When I first started writing online in the early 2010s, most of what you might term the evangelistic openness I saw in media culture was coming from the political or cultural center-left.
A columnist at the New York Times came to faith.
A religion writer from Vox did as well.
Additionally, there were editors at both Vox and the New Yorker who were part of PCA or ACNA congregations. A number of other prominent writers in elite media seemed open to faith.
I remember hearing one such figure, now at the Times with quite a large platform, interview all three of Rod Dreher, Michael Brendan Dougherty, and Patrick Deneen within about a 12 month stretch in the late 2010s. Hearing some of his questions, particularly in his conversation with Dougherty, had me genuinely wondering if he was close to conversion.
This was also, of course, the tail end of Tim Keller's ministry at Redeemer. Given Keller's success as a church planter and ecosystem builder in New York and given New York's significance culturally, much of this era may well be tied up in Keller's presence and Redeemer's ministry.
Yet if you look around today, something has shifted: To my eyes there is very little evangelistic openness in the center-left world. There are still plenty of Christians to be found, but virtually all of them that come to mind for me are not adult converts and came from Christian backgrounds.
But if you look at the right or the reactionary ends of the political horseshoe where right and left begin to converge, the picture is quite different: Jordan Peterson's wife is now Catholic. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a one-time new atheist who did events with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, is a Christian. So is Paul Kingsnorth and Martin Shaw.
Meanwhile, figures like Tom Holland and Douglas Murray and Bari Weiss all seem, to varying degrees, interested in Christian faith in a way that goes beyond mere intellectual curiosity.
Moreover, as younger Americans politically polarize by gender, with men tending toward the right and women toward the left, those trends seem to also align with young men going to church in growing numbers even as young women continue to dechurch.
It would be a mistake to suggest this is happening because Christianity itself is "right wing." In the first place, defining "right wing" is itself a fraught project—is it the "right wing" politics of Dwight Eisenhower or Mussolini? The politics of Reagan or George W. Bush or the politics of Orban or Meloni? Or should we range further afield—what about the "right wing" of D'Annunzio or Disraeli? "Right wing" conceals as much as it reveals in such conversations.
In the second place, one can easily think of any number of political positions one could plausibly assign to the right that do not align at all with historic Christianity. (Matthew Rose's A World After Liberalism is the essential book to read on this.)
So what accounts for this shift and how should Christians respond?
The answer to the first question might be surprisingly simple: The shift dates back to the growing awareness, acceptance, and promotion of transgender sexual identities in mainstream American culture. This shift, dating to the mid 2010s and probably peaking in the early 2020s, did two things that fundamentally changed the evangelistic landscape for Christians in America. (I know some will argue that the real shift has to do with "wokeness" more than it does trans issues specifically. I don't find this altogether persuasive both because I think one can disambiguate the different parts of the "woke" package and because I think issues of sexuality strike at the vitals of Christian belief and practice in uniquely complicated and challenging ways.)
First, as acceptance of transgender identities became a litmus test for the American left, the conflict between left wing political ideology and Christianity was redefined and intensified. A left wing media figure in 2015 might be able to signal friendliness to conservative post-liberals, for example, both as a sign of sincere desire to understand the appeal of Donald Trump and as an openness to alternative theories of American social collapse. Social breakdown was, after all, a long-standing concern of many on the American left dating back decades and certainly well-established by the early 2000s when works like Nickel and Dimed and Bowling Alone hit American bookstores.
But once the issue of trans identities arose, an openness to traditional Christian accounts became more costly: Christianity was no longer seen as a plausible conversation partner with left-wing political concerns around public justice. Instead, it became regarded as a threat to the lives of transgender individuals that made it impossible for trans people to publicly exist as their authentic selves. The social costs for progressive non-Christians of simply expressing an openness to or curiosity about traditional forms of Christian belief became much higher, in other words.
The second problem is closely bound up with the first: It is actually fairly simple for a Christian to pick up the chief political concerns of what we might think of as a first-term Obama liberal (Obama before he publicly supported gay marriage, in other words) and out-narrate a secularist about how to best address those concerns.
You care about wages and economic justice? Go read Laborem Exercens or Quadragessimo Anno. Concerned about the rights of women and sexual abuse? Tim Keller's treatment of Christian teachings on sexuality in the PCA's sexuality report (start on page 34) shows how Christianity answers those concerns beautifully. Worried about climate change? Consider the writings of Benedict XVI, Francis Schaeffer, or Norman Wirzba.
But trans issues were different: Christianity can't really affirm the instincts that lead there in the same way it could affirm the instincts of a certain sort of feminist or someone on the economic left or someone alarmed about ecological destruction. So for evangelicals schooled in a strategy of outflanking progressive non-Christians through superior narration of their concerns and priorities, trans issues created a problem. They had spent years evangelizing by essentially saying, "ah, you care about justice. Well, the best way to care about justice is to be Christian. I will show you how." It was effective, but also dangerously vulnerable to the critique Hauerwas made when he said that,
Christians are often tempted, particularly in this time called modern, to say more than we know. We are so tempted because we fear we do not believe what we say we believe. So we try to assure ourselves that we believe what we say we believe by convincing those who do not believe what we believe that they really believe what we believe once what we believe is properly explained.
As a result we end up saying more than we know because what we believe—or better, what we do—cannot be explained but only shown. The word we have been given for such a showing is “witness.”
The triumph of a more radical form of the sexual revolution in the mid 2010s vindicated this element of Hauerwas, I think, and made the point about "witness" far more central in any evangelistic efforts.
Keller himself understood this and you can see how he addressed it in his final works. For Keller, out-narrating was a strategy one could use evangelistically, but he never thought that it was the only way to engage. Indeed, the point of out-narrating someone was to direct their eyes to a church community that lived out the positive witness of Christian faith, a point that is quite clear in his final pamphlet on reaching the west again where he deploys language more reminiscent of Hauerwas or Rod Dreher in calling for a "sexual counterculture." But many of his admirers were less careful and were caught flatfooted by the shifts around sexuality caused by the emergence of transgenderism.
But this trend gave even as it took away: a group that James Wood refers to as "reality respecters" and which another pastor friend of mine has called "reality observers," became more open to Christianity. Why? Because they saw in traditional Christianity a bulwark against the cultural chaos set loose by the ascent of transgenderism and its undercutting of the family and of the created order, which they felt some attachment to, even if they couldn't articulate what it was or where it came from. This is reflected in the people who we today see signaling openness to the faith, figures like Hirsi Ali and Kingsnorth, but also Murray, Holland, and Peterson.
What should we learn from this shift? Three things come to mind.
First, as Schaeffer and Keller both recognized, an encounter with Jesus leading to faith and new life will generally involve an encounter with a Christian community whose way of life bears witness to Christ and, as we say at Plough, to the fact that through Christ "another life is possible." Or to turn in a different direction for the same basic idea: John Piper said in Let the Nations Be Glad that "mission" flowed from "worship." "Missions happen because worship doesn't," in his famous phrase. The worshiping Christian community is central to the work of evangelization and outreach.
Second, the reason that mission flows from worship is because the problems of new birth and Christian discipleship are organic problems, not mechanistic problems. Mechanistic problems are solved through technical means—get the right tool, the right skill, the right equation and you're golden. The problem is solved. Organic problems are more complex; they resist mechanistic solutions because they resist mechanistic description. What is needed is virtue, a set way of being in the world aimed at spiritual maturation and personal formation in Christian character.
One of the problems one can discern in followers of both Schaeffer and Keller is that they attempt to replicate the organic formation of those men through a mechanistic mimicry of them.
Put it this way: Jacques Pepin can do what he does because he has spent 80 years working in kitchens, mastering techniques, understanding ingredients, developing skills. He has a feel for it, such that the circumstances or conditions under which he works can change, and he can adapt because of who he has spent 80 years becoming.
You do not become Jacques Pepin by simply watching Pepin for an hour and copying what you see him do. You become Pepin by undertaking the training and way of life that Pepin has. Just so with Keller or Schaeffer: If you are a writer or pastor who wants to preach like Keller, you won't get there if your strategy is "listen to Keller and copy him." Keller himself would tell you that that's a terrible idea.
Instead, do what Tim did: Go to seminary. After seminary, read everything George Whitefield wrote. Read Calvin's Institutes and his sermons. Read The Lord of the Rings over and over and over. Read everything C. S. Lewis ever wrote. Read every Puritan paperback from Banner of Truth. Read sociology. Read social theory. Read Bavinck. Read current events books and a steady line up of journalists. Do all of that within the context of a family alongside your spouse and while talking to people facing ordinary life problems who are in need of counsel and aid and think about how to explain what you're learning to them in ways that are sensible to them. Lewis had a rule that if he couldn't say something in a way an ordinary British person could understand it meant that he wasn't ready to say that thing yet. Follow that rule.
That is how you become a good missionary.
You become a good missionary not by copying one missionary whose work you have followed, but by adopting the way of life that will shape you to be a fruitful, faithful missionary.
Third, care more about following Jesus than anything else. There is a way of being a missionary who helps direct other people to Jesus but who loses track of Christ in your own personal life and practice. To put it as Keller himself did in his last public words:
Forget about your reputation.... Don't worry about your credentials. Ministers, do not make your ministry success your identity so if things don't go well you feel like a failure and freak out. Lift up Jesus's name. Forget yourself. Forget your reputation. Do what you can to lift up God's reputation. 'Seekest thou great things for thyself? Seek them not.'