Disillusioned Evangelicals

A lot of things that never change are changing. Libraries used to be repositories of books. Now they are forward outposts for the lewdification of children. Newspapers used to be trusted institutions. Now they are neither paper nor trustworthy.

As an evangelical, I have watched the changes of the confessing church of Jesus Christ. The changes in the church have been rapid and tectonic. The death of Tim Keller (2023) suggests another seismic shift in the landscape. The three-fold outline of Aaron Renn has become commonplace among evangelicals making sense of the rapid change. We’ve moved from a positive world where evangelicals were privileged prior to 1994, to a relatively neutral view until 2016, and now ironically marked by the death of RC Sproul in 2017 who foresaw what was coming,  evangelicals are in a negative world, more than ever.

With these changes we are starting to see how ministries and ministers, along with churches and coalitions are being disrupted. It has left many people who have come through these changes left to scratch their brow and wonder what to make of it all.

Recently Stephen Wolfe has written on the topic of this fracturing.[1] He noticed that in 2006, there were friendships and coalitions that seemed very legitimate (Together for the Gospel) which became shuttered in the 20’s. Wolfe’s main point seems right, although he is unable to know the behind the scenes picture, which may be misrepresented. My own sense is that there were more close-knit affinities between people that became estranged publicly, and there were many estrangements in private that were not revealed publicly.

I know that many people have had friendships broken and relationships severed in the last half dozen years. The go-to answer for these betrayals and breakups is the American Presidency of Donald Trump. But that is too simplistic.

 What many observers have failed to see is the changes that have occurred as people have aged. The Young Restless and Reformed as Collin Hansen called them, were all young or relatively young. The interests and emphases of youth differ widely from those in older age. This can be the same for Christian confessions. Many people became disillusioned with the big box, brand-name, “Jonathan Edwards is My Homeboy” chic, when it failed to guarantee a thriving marriage or successful children, or a sense of being, belonging or becoming. The truth has come out now that so much of the ‘reformed’ element of this movement was thinly held and popular only until it wasn’t.

So the great ‘dechurching’ (which is widely overstated) has made a re-invigorated cottage industry of exvangelical memoirs. These outline all of the distinctive problems with Calvinism, complementarianism and intentional church order.

But there was another kind of disillusionment which Wolfe notes and which others have seen too. The glitz of flashy worship styles and status recognition by elite secular media (always pursued by neo-evangelicals since 1947) could not improve Christians’ PR. It then became shocking and discouraging for the laity to see evangelical leaders chase what appeared to be status and acceptance in the sophisticated circles of the world. They don’t seem to want to suffer outside the camp.

Into this disillusionment, a series of pastors have stood waiting for these former evangelicals to arrive. They are not the dechurching kind, but the re-churching kind. This reception has been happening since the 90’s with the Cambridge Declaration and the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. It grew with the Young Restless and Reformed crowd, scaled exponentially with The Gospel Coalition, and now the disillusionment returns to these former outlier movements.

Mirroring the disillusionment with the mainstream Republican party, many Christians have embraced new (to them) interpreters such as Douglas Wilson to discern the signs of the times.[2] Recently he noted well that the need of the hour was repentance and faith. Getting at what must be repented of was a key emphasis of the article. Repentance would admit the disillusioning effects of sin and corruption. Wilson offered a helpful listing of things that he is not pursuing (for example, no Red Caesar). But the call for repentance is striking for being so rare. By contrast, the guilt which is often heard from some quarters of evangelicalism is a constant hectoring about race, class, and the possible evils attendant to flourishing lives. Yet actual sin is being ignored as we distract ourselves by inventing ethereal ones.

So when David Brooks, who divorced his wife, married his research assistant yet wrote a book about character proceeds to champion the ‘dissenters’ who wish to save evangelicalism, skepticism is to be expected. The unaddressed assumption at the heart of his advocacy is a definition. The definition question was asked by Martyn Lloyd-Jones and David F. Wells, “What is an evangelical?” Kristen Du Mez and Tim Keller are not in the same doctrinal classification, even if Brooks includes them in a sociological category. Without doctrinal definition, evangelicals are destined to be a mere sociological group that can be swayed by power and profit. We are still revisiting the question from Wells in 1994, “Whatever happened to Evangelical Theology?”, still ashamed of the evangel (see MacArthur, 1993), and needing the courage to be Protestant (Wells, 2008).

What is most disturbing is how leaders who have gained careers by calling on Christians to suffer outside the camp, and to be “counter-cultural” like Russell Moore had for many years, now appear to disregard the constituency which gave them their platform. Now it is nearly predictable to see how embarrassed Moore is with his former associations. But for those who read his bold earlier work and witness,[3] there is only pity and disillusionment when Moore is considered. He is not speaking for them, and he is not speaking to them any more.

Maybe Trump was catalytic for all this disruption. But I don’t think that explanation is good enough. Instead, I think we’ve seen the disillusionment of leaders--- yes, leaders--- who found that they did not command the following they thought they did when it became socially costly to be associated with sincere Christians holding an edgy populism. Those leaders now act jilted and jaded.

They take their new constituencies of compromised, former evangelicals along with them to rebuild their social clout, which they can only do by making the church more political. It is an irony that those warning conservative Christians about too much politics tend to have political motives tinging everything they do in their desperate moves toward the Center-Left. The liberal mainline Protestant churches offer case-studies in how this turns out. Making the gospel palatable to ‘modern, scientific man’ was the formula at the beginning of the 20^th century. It was disastrous and killed the churches. But evangelicals, long accused of their scandalous lack of thinking, seem bent on doing the same thing again.

If you have read this far, you don’t need to despair. The triumph of the gospel will always prevail. But as the gospel of Christ’s power delivers souls and changes persons, families, and communities we will always have joy in sorrow. Some lose heart. Others forsake the faith. Others are snatched from the fire. Others show themselves to be Judas branches. But Christ’s triumph through the cross and the empty tomb is not stunted by the failures of men.

The armies of the Lamb continue to swell in number and sing with joy.

ACTIONS:

1. Don’t assume you know the degrees of agreement and disagreement between ministries and ministers simply because of their public associations. There is far more unity among disparate groups than social media pundits would indicate. At the same time, there is also increasing divergence behind the scenes in institutions that refuse to adjust to the new ‘negative’ world.

2. Watch your life and doctrine (1 Tim 4:16). This exhortation is given to Timothy and to pastors specifically, but it applies to all people, especially as they get older. There can be a tendency to let disappointment and disillusionment change a person’s doctrine, and their conviction of truth.

3. Faithful gospel ministry in local churches will win the day. If the gospel is preached in a full-orbed way with the call to discipleship, loyalty to the King, and readiness to his law, then such a ministry will be a light in the darkness. They will make it. But for ministries that are still chasing numbers, catering to felt needs or attempting to be the latest type of cool, they will not be able to stay orthodox ahead of the tsunami that is engulfing them. Those opposed to the tsunami but who are chasing clout and clicks as ‘edgelords’ will be swept away along with carnal methods (see 2 Cor 10:4-5).

[1] Wolfe is a lightning rod given his book on Christian Nationalism. I’m not commenting on that book or his other views, but only on this single article.

[2] On Wilson, see Crawford Gribben, Survival and Resistance in Evangelical America: Christian Reconstruction in the Pacific Northwest (2021).

[3] For example, “Christianity is undergirded by a vision of patriarchy. This claim is rendered all the more controversial because it threatens complementarianism as a “movement.” Not all complementarians can agree about the larger themes of Scripture—only broadly on some principles and negatively on what Scripture definitely does not allow (i.e. women as pastors). Even to use the word “patriarchy” in an evangelical context is uncomfortable since the word is deemed “negative” even by most complementarians.” Moore (2006).