Bad news evangelicals

From The Christian Century

Modern North American evangelicalism began in reaction. Those who embraced the term fundamentalist reacted against late-19th-century biblical criticism and biology, removing themselves from denominations and other Christian bodies that were less alarmed by such developments. Reacting against perceived liberalism in the realm of political involvement, fundamentalists separated themselves from the social gospel so decisively that they removed almost any hint of social dynamism from the biblical gospel.

In the middle of the last century, neoevangelicals such as Harold Ockenga and Carl Henry sought to nudge fundamentalists (and what we now know as conservative evangelicals) in a more socially aware direction. Yet the movement retained an ongoing vulnerability to its reactionary impulse. Evangelicalism (then and now predominantly white) was slow to support civil rights for blacks. Anticommunism was long a hot node of evangelical galvanization.

A newfangled dispensationalist eschatology (promulgated first in the 19th century) has regularly cycled into prominence through the aegis of the movement, repeatedly reincarnated to react to changed threats. Hal Lindsey proclaimed it in The Late Great Planet Earth in the 1970s and tailored the Chris tian gospel to resist the Soviet Union, European unification and the ecumenical movement. In the 1990s, Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins retooled dispensationalism to rescue American conservative Christians from Arabic terrorists, one-world government and moral decline. Pop apocalyptics aside, playing defense has long been a major mode of discourse for evangelical media—arming the faithful against religious cults, then the New Age movement, then feminism, then secular humanism, and so on and so on.

Still, evangelicalism re mains wealthy by any number of quantitative and sociological measurements. How can I suggest that it is in trouble?

It is in deep trouble because it faces a significant cultural and generational shift. Identifying itself with the wedge tactics of the political right, which is now falling (at least for a time) out of power, the movement cannot easily shake the image of being primarily negative and destructive. Indicators show that it is losing attractiveness not only among unconverted fellow Americans, but among its own young.

http://www.christiancentury.org/article.lasso?id=6484