The back-and-forth correspondence I was having with a colleague at work was proceeding just fine, thank you, when I was using the term “white American evangelical.” After all, I was referring to a recognizable demographic, a group of people who regularly get counted, consulted, and polled. But when my terminology slipped and I used the phrase “white American evangelicalism,” he was right to stop me and ask exactly what I meant. “-Isms” are different than persons. What made the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (literally “White Russia”) so distinct from regular “Russia” so that in 1991 it had become its own differentiated country, Belarus?
I’m not qualified to speak into the White Russia question, but I can into the white evangelicalism one for two reasons: 1) because I’ve reflected extensively on the question in relation to the 2016 US elections, and 2) because I spent fourteen years of my life as a cross-cultural missionary in India and Pakistan. During my time outside the US borders, I went to bed almost every night with the weighty self-scrutiny: “Did I speak and teach the “evangel” (the good news, the Gospel) that day as directly as possible from the Holy Spirit and the Holy Scriptures, or instead did I give my listeners MY version of the Gospel, which is invariably entangled with how I was raised as a white American evangelical Christian?” Every sermon I wrote I first had to go back and tease out those threads which were white and/or American. It was meticulous work, and not that I was ever fully successful at it, but my point is: since 1993 in earnest, I have just assumed that there is something like “white American evangelical Christianity.” I didn’t necessarily judge it, but I did have to reckon with it if I hoped to be faithful in my calling.
Part of the problem of course is conflation. Immediately after the 2016 US presidential election, many a news reporter was scolded for writing: “81 percent of evangelicals voted for Donald Trump.” No, --as their editors seem to have learned since-- 81 percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump. There are more evangelicals in the US, and in the world, than white, politically active ones. But the problem goes back further than that. If you were raised as I was, then you’ve been schooled in equating evangelicalism with Christianity itself, as if the Ryrie Study Bible was written by the Apostle Paul. It wasn’t enough to introduce yourself as a “Christian,” you were suspect if you didn’t qualify yourself as an “evangelical Christian.” Two weeks ago, a missionary with Operation Mobilization and I were discussing Operation World, that famous prayer guide for missions to unreached people groups, now in its seventh edition. For whatever country they listed, it was never enough to say that a population was “X percent Christian,” because our habituated eye was seeking out the boldface type which would tell us what percentage of those Christians were “evangelical.” That was the number that counted. That represented the parameters of our evangelistic task. The seventh edition of Operation World now calls evangelicals and renewalists (i.e. charismatics and Pentecostals) “Trans Blocs” which, despite the editors’ best intentions, makes it even easier to go straight there. My point is: there is a lot at stake in putting evangelicalism to the test, because in most of our minds, that’s like challenging Christianity itself. And since evangelicalism’s view of “saving faith” has also gravitated toward to the notion of “correct doctrinal assent” then the stakes for a questioner’s or a critic’s soul become very grave indeed. (But that’s a story for another time.)
Ask R.C. the Theologian
R.C. Sproul, in his book Getting the Gospel Right: The Tie that Binds Evangelicals Together (1999), explains the basics: “The term evangelical derives from the English evangel, which is in turn a transliteration of the Greek evangelium, which means “gospel.” Thus, the term evangelical etymologically refers to that which is of or pertains to the evangel, or gospel.” Unfortunately, the simplicity of this explanation doesn’t help differentiate evangelicals since Christians of any demographic can claim to be “gospel-believing,” just like every self-identified “born again Christian” must recognize that John 3:7 appears in everyone’s bible. Consequently, Sproul employs a common historical and negative approach: he describes how the term evangelical has evolved over time by declaring what it is NOT.
Circa 1517, Martin Luther says, “Hey, call my group of gospel-believing, born-again Christians, “evangelicals” (evangelische) since we are NOT Roman Catholics.”
Circa 1920, B.B. Warfield and Charles Hodges say, “Hey, call my group of Protestants, ‘evangelicals or fundamentalists’, since we are NOT modernists.”
Circa 1943, Harold Ockenga and Billy Graham say, “Hey, just call us ‘evangelicals’ because we are NOT fundamentalists, i.e. anti-intellectual and moralistic.”
Circa in my lifetime, everyone says, “Hey, since modernism isn’t a thing anymore, you know that we are talking about liberal Protestants, right? So, call us ‘evangelicals’, since we are NOT part of ‘mainline’ denominations.”
Negative definitions are always tricky business because you can never have the assurance that you have stripped away everything that isn’t the essential core. Positive definitions at least attempt to understand, “This is who I am,” whereas negative definitions are worried that the process of elimination will have no end. Only when you can point to everybody who is supposed to be OUTSIDE, can you have any confidence in claiming who or what is those who remain INSIDE. Sproul was writing in 1999 and predicted an emerging split but with both groups retaining the term evangelical. According to Sproul, “Left-wing evangelicals” are those engaged in both social justice and evangelism. “Right-wing evangelicals” tend to promote evangelism only. Sproul passed away in 2017 and is not witnessing what may be left-wing evangelicalism’s conceding of the term to the right-wingers. For example, just last month, the progressive group Evangelicals for Social Action changed their name to Christians for Social Action.
Ask David the Sociologist:
Most scholars of evangelicalism eventually find their way to what is called “the Bebbington Quadrilateral.” In 1989, David Bebbington wrote Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s and he claimed to find four common characteristics among those who self-identified as evangelicals. Here’s how the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) explains the Quadrilateral on their website:
Conversionism: the belief that lives need to be transformed through a “born-again” experience and a lifelong process of following Jesus
Activism: the expression and demonstration of the gospel in missionary and social reform efforts
Biblicism: a high regard for and obedience to the Bible as the ultimate authority
Crucicentrism: a stress on the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross as making possible the redemption of humanity
There was originally some latitude in the Bebbington Quadrilateral which the NAE, who even today works as hard as its founders did to keep the tent as big as possible, tries to capture in its wording. For instance, evangelicals had some latitude regarding inerrancy, so long as they upheld the authority of the Bible. Conversion could be that precise moment in time, or it could be more a process begun, if certainly not completed, in something like infant baptism. Crucicentrism was not exclusively the atonement theology espoused by The Gospel Coalition, and Activism could include both the soup kitchen as well as the evangelist on a street corner passing out tracts.
There is a lot that is appealing about the Bebbington Quadrilateral, and even I have used it as something of a last line of defense against a takeover by “white evangelicalism.” Environmental Missionaries who both preach the Gospel and care for the environment seem to perfectly embody the “Activism” category without any slippage in the other three categories. Nonetheless, we should remind ourselves that Bebbington’s study was on British evangelicals from the 1730s to 1980s. A lot changes when you skip across the pond and fast forward four decades. One thing that has changed is the growing constriction of the latitude that the Quadrilateral once gave. This constriction has led David Gushee to claim that modern evangelicalism is simply a case of failed re-branding. “White evangelicalism” may simply be NOT NOT fundamentalism, a historical regression or misfire. “Maybe evangelicalism,” Gushee writes, “—at its core, at its immovable power center—never was more than fundamentalism with lipstick on.”
If white evangelicalism of circa 2020 is NOT NOT fundamentalism, then that would seem to put us right back in the decades, the 1910s and 20s, when American theologians, pastors and parishioners could not recognize the incongruity of showing up at the lynching tree in their Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes, back when black Christian leaders couldn’t recognize us as “Christians” at all. “There must be a white Jesus,” some of them publicly surmised, “because try as I may, I cannot find their Savior in the pages of the Bible that I’m reading.”
Ask Kristen the historian:
Right before we left India in 2007, I was working with a professor at the University of South Africa on a D.Th. about the spirituality of missionaries. I was American and attended an Evangelical Free Church in Kansas. My promoter, Christo, was Dutch Reformed and lived in South Africa. For Chapter One of my dissertation, Christo demanded that I define my terms. I quoted R.C. Sproul and I quoted David Bebbington, but I also intuitively knew that this was not enough. I had grown up with a whole cultural construct of evangelicalism in the United States. Those cultural markers were just as important in my self-identification as an evangelical. So, I listed a number of examples which were suitable for a work of serious scholarship: e.g., evangelicalism is associated with Fuller Seminary, Wheaton College, Billy Graham, Christianity Today, Tyndale House Publishers, Focus on the Family, Campus Crusade, Wycliffe Bible Translators etc. Additionally, I could have taken Christo further in by listing Bob the Tomato, Left Behind novels, CCM, Promise Keepers, WWJD, the opening chords of the song “I Want to See Jesus Lifted High”, etc. In other words, the feel of the term evangelical was just as important as its definition, its connotation just as important as its denotation, its associations just as important as its essence. It’s similar to when Justice Potter Stewart was asked to explain what qualifies as pornography in Jacobellis v. Ohio, 1964. Justice Stewart might not be able to explain what pornography is, “but I know it when I see it,” he said. In a more sinister way, it is similar to Donald Trump’s tacit campaign to define who is a “true American.” Ilhan Omar may be a US citizen and a duly elected Representative to Congress from America’s heartland, but her dark skin, her Muslim faith, her Somali background, and her Democratic politics as well, somehow make her less than a true American, disqualified from “telling us what to do with our country,” as Trump told his supporters at a rally last week in Minnesota. For Trump and his campaign polemics, the cultural construct around what it means to be an American has more force than traditional definitions grounded in constitutional law.
What I knew only intuitively, historian Kristen Kobes du Mez was able to document in her recent book, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. Prior to 1943, the evangelical’s (the “NOT-modernist’s”) life was pretty much determined by the denominations. The emergence of radio and television meant that one could now attend a transnational “Church of the Air.” “The path forward was clear” to Ockenga and the founders of the NAE, according to Kobes du Mez,
and it would not be through denominational structures. To evangelize the nation, evangelicals needed magazines that would reach millions, and access to the airwaves for national radio broadcasts. They needed organizations for missions, and for evangelical colleges and Bible schools. They already possessed the resources and the brain power. What was missing was a network that would support and amplify these individual efforts.
Despite the best arguments of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, or Edward R. Murrow before them, the media is not conducive for deep theological discussion including on the question, “What does it mean to be an evangelical?” Instead, they gave us a movie cowboy like Stuart Hamblen, a co-star of John Wayne’s, who wrote a song about his conversion, “It is No Secret (What God Can Do).” Or they gave us the first real big star of enculturated evangelicalism: Pat Boone. Kobes du Mez writes,
Boone wasn’t a revivalist, but he fit well with postwar evangelicals’ efforts to expand their reach through modern media. In accord with Ockenga’s plan—and with Graham as their lodestar—evangelicals began to fashion a vibrant media empire, along with a national network of institutions and parachurch organizations that flourished outside of denominational structures. Graham himself published two dozen books, and in 1956 he helped found Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of American evangelicalism. Nearly 700 stations carried his radio program across the nation and around the world.
Whereas denominations maintained a shepherd-and-the-sheep approach, a media strategy put the Christian consumer front and center in evangelicalism, the seller and the buyer. The Christian Booksellers Association (CBA) had 270 affiliated stores in 1950, and over 3000 across the country by the end of the 1970s.
The CBA solved the distribution problem, but it also changed the market—and the publishing industry feeding that market. With a broader Christian market replacing denominational distribution channels, authors and publishers needed to tone down theological distinctives and instead offer books pitched to a broadly evangelical readership. Books on “Christian living” achieve this goal without offending denominational sensibilities. Together with Christian music, radio, and television, the Christian publishing industry helped create an identity based around a more generic evangelical ethos. It was in this milieu that evangelical celebrities—singers actors, and authors, popular pastors and revivalists—would play an outsize role in both reflecting and shaping the cultural values evangelicals would come to hold dear.
Ask David the Ethicist:
In 1998, Garry Dorrien warned: “if evangelicalism is to become something more than fundamentalism with good manners. . . it must become clearly distinguished from fundamentalism in its core theological issues.” It hasn’t. As befitting an ethicist, David Gushee is something of a bridge between Sproul’s theology (“What God has said”), Bebbington’s sociology (“What this group believes”) and Kobes du Mez’s history (“What this group has done.”) How then should we live? “We must leave,” Gushee claims. Gushee’s spiritual autobiography is called Still Christian: Following Jesus Out of American Evangelicalism, but you can read a summary of his storyline in these paragraphs from his most recent book, After Evangelicalism:
All of this, ultimately, helps explain why I believe now that we must leave evangelicalism behind. I first encountered a loving, devout, evangelistic, unpolitical, Southern Baptist version of evangelicalism. I didn’t ever know it was called evangelicalism, and it didn’t matter. I became a believer and disciple of Jesus there. About a decade later, as a doctoral student, I again encountered evangelicalism, now in the loving, devout, egalitarian, feminist, pacifist, social-justice progressive version of Ron Sider and friends. It was, again deeply appealing.
But now, twenty-five years later, both these versions of evangelicalism have been marginalized, if not pushed out entirely. Isaac Sharp aptly describes what remains: “Evangelical identity [became] closely associated with its most fundamentalist and conservative, Reformed and Republican, straight, white, and male leaders.” There is nothing in this for me, or for millions of others. We must leave.
What can Gushee possibly mean by “there is nothing in this for me?” While he might not be “fundamentalist and conservative, Reformed and Republican” Gushee is certainly straight, white, a male, and in leadership. What is left in white evangelicalism for him is privilege, the type of privilege, for example, that his female faculty colleagues wished they had when Southern Baptist Theological Seminary was firing them en masse. If Dr. Gushee had just learned to keep his mouth shut about torture, about climate change, about LGBTQ-inclusion, about Barack Obama or Donald Trump, Gushee could easily have found that the whole world remained for him “in this.” It must suck to be an ethicist.
Ask the Alabama Voters:
I have tried to drop little hints along the way why I think 2020’s iteration of American evangelicalism might be called “white evangelicalism.” Ask the co-actors of Hollywood cowboy Stuart Hamblen—you know, the redskins (who weren’t secretly Italian actors) who always got shot off their horses in the final battle scene—whether it was really any secret about what the white man’s god could do. Ask a black man about what vibe Pat Boone gives off. I could construct a syllogism that reads:
a cultural construct, driven by media and characterized by consumerism, has overtaken the identity of American evangelicalism;
that cultural construct is dominated by white evangelicals who are exercising their power to exclude the next round of those who are deemed NOT “true” Christians.
ergo. . . white American evangelicalism
In the end, I may be in the same boat as Justice Stewart. What is white American evangelicalism? I can’t explain it, but I know it when I see it. I could also employ a stratagem that Trump often employs in press conferences: “I know it. You know it. Everybody knows it.” But actually, I suspect that, no, everybody does not know it—which, unfortunately, feels like a function of our privilege. We don’t have to know it because there is nothing that really forces us to see it.
Nonetheless, every once in a while, an event will happen that can make one question their inherited and habiuated reality. For me that was the election that occurred, not in 2016, but in 2017. To first set the stage, it was categorically not true that 81 percent of evangelicals supported Donald Trump in the 2016 US election. The most accurate, albeit convoluted, way to write about this exit polling was: “Eighty-one percent of white evangelicals who could vote in a US election in 2016 and who bothered to do so, voted for Trump.” In other words, there were, and still are, more evangelicals in the world than white ones, American ones, eligible ones, or interested ones. And you also have to be careful to say, “voted for Trump,” not “supported Trump,” because many of those voters insisted, “No, I didn’t vote for Trump; instead, I was voting against Hillary”, or “I was voting for Supreme Court justices,” even though their ballots were clearly marked Trump/Pence. It was complicated. Nonetheless, this “81 percent voting” did elicit two thoughts in me at the time: 1) what do I have in common with these people anymore? and 2) who are these 19 percent of white American evangelicals who didn’t vote for Trump, and what might they mean to me?
At first glance—and arguably the second and third glance as well—the special election in Alabama on December 12, 2017 to fill Jeff Sessions’ seat in the US Senate should not have been as complicated. It wasn’t a run for the Oval Office; it was simply to ensure one extra vote among 100 in the Senate where the Republicans would hold the majority even if their candidate lost. The Democratic candidate, Doug Jones, was NOT Hillary Clinton. He had a perfectly acceptable curriculum vitae—a graduate of the University of Alabama (“Roll Tide”), famous for his prosecution of the Klansmen who bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church, a sui generis judge like his challenger. Meanwhile, the Republican candidate was Roy Moore, who had barely survived his primary run-off with Luther Strange. Republicans were divided on Moore. Even more were troubled when in mid-November, multiple women came forward with allegations of sexual misconduct against Moore when he was in his 30s. Two claimed to be minors at the time, i.e., below Alabama’s age of consent at 16. Meanwhile, James Dobson was presumably still a resident of the State of Colorado, but that didn’t stop him from inserting himself in this Alabama race with some radio spots:
I've known Judge Moore for over 25 years, and I know him to be a man of proven character and integrity. I often ask God to raise up men and women of faith who will govern the nation with biblical wisdom. . .. I can vouch for him as a man who will bring honor to the United States Senate. He has always stood for our Christian conservative values including the sanctity of life, traditional marriage and religious liberty. He will be a champion for families in the United States Senate.
“Alabama is heavily evangelical, regardless of one’s race” as the Washington Post explains. “In its special election, 76 percent of African Americans identified as born-again or evangelical, according to exit polling, along with 72 percent of whites. In national exit polls for the 2016 presidential election, 57 percent of blacks and 39 percent of whites identified as born-again or evangelical.” In the end, Moore won 80 percent of white-Alabaman- evangelicals-who-could-vote-and-bothered-to-do-so,” so thus, very similar to the percentages in the 2016 Trump election. Since, however, Moore lost the white non-evangelical vote by 29 points, that would seem to indicate that “evangelicalism” is a thing. But what about “white evangelicalism”? Is it a thing in Alabama? According to exit polls, 95 percent of black evangelicals in this most evangelical of states voted for Jones, just three percentage points less than black non-evangelicals. Wow! Weren’t they listening to James Dobson, who in the early 2000s, SBC’s Richard Land called, “the most influential evangelical leader in America. . .. The closest thing to his influence is what Billy Graham had in the sixties and seventies”?
The fact that there was a big voting difference in Alabama between white evangelicals and white non-evangelicals is no surprise; we assume that one’s religious affiliation signifies. But to see the difference between how white evangelicals and black evangelicals voted is unsettling, particularly in an election that had a significantly different feel to it than Trump v. Hillary. The easy thing was to look at the small disparity (3 percentage points) between how black evangelicals and black non-evangelicals voted and rush to the conclusion that whereas white evangelicals voted as good Christians according to their values, black evangelicals voted with “identity politics” according to their race. After all, isn’t the prophetic, exodus, social justice tradition of black churches suspect anyway, the Rev. Martin Luther King, a communist puppet in sheep’s clothing? Aren’t black church services just emotional release-fests with no real meat preached from the pulpit? However, rather than spend too much time trying to rationalize the loss, white evangelicals simply took comfort in the GOP-majority that still remained in the Senate as they began to make plans to flip Jones seat back in 2020.
In other words, most white evangelicals simply were not curious. Black evangelicals were obviously not listening to Dobson, but neither was Dobson listening to them. But I suddenly was. . . listening, that is. Not to Dobson to whom I had given my early adulthood in listening, but to black people, whether evangelical or not. Like the angel stirring the healing waters of the pool of Bethesda, my curiosity was swirling: What were they thinking and feeling? How did they see Jesus, their faith, the Scriptures, and the world in ways that I had previously been blind to? And if there is an evangelicalism which is NOT white in its perspective, then is it possible that “white American evangelicalism” is precisely the religion to which I had adhered?
Ask Erna the blogger:
Erna Kim Hackett is Intervarsity’s Associate National Director for Urban Programs. She is happy to use the term “White Christianity” and explains it this way:
White Christianity suffers from a bad case of Disney Princess theology. As each individual reads Scripture, they see themselves as the Princess in every story. They are Esther, never Xerxes or Haman. They are Peter, never Judas. They are the woman anointing Jesus, never he Pharisee. They are the Jews escaping slavery, never Egypt.
For citizens of the most powerful country in the world, who enslaved both Native and Black people, to see itself as Israel not Egypt when studying Scripture, is a perfect example of Disney Princess Theology. And it means that as people in power, they have no lens for locating themselves rightly in Scripture or society—and it has made them blind and utterly ill-equipped to engage issues of power and injustice. It is some very weak Bible work.
In the end, “White Christianity” may simply be good ol’ fashioned “religion of the empire,” but when that empire happens to be white, male, and American, that can be a bitter pill to swallow. Rather than admit privilege, it’s easier to gaslight. In 2017, a PRRI poll reported that white evangelicals were the only group to believe that Christians in America were more persecuted than Muslims. (Snideness alert, readers!:) One evangelical was so persecuted, apparently, that he was able to make it to the second highest office in the land. In 2019, Mike Pence gave a commencement address at an evangelical university that was so persecuted, apparently, that as of the same year, they possessed $3.13 billion in gross assets. Pence reassured the Liberty University audience that they were still the Christians of the catacombs, not of the imperial palace, but, watch out, because the evil sorcerer Jaffar was coming for their princess selves. “You know, throughout most of American history, it's been pretty easy to call yourself Christian," Pence admitted. "It didn't even occur to people that you might be shunned or ridiculed for defending the teachings of the Bible. But things are different now."
I suspect we’ll never get a true grasp on what “white American evangelicalism” is unless we leave the royal ballroom and go sit quietly for a while in the servant’s quarters or out in the stables. I don’t hold out hope that that will happen. Many white American evangelical leaders have already claimed to have spotted “Socialism and Marxism” advancing on our borders in the 2020 election, as surely as that Central American “caravan” was doing right before the 2018 midterms. One of the most impressive facts in my mind about Erna Kim Hackett is that she has chosen to pursue her master’s at the North American Institute for Indigenous Theological Studies. She’s listening.
Ask Lowell the missionary:
I began this essay with mention of my fourteen years as a cross-cultural gospel-preaching “activist” in India and Pakistan. When I said that I had to comb my messages lest I be preaching more out of my white American evangelical enculturation, I didn’t want to make a claim of wisdom or success. My point was that if I wanted to do a good job as a messenger of the Good News, I had to presume the possibility that such a thing as “white American evangelical Christianity” in fact existed. I could not let myself indulge in the notion that white American evangelicalism was the same thing as evangelicalism expressed among other peoples. Neither could I let myself conflate evangelicalism with “faith in Jesus” itself.
But that is Lowell-the-missionary pointing my face out toward “non-evangelical” Indians. The very word “missionary” means “sent one,” which means that I always had to be mindful of the “sending church” that sent me, and in my case, that church was overwhelmingly white, American, and evangelical. Similarly, the term “mission agency,” like the non-profit organization Christar in whom I was a member for 26 years, presumes “agency,” or a “going-through-ness.” Ideally, the through-ness would be reciprocal, namely that Christar and I could be a conduit back to the sending church. Ideally, the sending church would like to hear back from a group like the Dalit of India and be informed by what it means to follow Jesus in a world where oppression is a daily reality. The CCM group Caedmon’s Call sold a lot of albums after their trip to Lucknow and the release of their hit single “Share the Well” and they did raise both consciousness and money for digging wells in those villages which excluded access to Dalits. But again, the primary “through-ness” was from the American church to the Indian Dalit. The only thing expected to go the other direction was a thank-you note. Heaven forbid that a Dalit scholar of Liberation Theology should ask to lecture at Dallas Theological Seminary! As a Catholic priest working in Latin America once said: “When I feed the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a Communist.”
When you are a “sent one,” you are dependent on the sending church for your daily bread. If the sending church should stop giving, you must hope that there is enough money left in your account for a plane ticket home. Mission agencies are dependent on the sending church not only for their funding, but also for the next generation of recruits. For some “faith mission” agencies like Christar, recruiting too is tied to funding, since they must replace retirees with new missionaries who will then go out and raise their individual support, from which the agency can take a small percentage for their own administrative costs, “in order to keep the lights on.” Mission agencies were one of the institutions pointedly mentioned by Kobes du Mez as part of evangelicalism’s consumer-based expansion. Millions of dollars each year are spent by agencies and individuals on marketing to convince evangelical consumers that we are worthy of your support. We call it “support raising” or “mobilization” but deep inside, we know it is “marketing,” a chase after scarce resources.
There is nothing wrong or ungodly about marketing, and certainly it can be done in good and godly ways, but we should at least acknowledge that it is a thing, because our white American evangelical forbears have made it a thing. And since it is a thing, then let’s recognize marketing applies a particular pressure on missionaries and mission agencies, and that now the one-way direction of the through-ness extends to us as well: the sending church wants ‘thank-you’ notes from us, not prophetic admonition about, for example, the Trump administration’s policy on family separation. Violate the uni-direction, and you will likely get a note from someone in your church, as I did, accusing you of “biting the hands that feed you.”
When the elders of my home church in Kansas finally instructed the missions pastor and missions committee, against their dissent, to remove my wife and me from the missionary budget which we had been a part of for over 25 years, the elders cited my “activism.” I thought I was just being a good Bebbingtonite. After much grief and spiritual direction, I’m now ostensibly on the other side of that very painful moment, but so I believe is white American evangelicalism, not in terms of calm resolution but rather in terms of the corruption and fracturing that Kobes du Mez mentions in the subtitle of her book. I leave you now with my current prevailing image for what this missionary believes is the “white American evangelicalism” of which I can no longer be a part.
The traditional rallying cry for missions has been, “Give, pray, send, or go.” Back in 1993 when I left for India, we all knew what that meant and how it applied to church planting among unreached people groups in India. (And by the way, the first church we helped plant was among the Dalit). For a season, like for David Gushee in the evangelicalism of the pre-1990’s SBC or in the progressive evangelicalism of his time with Ron Sider, evangelicalism granted me some latitude to explore a broader missiological perspective that included creation care. The “hip bump” that eventually knocked me out of bounds may have been the re-assertion of what Sproul called “right-wing evangelicalism” with its demand of “evangelism only,” but it was more than that, even as articulated by the elders. On the far end of their deliberations—and I am NOT saying that those eight men ever got anywhere near this same extreme—is a newly emerged application of “Give. Pray. Send. Go,” a broader definition of activism than what I suspect Sproul could even imagine. There is a Christian crowd-funding website entitled “Give. Send. Go.” It used to be a place where if you were making a short-term trip to India to do a VBS among the Dalit, or a trip to India to dig wells for a Dalit village, you could market your project on the website. You did have to compete against other offerings on the website, including, for example, fundraising to pay the medical bills of those caught in a crisis. We are all familiar with the good work of these crowd-funding sites like Go Fund Me, and we uphold a donor’s freedom to lavish their generosity on anyone they choose. But this website took up the traditional missions rallying cry of “Give, send, go” and their number one trending project last month was to raise money to cover the legal fees of Kevin Rittenhouse, the Kenosha shooter. Donors left messages on his board— “God bless you, you are a godly patriot”—as they raised half a million dollars, $300,000 more than what the project originally sought. Evangelical “activism” apparently now includes the legal defense of white supremacist militias. Again, I recognize Rittenhouse’s right to a just and rigorous defense, but. . . I know porn when I see it, and I was sick to my stomach. Meanwhile, Jacob Blake was still in the hospital with seven bullet wounds in his black body. There was a time when I believed that the white American evangelical church could raise an equal amount of funds for the healing of someone who looked like Blake. Now they won’t even let the Affordable Care Act do it for them. I no longer believe.
Where is a missionary and a climate activist to go who is leaving “white American evangelicalism” as his sending base? I and Eden Vigil are finding out. One of the first things we found out is that there is a metaphoric “nineteen percent” (cf. 2016 exit polling) who are also on the move with us. We are not lacking for fellowship, albeit we gather “in the wilderness,” which is the terminology of a Brené Brown or a Rachel Held Evans. Who will teach us once we disenroll from Liberty University or turn off John MacArthur’s “Grace to You” broadcast? Hey, stop consuming and start listening!; my reading and podcast list of black and indigenous teachers is daunting, but I know that that is my own fault since I’m making up for lost time. David Gushee has been a good guide in his two books. Most importantly, when he writes that “there is nothing for me” in white American evangelicalism, “we must leave,” he immediately follows it up with the following paragraphs:
But this means that I and other post-evangelicals have some work to do. We need to develop, or discover, a version of Christian faith and ethics that finally leaves all vestiges of this subculture behind—without leaving Jesus behind.
Rather than simply lamenting our losses and critiquing evangelicalism, it seems important to try to articulate a more faithful version of faith. This is the post-evangelical task. It is where we go from here.
In the third section of After Evangelicalism, Gushee proposes a new ethics for sex, politics, and race. These are obvious tasks given the headlines that the white American evangelical church generates. But I can easily identify the stirring in me that says: hey Lowell, you can help write the chapter for missions, or for creation care, now that the white American evangelical church is no longer sending you, praying for you, giving to you, or going with you. When Jesus said that his disciples should “let the dead bury their own dead” (Matt 8:22; Luke 9:60), he wasn’t being as critical and offensive as it certainly sounds. On other occasions, he decried the Pharisees directly: those “generation of vipers.” Instead, here, Jesus was telling his disciples that sometimes you just have to let go of those whom you never really had any control over, of those who are no longer responsive to you, of those whom you may have tried to reform only to hear, at easiest, “who do you think you are?” or, at the worst, “race traitor! baby killer! apostate!” When someone is dead, they are beyond your ministrations, but they are NOT beyond God’s care, so lovingly and trustingly leave them in his hands, and realize that the most important words from Jesus to you are, “Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead” (Matt 8:22), and “Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God” (Luke 9:60). I’m not where I used to be, but these two verses tell you where you can still find me.
