In Defense Of Evangelicalism: A Review
The actual title of the book under review is In Defense of Evangelicalism: A Response to Its Cultured Despisers.
I suppose that response would include me, though we can certainly debate how “cultured” I am.
The author is Bonnie Kristian, whom I’ve followed for some time on various platforms. She is often insightful, articulate, and genuinely helpful in understanding the issues she writes about. I have appreciated her work even when I’ve disagreed with her conclusions.
And she does an excellent job defending evangelicalism in this book.
If you are an evangelical.
Kristian’s real targets are writers such as Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Tim Alberta, Beth Allison Barr, Samuel Perry, and others who have spent the last several years documenting what they see as serious failures within American evangelicalism. Kristian’s project is to challenge what she regards as sweeping, unfair, and sometimes exaggerated judgments about the movement as a whole. That is a legitimate argument to make, and she makes it skillfully.
The arguments will also sound compelling to people who already want to believe them.
And that is where my disagreement begins.
At the heart of the book is an argument I have been hearing for twenty-five years:
“We’re not all like that.”
Most evangelicals, we’re told, are kind, Bible-believing people who love Jesus, care for their neighbors, bring casseroles, lay hands on the sick, and go about the ordinary business of Christian faithfulness.
The people you are criticizing are the fringe.
The freaks.
The extremists.
Don’t judge the whole movement by its worst representatives.
There is truth in that argument.
I’ve known hundreds of evangelicals—perhaps thousands—over the years. Many of them, perhaps even the majority, are exactly as Kristian describes them. They are decent people trying to follow Jesus. They serve their churches, care for their families, help their neighbors, give generously, and genuinely love the Bible.
I have no desire to deny any of that.
But there is another story.
Some of the people in evangelical leadership have been anything but benign. And the people who follow destructive leaders don’t always hold them accountable. Sometimes they defend them. Sometimes they excuse them. Sometimes they attack those who expose them.
And the consequences have been enormous.
This is where I think the “we’re not all like that” argument becomes inadequate.
The question isn’t whether every evangelical is like the worst evangelical.
Of course they aren’t.
The question is what happens when the worst people in a movement acquire disproportionate power—and the good people in that movement refuse, or fail, to hold them accountable?
That is a very different question.
Kristian describes evangelicalism as something like the Walmart of Christianity: enormous, sprawling, containing both the admirable and the ridiculous. There are “freaks and fringes,” she argues, but they aren’t the whole. And she’s right about the basic point: evangelicalism is far too diverse to be reduced to its most embarrassing representatives.
But the existence of good people doesn’t neutralize the damage done by powerful people.
That distinction matters.
A movement isn’t defined solely by the character of its average member. It is also shaped by who gets the microphone, who gets the book contracts, who gets invited to conferences, who gets platformed in churches, who gets defended when accused, who gets removed when they abuse their power—and who gets sacrificed when protecting the institution becomes more important than protecting the victim.
For twenty-five years I have watched this happen.
I’ve watched abuse minimized.
I’ve watched victims questioned.
I’ve watched leaders protected.
I’ve watched people who knew better remain silent because confronting the powerful would cost them friendships, positions, churches, or reputations.
And I’ve watched evangelical Christians rally around political leaders whose character and behavior would once have been considered disqualifying.
That is not a fringe phenomenon simply because most people sitting in evangelical pews aren’t themselves abusive.
And this is where the discussion of Donald Trump becomes unavoidable.
Kristian’s argument is not that evangelical support for Trump doesn’t exist. It plainly does. Her argument is that Trump-supporting evangelicals should not be treated as representative of evangelicalism as a whole, and that critics have sometimes conflated a particular political constituency with the entire evangelical tradition.
Again, there is something important in that corrective.
But it doesn’t answer the question I think needs to be asked.
Why did so many evangelical leaders and institutions decide that supporting Trump was compatible with the moral and theological commitments they had spent decades preaching?
Why did so many ordinary evangelicals accept that reconciliation?
Those questions cannot be answered simply by pointing to the existence of good evangelicals.
The “freaks and fringes” may not be the majority.
But sometimes the fringe is enormously influential.
It can shape institutions.
It can determine what gets preached from pulpits.
It can determine which voices are welcomed and which are silenced.
It can determine who receives forgiveness and who receives discipline.
It can determine political priorities.
And, in American political life, evangelical voters and organizations have played a significant role in electoral coalitions supporting Donald Trump. That doesn’t make every evangelical a Trump supporter, nor does it mean every Trump-supporting evangelical supports him for the same reasons. But it does make the relationship between evangelicalism and Trumpism a legitimate subject for serious criticism rather than something that can simply be dismissed as the behavior of a few “freaks and fringes.”
This is ultimately where I find Kristian’s defense insufficient.
She is right that evangelicalism contains much that is good.
She is right that evangelical critics can sometimes generalize unfairly.
She is right that there are millions of ordinary evangelicals whose lives bear little resemblance to the caricature presented by some of their critics.
But none of that tells us whether evangelicalism has developed structures that allow unhealthy leaders to flourish.
None of it tells us whether ordinary evangelicals have become too willing to excuse those leaders.
And none of it answers the question of why the movement’s most influential representatives have so often failed to live up to the very gospel they proclaim.
Kristian ends the book by returning to what she considers the heart of evangelicalism: Christ, salvation, Scripture, conversion, sanctification, and the gospel. She writes that the central claim is that “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners” and that evangelicals have the same Scripture and the same Spirit as ever.
I agree with her.
That’s precisely why I find the failures of evangelicalism so painful.
The problem isn’t that evangelicals believe too much.
It is that they have so often believed one thing and practiced another.
They have preached repentance while protecting powerful men who refused to repent.
They have preached truth while punishing people who told uncomfortable truths.
They have preached the dignity of every human being while treating victims as expendable when their stories threatened the institution.
They have preached that Jesus is Lord while becoming remarkably comfortable with political power.
And we have sometimes confused defending the reputation of evangelicalism with defending the gospel itself.
So yes, Bonnie Kristian is right.
We’re not all like that.
I never thought they were.
But after twenty-five years of watching evangelicalism from the inside, I don’t think that is the question we should be asking anymore.
The better question is:
What do we do when the people who aren’t “like that” allow the people who are to lead them?
Because good people can belong to a broken system.
Good people can protect bad leaders.
Good people can remain silent.
Good people can look away.
And good people can convince themselves that because they aren’t part of the problem, the problem isn’t really theirs.
That’s the conversation I wish this book had pursued more deeply.
Because evangelicalism doesn’t need to be defended from every criticism.
It needs to be honest about the criticisms that are true.
After twenty-five years, I’m less interested in proving that evangelicalism isn’t as bad as its critics say than I am in asking whether they are willing to become what they claim to be.
Most of the despisers of evangelicalism are not especially cultured: maybe the author of this book should write another one responding to them.
I’m not going to read it, but from what you’ve said here it seems like the book is actually meant to be read by evangelicals, not its critics, who want to be reassured that they are actually okay as they are.
And I think that title is very condescending, as was Schleiermacher’s book to the supposed “cultured despisers” of his time.
Michael,
For my part, I think you’re asking all of the right questions. They just happen to be the ones that cannot be answered by evangelicals…
Duane,
They can be answered…but there is a lack of desire to do so.
Instead, they write books like this…
Michael,
I have not read the book, but I agree so much with your commentary and questions here. There are many, many evangelicals who are for the most part good people. However, I believe that even many of the good ones share a significant flaw that has been ruinous to the culture.
The flaw is susceptibleness to look away from or even to justify wrongdoing and corruption that occurs within their culture, especially when it occurs from higher levels. The reasons why this flaw is so prominent in the evangelical culture can be listed out and debated as to what are the biggest culprits, but the bottom line is that this flaw has allowed many bad actors to operate within and gain power and influence over the culture without being held to account. It is a vicious cycle where the more power and influence they gain, the more they lead evangelicals to look away from or even justify the corruption, and then all the more are they able to gain even more power and influence and ability to carry out their debased schemes.
Kevin H,
If evangelical institutions are actually going to reform, it will have to be from the inside.
They survived me, they survived Julie Roys and others and know they can get away with almost anything.
At some pointe have to examine the theological underpinnings that allow this…
I tend to say I’m a Christian. If people want the specific flavor, I prefer “having a personal relationship with Christ through God’s revelation in the Bible.” Evangelicalism is a huge tent that covers so many people. I sometimes think that the loudest voices are the ones that get the most press, and that some of the more moderated voices get ignored because they are not loud enough. If you read Christianity Today, you would think that most Christians are anti-ICE (they have an anti-ICE/pro-immigration reform article almost everyday).If you read something published by the SBC convention, it will be much more skewed towards the current administration’s deportation attempts. This is not an attempt to defend evangelicalism per se; it’s just an attempt to say that we have a huge elephant in the room that no one really knows how to describe, with a different opinion or issue in every crease and fold of its skin.
I see the issue as to how I used to regard people in more liturgical traditions-they were all lost, did not have the truth of the Scriptures (was I surprised when I realized that more Scripture is read in the liturgical church during a service than in most Protestant ones), and slaves to the worship of images and traditions (thanks to my first IFBC church). Then, I found out that CS Lewis, JI Packer, and John Stott were Anglicans (gasp) and I met Catholics who really did have a relationship with Christ and did not base their faith on a statue, but rather on the Word of God. I still don’t have a liturgical bone in my body, but I did grow in respect and appreciation for brothers and sisters who had a different perspective, yet a growing faith in Christ.
My last thought-I was appalled when, as a teen, I realized how much segregation in the South had been supported by the church. I wrote the Southern Baptists off as evil and unsalvageable. Then, I went to Colombia, met some of their missionaries, saw how well their unsegregated churches were growing, and I had a different opinion. My preference is to take it church by church, pastor by pastor, congregant by congregant. What their church represents may not be what they represent, and they may actually belong to a church that is not like many evangelical churches at all.
Hope that all made sense!
For me, true evangelicalism is rooted din what Paul said it was in Acts 13;32-36 i.e. the Davidic Kingship of Christ (Psalm 2:7). When we understand that Christ is King on the throne of David in heaven then that should frame how we view everything whether they be political controversies or otherwise. If someone asks me, I just tell them I’m a Kingdom Christian. As the Son of God said our Kingdom is not of this world that’s why I don’t get involved in the political issues of the day and it keeps me rooted in the gospel. Governments will do what they do and we as Christians are called to pray for our leaders.
The problem with evangelicalism is, to borrow from Noll, is they utter lack a mind
No doubt Kristian would be offended at that, but it is the truth and has been that way for decades. Their cultlike devotion to their real lord, savior, and cheeto Jesus only proves that. If all of them including Kristian would just go to a South American country and drink a fruit flavored beverage with a special ingredient, the world at large would be better off.
R’as al Ghul,
That’s unacceptable.
Last warning.
You take a lot of shots at believers…what do you think about Jesus?
The biggest problem with this book and defenders of evangelicalism in general is they resort to the no true Scotsman fallacy. And yet many do nothing to go after these posers or go after them by name. Most likely they will be kicked out of the club (as the posers are the majority) and they will lose influence. Of course I can also bring up Asch Conformity Theory and the 75%- 80% threshold to explain the evangelicals cultlike devotion to Trump and why those who do toe the party line like Tim Alberta, David French, and Michael here are declared heretics and enemies.
Correction do not toe the party line.
I have begun to suspect there are at last two or more dynamics at play in how evangelicals have situated themselves (and have been situated). Frank Schaeffer wrote in Crazy for God that if the DNC refused to make any room for pro-life/anti-abortion groups many Christians would just switch to the GOP (he didn’t add that there have been atheists who object to abortion like Hitchens but Frank Schaeffer has never been an exactly careful, nuanced writer as much as a soap boxer but that’s what he does).
Meanwhile, in bids at not looking commie evangelicals seem to have lurched further right in the last forty years. Michael knows this part of Oregon history, and I risk repeating it too much, but when I was a kid the two evangelicals I knew of who held high office were Senator Hatfield in Oregon and Jimmy Carter. The GOP has basically not had space for a Hatfield type of Republican since Newt Gingrich. To be against abortion, the death penalty, military interventionism and have a conservationist stance has long been dismissed as liberal hippie stuff. I was told at a formative age that I was a Burke style conservative, and that can get clarified a little by saying there’s a big difference between reading what progressives and reactionaries say ABOUT Burke and actually reading Burke, whose work does not fit as readily into contemporary North American political dualism as his partisans and detractors have made him out to be since Bill Buckley and his adversaries took him up as an example.
Whether we’re talking about evangelicals as a cohesive group is even tricky, because Paula White and figures in Trump’s circle don’t seem all that conventionally evangelical by Debbington’s quadraleteral.
This is where I finally get around to the observation that what seems to have shifted in the last forty years is “evangelicals”, for want of a more accurate term, have made conformity to a political platform more important than any historic standard of doctrinal orthodoxy. Someone like Senator Hatfield would be denounced as a flaming liberal now even though he was a Republican senator and a practicing Christian.
A longer-term warning that I find interesting is that contemporary MAGA Christians don’t have enough historical sense to realize that the kind of jingoistic America is the promised land civic piety they are touting was slowly refined and developed by the mainlines across the last two centuries. I can be sympathetic to mainliners worried about the right-wing shift of evangelicals but I can be a lot more sympathetic if they are writers like L Daniel Hawk pointing out the roles the mainlines had in running the Indian boarding schools a century ago; pointing out that the mainlines were not only complicit but active in promoting Manifest Destiny, and that rejecting the doctrinal and practical outworking of Manifest Destiny in connection to Native American groups is a mainline responsibility.
Contemporary evangelicals want to replicate the influence the mainlines had and seem too intellectually benighted to grasp that in endorsing concepts of religious affiliation based on ethnic solidarity they are replicating Schleiermacher’s bid at formulating a concept of Christian identity via ethnic solidarity rather than historic orthodoxy (Theodore Vial, who is actually a pretty big Schleiermacher fan, has written a whole book on race and religion in which he argued that Herder and Schleiermacher were both pluralist Protestants whose bid at encouraging ethnic solidarity and democratic norms also introduced a problematic concept of racial identity politicking as a nascent concept that didn’t exist in earlierepochs, ie German nationalism).
We seem to be living in an era of scapegoating. I was reading a Christian blogger name-check Malthus and Darwin to say people should marry and have kids and not fear so much. Malthus was an ordained Episcopalian, and he may have turned out to have been wrong, but just mentioning Malthus ONLY as a bugbear for worries about population bomb scares isn’t exactly fair to Malthus. History is full of people who were proven to be wrong who were trying to make sense of the world they saw. John Neville Figgis had a riff on divine right of kings that has stuck with me, historians need to remember that a sufficient CAUSE to explain the historical emergence of an idea is not the same thing as saying that X is a compelling REASON for the idea. Divine right of kings is the easiest doctrine in the world to make fun of but, as Figgis put it, what was it embraced as an alternative TO? If you see divine right of kings as a historically contingent political doctrine embraced as a rejection of papal supremacy then modern Protestants (and Catholics) may see divine right of kings as still dubious but its historic embrace is explicable.
Contemporary evangelicals seem to be doing what Neville Figgis complained about in 1911 about Christians in his day in the UK, promulgating sweeping theories of political sovereignty for regimes that exist only in their own imaginations rather than attempting to figure out to be Christians and live as Christians in a secular, pluralist modern state. John Neville Figgis’ Churches in the Modern State is free at archive.org and it’s a read that I have found helpful for clarifying that what evangelicals have been trying to do is just ignore the reality that we have been in a pluralistic and modern secular state.
Robert F, in some ways it could be very seriously argued that Schleiermacher unintentionally created the problems of a Christianity that is predicated on ethnic solidarity rather than historic dogmatics but, to try to be fair to the guy, there’s no reason to think that’s what he actually intended. We live in an era in which it’s all too easy to scapegoat a figure from the past for consequences we don’t like in our age. I just refuse to put Augustine on the hook for what a bunch of neocons have done with just war theory in the last thirty years, for instance. Even Walter Wink pointed out that if you separate Augustinian just war theory from an imperial/colonial or national security state mindset then Augustine’s just war theory is explicable and defensible as a Christian doctrine of war. We seem to be living in an era in which the temptation to scapegoat spans the political and doctrinal aisles and, as Ra’s just put it, sticking to the party line in a pretty literally political way has become more important than other considerations.
WTH,
The vast majority of so-called “Evangelical Christians” would not know, understand, believe, or practice the Bennington Quadrilateral even if came and bit them on the a**. Which is one of the main reasons for my utter contempt for almost all of them. I have very low tolerance for frauds, bullshit, posers, incompetence, and ignorance. It’s as if 90% of the people who have accountants in their job description don’t know what double entry bookkeeping is, but STILL call themselves accountants. And what is worse, is when people try to point this out, they are marginalized, attacked, and so on. And if I say damn them all for being frauds and speaking the truth, so be it.
WTH,
Schleiermacher’s criticism was at least pointed inward at his own peer group, other cultured elites; Kristian’s, otoh, is pointing criticism outward for the sake of bolstering and defending those in her own in-group, whom she is really writing for. I wasn’t attempting a general attack on him, just noting what I consider to be the condescension of his title, a quality it shares with Kristian’s title.
RF, true, Schleiermacher was in the Mendelssohn family social circle, for instance, so he really WAS among the best and brightest of his time and place. Schleiermacher’s rejoinder to the unbeliever’s “infinite regress of causes” attack on theism was to point out that the infinite regress of rules that govern the languages within which we can even think wasn’t really a “better” situation for unbelievers. And anyone who set the course for the continental European hermeneutic tradition for two whole centuries was obviously in a position to say something to those he felt were cultured despisers of religion even if the title is off-putting.
Given how many cultured people were fine with ethnic cleansing, though, Schleiermacher’s pluralism and admonition to live and let live makes him more likeable even if I have plenty of disagreements with his orthodoxy in Christian confessional terms. It doesn’t mean he wasn’t, by most accounts, a really nice guy and a brilliant conversationalist.
WTH,
I had forgotten how much the elites of S’s time had viewpoints like the ethno-nationalists of ours. Racism and social Darwinism were rife among them; in fact, they were pervasive among many intellectuals right up to WWII.
WTH,
In fact, racist eugenics views were widespread in the scientific community, and were accepted by the consensus of that community to be normal and mainstream. The science of the time itself was formed by such views. One can’t help but wonder if certain things widely accepted by scientific consensus now, as well as many of the public, are just as erroneous and harmful.
Robert F, yeah, it’s true that white supremacist views were pervasive in scientific communities. John Gray had a short but sharp point that religious racists come up with religious arguments (curse of Noah) while scientific racists come up with scientific reasons for their racism. Gray’s zinger was that atheists favored polygenesis and Christians had to come up with Noah’s curse because they couldn’t get around the doctrinal commitment to the Adamic origin of all humans and not everyone was on board with polygenesis. Hume’s racism remains notorious centuries after his era and I have been going through a recent Gordon Graham book that has a whole chapter on Beattie’s rejoinder to Hume’s views on race.
WTH,
And many of the most powerful business leaders of that era held racist eugenicist views, such as Kellogg and Graham, not to mention political leaders. Of course the common people were not immune to having such views themselves.