Picture, if you will, the lush campus of an international research university, firmly ensconced in one of the least religious areas of the country. It’s the mid-2010s, and the Collegiate Gothic thoroughfares are bustling. On that campus are three Christians, each engaged in distinctive forms of on-campus ministry:
With these three now in view, one might ask a provocative question: which of these Christians was best in witness in a hostile culture? Or, to borrow from sociologist James Davison Hunter: which one was most faithfully present?
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As should be obvious, all of these stories are true. I personally witnessed them all between 2014 and 2017, while I was a law student in New England. The New York City pastor in question is, of course, the late Tim Keller—debating philosopher Anthony Kronman over his book Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan.
In the last few years, Keller’s legacy has been increasingly contested by the evangelical movement’s rightward fringe. Journalist Bari Weiss recently wondered on X—quite reasonably—“Who is the intellectual successor to the beloved, late Rev. Timothy Keller?” And Protestant public intellectual Aaron Renn answered—in my view quite correctly—that “There isn’t one. Evangelicalism is fracturing and its institutions are in a ‘catabolic’ phase."
The upshot of this critique is that Keller’s well-known brand of cultural engagement—civil, cerebral, unthreatening, accessible to New Yorker readers—may be ill-suited to the needs of the American Christian moment. Renn has argued, for instance, that somewhere around 2014 the outlook for public Christianity darkened considerably. Under present conditions, “[s[]ociety has come to have a negative view of Christianity. Being known as a Christian is a social negative, particularly in the elite domains of society. Christian morality is expressly repudiated and seen as a threat to the public good and the new public moral order.” Perhaps now, any Christian claims at all—even Keller’s winsome versions—cannot get a fair hearing.
Christians have extensively debated and discussed Renn’s “negative world” thesis (just like its predecessor, Rod Dreher’s bleak characterization of the cultural status quo in The Benedict Option). But importantly, this sort of argument is not merely an outward-facing critique—a statement of oppositionality to a hostile culture. It is also, implicitly, an internal critique of tendencies within evangelical Protestantism itself: that is, the framing suggests that those Christians engaged in ministry in hostile public spaces are more likely to make theological and philosophical concessions to maintain their social position. After all, as Renn puts it, “[c]ultural-engagement leaders have been treated by elite secular society in a way the culture warriors never were. They have a cultural status to lose[.]”
A fault line therefore emerges within the broad evangelical movement: the compromisers versus the convictional. (Of course, the argument can be run in the other direction: perhaps the “convictional” are those who’ve simply embraced a nihilistic, ahistorical triumphalism, rather than those who are helping to negotiate Christianity’s survival within at least some mainstream institutions). In any event, both “sides” of this divide understand themselves to be radically opposed to the “other.” That much is clear.
But what, exactly, is this dividing line? The church has always deployed a variety of cultural-engagement strategies. Surely, differences in ministry philosophy do not alone explain the intensity of this intra-evangelical conflict. Something else seems to be aggravating the issue.
A few years ago, I published a piece on Patheos entitled “A Typology of Conservative Protestants in an Anxious Age.” Since then, it’s wound up being one of the most-read things I’ve ever put out, and its terminology has taken on a bit of a life of its own. That piece contained a four-quadrant chart, with its axes based on (1) sympathy for “classical liberalism,” and (2) social class. Among those committed to broadly “liberal” principles are the “pluralists”—Christianity Today and other elite-skewing individuals and organizations—and “patriots” (roughly, much of the conservative/evangelical voting base, lacking access to elite spaces). Among those more interested in nonliberal visions of Christian social order are “tweeds” (those primarily concerned with intellectual retrieval within a social order that is critiqued mostly in the abstract), and “pugilists” (those less interested in theory than in radical political action here and now).
What I continue to find useful about this typology is that it captures a nuance of the unfolding debate that’s mostly gone unexamined: the fact that the conflict currently fracturing evangelicalism is not merely about doctrine and practice, but also about economics, access, and cultural prestige. It is about social class and status.
Essentially the same point is foregrounded by prominent apologist Larry Taunton, as quoted by journalist Megan Basham in her recent bestseller Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda:
I’m fully convinced that much of this conflict that we’re seeing isn’t actually political at all. I mean, it has political outworkings, but it isn’t actually about policy. It’s sociological . . . Because [elite evangelicals] see themselves as very much above the quote-unquote populists. And populism is just a grassroots movement. It’s just ordinary, decent, hardworking American people who are black, white, Hispanic, Asian, all across the political spectrum.
Evangelicalism’s civil war is, at bottom, a class war.
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I use the term “class war” advisedly: this internecine struggle is a battle over access to financial and cultural capital (that is, the necessary means for implementing one particular ministry strategy over another), but it is also, clearly, more than that. The intra-evangelical conflict is conceived by both sides as a zero-sum process in which one side must prevail over the other.
This is no exaggeration. Witness, for example, a writer pronouncing in American Reformer that, as far as “those in the upper crust of the evangelical world” are concerned, “it’s necessary for us to stop their influence, remove them from power one by one, and replace them with better elites.” And then consider New York Times columnist David French declaring that “MAGA Christians,” characterized by “viciousness and intolerance” must be stopped once and for all. What makes the current conflict a class war, and not merely a strategic disagreement, is that both sides understand themselves to be irreducibly adverse to the other.
Lest I be accused of bothsidesism, let me put my own cards on the table: I am generally sympathetic to a form of the “critique of evangelical elites” that began somewhere around 2020. Specifically, I have criticized the critical subordination of Christian doctrine to social-scientific theoretical models whose premises would seem to necessarily deny the truth-value of Christian doctrinal claims, as epitomized by some evangelical leaders’ uncritical embrace of books like Jesus and John Wayne. If theology is to count for anything much at all, it cannot take its cues from academic fields that deny its distinctive independence. And I would hope that “evangelical elites,” whomever they might be, would recognize this.
What follows is, for the most part, an argument primarily aimed at those who also find themselves within this “populist” faction. Missteps are being made; indeed, I would argue that the “class war” framing needs to be fundamentally revised. Specifically, a zero-sum understanding of this debate is both nihilistic and cannibalistic. It is nihilistic in that, for all its talk of the “common good,” the populist faction risks functionally denying the realities of cultural difference, cultural translatability, and forgiveness. And this approach is cannibalistic in that it attacks the very structures of individual and cultural formation that are required in order to produce a generation of “new elites” in the first place.
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In the fall of 2019, my wife and I went to New York City to see the play Heroes of the Fourth Turning during its initial off-Broadway run. Heroes has little action: it is a dialogue between four conservative Catholic young people, all previously students at a small religious college, debating politics, theology, and the future of Western Christianity in the shadow of the 2016 presidential election. In watching Heroes, my wife and I had the uncanny experience of seeing our own “tribe” credibly represented onstage. Never before had we seen anything like it: playwright Will Arbery—son of two professors at Wyoming Catholic College—clearly has a keen ear for the sorts of discussions he depicts on stage, because those are the kinds of conversations I and my friends have all had for years.
Midway through the play, one of the characters characterizes abortion as murder. Neither my wife nor I were struck by the line. But instantly, there was an audible gasp in the auditorium, as if an unspeakable taboo had been violated. It foregrounded exactly where in the country we were sitting: the sort of person who goes to artsy, off-Broadway plays is not exactly the sort of person for whom “the life of the unborn” is a winning slogan.
Surely, this audience knew in the abstract that pro-life arguments existed. A more aggressive pro-life message could be tuned out (and undoubtedly would’ve been. If these characters had been fundamentalist caricatures, they would’ve sparked little response. What I think was so jarring to that audience was the juxtaposition of Arbery’s characters’ apparent intellectual sophistication with their profoundly conservative positions on abortion: the shock of learning that someone who presents like this, believes that.
Ministry context, including and maybe especially geographical context, necessarily shapes the tenor and tone of that ministry. In a place like New York City, a great deal of theological-philosophical-moral groundwork must be laid: basic Christian ethical commitments (the life of the unborn) positively stun when articulated as serious intellectual positions. Acknowledging this difference really does require a difference in rhetorical style: a message that may meaningfully speak to a primarily blue-collar audience will probably not be the same message that meaningfully speaks to an audience of (say) college students. (Students just ignored the man on campus proclaiming Evolution Is a Lie. They filled the room to see Tim Keller.) This is not to make a categorical value judgment regarding either approach—but simply to insist that context does necessarily inform tactics.
Recent years have complicated this, because the internet has made context collapse a daily reality. With a single click, one can instantly toggle between city-based megachurch pastors allegedly “soft-pedaling” social issues, and pastors in the Mountain West fulminating against the cultural ills of Western society. When juxtaposed side by side, it is easy to critique the former for taking too light a touch (or from the other direction, of course, to decry the latter’s insensitive and brutish “fundamentalism”). But the two audiences to whom they speak are not the same. Surely, it is broadly permissible to speak to a group in the manner that best reaches them—else, would Christian mission work be possible at all?
This position is, of course, predicated on the assumption that one can in fact meaningfully speak to both audiences. And it is precisely that point that seems to be increasingly called into question: one implication of the “negative world” framing (though perhaps not intended by Renn) is that a sort of incommensurability has emerged between Christian claims and those of mainstream mass culture. This is a state in which, as Alasdair MacIntyre once wrote, “rival premises are such that we possess no rational way of weighing the claims of one as against another.” So, for instance, one finds the argument that in contemporary debates, Christian morality counts for nothing against the demands of secular autonomy.
There’s truth to this tension. But it is facile to leave off there. If (as the Christian tradition has historically asserted) Christian truth claims reflect reality as it most truly is, then one should rationally expect to find “traces” of fundamentally Christian insight scattered throughout the ostensibly secular mainstream. And find them one still does. There are Richard Reeves’s arguments, in his recent book Of Boys and Men, for the enduring value of maleness as such. There is Christine Emba’s recent case, in Rethinking Sex, for the relocation of sexual desire and consent within a more complex constellation of moral commitments. There is Julius Krein’s analysis of the possible rediscovery of humane political economy, almost sub silentio, within the Democratic Party.
Whatever philosophical incommensurability between Christian and secular positions exists within the “negative world” is not, strictly speaking, an absolute gulf. Indeed, that incommensurability may be primarily located at the discursive level—that is, an unreceptiveness to positions advanced in a specifically Christian idiom—which, ironically enough, would suggest that “winsomeness” still has a place. Perhaps the “negative world” is not quite as negative as it appears?
More problematically, the implication of a “hard incommensurability” position is that the white-collar cultural bloc—those to whom, for instance, Keller ministered—can be essentially abandoned to itself, left to rot in its own defective premises. This is poor strategy and poorer theology. To make this analytical move is to transpose a political campaign tactic into the domain of Christian missiology (and even ecclesiology): we’re never going to win that group, so we might as well just give up and concentrate our strategies elsewhere.
Understood narrowly as an allocative tactic, this may be warranted: it may not make sense to invest as many resources in the tilling of rocky soil. But understood as an ecclesiological principle, it is badly flawed: Jonah, after all, was called to labor in hostile Nineveh, with no ex ante guarantee of success. So too, the book of James expressly contemplates that the church may contain individuals of both higher and lower social position—and yet within the church’s fold, they are treated the same. The church is not a proper site for class war, because all her members—elites and laborers alike—stand in equal need. And that is because the church’s destiny is to enfold all of human existence—not to become merely an interest group among other interest groups, warring for a share of scarce resources.
Over-reading the “negative world” thesis to entail a hard, or absolute, incommensurability between Christian and non-Christian domains—an incommensurability justifying the tactical abandonment of “elite” ministry contexts—amounts to essentially denying the possibility of any substantive “common good” at all. It is to imply that there is no shared principle or theological vocabulary that can meaningfully speak to blue-collar Christians and white-collar secular liberals alike. The “common good” is reduced to a political project to which one pays abstract lip service, rather than something realized coherently in the lives of ordinary people. And with this reduction of the “common good” to the private good of those self-identified with the visible church, that same visible church is pushed into a self-consuming nihilism, rendered impotent to speak to those beyond its own borders. All the church can do is culture war.
This implicit nihilism represents a moral problem with the class-war paradigm. But there is a pragmatic problem as well: the fact that the class-war approach cripples the emergence of the very “new elites” that elite evangelicalism’s critics crave.
The evangelical class war is a battle for status, not merely resources. And for the most part, that status is conferred on the basis of something elites bring to the table beyond merely their own elite status. The much-maligned David French did not become an “evangelical elite” simply by fiat: he reached prominence because of his long track record as a litigator, especially in free speech and religious liberty cases. The Gospel Coalition grew to prominence as a colloquium of pastors characterized by ministry effectiveness. This is not the acquisition of power for power’s sake; it’s the exemplification of excellence at some specific thing or other. Endlessly talking about “wielding power” or the “need for new elites” is actively inimical to that very end: first one excels in some area, then one obtains influence.
The price of “new elites” is the production of a group of individuals who work in some isolation from the pressures of class warring—individuals who are primarily interested in issues for their truth-value, not their utility, and allowed to pursue their conclusions without regard to whether these conclusions serve some predetermined end or other. (Recall that the most powerful critiques of the 1619 Project were not those aired in conservative media (or those spearheaded by political leaders), but those produced by (liberal) historians at some of the nation’s leading universities. Intellectually honest liberals can still recognize pamphleteering when they see it.) It is this intellectual autonomy that produces the sorts of figures who lead.
Who, among today’s critics of “elite evangelicalism,” could take Tim Keller’s place on stage, across from Anthony Kronman, and credibly and persuasively critique Spinozism before an indifferent-to-hostile audience? Names do not readily suggest themselves.
Ultimately, to the extent that the critique of “elite evangelicalism” is pursued as a class war, it undercuts its own long-term effectiveness. The war becomes everything. And that is a slender reed upon which to build a Christian future.
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Where to go from here?
Begin with this: in the evangelical civil war, both sides have, implicitly, accepted the premise of the question with which this essay began: that there is one, and only one, way to be faithfully present under contemporary cultural conditions. This is the root issue. And yet it is precisely that premise which, I think, should be called into question. The logic of class war—of existential zero-sum struggle between different evangelical factions—should be dropped. The now-developed “critique of elite evangelicalism” goes astray when it is understood as a warrant for class war rather than as a necessary internal critique of theological drift. The goal need not be the overthrow and replacement of those currently serving in elite/white-collar ministry contexts; where such figures have made improper concessions to cultural norms, they should be corrected as erring brethren rather than written off as subversives or enemies.
And ultimately, it must be recognized that shared terrain persists, even within the horizon of the “negative world.” That ground may be harder now to locate, and especially hard to articulate in mutually acceptable terms. But that is what it means, after all, to speak of a “common good” that transcends and pervades all things. If it blinds itself to this unifying center, evangelical populism will tear itself apart—even more than it already has.