I spent 45 years as a proud conservative evangelical. It was my home. It wasn’t perfect, but nowhere else was either. Evangelicalism helped shape my love for Scripture, my devotion to Jesus, my commitment to conversion, prayer, mission, and discipleship. I owe much to people within it.
In the circles I grew up in, I was also taught the importance of engaging with the community and the world in a way that brought healing and hope.
- We sent missionaries near and far dedicated to telling others about the good news of the Gospel, often accompanied by acts of service to show that we cared about the whole person, not just their souls.
- We promoted foster care, adoption, and crisis pregnancy centers as a proactive way to build a culture of life.
- Evangelical disaster relief organizations did incredible work in meeting practical needs in areas devastated by natural disasters.
- Personally, my experience in the local churches in my life - Sunday School, youth group, services, revival meetings, potlucks, small groups, community outreach - gave me many wonderful memories and formed me in ways that I still cherish. [1]
The evangelical neighbor who quietly loves Jesus, serves the poor, cares for refugees, tells the truth, honors his marriage vows, and treats political opponents with dignity is not the source of my disillusionment. In many ways, they are evidence that the best of evangelicalism still shows sparks of life.
And yet, here I am, feeling the need to no longer be associated with evangelicalism because of the terrible toll the Trumpification of conservative evangelicalism has taken on its witness, reputation, and impact.
I’m not a grumpy curmudgeon, pummeled by evangelicalism, who now just wants an excuse to throw shade. No, conservative evangelicalism was the Christian ecosystem into which I was born, and for most of my life, it felt like home.
I helped build it. I voted party line most of my life. I participated in the ecosystem. This is not a story about “those people.” It is a story about me and “my people.”
Speaking of “my people,” this series is not primarily aimed at the sincere evangelical Christian who voted for Donald Trump while wrestling with competing concerns and difficult choices. I know many such people. Some are dear friends. Some remain among the most faithful followers of Jesus I know.
Many Christians concluded that one set of policies represented a lesser evil than another. Whether I agree with that conclusion is not the point. Reasonable people can disagree about political strategy, candidates, and public policy.
My concern is different.
I am concerned about the pastors, authors, conference speakers, ministry leaders, media personalities, and political operatives who function as the gatekeepers of modern evangelicalism. I am concerned about the voices that shape the movement’s public witness and define its moral instincts.
My disillusionment is rooted in the willingness of many evangelical leaders to excuse, defend, celebrate, or imitate conduct they once condemned as incompatible with Christian character.
A movement can survive policy disagreements. It cannot indefinitely survive the loss of its moral credibility.
Unfortunately, the movement’s public witness in the United States has become so distorted politically, morally, and spiritually that continuing to wear the label increasingly feels deeply uncomfortable. I tried hard to stay within the label and make a difference, but nowadays, too few places give me welcome.
I can take a hint.
Leaving the label does not mean abandoning the convictions that once made the label meaningful.I still follow Jesus. I still believe the gospel is good news. In addition, I still agree with the fundamental tenants of belief. Historian David Bebbington has defined four core evangelical beliefs that arose following the Protestant Reformation with his famous ‘quadrilateral’:
Conversionism: the belief that lives need to be transformed through a “born-again” experience and a life-long process of following Jesus.
Activism: the expression and demonstration of the gospel in missionary and social reform efforts.
Biblicism: a high regard for and obedience to the Bible as the ultimate authority.
Crucicentrism: a stress on the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross as making possible the redemption of humanity.
I still embrace all of that in both theory and practice. The problem is that in the past 10-12 years, the evangelical public support of Empire politicians once considered the antithesis of evangelical moral principles has undermined, if not destroyed, the credibility of evangelicalism as a living representation of Jesus’ spiritual kingdom.
Apparently, a movement can keep its doctrinal statement long after it loses its moral center.
Scripture teaches that faith without works is dead. In other words, the transformative power of faith is displayed as it is lived out. A gospel preached loudly but embodied poorly reveals itself to be on life support, badly in need of revival. It preserves the vocabulary of Jesus while abandoning his posture, and that’s just not going to work. This is the problem facing the conservative American evangelical tradition in which I was raised. [2]
Now - for better or worse, fair or unfair - the word ‘evangelical’ no longer describes a theological conviction when it is used in cultural conversation. To the majority of Americans, it describes a political and cultural tribe known for wildly slanderous conspiracies, fear-mongering, partisanship, a denial of systemic sin (particularly racism), a rejection of empathy, the “othering” of so many people in a way that robs them of dignity, and a love of power and coercion as a means to bring about God’s Kingdom.
Sadly, the moral instincts I was taught as a young evangelical are now often treated as liabilities within evangelical culture itself. (This is just a broad brush overview. I will bring the receipts as this series unfolds.)
Truthfulness seems optional, as the gatekeepers of evangelicalism have aligned themselves with leaders for whom the truth is dispensable.
Personal integrity no longer seems to matter in leaders as long as they are effective. “I voted for a president, not a pastor!” had to be coined in the past decade to accommodate the changing mores. We see this in the many church scandals, as well as the politicians conservative evangelicals have lionized. I am not sure which one filtered into the other.
The call to “Love your enemies” has turned into mockery and brutalization of those perceived to be enemies - not just of the church, but of America (which is not the church), as if both have some sort of sacred nature, and as if the stakes are so high love is no longer the means by which we demonstrate God’s kingdom.
While the concern for the vulnerable still continues in some really wonderful ways at a grass roots level, it is increasingly a concern for the vulnerable that fits a political agenda rather than simply seeing everyone as image bearers in need of aid.
Increasingly, it seems like a love of power has replaced a heart of service.
Even if every policy goal were correct, the character, methods, rhetoric, and treatment of people who are different would still trouble me.
If our public witness consistently produces fear, contempt, cruelty, dishonesty, and the pursuit of power, then eventually we have to ask whether we have misunderstood Jesus, or at least stopped paying attention to him.
I’ve been accused of becoming a progressive liberal because I have been pushing back against what I see as a move toward Empire values—power, dominance, coercion, tribal loyalty, a dismissal of “the least of these,” an almost idolatrous adulation of politicians, and the belief that the ends justify the means.
I suppose it balances the times I have been named as a conservative. That was when I also stood for what I believe to be gospel truth about things like the value of human life beginning in the womb, and the support of historical Christian positions on marriage, sex, and family.
When that was the public conversation, my counter-cultural stances were apparently heroic (based on the feedback I got from my tribe). Now, however, when I support historic Christian positions on other issues that have been labeled “DEI” or “woke” or “leftist agendas” - well, now, I am clearly partisan, duped by progressive brainwashing.
And yet I have always tried to stand where I see Jesus standing.
In that sense, my concern is not that evangelicals have become too “conservative” or too “liberal.” Those definitions will change and encompass different things given enough time. My concern is that evangelicalism has become increasingly comfortable excusing sinful, immoral things in our own tribe, things that we once recognized as incompatible with the character and teaching of Jesus, because pointing out any crack in the party's armor is treated as traitorous betrayal of....Jesus?
As far as I can tell, I didn’t move. I am standing where I was told to stand. I took the things evangelicalism taught me seriously enough that eventually I could no longer ignore the gap between those teachings and the movement’s public witness. I have not drawn new lines. I have re-marked the ones given to me. If anything, I have anchored more deeply into the values that formed me.
It feels less like I left evangelicalism and more like evangelicalism left many of the values it taught me.
As noted earlier, many evangelicals remain people of integrity, compassion, and sincere faith. Some of them will disagree with much of what I write - and may well disagree with some of what is happening in conservative evangelicalism. To their credit, they continue trying to follow Jesus as best they understand Him, and their personal lives put this commitment on display.
They are not my target. My target is the public institutions, celebrity leaders, political alliances, and cultural incentives that increasingly define evangelicalism in the American imagination.
Orthodoxy shapes orthopraxy. Orthopraxy eventually reshapes orthodoxy.
If what we tolerate in practice will eventually get rewritten into what we claim to believe, well, the trajectory for evangelical witness and discipleship is not good.
* * * * *
Evangelicalism has never been morally pure. I get it. As I write this, I am thinking of the study I have done as an adult about my evangelical roots. It was in some ways encouraging and in other ways deeply depressing at the same time. [3] There was so much potential for good that often actualized…. and so much leaven that spoiled the loaf.
I am fortunate to have had a decent experience in a movement that has always contained tensions, blind spots, and political entanglements. But there was at least a meaningful public expectation that Christians should aspire toward humility, truthfulness, compassion, integrity, and concern for the vulnerable. Increasingly, those virtues themselves are treated with suspicion.
What if the issue is not whether we can still recite the right doctrines, but whether we still resemble the Jesus we claim to follow? And what if the Jesus we claim to follow…doesn’t look like Jesus anymore?
Case in point. I was having lunch with a friend a few weeks ago. We were talking about faith, church, etc. When a young lady next to us got up to leave, she interrupted us: “Excuse me. I just want you to know it’s so exciting to hear you talking about these things. I just became a Christian last week, and I am excited too!”
When she left, my friend asked me how I felt about what the young lady had said. My response: “My first thought was, ‘Awesome!’ My second thought was, “Oh, no. I wonder what kind of Jesus she was introduced to.”
I have spent decades telling people that Jesus is good news. I still believe that. Jesus is the best news ever.
But when the public face of Christianity becomes increasingly associated with fear, contempt, cruelty, dishonesty, and domination, then people will naturally assume those things reflect Jesus himself. And if people are going to reject Jesus, I don’t want them to reject a terrible caricature that Christians created.
This is the dilemma with which I am wrestling. This is the dilemma this series will address. I intend to show what evangelicalism claimed to require of us for many years of my life in contrast to what it has now become.
I’ll start by offering a timeline of mainstream evangelical declarations. This is going to be a lot of reading, but it’s necessary to show how evangelicalism has moved such that I am unable to reconcile the label with its public witness.
After we look at those evangelical Statements and Declarations, I will unpack in more detail the contrast between the movement that raised me and the movement that currently exists.
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Also, the conservative website the Gospel Coalition has a good article discussing the frustratingly mixed recored of evangelicals during the Civil Rights Movement.
In other words, I’m not nostalgic for a perfect evangelicalism that never existed. I miss the one that really tried, and fell down, and self-corrected, and kept moving toward Christ-likeness instead of toward bitcoin trillionaires, power-mongers, Christian nationalists, and gold statues of America's Caesar.
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