I’ve been meaning to update my blog the last couple weeks, but other projects have kept me preoccupied. So here I am trying to play catch up. A couple weeks ago I had a new piece in The Daily Beast on progressive millennial evangelicals. Check it out.
They’re young, liberal, LGBTQ+, pro-choice, feminist, science loving, climate change accepting, and immigrant welcoming. They’re evangelicals.
No, this is not a report from an alternate universe, where history took a different turn. This is about a growing rift in the evangelical continuum, one with significant uncertainty about its future. It’s about a tribe within a tribe within a tribe—outcasts on the inside.
To play devil’s advocate, it sounds like the young evangelicals you describe are much more in the spiritual lineage of Henry Emerson Fosdick than Carl Henry. So what, if anything makes them evangelical, and if they are evangelical, can there be any such thing as a liberal Protestant anymore?
Yeah, the line is definitely disappearing between liberal Protestant and evangelical in this case. I think there are a couple of ways to look at it. If the tenets of historical evangelicalism are in play—which are definitely conservative—then it is less evangelicalism (universalism, for example, is not historic evangelicalism) and more something else (maybe just liberal Protestantism). But probably only when compared to historical evangelicalism of the 1740s, for example, or pre-WWII evangelicalism.
The second way is to say that no religion stays what it was. Modern Christianity is not first century Christianity, for example. Religions evolve as they are received in different contexts, so as evangelicalism took Protestant Christianity in a different direction in the 1740s, so also progressive evangelicals are doing the same now. In that sense, they are evangelicals, but with a new adjective added to it. This may be somewhat like Ockenga’s neo-evangelicalism, which helped to birth modern mainstream evangelicalism or the way confessional evangelicalism set out to distinguish itself from fundamentalism.
I recognize that this is a bit oversimplified, but in situations like this the language does begin to slip, making it more about where you stand on a point than the term itself. (One person’s evangelical is another’s fundamentalist, for example.)
The strange thing is, I’m kind of two minds about the entire thing. On the one hand, the historian in me feels like there is so much messing with categories that it gets difficult to see what value the term “evangelical” has in progressive thinking and why they’d even want to connect to the tradition. That is why I left evangelicalism for the mainline before I left the faith entirely. It lost all helpful meaning for me.
On the other hand, there is a very pragmatic side. I have more in common with these evangelicals on social issues than I do with an atheist voting for Trump (believe it or not there are some), so I’m kinda rooting for them. If evangelicalism isn’t going to disappear, I prefer this version, which emphasizes love and I think makes the world a better place in the end.
So that’s my answer/non-answer. 🙂
I’ve increasingly come to think of evangelicalism not as a theological movement than a matter of populist style or spiritual mood, which would be why confessional Protestants had an uneasy alliance with evangelicalism. They had a degree of theological overlap with fundamentalist and evangelicals in the early 20th century that allowed for a coalition, but only a temporary one that is fading away (as are confessional Protestants). So, it could be that these young evangelicals are genuinely evangelical heirs of Finney with little interest in mainline Protestantism’s liturgy and hymns, even if their theology is creeping closer to liberal views (as you note, universalism isn’t historic evangelicalism, though Rob Bell seems to have promoted it, even if he denied doing so). I guess I’ve switched from Marsden’s paradigm to Dayton’s. What does surprise me is I had thought of the political conservatism of post-war NeoEvangelicalism was central to their identity, but perhaps not.