I am a former evangelical. I no longer wear that identity, after having become Roman Catholic 12 years ago. But prior to that I spent decades as an evangelical Quaker pastor.
This post is a follow up to my previous post, Why Every Christian Should Repudiate Biblical Inerrancy. These thoughts gelled pretty quickly as I responded to a Patheos blog piece by my good friend, Rev. Rob Schenck.
Rob was addressing how evangelicals have become, in my words, "truth-challenged." His opening sentence to his piece said, "American evangelicals have a problem with the truth." I think I might go farther than Rob does. I think American evangelicals have repudiated the very idea of truth.
When Kellyanne Conway made her infamous "alternative facts" comment shortly after the Trump inauguration in 2017, I was mortified. Ms. Conway was known in evangelical circles and in the pro-life movement as a leader and spokesperson. With a background in philosophy, and an awareness of the importance of the law of non-contradiction, which is the principle that two contradictory statements can both be false but they cannot both be true, I considered the statement about "alternative facts" to be the most offensive and dangerous statement I had ever heard. I wrote this at that time:
This alternate reality did not begin with the inauguration of a new President. It did not begin with his campaign in the summer of 2015. It has been with us for a while, as the popularity of radio personalities like Alex Jones attests. I believe the reason we ended up with a post-fact President is that we have been becoming, for some time now, a post fact society…where “I have my truth and you have your truth.” That statement is blasphemous to me, I think it rapes the word truth, and renders it practically useless. Francis Schaeffer, a philosopher with whom I mostly disagree, said one thing which I think any thinking person should agree with—we need to be able to talk in terms of what he calls “true” truth!
I think there is a direct connection between evangelicals being "truth-challenged," and therefore being willing to live in a world of "alternative facts" and the very definition of evangelicalism. In one decade of my life, I saw that definition dramatically change. I want to contrast what I will call "Evangelicalism One" with what I will call "Evangelicalism Two." Because of the two seminaries I attended, I had a front-row seat to see this shift which made good evangelicalism into toxic evangelicalism.
I learned what "Evangelicalism One" was as I was a student at Earlham School of Religion. ESR was not explicitly evangelical but there were some evangelical students. I was under the tutelage of the Quaker philosopher D. Elton Trueblood, who was as he put it, an evangelical because of the fact that his faith was Christ-centered. In the sense of evangelicalism he offered, through the ministry of Yokefellows International, in which I was quite involved, you could be an evangelical no matter what your faith tradition, whether you were involved in a liturgical church (even Roman Catholicism), or a more free-church tradition, or even an unprogrammed Quaker meeting. This kind of evangelicalism was grounded in the good news--the evangel--of Jesus Christ. Anyone who was centered on Christ was an evangelical. It could be someone like Francis Schaeffer, D. James Kennedy (who spoke at one of our annual conferences), James Dobson, or even someone like Karl Barth or William Sloane Coffin.
Then I transferred to the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville. Elton told me he thought I was going to the best seminary in the world. It was wonderful. But a few months in, a storm began brewing as Southern Baptists began their civil war over the inerrancy of the Bible. Last week I explained why an inerrant Bible is an immoral idea which every Christian should repudiate.
As time went on, the inerrantists got the upper hand and complete control of the seminary and the convention. This led to what I will call "Evangelicalism Two." No longer would it be enough to profess faith in Christ. Now you had to believe in Christ AND the inerrancy of the Bible or you were not even considered Christian.
The big problem is, as I said last week, placing your faith in a book instead of in the person and work of Jesus Christ is a house of cards. I have heard people say you have to be able to take the whole Bible literally or you cannot trust any of it. I think that is balderdash. As we made our way through the COVID epidemic, conservative, evangelical Christians were largely anti-vaccine and anti-mask. My good friend I mention above, Rev. Rob Schenck took a great deal of abuse from his fellow evangelicals for encouraging people to mask and to be vaccinated. Rob was right though, the command of our Lord to love our neighbor as ourselves required us to get vaccinated unless there was a physical health condition which indicated vaccination could harm the recipient.
No religious objection to the vaccine could be justified. This is not like conscientious objection to war. The conscientious objector to war is trying to follow Jesus' teachings and love her neighbor as herself. The anti-vaxxer or anti-masker is trying to love himself at the expense of his neighbor. Anti-vaxxers wanted to let people turn their bodies into weapons of mass destruction, and anti-maskers wanted to let them indiscriminately point those weapons at whoever they came in contact with.
I think the root of this resistance to science in Evangelicalism Two is a direct consequence of things like the Scopes monkey trials. In the name of biblical literalism, a seed of distrust of science was planted, and the response of Evangelicalism Two to the pandemic is part of the fruit of that seed.
I have seen people I once respected move from Evangelicalism One to
Evangelicalism Two, and it is one of the most heartbreaking things I have ever witnessed.
I love Evangelicalism One. I do not think Evangelicalism Two can be redeemed. I think it has put itself beyond the reach of even the grace of God. I think the only way for those in Evangelicalism Two to find redemption is to realize their prodigality and get up from the pig-pen and return home.
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