Evangelicals Speak Up for Religious Liberty

Well, it took a while for the Evangelicals to show up to support the Catholics on the religious liberty fight over contraception and abortion pill issue, but at least they brought their big guns.

Here is an open letter from Charles Colson and Timothy George calling Evangelicals to stand up to the Obama administration's attempts to restrict religious freedom.

Even liberal Catholics like E. J. Dionne and the Jesuit magazine America are up in arms. (When Obama has lost E.J. and the Jesuits, you know the end is near.) But the Evangelical Left is silent. Where is Sojourners? Where is Tony Campolo? Where is Brian McLaren? Silent. Complicit. Accommodated. Sold out. Irrelevant.

Meanwhile on the front lines:

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ:

As you probably know by now, Obama Administration has refused to grant religious organizations an exemption from purchasing health insurance that covers abortion-inducing drugs, surgical sterilization, and contraception.

The Catholic bishops in America have responded quickly, decrying the Administration's decision for what it is—an egregious, dangerous violation of religious liberty—and mobilizing a vast grassroots movement to persuade the Administration to reverse its decision.

We evangelicals must stand unequivocally with our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters. Because when the government violates the religious liberty of one group, it threatens the religious liberty of all.

Many bishops have already declared that they will not obey this unjust law. The penalty for such a move would be severe. Catholic hospitals, universities, and other organizations would be forced to pay punitive fines ($2,000 per employee) for refusing to purchase insurance that violates the teaching of their church.

For some institutions, it would spell the end of their existence—and their far-reaching service to the public and the needy.

But Catholic institutions aren't the only ones affected by this mandate. Prison Fellowship, for example, which employs 180 people, could not purchase insurance for its employees that covers abortifacients. Nor could the world's largest Christian outreach to prisoners and their families afford the fines we would incur.

Three years ago, when we co-authored the Manhattan Declaration, we predicted that the time would come when Christians would have to face the very real prospect of civil disobedience—that we would have to choose sides: God or Caesar.

Certainly for the Catholics and for many of us evangelicals, that time is already upon us.

We would urge you, therefore, to raise your voice against this unjust mandate that violates our first freedom as Americans. First, please sign the petition to President Obama prepared by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which we have posted at the Manhattan Declaration site, demanding that the President extend exemptions from this onerous mandate to all religious employers.

Second, write to your representative and your senators in Congress.

Third, sign the Manhattan Declaration. Join with 500,000 people who have committed to "fully and ungrudgingly render to Caesar what is Caesar's. But under no circumstances will we render to Caesar what is God's."

Fourth, pray. Pray that God would soften the hearts and minds of the president and the leaders within his administration so that they would reverse course.

We do not exaggerate when we say that this is the greatest threat to religious freedom in our lifetime. We cannot help but think of the words attributed to German pastor Martin Niemoeller, reflecting on the Nazi terror:

First they came for the Socialists, and I
did not speak out —
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists,
and I did not speak out —
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did
not speak out — Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me — and there was
no one left to speak for me.

In Christ,
Chuck Colson
Timothy George

The Bayview Review

I'm two weeks late getting in this plug for a new venture that three of my faculty colleagues from Tyndale and I have started. It is a group blog called "The Bayview Review" and the purpose is stated on the blog as follows:

"The Bayview Review is an online magazine that attempts to be a resource for historic Chrisitan thought in relation to culture, government, philosophy, politics, and theology. While the authors of The Bayview Review agree on many things it would be a mistake to think we agree on them all and even when there is an agreement that some particular conclusion is correct it is very likely there will be widespread disagreement as to why that conclusion is correct. At The Bayview Review one should expect to see a broad diversity of views that all remain within the boundaries of historically orthodox Christianity.

In sum, the aim of The Bayview Review is to demonstrate that the conservative mindset is not only intellectually defendable against attacks from the Left (whether Secular, Liberal-Protestant, or Evangelical) but it is actually intellectually preferable to those alternatives."

Contemporary Evangelicalism arose out of the Fundamentalist movement in the 1940s and at first all Evangelicalism was Conservative Evangelicalism. Over the past few decades, however, as Evangelicalism has experienced numerical, financial, intellectual and institutional success, it has also become very diverse. Today there are many kinds of Evangelicals on a left-center-right spectrum plus many diverse sub-cultures within the overall movement.

Theological diversity within Evangelicalism is of two kinds. On the one hand, there is diversity in denominational traditions such as Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist, Pentecostal and other traditions but with all of these being rooted in historic Christian orthodoxy. On the other hand, there is also a developing Evangelical Left which crosses denominational lines and consists of those who are on a journey similar to that taken by the mainline denominations a century ago.

So, Conservative Evangelicalism is not a particular denominational or regional branch of Evangelicalism, but simply a continuing movement that believes what the Fundamentalists and the later Evangelicals have believed from the beginning of the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy in the 19th century. The Bayview Review is designed to promote an intellectual version of a Conservative Evangelicalism that desires not to live in the 1940s so much as it desires to be in communion with the 1500s and the 400s. What others may consider to be "out-of-date" we consider to be "grounded in historic orthodoxy." That which some may see as "progressive" we see as "lame cultural captivity". We want to be both Evangelical and Catholic because we believe this is the only way to be Biblical and because we believe that this is the future of Christianity.

In the future, I'll be cross-posting some of my posts there as well as here. Also, I'll be posting some of the best of my posts here at The Politics of the Cross Resurrected over there from time to time. The first of these is available now and is called "In Praise of the Lecture."

I hope you take time to visit The Bayview Review.

Secular Politics Infiltrating the Church: Hell's Scheme to Bring Down Evangelicalism

From the discussion surrounding the unfortunate cancellation of George W. Bush's speech at a Tyndale event, it has become clear that many Tyndale students are in danger of being led astray into false doctrine by those for whom secular politics, rather than the Gospel, are the most important thing.

Between the time of Augustine and the French Revolution, politics in the West was developed within a basically Christian worldview. The Enlightenment and the revolutionary movements that emerged out of it constituted the rise of a new paganism. In part they were a return to pre-Christian paganism but they also constituted a new, distinctively post-Christian form of paganism. Insofar as these intellectual movements denied cardinal Christian doctrines and defined themselves over against Christianity, they are technically heresies. So the 19-20th centuries are the age of political heresies.

The most influential of these political heresies is Marxism. Marxism is best thought of as a Christian heresy in which key Christian doctrines are inverted like some sort of "Satanic Bible." For example, the idea of an eschatological kingdom of God in which heaven comes to earth is part of Marxism, but it happens through human effort according to the "iron laws" of history instead of happening through the great Divine intervention in history that the New Testament calls the Return of Christ.

Marxism views human nature as plastic and malleable and therefore denies the Biblical doctrine of original sin. Rejecting the Genesis accounts of Adam's fall and Paul's theological interpretation of the meaning of that event in Romans, Marxism views evil in the world as arising from inadequate social arrangements. Instead of seeing sin as inherent in us, it sees sin as inherent in social structures of oppression. This view of the problem also changes the nature of the solution. Instead of seeing individual salvation - redemption through the blood of Christ - as the solution, Marxism views social revolution and the common ownership of material goods as the solution.

Marxism is atheistic; it denies the existence of God and blames faith in God for the passivity of the masses who are slow to rise up in revolution at the urging of Marxist agitators. Religion, said Marx, is the opiate of the people.

Marxism urges the breaking of all of the Ten Commandments as part of its system. It urges us to covet our neighbour's goods and to rise up in a redistributive revolution to steal from the rich and give to the less rich. It worships material wealth and substitutes material wealth for God, thus breaking the first two commandments. Marxism despises the family and tradition and wants to see the family dissolved so that nothing remains except the individual and the all-Powerful State. (Even though Marx advocated the abolition of the State the depth of his sincerity can be gauged by the fact that in practice he wanted to use the State to abolish the State!)

By now you might be asking what this revolutionary, atheistic, anti-Christian system of thought could possibly have to do with Tyndale. Well, over the past century or more, Marxist ideas and Marxist apologists have gradually been worming their way into the heart of Christian institutions, churches, colleges and seminaries in order to corrupt pure doctrine and replace Christian thinking with Marxist thinking.

In the 19th century the German influence on North American Protestant theology was pronounced and it included higher criticism, evolution, idealism and socialism of various sorts. The resulting Social Gospel movement secularized Christianity by turning it from a religion that focuses on heaven and hell, sin and salvation, and Christ and the Bible into a religion that focuses on this life only, socialist politics and Marx and politics. The churches became social service agencies, theology was reduced to a vague humanism centered on tolerance and inclusion, pastors became social workers or community organizers and the enemy became big business, capitalism and the rich. The Bible is full of myths, the resurrection never happened, miracles are rejected and the real message of Jesus was simply "Love your neighbour." Since we are all good people there must not be any hell or judgment and salvation means adjusting the living conditions in this world so that there is equality of income.

In reaction to this horrifying perversion of the pure Gospel of Jesus Christ, Christians who wanted to remain connected to the orthodox tradition of the Church took their stand on Scripture and continued to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ who died for our sins and rose again. They were called the Fundamentalists and they were hated, ostracized, mocked, despised and feared by the Social Gospel heretics. Fundamentalism flourished between the last decades of the 19th century and World War II.

After World War II, some Fundamentalist leaders decided to try to break out of their ghetto and re-engage the wider culture. They wanted to get involved in higher education, intellectual debate and socio-political affairs. But they wanted to do so without giving up their orthodox, biblical, fundamentalist theology.

It was at this time that institutions such as The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, the National Association of Evangelicals, Christianity Today and Fuller Theological Seminary were founded. Leaders such as Billy Graham, Harold Ockenga, Bill Bright, John R. W. Stott, J. I. Packer, Carl F. H. Henry and Harold Lindsell were prominent.

Over the next 50 years Evangelicalism grew and flourished. Many seminaries, publishing companies, liberal arts colleges and mission agencies were founded and grew rapidly. Evangelical churches grew quickly while liberal Protestant ones emptied out. Evangelicals helped elect the first Evangelical president, Jimmy Carter, and when he disappointed with his liberal policies, they helped elect Ronald Reagan in 1980. Leaders like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell became politically influential as Evangelicals began to join with Catholics to resist the increasingly aggressive secularism being pushed from the Left, exemplified in the demonic practice of abortion.

In some ways, Evangelicalism became a victim of its own success. Its rapid growth in numbers meant that much of the movement was a mile wide and an inch deep. Apologetics was always a big part of Evangelicalism because evangelism was at the center of Evangelical concern. But as Evangelicalism became bigger and more successful, it began to seem to be mainstream. The despised Fundamentalists of yesteryear now had the biggest, newest churches in town and went to nice colleges to become professionals and live an upper middle-class lifestyle.

In this situation, false prophet arose who played on the guilt felt by Evangelicals who were materially well off (or whose parents were) and used this as an opening to insinuate Marxist ideas into the thinking of younger Evangelicals. Like all heresies, Marxism uses a germ of truth as bait. Jesus does call us to love our neighbours and God is concerned for the poor. These two biblical truths, however, do not justify violent revolution, income redistribution by government coercion and class warfare. But they provide an opening for Marxist ideas.

One of the main ways Marxism attempts to beguile Evangelicals is through its critique of capitalism. If they can convince you that capitalism is the problem (rather than sin) then you will be open to focusing your attention on fighting capitalism rather than preaching the Gospel. That is good for Marxism, since its goal is to overthrow the capitalist order, and it distracts Christians from preaching the Gospel.

Once the Marxists have convinced a group of Christians that capitalism is the enemy, they can work to encourage you to become ever more envious and covetous. But the brilliance of their strategy is revealed at this point: they don't get you to covet and envy for yourself, but rather, you do so on behalf of the oppressed poor! That seems unselfish and noble.

Next, the strategy is to get you to slowly but surely forget about evangelism and focus all your attention on "social justice ministry." This is a process in which you gradually get used to neglecting the well-being of the souls of the people you are reaching out to and concentrating on their material well-being in this life only. It begins by an innocent-looking theological move in which you are asked to accept the idea that mission includes both social service and evangelism as co-equal parts of the mission. But in practice one always is more prominent than the other and you will soon be told that to make evangelism the most important is unloving and unjust. Before long, evangelism drops out of sight altogether in many cases and Evangelical mission has been turned into a new, updated version of the Social Gospel.

One thing to remember is that practice precedes theory. The theological changes come later. First, we change the actual, on-the-ground way of doing mission that only later do we revise our theology to go along with the new way of doing it.

By the time the actual theological changes are made, it is almost too late because the whole meaning of Christian mission will have already been secualrized and theology grows out of mission.

Marxism is corrupting Evangelicalism today on many levels and in many ways. Those who have eyes to see and ears to hear must be alert and understand the times.

What Does It Mean to Be Conservative?

What is conservatism? It is a series of moral, political, economic, cultural and intellectual ideals.

Moral Ideals
Sanctity of Human Life - this is the ideal you get when you apply the doctrine that people are created in the image of God

Sexual Restraint and Marriage - this is the ideal you get when you take the Ten Commandments seriously as a society

Concern for the Poor, the Weak, the Sick and the Elderly - this is the ideal you get when you take the Christian love ethic seriously

Political Ideals
Limited Government - when God is recognized as God the government can not become divinized and there are limits placed on its authority

The Rule of Law - to be ruled by law means the law applies to everyone alike and is made by bodies that operate with the consent of the governed so as to make understandable rules which are made known widely and applied without favoritism

Natural Law as the Basis of Positive Law - when human government makes law it defers to the society's best understanding of the natural law and does not try to go against the natural law

Economic Ideals
Free Enterprise - government regulation should be kept to a minimum so that many people can easily start small businesses and anti-monopoly laws should prevent the formation of monopolies so that competition can flourish

Free Markets - the markets are allowed to set prices, which eliminates "crony capitalism" and benefits everyone by ensuring that the goods and services people want are produced

Low Taxation - governments tax only for the purpose of funding the legitimate functions of government, not every Utopian project that comes along

Cultural Ideals
Family - the traditional family is seen as the pre-political basis of society and is supported by laws and government policies

Morality - objective right and wrong is acknowledged and the fallenness of humanity is taken into consideration as a fact of life

Freedom of Religion - society encourages religion and recognizes the fundamental importance of Christianity to the shaping of our culture, but draws the line at having a state church or coercing anyone to belong to a particular denomination

I think the word "conservative" is a great word and we should not let cultural Marxists take it away from us. The essence of Christianity in the Late Modern West is not to somehow "balanced" between being too liberal and too conservative. It is to be conservative rather than liberal.

Is it Cultural Captivity to be Conservative Today?

It is not often that you hear of Al Mohler and Brian McLaren agreeing on something, so it deserves to be noted when it happens. Here is Mohler responding to McLaren's critique of Mohler's critique of McLaren:

Finally, McLaren agrees with me at “home plate,” though with a very different application:

Finally Dr. Mohler strides across home plate with a point I actually agree with: “At the end of the day, a secular society feels no need to attend or support secularized churches with a secularized theology.”

True enough (if by “secular” you mean “without any reference to God”), but the rub for many who identify as conservatives, I think, is that for them, secularism only comes in one flavor: liberal.

To more and more of us these days, conservative Evangelical/fundamentalist theology looks and sounds more and more like secular conservatism - economic and political - simply dressed up in religious language. If that’s the case, even if Dr. Mohler is right in every detail of his critique, he’d still be wise to apply the flip side of his warning to his own beloved community.

And, in return, I must say that McLaren lands a firm punch with this statement. He is profoundly right in seeing much of presumably conservative Christianity as a sell-out to the idols of the day and a new form of Culture Christianity. He is right to challenge us to call this what it is and to root it out.

I think that Mohler is on shaky ground if he is agreeing with McLaren that much of conservative Christianity is a "sell-out to the idols of the day and a new form of Culture Christianity." Now, in Mohler's defense, he may simply be saying that conservative Christianity is selling out precisely by becoming less conservative and words in the previous line "much of presumably conservative Christianity" would seem to bear out this interpretation.

However, the general tenor of the paragraph, read quickly, seems to imply that there are two ways the church can "sell-out:" a liberal way and a conservative way, which are morally equivalent. I would argue that the liberal way leads right out of Christianity altogether. J. G. Machen, in his Christianity and Liberalism, argued this case and I think he is right. Look at the Episcopal Church today: only by excessive generosity and by ignoring reality can one call this organization a Christian Church. The fact that it has some genuine Christians in it does not affect the reality that it is firmly controlled by people who do not believe in the Biblical Gospel and who themselves need to be converted to Christ. Liberalism is an alternative to Christianity.

But conservatism is not an alternative to Christianity: it is the cultural expression of Christianity. It is Biblical discipleship in the non-religious areas of life. It was Christian influence that helped create some of the great ideals of Western civilization from limited government to freedom of religion to free markets to parliamentary democracy. Western Christendom is not beyond criticism but most of the legitimate criticism involves showing how it failed to live up to its own ideals. To seek to conserve those ideals is the essence of conservatism and it is a Biblical calling.

[In my next post, I will offer a definition of what I mean by conservatism.]

Why Does the Left Project Its Obsession with Promiscuity, Unnatural Sex and Abortion onto Conservatives Who Want Nothing to Do with Such Things?

One of the least serious and most amusing charges made against conservative Evangelicals like me is that we are "obsessed with gay marriage and abortion." What a ridiculous accusation! We have absolutely no interest in either subject unless somebody tries to make murdering babies legal or tries to change the definition of natural marriage. It is clearly the Left which is obsessed with these things and it is the Left which is the clear aggressor in the culture wars that have been raging since the 60s. I believe the pop psychology phrase that describes this phenomenon is "projection."

So it is nice to see this high school debating tactic demolished every once and a while. The latest to shoot these barrel-dwelling fish is David French, who writes:

I chuckle when I hear the common critique of the religious and secular left: "Evangelicals are obsessed with gays and abortion." The criticism is so common that it's often internalized and adopted by the church itself. Similar to our reaction to another leftist refrain ("Christians care about children until they're born"), we act as if the critique is legitimate-as if it's the result of some kind of empirical, good-faith analysis of Christian action in America. But it's not. It is, pure and simple, a talking point.

And it's false. Demonstrably false.

What if I told you that American Christians, in fact, are "obsessed" with helping the poorest and weakest members of our society? Would that improve our image? What if I told you that this "obsession" was so obvious as to be demonstrable even to the most hardened skeptic? Would that make you doubt the good faith of the "obsessed with gays and abortion" critique? . . .

We can find part of the answer by looking at the budgets of the largest and most influential Christian organizations. A website called Guidestar publishes the tax filings of most charitable organizations, so register (it's free) and take a tour of Form 990s.

First, you'll notice that Christians do give lots of money to what I'd call "pure" culture war organizations, but not as much as the Left. The largest (by budget) include my employer, the Alliance Defense Fund, and the Family Research Council. Of the pro-life organizations, two of the largest are National Right to Life and Americans United for Life. These organizations raise quite a bit of money-almost $60 million combined. But it's not as much as the leading legal organization on the Left. The ACLU Foundation (which does not include the various state ACLUs) took in $98 million with the national ACLU itself raking in an additional $33 million.

But what about organizations like Focus on the Family? Focus is big, no doubt, with gross receipts exceeding $135 million. But anyone with even a passing familiarity with that organization knows that the vast majority of its efforts are thoroughly divorced from the "gays and abortion" side of the culture wars. Its website and radio show are primarily dedicated to such topics as enriching your marriage, dealing with unruly teens, and reviewing TV shows and movies for their family-friendliness.

How do those numbers stack up with leading Christian anti-poverty charities? Let's look at just three: World Vision, Compassion International, and Samaritan's Purse. Their total annual gross receipts (again, according to most recently available Form 990s) exceed $2.1 billion. The smallest of the three organizations (Samaritan's Purse) has larger gross receipts than every major "pro-family" culture war organization in the United States combined. World Vision, the largest, not only takes in more than $1 billion per year, it also has more than 1,400 employees and 43,000 volunteers.

If you care about poor people in need, you had better hope that the Evangelical Left fails to entice many conservative Evangelicals down the path of liberal Protestantism. You had better hope that the number of conservative Evangelicals grows quickly - if you actually want to see the poor get help, that is.

Evangelicalism is Growing: Liberal Protestantism is Dying

We have been hearing for several years now that Evangelicalism and/or Christianity in general is declining in the US. What we know is that liberals desperately wish this to be true; until now the actual picture has been unclear. A new study from Baylor Religion Survey shows that Evangelicalism is hardly falling apart. Bryon Johnson writing in First Things says in his article entitled "Good News about Evangelicalism":

The evangelical movement is undergoing a sea change, to be sure, but it is not the sort most observers imagine. For starters, evangelicals have not lost members. This was confirmed by the Baylor Religion Survey, an in-depth study of American religious beliefs and practices using data collected by the Gallup Organization. Instead of relying on questions about religious preference alone, as previous studies have done, the survey identified respondents by religious family, denomination, and local congregation.

One of the ways researchers misinterpret the data is to assume that those who leave churches leave for a non-religious lifestyle. Actually, however, many leave liberal churches in search of a more relevant faith (usually in an Evangelical church) and many others move into nondenominational churches that are not well-described in survey instruments.

Nondenominational churches, almost exclusively evangelical, now represent the second-largest group of Protestant churches in America, and the fastest growing section of the American religious market. Many denominational churches, especially newer ones, avoid advertising or communication strategies that feature their denominational affiliation. Consider Saddleback Church. All of its members know that their pastor is Rick Warren, but not all know that their congregation is Southern Baptist. Typical is Christ Community Church, near Nashville, Tennessee—a member of the Presbyterian Church of America that does not highlight this fact in Sunday services or sermons.

This trend has affected popular statistics and has also served to exaggerate the loss of religious faith and evangelical influence in America. Most previous research missed a new phenomenon: that members of nondenominational churches often identify themselves on surveys as unaffiliated or even as having “no religion.” Because traditional surveys do not provide categories that adequately describe those who attend nondenominational congregations, their members often check “unaffiliated” in typical surveys and questionnaires.

According to a recent survey by the Pew Forum, 44 percent of Americans have switched their religious or denominational affiliation. Much of the media coverage suggested that something much different had happened: that a significant portion of the American population had left the faith of their youth. But that is not what the research actually discovered. These are two vastly different stories, with profoundly different implications for American religion in general and evangelicalism in particular. Switching churches or denominations should not be interpreted as a proxy for losing one’s faith.

Between 1960 and 2000 membership in "mainline" (liberal) denominations has declined by 49%. During the same period, membership in Evangelical (the new mainline) denominations has increased by 156%. Clearly, liberalism empties churches and Evangelicalism is where people who want to be serious Christians go.

Look for these trends to continue until the Roman Catholic Church and Evangelicalism constitute the bulk of Christianity in the US and Liberal Protestantism has died out. The same trends are at work in Canada and in the UK as well.

Evangelicals and Progressivism

This post is part 3 in a four-part series on Peter Berkowitz's extremely helpful and informative article, "Obama and the Rhetoric of Progressivism," which you can read here. In this post I look at how this article can help us understand the nature, defects and future of the Evangelical Left.

______________

In the 2008 election, Obama's team learned from the mistakes made by John Kerry's campaign in 2004 when "values voters" (aka Catholic and Evangelical Christians) flocked to George W. Bush. When I say "flocked" I mean something like "ran screaming from the horror that was Kerry's blatant secularism." Obama's team determined that they would not cede the white evangelical vote to McCain and that they would reach out to religious voters. They got Obama to talk about religion, which he proved relatively effective in doing. They used Brian McLaren, Tony Campolo and Jim Wallis to reach out to younger Evangelicals and to those interested in the peace and justice agenda.

Tiffany Stanley in an article in The New Republic, entitled "Things Fall Apart: How Democrats Gave Up on Religious Voters," writes:

Between 2004 and 2007, when Obama announced his candidacy for president, he became possibly the most prominent Democratic politician who was comfortable speaking about religion—a liberal who gave the impression that his religiosity was heartfelt, genuine, and important to his politics. He spoke with ease about his conversion; of the influence of Reinhold Niebuhr and Martin Luther King, Jr.; and, in a key speech before the Call to Renewal conference in 2006, of the importance of “religion in the public square.” In the 2008 presidential election, Obama’s message seemed to resonate with religious people who had not, in recent years, gravitated toward the Democratic Party. He won more churchgoers than any Democratic presidential candidate since Bill Clinton.

But, she notes, the wheels have come off the Democratic outreach to "values voters."

But, in just two short years, the left has become sluggish in its courtship of religious voters, significantly scaling back its faith-outreach programs. . . . In the recent midterm elections, House Democrats lost white evangelical voters in greater numbers than they did in 2004, when “values voters” flocked to George W. Bush. Reversing their Democratic allegiance from the past two elections, Catholics—nearly a quarter of all voters—favored the GOP 54 to 44 percent. Compared to 2008, the drop-offs were steep: a 20-point decline with Catholics, a 14-point decline with white evangelicals, and a 10-point decline with white Protestants. How and why did this happen?

Jennifer Rubin in her blog at the Washington Post, "Right Turn," comments on Stanley's article and says that, while the article explains that the Democrats have scaled back their political programs designed to win over religious voters, Stanley never explains why they have done so. Rubin offers her own explanation:

You have to imagine that value voters lack core convictions -- an obvious bit of cognative dissonance -- to miss why it is that religious voters disapprove of the Democrats these days. It's the agenda. Religious conservatives are staunchly pro-Israel. They don't like Obama's approach to Israel. They are pro-life; Obama has reversed the Mexico City accord, appointed two pro-choice Supreme Court justices and reversed Bush administration policies on stem cell research. Value voters have a commitment to "traditional family values;" the Democrats successfully championed the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell." Value voters bristle at efforts to restrict religious expression in the public square and at government interference with the free exercise of religion (e.g. they favor a conscience clause for health-care providers with regard to abortion and birth control). The administration has generally ignored such concerns. And finally, religious voters generally care deeply about religious freedom around the world; Obama's record is woefully deficient in this regard.

Moreover, religious voters have traditionally been suspicious of the power of the state. It comes as a shock to many on the left, but it is entirely understandable, that while the agenda is focused on fiscal matters, many in the Tea Party identify themselves as religious conservatives. Once again, the Obama administration and religious voters are at odds on fundamental policy issues.

So the real question is not why value voters have fallen away from Democrats, but why a significant number were lured into the Obama camp in the first place.

In Rubin's estimation, the Democrats were never serious about serving the religious voters as a constituency; they just wanted to hoodwink enough of them to vote Democrat in a close election but had no intention of budging on policy.

Mark Tooley at The Weekly Standard asks: "Is the Religious Left Fizzling?"

Over the last several years the old religious right reputedly has been melting down, with younger, more liberal evangelicals in the ascendency. But exit polling from the 2010 midterm election indicate no major political shift among evangelical or Protestant voters.

According to CNN's exit poll, 77 percent of self-described white evangelicals or born again Christians voted Republican. This number is actually higher than the 74 percent who supported George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004, which was considered a high water mark for conservative evangelical activism. Seventy percent of white evangelicals and born-agains voted Republican in 2008 and 2006.

But I want to call attention to Tooley's conclusion (and we are getting to Berkowitz soon!):

Exit polls of actual voting by evangelicals indicate that the evangelical left remains primarily a phenomenon among evangelical elites on seminary and college campuses and among some parachurch and activist groups. The prolonged wars, culture clashes, and ultimate financial collapse during the George W. Bush years undoubtedly moved some evangelical elites and young people to the left. But the ongoing recession, explosion of government spending, and liberal stances on abortion and homosexuality by the Obama administration (the NAE quietly opposes revoking “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”), along with the president's discomfort with American exceptionalism, have likely solidified grassroots evangelicals overall within their traditional conservative politics. Like left-leaning mainline Protestant elites starting decades ago, evangelical elites increasingly will probably denounce their own constituency for its lack of political enlightenment.

The Evangelical Left is following a predictable path just as the progressive Protestants of the mid to late 19th century in embracing progressivism right down to the idea that the ordinary people are too stupid to understand how progressive, enlightened and good the left-leaning progressive elites are. The Evangelical Left is attempting to gain control of all Evangelical institutions and has already made serious inroads into seminaries and publishers and has taken almost complete control of most Evangelical liberal arts colleges. It suffered a real setback in the 1980s when it was expelled from the leadership of America's largest Evangelical denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention. But the battle continues and those ignorant of history will be impotent to prevent its repetition.

Peter Berkowitz, in discussing the "Old Progressivism" notes in passing that the Protestant churches and the Social Gospel were integral elements of the original progressivist movement.

The original progressivism arose in the 1880s and 1890s and flourished during the first two decades of the 20th century. It is associated with, among others, Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, scholars Fredrick Jackson Turner and Charles Beard, reformer Jane Addams, theologian Walter Rauschenbusch, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, philosopher and educator John Dewey, and journalist and New Republic founder Herbert Croly.

At their best, the original progressives responded to dramatic social and economic upheavals generated by the industrial revolution, opposed real Gilded Age abuses, and promoted salutary social and political reforms. They took the side of the exploited, the weak, and the wronged. They fought political corruption and sought to make political institutions more responsive to the will of the people. And they advanced programs and policies that, in a changing world, brought liberal democracy in America more in line with the Declaration of Independence's and the Constitution's original promise of freedom and equality for all.

But progressivism went astray owing to a defect in its basic orientation. It rejected the sound principles of government embodied in the Constitution, because of a critical difference of opinion about human nature. Progressives believed that great improvements in the moral character of humanity and in the scientific understanding of society had rendered the Constitution's scheme of checks and balances - or better its separation, balancing, and blending of power - unnecessary to prevent majority tyranny and the abuse of power by officeholders. Whereas the makers of the American Constitution believed that the imperfections of human nature and the tendency of people to develop competing interests and aims were permanent features of moral and political life, progressives insisted that progress allowed human beings, or at least the most talented and best educated human beings, to rise above these limitations and converge in their understanding of what was true and right. Indeed, according to the progressives the Constitution's obsolete and cumbersome institutional design was a primary hindrance to democratic reforms to which all reasonable people could agree and which upright and impartial administrators would implement. It is a short step from the original progressives' belief that developments in morals and science had obviated reasonable disagreements about law and public policy and dissolved concerns about the impartiality of administrators to the new progressives' belief that in domestic affairs disagreement is indefensible and intolerable.

Liberal Protestantism went wrong by embracing the heretical progressivist view of man as perfectible by education and by rejecting a biblical Augustinian view of human nature. This was the key doctrinal mistake and it led to a rejection of the penal substitutionary atonement as the heart of the Gospel and to the exaltation of social service to the center of the Church's mission and message instead. All this followed logically from the embrace of Rousseauian perfectionism. And it is happening all over again, which explains why progressives like Brian McLaren are so adamantly opposed to Reformed theology and its atonement-centered Gospel. The problem with the Evangelical Left is its embrace of progressivism.

Is the "New Calvinism" Growing?

I would say it is growing in influence, but the issue of whether it is growing in numbers is more difficult to analyze. Here is a story in which the Barna Research Group says that there is no evidence that Calvinism as a whole is growing in American Protestantism.

Some observers and journalists have described a movement among Reformed churches, pointing to prominent Reformed pastors and new Reformed church associations as a significant trend. A new study from Barna Group explores whether the so-called “New Calvinism” has, as yet, affected the allegiances of pastors and whether Reformed churches are growing.

Their conclusion?

Kinnaman, who serves as Barna Group president, concluded, "there is no discernable evidence from this research that there is a Reformed shift among U.S. congregation leaders over the last decade. Whatever momentum surrounds Reformed churches and the related leaders, events and associations has not gone much outside traditional boundaries or affected the allegiances of most of today's church leaders. It is important to note that the influence of Reformed churches might also be measured through other metrics that are currently unavailable, such as the theological certainty of self-described adherents, their level of acceptance toward those who are not Calvinist, and the new methods Reformed leaders are using to market their views to their peers and to the public.

I think that, since conservative, biblical, Evangelical Calvinism is a subset of all Calvinism (which includes many liberals who claim the Reformed or Calvinist label), broad brushed research of this type does not really help in answering the question of whether the movement described in Hanson's Young, Restless and Reformed is actually growing.

We should bear in mind that the qualifications in the above paragraph may be far more significant that the main conclusion. In particular, I think that the new-found confidence in the Gospel displayed by many in the so-called "New Calvinism," (which is really just another wave of the original Calvinism), and the new methods used to market Calvinist views to Evangelicals in general are signs of an important resurgence of Calvinism today.

The Reformed wing of Evangelicalism is engaged in a debate with other theological perspectives about what constitutes an adequate basis for a healthy Evangelicalism. This debate can occur in Evangelicalism because Evangelicalism has not drifted as far from biblical and orthodox Christianity as Liberal Protestantism has done. The issue at stake is the alarming degree of leftward drift within Evangelicalism and what must be done to stop it.

Just as the election of the leftist Obama to the presidency has shocked conservative and moderate America into active repudiation of his policies and into political activism, the rise and flame-out of the Emergent Church movement has shocked and alarmed ordinary Evangelicals into the realization that a second major slide into liberalism is not only possible, but likely unless theological renewal occurs.

This development has caused many to take a second look at a robust, biblical, orthodox, Reformed theology and consider whether or not it alone has the power to prevent the slide into a new social gospel which is no real gospel at all. The fact that a number of people are coming to the conclusion that whether or not Reformed theology is the only kind of theology capable of sustaining a vigorous Evangelicalism, it is likely the best alternative for doing so is what is causing the "New Calvinism" to grow in influence within Evangelicalism.

Rodney Stark on Why the Evangelical Left Has No Future

Timothy Dalrymple has a great interview with Rodney Stark at Patheos titled "Crusades for Christ." I would like to post some excerpts on the crusades, which was the main point of the interview, but I did review Stark's book God's Battalions here already.

But what I will do is to quote the last few paragraphs of the interview, which Justin Taylor also quoted over at "Between Two Worlds." (HT to Justin Taylor) He has some very appropriate (in my opinion) comments on the Evangelical left and the attempts of the Left to demonize Evangelicals as extremists.

Here they are:

What happens with "progressives" is that they cannot get any traction amongst evangelicals. Their audience, or their intended audience, is largely among the "mainline" congregations and the media that favor them. I don't think they have found much traction amongst most evangelicals -- and I think that's for the same reason that everybody has fled the old mainline. You get tired of hearing that capitalism is sinful and that Cuba is the way of the future, and other kinds of idiocy like that. Yet when I look at evangelicals using survey data, they are not a bunch of right-wing Republicans. They're conservative, but they're about equally Republicans and Democrats. It's religious and not political conservatism that defines them.

Very clearly, evangelicals don't like abortion. They do like school prayer and a few things like that. If those were right-wing issues, then sure, evangelicals would be right-wing. But if they're not right-wing issues -- and the majority of Americans agree with evangelicals on those issues -- then I fail to see that there's anything right-wing or scandalous about it. But when it comes down to meat and potatoes politics, evangelicals are not that different from the rest of America, and that's important for people to understand. A whole lot of them voted for Obama. Whether they will do so again, I don't know.

So, I think those guys are entirely wrong. I am tired of people like Mark Noll worrying about "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind." What do they expect? I don't consider it a scandal that a bunch of laymen don't want to read academic books. It's not a scandal that ordinary evangelicals are not left-wing seminary professors.

Too many evangelical intellectuals want to be the house conservative at the liberal banquet. So Martin Marty will invite you to his table because you can be the token evangelical. I'm sorry, but I'm not a token anything.

I could not agree more. Read the whole interview here.

The Stuggle for the Soul of Evangelicalism Visible in Two Recent Conferences

Two weeks ago there were two highly significant conferences held in Wheaton and Louisville that represent two related but significantly different movements that aspire to provide the intellectual center of gravity for contemporary Evangelicalism.

The Wheaton Theology Conference, which featured a conversation with N. T. Wright on Jesus and Paul, usually draws 300 registrants but was capped this year at 1100. The Together for the Gospel Conference, held in Louisville was also sold out and featured speakers like Mark Dever, Ligon Duncan, John Piper and Al Mohler.

T4G is just one of a number of contemporary organizations that are attempting to renew the reformed center of Evangelicalism. When (as it was then called) "Neo-Evangelicalism" got off the ground in the late 1940's, it was an attempt to be Fundamentalist without the separatism, anti-intellectualism, legalism and sectarianism into which the Fundamentalist movement had fallen during its bruising battle with Modernism during the first half of the 20th century.

Neo-Evangelicalism was led intellectually by Westminster Theological Seminary and the newly formed Fuller Evangelical Seminary and was overwhelmingly Reformed in its theology, yet with an emphasis on evangelism Billy Graham style and missions that appealed to non-Reformed Evangelicals. The leaders skillfully brokered a potentially fractious coalition of Reformed, Arminian and Pentecostal groups into something that came to be known as Evangelicalism and which has become the most vibrant religious group in the world in the past half century.

But as the movement grew and matured, the Wesleyan, Anabaptist and Pentecostal and other Arminian theological groups, as well as the Dispensational groups, began to challenge the Reformed theological center. There have always been dissenters from the Reformed orthodoxy looking for alternatives as potential centers for Evangelical theology. See, for example, this article by a professor at the Charismatic Regent University entitled "The Westminster Captivity of the Church."

This is where N. T. Wright comes in. Evangelicals are making something of a rock star out of him, even though he is ambivalent at best to their ecclesiology, their evangelistic and missionary emphasis and their traditional devotion to personal piety and conversionism.

Groups like T4G, the Gospel Coalition, Desiring God, 9 Marks and the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals are attempting to call Evangelicalism back to its historic center and to define the center in Neo-Reformed terms as a way of stemming the seemingly endless diversification of Evangelicalism into whatever anyone wants it to be. I think many will agree that a movement that allows Joel Osteen, Brian McLaren and Robert Schuller to be identified as within its boundaries could use a little stricter definition. But rather than policing the boundaries, as Fundamentalism tried to do, the Neo-Reformed strategy is not to focus on the boundaries, but on the center.

The goal is to define the center in ways that make it continuous with the theology of the 16th century Reformers and the post-Reformation Puritan and Pietist movements, the revivalism of the Wesleys, Whitefield and Edwards and Protestant confessional orthodoxy. To the extent they are successful, then, the essence of the best of Protestantism will be preserved within the contemporary Evangelical movement even as the liberal Protestant denominations die out.

So is N. T. Wright an ally or a rival to the Neo-Reformed movement? That question sparks lively debates today and is a pressing question for Evangelicals to get sorted out. Brett McCracken has an interesting article in Christianity Today in which he describes his experience of attending both conferences: "Wrightians and the Neo-Reformed: All One in Jesus Christ." He also blogs about it here. William B. Evans has a very good report on the Wheaton Conference at Reformation 21 here. His last two paragraphs are worth quoting because they sum up the ambivalence with which Evangelicals hold N. T. Wright.

. . . I suspect that no sentient being could come away from the conference without an appreciation for Wright's rhetorical gifts and power. I had heard Wright speak in other contexts but had never heard him preach until Friday morning, when he preached to the students in the college chapel service. His sermon, in which there was nary a pause or break, consisted of a thirty-five minute guided tour of the book of Ephesians with application. I came away from that service with a sense of just how relentlessly verbal Wright can be, and of how he has been able to churn out some many books of such consistent quality. I also came away sensing that the Wheaton invitation was not a misstep and that Wright is a man of authentic evangelical (small "e") piety even if, in my judgment, he is not "right" on everything--in short, he really does love the Lord and genuinely strives to be biblical.

But there are also, in my opinion, at least three significant dangers lurking in his theology. First, without a deeper appreciation for the role of faith commitments in historical scholarship, Wright's historical endeavors run the risk of lapsing back into the historicism he so abhors. Second, his nearly constant preference for corporate inclusion over against the individual's experience of forensic justification risks a tragic obscuring of essential Reformational insights. Finally, his apparent distaste for the church's confessional tradition is unlikely to serve the church well in the long run and is, in fact, likely to undercut his ecclesiology.

I think these three dangers in Wright's theology go to the heart of the matter. While I agree with Evans that Wright is an Evangelical who is trying to be biblical, it is somewhat ironic that an Anglican of all people should, in the end, have his high ecclesiology undercut by, of all things, that old Evangelical habit of biblicism. In the end, Wright may be a temptation for Evangelicals precisely because they recognize a kindred spirit at this very point. And that, it seems to me, is where the historically-oriented confessionalism of the Neo-Reformed becomes absolutely necessary if we are going to be faithful to the biblical Gospel.

Homosexuality, Evangelicalism and the Gospel

Note: The following article was published in the Tyndale student newspaper: Canon 25 (Apr. 2010).
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The most important cultural event in the past century was the sexual revolution, which was the rejection of traditional sexual morality by the middle class in North America and Europe during the 1960s (the intellectual elites of Western culture having already rejected traditional sexual morality). The sexual revolution is a denial that there is a Divinely created order in the world to which we must submit in order to be happy and fulfilled as creatures. Utilizing moral relativism and hyper-individualism, the sexual revolution sought to overturn traditional sexual morality, which upholds stable family structures that have child-rearing as their central focus, so as to promote the fulfillment of the individual through hedonism and choice.

Liberal Christians have followed the secular culture in abandoning traditional sexual morality. Since they had already lost their belief in the authority and inerrancy of Scripture, it was easy to set aside the exegetical tradition of the Church that had universally condemned homosexual behavior. For over a century now liberal Christians have embraced first the social gospel and then liberation theology in place of the personal Gospel of sin and salvation. Therefore, as the culture becomes more hostile to traditionalists of all religions, liberal Christians have added sexual liberation from traditional morality to their message and have thus been able to avoid clashing with the culture and having to face persecution. Liberal Christianity substitutes experience for Scripture as the highest authority and substitutes the false gospel of inclusivism, which requires no repentance, no forgiveness, and no transformation, for the Biblical Gospel of sin, repentance, faith, forgiveness and transformation.

Evangelical, however, are in a different situation. We believe in the inerrancy and authority of Scripture and our very identity is defined by our confidence in the power of the biblical Gospel, through which we have forgiveness of sins, eternal life and a transformed life. We declare the good news that God can forgive any sin and transform any sinner, no matter how serious and entrenched that sin might be. Therefore, we are on a collision course with a culture that is determined to normalize all the forms of deviant sexuality that flow from the sexual revolution, of which homosexuality is just one.

How will Evangelicals respond to the sexual revolution in the long run and, specifically, how will we deal with the pressure to endorse homosexuality that is so pervasive in today’s secular culture? Sadly, I believe that Evangelicalism will divide over this issue. Homosexuality will be an issue of division because of the tremendous pressure exerted by the culture over this particular issue. There are many other issues raised by the response of the Church to the sexual revolution that are being discussed, disagreed on and worked through such as divorce, remarriage and new reproductive technologies. But the secular culture will not leave us in peace on the issue of homosexuality and many Evangelicals choose to conform to the culture and, in the process, will migrate into liberal Protestantism.

The Evangelical Left has been moving toward liberalism for some time now on a wide range of issues including the acceptance of open theism and panentheism, the embrace of left wing politics and economics, a watered down view of biblical authority, an uncritical endorsement of secular feminism, the rejection of the penal substitutionary doctrine of the atonement and downplaying of the necessity of personal conversion. Those who are enamored of such moves will likely be open to the approval of homosexual behavior as well. But what is at stake in such a change to the Church’s traditional teaching? Is disagreement on homosexuality merely a disagreement on a moral issue that does not touch the heart of the Gospel? One can only wish it were that simple.

What is at stake here is the truthfulness of the basic Gospel message. Are we sinners in need of salvation or merely good people in need of inclusion in the body of Christ without repentance? Are we under God’s judgment and in need of justification on the basis of the atoning blood of Christ? Are we lost and without hope apart from salvation in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit? Is there hope for people struggling with deep seated sinful patterns, vices and temptations that are now a part of their very being? Or is the Gospel only for good Church people who don’t have to change much in order to live the Christian life?

We are being tested here as to the real content of our faith. Homosexuality is a deep seated disorder that is not always in every situation freely chosen by the person involved. That, however, does not make it part of the original good creation. In a fallen world, many of us struggle against such deep seated moral disorders and will do so for our whole lives. The Gospel does not promise instant release from all sin and temptation, nor does it promise that we can totally overcome a homosexual orientation in this life. But it does promise that if we walk by the Spirit we will not fulfill the lusts of the sinful nature. A life of obedience and joy in the Holy Spirit is available to all people including drug addicts, alcoholics, homosexuals, those addicted to heterosexual sex and those who struggle to overcome the painful effects of sexual abuse. For some this may involve a life of celibacy, which can be a witness to the Kingdom of God and a spiritually fruitful way of life that brings joy and friendship in Christ. What the world thinks is a “fate worse than death” can be a fulfilling and joyful life in Christ.

Our faith will be tested in the years ahead in at least three ways. First, it will be painful to watch former brothers and sisters in the Faith drift away into liberalism, thus escaping the persecution that will come upon all who stand firm for the traditional teaching of Christianity, and it will be tempting to join them. Second, our commitment to the Faith once delivered to the saints and the authority of Scripture will be tested as more and more arguments are mounted against traditional exegesis, sometimes by those who can talk the Evangelical lingo because they themselves have been raised within Evangelicalism and are on the way out of the movement. This will require steadfastness and discernment. Third, our confidence in the power of God’s Holy Spirit will be tested as we are told over and over again that the Spirit is helpless against the power of a homosexual orientation and that people cannot change something so fundamental to their identity even with God’s help. We must resist the temptation to lose confidence in the hope and freedom promised to those who humbly seek the strength that comes from trusting in God to change us and empower us for holy living.

What is at stake? Faithfulness to the Gospel itself is at stake. The authority of Scripture, the Lordship of Christ and the transforming power of the Spirit are all implicated in this moral issue. The stakes could not be higher, but those who endure suffering and persecution in this life because of their faithfulness to Christ and the Gospel can look forward to joy and peace in the Kingdom of God. And anyone struggling with the temptations of same-sex attraction can find forgiveness, healing, peace and strength to live the Christian life at the same place we all find these things – at the foot of the cross.

Glenn Beck and Social Justice: Part VI: Conclusions

This is the concluding post in a series on Glenn Beck and Social Justice. After an introductory discussion of conflicting definitions, we examined four appraoches:

1. Social Justice as Code for Communism
2. Social Justice in Roman Catholic Social Doctrine
3. Social Justice in Neocalvinist Thought
4. Social Justice in Evangelical Thought

Now, I want to try to draw a few conclusions. First, we should be thankful to Glenn Beck, clown that he is, for sparking a public uproar over the question of what social justice is. After all, not all that goes under the flag of social justice is innocent.

Second, we should reject social justice insofar as it is merely code for Marxism, Socialism or Communism. All of these involve the tyranny of statism and all must be rejected by Christians. Sadly, however, Liberal Protestants have bought into either an inconsistent form of socialism or, in many cases, into the whole thing. In doing so they have transformed the Gospel into a Social Gospel that neglects salvation through the cross and substitutes salvation through the state.

Third, we should recognize and be thankful for the vocation of Evangelicalism to keep before the Church Catholic the priority, integrity and centrality of the biblical and historic Gospel of salvation by faith in the atoning death of Jesus Christ as the foundation of the Faith.

Fourth, we should recognize and be thankful for the contributions of Roman Catholic social doctrine and Neocalvinism in advancing non-statist and non-socialist thinking in the service of finding creative ways for the Church to be salt and light in modern Western culture. We can be especially grateful for the good work done by Neocalvinists in education and the magnificent contribution of Pope John Paul II to the naming of and the struggle against the culture of death.

Fifth, we must be cognizant of the danger of Evangelicalism, Catholicism and Neocalvinism drifting into a culturally accommodated liberalism or socialism. The danger of statism is the most pressing problem in contemporary culture as family is under severe attack and civil society is eroded. In this situation the temptations of Socialism and Capitalism (Liberalism) must be resisted for both are false answers to the problems we face. Resources for working for a kind of social justice that rejects the idolatry of the State and of the Market can be found in the Christian Tradition. The goal is not to conform to Modernity, but to reform it on Christian principles.

The Gospel and the Consequences of the Gospel

In my Adult Sunday School class at Westney Heights Baptist Church last Sunday I expounded John 21:1-14, the miraculous catch of fish, which is, of course, about evangelization. John 20-21 depicts the risen, but not yet ascended, Lord Jesus Christ organizing, empowering, instructing and preparing His Church for her mission in the world. Central to the work of the Church in the time between the Ascension and the Return of Christ is evangelization. My plea was that we would keep our eye firmly fixed on the ball and not allow the world to squeeze us into the mold of making social action and social justice central to the mission of the Church. They are good in their place, but they are not the Gospel. Only the Church has the Gospel; if we don't preach it no one else will. Others may feed the hungry physically, but no one else can feed them spiritually.

It seems to me that we may well be in the middle of a Second (or is it the Third?) Great Defection from Evangelical Protestantism into liberal apostasy. A previous defection took place in the late 19th century and led eventually to the expulsion or withdrawal of many Evangelical and orthodox believers from the mainline Protestant denominations during the Fundamentalist-Modernist conflicts of the 1920's and 30's. Those events sowed the seeds for the current on-going decline of the old Protestant denominations, which is so evident today. Their decline is doctrinal, moral and numerical and the very survival (in any form) of denominations like The Episcopal Church and the United Church of Canada is in question. Certainly their gospel witness has evaporated.

Yet, incredible as it may seem, many Evangelicals are once again falling for the siren song of "relevance" by embracing the same doctrinal deviations as late 19th century Evangelicals did, including a denial of moral guilt produced by sin, the need for a substitutionary atonement, the divinity of Christ, the need for personal conversion and the need for separation from worldliness (while remaining, of course, in the world). Along with this eviserating of the the heart of the Gospel (Christ died for our sins) there must be, and always is, a new replacement "gospel" of moralism and good works. Concern for the poor, "peaceandjustice" and environmentalism come to stand in the center of the Christian proclamation instead of sin and atonement.

In a recent editorial in Themelios, D. A. Carson addresses the question of "What is the gospel?" [My comments in bold in square brackets]
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"In blogs, journal essays, and books, there has been quite a lot written recently about what “the gospel” is. In the hands of some, the question of what “the gospel” is may be tied to the question of what “evangelicalism” is, since “gospel” = εὐαγγέλιον = evangel, which lies at the heart of evangelicalism. . . .[In David Bebbington's widely-accepted four-fold definition of Evangelicalism as an historic movement, the centrality of the cross is one of the four distingishing marks. This is indisputable and Carson is about to unpack it.] . . . one must distinguish between, on the one hand, the gospel as what God has done and what is the message to be announced and, on the other, what is demanded by God or effected by the gospel in assorted human responses. [This is a crucial distinction. If not made, it results in the distortion of the gospel and the failure to preach the gospel.] If the gospel is the (good) news about what God has done in Christ Jesus, there is ample place for including under “the gospel” the ways in which the kingdom has dawned and is coming, for tying this kingdom to Jesus’ death and resurrection, for demonstrating that the purpose of what God has done is to reconcile sinners to himself and finally to bring under one head a renovated and transformed new heaven and new earth, for talking about God’s gift of the Holy Spirit, consequent upon Christ’s resurrection and ascension to the right hand of the Majesty on high, and above all for focusing attention on what Paul (and others—though the language I’m using here reflects Paul) sees as the matter “of first importance”: Christ crucified. All of this is what God has done; it is what we proclaim; it is the news, the great news, the good news. [The gospel is not everything that the Church has to say, but rather a proclamation (heralding) of what God has done. The Church will, of course, have other things to say on the basis of the Gospel, i.e. "teaching them to obey all things I have commanded you," once the Gospel has been proclaimed and a local congregation of believers formed. ]

By contrast, the first two greatest commands—to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength, and our neighbor as ourselves—do not constitute the gospel, or any part of it. [This must be said and it must be said this bluntly. If you find yourself resisting this truth, you may well need to examine your conscience and your understanding of the basis of your salvation.] We may well argue that when the gospel is faithfully declared and rightly received, it will result in human beings more closely aligned to these two commands. [Of course.] But they are not the gospel. Similarly, the gospel is not receiving Christ or believing in him, or being converted, or joining a church; it is not the practice of discipleship. [Here is where many Evangelicals make the same mistake with regard to piety as Liberals make with regard to social service and it explains why some Evangelicals are already half-way to Liberalism even though they look and sound orthodox. I want to stress that this insight is not a uniquely Reformed insight, as people like Brian McLaren would like you to believe (although many Reformed preachers express it very well). But John Wesley would concur with Carson here, as would Benedict XVI.] Once again, the gospel faithfully declared and rightly received will result in people receiving Christ, believing in Christ, being converted, and joining a local church; but such steps are not the gospel. The Bible can exhort those who trust the living God to be concerned with issues of social justice (Isa 2; Amos); it can tell new covenant believers to do good to all human beings, especially to those of the household of faith (Gal 6); it exhorts us to remember the poor and to ask, not “Who is my neighbor?” but “Whom am I serving as neighbor?” We may even argue that some such list of moral commitments is a necessary consequence of the gospel. [Theologians will argue about the precise definition of "necessary" here.] But it is not the gospel. We may preach through the list, reminding people that the Bible is concerned to tell us not only what to believe but how to live. But we may not preach through that list and claim it encapsulates the gospel. The gospel is what God has done, supremely in Christ, and especially focused on his cross and resurrection.

Failure to distinguish between the gospel and all the effects of the gospel tends, on the long haul, to replace the good news as to what God has done with a moralism that is finally without the power and the glory of Christ crucified, resurrected, ascended, and reigning. [Right. This is the main problem of liberalism - moralism instead of the good news of salvation. And moralism is bad news - who can live up to the Divine standard?]
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Clearly, Don Carson and I are on the same page here. It is a good editorial about a pressing contemporary issue.

The Augustinian Turn: Will Evangelicals Make It?

Caleb Stegall has a brief, but highly fascinating article in Touchstone on Evangelicals.
http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=21-07-013-v

He says that 2008 may be remembered as the year that "the Evangelical political consensus - which had cohered so strongly around family values, industrial capitalism, and American exceptionalism - fell apart." He goes on to describe Evangelicals as believers in what Herbert Butterfield famously called "the Whig view of history" in which there is a progressive march through time to a glorious future.

This Whig interpretation of history can be seen in both left wing and right wing Protestantism: in George Bush just as much as in the Clintons and in Mike Huckabee as much as in Barack Obama. Jim Wallis is convinced that utopia is possible through the welfare state and for Michael Novak it can only come through capitalism.

Both liberalism and its daughter, neo-conservatism, are products of modernity. They both owe much to assumptions that lie at the roots of the two great Enlightenment secular religions: socialism and capitalism. And both are deferential to the great invention of the early modern period: the modern State. Neither the left or right have a specifically Christian political philosophy: they both function with a lame version of "What would Jesus do?" thinking.

Stegall notes, however, that an older (pre-modern) Christian tradition founded by St. Augustine is an alternative to what he calls the "restless Evangelicals." They are restless because they are sick of the corruption in the Republican Party, the failure of the leadership to appreciate them and the failure to derail homosexual "marriage" and abortion. Is there something more? Stegall recommends Augustinianism.

I believe that Stegall is right to say that Evangelicals are restless and he is right to commend Augustinianism. But I see the stakes as higher and the situation as more urgent than he does. If Evangelicalism does not make its way home to a more catholic faith it is doomed to go the way of Protestant liberalism. Already, we see Wallis and co. leading Evangelicals into moral compormise as they exchange a capitalist mess of potage for a socialist one.

And as Carl Bratten points out in an article entitled "The Gospel for a Neopagan Culture" the gnostic spirituality of late modern North America finds fertile soil in the pietist tradition. He writes:

"Evangelical pietism that has lost the catholic elements of the great tradition provides a fertile soil for such ahistorical spiritual religion. There are signs that American evangelicalism with its pietist background is breaking up under the impact of the "culture wars,' with one wing seeking to reattach itself to catholic and orthodox traditions, which we welcome, and the other wing allying itself opportunistically with the culture-conforming progressives in American religion." (Either/Or: The Gospel or Neopaganism, ed. C. Bratten and R. Jenson, Eerdmans, 1995, p. 20)

The political problem identified by Stegall is intimately related to the spiritual problem identified by Bratten. Gnosticism and liberalism go hand in hand and both are inimical to catholic orthodoxy.

Stegall describes Augustinian political thought as being built on the idea that what a man (or community) loves is determinative of the kind of man (or community) he will be. Modernity seeks a rationally-designed political system that is so perfect that no one need be good. This is seen in the neo-conservative idea that the greed of individuals results (miraculously!) in the welfare of all. It is also seen in the naive faith placed in the all-encompassing state and its rational planners by liberals. But Augustine will have none of that. He knows that who we worship determines what our community will be like. If we worship "Choice" we will have blood-stained hands as our will to power is exercised against the weak and helpless children who are inconvenient to our plans. Only the worship of the true God leads to shalom.

Augustinians do not see history marching toward glorious things and progressing inevitably toward the good society. Augustinians view life as eucatastophe - a joyful catastrophe. History is a long defeat with a twist at the end that saves the day. This is what it means to believe in the return of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. This life is important, not because it is an end in itself, but because it is the preparation for eternity and the place where our souls are formed for the telos of our lives - to see God and enjoy Him forever.

This is a spirituality with political implications and a politics that is spiritual. It is historic Christian orthodoxy and Evangelicals will either embrace it or they will pass out of the Church and into post-Christian Western paganism along with the rest of the Protestant Gnostics.