On January 17, Ron Sider, an evangelical theologian famous for his insistence that rich Christians make work of addressing poverty, posted on a piece on his blog titled “STILL EVANGELICAL IN SPITE OF PRESIDENT TRUMP’S EVANGELICAL SUPPORTERS?” In this blogpost Sider outlines why he still calls himself an evangelical in spite of the Evangelical sell-out to Trump.
While I greatly respect Sider for his work, I think the times and context in which we live require us to abandon the term evangelical. I acknowledge Sider’s emphasis of rootedness in historical Christianity but I’m afraid that late 19th en 20th century evangelicalism has undergone developments and made certain fatal decisions that set it apart from earlier forms of evangelicalism. The movement basically set itself up for the apostasy that is currently happening in American Evangelicalism.
Three Major Developments
Three major developments took place that changed the evangelicalism of the socially engaged abolitionist movements of the 19th centuries into something unrecognizably different. American evangelicalism may be carrying the same name as the evangelicalism that went before but it is something else. And that else has now born fruit into its current support for president Trump.
The first of these three developments is that the evangelical movement became obsessed with the end times. An extreme focus on the book of Revelation and an interpretation of world affairs from the perspective of Revelation caused believers to have a sense of immediacy and urgency. The Lord was returning soon and people needed to be saved. Images of fire and brimstone, cataclysmic disasters and widespread catastrophes filled the imagination of evangelical believers.
The focus away from ameliorating things on earth in the light of impending doom was exacerbated by the second development early in the 20th century, namely the fundamentalist turn. The traditional emphasis on the Bible as the word of God turned, as part of a desire to stem the tide of theological liberalism, into a literal reading of the Bible as plenary inerrant. Assent to inerrancy became the litmus test for faith. Right doctrine rather than love for the neighbor became the rallying cry for the movement.
This fundamentalist turn was instigated by more than just theological liberalism. Liberal Christians had begun to preach a Social Gospel in which the emphasis was on equality and economic justice. Fundamentalist evangelicals would have none of it. With the financial help of rich business owners they started a number of evangelical educational institutions and in the process wedded fundamentalist evangelicalism to corporate capitalism.
These three things inoculated Evangelicalism against almost any meaningful involvement in movements for racial equality, emancipation of women, liberation of the economically oppressed, and involvement in effort to save the environment. It’s Gospel of a privately held faith in Jesus Christ as a one-way ticket to heaven was as detached from earth as Apollo 13 was from the moon.
Abandoning the Term Evangelical
For me there are a number reasons why, against my own will, I saw myself forced to abandon the term evangelical well before the ascendancy of Trump. Here I offer three:
- The first one had to do with my own experience. I grew up within a narrative of a providential Father in heaven who worked everything for the good for those who believed. God provides, leads, and blesses. My personal life, however, has been marked by suffering, struggle, difficulty, and defeat. When I was 1.5 years old my 2.5 year old brother suddenly died. Trauma ensued, of course, but I did not have the words to express the loss of being I underwent. No explanation came from above; no message from the Holy Spirit to guide me through these murky waters. I grew up and never understood why my life was marked by silent suffering. To make things worse, my providential Father in heaven saw fit to let my youngest sister die when I was 13. Never did I see the arrival of the promised land in which God’s perfect plan for my life was realized in spite of all the promises of revival preachers and successful victorious life coaches. Toward the end of my 40s I finally realized that if I wanted to remain a Christian I had to abandon my evangelical faith and call out that imaginary god who did not do anything real ever. God had to be different than my evangelical pastors told me. I didn’t want to become an atheist and thus opted for the God behind or beyond the evangelicalism that explains all suffering away.
- My second reason had to do with theology. In seminary I initially attempted to become a Christian apologist until I realized that the entire project leads to the domestication of God for human ends. Proving God never amounts to more than proving what the human mind is capable of and what has first been defined in human terms. This turned out to be even more true in evangelical theology based as it is on the doctrine of inerrancy. This 19th century invention guaranteed believers absolute access to the absolute will and mind of God (as opposed to the so-called wishy-washy nonsense of liberal theology). With disregard for (and ignorance about) their own hermeneutical filtering, evangelicals claimed all sorts of things about God not realizing they read their own victorian social ethics into Scripture, fit Scripture into their own doctrinal convictions, and domesticated the biblical God into a lap dog who barked at strangers and gave paw at command. I will only mention the rigid stalemate between science and religion that resulted from this mindset.
- And then there’s the all important issue of justice. What really did it for me was the discovery that the evangelical theological system, dependent as it is on the doctrine of inerrancy, not only leads to an inadvertent reading of one’s own bias into Scripture. It seems almost designed to reinforce one’s own opinion and to protect the interests of the in-group of the faith one belongs to. I discovered a direct link between evangelical theology as it developed in the 19th and 20th centuries and the white privilege, racism, xenophobia so widespread today among American evangelicals. Likewise, it’s gospel is designed to not upset the economic status quo and only deals with the privatized realm of an individual’s personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Its gospel demands a few words of assent and requires hardly any changes in behavior. God forbid that the blue-eyed and blond-haired Jesus would have something to say about neoliberalism.
Evangelicalism has betrayed its roots
I cannot be an evangelical anymore because evangelical theology represents the subversion of the sola fide of the Reformation. Reformation theology is often called evangelical, in the sense that it represents a rediscovery of the Gospel. But since the inerrancy of evangelicalism today leads to absolute knowledge of God and God’s will, grace is annulled and no longer necessary. Inerrancy therefore represents a move away from the evangelicalism of the Reformation.
Evangelicalism today preaches grace but doesn’t need much of it and shows it even less. All one needs to be is a good reader of Scripture and one knows what God thinks and wants. So who needs grace? You only need to look around you to see how gracelessness informs much of evangelical speech and praxis: children are separated from their parents at US borders, while efforts are made to turn the United States into the theocracy that reflects the myopic social ethics of fundamentalism while its adherents remain deaf to the vices of its corporate capitalism and the way it is an environmental threat to the planet. Evangelicalism has turned into a graceless and loveless state religion under Trump. All to win the world for Christ: their world; their version of Christ.
To be sure, liberal theology is not the answer either. Both it and evangelical theology are products of modernity and are in need of an alternative that reaches back to the Reformation in a way that it answers the questions of today and reaches toward the future in an effort to address the situation today.
We need a Christianity that seeks to answer the question of who Jesus Christ is for us today. And for that I need to abandon evangelical as my label and look for the grace that is beyond the God who is made in the image of my own privileged subculture by means of a literalist interpretation and who wages my culture wars to safeguard my wealth and my version of reality. And I call on thinking and concerned evangelicals who love their neighbor and want to follow Christ to do the same.
Your story moves me profoundly, and I am so very sorry for your loss. The bizarre metamorphosis of evangelicalism, and how I was peripherally caught up in it as a young man (and have been “deconstructing” this experience ever since) became a sort of unexpected backdrop for my life. Odd, that falling to my knees in the carpark of a WOF megachurch as a teenager was such a fatal decision. Now I am a sort of wandering exile from that tradition – and from Christianity – at least at the far borders of Christianity. Your blog is helpful to me and I appreciate your insights. Thank you.
Thanks. That is encouraging!
# comment on after God’s end
I feel the struggle and pain of all the 3 points you wrote. Since became a christian 30+, I have been chasing the elusive out-of-reach “small still voice” of God/Holy Spirit. Gone through multiple book studies such as Experiencing God, discipleship training, my church’s wisdom conferences, etc.
The silence of God is deafening.
I heard nothing. I never able to grasp how other christian have the absolute certainty about their understanding of the Bible and their relationship with God.
My conclusions is that once you became a christian, you will be assimilated to become part of the Collective – I do not a have better word for it.
You learn to speak the “right” way”(the group’s way), to see life the “right way”, to do the “right thing” in the “right way”. All done to show that you have an intimate “personal relationship with God” and to be accepted in the group. You con each other and you con yourself in the milieu, reinforcing the hive mind. In my experience, the church was not there to walk beside you to help you in your unique spiritual. The church is the Borg to assimulated you – you to become one of them. Nothing to do with actually getting closer to God because nobody can point out what “closer” to God is really like.
My exchurch senior pastor proudly said God “spoke” to him twice only and he is told to start a movement or his life is at stake. He has a phd in chemistry and throughout the years put together a comprehensive system about how to do church and how to do life that covers everything under the sun. All his thoughts and advises are back up with Bible verses that he pick and choose to support what he thinks how life should be. My family left the church of 16 years. I cannot pretzel myself under his system anymore. I wasted 16 years and no growth. My faith struggles the same way as before and God is as silence as before.
Thanks for this. Deconstruction is a painful process. Yet you’re so much closer to freedom.
Thanks for the encouragement.
EVANGELICAL . . . is only one of many labels which should be dropped by those who love the truth and are true followers of Jesus. Virtually all of professing Christianity, in this day, is utterly apostate. Titled and credentialed religionists, in direct defiance of Matthew 23: 5–10, and such as was not found among the Lord’s apostles, are constantly deceiving and being deceived. They are hirelings and wolves in sheep’s clothing, enriching themselves, and many of them are multi-millionaires. Billy Graham led the pack for more than fifty years. IT IS TIME TO WAKE UP!
I am a Christian who has a personal relationship with God, the God of the Bible. There is no doubt in me that God has protected and provided for me throughout my life. Reading the Bible has made me a better man. I am not a member of any church although I do attend “a non-denominational, denomination” (lol) church service at times and listen to a preacher often. I get something special from such.
I think you are lost in your intellect. Sorry to be so blunt. When one is seeking God, one has to know it is a spiritual thing and not intellectual. You seem disallusioned because what you want you don’t see in your world view governed by your rational mind; your intellect; you label yourself a this or that.
As a young student of psychology I learned the axiom that “the intellect is the whore of the subconscious”. That may be a hard one to get your mind around because you have to let go the illusion that your are in control.
I am a Christian who has a personal relationship with God, the God of the Bible. There is no doubt in me that God has protected and provided for me throughout my life. Reading the Bible has made me a better man. I am not a member of any church although I do attend “a non-denominational, denomination” (lol) church service at times and listen to a preacher often. I get something special from such.
I think you are lost in your intellect. Sorry to be so blunt. When one is seeking God, one has to know it is a spiritual thing and not intellectual. You seem disallusioned because what you want you don’t see in your world view governed by your rational mind; your intellect; you label yourself a this or that.
As a young student of psychology I learned the axiom that “the intellect is the whore of the subconscious”. That may be a hard one to get your mind around because you have to let go the illusion that your are in control.