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Like any movement, religious or not, evangelicalism has become embedded in certain aspects of its culture. Because it exists in the contingencies of history, it can't help but tie itself to some cultural themes while fighting others. While there is a socially liberal wing of the movement, evangelicalism has mostly tied itself to the pro-life, traditional family, personal responsibility, suspicious-of-big-government-yet-patriotic part of our culture. Spencer, among others, says that such identification will lead to its collapse. Eventually, perhaps, but not until a large part of our culture rejects such themes. It's hard to imagine that happening in ten years.

While one can describe evangelicalism in this sociological way, in another sense, the movement is an intellectual construct, an attempt to tie a number of individuals and organizations together under one socio-theological banner. This helps sociologists predict voting patterns and marketers determine how to sell products to this group. This doesn't mean there aren't significant commonalities among these people, or that these people don't identify themselves as such. It just means that we might not want to equate the intellectual construct with the complex dynamics at play on the ground.

One of those dynamics is that evangelicals on the ground, in our better moments at least, care less about our "movement" and more about "the evangel," the Good News of Jesus Christ. If the constellations of individuals and groups that have constituted the cultural shape of evangelicalism were to disappear, most of us would quickly move on. Because we know that would hardly signal the end of evangelicalism.

As senior managing editor of Christianity Today — whose masthead reads "a magazine of evangelical conviction" — it would seem that I have a vested interest in the survival of evangelicalism. Yes and no. On the one hand, as a student of church history, I can also predict that cultural evangelicalism will collapse, not likely in ten years, but collapse it will. On the other hand, evangelicalism will never collapse, at least not until the final altar call.

That's because evangelicalism is a word that describes a phenomenon that transcends time and place. British historian David Bebbington talks about it in terms of certain theological emphases and behaviors (crucicentrism, conversionism, biblicism, and activism). I think of it more as a religious mood. It is a spiritual sensibility that includes pessimism about human nature, a longing to be converted from the worst of our selves, mystical moments when Jesus Christ is experienced, a conviction that nothing can be redeemed without suffering and that resurrection is ultimate reality, and a passion to make a difference in the world.

In this sense, the history of the Christian faith is littered with evangelicals, from the apostle Paul to Antony of the Desert, from Francis of Assisi to Teresa of Avila, from the monastic movement to camp meetings, from Beth Moore to Mimi Haddad, from the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association to Evangelicals for Social Action.

Evangelicalism as such will no more collapse than will the ubiquity of sin and the longing for salvation.

To be sure, those of use who identify deeply with American evangelicalism will no doubt be grieved by its death, as least as a subculture — just as we grieve the extinction of other unique subcultures. But we're not in the evangelical preservation society, and I certainly won't join a group that says we need to reform the evangelical movement or else we'll die.

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March (Web-only) 2009, Vol. 53