Evangelical and evangelical
The estimable Timothy Crouch raises a question about my series of posts, not from the CoC side, but from the evangelical:
This intriguing paragraph from Brad East (from the coda of his series of posts on the Churches of Christ: https://bradeast.org/blog/coc-coda), in which he offers a ten-point description of “evangelicalism,” inadvertently suggests that denominations like, say, the PCA are not “evangelical.”
To my mind, this mostly just indicates that we need more language than “evangelical.”There is no use denying that there are real differences (theological *and* sociological) between Stone-Campbellites, the PCA, Dutch Reformed, Southern Baptists, charismatic megachurchers…
… AND there is no use denying that all five of those groups (and many more which I could name) have something important in common, that the non-Christian world — to say nothing of the liberal mainline Christian world — recognizes, dislikes, and calls “evangelical.”
I tend to use the word “evangelical” expansively, to describe whatever that common sensibility is, which (on balance) I share. But being raised Anglican and now part of a Presbyterian church (and studying historical theology), on Brad’s definition I am not an evangelical.
The intriguing paragraph in question is this:
evangelicalism is not a particular confessional tradition. Rather, it is a family of non-traditions, a dominant way or mode or ambient religious culture of being (1) a Christian community (2) in America, defined by (3) biblicism and (4) congregationalist polity, lacking (5) external tradition and (6) holy orders and being led instead by (7) elders, focusing above all on (8) personal faith, (9) the worship experience, and (10) active evangelism.
Timothy’s is a worthy rejoinder, and it calls for comment. Since I talk about evangelicalism a lot, I figured I should put down in black and white what I mean and why.
For starters: I’m neither a historian nor a sociologist. I’m a theologian commenting on sociohistorical categories and terminology. So I have far from the last word on this. But given how disputed the term is in the literature, I think it’s fair to have a “take” on the question as a non-expert.
To me, any definition of “evangelical” that is primarily theological in nature is a nonstarter. It will always include more than it’s meant to, and often exclude groups that are clearly evangelical in the way most people use the word. Rather, “evangelical” names a certain subset of American Christianity, a subculture with marked family resemblances across branching genealogies and descendants. Some of these resemblances include:
a principled commitment to biblicism;
a leveling or egalitarian or democratic impulse;
an association with frontier revivalism;
an emphasis on the proclamation of the word;
an emphasis on the event or experience of conversion;
an emphasis on living personal faith;
a consistently conservative approach to law, family, and gender relations;
a certain style of hermeneutical literalism;
a certain kind of individualism;
a certain entrepreneurial spirit: a flair for innovation, adaptation, and deployment of new strategies and technologies in the service of the gospel;
a deep concern for evangelism and world missions;
a relative lack of emphasis on structures of governance, sacramental administration, holy orders, or patristic-medieval tradition.
It is true that many, perhaps most, of these features may be found, and are historically found, in Christian communions whose polity is neither congregationalist nor dismissive of sacred tradition or historic patterns of liturgy. Here’s what I want to say about that.
On one hand, I’m wanting to use “evangelical” as a meaningful term in the present, not as it was or could be used one or two centuries ago, retrospectively. And it seems to me that, for a number of reasons, the term is better reserved today for those American churches or individual Christians who do not belong to the kinds of creedal/confessional traditions Timothy has in mind. First, because there are just so few of them left, relatively speaking. Second, because evangelicalism is such a different animal than it once was. Third, because so many of those traditions have themselves been colonized by what I’d call “the evangelical style”: diminished emphasis on denominational distinctives, increased emphasis on the musical and emotional experience of Sunday morning worship, etc., etc. Just as many Methodist churches in the south are called “Metho-Baptist,” given how similar they are to their Baptist neighbors, so confessional Protestant churches are effectively post-Protestant in America, just to the extent that they have become “properly” evangelical. This is what Bruce McCormack once called “the slow death of the Protestant churches” in North America.
On the other hand, I’m not actually persuaded that “Stone-Campbellites, the PCA, Dutch Reformed, Southern Baptists, charismatic megachurchers” “have something important in common” that outsiders see, a “common sensibility” evident to the naked eye. A good number of the twentysomethings I know from those groups wouldn’t recognize the others as Christian. I don’t mean they’d condemn them to hell. I mean they would be, and are, utterly alienated by them, almost as if the latter belonged to some other religion altogether. This very alienation was what prompted my first post about “CoC catholicity”: I have never found anything meaningful in common with evangelicals, in terms of spiritual sensibility or theological instincts or sacramental practice, and it took me a long time to figure out why. Furthermore, the very things that annoy and repel nonbelievers and mainline liberals about evangelicals also annoy and repel them about Catholic and Orthodox Christians. (Consider the constant confusion in elite journalism about “evangelical Christians” and pro-life activism. Catholics are constantly written out of the story by classifying them under the unsavory category of “evangelical.”)
Here’s my proposal. As a capitalized noun, “Evangelical” is used with greatest clarity when applied to the kinds of Christians, churches, and communities I’ve been describing, not Presbyterians and Anglicans. But as a lower-case adjective, “evangelical” may be employed with much wider scope, whether modifying conservative mainliners or even Catholics (as in George Weigel’s usage). This sort of distinction would recognize that, at this point in American history, “Evangelical” names a tribal identity, membership in a large and unruly family only partly defined by religious belief or practice. In that sense it is a sociological designation, not a theological one. Whereas “evangelical” as an adjective modifies the mode of any kind of Christian at all, including those who are unconnected to the frontier, undefined by biblicism, unattracted to ahistorical presentism, or otherwise governed by centralized authority, historic confessions, and sacred traditions.
Whether or not that distinction is a satisfying proposal to others, it’s how I aim to use the terms, and why.
