For as long as evangelicalism has existed in the post-war US, it has had a certain inhale-exhale quality about it.
Breathe in: Emphasize Christian outreach. Resist political capture. Center evangelization and irenic engagement with the world.
Call this the "missional" wing of the movement.
Breathe out: Emphasize the purity of Christian communities. Identify and align with friendly political powers that will protect your communities. Center discontinuity with the world. Adopt a more confrontational posture.
Call this the "purity" wing of the movement.
Yes, these two groups are more commonly described as "evangelical" and "fundamentalist." But I think this is an unsatisfying framing for many reasons. First, no one cares about the difference between the two groups except for evangelicals and fundamentalists. In the eyes of everyone else both groups are just conservative Protestants, even "fundamentalists." Second, "fundamentalist" has a pejorative sense to it that is not helpful for the conversation and, in any case, no one has a clear notion of what a "fundamentalist" is anyway.
The dynamic is not surprising. Many parts of it are even quite understandable. My point here is not to tell a simple story of heroes and villains. Evangelicalism was born in the post-war, early Cold War context of the 1950s and was something of a striver class phenomenon built around the combination of Sunbelt money and energy and some limited northeastern academic and cultural sensibilities. It wasn't a bad movement, but it was also a movement very much wrapped up in the sociological environment of Cold War America. The push-pull dynamics of growing evangelical wealth and ambition and of global and national uncertainty and anxiety all makes a great deal of sense. We should be able to tell that story without necessarily portraying one side as wholly good and the other as wholly bad, even if both sides did also have some genuinely bad actors, some of whom are very bad indeed.
That said, it is a deeply dissatisfying cul de sac to find oneself circling—you can take the more missional side of things and know you'll have periods of time when you're ascendant and things are going "well" in your eyes. Or you can take the side more concerned with the purity of the church (a worthy concern!) and know you'll also have times when you are ascendant and think things are going "well." And those times will cycle every 10-20 years.
Of course, what happens in practice most of the time is that the missional side of the evangelical divide will spend all their time acting as if the purity side of the divide is the greatest threat the church has ever faced. The purity side is happy to reciprocate. To listen to some missional folks is to come away with the idea that Mark Driscoll is the worst threat the Christian church has ever faced. To listen to the purity folks is to come away with the same idea about Andy Stanley. The option of "mostly not caring" is seemingly unavailable. (Except it actually isn't.)
Here's the problem: That sociological environment that birthed evangelicalism as we know it today is basically over. The economy that shaped that world from the 50s to the 2010s is ending. That much has been clear for nearly ten years now—Brexit and the Trump election both represented quite explicit movements against the post-war open society model. Moreover, the demographic groups that shaped that era are aging into mass retirement or are already dead. Within evangelicalism in particular, there are not sufficient people (or funds) in the pews to replace them. Even the political assumptions that defined the latter half of that era are now being challenged, as both Republicans and Democrats go through their own realignments, as both tend to do every two or three generations.
Because the sociological environment that created evangelicalism is winding down, it has created enormous anxiety and uncertainty for evangelical believers who simply don't know how to imagine a Christian movement outside of the unique environment created by the 1950s economic environment, the Baby Boom generation, and the post-Cold War pax Americana. (Tellingly, one of the things this indicates is that they have no space in their imagination whatsoever for what a healthy mainline even looks like—and thus, if Jody Bottum is correct, no actual idea of how American Christianity has historically functioned within American public life.)
The outcome of this anxiety, I think, is that the divisions within the evangelical coalition between the purity wing and the missional wing have become sharper. We're still driving around the same cul de sac. It's just now we're way angrier and also there are fewer and fewer of us every time we loop around.
People who aren't as steeped in evangelicalism as a sociological entity often find all this mystifying. One friend with ties to an eastern Christian tradition once remarked to me that, "you evangelicals are kind of a joke, you know? My people have been persecuted for centuries. Our children have been stolen from us. We've had martyrs. Our churches have been burned. But still we are faithful. We still follow God. We still meet for worship. We still pray. We still raise our children in the truth. But you evangelicals discover that critical race theory is a thing that exists and six months later you're devouring each other."
So what should you do in this environment if you are a Protestant Christian concerned with the life of the church? One tip: Stop caring so much about "evangelicalism" and the celebrities who define it as a sociological phenomenon.
50 years from now vanishingly few people will have any idea who Mark Driscoll was. They'll also almost certainly have no clue who Andy Stanley was. Indeed, they will be wholly ignorant of virtually every celebrity pastor or evangelical influencer you can name, with perhaps one or two exceptions, but no more. So unless you have some very specific situation in which proper pastoral care requires caring about a certain celebrity, you should just stop caring.
To stop caring about "evangelicalism" is not the same thing as no longer caring about Christianity or Jesus or the church in general or even specific churches in our communities. It is, rather, to turn away from the mostly fake discourses that pervade Christian media and to focus instead on actual flesh-and-blood Christian communities and Christian believers.
What should we do instead?
We should think about public worship, church staffing, and day to day church life as if we have something to learn from the church as it existed before the 1950s in America. (This may well mean trying to remove phones, perhaps even screens more generally, from public worship.)
We should also think about the shared life of our church as if there are possible structures for such common life aside from the heavily car-dependent context shaped primarily by individual lifestyle ambition and cheap energy that has defined our experience for several decades now.
We should think and practice Christian discipline as if the church as it existed before 20th century America has something to teach us.
We should recognize both marriage and celibacy as normal Christian callings, one or the other of which is given to every Christian. Celibate Christians should be supported in that calling with a robust communal life. We should also regard children as a normal and constitutive part of marriage. We should regard the vows we make to families and children as having real force. (When baptizing a child in PCA churches the pastor will ask the congregation if they vow to support the parents in the raising of their child. After the congregants raise their hand saying "we do," my pastor will sometimes remark, "hey, look at all those nursery volunteers!")
The marching instructions we've been given are simple enough: Pray without ceasing. Rejoice in all things. In everything give thanks. Devote ourselves to the teaching of God's Word and the breaking of bread. In the novel bearing her name Hannah Coulter surveys a version of these instructions and says, "I am not altogether capable of so much. But those are the right instructions."
Fortunately, our capacity to follow them is not dependent upon ourselves. We have "a great high priest whose name is love who ever lives to plead for us." Our hope in this world is not founded on the status of sociological blocs, but purely on this fact: That our names "are graven on His hands and written on His heart."