Book Review Article: "Who Is an Evangelical: a Movement in Crisis," by Thomas S. Kidd

 In 1963, Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter published "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," a work for which he won a Pulitzer Prize the following year. The book received high praise on the left from academics who agreed with the author's jeremiad of a spreading anti-intellectualism in the United States. Perhaps unexpectedly, the work has also been applauded by reformed evangelicals who appreciate Hofstadter's praise of Puritan New England as the intellectual high point of American history. Noting that the agrarian colonists prioritized the building of colleges and built a culture featuring high literacy rates, Hofstadter complained that American religionists had since contributed to the downward spiral of intellectual life in this country.

While Hofstadter's book is a well written and argued survey, it can be read as a work of his times. In some important ways, the highly regarded book was simply an extended rant against a culture so lacking in sophistication that it had elected the philistine Dwight David Eisenhower instead of the poster boy of socially elite enlightenment, Adlai Stevenson. Subsequent investigation demonstrates that neither Eisenhower nor Stevenson deserved their reputation, but, nevertheless, Hofstadter was hardly the only academic elitist who held to this view of the two men.

All of this brings us to the more recent work by Thomas Kidd, Who Is an Evangelical, surveying the evangelical landscape. Kidd, a highly regarded evangelical historian who teaches at Baylor University, would seem well positioned to write such a survey. While the stated purpose of the book is to "introduce readers to evangelicals' experiences, practices, and beliefs, and to examine the reasons for our crisis today," he acknowledges that the work is not primarily intended to address the interests of scholars. Rather, he is writing for "journalists, pastors, people who work in politics...." to explain to them "what has happened to evangelicals." Nonetheless, he seems particularly exercised about reports that 81% of evangelicals supported Donald Trump in the 2016 election (the book was written prior to 2020, which spared Kidd the necessity of adding more anxiety inducing details). Nonetheless, Kidd wants to clear evangelicals from the calumny that they are an extension of the Republican Party. He also doesn't want evangelicals to be thought of as white, though he finds it necessary to admit that blacks have sometimes not been included in the movement.

Every writer on evangelicalism struggles to find a definition for the movement, and Kidd is no exception. As is common with contemporary writers and pollsters, Kidd uses the characteristics suggested by David Bebbington (conversionism, emphasis on biblical authority, centrality of the cross, and evangelistic activism) to develop his parameters. Nonetheless, Kidd runs into trouble by lumping Pentecostals (but not prosperity gospel advocates) into the movement. Ignoring the fact that mainstream evangelicals either in the pre or post WWII era did not consider Pentecostals to be part of their movement helps Kidd improve his demographics, but it forces him to ignore many of the aspects of contemporary evangelicalism contributing to the movement being in crisis. He is able to include everyone from Aimee Semple McPherson to John Gerstner as an evangelical, a feat requiring an extraordinary bungee cord. In short, including Pentecostals undermines any ability to focus on a unified and defined movement (Bebbington's criteria notwithstanding) while masking the doctrinal decline that this blogger would find at the center of the crisis. Having defined those issues to the periphery, Kidd is left to focus on political and social concerns.

Kidd contends that political interest has always played a role in evangelical activism, arguing that evangelicals have done best when advocating in behalf of the marginalized. Notions of the church having a spiritual mission are readily dismissed as opportunistic when groups don't want the church to weigh in against their interests. Kidd is no political leftist -- no one should think that his criticisms of the religious right mirror those of evangelical leftists such as Ron Sider or Jim Wallis. Nonetheless, Kidd takes an increasingly dim view of evangelical politics since the rise of the Moral Majority. Leaders of the movements leading up to the present have damaged the reputation of the church, bringing it to the point of crisis.

While one should take care not to criticize a survey unfairly for what it has left out, a couple of obvious matters deserved attention in a work of this sort. First, many of us believe that the crisis of American evangelicalism may have a political component, but the more fundamental issues relate to a decline in doctrine and piety. Second, if Kidd is going to insist on evangelical politics, the work of Carl F.H. Henry deserved greater attention as providing an example of a road not travelled. Kidd discusses Henry's critique beginning with his publication of The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism in the post-war years. However, he gives no attention to Henry's post 1980's critique of Christian political engagement as lacking in an overall political philosophy including the goals and limits of political engagement.

Finally, Kidd fails to address the potential benefits of the church not seeking a seat at the political table. The late conservative journalist Robert Novak, when asked whether the rise of the religious right had been beneficial, responded that it had been great for the Republican Party, to which it provided foot soldiers, and a disaster for the church.

Had Novak lived longer, he might have even argued that the disaster contributed to a movement in crisis.

Yes, He Gets us, but we Crucified the Lord of Glory

 Christian media outlets are awash with the news that Jesus will have a Super Bowl ad this year. The ad furthers a campaign designed to let America know that Jesus "gets us." In order to get across that message, its designers created a modified version of qualities emphasizing those aspects of Jesus' life that most of our secular neighbors would find agreeable. He was a migrant who suffered poverty and other forms of privation while also enduring racism. That he bore such griefs means that he empathizes with all of us who carry similar loads. Thus, he gets us. There is no mention of allegedly controversial notions that he was the Son of God or died bearing the punishment of people's sins.

Reports indicate that those bankrolling this cause have committed $1 billion over 3 years. When people whom I would on many things agree with have shown their sincerity by giving so benevolently of their treasure, one can have no pleasure in disagreeing with them, but here goes:

It won't work. And, if it does work, it will be a bad thing.

Promoters of the campaign, particularly as it regards placement of an ad during America's seminal religious event (the Super Bowl), embrace hope in the presentation of a likable Jesus to a culture that is sprinting away from organized religious belief. It would seem relevant that in the New Testament the apostles faced a similarly hostile crowd and presented Christ's claims in an entirely different fashion. Peter announced in the temple precinct in Jerusalem that God raised the One whom they had crucified. Paul told the Corinthian Christians that their leaders had "crucified the Lord of glory," and the author of Hebrews, addressing a crisis resulting from a generation of Christians looking to abandon the faith, asserted that God had spoken by the Son, who had created, sustains, and been appointed the heir of all things. Thus, the biblical preachers and writers responded to unbelief by boldly proclaiming the claims of the one being rejected.

Modern evangelicals are riding down a well worn historic path of soft selling a Socinian Savior who can supposedly be believed in by modern Americans. Christians of varying stripes have attempted this over the course of history. That it has never worked doesn't seem to have occurred to current evangelicals, most of whom haven't given much thought to the history of their own movement. In fact, today's evangelical apple has not fallen far from the liberal tree of a century ago, when "modernists," certain that no one in their day could be expected to believe in historic Christian claims, advanced updated "interpretations" of biblical doctrines designed to make God relevant to anti-supernatural men. Thus, those committed to making the church relevant capitulated in a way that ultimately emptied it out. Socinianism as a half way house to committed Christianity has never been an effective approach.

Thus, if one wants to spend $1 billion on a campaign -- and I am not saying that they should -- he might want instead to deploy a strategy that has actually worked, particularly when empowered by the Spirit of God. Such an approach would involve confronting men with the historic and eternal claims of the Lord Jesus Christ. Of course, someone might claim that this is what the church has been trying. If one wants to make that claim, I would ask when? Not during the last generation.

Over the last 50 years, the evangelical churches have largely taken one of two reactive approaches to the secularization of American society. One has involved a "seeker sensitive" mentality that emphasized the use of marketing techniques to present a vision of church that would be palatable to the felt needs of our unchurched neighbors. While for decades those promoting these church growth techniques claimed that only the methods, not the message, changed, almost anyone surveying the course of this history can see that they modified the message itself in significant ways, too often creating the result of a "Christless Christianity."

The other evangelical approach was a more politically oriented one making a strange case for "taking back America." Again, one might look through history to the New Testament to see that this might have some history behind it post-Constantine, but that history would not include the teaching of the Apostles. After all, Peter did not stand in Jerusalem and announce that the resurrection meant that they were going to bring Jerusalem back to God. He didn't tell them either to brandish swords or register to vote. Instead, he told all of his listeners to believe and be baptized, thus introducing them to a different kind of kingdom.

Evangelicals today know that they stand at a threshold, but they may not recognize what awaits behind the door where they stand. In his book "The Kingdom of God in America," the highly regarded neo-orthodox theologian Richard Niebuhr famously castigated the religious left for their drift away from Christian coherence, saying that they were now preaching that "A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.”

Niebuhr's liberal castigation strikes eerily close to much contemporary conservative preaching. Evangelicals would do better to follow a more faithful path, praying that God would use the proclamation of a full Christian message announcing the whole Christ for the renewal of his church and the salvation of the lost.