Evangelicals Must Resist Mainline Protestant Trajectory
New efforts to inflate an Evangelical Left arose as many central institutions of evangelicalism were already internally liberalizing morally and theologically. Partly this trend was sociologically inevitable, similar to Mainline Protestant schools and institutions liberalizing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, wanting freedom and independence. Partly it was a psychological reaction against the Religious Right by a new generation of Baby Boomer evangelical elites, who unlike Silent Generation Religious Right founders like Falwell, Robertson and Dobson, did not have to fight to gain social legitimacy, were not so shaped by the Cold War, were less confrontational and more therapeutic, and were more anxious for cordial relations with liberal and secular critics. Some evangelical academics especially chaffed at identification with the Bush Administration and were anxious for a new public and especially political identity. Naturally these Baby Boomer academics began to influence their students, who were increasingly Millennials.
The newly emboldened, funded and confident Evangelical Left was enthusiastic for Barack Obama, who was himself a liberal Protestant, represented ostensibly a post-ideological and post-racial America, would focus on social uplift at home rather than wars abroad and whose election would it was hoped would atone for America's past racial sins. In fact, white evangelicals as a whole voted for John McCain in 2008 at nearly the rate they had supported Bush in 2004, although McCain had no similar evangelical testimony or interest in evangelical issues, and illustrating that evangelicals remained steadfastly conservative politically, no matter the candidate. But about one third of young evangelicals supported Obama, giving hope to the Evangelical Left and liberal allies that evangelicals would not remain a political monolith.
As right and left over the last 20 years have contended for evangelicals, with much media attention, Mainline Protestants have become almost politically irrelevant, although polls still show that about 20 percent of Americans broadly identify with that tradition. Mainliners were never really a political voting bloc. Historically, they had been more Republican than Democrat, since they are almost entirely white, middle or upper class, and mostly live in the suburbs or small towns. Radical Mainline elites never spoke for their own constituency. Church going Mainliners were and are more Republican than nominal Mainliners. Mainliners remain mostly conservative on economics and foreign policy, at odds with their church hierarchies, but increasingly liberal on social issues, perhaps influenced more by secular culture than by their denominational policies.
Get Our Latest News for FREE
Meanwhile, evangelical liberals, as they have increasingly replicated the Mainline Protestant experience, seem oblivious or indifferent to Mainline implosion and its causes. The Evangelical Left has become increasingly bold in departing from evangelical and Christian orthodoxy on sexual issues. Obama's endorsement of same sex marriage effectively gave permission or provided retroactive political cover for some professing to be evangelical to follow suit. Jim Wallis did so. Popular blogger Rachel Held Evans has done so. Evangelicals for Social Action, a 40 year old liberal group that has long be pacifist and statist but also pro-life and pro-marriage, has embraced LGBTQ advocacy under its new leadership. Other older evangelicals like Tony Campolo have often walked up to the line, not wanting to lose ties to the evangelical mainstream but still nodding to the liberationist narrative that LGBTQ is the next natural step for civil rights progression.
More commonly there is a growing stratum of evangelical elites and activists who avoid marriage and hot button issues as unnecessarily contentious in favor of more feel good advocacy for victims of sex trafficking, environmentalism, lobbying for illegal immigrants and exertions on behalf of the poor. The annual "Justice Conference," endorsed by major evangelical schools and parachurch groups, embodies this trend. Although focused on social justice, it carefully avoids debates over marriage and protecting the unborn, as well as the plight of persecuted Christians. All of those issues are associated with the traditional Religious Right and therefore to be avoided in pursuit of a new public identity for evangelicals that is more collegial with liberalism and secular culture.
Nearly every minor blip and bump by anyone who's ever been evangelical who announces for the LGBTQ cause will be widely advertised as supposed proof of historical inevitability. But polls still show evangelicals remarkably unified for traditional Christian teaching, more so than any other Christian demographic. Likely evangelicals will remain so, even if they fall mostly silent politically on this issue, as the courts attempt to snatch marriage definition away from the democratic process.
Interestingly, evangelicals in their personal views, including among the young, are as pro-life as ever. But a significant number of evangelical elites prefer to avoid the topic or to emphasize ministries or government social programs that might reduce abortion rates, rather than discuss punitive laws restricting abortion.
Avoidance or downplaying of persecution of Christians globally by many evangelicals is another notable development, especially in light of recent atrocities by ISIS against Syrian, Iraqi and Egyptian Christians. Some evangelical elites, especially among the young, see focus on Christians as self-serving and prefer a wider generic advocacy on behalf of all persecuted persons everywhere.
Other notable political trends aligned with the Evangelical Left include a growing assumption of some forms of neo-pacifism, opposition to American patriotism as a form of nationalist idolatry, and increasing hostility or at best ambivalence about Israel and American support for it. These issues are interrelated and are often influenced by neo-Anabaptist thinking and maybe unconscious Marcionite tendencies that minimize the Jewish Scriptures.
The pacifism among evangelical elites and young people owes partly to the school of John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas, partly to anxiety over inconclusive U.S. military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, which evangelicals are perceived to have championed, partly to traditional post-Vietnam War rhetoric long touted by older activists like Jim Wallis and Ron Sider, and partly to an understandable desire for Christians to seek reconciliation over conflict.
But this pacifism, which is typically not based on traditional Anabaptist beliefs that affirm the state's vocation for violence even as some communities are called to non-participation, is often absolutist, demanding the state renounce violence, or at least demanding that all Christians renounce participation in the state's violence. Shane Claiborne, the Philadelphia activist who was in Iraq to stand against overthrow of Saddam, and who recently tweeted against both ISIS and U.S. police violence, is a prominent and no doubt sincere pacifist advocate among some younger evangelicals. One of his slogans has been "more ice cream, fewer bombs," in an initiative funded by Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream.
This pacifism among some evangelicals is also typically anti-American, with much critique of "empire" that compares America to Ancient Rome or perhaps even the Third Reich. It does not often if at all concern itself with the violence of tyrannical regimes that are hostile to America. The pacifist absolutism inspired by Yoder/Hauerwas/Wallis/Claiborne, which portrays any agents of violence, whether soldiers or police, as anti-God, is of course a stark rejection of classical Christian teaching rooted in the New Testament about God's vocation for the state to wield the sword to avenge evil. It assumes that across history and cultures almost all of Christianity has been in error on this issue, and only a select prophetic few have been aligned with God's favor. And except for occasional reluctant admissions from Hauerwas, who when pressed says he would allow his family to be slaughtered before physically intervening, exponents do not admit the consequences of their advocacy and, as such, offer a utopian and not Christian much less evangelical view of the world.
The evangelical rejection of American patriotism, which stereotypes the Religious Right as handmaidens to American empire, also slips into utopianism by asserting that Christians are to have no national loyalties or presumably ties to any community other than the church itself, in effect asking Christians to behave almost as disembodied spirits, without earthly ties, despite a traditional Christian that God appoints the nations, and that Christians are to serve the communities where God has placed them. This perspective almost always accepts and repeats as Christian truth a post-1960s New Left critique of American foreign policy that fantasies, as does Shane Claiborne's 2004 book Jesus for President, that nearly all evils in the world were born in America, ignoring the wars, barbarities and genocides of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein and countless others, whose tens of millions of victims apparently don't register.
