Mapping the End of Evangelicalism: Part 1

Last updated on: May 10, 2013 at 2:31 pm by Dr. James Wellman

Mapping the End of Evangelicalism: Part 1 2013-05-10T14:31:06-06:00 Dr. James Wellman

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

I have to say it’s been a surprise to hear so consistently about the end of American evangelicalism. My own experience with the tradition goes back a long ways to my marginal participation in Young Life (mostly because of friends and girls) and then on and off in various groups in college. But the break was solidified the night I attended a Josh McDowell revival at my university; midway through I walked out. I couldn’t take the idea that anyone could seriously try to “prove” faith by trying to proof text the resurrection. I walked home to my apartment and began reading Soren Kierkegaard’s Concept of Dread. I felt relief.

Fast-forward to my second book, Evangelicals vs. Liberals: The Clash of Christian Cultures in the Pacific Northwest, in which I mapped the incredible power and growth of evangelical churches in the putatively ‘secular’ Pacific Northwest. It was 2007, I thought at that time the evangelical civic religion was at the very heart of American religious, cultural and political life. Evangelicalism seemed like a force that had the ability to maintain itself as a social and a political movement for a long time. But low and behold, with the multiple missteps of the George W. Bush administration, the fiasco of the Iraq War, the election of Barack Obama, the growing groundswell of support for gay marriage, suddenly the civil and religious landscape of American religion flipped. A new evocative secular and even atheist force has made its voice and power known in American culture and politics. How did this all happen? Well, in part, this blog will try to answer some of those questions and grapple with the changes that have occurred and continue to disrupt the American religious landscape.

To be sure, we now live in an open religious market and America’s religious subculture’s must adjust and respond to that culture. This is not to say that religious cultures aren’t thriving. I’m now writing a book on American Megachurches, which will show that megachurches are one of the primary ways American do their religion today. But that story is for another time. Nonetheless, the ground beneath American religion is shifting—and that is exactly what makes it so exciting to explore.

I start with David E. Fitch’s excellent work on The End of Evangelicalism, and his more recent book, Prodigal Christianity: 10 Signposts into the Missional Frontier. I think both are worth exploring. The End of Evangelicalism, charts how the trinity of evangelicalism has collapsed: 1) the inerrant Bible, 2) the call for conversion to Christ, and, 3) the Christian nation. The last is perhaps most obvious for many evangelicals. The cultural shift on gay marriage alone is enough to make conservatives claim that the nation has “fallen.” The problems with inerrancy have been thoroughly eviscerated in Christian Smith’s recent book*,* Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture. Fitch’s book is a fascinating exploration of the wreckage of evangelical culture. He uses the Slavoj Žižek, the Slovenian cultural critic, to announce the “empty politic” of evangelical culture in which belief and action are divorced. Fitch wants a missional and incarnational faith that he brings together belief and action in an unbreakable unity.

Fitch quotes David Kinnaman’s 2007 UnChristian, in which Kinnaman argues that most people consider Christians “antigay, anti-choice, angry, violent, illogical, empire builders….” In other words, Fitch and other evangelicals are fighting upstream, in which many in the younger generation are repulsed by evangelicalism; in fact, trends show this is the first generation in the 20th century in which Christian belief is seeing a demonstrable decline.

For Fitch, evangelicalism has become an ideology, which is, as he says, “empty at its core.” That is belief has been thoroughly instrumentalized and used as a weapon in the culture wars—as a club, as it were, to assault opponents and to defend specific political rostrums. This culture war is exactly what has repulsed so many young evangelicals. The ideology of the culture war has been an ill-fated attempt to maintain the status quo. This kind of naked political power as rightly noted, by Fitch, has little to do with the gospel. For Fitch, something terrible has gone wrong. In this midst of this wreckage, as Fitch notes, “irruptions of the Real” show the poverty of the present, and in coming blogs I’ll explore these irruptions and the “signposts” of the real. For now, I’ll go back to reading Soren Kierkegaard’s Attack upon Christendom. What a relief.

Previous Post

April 22, 2013

I Am Looking Forward to Exploring Questions in American Religion with You

Next Post

May 20, 2013 Monsters and the End of Evangelicalism, Part 2

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Uncategorized

Select a Month October 2017 June 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 July 2016 June 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 July 2015 April 2015 March 2015 June 2014 May 2014 March 2014 January 2014 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz