As the fracturing dynamics that roiled within American evangelicalism between 2015 and 2024 begin to finally exhaust themselves, it is worth pausing to consider where we now find ourselves at the beginning of what may feel like a new era in the life of the American church. Old alliances and coalitions have fragmented and many institutions have fallen, either through moral failure or through actually closing their doors and ceasing to exist. Yet alongside these threats one can also see many signs of hope–there seems to be a new openness to Christianity amongst many people who once seemed quite closed off. This openness can be seen in everything from the response to the Asbury outpouring, to Canadian apologist Wesley Huff’s appearance on the Joe Rogan Show, to surprising conversions like those of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, to soaring Bible sales numbers in 2024.
Indeed, the British broadcaster Justin Brierly has built an entire podcast and book around the theme titled “The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God.” More recently, Australian pastor Mark Sayers reviewed a wide range of data on his podcast “Rebuilders”, all of which point to a surprisingly bright future for the Christian church not only in the USA, but in Australia, England, and around the world.
Yet it is an odd and disorienting moment too: Social trust is low. Core institutions that define our common lives as people face serious challenges to their credibility and reputation–and many of the challenges they face are of their own creation. The combination of positive energy and social incoherence, perhaps even a pluriform public crisis or what Adam Tooze has called “polycrisis,” has created a moment with immense evangelistic opportunity as well as high risk and uncertainty.
So far, four basic responses to this mixture of factors have begun to emerge amongst anglosphere Protestants. Which of the four you tend toward is going to be a function of how you place yourself along two spectrums.
- Spectrum 1: When it comes to Christians relating to the world outside the church, do you value purity more or pluralism more?
- Spectrum 2: What is decisive in shaping societies and bringing about transformation: a plurality of individuals or key institutions?
You can plot the four responses on an x-y chart very easily:
To understand each bloc, we will first define the two axes being used and then will treat each of the four quadrants.
The first question has to do with your relative willingness as a Christian individual or as a small group of Christians to exist within spaces not owned or controlled by Christian believers. People more willing to participate in such institutions and social spaces are on the positive side of the vertical axis. People who desire greater uniformity in their social circles and specifically seek to live as much of their lives as possible in institutions and spaces controlled by Christians are the negative side of the vertical axis.
The second question concerns how societies and cultures change. Those who tend to view social change as resulting from mass movements of individuals are on the negative side of the horizontal axis. Those who believe societies and cultures are largely defined by a small number of key institutions and powerful individuals are on the positive side of the x-axis. (To put it another way, both quadrants on the right side of the chart above are basically “Hunterian,” meaning they agree with the theory of cultural change described by James Davison Hunter in his various works, particularly in To Change the World.)
With those terms defined, we can now define each of the four approaches currently common amongst Christians in the English-speaking world.
Populism
The populist approach recognizes pluralism as an inevitable part of life which cannot be avoided. But they also tend to think in highly individualistic terms, building their vision for public renewal around a robust account of individual outreach and discipleship. This is the most common approach one will find in most American megachurches as well as with many non-denominational campus ministries.
I once heard a speaker with one prominent campus group explain the group’s philosophy of discipleship by proposing that if their philosophy were actually implemented, you would get something like an exponential growth of Christian disciples, thereby bringing about a renewal of our various communities. The logic was fairly simple: If I disciple two people–by which he meant meeting with two people regularly in one-on-one settings to study the Bible, pray, and talk about how they are doing–and then each of the two people I disciple goes on to do the same and then the people they disciple do the same… well, you can do the math for yourself.
It sounds great in theory. But there are problems.
First, discipleship is not necessarily something accomplished primarily through conversation, important as that is. Most of the highly significant and formative moments I’ve had in my own Christian life are not over conversations in coffeeshops or at Bible study, but simply happened organically as I was living my life, having conversations, carrying out my responsibilities, asking for help, offering help, and so on. Discipleship is not really something one “schedules” in the way one schedules a coffee date.
There are two other problems: A number of people simply won’t pursue two mentor-mentee relationships of the sort envisioned by the speaker. And that isn’t necessarily wrong–perhaps they simply don’t enjoy meeting people for coffee, or perhaps they have focused their energy elsewhere. But enough people won’t adopt this vision of discipleship that the math will very quickly fall apart.
Finally, cultures and societies aren’t really functions of mass movements of individuals. One example might suffice: Think about the most influential TV shows made in the late 2000s. Probably the shows that come to mind are The Sopranos and The Wire, both from HBO, and AMC’s Mad Men. You likely do not think of The Mentalist or Desperate Housewives or Ghost Whisperer.
But if you crunch the numbers, you’ll find that in the 2008-09 season, The Mentalist averaged almost 11 million viewers, Desperate Housewives averaged nearly 10 million, and Ghost Whisperer averaged 6.6 million. By comparison, Mad Men’s season finale in the fall of 2009 had 1.7 million viewers and The Wire’s final season in 2008 averaged under one million viewers per episode. It is not wrong, of course, to note that both Mad Men and The Wire attracted far more critical attention and are regarded as more influential. Indeed, both are still remembered today while I couldn’t even tell you the premise of Ghost Whisperer. But in terms of raw numbers, even a forgotten show like Ghost Whisperer wildly outperformed Mad Men.
The issue is that culture isn’t shaped by raw numerical superiority. It is shaped by a small number of highly influential elite institutions and figures. So the populist strategy, attractive as it is, simply fails on its own merits.
There are other pitfalls to populism, however. A populist approach can quickly devolve into a race to the bottom as the sole goal of a church or Christian community becomes the amassing of a large number of people who occasionally attend services at the church. But if your goal is simply numeric, you will not have many controls or limiting mechanisms to guide your decision making beyond that. A common saying in some megachurches today is that “we will do anything short of sin to reach people for Christ.” But the goal of the church is not simply to reach people for Christ; it is to help people to know and love Christ. And while there are things that might be pragmatically justifiable to help us reach people, those things should be rejected if they will hinder our ability to walk with people toward Jesus over the “long obedience in the same direction” to which we are called.
Separatism
The separatists are Christians who agree with the populists that society is largely a function of mass movements of individuals, but they are less comfortable participating in public institutions, businesses, voluntary organizations, and so on which include large numbers of non-Christians.
On the one hand, this means separatist communities will generally have a stronger private practice of certain Christian disciplines than do the populists. They are usually far more rigorous. They also can be highly energetic and entrepreneurial because the desire to maintain what they see as appropriate separation from the world necessitates the creation of parallel institutions that do for their members what other organizations and groups do for their neighbors. So they build their own small businesses, youth sports leagues, schools, and so on. But the primary purpose of this is simply to raise up individual believers who will care for other individual believers in their pure Christian communities. There is no aspiration toward cultural transformation.
The reasons for these limited ambitions are mixed. In some cases it is a function of the group’s eschatology. Many separatist groups will be dispensational and as such they often have a more ambivalent attitude about society because they regard all social bodies as basically temporal and “earthly,” and therefore not worth their investment. In other cases, separatist groups simply have very low expectations when it comes to how neighbors will respond to the Gospel. Indeed, a mass response to the Gospel is virtually always dismissed as itself being evidence of a lack of purity or rigor. This, for example, is why many separatist groups are deeply critical of Billy Graham–they saw him as compromised and worldly because he failed to separate himself sufficiently from the world outside the pure Christian community.
What this means is that separatist communities are often far thicker in terms of relational and communal experience than populist communities. However, they are also more brittle: Your experience of a separatist community can change overnight simply because of a careless word or a changed opinion or a personal choice that is seen as evidence of your own worldliness. To borrow from Daniel, you could almost picture separatist communities as a mixture of iron and clay–quite strong, but also surprisingly vulnerable and weak at the same time.
Revanchists
Revanchism refers to an attempt to take back territory that has previously been lost in a military conflict. It is a useful term for describing individuals who are both institutionalist and high purity. For revanchists, it is true that society is shaped by institutions rather than mass movements of individuals. But also it is important to maintain purity from the world and from corruption. For that reason, one should not seek to participate in the existing dominant institutions simply as a member of that group, but should instead either conquer existing institutions or build new ones to replace the corrupt institution.
In practice, the revanchists could be understood as a kind of reactionary Hunterian, so named for James Davison Hunter, the University of Virginia sociologist whose book To Change the World continues to be a defining text for these conversations. The idea that unifies the Hunterians is the importance of institutions in forming society. They agree that societies tend mostly to adhere to something like the pareto principle in which 20% of the parties involved exert 80% of the influence.
One way of naming this dynamic is to consider two changes that came about during the fracturing years. First, Doug Wilson has become a more prominent voice within American Protestantism. Second, many former Acts 29 pastors once closely associated with the urban missional sensibility of Mark Driscoll have taken a hard turn toward the political right wing, becoming sharply critical of figures like Tim Keller as well as former colleagues in Acts 29 like Matt Chandler.
What is interesting about this is that there is actually a great deal of overlap between Wilson’s project and Keller’s, counter-intuitive as that will seem to most readers. But both men are Kuyperian in as much as they believe that social renewal and reform is an entailment of the Christian faith taking root and growing in a specific place or community. Both men are also Hunterian, in as much as they agree with Hunter’s assessment of the necessity of influential institutions to bring about social change. Both men also shared a fairly strong critique of a sort of metaphysically agnostic liberal individualism. So if they shared so much, why is it that their general posture as well as the communities they work in are so wildly different? The answer has to do with the the dynamic on the right side of our chart above.
Wilson has explained many times that his family moved to Moscow, ID because Wilson’s father, Jim, saw it as a strategic location. For Jim Wilson, Christians seeking to influence culture needed to aim at “decisive points,” as he explains in his book Principles of War. What makes a point “decisive” is two-fold: First, it must be important in some way. If a point is not important, it is not decisive. Second, it must be feasible as a point that can be taken. If it is important but not feasible as a point to subdue, then it cannot be decisive.
What made Moscow “important” is that it had two large universities within eight miles of it: the University of Idaho in Moscow and Washington State University in Pullman. What made Moscow “feasible” is that it is not a large town. A small group of well-funded, energetic Christians could feasibly take over the city.
This is, essentially, the foundation of the revanchist project: Their frame for understanding social life is that it is a war between irreconcilable sides, one standing for Christ and one for the world. Christ’s side triumphs by taking decisive points. And while for Wilson the point about feasibility was chiefly about size, feasibility can also be understood in other ways as well. If an institution is seen to be both highly visible and influential but also surprisingly weak, then it can be possible to either take over that institution or to subvert the institution and replace it with a friendly one.
This, then, is the revanchist model of engagement: It draws on the same entrepreneurial tendencies of the separatists, but whereas the separatists largely aspire to quiet faithfulness amidst an intractably and unchangeably hostile world, the revanchists aspire to actually building a Christian regime either through taking over existing high-influence institutions or replacing those institutions with comparable bodies that they themselves control.
How healthy is this as a project? Well, that is a complicated question. On the one hand, the instincts of the revanchist movement are clearly informed by biblical texts: scripture does sometimes speak in the war-like language favored by Wilson, and it is clear at many points about the importance of maintaining separation from the world. Moreover, the revanchist project, like the separatist project, recognizes that sometimes mainstream institutions and communities can become so corrupt that one cannot really participate in them in a healthy or appropriate way.
That being said, there is an issue here that is in some ways cousin to the pragmatism of the populists. When the encounter between the body of Christ and the life of the world is framed purely in terms of war and militarism, it is easy to develop a number of mental habits that are highly corrosive to Christian piety. Those habits include:
- A posture of aggression toward anyone perceived as an outsider
- A tendency to think that any enemy of your enemy must be your friend
- An inability to regard civic society as a commonly shared project amongst all the residents of a place
In other words, the revanchist posture tends to militate against several qualities Paul regards as indicative of Christian faith, such as kindness and gentleness. It also has little space for mercy, and it struggles to make sense of biblical exhortations to care for the sojourner.
None of that is to say, of course, that common progressive readings of biblical texts concerning the sojourner are correct. I am simply noting here that those texts do exist and they mean something. You do not need to agree with a no borders radical to affirm that the Bible seems to have a particular concern with the status of the vulnerable and that it includes “sojourners” in their number.
And so that brings us to the final quadrant: the reformers.
The Reformers
The Christians who are high pluralism and institutionalist are the Reformers. These Christians are defined by two basic convictions that shape their approach to public life: First, engaging in the life of groups, businesses, and other institutions that are deeply pluralist is unavoidable, at the very least, and can actually be a good and desirable thing, in fact. Second, cultural change happens through institutions, not individuals.
Based on these two beliefs, reformer Christians tend to take the Keller side of the Keller-Wilson dispute. They share the Hunterianism and Kuyperianism of both men as well, quite often, as their strong critique of a certain type of liberal individualism. (Go back and re-read The Reason for God and you’ll see how surprisingly sharp Keller could be in his critique of post-Cold War liberalism.)
Their point of departure from the revanchists is that they do not primarily view the public square as a war zone. Rather, they view the public square and civic society as being a complex mix of good and bad actors with a mix of motivations and desires, all trying to accomplish various things in a people’s common life together. The reformers, in other words, rely less on a black/white analysis of the public square, attempting instead to make distinctions and promote the common good where they can through partnerships aimed at specific goods and done with men and women of good will. In short, they adopt Hunter’s idea of “faithful presence” as their primary guide in participating in the life of their city or neighborhood or nation.
At this point it’s perhaps helpful to make a few limiting observations:
First, if you imagine the graph as an x-y chart, then there are stronger and weaker forms of each of these four tendencies. Because of that, one can easily imagine a situation where someone who is a more centrist reformer might find themselves agreeing more with a centrist revanchist than they do a stronger reformer.
Second, the point of this exercise is not simply to identify good teams and bad teams. The goal is to identify distinct ways that Christians are responding to the particular challenges of our moment and to identify pitfalls and challenges with each response while also, hopefully, establishing that some responses genuinely are better than others while still remaining imperfect and having certain vulnerabilities and dangers.
In this context, it is worth considering the most common failure amongst reformers and what that failing should teach us going forward. Too often, Christians working in the reformer quadrant found themselves falling into the very traps that motivate separatist and revanchist Christians to take the stands they do. There is such a thing as loving the things of this world and, through that love, being drawn into deep moral compromise. While Keller himself admirably avoided those traps and truly exemplified both elements of Hunter’s “faithful presence” many others in this quadrant tended to overtime simply become “present” without being altogether “faithful.” One of the core temptations facing reformers is to over-value either their place in elite institutions or to over-value those institutions themselves and, as a result of that, begin making unacceptable compromises to retain their place or their group’s reputation. This is the path toward failure because it is a path away from Christ and for Christian believers anything that leads us away from Christ should be rejected.
That being said, the above nuances and observations do not entail that we must separate from the world in the way that revanchists or separatists claim. Surely Paul’s warnings in 1 Corinthians apply at this point:
9 I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people— 10 not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world. 11 But now I am writing to you that you must not associate with anyone who claims to be a brother or sister[c] but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or slanderer, a drunkard or swindler. Do not even eat with such people.
12 What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? 13 God will judge those outside. “Expel the wicked person from among you.”
What does reformer work look like in practice? There are layers to that answer. But much of it is simple and perhaps even common sense: to live in the world is inextricably to live amongst mixed communities of people with varying beliefs and convictions and desires. The Christian must learn to live wisely, gently, shrewdly, and carefully amongst their neighbors, both so that they are able to love their neighbors well and so that they themselves remain faithful to Christ. Two stories might suffice to conclude this meditation and explain the goal:
First, during the peak of COVID and aggressive DEI policies, a friend of mine was working for a fairly large corporation that implemented some quite extreme policies around transgender identity in particular. The policy included a requirement to use preferred pronouns and all employees were expected to sign their name on the policy, indicating their willingness to submit to it. My friend knew his conscience would not allow him to sign that. He believed, as do I, that using pronouns in that way is to participate in a sort of lie because it is stating something that is not true given the design of human bodies. So my friend had a problem: He could violate his conscience, sign the policy, and keep his job. Or he could refuse to sign and be fired. What happened next is the difference between high purity and high pluralist Christians: Because high purity Christians tend to rely too strongly on militaristic concepts and metaphors to guide their life in the world, they can easily begin to operate in a world overrun by false dichotomies. For, of course, those were not the only two options my friend had. But the other options only existed because my friend had worked to build relationships with his coworkers and was generally well-regarded by his employer–and those are two things that high-purity Christians struggle to do in mixed groups amongst non-Christians.
So my friend went privately to his contact in the HR department. He explained that it would violate his sincerely held religious beliefs to accept certain requirements in the policy and, therefore, he could not in good conscience sign the document. However, he was willing to use the chosen name of transgender coworkers whenever he was working with someone, and he was not seeking to create scandal in the company or to antagonize transgender individuals. He was simply trying to figure out if there was a way for him to submit to his conscience as it was informed by his sincerely held religious beliefs while keeping his job. And, turns out, there was: The HR official accepted his compromise and did not require him to sign the doc that had been circulated to employees.
Now imagine how this might play out in our media discourse: If my friend were a prominent church member at a megachurch with a famous pastor and if it became known that employees of a certain company had to sign a certain policy and this friend worked for that company… well, what do you think would happen? I think we all know: My friend would be blasted on social media, accused of all sorts of things, and would likely also face some awkward in-person encounters with people at work or church due to the social media controversy. And, infuriatingly, all of that controversy would be basically fake because it proceeded from premises that were false. But the only way my friend kept his job and the only way it would be known that the imagined claims against him were false would be through conversation. And this is why communities seeking to live by faithful presence need to have a great degree of trust in each other.
A second principle follows, which has to do with shrewdness: Years ago I heard a story about a university that adopted an “all-comers” policy for all registered student organizations (RSO) on campus. What this meant is that any RSO needed to welcome anyone who wished to join the group, including anyone who wished to join the group’s leadership team. For many Christian orgs, this policy effectively drove them off campus because they obviously could not have atheist students serving on their leadership team making decisions about programing, organizational priorities, and so on. One group was relatively unaffected, however: Reformed University Fellowship, the official campus ministry of my home church, the Presbyterian Church in America. Why was RUF unaffected? It wasn’t because they compromised in unacceptable ways. It was because of how the organization was set up. In RUF, a given chapter is run by the campus minister, who is an ordained pastor in the PCA. He makes all the decisions, under the guidance of the local presbytery. So it wasn’t a problem for RUF to have–theoretically–an atheist on their student leadership team because the student leadership team was basically just a way of identifying students who were committed to RUF, such that they came to large group gatherings regularly, met regularly with the campus pastor, and so on. You could even make a case that having an atheist on leadership team is desirable, if only because it means that atheist student has committed to regular lunches with an ordained pastor to talk about life and big questions.
In this respect, groups like RUF as well as many university study centers who purchase office space across the street from the campus they serve so as to minimize their exposure to university policies, are models of how reformers can be shrewd in their outreach and advocacy. By adopting policies that simply exclude certain possibilities by definition, these groups allow themselves to faithfully engage the life of the university while preemptively closing the door on certain dangers and temptations. Through policy and organizational decisions they effectively make decisions in advance. I once spoke to a director of a study center at a major public university about this and asked him what would happen if the university adopted policies that targeted Christian organizations. He laughed. “Well, they could take away our RSO,” he conceded. But that wouldn’t really affect them because their event programming all happened in their building, which was technically not on campus anyway. This organization does not adopt a confrontational posture toward the university in any way. On the contrary, they are immensely clear that they love the university and desire to see it flourish, and they act in a thousand small ways to aid it toward those ends every day. They are clearly reformers rather than revanchists or separatists. And yet through wise stewardship of their organization they have been able to protect themselves from some of the chief temptations that afflict many reformers.
That, then, is the work before us, as far as our lives outside our local churches are concerned: How to be constructive, fruitful members of mixed communities and organizations while genuinely serving them and promoting their good and living shrewdly enough to recognize the dangers and protect ourselves from those as well. It is hard work and often quiet. But, of course, hard work done quietly is often the best and most long-lasting sort of work there is.
