangelical church in other times of history have been able to weather and navigate really challenging issues, to what it feels like today, which is that every issue becomes a catastrophic issue. Right? Every issue is escalated. Every issue, the volume is turned up, That says far less about the issues it does about, you know, the this stability and the foundation, the health of the foundation of the institutions being so shaken. And I think that's what folks are pointing to in both helpful and unhelpful ways.

BROWN: Author Trevin Wax at The Gospel Coalition wrote about this, too. He pointed out differences between progressive Christians and conservative Christians. You also wrote about this. What does that mean?

STONESTREET: Trevin had a terrific article in which he really summarized some surprising conclusions from two sociologists: George Yancey and Ashley. And her last name is and this last name is something that I'll promise you I just am going to butcher.. But the new book is called One Faith No Longer. And Trevin pointed out three big conclusions to that book, with a punchline that progressive Christians are more likely to establish their identity in politics than our conservative Christians, which of course, just completely goes against the narrative.

Now, I don't think he's saying that conservative Christians never establish our identity in politics, we've got plenty of examples of that. And of course, you now have to define Christian and conservative and you've got to define, you know, the strange tendency of the larger news media to identify people as evangelical, when there's no real indication that they have a faith commitment, they go to church, or they do anything that is Christian in their way, but because of that, you know, kind of identification.

The second thing that Trevon points out is that conservative Christians are more likely than progressive counterparts to defy their own side's political orthodoxy. In other words, go against the narrative. They're more likely to say that this is not enough.

And then third, that progressive Christians, and this is fascinating, tend to think that conservative Christians are the ones that need to be converted, not non Christians. In other words, their most important work is converting conservative Christians to progressive causes, not converting non Christians to Christianity. And one of the features historically of evangelicalism has always been that conversionism, this need for people to actually be converted to Christianity. And this is what happens when politics takes the front seat, and to you know, to theological conviction. But a conservative Christian political engagement doesn't begin with economics. It begins with pre governmental institutions, the significance of the family, and these are things that aren't up for grabs. Because we think that they are built into the world like gravity, they're not social constructs. They're actually real things.

REICHARD: Ok, John, I do want to reserve some time on the big Supreme Court argument heard this week, Dobbs v Jackson Womens Health. The biggest abortion dispute of the term, possibly of the past 50 years. It’s a challenge to Mississippi’s ban on abortion after 15 weeks’ gestation. What did you take away from oral arguments?

STONESTREET: I'd say two or three things. Number one, the Mississippi leadership, the Attorney General Solicitor General said we're not trying to ask the question of whether the Mississippi law can pass muster; we're challenging whether or not Casey and Roe were good law, and have they ever been good law? And that this needs to be overturned. That's a remarkable thing. And so when you have both sides saying this is the most important challenge to Roe in our lifetime, one out of panic and other out of you know, hopeful jubilation, this is an interesting moment. Third, I was struck by the arguments by the attorney for Jackson Women's Health, basically bringing up arguments that are kind of I'm going to say trope, I'm going to say that carefully, but, you know, the idea that women cannot be fully participatory in society without the ability to, you know, kill their children. And in here, this is the best argument that that side has! You had another argument from Justice Sotomayor, you know, about, let's nuance brain activity from what we actually know from fetal development. I mean, it was just really a stunning thing to actually hear. You realize what shaky ground Roe was decided on, And I agree with with Ryan Anderson, who said, you know, this went about as well as it could go for those who care about unborn life, and it went about as bad as it could go for those who want to advance abortion. yet. And I think it's very, very important to note that if this goes exactly the way some of us hope, which is a full dismantling of Roe, the pro life movement has not reached any finish line whatsoever. It is a new starting line for what it means for us at the state level, the local level, both in civil society and lives. And legislatively applying. reapplying this new understanding. There's going to be a long tail to this on every level of society. And so now's the time to ramp up, not to to breathe easy.

BROWN: John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Thanks, John.

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.