Tim Keller (click here for a bio) has written a 4 part series on the fall of the American Church and how it can be restored. In the first article, Keller focused on how the Mainline Protestant churches fell. In this article, Keller focuses on the fall of the Evangelicalism (click here for the article). Remember from his last article Evangelicalism had replaced Mainline Protestantism's in terms of its controlling influence in Christendom in America.
In this article, Keller continues some themes used in his first article. He also shows a strong bias in favor of religious conservative Christianity in his analysis of what is happening in America. Some of those themes that show his bias, include the claim that all that is good in America and the West comes from Christianity. Also he claims that decay in America, both in the Church and in society, comes from secularization. And the root source for that secularization has been the Enlightenment. Keller claims that the ideas from the Enlightenment began to destroy the good that the Christianity had created and maintained in society including our personal connections and institutions. That is because, according to Keller, while Christianity emphasized community, the Enlightenment, by making human reason the standard by which we judge all things, glorified the individual. In addition, his view of the Sexual Revolution misses the point that the revolution was primarily about equality for women in society.
But we also see in Keller's analysis his lite but significant reliance on black-white thinking. His treatment of the contrast between Christianity and the Enlightenment as well as the political polarization he mentions between those on the right and those on the left lends evidence to that charge.
However, Keller also provides some useful definitions and distinctions. For example, Keller provides the current working definition of Christian Fundamentalism as including the belief in Biblical literalism combined with some rigid social marks or cultural views. Those marks consist of cultural attitudes and practices, of its adherents that revolve around isolationism from the world or control of others.
A list of those social marks are below
Keller defines Evangelicalism by 4 basic tenets of the faith. And though those 4 basic tenets are not the same as 5 basic tenets of the faith adhered to by the first generation of Christian Fundamentalists, what we see from Keller's definitions is that Evangelicals were defined by what they believed about God and how they relate to Him. And because Christian Fundamentalists are those who believe much of what Evangelicals believe because of how they interpret the Bible, what, for the most part, distinguishes Fundamentalism from Evangelicals are the social marks. Keller also briefly compares Fundamentalism with conservative Confessional Protestantism. And in that comparison, though conservative Confessional Protestantism has the same high regard for the Scriptures that Fundamentalists have, the former does not adhere to Biblical literalism. In addition, the former does not share the same social marks.
Keller also mentions the sociological location of Evangelical and how that affects their beliefs. He mentions how Evangelicals from other nations have different views that American Evangelicals.
So the question becomes how did Evangelicalism fall? For one thing, Keller states that faith in general was in decline. Factors that contributed what is causing the decline in Evangelicalism is the fall of faith in America including moving religion to the realm of the individual by making science and technology the only agreed upon tools we have to solve problems, radical individualism where the person, rather than the community, becomes the only judge of one's actions, the secularization of the masses, and the promotion of a therapeutic view of the self, the political polarization of people, the sexual revolution, and an increase in the percentage of people who had a higher education.
In addition, there were events in the US that produced a social context for American Evangelicals which are different from Evangelicals from other nations. Keller calls the above mentioned social context a sociological address.
Keller also lists social markers that tend to distinguish Evangelicals from Fundamentalists. These social markers dealt with how Christians interacted with or stood away from the outside world. And while Evangelicals act in ways that both interacted or stood away from the outside world, Fundamentalists, because of their rigid in thinking, tend to strongly stand away from the outside world.
While Evangelicals were the mighty in America's Christendom, and thus in America, from the 1940s to the 1970s. But with religiously conservative Christian involvement in politics came a resurrection, of sorts, of Christian Fundamentalism in America. And with that started a decline in Evangelicalism
Part of the fall of Evangelicalism have been due to certain challenges listed and described by Keller. Those challenges include:
- 'The United States is slowly running out of traditionally-minded Americans to be converted, and conservative Protestants on the whole are unwilling or unable to reach the highly secular and culturally different.'
- 'Notably, conservative church politicization has turned off half the country. In a polarized environment, white evangelicals’ strong identification with one party and one presidential candidate has produced deep and hostile reactions from the 50% of the country opposed to this political platform. And, in general, the 50% that it has alienated is younger and more multi-ethnic. Many fundamentalists consider this a victory, rather than a defeat.'
- 'Conservative churches, both fundamentalist and evangelical, continue to have a race problem. Conservative white evangelicals in the past (1) originally supported slavery, (2) were silent during the Jim Crow era, (3) largely rejected the Civil Rights movement of the time, and (4) were slowest to integrate their schools and seminaries.'
- 'Fundamentalism is an anti-intellectual movement, and even non-fundamentalist evangelicals tend toward pragmatism. Catholicism is both a popular religion for the masses and yet has nurtured a robust intellectual class. Fundamentalism’s largely anti-intellectual stance has only grown among conservative Christians who are alarmed by the progressive excesses of today’s universities.'
- 'Conservative Protestants lack a model for relating to a secular culture. Evangelicalism has been a prominent part of a “Christendom” culture—one in which Christian beliefs and practice were dominant and assumed. Now that this has changed, evangelicals struggle to find a “public theology”—one that defines how they relate to the larger society. Many fundamentalists simply want to re-establish Christendom through government action. Others simply want to withdraw from culture altogether and just build up the church.'
The listing of these challenges by Keller are very insightful and helpful. Because of the political allegiance of all sorts of religiously conservative Christians to conservative political, economic, and social ideologies, they have become a very loyal, and productive, voting block for the Republican Party. And so when we look at the first listed challenge, the potential growth of all groups of religiously conservative Christians is significantly limited.
We could easily broaden the 2nd listed challenge to include but go beyond religiously conservative Christianity's draw to racism. In fact, the history of the Christian Church in the last few centuries show that the predominant branch of the Church in a given nation often side with wealth and power. The Roman Church sided with wealth and power in the pre-revolutionary times of both France and Spain and the Orthodox Church did the same during the pre-revolutionary times of Russia. In America, conservative Protestantism has sided with wealth and power by their siding largely with the Republican Party despite their denial of climate change, our nation's problem with gun violence, systemic racism, and the threat posed by the pandemic especially in its first two years.
For the third challenge, we need to ask how far behind Fundamentalism's anti-intellectualism is Evangelicalism's? Such points to a personal social marker that Keller does not bring up because that marker is present, in different levels and ways, in all of religiously conservative Christianity from Fundamentalism to Evangelicalism to conservative Confessional Protestantism. That marker is authoritarianism as researched and described by the Frankfurt School. And here were are referring to authoritarian personality types.
With the authoritarian personality type, truth is determined more by the ideological beliefs and credentials of a given source more than on the facts and logic involved in what a source says. That means that for religiously conservative Christians, what a source says will be, to varying degrees, readily accepted or rejected based on the ideological tribes to which the source belongs. That goes for theological and religious ideologies, which is why we have denominations within the Protestant branch of the Christian Church, as well as political and economic ideologies. An explanation for that can be found in Keller observing that all too often religiously conservative Christianity has been conflated with conservative American values and beliefs.
And as much as Keller complains about the conflation of Christianity and American conservative ideology, he shows signs of this embracing of authoritarianism in this series in how he describes the divide between Christianity and the secularism that came from the Enlightenment. For with authoritarianism comes a black-white worldview. And Keller's comparison of Christianity and the Enlightenment comes the attribution of all that is good in America to Christianity and all that is causing America to fall is the Enlightenment.
Of course, what was just said leads to the 4th challenge. How can religiously conservative Christians, whether they be Evangelicals or conservative Confessional Protestants, engage with secularists from the Enlightenment tradition when they have already seemed to have said to them that we have everything to teach you but have nothing to learn from you? That is the message given when one attributes all that is good in America to one's own group and attributes the decay in America to the group one is speaking to.
We also need to challenge Keller on his view that individualism, which stems from the Enlightenment's reliance on reason and science, is what has divided our nation, has destroyed our respect of authority (mentioned in Keller's first article in the series), as well as has destroyed our institutions by destroying our faith in them. By emphasizing reason and science, the Enlightenment didn't usher in individualism into America's psyche, it attempted to promote mathematics, which is the basis for reason, and science.
Not only that, perhaps individualism isn't the monster that Keller makes it out to be. Rather, what is causing our nation to be so divided as well as persuading parts of the Church to shy away from intellectualism is tribalism. Tribalism has more than one definition. The one being employed here describes tribalism have having such a high degree of loyalty to a group that one loses the ability to look at a given group objectively. In addition, tribalism produces a relative morality in people so that what is right and wrong depends on who does what to whom.
Our nation is divided into competing groups, not into a kind of anarchy where each person is doing their own thing. Thus, the division in our nation is due to tribalism. And here we should note that what appears to be a lack of respect for authority is not the real problem. That is because tribalism, in part, consists of the authority of one's own group. So what appears to be a lack of respect for authority is nothing more than the rejection of the authority of a rival group.
Finally, the loss that Keller is lamenting over and what he wants to see restored is a form of Christendom. But Christendom to any degree or at any level is a contradiction to Democracy. That is because Democracy is more than just the rule of the majority where voting is allowed. Democracy also includes a sharing of power so that the majority does not use its voting power to oppress any minority groups in the nation. Jefferson so warned against the majority from using their power to oppress minority groups in his 1801 Inaugural Address.
And there is one of the reasons why we see a decline in Evangelicalism. For even if Evangelicals can put an end to their racism and even if they can break the trend in Church history of siding with wealth and power, Evangelicals, in the name of moral values and natural law, will always work to marginalize one particular group in America: the LGBT community. And one of the reasons why Evangelicalism has declined is because of the 1960s. That is because thee 1960s have been described as some as the time period where there was an excess of democracy.
Our problem is that we religiously conservative Christians, including us Evangelicals and conservative Confessional Protestants, let alone Christian Fundamentalists, have a penchant for authoritarianism whether it stems from tribalism or not. And in authoritarian societies, there are hierarchies. But the presence of any hierarchy means the negation of democracy. With the 1960s pushing democracy, Evangelicalism was rightfully seen as one of its opponents.
No comments:
Post a Comment