Evangelicals: Who Are They?
I'm just gonna quote from my senior thesis
In this week’s edition of Thinking Aloud, I’m using the recent discussion about evangelicals prompted by the Christianity Today editorial calling for Trump’s removal as an opportunity to think about the question of evangelical identity. In particular, I’m using the response (CT is “elitist”) as a way of thinking about policing evangelical identity. I wrote a forty page history thesis which addressed a lot of these questions, entitled “Jonathan Edwards and The Quest for a Grand Narrative: A Critical Survey of American Evangelical Historiography.” This edition will basically just be extended quotes from that. (And you’re welcome to request the full thesis: really, I’d be flattered.)
But first, a joke, a teaching update, some tweets:
Joke: "In the meadow we can build a snowman / Then pretend that he is Parson Brown / He'll say: Are you married? / We'll say: No man / and he'll say that premarital cohabitation is linked with higher rates of divorce later in marriage (Rosenfeld and Rosler, 2018), although some social scientists point out that when you control for age as a variable, there is less of a stark correlation (Kuperburg, 2014.)”
Teaching update: We finished Beowulf and my 2nd and 3rd graders were pretty divided on the question of whether or not he had a good life. In favor, they said that he was noble, protected his people, feasted with friends, died for a worthy cause. But on the other hand, he didn't have a family, he spent his whole life killing, and he was abandoned by (most of) his men. At recess, I asked one of the 5th graders and she shrugged her shoulders and said, "well, he was a hero, but his life was really hard." Indeed.
Tweets:
Okay, this will be long-ish, so let’s jump right in. Here’s the background:
Christianity Today is a conservative publication aimed at both the general reading public and Protestant Christians specifically. The editorial team tend to be high-church (Episcopalian and Presbyterian) but the goal is to be representative of and useful for all evangelicals, from Southern Baptists to non-denominational mega-churches.
CT has been critical of Trump in the past, but this past week they published an editorial calling for his removal from office. The piece was so widely read that the website crashed. Here’s the link: https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2019/december-web-only/trump-should-be-removed-from-office.html
The column opens by invoking Billy Graham, the founder of CT: “In our founding documents, Billy Graham explains that Christianity Today will help evangelical Christians interpret the news in a manner that reflects their faith. The impeachment of Donald Trump is a significant event in the story of our republic. It requires comment.”
One of the responses came from Matthew Schmitz, the sophist over at First Things who stylized himself as a Christian socialist for, like, two minutes, before doing a hard pivot to Trumpian nationalism. (How much are they paying him at First Things anyway?) Writing for the NY Post, Schmitz (an evangelical convert to Catholicism, like myself) complained that: “Elite evangelicals once again belittle their pro-Trump co-religionists.” He writes:
evangelical leaders who have come up through established institutions tend to acquire the training and tastes of the wider American elite. They often disdain the religious and political populism of the base. Whatever their theological convictions may be, these elites have ceased to be evangelical in a sociological sense. And evangelicalism is more exactly defined sociologically than theologically.
For Schmitz, CT’s “contributors more ardently desire to freelance for The New Yorker than to appear on Tucker Carlson, despite the fact that their parents would be more impressed by the latter.” (This might be true, though wonders why Schmitz is penning this for NY Post and not First Things?) He continues: “These people hold less sway among evangelicals than the editors of liberal publications do among their constituencies. They also have functionally ceased to be evangelical.”
Every once in a while, First Things publishes some Protestant arguing that they are actually more Catholic (“it means universal!”) than the Catholics. So I guess it’s only fair that we’d get a Catholic telling evangelicals that they are more evangelical than the evangelicals. Anyway, what I want to think about now is this question of intellect and cultural respect, and the dynamic of spurning or seeking the respect of cultural elites who are also often resented. To do so, I look at how evangelical historians talk about their own history. For in examining evangelical historiography, we get a peak at the way that learned evangelicals have sought to form evangelical identity. Everything that follows is from my thesis, unless otherwise noted.
——
The short version:
In summary, American evangelical historiography often roots evangelicalism in a monolithic Puritanism in part to give it historical legitimacy as a tradition and in part as a benchmark against which to (negatively) compare the more “enthusiastic” and less “intelligent” and “respectable” variants of Protestantism that are seen as emerging out of the chaos unleashed by the Great Awakenings.
The longer version: from the Introduction:
Before evangelicalism, there were the Puritans, and chief among those Puritans was Jonathan Edwards, or so goes one of the most popular narratives in evangelical historiography. Molly Worthen writes that today’s evangelicalism is “a creature of the Puritan and Pietist revivals” and she sees Edward and other such leaders as being “among the very first evangelicals, simultaneously troubled and inspired by the new problems in postmedieval political and intellectual life.” In casting Edwards in this role, Worthen follows the lead of Mark Noll who writes that Edwards “was both the last of the Puritans and the first of the evangelicals.” One of the reasons Edwards is so compelling in these stories is because of the significant context that surrounds him, the covenanting Puritanism that comes before him and the Enlightenment-shaped, democratic, and sectarian forms of Christianity that emerges after him.
In positing Edwards as both premodern and modern, Puritan and Evangelical, the story of evangelicalism is saved from being perpetually in medias res in that the story can quite naturally locate its origin at the very beginning of the Puritan project in the New World. As will soon be demonstrated, however, the desire to root this story in an illusory image of stable Puritanism has an additional historiographic function for evangelical scholars. “Puritanism,” when conceived of in a particular way, serves as an ideal of church unity, clerical authority, and theological rigor from which, it is implicitly or explicitly argued, American society has tragically and likely irrevocably departed.
“A Philosophical Religion; and yet how Evangelical:”
“Not since the English Civil War had such swift and unpredictable currents threatened the traditions of Western society.” This audacious claim regarding the half-century immediately subsequent to the American Revolution is found in the beginning of Nathan O. Hatch’s seminal text, The democratization of American Christianity. The “swift and unpredictable currents” of which Hatch writes are the “popular religious movements that broke upon the United States in the half century after independence.” In Hatch’s account of this history, much as the English Civil Wars resulted in instability, so also in America these democratic movements seemed to dissolve the “cement of an ordered society.”
Hatch is not alone in making this connection between America and England. In Seers of God, Michael Winship argues that the “itinerant preachers, broken parishes, no shortage of signs and wonders, and anarchy in interpretive frameworks” that characterized America’s first Great Awakening simply “repeated as a provincial coda the social disruptions stemming from the religious creativity of the English Civil Wars." Similarly, Mark Noll, writing also of the beginnings of revivalist tradition, notes the disintegrating nature of these social events. Noll claims that the “theological inheritance” of Puritan New England “did not vanish in the century or more that followed” but rather that “it did, however, fragment, and its broken pieces were recombined with a whole range of new intellectual associations.” Hatch is more heavy-handed in his assessment of this fragmentation. He argues that whereas American Protestantism was once tethered to traditions “intellectually respectable and institutionally cohesive,” it has been “skewed away from central ecclesiastical institutions and high culture” and subsequently “pushed and pulled into its present shape by a democratic or populist orientation.”
Noll also notes the irony of Puritanism’s disintegration being “caused in part by a revival of the same sort of experiential Calvinism that had first inspired the Puritan vision of a total Christian society.” Reading Winship, however, reveals a deeper irony, namely that this lamenting of “fragmentation” and “disintegration” also recalls the aftermath of the English Civil Wars in the sense of echoing the Anglican concerns with the pietist traditions that became the Puritans. Put more controversially, the embarrassment that Noll and Hatch especially feel regarding the so-called scandal of the deteriorating evangelical mind in light of Puritanism’s collapse simply repeats the attitudes that establishment Christians in England had toward the Puritans.
Winship’s book Seers of God details how the Puritans in New England were seen by the learned in England as being backwards-minded and uncouth. The Puritans had once rejected the Church of England as being too papist, and had established themselves in the New World as a pure church standing as a light to all the world. Nevertheless, Winship notes that “with a hundred years of fighting ‘superstition’ behind them, Puritans discovered their own wonder-working Providence deemed superstitious and enthusiastic.”
Winship quotes Mather to demonstrate how he attempted to gain the respect of the English learned culture. In one place Mather advises that “instead of saying Shew your selves Regenerate Christians, we will only say, Show yourselves Rational Creatures.” Mather also desires Puritanism to be something esteemed by “the more Polite Part of Mankind.” Mather describes this ideal Puritanism as ”a Philosophical Religion: and yet how Evangelical.”
In light of the context explored above, the desire to depict Edwards as last Puritan and first evangelical begins to make sense. Regarding the first, Edwards can rather convincingly be understood as furthering Mather’s work. One can even plausibly argue that the structure of Edwards’ A Faithful Narrative is likely modeled after or at least informed by Mather’s An Essay for The Recording of Illustrious Providences. Yet Edwards also uses his intellectual prowess and cultural clout to champion revivalism, and in this regard, Edwards is seen in his evangelical mode.
Even longer stuff: Edwards, Separatists, and American Democracy:
In his book Jonathan Edwards, Religious Tradition, and American Culture, historian Joseph A. Conforti advances the claim that the “Great Awakening” of the 17th century is mostly the invention of prominent thinkers in the 18th century. Conforti argues that “mainline evangelical leaders invoked the past, created a revivalistic tradition, and canonized 'classic' religious texts” and that they did so “as a response to the religious populism that was stimulated by the Second Great Awakening.” In Conforti’s account, these mainline evangelicals included the New Divinity men, New England Congregationalist theologians such as Samuel Hopkins, who were in direct opposition to the populist revivalism in the ministry of men like Charles Finney.
For example, Conforti explains that “beginning in 1816, both the New England and the American Tract societies printed eight editions and thousands of copies” of a work abridged from Edwards’ account of the Northampton revivals and published as the Account of Abigail Hutchinson, A Young Woman, Hopefully Converted at Northampton, Mass., 1734. In addition to Edwards’ writings, historian Thomas Kidd notes the number of texts published in the decades following Edwards that are directly modeled after his Northampton account, including: A Short and Faithful Narrative, of the Late Remarkable Revival of Religion in the Congregation of New-Londonderry published by Pennsylvanian Samuel Blair (Presbyterian) in 1744; A Faithful Narrative of the Remarkable Revival of Religion, in the Congregation of East-Hampton, on Long-Island published by New Yorker Samuel Buell (Presbyterian) in 1766; A Short and Plain Narrative of the Late Work of God’s Spirit published by Massachusettsian John Cleaveland (Separatist) in 1767.
For Kidd, “there was, really, no Second Great Awakening” but instead, the slow emergence he writes of which featured “a long-term turn toward Baptist and Methodist piety from the American Revolution to the Civil War, punctuated by new revivals like the one at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in 1801.” Kidd provides very concrete examples to flesh out this interpretation of history. Regarding the above mentioned Presbyterian minister Samuel Buell, Kidd writes that he wanted to “paint [the revivals] in more moderate colors” and to “market the revivals as moderate and enthusiastic” thereby changing “the public image of the evangelical movement itself.” Kidd’s assessment of Samuel Blair also sees him as endorsing a moderate revivalism akin to that of Buell’s.
In Hatch’s assessment of this period, the “gospel of the backcountry resonated with powerful Anti-Federalist and Jeffersonian persuasions. It challenged the right of a natural elite to speak for the people and empowered those who could claim no real stake in the promise of America.” Hatch writes that the populist preachers “mingled diverse, even contradictory sources, erasing distinctions that the polite culture of the eighteenth century had struggled to keep separate.” Specifically, the preachers expressed a mixture of “high and popular culture, of renewed supernaturalism and Enlightenment rationalism, of mystical experiences and biblical literalism, of evangelical and Jeffersonian rhetoric.” Moreover, given the syncretic nature of their theology, these populist preachers “could differ from each as easily as they could from the establishment.” For better or worse, Hatch portrays this democratic period of religion as being the battleground of the orthodox calvinists on the one hand, and everyone else on the other.
—
Okay, so this is just a sliver of my thesis, but I think you can see some of the dominant themes. My main argument is that evangelical identity is constituted by narrative, evangelicals are the story they tell themselves about who they are. And from the moment that the Puritans first landed in America, there have been battles for who gets to tell that story, who gets to answer the question, “what does it mean to be an evangelical?”
To grossly oversimplify, the more formally educated one is, the greater the tendency is to tell a story about institutions and theologies and leaders. The less formally educated, the greater the tendency to tell the story of revivals and popular movements. But of course there are always notable people, like Jonathan Edwards, like Billy Graham, who try to tell incorporate both stories into a more unifying metanarrative. But even then, that story tends not to focus on, say, pentecostals or even southern baptists for example.
There are also a lot of class, gender, and race dynamics that go into who is telling the story and how the story is told. And it is only more recently that evangelical historiography is beginning to take note of that aspect of the conversation.
I ended my thesis by suggesting that we should have an ethic of charity in storytelling. Rather than policing the boundaries of who is or is not evangelical (or evangelical enough), we should recognize that no single meta-narrative can do full justice to the complexity of evangelical identity. And we should welcome more stories.
Anyway, hope this is helpful. Here’s my list of references for the thesis:
Beaty, Katelyn. "At a Private Meeting in Illinois, a Group of Evangelicals Tried to Save Their
Movement from Trumpism." The New Yorker. April 26, 2018. Accessed April 26, 2018.
https://www.newyorker.com/.../at-a-private-meeting-in...
up-of-evangelicals-tried-to-save-their-movement-from-trumpism.
Conforti, Joseph A. Jonathan Edwards, Religious Tradition and American Culture. Chapel Hill
(N.C.): University of North Carolina Press, 1995.
Edwards, Jonathan. Jonathan Edwards Reader. Yale University Press, 2003.
Gerson, Michael. "The Last Temptation." The Atlantic. March 11, 2018. Accessed April 02,
2018.
https://www.theatlantic.com/.../the-last.../554066/...
_source=feed.
Hamilton, Michael S. "The 'Religious Affections' of Billy Graham's Evangelism."
ChristianityToday.com. Accessed April 02, 2018.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/.../how-billy-graham....
Hamilton, Michael S. "How a Humble Evangelist Changed Christianity As We Know It."
ChristianityToday.com. Accessed April 02, 2018.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/.../how-humble....
Hatch, Nathan O. The Democratization of American Christianity. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1989.
Haykin, Michael A. G., and Kenneth J. Stewart. The Advent of Evangelicalism: Exploring
Historical Continuities. Nashville, TN: B & H Academic, 2008.
"History of BJU." Bob Jones University. Accessed April 21, 2018.
https://www.bju.edu/about/history.php.
Jones, Martyn Wendell. "Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker: A Scandal of the Self." Weekly Standard.
March 02, 2018. Accessed April 02, 2018.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/jim-and-tammy-faye.../articl
e/2011793.
"Karl Barth - Mark Galli : Eerdmans." New Releases RSS. Accessed April 21, 2018.
https://www.eerdmans.com/Products/6939/karl-barth.aspx.
Kidd, Thomas S. Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America.
Yale University Press.
Knight, Janice. Orthodoxies in Massachussetts: Rereading American Puritanism. Cambridge
(Mass.): Harvard University Press, 1997.
Noll, Mark A. Americas God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005.
"Political Dealing: The Crisis of Evangelicalism." Fuller Seminary. Accessed April 24, 2018.
https://www.fuller.edu/.../political-dealing-the-crisis.../.
"Program." Nollconference. Accessed April 24, 2018. https://www.nollconference.com/program.
"The Grand Strategy of Charisma: From the Puritans to the Age of Trump." The Grand Strategy
of Charisma: From the Puritans to the Age of Trump | Brady-Johnson Program in Grand
Strategy. March 27, 2018. Accessed April 24, 2018. https://grandstrategy.yale.edu/.../grand-strategy....
Tracy, Joseph. The Great Awakening: A History of the Revival of Religion in the Time of Edwards and Whitefield. Boston: Charles Tappan, 1845.
Winship, Michael P. Seers of God: Puritan Providentialism in the Restoration and Early
Enlightenment. Johns Hopkins U.P., 2000.
Worthen, Molly. Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism. New
York (N.Y.): Oxford University Press, 2016.
What I Am Reading Elsewhere:
In the failing New York Times, an absorbing piece about a Mexican hitman who was recruited as a teen, became the best in his business, had a son, found God, became a state witness. “The sicario’s journey from hit man to state witness — drawn from public records, visits to the program and 17 months of interviews with him, his family, officials and other assassins — offers a rare glimpse into the world of Mexico’s ultraviolent killers"
John Gallagher has been a columnist with Detroit Free Press for 32 years. He just penned this final column, a loving tribute to the city he loves. Truly remarkable. “This job has given me a front-row seat into one of the world’s great urban dramas — the resurrection of a once-powerhouse city brought low by the scourges of racism, suburban sprawl and factory closings.”
One of my favorite writers, Martyn Wendell Jones, has this great review of a book called Converts to the Real - about how Catholicism and phenomenology go hand in hand. “By tempering the institutional and political explanations of individual belief with an attention to the dynamic role of conversion in the first decades of phenomenology, Converts to the Real locates itself in the postsecular project while demonstrating that project’s potential to extend historical knowledge.”
Dr. RJ Snell (a former professor of mine) has an essay in Public Discourse about conversation, truth, and freedom. “Plato is not satisfied if a conversation is merely free of external censorship; for him, the ethics of discourse also requires that the interlocutors possess the right sort of character."
Heritage Foundation is…not my favorite. But they have a really smart piece decrying conservative embrace of nationalism: “Nationalism celebrates cultural and even ethnic differences of a people, regardless of the form of government. The democratic nation-state, on the other hand, grounds its legitimacy and its sovereignty in democratic governance.”
Michael Wear (faith outreach for Obama) has this analysis of why the CT editorial matters: “he impact of this editorial is going to be in the pastors and non-profit heads who are sharing this with their staffs and the decisions that flow from those conversations. The leaders who now feel they can share this editorial or other political news, privately or publicly, who wouldn’t have before.
Buzzfeed has this remarkable profile of Bernie Sanders, and it’s all about solidarity: "His suggestion, by asking you to speak up about your private anxieties, many of them financial, is that you and the millions of people in the proverbial audience will begin to see your struggles not as personal failings, but systemic ones...He believes his presidential campaign can, he says, help people “feel less alone.”
In 2016, Elizabeth Warren apparently leveraged the threat of endorsing Sanders / running herself to force Clinton toward personnel choices that aligned with Warren’s economic agenda. Brilliant inside baseball. Politico has the story here.