Has the evangelical world changed for the worse in recent decades? I believe it has. Over the past several decades changes have occurred in the evangelical world that have produced the negative symptoms we have been discussing, and others not yet mentioned.
Some might object by noting that evangelical doctrine has not changed, and therefore, whatever changes that have been made are superficial. The idea is that the beliefs in our doctrinal statement are nonnegotiable, and that all else is open to discussion and change.
However, it is wrong to conclude that our doctrinal statements encompass all of the essentials of the New Testament. In fact, most doctrinal statements do not include many of the more practical issues that impact our lives directly. For example, most doctrinal statements say little or nothing about divorce, homosexuality, abortion, or even polygamy for that matter.
While those issues may be obvious to most of us, effective Christian living includes many other factors for which the applicable perspective may not be so obvious. For example, is self-esteem an essential aspect of healthy Christian living? What part does discipline play in the Christian life? Do we change by letting go and letting God or by exercising discipline? Do the lyrics “it is not by trying but in trusting” convey a biblical truth regarding living the Christian life, or is trying an essential ingredient of Christian living? Is it okay to be angry with God? If it is, many believers are unnecessarily putting themselves on a guilt trip. If it is not, many contemporary Christians could be in a heap of trouble. From a biblical perspective is it true that the ultimate marriage relationship (or any other kind of relationship for that matter) involves two people accepting each other unconditionally? Or do conditions need to be stated and maintained as a basis for relational health?
All of these issues and countless more impact our individual and relational health. Yet they are not doctrinal statement types of topics. Though the doctrinal statements of most of the entities within the evangelical community have not changed, many of our ideas and attitudes related to these more practical issues are drastically different than they were several decades ago. The question becomes whether these changes are biblical.
The symptoms we have been discussing would suggest that they are not. Instead, it appears that we have been infiltrated by many secular ideas that have eroded our health as a community. Because these ideas impact you as an individual and your relationships, it is my hope that as we continue our discussion on these relevant topics you will continue to visit this site.
The Terri Schiavo story has taken on an omnipresent quality in our media today. Since our society seems to be fixated on this situation, I thought I would show the relationship between these developments and the concern of this website, evangelical reformation.
One of the major factors in the Terri Schiavo story is the dominant role played by the judiciary. Many conservatives are deeply concerned over both the power and the tendency of the judiciary to override the will of the people. This is especially problematic since our judiciary often seems to be out of step with the majority of Americans, undoing decisions people make at the polls.
One reason why more public pressure is not placed on the judiciary to stop legislating from the bench is that this tendency is supported by a liberal news media. The judiciary and the media working together are able to advance a liberal agenda, overriding the will of the people.
But this leads to the question, if the will of the people is otherwise, how did liberals gain control of the judiciary and the news media? At least part of the answer is that they first gained control of the universities that produce many of our judges and journalists. The control of the universities enabled them to get control of the news media, and the combination for many years enable them to control the political process, resulting in the appointment of a predominance of liberal judges.
Several factors have helped in the reversal of that process. The first was the election of Ronald Reagan. He was able to overcome the opposition of the news media by his tremendous communication capabilities coupled with the deplorable performance of President Carter and the resulting disastrous condition of our country. Another factor that has helped to release the grip of liberal control is the advent of conservative media, including talk radio, Fox news, and conservative blogs on the Internet.
This still leaves us with the question of how liberals gained such control to begin with. Historically our country has been rather strongly evangelical and conservative. How did a minority of liberals seize control in this environment? One answer is that they developed a good strategy, noted above, targeting the centers of influence in our society. By so doing, they were able to leverage their minority position.
So what does this have to do with evangelicals? The answer is that this liberal success was made possible by an evangelical attitude of withdrawal from the public square predominant in the early and mid-20th-century. This attitude developed in response to the modernist (liberal) belief that the world could be saved by changing society. With enough education, psychology, medical advances, and other human efforts, our world could evolve into a Utopia. Evangelicals reacted (in my estimation overreacted) by asserting that since human beings are fallen, the only means of helping society was through bringing people to Christ. They viewed any attempts by Christians to change society through involvement in the public square as an expression of accommodation to liberalism.
The problem with this thinking was that it failed to appreciate the role that Christians can play as salt and light in a society. Having Christians professors, journalists, judges, musicians, actors and actresses, and even comedians, can make a vast difference in a culture. By withdrawing from the public square, evangelicals opened the door for liberals to achieve their objective in seizing control of the centers of influence in our society.
For the most part, this has changed. That change began in earnest with Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, which gained momentum at least in part because evangelicals realized that their isolationism was not working, leading to a total capitulation to liberalism.
The problem, though, was that instead of identifying the theological error that led to near catastrophe in our country, evangelicals merely moved on to a different approach. By failing to recognize where they had gone wrong, evangelicals are susceptible to repeating the same error. In fact, when the Senate failed to uphold the impeachment of Bill Clinton by the House of Representatives, some evangelicals began to assert that the old approach was correct, and that Clinton’s victory demonstrated that evangelicals have no business in politics. Though this backlash did not gain any traction, those inclinations continue to lurk beneath the surface. That represents a problem.
An even bigger problem with not identifying our error is that we do not move away from it with understanding and clarity. Therefore, we are not as effective as we might be in the public square. If the evangelical community would acknowledge that its past isolationism was unbiblical and produced devastating results, it would probably be more intentional and effective in its future efforts to be salt and light in our society.
However, my concern is with more contemporary evangelical errors, many of which have resulted from the integration of psychology with evangelical theology, issues that I will describe in later postings. It appears at present that we are in the process of moving away from some of those errors. This is good.
What is bad, though, is that again we are doing so without acknowledging what has been wrong with the approaches of the past. My fear is that failing to identify past and present errors will leave us susceptible to falling back into the same patterns and will prevent us from moving forward as strongly as we might otherwise.
Therefore, one purpose of this website is to identify current evangelical failures and the bad theology behind them so that we can build our future on more solid ground. This is nasty business because it is unpopular to deal in negativity, especially in our current cultural environment. Nonetheless, it must be done. So I hope you will hang in there with me as we go through that process. I believe you will find that this is the necessary path toward a better future for the evangelical community in America and for your personal life.
I’ve been making a case that the evangelical community needs reformation by identifying symptoms demonstrating that the evangelical community is not well. The past two days we looked at the evangelical divorce rate and our lack of concern for our persecuted brothers and sisters around the globe.
I take no pleasure in disclosing the faults of the evangelical community for several reasons. First, that community, more than any other, represents the Lord in our society. Therefore, the issues which I have been discussing detract from the glory of God’s name. That is a cause for heartache. In addition, it is painful to identify evangelical maladies because the evangelical community is my community. Beyond that, merely identifying problems is counterproductive. Imagine a surgeon cutting somebody open and doing nothing. That would be a heinous act. So would be leveling a string of criticisms at the church with no positive goal in mind.
Rather, my ultimate purpose is to suggest remedies and encourage people to take them. People are not going to pop pills or undergo surgery if they are not convinced that they are sick. Likewise, evangelicals will not undergo change unless they are convinced that their present condition is pathological.
This brings me to the issue that I would like to address for the rest of this posting. Evangelicals who hear my assertion that our community needs reformation might object by pointing to the many indicators that the evangelical community is healthy. We seem to have a powerful presence in our society, representing the swing vote for the previous election, having one of our own in the White House, publishing books at an overwhelming rate, possessing a presence in the national media through radio, television, guests on major news programs, etc. Leading evangelicals are household names in our society. All of this and more points to the conclusion that the evangelical community, rather than being sickly, is robust and powerful.
The problem with this thinking is that many of these issues are externals. From a scriptural perspective the real test of our spirituality is found in our personal lives and in our relationships. In John 13 Jesus asserted that people would be able to identify His disciples by their love for one another. Yet the symptoms mentioned in the last two postings convey a serious lack of love. If evangelical spouses loved each other, their marriages wouldn’t fall apart. If we loved our persecuted brothers and sisters in Christ around the globe, we would be relentless in our efforts to come to their aid.
All of this points to the fact that the church in the United States is much like the athlete who appears to be in top-notch shape, but who upon undergoing a routine physical is told that he is critically ill. As evangelicals we must be careful not to put too much stock in external appearances of health. Rather, we must make our evaluation based on diagnosis of the Great Physician in His Word.