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Growing Pains:
Learning to Love My Father's Faith
Randall Balmer
Brazos Press, 144 pages, $15.99

Evangelicalism has always had two kinds of children, and they tell different stories. Its adopted children find their way into the family through conversion, whether from another faith or from none. Its biological children, on the other hand, grow up in the embrace of Sunday school, family devotions, Bible camps, and Christian colleges. In the terms of Jesus' famous parable, they are the elder son—yet as they try to make sense of the faith they have inherited, they often trade places with the prodigal.

When a young Columbia University historian named Randall Balmer published Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: Travels Through the Evangelical Subculture in 1989, it wasn't hard to see that he was coming to terms with his own story. The book's most affecting chapter, describing the experiences of teenagers "rededicating their lives" to Christ at a summer camp in upstate New York, fairly shone with emotion. Loosing the bonds of academic observation in his imagined account of a late-night meeting around the campfire, Balmer rendered the unforgettable essence of youth-group retreats.

Now Balmer (a CT editor at large) has collected a series of essays that describe, often with wrenching vividness, the struggles of a pastor's son to embrace his father's faith.

Clarence Balmer was a minister, and later a district superintendent, in the Evangelical Free Church of America, a hard-working, devout leader with great dreams for Randall, his oldest child. His son is a master of the telling detail—the three-foot-high pulpit he received as a Christmas present when he was 5, the encouraging words of his father's letters during college and seminary, the pain and silence when Randall chose to leave the path toward ordained ministry and pursue a Ph.D. instead.

In these stories, Balmer describes a world that evangelicalism's adopted children can only glimpse from a distance, one that every evangelical parent will instantly recognize—a world filled with the sometimes unbearable tension between "training up a child in the way he should go" and allowing one's children to discover the faith for themselves. That Balmer is now himself a father, with two sons from his first marriage, lends more poignancy to these essays, which bleed with an honesty that never slips into self-indulgence.

Balmer does not restrict himself to personal narrative. He has strong opinions about the theological and cultural strictures that alienated him from his father's world. Musing on his 15th reunion at his alma mater, Balmer pulls no punches in decrying the school's retreat in the 1980s, as he sees it, into "sectarianism" from the daring intellectual engagements of his student days. In other essays, he indicts evangelicalism for intellectual its "shibboleths" and guilt-by-association grid of theological correctness. Balmer writes, "I became disquieted by evangelical attitudes toward women, which struck me as chauvinist at best, and probably misogynist. In my youthful impetuosity, I came to regard evangelicals' vicious theological controversies as churlish and irrelevant, the intellectual equivalent of shoring up the Maginot Line."

Such criticism will ring entirely true to some readers and sound hollow to others, largely depending on which piece of evangelicalism's patchwork quilt they call home. Balmer has a few shibboleths of his own, borrowed from the world of mainline Protestantism—for example, he relies more than once on the difference between the legalistic "God of the Hebrew Bible" and the New Testament God of grace, a facile distinction that is blessedly losing favor among most scholars.

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January 7 2002, Vol. 46, No. 1