Screwtape’s Warning about Polemics and Evangelical Associations

Over the past year, I sounded in various ways my growing concern about the tribalization of public life and the corresponding loss of a shared framework where we might work out disputes reasonably has grown. My final post in that direction was an attempt to outline “intellectual empathy,” an overly fancy way of framing what previous generations might have simply called “charity” or “understanding your opponent.”

The concept didn’t win everyone over, of course, as it was admittedly underdeveloped. Brad Littlejohn did some excellent work filling the things out and clarifying what “intellectual empathy” does not mean. It’s hard to improve on what he’s already said, though I’d simply note my agreement that we ought not forgo the occasional strong words for those people and positions who deserve them. Indeed, part of my broader concern is that the widespread lack of intellectual empathy actually makes polemics more difficult, as they have nothing to stand out against. If everything is polemical, then nothing is. Yet I take it that we are increasingly moving to the point where trans-”party” dialogue is treated as intrinsically treasonous. That seems to me an unhealthy way of looking at things.

Screwtape Letters (Photo credit: ckpicker)

I will also add this. While I made the point in relationship to partisanship (as the piece was written around the time of the election), my real concern is for the church and for how we talk with each other. To reiterate a throwaway comment I made in my review of Rachel Held Evans’ book, we have other norms besides the truth that should govern our public discourse. We have an obligation to pursue reconciliation and peace, even when they involve drawing sharp lines (as they sometimes do—cf. 1 Corinthians 5).

Let me put a hypothesis out there, by way of inquiry rather than assertion: it seems that pursuing those other ends in our public discourse is more difficult within the diffused networks of “evangelicalism” than it is within defined institutional contexts. Our tribal affiliation (if I may put it that way) tends to overwhelm and subsume within it our relationship to our church. If we conceive of ourselves first and foremost as “evangelicals” rather than as members of “First Baptist Church” or what have you, then the good of “unity” will be as diffused as the institutions that support it and so will have less power to govern our rhetoric. Which often happens, at least tacitly, among those who spend a good deal of their time online or who write and speak for non-ecclesiastical organizations (as I do).

Where we conceive of our “public discourse” occurring actually shapes which virtues we prioritize, in other words. The most ecclesiastically tied among us might still interact with Christians online and still not know precisely how the good of unity ought stand with their love of truth. And they too have their own other ways of aligning themselves and so calling their emphasis on unity into question (“Are you of Keller? Are you of Wilson?”). But they at least have the advantage of prioritizing a particular instance of unity in ways that many evangelicals in their church contexts do not, and that helps them see the point of pursuing unity (and to know better when to draw lines) better than other folks.

I realize all that is underdeveloped, and I put it out there somewhat gingerly. But behind it is this bit from Screwtape, which I stumbled over in my holiday reading:

“Any small coterie, bound together by some interest which other men dislike or ignore, tends to develop inside itself a hothouse of mutual admiration, and toward the other world, a great deal of pride and hatred which is entertained without shame because the “Cause” is its sponsor and it is thought to be impersonal.

Even when the little group exists for the Enemy’s own purposes, this remains true. We want the Church to be small not only that fewer men may know the Enemy but also that those who do may acquire the uneasy intensity and the defensive self-righteousness of a secret society or a clique.

The Church herself is, of course, heavily defended and we have never yet quite succeeded in giving her all the characteristics of a faction; but subordinate factions within her have often produced admirable results, from the parties of Paul and of Apollos at Corinth down to the High and Low parties in the Church of England.”

I don’t have much to say beyond that, other than to add an exclamation point. The evangelical world these days is largely driven by precisely the sort of small coteries that Screwtape wants to encourage, and they generally line up with the conferences where they happen (“Are you of Q? Are you of The Gospel Coalition?”). For all the good that comes from those organizations—and having been to both and written for both, I think on balance a lot does—there is a perennial danger that they will devolve into “hothouses of mutual admiration.”

And particularly as evangelicals, we ought to worry a little about whether our weak ecclesiastical ties and the rise of even more sub-ecclesiastical associations will stunt our discourse by diminishing our sense of the need for unity, a sense which is primarily shaped by our experience of the local church.

Digg Digg

Are the Metro Evangelicals Right?

Andy Crouch (or his headline writer) coined the catchy term “metro-evangelicals” to describe the growing urban resurgence within American evangelicalism. In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Crouch explains that pastors like Tim Keller and Mark Driscoll see cities as the beachhead of a new evangelization. Crouch’s magazine, Christianity Today, has launched an extensive series on this work of God (This is Our City).

My first two reactions are profound rejoicing at the sending of workers into the harvest and profound prayer that these efforts may bear much fruit. To all who are called there (like my two siblings in Manhattan) the great opportunity and great difficulty should always occasion our concern and support.

A panorama of Lower Manhattan as viewed from the Staten Island Ferry. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Yet there is a timbre amidst all of this city-centrism that troubles me.

Maybe this is because the metro-evangelicals are not counter-cultural, but rather a baptized version of New Urbanism. In a culture that idolizes living in a loft in a gentrifying art district, a church planter is not exactly bearing a cross in deciding to “rough it” under such conditions.

Maybe it is that some of its advocates tell a story that previous generations fearfully abdicated the dirty, sinful cities. Thus, all this new “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” generation needs do is show up and things will get better. It’s worth noting that this mythical Evangelical abandonment never really happened and we should be more careful at imputing impure motives to previous generations of believers.

Or maybe the metro-evangelicals’ claims of self-importance are so hyperbolic that they insult the gospel work being done in less densely populated zipcodes. For example, some urbanist church planters claim that cultural transformation emanates exclusively from cities, as Mark Driscoll writes: Continue reading →

How Liberal are Young Evangelicals: A Dialogue with Ben Domenech

Are the young evangelicals becoming liberal? And how would we know? I asked Ben Domenech to let me publish our correspondance on the question. Ben is directly responsible for Mere-O’s success the past few years: his encouragement to write for The City came right when I was contemplating leaving writing behind altogether. And I’m addicted to his daily email, The Transom, which you all should read. To it, then.

Ben: Isn’t this exclusively a measure of young evangelicals‘ position on marriage? There’s a healthy body of evidence indicating that young churchgoers are more pro-life than they’ve ever been, and Millennials broadly are more fiscally conservative than prior generations at the same point. “Becoming more liberal” requires that you track trends, and other than marriage, I have a hard time seeing where that trend exists. Plus, statistically, as you become more liberal, you typically become less likely to attend church… so if they’re wedded to liberalism, they become less likely to remain evangelicals, or at least engaged ones.

Young evangelicals like this book. A lot.

Matt: Well, a position on marriage has ramifications everywhere. The study I referenced found differences on views of pornography, cohabitation, premarital sex. Johnson and Smith grant that there are significant differences on environmentalism. And I would bet that the gap on the permissibility of recreational drug use is pretty large, too. Which is to say, when it comes to public issues besides abortion, the mindset is increasingly something like liberaltarianism. At least from where I sit, anyway.

To your point about attending church, we haven’t started hearing much about evangelical church decline yet because of the emphasis on celebrity pastors that evangelicals have and the disparate nature of the movement which makes measuring numbers notoriously difficult. But the SBC is a good bellwether of the evangelical world, and their decline has definitely begun (and if their voter rolls actually reflected the number of people in the pews, the drop would seem precipitous).

So I do think that the problems extend beyond marriage.

Ben: I remain skeptical of the impact of this population primarily because 1) the claim that our inability to acknowledge the entrenched social leftism of youth will doom conservatism and the church isn’t new, 2) historically, we see that after the point of childbirth and homeownership, people’s priorities change, and 3) the number of elected officials representing this viewpoint is extremely small, infinitesimal even. The drug legalization comparison is worthwhile: the priorities of the young shift after a certain point of maturity. You can hold this shift into adulthood off for longer, as we do today, but at a certain point you care more about property taxes than pot.

My general view is that what we’re really talking about is the rise of the religiously unaffiliated who find doctrine socially inconvenient. People stop enjoying church so they effectively drop out. For all the talk of atheism and agnosticism, the real rise in America in recent decades has been the religiously unaffiliated, accompanying a decline in Protestantism. You dig into these numbers and you see people who, unlike atheists and agnostics, actually do believe in God. They just don’t have any interest beyond that (68% say they believe in God, only 14% say he’s very important). They actually approve of churches generally, saying that they do all sorts of good work in the community, etc. But they just don’t care. They’re not seekers, they’re not spiritually interested – only 10% are “looking for faith right for them”. How incredibly dull. Continue reading →

The Existence of the Liberal Young Evangelical

My good friend Joe Carter has gone public with a disagreement we’ve had for a few years now over whether the “liberal young evangelical” exists, or whether he is a media creation.

My own line on this is that the shift has been overstated by the media, but still real. And that media narratives tend to become self-fulfilling prophecies, as they provide cover for those who might be on the fence to go in a more liberal direction. It’s a theme echoed by my other good friend Eric Teetsel, who points to the details of a study by Sojourners to make his case.

There’s a lot to say about both posts, but I’ll limit myself to a few points.

First, Brett’s analysis of why he’s voting for Romney pretty much nails the younger evangelical support: it’s there, but it’s not quite enthusiastic. In fact, given Romney’s own moderate past I’m a bit surprised that Joe didn’t take the opportunity to say that the millennial evangelical support for him is a sign of how confused we are.

Second, Joe points primarily to party identification to make his case. But the Republican party hasn’t been very friendly territory for social conservatives these days, and that’s probably only going to get worse. So while I understand the decision to use it as a metric, it’s not as persuasive as Joe makes it out to be.

Young evangelicals dig this.

Joe’s best argument is the Baylor study he points to, but then when it comes to analyzing trends among young evangelicals, that one is such an outlier that it’s tendentious to weigh it too heavily. For instance, most other studies have found young evangelicals to be twice as willing as their parents to support same-sex marriage. Yes, it’s still not at the level of other social groups, but the trend is definitely in a liberal direction.

And the most recent peer-reviewed study I’ve seen after Johnson’s critiqued it for focusing too heavily on electoral issues directly. Justin Farrell, who makes the case, found that young evangelicals are in fact more liberal on their parents on every social issue besides abortion.

In fact, Farrell’s study nails the real problem with Joe’s analysis: by focusing on party affiliation, Joe misses the change in ethos that younger evangelicals have experienced. Farrell’s article measures attitude, not behavior, and he points out in closing that the changes do not necessarily “suggest that young evangelicals are becoming Democrats, or leaving the Republican party in droves.” If we deprioritize the political affiliation–which is a move that young evangelicals tend to want anyways–then the case for a liberal shift becomes quite a bit stronger.

As to the Sojourners study, I don’t have much to say about it other than I don’t quite share Eric’s excitement over 42% of evangelicals prioritizing social issues in their top two concerns. The Sojourners folks note some Akron University study that listed about half that, which I presume comes from John Green’s center but I could not verify. At any rate, 42% seems disappointingly low–and at any rate, the number can only be used one way or the other when compared with the previous generation. If we’ve gone from 80% to 40%, then it seems like we’d be able to call that a liberalizing shift.

Which is to say, I remain unmoved in my position: the liberal young evangelical is no myth. They may not be a Democrat (yet), but they are very real indeed.

With a grin: rejecting the victim’s stance

One of the great follies of our day is that every group’s story has become a tragedy. Our society has increasingly embraced a discourse of victimization, in which every subculture tends to define itself in terms of grievances created by other groups. This is most prominent in queer, feminist, and racial discourses, but it has crept into every corner of our society, to our great harm.

A culture in which the language of victimization is primary is doubly broken. First, it drowns out the cries of real victims in a torrent of illegitimate (or at least, much less legitimate) claims. People who have suffered real abuse find it much harder to get a hearing when others are using “abuse” as merely one more lever to achieve their own ends. To be sure, many of the groups that cry “victim” do so with some legitimacy. Christians in America really never have to worry about being beaten mercilessly for their proclaimed identity; people who come out as gay do in certain parts of the country. Feminists have had legitimate complaints about male abuse of power, and we would do well to listen – which is not to say that we must agree with every such complaint; we shouldn’t, and I don’t.

Even when communities have experienced real hostility and oppression, though,the choice to define themselves entirely in these terms of persecution is to everyone’s detriment: the second pernicious consequence of embracing a pervasive culture of victimization is that the possibility of dialogue between oppressor and victim erodes rapidly. Rational discourse is and must be out the window. All that remains is conflict, lasting until the old grievances have been redressed and the power balance righted – or at least, right from the perspective of the victim. Anyone who has studied the French Revolution knows how that plays out.¹

Christians, then, ought not perpetuate a culture oriented around the language of victimization. Continue reading →

“He Desires a Noble Task” The Erosion of the Evangelical Pastorate

The evangelical church has a problem. We’re going to run out of good pastors. For a variety of reasons, we are failing to sufficiently prepare the next generation of church leadership. I doubt this particular problem will ever feel like a full-blown crisis, given the many influences on church health and the wide diffusion of the effects, but it’s a trend with costly consequences. All things being equal, eventually there will be fewer churches than there could be, and on average they will be weaker.

This message is different than the common doomsday alarms. American evangelicalism is not in perfect health, but it’s strong in many respects. More 20-somethings are currently attending evangelical churches than any year since 1972. Enrollment in Christian Colleges is also up, as is diversity. The problem is not that there aren’t any young people in church; it’s that not enough of them are planning to lead.

Why think this?

First, the numbers. While Christian colleges are growing, seminary enrollment has either plateaued or declined at mainline and evangelical seminaries. Don Sweeting, President of Reformed Theological Seminary, told the Lausanne Consultation on Global Theological Education a few months ago in his plenary address, “We have more seminaries and fewer students.” It’s not just an enrollment issue. As anyone who has recently spent time on seminary campuses can tell you, more and more seminarians are not planning on leading churches. They are there for counseling, or para-church ministry, or simply to learn more about Scripture. Quite a few don’t know why they are there.

This brings us to quality. There are no easy ways of determining the quality of pastors-in-training, even on very simple metrics (unlike most other graduate programs, an M.Div. does not require GRE scores). What we do know is that there has been a distinctive cultural shift away from a “best and brightest” mentality of the Puritans. To put it very simply: the top Christian students (whether attending a Christian colleges or not) are generally not interested in leading churches vocationally. From what I see, this trend is accelerating. Schools like Gordon, Wheaton, Moody, and Biola are not producing nearly as many future ministers as they used to, and even fewer from the top 25% of students (a group I’ll call the leadership quartile). To the leadership quartile academia, medicine, law, politics, technology, and media are attractive—sadly, being a pastor is not.

I see three reasons this is happening: Continue reading →

Only One Center: Reorienting Evangelical Theology on Christ

If evangelicals have a singular strength, it is a willingness to disagree over secondary issues while agreeing on the centrality of the gospel, inerrancy, and conversionism. This has given us enormous flexibility to cooperate on missions, charity, social justice, and political belligerency.¹ The space for common effort that Eric Landry once described as the village green – a common space for neighbors to gather – has been one of the great boons to Christianity.

Evangelicals have learned to put the gospel first, to insist on inerrancy, to prioritize evangelism and discipleship. A better set of practical emphases is hard to come by, and we are right to see the salvation of the lost as God’s great mission and thus our most pressing task. We live "between the times"; there is a necessary urgency to proclaiming Christ’s death and resurrection while we await his return. We recognize that the priorities of the young church were essentially threefold: missionary work, the sanctification of believers in the church through mutual edification and the elders’ teaching, and ministries of compassion. It is to evangelicals’ great credit that these have been our emphases as well.

Indeed, because we esteem the twin causes of evangelism and discipleship, we have set them in the center of our movement – to our detriment.² To our detriment, I say, because there can be only one center, and if it is anything but God himself, we will run amok. The gospel is the way to the center, but it is not the center. Having put it there, we have misplaced many other genuine goods that are a necessary part not only of human flourishing but of specifically Christian flourishing.

The solar system provides a useful metaphor here. The earth is essential to human existence. It is not, however, the center of our solar system, and it could not support human existence if it were. Just as the sun is the center of the solar system around which all other bodies revolve, Jesus Christ himself is the center of our faith around which all other aspects revolve. Some of those aspects may be nearer the center, spinning faster (that is, with greater urgency). Others may be like Jupiter: some way removed from the center, but of enormous importance to the health of the whole system. Still others may be like the moons of Pluto: far-out, with little impact on the rest of the system, but still part of it and not to be entirely ignored.

To be sure, all healthy evangelicals implicitly understand that the gospel is here to point us to Jesus, rather than being its own end. We struggle with this practically, though; we often make "ministry" the point around which all other aspects of the Christian life must revolve. Continue reading →

Evangelical Tracts and Real Art: Gungor and Creation’s Goodness

You know music has power when it has you shivering while running in hundred-degree heat.

Güngör’s Ghosts Upon the Earth is like that, though. From the opening track, the album screams its willingness to be and do something terribly different from most Christian music of the last quarter century. For one thing, this is an album, not just a collection of songs. For another, the musical skill on display here combines with a willingness to forge a new sound, rather than retread the same old pop-rock milieu one more time.

Musical and lyrical unity in an album is a rarity today in any genre, but this album tells a story. Indeed, it tells the story.

But back to those shivers.

“Let There Be” is the first and only time to date that any piece of art in any medium has struck me with the same force and intensity as Tolkien’s glorious description of creation in The Silmarillion. One suspects, given some of the commonalities between the two, that Güngör is familiar with “Ainulindalë”, Tolkien’s magnificent chapter of sung creation and sung rebellion and sung divine triumph.

Ghosts Upon the Earth sweeps from this divine moment of joyous creation through an idyllic, Edenic revel in the delight of yet unbroken fellowship with God before plunging through the Fall and into the longing that pierces every heart in this age. But the hope of resurrection comes soon in the proclamation that “when death dies / all things live”, and this theme of hope then undergirds the painful journey that follows. Every joy that follows in this album is tinged with sorrow, but every moment of despair gives way eventually to hope. Again: this is a journey. It is beautiful and broken.

Güngör’s first album, Beautiful Things, had musical interest in spades but sometimes at the cost of musical intelligibility. Much of the album – the titular track the main exception – required repeated listens before I could “get” it, and the recording never entered my regular listening. It was, like many classical pieces I have studied, interesting but not consistently engaging. But here, the band has achieved something remarkable: they have kept the same musical interest and complexity, but in such a way that every song on the album is engaging. You can sing this stuff with them, but you can also dig deep, deep down into the musical guts and find there remains yet more to plumb. That’s hard to pull off.

If you take a look at Güngör’s blog, you’ll note that Michael Güngör has criticized the typical evangelical approach to art, and rightly so. This album isn’t just a piece of music; it’s a salvo in a war against a reductionist understanding of art that typifies so much of evangelicalism. If it has become something of a cliche to attack the evangelical approach to art, there nonetheless remains a need for pieces to fill the gap, and there remains too the need to educate.

One reviewer on iTunes noted that the album confused him. It is not, he said, a typical worship album, and the lyrics were not all perfectly suitable for use in evangelism. You can not simply hand this to an unbeliever and expect them to come away understanding the gospel perfectly. The reviewer seemed particularly confused by the second track, “Brother Moon,” with its references to “Brother Moon” and “Sister Sun” and “Mother Earth.” I was bemused by his concern. Every reference to nature points right back to its Creator. The song points toward an innocent, nearly Edenic delight in unbroken fellowship with God and in all his hands have made. In the end, the album is as gospel-saturated as one could wish. But this was too much lyrical and intellectual complexity for someone looking for an evangelistic tract in the form of an album. Continue reading →

Dwight Moody, Heaven, and the Resurrection of the Body

N.T. Wright’s works have had many good effects. Inspiring eager readers to police people’s use of heaven is not one of them. ”Heaven” in much of evangelical discourse functions as shorthand for a whole nexus of ideas that are, well, pretty Biblical and not nearly as opposed to the body as Wright made it seem. The difference is one of emphasis, which is important but not everything.

To underscore the point, I decided to excerpt a little from Earthen Vessels about D.L. Moody’s understanding of the body.

English: Dwight Lyman Moody, founder of the Northfield Seminary, Mount Hermon School, and the Moody Bible Institute, circa 1900. Edited image from the Library of Congress (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

D.L. Moody was one of America’s most famous preachers in the early 1900s and a central figure in one of evangelicalism’s dominant strands: the revivalist movement. The revivalists have been (often justly) criticized for developing a theology that was inwardly focused and a piety that is wrapped up in spiritual experiences; all the sorts of things that generally accompany distaste for the physical body.

Moody, however, has a more nuanced view of the body than we might expect. Consider what he wrote before dying, a passage that his son would use to open his biography:

Someday you will read in the papers that D. L. Moody of East Northfield is dead. Don’t you believe a word of it! At that moment I shall be more alive than I am now; I shall have gone up higher, that is all, out of this old clay tenement into a house that is immortal—a body that death cannot touch, that sin cannot taint; a body fashioned like unto His glorious body.[39] It is as clear a statement about the hope of the resurrection as one could possibly hope for.

When it comes to the afterlife, N. T. Wright is correct that Moody’s focus is on “heaven,” which Moody thinks is “up there,” and that it is a place where we will someday “go.”

But even though Moody reads John’s description of “streets of gold” rather literally, heaven is not a glorious place because of the stones or the physical splendor but because of the presence of the triune God. Throughout his sermons, Moody is always focused on the center of theology—God. But the center doesn’t consume everything else, and Moody never rejects the resurrection of the body. In fact, in his sermon on the resurrection of Jesus, he suggests that it and the cross are the “chief cornerstones of the religion of Jesus Christ.” And that has serious implications for us as believers:

We shall come up from the grave, by and by, with a shout. “He is the first fruits;” he has gone into the vale, and will call us by and by. The voice of the Son of God shall wake up the slumbering dead! Jacob will leave his lameness, and Paul will leave his thorn in the flesh; and we shall come up resurrected bodies, and be forever with the Lord.

Moody clearly isn’t bashful speaking about the resurrection of the body, even though he emphasizes the presence of God in the afterlife rather than the resurrection of our physical bodies.

A Faith of our Own: A Review of Jonathan Merritt’s New Book

Jonathan Merritt is a friend, someone who I think very highly of and who has been enormously kind to me. We don’t always agree, as I outline in my review of his new book A Faith of our Own, but he’s someone whose voice I take very seriously. An excerpt:

More than anything, A Faith of Our Own is indispensable for understanding how millennial evangelicals understand their own heritage and their place in the world in light of it. Merritt is honest that millennials have sought a different tone in public predominantly because of their experiences of poverty in third world countries, gay friends, or what have you. As he puts it, “These experiences—these faith crises—are often the power train behind the shifts taking place in our culture. Experiences like these thrust people of faith back into the Scriptures to ask new and different questions.”

Merritt is careful to suggest that this generation is shaped more by its “reflection” than by “reaction or response.” That may be true enough on an individual plane, but Merritt also points out that the broader, younger evangelical world is still reacting: “No one will deny,” he writes, “that there is a reaction against the past several decades of Christian political engagement.” In every story Merritt tells on this theme, people move in a liberal direction after a perceived failure of their conservative outlook to explain their experiences. The reaction may be a matter of deliberate reflection, but it is a reaction nonetheless.

Read the whole thing. More on all this culture wars business, I suspect, next week.

Culture, politics, and religion for those who love words.

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