I. PROLOGUE#
American evangelicalism proved to be one of the most significant and impactful religious movements in the twentieth century. Its moniker derives from the Greek euangelium, which is the New Testament word for the “good news” of the Christian message of eternal salvation offered through Jesus Christ. Because the gospel message lies at the heart of the movement, it has been christened “evangelicalism.”
In the broadest sense, evangelicalism has been a vital pulse in Christianity from its first-century origins. It also was deeply influenced by the theological eruptions from the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation. The followers of Martin Luther and other Protestant Reformers identified themselves as evangelicals, even before such labels as “Lutheran” or “Reformed” came into use.
As a historically defined phenomenon, American evangelicalism emerges from the twin tributaries of
The seventeenth-century German Pietism
The eighteenth-century Methodist revivals in England
These tributaries converged in the American colonies, giving birth to the “First Great Awakening” of the 1730s and 1740s. The principal revivalists of the American awakening included the Anglican George Whitefield, the Presbyterian Gilbert Tennent, the Dutch Reformed pastor Theodore Freylinghuysen, and the Congregationalist Jonathan Edwards.
One of the distinctive emphases of all revivalists was the stress on the “new birth”, that is, an identifiable conversion experience. The American revival was often characterized by sudden and highly emotional conversions. Hence, one of the enduring attributes of American evangelicalism has been the conversion experience.
Closely related to the eighteenth-century “Great Awakening” was the nineteenth-century revival known as the “Second Great Awakening”. In the wake of the Revolutionary War, church attendance suffered a precipitous decline. According to some estimates, less than 10 percent attended church in colonial New England in the immediate aftermath of the war. But by the time the nineteenth century arrived, a new wave of religious enthusiasm engulfed the young nation from the former English colonies on the east coast to the western frontier.
In a remarkable historical parallel, the grandson of Jonathan Edwards, Timothy Dwight (1752–1817), had become the president of Yale College in 1795 and, like his grandfather, was an avid supporter of revival. By 1802 a third of all the students at Yale had undergone dramatic conversions and upon graduation took the revival call to the corners of the new nation.
Lyman Beecher (1775–1863), one of Dwight’s students, became particularly active in transferring the revival impulse into permanent institutions such as:
The American Board for Foreign Missions (1810)
The American Bible Society (1816)
The American Tract Society (1825)
The American Society for the Promotion of Temperance (1826)
These organizations ensured that revivalist evangelicalism would endure.
In the newly settled regions on the western frontier, the revival was transmitted through highly emotional weeklong camp meetings with an assortment of preachers. In sparsely populated areas, settlers came from miles around for fellowship and worship and then returned to their villages to establish new frontier churches. Baptist farmer-preachers spread the revival wherever they settled.
Under the incomparable leadership of Francis Asbury (1745–1816), the Methodists grew rapidly through the efforts of itinerant circuit-riding preachers, who furthered the revival in the remote areas of the frontier.
Baptists and Methodists were also active in converting large numbers of the black population, although continued racism led to the establishment of their own churches.
Richard Allen (1760–1831) broke away from the Methodist Church and founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1815, the first independent black denomination in the United States. Many slaves became Christians. Soon Baptists and Methodists surpassed the Episcopalians, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians as the largest denominations.
The western revival was also instrumental in fostering what came to be known as the Restorationist movement, which was led by the disaffected Presbyterians Barton Stone (1772–1844) and Thomas Campbell (1788–1866), who sought to restore the worship of the early New Testament church. Denominations such as the Church of Christ and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) have their roots in this movement.
Charles Grandison Finney (1792–1875) transported the populist atmosphere of the rural camp meeting revivals to the growing urban populations of the Northeast. He employed new methods such as public testimonies and the “anxious bench,” a specially designated area near the podium where Finney called people forward for prayer and encouraged them to make a decision for Christ. Such revivalism became deeply entrenched in American religious culture.
By the time of the American Civil War (1860), evangelicalism constituted the prevailing religious orientation in North America.
The evangelical prevalence continued to be a major force throughout the twentieth- and twenty-first-century religious landscape, but it was often accompanied by bitter controversy. Over the last century evangelicalism has undergone a number of permutations, largely determined by historical circumstances.
In modern theological parlance, an “evangelical” is one who affirms several core beliefs:
The authority and sufficiency of Scripture (biblicism)
The uniqueness of salvation through the cross of Jesus Christ (cruci-centricism)
Personal conversion (conversionism)
The urgency of evangelism (activism)
These evangelical core convictions, however, have never by themselves yielded theological or ecclesiological uniformity.
While all four evangelical distinctives are vital, it is the first principle that provides the foundation for all the others. As such, the authority of Scripture has been at the center of vigorous debate. American evangelicals have tended to identify the authority of Scripture with the doctrine of the inerrancy of Scripture — the notion that the Bible contains no errors in the original writings.
Because of its foundational significance, this doctrine has been at the forefront of many of the key debates of the twentieth-century evangelical movement.
II. FUNDAMENTALISM#
The Bible has always been the authoritative sourcebook for Christians. Drawing from their Reformational heritage, evangelicals stress the authority and sufficiency of the Bible so as to distinguish themselves from Roman Catholics, who recognize a twin source of authority — Scripture and church Tradition.
This deep-seated conviction, as expressed in the Latin phrase sola scriptura (Scripture alone), was one of the rallying cries of the sixteenth-century Reformers, who insisted the Bible alone was the only authoritative source for Christians.
A. Higher Criticism#
At the twilight of the nineteenth century, evangelicals were in cultural ascendancy in America and thus generally unconcerned about higher critical developments in Europe. But as the century moved toward the dawn of the twentieth century, storm clouds appeared on the horizon.
In Germany, Friedrich Schleiermacher had inspired a dramatic theological shift within historic Christianity.
The Enlightenment had rejected the ultimate authority of the Bible and the church in favor of human reason
In the nineteenth century Schleiermacher took a subjective turn, replacing the authority of reason with the conscious self (Gefühl).
The emphasis in biblical studies shifted from the objective biblical text to the subjective individual.
“Protestant liberalism,” as Schleiermacher’s movement came to be called, thus laid the foundation for the emergence of higher critical views of the Bible.
Other German scholars—including David Friedrich Strauss, Julius Wellhausen, and Ferdinand Christian Baur — followed in Schleiermacher’s footsteps.
Strauss denied the miracles of Jesus in his The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined.
Wellhausen developed his famous “documentary hypothesis,” arguing that the five books of the Torah are a redaction of four originally independent texts, dating from several centuries after the time of Moses, their traditional author.
Based on his studies of the New Testament, Baur concluded that only the epistles to the Galatians, Corinthians, and Romans were genuinely Pauline and that the book of Acts was the creation of the second-century church.
These scholars tended to view the Bible, not as divine revelation to be approached with the eyes of faith, but as an ancient composition open to precisely the same method of critical analysis and interpretation as any other ancient literature. The effect of these developments was to call into question the abiding validity of the foundational documents of the Christian faith.
B. Infallibility and Princeton#
In the face of these intellectual challenges at the turn of the twentieth century, Princeton Theological Seminary took the lead in defending the Bible as the authoritative foundation for Christianity.
Princeton had long been a staunch upholder of the authority of the Bible. From the first professor of the seminary, Archibald Alexander (1772–1851), through Charles Hodge (1797–1878) and his son, Archibald Alexander (A. A.) Hodge (1823–86), to Benjamin Breckinridge (B. B.) Warfield (1851–1921), Princeton unequivocally affirmed the authority of the Bible.
In the seminal essay on “inspiration” in the Princeton Review (1881), A. A. Hodge and B. B. Warfield defined inspiration as the “absolute infallibility” of Scripture. This meant that the original writings of the Bible (autographs) are free from error in all their assertions, whether touching on matters of science and history or theology and ethics.
Warfield acknowledged that the biblical writings reflected the human personalities of their human authors and their varying educational levels and writing styles, but he insisted that God protected the original authors from error. While Hodge and Warfield allowed for human creativity in the writing process, the truthfulness of the original writings was guaranteed by the Holy Spirit, whose supernatural supervision precluded any errors.
Hodge and Warfield acknowledged that infallibility did not apply to the subsequent copies made down through the centuries, only to the original autographs. Warfield argued that the authors of the Westminster Confession, while not using the same terminology, held the same conviction. In subsequent refinements, “inerrancy” became the preferred term to express what Hodge and Warfield asserted.
C. Common Sense Realism#
It has been argued that the seedbed for the flowering of the doctrine of inerrancy lay with the philosophy of Scottish Common Sense Realism (CSR) and Baconian inductivism. CSR was developed by Thomas Reid (1710–96), a Scottish moral philosopher and Presbyterian minister, in order to refute the skepticism of philosopher and historian David Hume.
By “common sense” Reid meant those truths known by universal human experience — common to all humanity. The human mind is trustworthy, he argued, because God designed it to work reliably in the world he created. According to Reid, average people, responsibly using the information gathered by their senses, actually grasp the world as it really is.
For many nineteenth-century Americans, the common sense truths included the basic teachings of Christianity, such as God’s existence and creation of the world.
Common Sense Realism is seen by some modern interpreters as having a natural affinity with the inductive methodology of Francis Bacon. With insights from Baconian inductivism, statements in Scripture were treated as analogous to the self-evident facts in nature and knowable in exactly the same way.
The combination of Scottish CSR with Baconianism would have provided the Princetonians with a useful philosophical and methodological framework to defend the long-held conviction of the absolute authority of the Bible. With this framework, one could be reassured that the Bible is exactly what it purports to be — the revelation of God. Any person with common sense can see this.
Modern critics have claimed that Hodge and Warfield advocated the inerrancy of the original autographs as a theological dodge to escape mounting attacks on Scripture. By defending only the original texts of the Bible, it was argued that Hodge and Warfield had shifted the debate to the realm of the unprovable, since the original autographs no longer exist.
There can be little doubt that the Princetonians were theological heirs of the Reformation, and as such they inherited a robust understanding of the authority of Scripture. Even if the terminology did not exist previously, the essential idea of inerrancy (trustworthiness and authority of Scripture) was not new to nineteenth-century Princeton.
Common Sense Realism and Baconian inductive methodology were part of the intellectual context, but one cannot simply conclude that they produced Princetonian inerrancy. An authoritative and accurate Bible was a Reformational inheritance, although the Princetonians would not have been adverse to a philosophical framework that reinforced their deeply held convictions.
D. The Modernist-Fundamentalist Controversy#
Initially, most churches were generally conservative and generally unaffected. However, as the twentieth century unfolded, these new ideas began to take root in America’s elite academic institutions. Battle lines were drawn between the new theological impulses and traditional Protestantism, between modernists and fundamentalists.
“Modernism” is a notoriously vague and loose designation for a broad variety of Protestant Christian thought that initially emerged in the mid-seventeenth-century Enlightenment and found its fullest expression at the end of the nineteenth century. Rather than a set of specific doctrines, modernism was an intellectual mind-set with a predilection for incorporating into their Christianity the new advances of philosophy, biblical scholarship, and science. Modernism reflected a new Zeitgeist — a new spirit of the age.
Although there were many different theological applications of this new intellectual mood, modernists shared two overarching presuppositions.
First, Christianity had to be reconstituted in the light of modern insights.
Second, Christianity had to be debugged of supposed cultural accoutrements that had obscured the true teaching of the Bible.
Modernists, for the most part, remained in their denominations, determined to reinterpret and redefine historic Christianity in the new light of modern thought.
American fundamentalism is also difficult to define precisely. In a general sense, American fundamentalism was a reactionary fusion of varying conservative, traditional Protestants who banned together for the purpose of battling the perceived evils of modernism. Real theological differences existed, but the various groups were able to overlook those differences initially in order to mount a united assault on modernist liberals. At the most basic level, what bound them together was a devotion to the authority of a supernaturally inspired Bible. For the vast majority, that meant affirming biblical inerrancy.
As conservatives became more aware of the impact of Protestant liberals in their denominations and the bastions of higher learning, they banded together to launch a counteroffensive. There were two main varieties of fundamentalism:
an intellectual fundamentalism epitomized by J. Gresham Machen and the Calvinist orthodoxy of Princeton Seminary
a populist fundamentalism represented by the dispensationalist Cyrus Ingerson Scofield and his best-selling Scofield Reference Bible.
There were other subcurrents that flowed into the fundamentalist stream, including the revivalism of D. L. Moody and the Holiness Movement. These were popular subcurrents that often overlapped with the dispensationalist outlook. In some cases the popular subcurrents manifested themselves among conservative Presbyterians and Baptists.
Intellectual and populist fundamentalists forged a coalition that was theologically mismatched from the outset except for certain core doctrines and their sense of alarm.
In many respects, the modernists determined the main issues of the debate with fundamentalists. Liberal doubts about the supernatural events of the Bible dictated the basic contours of the controversy. For the fundamentalists, the Bible is a divine book and describes supernatural events surrounding the life and ministry of Jesus, who, as the incarnate God-man, is the Bible’s focal point.
In 1910 a group of conservative Presbyterians, in reaction to modernist assertions, responded with a declaration of five cardinal convictions that derive first and foremost from an inerrant Bible and that generally epitomized the parameters of fundamentalist coalition. The five points were
the inerrancy of the autographs
the virgin birth of Jesus
his substitutionary atonement
his bodily resurrection
the miracles of Jesus
These five convictions managed to hold together a fractious coalition of fundamentalists in their battle against the modernists.
E. Dispensational Premillennialism#
The primary impetus for The Fundamentals came from advocates of dispensational premillennialism, an eschatology embraced by many of the nineteenth-century revivalists. This particular variety of premillennialism, however, is relatively recent. Its theological progenitor was John Nelson Darby (1800–1882), who was originally a lawyer, served as a priest and curate in the Anglican Church of Ireland, and then became one of the early founders of the Plymouth Brethren.
The term “dispensationalism” is derived from Darby’s division of Bible history into eras, or dispensations, in which God dealt with his people in distinctive ways. Such divisions were not in themselves unusual, but his distinctive division of Israel and the church into two peoples of God was unknown in the history of Christianity. The dispensation from the time of Christ to the second coming was designated the “church age,” which was seen to be a “parenthesis” in the prophetic unfolding of God’s plan in history.
Darby’s most notable innovation to premillennialism was his concept of the “rapture” of the church. He postulated that the second coming of Christ would be in two stages.
In the first stage, Christ would momentarily return to earth and rescue (or “rapture”) the church before the “great tribulation” — a literal seven-year period of intense persecution.
The second stage was the final return of Christ to establish his millennial kingdom, from which he would rule over the earth and dispense final judgment.
In the 1850s Darby began to make frequent trips to America, the United Kingdom, and Europe, that spread his views in conservative Christian circles. This sparked a renewed interest in biblical prophecy and emphasized the doctrine of a “secret rapture.” Through the Niagara Prophetic Bible conferences, Bible schools and seminaries, and the publication of the Scofield Reference Bible (1909), large numbers of American Protestants, including Dwight L. Moody, became proponents of Dispensational theology.
Although deriving in significant measure from the same conservative heritage, the fundamentalist coalition of dispensationalists and Princetonians remained tentative. However, the modernist threat drove Princetonians into the arms of the fundamentalists even though they embraced different theological convictions. Princetonians did not accept Darby’s novel eschatology, which Machen once described as “a very serious heresy,” but they shared a devotion to the authority of the Bible.
Although many of the participating authors were dispensational, they played down the differences for the sake of the alliance and the greater cause. Contributors included some of the leading theological conservatives at the turn of the century: the Princeton theologian Warfield, Anglican scholar H. C. G. Moule, and the dispensationalist Scofield.
F. Darwinian Evolution#
To fundamentalists, Darwinian evolution appeared to strike at the heart of the Christian faith. Traditional Christian theology taught that the human species was created by a personal God, not by an impersonal process of natural selection.
For many traditional Christians, evolution meant that the supernatural was superseded by the natural.
Darwin seemed to leave no place for God’s redemptive purposes through Jesus Christ.
God was no longer necessary to explain the world.
Darwin himself died an agnostic in 1882.
Princetonians landed on both sides of the Darwinian divide.
The venerable Charles Hodge characterized Darwinianism as “a blind process of unintelligible, unconscious force, which knows no end.”
On the other side was one of the principle advocates for biblical inerrancy, B. B. Warfield. He concluded, “I do not think that there is any general statement in the Bible or any part of the account of creation, either as given in Gen. I & II, or elsewhere alluded to, that need be opposed to evolution.”
Machen, who was somewhat sympathetic to theistic evolution, declined to take part in the Scopes trial.
To many traditional Christians, the new science and the new biblical criticism seemed natural allies. The modernists seemed to be saying that the teachings of the Bible, like human beings, evolved from a primitive polytheism to the more highly complex ethical monotheism of Jesus. Such evolutionary ideas must be opposed and the truth defended. If orthodox Christianity was to survive, theological bulwarks must be established and defended. This was a battle the fundamentalists lost in a Dayton, Tennessee, courtroom in 1925.
In 1925 Tennessee, as had other Southern states, passed legislation prohibiting the teaching of evolution in public schools. This new law was immediately challenged by a young Dayton school teacher, John Scopes, who was brought to trial in July. The American Civil Liberties Union took up Scopes’s cause and provided legal counsel in the person of Clarence Darrow, one of the foremost defense lawyers of the day. On behalf of the state, William Jennings Bryan took up the prosecution.
The Scopes trial had less to do with John Scopes than with the broader cultural clash between secularists, modernists, and fundamentalists. The trial made national news in significant measure due to the syndicated columnist for the Baltimore Sun, H. L. Mencken (1880–1956). A self-described freethinker, Mencken relished Bryan’s feeble responses to Darrow. In his newspaper accounts Mencken heaped scorn not only on Bryan, but on the whole fundamentalist movement.
Even when Bryan suddenly died immediately after the trial, Mencken was unrelenting, linking fundamentalists with the Ku Klux Klan. Bryan’s brand of Christianity was made to look like backwater superstition that, if permitted to flourish, would lead to a new dark age. Mencken’s overwrought caricature of fundamentalism undoubtedly affected public opinion. But some others, as Larson points out, were unaffected by the “Monkey Trial.”
G. Fundamentalist Fragmentation#
Fosdick was forced out of his pulpit at the First Presbyterian Church in New York City in 1927, but soon emerged as a leading voice for the modernists. With money and support from John D. Rockefeller Jr., Fosdick became an even more prominent exponent from his new pulpit at Riverside Church in New York City.
Machen, on the other hand, fell out of favor with his own institution. The president of Princeton Seminary, J. Ross Stephenson, considered Machen a troublemaker, which led to a reorganization of the seminary in 1929 to ensure a broader theological perspective. Machen resigned from Princeton Seminary that same year.
Having failed to preserve the conservative theological legacy of Alexander, the Hodges, and B. B. Warfield, Machen led a dissident group of faculty and students from Princeton to Philadelphia, where he founded a rival seminary— Westminster Theological Seminary. Machen took with him several Princeton faculty: Cornelius Van Til, Oswald T. Allis, and Robert Dick Wilson—as well as several students: Harold J. Ockenga, Ned Stonehouse, and Carl McIntire. Eventually, in 1936 Machen was suspended from the ministry of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A.
Machen countered by founding a new denomination, which later became known as the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (1936). He died in 1937, but inclement decline was already in the forecast. One sign of declining influence was the fact that fundamentalists began to turn their fury, previously reserved for the liberals, toward one another. Within a year of its founding, Machen’s new denomination suffered an acrimonious split, leading to yet another new denomination (Bible Presbyterian Church) and another seminary (Faith Theological Seminary in Philadelphia).
Other fundamentalist divisions occurred.
In 1956 disaffected faculty left Faith Seminary and became founding members of Covenant Theological Seminary in Saint Louis.
In 1971 still another rancorous fracture occurred when the president of Faith Theological Seminary, Allen A. MacRae (1902–97), resigned over McIntire’s alleged suppression of academic freedom and went on to establish Biblical Theological Seminary in Hatfield, Pennsylvania.
The fundamentalists were nothing if not fractious—something they proved again and again over the years.
The modernist-fundamentalist controversy continued, albeit in an attenuated form.
A cultural divide existed between the elite fundamentalists of Westminster Seminary and the populist/revivalist fundamentalists.
The fundamentalist coalition between dispensationalists and Calvinists unraveled into subgroups, thus undermining their national influence.
undamentalists turned inward and circled the wagons. The populist/dispensationalist fundamentalists took a distinctive Pietistic turn. Their network of fundamentalist institutions especially were intended to promote evangelism and to fend off the corrupting influences of the world — alcohol, smoking, gambling, dancing, and movies.
A few denominations with a confessional heritage remained largely free of the modernist impulse, such as
The Missouri Synod Lutherans
The Christian Reformed Church
The Reformed Episcopal Church
Among the nonconfessional denominations, Southern Baptists retained a significant contingent of fundamentalists, as did various churches from the Anabaptist and Holiness traditions. Declarations of the death of fundamentalism, as it turned out, were premature.
Like the phoenix rising out of the ashes of defeat, a new, more progressive, and culturally relevant (and eventually more powerful) version of fundamentalism emerged onto the American scene.
III. NEO-EVANGELICALISM#
By midcentury a new faction within fundamentalism had grown weary of its cultural isolation. Many from the older generation of fundamentalists had passed from the scene, and younger more progressive minds emerged. This new way of thinking (or rethinking) emerged among the offspring of the elite fundamentalists, and they sought to carve out new space in the American religious landscape between fundamentalism and modernist liberalism.
The Neo-Evangelicals or “New Evangelicals,” as they called themselves, retained their belief in biblical inerrancy, but were more willing to engage the culture. This new approach proved attractive not only to conservative Baptists and Presbyterians, but also to groups that had not been part of their natural constituency — Holiness Wesleyans, Dutch Calvinists, Mennonites, and Scandinavian Lutherans who began to identify with the new evangelical movement in some measure.
Although there were many who played key roles, three leaders especially stand out in the new evangelical movement: a pastor, an evangelist, and a theologian — Harold J. Ockenga, Billy Graham, and Carl F. H. Henry.
A. Harold John Ockenga#
Harold John Ockenga (1905–85) was the main spark for the new evangelicalism. Although raised a Methodist, he had been an early protégé of Machen’s at Princeton Theological Seminary. When Machen left Princeton and established Westminster Seminary in 1929, Ockenga followed and was in the first class of graduates. But Ockenga’s admiration for Machen was tempered after the latter defied the Northern Presbyterian Church and organized a competing mission board, the Independent Board Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions (1933).
Ockenga wanted to create a more irenic, socially engaged movement that would avoid the infighting and harsh rhetoric of the earlier modernist-fundamentalist controversy. In the 1940s Ockenga, the young pastor of the historic Park Street Church in Boston, began heralding neo-evangelicalism, a designation that was simplified later to “evangelicalism.”
The new evangelicals began as a protest by several of the younger fundamentalists against the internal divisiveness, anti-intellectualism, and disregard for the social implications of Christianity that had come to characterize the older movement.
The new evangelicals sought, in Ockenga’s words, to manifest “a spirit of cooperation, of mutual faith, of progressive action and of ethical responsibility.”
The architects of neo-evangelicalism took a stand against both hardened fundamentalism and modernist liberalism.
They affirmed the same cardinal doctrines of historic orthodox Christianity, but they wanted to engage their culture rather than withdraw from it.
The new evangelicals focused attention on a new social responsibility, setting forth an intellectually credible apologetic, presenting bold public evangelism, establishing educational institutions promoting scholarship, and having trans-denominational cooperation with other progressives of like mind.
To that end, Ockenga, along with other new evangelicals, established the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) to revitalize conservative Christianity, but also to provide a credible alternative to both the more liberal National Council of Churches and the separatist-fundamentalist American Council of Christian Churches.
Ockenga seemed to have a hand in all of the early initiatives of the neo-evangelicals. He was not only the founder of the NAE, but also the first president of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. The idea of a new seminary first occurred to Charles Fuller, a well-known radio evangelist and host of the Old Fashioned Revival Hour, in 1939, but it did not come to fruition until 1947, when Fuller and Ockenga joined forces.
Within a few years of its founding, Billy Graham became a member of the board. Since Graham and Fuller were the two leading evangelists of the day, their joint association with Fuller Seminary gave powerful credibility and stature to the new evangelicalism.
One of the most important achievements of the new evangelicalism was the establishment of a national magazine called Christianity Today. This magazine was intended to become a beacon for the new evangelicalism and indeed became the chief organ of the growing movement. It was founded in 1955 by Billy Graham, Sun Oil founder J. Howard Pew, and Graham’s father-in-law, Nelson Bell, with Ockenga as chairman of the board. Carl Henry was persuaded to leave Fuller Seminary to become the first editor.
Christianity Today sought to reach a broad audience and provide an evangelical alternative to the more liberal magazine Christian Century. Some of the old fractiousness of fundamentalism surfaced from time to time. Still, the magazine continued to have enormous influence over the evangelical world.
B. Carl F. H. Henry#
The Baptist theologian Carl F. H. Henry (1913–2003), warned in 1967 that American evangelicalism was in danger of becoming a “wilderness cult in a secular society.” Neoevangelicalism, he argued, must distance itself from the older fundamentalism if it was to survive into the future. In the aftermath of the modernist-fundamentalist controversy, the intellectual fundamentalists — who did not have the same moral qualms about smoking, alcohol, movies, and dancing, and who in their heart of hearts viewed dispensationalism as a marginal sect — turned away from the more rigid fundamentalism and gradually emerged from their cultural isolation.
Although the neo-evangelicals fervently maintained the inerrancy of the Bible, they were not cultural separatists. These neo-evangelicals were governed by a different principle.
Instead of Christ against the culture, they embraced the notion that Christ transforms culture. Thus, they decided to enter the secular realm instead of retreat from it.
In significant measure, this meant that the neo-evangelicals would strive for intellectual credibility.
If they were to transform culture, they had to participate in it.
If Ockenga was the chief organizer of the new evangelicalism, Carl F. H. Henry was its principal theologian. As the first president of Fuller Seminary, Ockenga was instrumental in building the first faculty:
Everett Harrison in New Testament
Wilbur Smith in apologetics
Harold Lindsell in missions
Carl Henry in theology and philosophy
There is little doubt that Ockenga especially pinned his hopes for a new evangelicalism on the shoulders of Henry, who was lured away from his teaching post at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary to become the first dean of Fuller Seminary. Shortly after Fuller opened its doors in 1947, Henry’s manifesto for a new evangelicalism was published: The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism.
Henry depicted American fundamentalism as having retreated from the full gospel mission.
He chastised fundamentalists for failing to preach against “such social evils as aggressive warfare, racial hatred, [and] intolerance.”
Henry’s theological formation was indebted to the Reformed philosopher Gordon H. Clark, whose own brand of Calvinism placed a high value on rationality. Following the direction of his mentor, Henry concluded that “faith without reason is not worth much, and that reason is not an enemy but an ally of genuine faith.” Henry’s rationalistic tendency, it has been argued, somewhat undermined his Calvinism. For Henry, intellectual respectability was best achieved through a rationally cogent Calvinism.
Fuller Seminary’s intellectual orientation soon laid the groundwork for reconsideration of some of the most cherished theological commitments of evangelicalism. When Ockenga decided he could not finally leave his Boston church, the distinguished evangelical theologian Edward J. Carnell was appointed president.
Carnell was a committed neo-evangelical, but he was amenable to rethinking the cardinal doctrine of both fundamentalists and neo-evangelicals: inerrancy. He explored the earlier ideas of James Orr and James Denny, two Scottish evangelicals who concluded that the Princeton view of inerrancy was indefensible. On a personal level, Carnell never abandoned the doctrine of inerrancy, but he did seek to broaden its range of meaning, which laid the groundwork for other Fuller faculty to press the matter in future years.
Carl Henry resisted the more militant claim that inerrancy must be the litmus test for qualification as an evangelical. When the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS) was established in 1949 as a trans-denominational forum of evangelical scholarship, it had only one theological requirement for membership—a commitment to inerrancy: “the Bible alone and the Bible in its entirety, is the Word of God written and is therefore inerrant in the autographs.”
As editor of Christianity Today, Henry was editorially committed to inerrancy, but he refused to make it the sole determinant of evangelical authenticity.
Some of Henry’s fellow neo-evangelicals took a very different tack. Harold Lindsell, Henry’s former colleague at Fuller and then at Christianity Today, flatly denied that one could rightfully “claim the evangelical badge once he has abandoned inerrancy.” A war of words ensued.
Lindsell accused Henry of opening the door to liberalism.
Henry criticized Lindsell for effectively elevating inerrancy above the more foundational concepts of authority and inspiration.
This interevangelical debate reached a fever pitch with the publication of Lindsell’s book The Battle for the Bible (1976). Evangelicalism was again divided.
Generally, there were three neo-evangelical responses to the debate.
The first was the Lindsell view requiring inerrancy as a necessary affirmation of evangelicalism.
The second was the Carnell-Henry view in which one personally holds to inerrancy, but does not make it an evangelical requirement.
The third was to reject the term “inerrancy” as an inadequate expression of biblical inspiration while still holding to the authority of the Bible.
Fuller Seminary carved out this third view when it dropped its inerrancy statement in 1962. Lindsell took Fuller Seminary and other moderates to task, arguing that to abandon inerrancy was to abandon the authority of Scripture. Others took up the inerrancy torch and issued the Chicago Statement on inerrancy in 1978, but evangelicalism remains divided on this matter to the present day.
European evangelicals never really embraced the notion of inerrancy. Leading British and Continental evangelicals such as I. Howard Marshall and Herman Ridderbos fully endorse the trustworthiness and supreme authority of Scripture, but express little anxiety over the factual accuracy of the biblical text. Most European evangelicals fall into the third evangelical category, rejecting the term “inerrancy” while still holding to the supreme authority of the Bible.
Thus, inerrancy has remained principally a topic of debate for American evangelicals.
C. Billy Graham#
The most famous face of neo-evangelicalism is the Southern evangelist William Franklin “Billy” Graham Jr. (1918 –). Born on a dairy farm near Charlotte, North Carolina, Graham was raised as a Presbyterian (Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church), but after his conversion experience in 1934, he was ordained a Southern Baptist (1939).
Graham was shaped by rather diverse influences. He attended Bob Jones University in Tennessee before transferring to Wheaton College, from which he graduated in 1943. Torrey Johnson, the founder of the worldwide movement Youth for Christ, and Henrietta Mears of the First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood were especially instrumental in his spiritual development.
Graham had a meteoric career. With the energy of a new convert, Graham and Charles Templeton traveled the United States and Europe as evangelists for Youth for Christ. When Templeton began to question the authority of the Bible, he and Graham parted ways. At age thirty, Graham became the youngest person ever to serve as a sitting college president, when in 1948 he was appointed to the position at Northwestern College in Minnesota (where he served until 1952).
During a series of evangelistic meetings in Los Angles in 1949, Graham was catapulted into national notoriety by journalism moguls William Randolph Hearst and Henry Luce. Both believed Graham would be helpful in promoting their conservative anticommunist views.
Hearst famously sent a telegram to his newspaper editors instructing them to “puff Graham” during his 1949 Los Angeles crusade. The result of the increased media exposure caused the crusade event to run for four weeks longer than planned.
Luce later also put him on the cover of Time magazine.
With the newfound popularity, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association was established in 1950, and Graham began holding evangelistic crusades all over the world.
Early on, Graham identified with the neo-evangelicals. Soon after the establishment of the NAE, Billy joined with Ockenga and Henry as a leader in the NAE and neo-evangelicalism. Self-consciously they disavowed fundamentalist anti-intellectualism, vitriol, and separatism from culture while still sharing many of the moral proscriptions and doctrinal essentials with their fundamentalist cousins.
Although not an intellectual or a scholar, Graham played a large role in promoting the intellectual enlightenment of evangelicalism. He did nursemaid Christianity Today into existence out of a desire to have a serious evangelical counterpart to mainline Protestant and Catholic journals of opinion.
Graham also lent his name and influence to several of the seminaries and colleges that hoped to reestablish evangelical academic respectability. Graham was notable for his willingness to cooperate with a wide variety of non-evangelical Christians in all parts of the world. But his willingness to associate with mainline Christians and his avoidance of invective toward liberals predictably earned him the anathemas of many fundamentalists.
The New York City Crusade of 1957 stoked existing tensions, if not a sharp division between Billy Graham and many fundamentalists such as John R. Rice, Jack Wyrtzen, and Bob Jones II. Alarms sounded when Graham allowed non-evangelicals to participate in the crusade.
Some brands of fundamentalism required “second-degree separation,” that is to say, a Christian should separate from any Christian who is not practicing “biblical separation” from liberals and those who are sliding down the slippery slope toward liberalism.
Consequently, many fundamentalists separated not only from Billy Graham, but from anyone who did not separate from the evangelist. For many fundamentalists, the principle of separation had become a new doctrinal litmus test.
Like his fellow neo-evangelicals Henry and Ockenga, Graham publicly addressed some of the pressing social issues of his day — especially racial injustice.
During the apartheid era, he consistently refused to visit South Africa until the government permitted his audiences to be desegregated.
Then, at his first crusade in South Africa in 1973, he openly denounced apartheid.
He also opposed segregation in the southern United States during the 1960s.
At one point, Graham quietly put up bail money to secure the release from jail for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the height of the civil rights movement.
Graham had much the same message and beliefs as the fundamentalists, but unlike his fundamentalist forebears, he was not a separatist and refused to condemn non-evangelicals.
Billy Graham has been the most visible evangelical in history, largely because of his forty-plus crusades since 1948. Over the course of his ministry, he preached to live audiences of nearly 215 million people in more than 185 countries and reached hundreds of millions more through various media. One of Graham’s most notable achievements was the Lausanne Congress (1974), which produced the Lausanne Covenant, an ecumenical doctrinal statement considered one of the most influential documents in modern Christianity. The Lausanne movement continued with international congresses in Manila, Philippines (1989), and in Cape Town, South Africa (2010).
Because of his global ministry, Graham overshadowed Ockenga and Henry to become the public visage of American evangelicalism.
IV. POSTMODERN EVANGELICALISM#
A. A Cultural Paradigm Shift#
As the third millennium dawned, there was a broad consensus that the Western world was in the throes of a cultural paradigm shift from the modern to the postmodern era. The first notable hints of this cultural shift surfaced in the wake of the Vietnam War and the emergence of social and political discontent with traditional values. Although the term “postmodern” was first employed to describe a new style of architecture, it soon found currency in intellectual circles as the descriptor for a broader cultural phenomenon.
Amid much scholarly disagreement on its definition, there is a consensus on one point: this cultural phenomenon is marked by a rejection of a universal worldview. At its core, the postmodern mind-set is dubious of a unified, all-encompassing, and rationally valid explanation for truth. Leading theorists Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), Michel Foucault (1926–84), and Richard Rorty (1931–2007) reflect what has come to be the central dictum of postmodern philosophy: abandonment of the quest for a unified worldview (metanarrative). The postmodern world has no center, only differing perspectives.
Postmodern Christians have been willing, unlike many traditional evangelicals, to engage postmodernity to determine if they might legitimately appropriate some insights.
The more controversial work of the leading secular postmodernists, while studied, hold little allure for postmodern evangelicals, because they cannot follow the secular postmodernists in denying ultimate truth. Most of these Christians affirm the central tenets of the faith, yet they are rather dubious of the accepted interpretations of truth handed down by the traditional church.
The postmodern Christians are cautious of socially constructed statements about God and faith. They deny neither ultimate truth nor the identification of truth with Jesus, nor even that the Bible is truth. However, they are wary of the assumption that divine truth can be captured in finite propositional systems. With this “chastened epistemology” they stress that the gospel is not just to be intellectually affirmed, but embodied.
The new cultural paradigm of postmodernism means that many of these evangelicals no longer are willing to think in terms of the modernist-fundamentalist controversy or give it a controlling function in their theological outlook. They reject both modernism and fundamentalism, arguing that both derive from the same rationalist assumptions.
B. Post-Conservative Politics#
The term “post-conservative evangelical” was first coined by Baptist theologian Roger E. Olson in 1995 to describe what he saw as a new mood emerging among some evangelical theologians. Olson was careful not to describe it as a formal movement with a unified message. Rather, it was a loose affiliation of disaffected evangelicals who were alarmed at perceiving a shift back toward the fundamentalism of the early twentieth century.
Most of these post-conservatives view themselves as evangelical both sociologically and theologically, and they have no intention of discarding that moniker. They self-consciously embrace the four standard hallmarks of evangelicalism of the Bebbington quadrilateral:
biblicism
conversionism
cruci-centricism
evangelism
At a core level, post-conservative evangelicals believe that modern American evangelicalism has been conscripted by leaders who are really fundamentalists in evangelical garb, offering oversimplified answers to complex questions and exhibiting a proclivity to defend the political status quo.
Post-conservative evangelicals became increasingly disenchanted with the social and political direction of mainstream evangelicalism. Since the 1970s, American evangelicalism was often aligned with right-wing politics. One of the original sponsors of this political resurgence was the fundamentalist Baptist preacher Jerry Falwell, who garnered media attention when he formed the Moral Majority in 1979 to galvanize conservative Christians in support of Ronald Reagan’s 1980 bid for the U.S. presidency.
Equally important was the conservative religious broadcaster Pat Robertson, who actually made a run for the presidency in 1988 and then used his campaign machinery to create a voter mobilization effort called the Christian Coalition.
Having entered the public sphere, conservative Christians came to be closely identified with certain political issues: pro-business economic policies, advocacy for a strong military, small central government, but especially opposition to social issues such as abortion and homosexuality.
As the twentieth century became the twenty-first century, growing doubts about right-wing politics began to erode the confidence of many younger evangelicals. In the wake of these developments, a new, more politically progressive evangelicalism began to emerge that was skeptical of the television preachers as well as the political right wing.
C. Social Justice and the Gospel#
The twenty-first century is also witnessing a growing concern among younger evangelicals for social justice. One of the most interesting developments is the influence of Irish rock star Bono (Paul David Hewson), who led a successful global effort to reduce Third World debt and to provide large-scale economic solutions for the poorer African nations.
There have long been progressive evangelical leaders, such as Jim Wallis and Ron Sider, who advocate on social issues such as care for the poor, women’s rights, sex trafficking, immigration, HIV/AIDS, and opposition to the death penalty, but none has had a higher profile or influence than Bono.
Many other Christian organizations and individual churches have taken up advocacy for the poor and marginalized all over the globe, and they do so without regard to religious affiliation.
Critics fear that the concern for social justice is a revival of the early twentieth-century Social Gospel Movement of Walter Rauschenbusch, but for the most part such criticism has fallen on deaf ears. Far from embracing the Protestant liberalism of Rauschenbusch, postmodern evangelicals see themselves as actively living out the gospel, perhaps with more consistency than their forebears. Abandoning the left-right dichotomy, they believe Jesus exemplifies a generous orthodoxy joined with a generous orthopraxis.
D. Evolving Ecclesiology#
Postmodern evangelicals do not see themselves as a conventional church movement or even a theological tradition in the strict sense, but instead prefer to view themselves as a loose network of conversation partners who want to explore afresh the nature and meaning of the Christian faith in the postmodern world. A central commitment is to engage in these dynamic conversations with complete freedom and honesty.
The common descriptor of this loose affiliation of evangelicals is the emerging church movement. In their book Emerging Churches: Creating Christian Community in Postmodern Cultures, Eddie Gibbs and Ryan Bolger define emerging churches simply as “communities that practice the way of Jesus within postmodern cultures.”
One of the distinctive expressions of the emerging church movement is the Emergent Village, which is an online clearinghouse dedicated to fostering communities and facilitating conversations about what it means to be a Christian in a postmodern world. The Emergent Village consists of cohorts from all over the world who are connected via the Internet.
At its core, the Emergent Village conceives itself as a social network that is characterized as a “growing, generative friendship.” While there is no official spokesperson for the emerging church or the Emergent Village, leaders such as Tony Jones and Brian McLaren are viewed as representative voices.
These emerging communities are often independent house churches without any denominational affiliation and no doctrinal statement beyond the early Christian creedal statements such as the Apostles’ Creed. They tend to look to the early church as a model and stress such fundamental Christian notions as ministry to others, imitation of Christ, and fellowship.
There are many diverse motivations, but in general one may observe that most are frustrated with the traditional church and its guiding presuppositions; most manifest a heightened awareness of social justice; most display a more tolerant attitude toward non-Christians; and most embrace a missional perspective.
E. The Church as Mission#
In the past half century there has been a subtle but nevertheless decisive shift in the understanding of Christian missions.
In prior centuries “mission” was understood primarily in soteriological terms: as saving individuals from eternal damnation.
Much of contemporary missiology now understands missions as being derived from the very nature of God and thus is grounded in the doctrine of the Trinity rather than soteriology.
The classical doctrine of the missio Dei (mission of God) viewed God the Father as sending the Son, and God the Father together with the Son sending the Spirit. The new insight understood a third movement, in which the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit send the church into the world. Mission is therefore seen as a movement from God to the world, and the church is viewed as the instrument for that mission.
In a postmodern culture, emergents tend to replace traditional propositional evangelism and proclamation with an embodied gospel and a more conversational approach to evangelism. Emergents do mission by faithfully living out the gospel in their postmodern cultural context.
For the postmodern evangelicals, the church does not do mission, but rather, the church is the mission. Indeed, mission is conceived as the true and authentic organizing principle of the church. Thus, one is missional by participating with God in the redemptive work God is doing in this world. Although there are varying nuances and connotations, there is a basic agreement among postmodern evangelicals about a missional view of the church. Because this missional outlook has rapidly entered the lexicon of the emerging church movement, it has enabled adherents to recognize each other across denominational lines.
Postmodern evangelicals have a special affection for the British missionary Lesslie Newbigin (1909–98). He served as a missionary in India, where he contextualized worship, discipleship, community, and service in order to engage effectively with the non-Christian society surrounding him. Returning to England after thirty years in India, he realized that the Western church was itself existing in a post-Christian society, but had failed to adapt to its new circumstance. So Newbigin became an advocate for the missional principle that the non-Christian, if he is to be reached, must be reached within his own culture.
This missional principle finds its origin, according to Newbigin, in the incarnation of Christ, who took on the form of a human being. As missionaries sent by Jesus, every Christian must incarnate themselves into their particular culture and thereby learn to exegete their surrounding culture, understanding the language, values, and ideas of the culture. With these insights, they may then take steps to reach people with the gospel message in the context of the surrounding culture.
F. The Role of Women in the Church#
For all of the changes that have occurred in the postmodern evangelical church, there remain significant pockets of cultural traditionalism. This is nowhere more evident than in gender relations. One of the defining cultural features of twentieth-century America was the enhanced status of women in society. However, the advances of women in American society did not necessarily carry over into the church. Although mainline denominations have female clergy, they tend not to become senior ministers. In many evangelical churches and denominations it is a matter of theological conviction that women should be limited to traditional roles—women’s ministries, hospitality, and the children’s ministries.
The 1974 landmark book All We’re Meant to Be by Letha Scanzoni and Nancy Hardesty sparked a gender debate among evangelicals that continues to this day.
A group of evangelical leaders met together in 1987 and established Christians for Biblical Equality (CBE, which officially began in January 1988) in advocacy of Christian egalitarianism in the home and church.
In direct reaction to Christian egalitarianism, theology professor Wayne Grudem and Baptist pastor John Piper established the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW) in 1987.
Thus, by the late 1980s two ideologically opposed organizations were vying for the right to define the role of women in American evangelicalism.
The dispute was often openly hostile.
For the complementarians (CBMW), the differences were seen as a battle for orthodoxy, arguing that egalitarianism is a wolf in sheep’s clothing that ultimately undermines the authority of the Bible.
Evangelical egalitarians did not remain passive; they mounted a vigorous challenge to the exegesis and theology of the complementarians. More recently, egalitarians even have charged the complementarians with verging toward heresy by advocating the eternal subordination of the Son in the Trinity.
As gender debates raged in the evangelical world, economic realities intruded into traditional household structures. The conventional paradigm of husband as breadwinner and wife has homemaker has been replaced by dual-income households. Inevitably, this cultural shift has impacted the evangelical subculture. Dual-income families require that the husband and wife function more as partners in the household.
Although most evangelicals still affirm some version of male headship, it has been reconstituted as “servant leadership.” Most evangelicals still are more likely to believe that the husband should in some sense be the spiritual leader in the home, but there is a growing consensus that marriage is a partnership of equals. This blending of the ideals of mutuality and hierarchy within marriage has become the evangelical norm by economic necessity.
Younger postmodern evangelicals have grown up with pragmatic egalitarianism in the home while living in a broader egalitarian culture. The contradictions have led to a measure of confusion for some, but many younger evangelicals incline toward egalitarianism in principle even if somewhat ill-defined.
G. The Decline of Denominationalism#
America remains a generally religious nation, yet recent indicators suggest that the Christian church is eroding in numbers and influence. There has been significant loss of its capacity to shape culture the way it did just a few decades ago. Religion continues to be a powerful presence, but it is not the presence that once was.
There is a new reality in the American church. Most notable is the widespread decline in church attendance. More accurate research methods reveal that regular church attendance actually hovers at around 20 percent, much less than previously thought. Sociologists refer to the “halo effect” that has led to exaggerated church attendance and a distorted perception of religious involvement.
This new reality has two obvious corollaries.
- First, Protestant denominations themselves are in decline.
It has been well documented that mainline denominations (such as American Baptist Church USA, Christian Church/Disciples of Christ, Episcopal Church, Evangelical Lutheran Church, Presbyterian Church USA, Reformed Church in America, United Church of Christ, and United Methodist Church) have experienced a significant and sustained decline over the last fifty years.
During the same period, evangelical denominations (such as Southern Baptist, Assemblies of God, Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod) often enjoyed dramatic growth. However, that trend has reversed, and now evangelical denominations are beginning to show signs of decline. While the American population grows by roughly two million a year, attendance in evangelical churches has gradually declined, according to surveys of more than 200,000 congregations by the American Church Research Project.
- Second, denominational loyalties are also fading.
The Pew Religious Landscape survey concludes that 44 percent of adults have changed their religious affiliation (including transferring to another denomination, moving from “unaffiliated” to a church affiliation, or severing all church connection). In the culture of twenty-first-century America, Presbyterians and Methodists can easily move from one denomination to the other as though the theological tensions between Arminianism and Calvinism are of no consequence.
Why the decline in evangelical churches in America?
The answer to this question is multilayered and complex. Certainly, the scandals of fallen evangelical leaders, the worship wars, and theological fistfights among insiders (over such matters as justification, open theism, homosexuality, and the role of women in the church) have contributed to the growing disaffection with traditional expressions of evangelicalism, especially among the younger generation.
In his book unChristian: What a New Generation Thinks about Christianity … and Why It Matters, David Kinnaman, president of the evangelical Barna Group, concludes that “Modern-day Christianity no longer seems Christian.” His research found that:
The prevailing perception of Christians by outsiders is that they are hypocritical, too focused on getting converts, antihomosexual, out of touch, too political, and overly judgmental.
Many of the under-thirty Christians actually share the same perception of American Christianity as the outsiders: 80 percent of churchgoers perceived the Christian church as antihomosexual; 52 percent judgmental; 50 percent too involved in politics; and 47 percent hypocritical.
Such perceptions, by both insiders and outsiders, have contributed to noticeable decline in evangelical churches, especially among younger Christians. As a consequence, a growing number of younger evangelicals are abandoning local churches and instead are gathering informally in alternative faith communities for fellowship in places like Starbucks.
There is also a cultural factor at play in the decline of evangelical churches. Postmodernism has engendered a spirit of mistrust toward traditional ecclesial authorities and theological certainties.
Postmodernism is itself a complex phenomenon that is difficult to define, but there is a general consensus that it entails, at the very least, a heightened sense of uncertainty, even about the Bible itself. This postmodern epistemic shift —joined with the public scandals, infighting, and suspicion of social justice — has loosened affinity and affection with traditional denominations.
H. Ethnic Minorities#
The global South has come to North America. Immigrant churches from Latin American, Africa, and Asia are making significant inroads into American evangelicalism. One of the postmodern realities is the growth of ethnic minorities.
1. African Americans#
Most African Americans are the direct descendants of captive Africans from sub-Saharan Africa, although some are descendents of immigrants from African, Caribbean, Central American, or South American countries. African Americans make up the second largest racial minority in the United States, with 13.5 percent of the total population.
Currently, more than half of the African-American population is part of historically black Protestant denominations:
The largest of which is Baptist (the largest being the National Baptist Convention and the National Baptist Convention of America).
The second-largest African-American denomination is Methodist (the largest being the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church).
Approximately 16 percent of African-American Christians attend predominantly white Protestant churches.
A small percentage of African Americans (5 percent) attend Roman Catholic churches.
One notable development during the course of the twentieth century is the number of African Americans attracted to Islam. Historically, perhaps as many as a quarter of the African slaves brought to the Americas were Muslims, but most were converted to Christianity.
A new distinctively American form of Islam emerged in 1930 when Wallace Fard Muhammad founded the Nation of Islam and asserted that blacks are a superior race and that whites are “devils.” It was his successor, Elijah Muhammad, who attracted significant numbers of African Americans to this distinct version of Islam, largely through the influence of converts such as black nationalist Malcolm X (born Malcolm Little, also known as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz) and world boxing champion Muhammad Ali (born Cassius Marcellus Clay).
Due to a falling out with Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X made a pilgrimage to Mecca and returned to establish the first mainstream (Sunni) Islamic movement among African Americans. He was murdered in 1965 by members of the Nation of Islam.
After the death of Elijah Muhammad in 1975, his son and successor, Warith Deen Muhammad, abandoned the black separatist views of his father and forged ties with Sunni Muslims. However, among those who resisted these changes was Louis Farrakhan, who revived the Nation of Islam in 1978 and returned it to its original teachings. African-American Muslims constitute 20 percent of the total U.S. Muslim population, the majority of whom are Sunni Muslims.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. remains a towering figure from the civil rights movement and perhaps the most influential African American in history. His tragic assassination in April 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee, sparked race riots in 125 cities. Although the civil rights movement continued to make significant cultural and legal advances, racial tensions have persisted.
For the most part, American evangelicals have been indifferent or even hostile toward Dr. King and the civil rights movement, thus creating an uneasy relationship between black and white American Christians, despite many of the same theological convictions and social values. Dr. King’s famous statement that Sunday is “the most segregated day of the week” remains true for millions of African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and other ethnic minorities. For all of its vaunted stress on evangelism, ethnic segregation remains the norm in American evangelical churches.
Many evangelicals have called for racial reconciliation, and indeed, there have been successful efforts to establish multicultural congregations, but more often than not, ethnic minorities remain segregated from white evangelicals. One of the pressing challenges facing the contemporary evangelical church is that among Christian ethnic minorities there is a heightened concern that “racial reconciliation” amounts to assimilation to the dominant white culture and thus loss of cultural identity.
2. Latinos#
Of the three main ethnic minorities, Hispanics/Latinos are the largest and fastest-growing ethnic minority in the United States and constitute 15.4 percent of the total population.
Historically, the large majority of Hispanics (68 percent according to Pew Research Center) has identified with Catholicism, but that has changed significantly in recent decades with the growing influence of Pentecostalism. Approximately 15 percent of Hispanics have left the Catholic Church for evangelical/Pentecostal churches. Catholics call these Hispanic evangelicals hermanos separados—separated brothers. Moreover, Pentecostalism is not only bringing Hispanics to evangelical Protestantism but is making inroads within Catholicism itself. Among Roman Catholics, about 20 percent are Pentecostal/Charismatic.
The terms Hispanic and Latino tend to be used interchangeably in the United States for people with origins in Spanish-speaking countries and include persons of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican, Central American, or South American origin. They have been in North America for centuries, long before the English-speaking culture became dominant.
Hispanic peoples have lived in the regions of California, Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and Florida since the sixteenth century.
In parts of Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico there are Hispanic communities (Hispanidad) that have continuously been the majority population since they were settled in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Many Hispanic evangelicals find common cause with white evangelicals because of shared social views. Like most white evangelicals, Hispanics tend to oppose gay marriage and believe abortion should be illegal. However, the matter of immigration threatens this coalition.
Two-thirds of white evangelicals thought immigrants posed a threat to traditional American society and are a burden on the economy.
Nearly 60 percent of Hispanic evangelicals believe immigrants strengthen American society.
Many white evangelicals see immigration as a law-and-order issue, but for Hispanics, immigration is a family values issue.
One of the most high-profile evangelical Hispanic leaders working on the immigration issue is Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, founder and leader of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference (NHCLC).
3. Asians#
Asian Americans make up the third-largest minority group in the United States and are often considered the “model minority” because their culture encourages a strong work ethic, a respect for elders, professional and academic success, and a high valuation of family, education, and religion.
Current estimates indicate that about 14.9 million people report themselves as having Asian heritage, which is around 5 percent of the U.S. population. The largest Asian subgroups are Chinese (3.53 million), Filipinos (3.05 million), Indians (2.77 million), Vietnamese (1.64 million), Koreans (1.56 million), and Japanese (1.22 million). The Asian-American population is heavily urbanized, with nearly three-quarters of Asian Americans living in large metropolitan areas.
Asian Americans are often portrayed as an elite group of successful, well-educated, intelligent, and prosperous people. However, postmodern Asian evangelicals resist the stereotype and challenge some of the core values of American evangelicalism.
Soong-Chan Rah, a Korean-American professor at North Park Seminary in Chicago, contends that ethnic churches and their leaders are often invisible to the white evangelical community. According to Rah, ethnic minorities, many of them immigrants from majority world countries, are often overlooked in the count of congregations and in leadership conferences.
V. POST-EVANGELICAL EVANGELICALS#
As the twenty-first century gains momentum, a growing segment of postmodern evangelicals have become deeply disenchanted with their own heritage.
Repeated moral failures of prominent evangelical leaders
Partisan political views
Consumerism
Restrictive interpretations of the Bible
Misogyny
Cultural insensitivity
Antihomosexual rhetoric
have led some disheartened evangelicals to abandon the label entirely. The designation “post-evangelical” does not refer to any particular entity; it is more of a sensibility or mood.
Post-evangelical Christians retain their evangelical convictions when it comes to speaking of their conversion to Christ, but they are post-evangelical when it comes to what they judge are the culturally defined dictums of American evangelicalism. They are suspicious of biblical proof-texting in general and especially the use of proof-texting as a weapon against social or political views with which evangelicals might disagree.
Reflecting something of their postmodern culture, post-evangelicals tend to avoid claims of theological certainty on matters not central to the gospel, and they disparage the evangelical tendency to dismiss those with whom they have theological differences as unbelievers.
They are confident that Jesus is their personal Savior, but they are not convinced that one can have apodictic certainty on all matters.
They are painfully aware of a long history of Christians who were sure they were right on a particular matter, only to discover in hindsight that they were wrong.
They argue that Christians were wrong in the Crusades; they were wrong about slavery; maybe they are wrong about contemporary issues such as homosexuality.
As a result, this post-evangelical sensibility is somewhat suspicious of systematic theology because of the dizzying array of competing theological certainties. They do not necessarily reject theology, but prefer to view theology as an open-ended conversation about God.
Particularly troubling to post-evangelicals is the perceived evangelical tendency to conclude that those with whom they disagree are beyond the pale of salvation or at least must be excluded from their particular community. They see this tendency as a separatist hangover from fundamentalism, in which Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians were shunned as unbelievers at worst or viewed with suspicion at best.
Post-evangelical concerns about the separatist mentality are perhaps most acute in relation to homosexuality. With a growing cultural acceptance of homosexuality, have inclined post-evangelicals to a more tolerant attitude. Recent indications suggest that for the most part, their tolerance derives less from theological conviction than from general compassion and the personal experience of having gay friends. Tolerance for postmoderns is not quite the same as endorsement, but it signals that separatism is fading and signals a decided preference for dialogue rather than disengagement.