A more poetic Bultmann?

Have evangelicals been justified in claiming C. S. Lewis as one of themselves? Or is an emerging group of literary and theological scholars on the right track in thinking him a kind of poetic Bultmann who is much more the friend of the theologically unorthodox than the orthodox?

Before this group began to write, the experience of discovering Lewis had formed an almost archetypal pattern in the lives of countless evangelical students of the past three decades, so the dissenting view would call for a new and violent step. First in the traditional pattern of appreciating Lewis came a period of gnawing doubt about the whole Christian faith. Could such a doctrinal system be true when its adherents were so defensive about questions and so indifferent about aesthetics? The teaching of the church seemed in impossible conflict with its practice.

Into this dark night of the soul swept whatever happened to be the student’s first Lewis book. That led inexorably to the others. And what he or she found there was not so much answers—though they were wonderful beyond all hope—but more, an irrefutable demonstration that at least one Christian mind actually existed. The apologetics were bracing, the essays mind-expanding; the fiction put flesh on the bones of doctrine, and made them live.

And more impressive still was the wholeness and sanity of that mind, the very unflinching orthodoxy and uncompromising morals that had seemed so barren only months before. Here was a mind that simply refused to tolerate the wedges modern man has driven between Faith and Reason, and between both and Imagination. In Lewis’s works those fair sisters walked hand in hand once more.

From Lewis’s own work the typical student went on another step to devour what Lewis’s acquaintances said about him. It was true of him that “Sownynge in moral virtu was his speche, and gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche.” But it was likewise true that “Cristes loore and his apostles twelve He taughte, but first he folwed it hymselve.” The most difficult unity of all—that of theory and practice—had in some measure been achieved.

The final step in the pattern has been, for many who have taken it, the most baffling. From friends and sympathetic interpreters such as J. R. R. Tolkien and Clyde S. Kilby, the student moves on to evaluations of Lewis’s work by the scholarly world in general. And what emerges there is both puzzling and disturbing. It is not so much opposition to Lewis—that we would have expected—as a categorical denial that the Lewis we had come to know and love could ever have existed. An entirely different portrait begins to take shape, and the great champion of historic Christianity is replaced by a more or less neo-orthodox existentialist who merely sounds like a fundamentalist to the naive.

Chad Walsh, for example, in his foreword to William Luther White’s Image of Man in C. S. Lewis (1969), delineates an alternative pilgrimage undergone by some readers of Lewis. Walsh’s pilgrimage begins in much the same way as the one outlined above, but it proceeds to the uneasy fear that Lewis is too conservative, too well-liked by “fundamentalists,” a fear that “the very brilliance of his writing was at the service of a backward looking way of facing the primal questions.” Lewis is salvaged for Walsh by the realization that “he practiced a highly sophisticated use of language, metaphor and myth in particular.” Enlightened men can still read Lewis because he is really “a more poetic Bultmann … attacking with radical consistency any attempt to box God up in the language of formal logic or static theology.” So the wedge between Faith and Reason is safely back in place, and we can relax. Lewis is one of us modern men after all.

The wedge must go back between Reason and Imagination, too. This is the implication of W. Fred Graham’s argument in the Christian Century, “Fantasy in a World of Monochrome: Where C. S. Lewis Continues to Help.” He says Lewis’s nonfiction is not helpful, and that the argument for God’s existence in Mere Christianity (for reasons unexplained) “simply does not work.” Yet, though the rational and doctrinal base has been discarded, the imaginative work can still help modern man in his search for meaning.

R. J. Reilly, in his Romantic Religion: A Study of Barfield, Lewis, Williams, and Tolkien (1971) has a different method of liberalizing Lewis, but he achieves similar results. Reilly sees the theosophist Barfield as the intellectual key to understanding the Inklings, and he interprets Lewis’s thought in the light of Barfield’s, despite the fact that their friendship consisted of a running argument they jovially called “the great war.”

Thus, Lewis’s frequent assertion that human logic was a participation in a cosmic logos is taken to imply agreement with Barfield’s notion of the evolution of consciousness. Therefore, Reilly reads the story of Orual in Till We Have Faces as if it set forth Lewis’s view of the history of the religious consciousness of the human race, rather than as a picture of the ultimate choices facing each person. The result is to deemphasize Lewis’s characteristic stress on individual salvation and the weighty choices on which it depends, a theme that appears throughout his work but is treated with special poignance in the Narnia books. (“ ‘My sister Susan,’ answered Peter shortly and gravely, ‘is no longer a friend of Narnia.’ ”)

Reilly thus presents a C. S. Lewis who is much less clearly an ally of evangelical Christianity than the Lewis we thought we knew. He admits that Lewis appears at first glance to be a conservative, and even that he saw himself as a conservative defender of historic Christianity. But Reilly nonetheless thinks the real Lewis is the one he sees through the theosophical lens of Barfield. This Lewis reinterpreted the original Christian myth because, again, like Bultmann, he saw it as “no longer sufficient to carry the tenor of religious truth.”

A 1976 book-length study of Lewis that has attracted much attention is Paul Holmer’s C. S. Lewis: The Shape of His Faith and Thought. Holmer’s book is baffling, partially because of his clumsy and turgid prose, and partially because he seems to keep missing the point of the Lewis we thought we knew. For Holmer, Lewis’s significance lies in his refusal to view every person or every piece of literature as one instance of some general theory about life or reality. Rather, Lewis came to each experience and formed an ad hoc explanation based on a “competence” he had attained from personally tasting many such experiences. Holmer admits that “in the heat of controversy” Lewis does “say extraordinarily strong things about the objectivity of law” in moral and spiritual things; but he supports his notion of Lewis’s antipathy to general statements from the passage in Mere Christianity where Lewis says that the fact of the Atonement, rather than a particular theory of how it works, is what the Christian convert is asked to accept.

Holmer is right in his analysis of Lewis’s “range of competencies,” which allowed him to relate humanely to a wide range of literature and to life; no one would disagree with it. But the Lewis who was opposed to general theories per se, and not simply to a large number of them that happened to be wrong, is new to us. With its disparagement of general and universal statements, Holmer’s portrait injects a great deal of fuzziness and equivocation into those frequent attacks on all forms of relativism that had so endeared Lewis to the evangelical camp.

The general tendency of all this criticism is to loosen in various ways the connection between Lewis the rational defender of a stubbornly conservative orthodoxy and Lewis the poet and myth-maker. This appears most clearly in a recent article by Lewis’s old friend Owen Barfield, “Some Reflections on The Great Divorce of C. S. Lewis.” Barfield insists that there were, in fact, two Lewises: the “bonny fighter of the Socratic Club,” and the mythopoetic Lewis; and that there was “something like a great divorce between the two.” Once this divorce is granted, Lewis becomes much easier for modern man to tolerate. He can by this means protect himself from the offense of the gospel in Lewis, for there is nothing to stop him either from dismissing Lewis’s moving stories as mere Bultmannian demythologization or from praising his statements for their “competence” rather than for their truth.

We as evangelicals, on the other hand, need to examine this new portrait of Lewis carefully. We have long hailed Lewis as a strong ally in the battle against liberalism, and we must now question whether we have done so legitimately. One of the arguments reiterated by critics of the school we have been sampling is that we have done so naively, if not unfairly. We wrong Lewis, they would insist, by viewing him as an evangelical, fundamentalist, and so on, because Lewis’s thought cuts across the normal categories of liberal and conservative.

It is a great temptation simply to dismiss the “liberal Lewis” as the product of liberal and semiorthodox wishful thinking—and there might be some justification for such a move. The liberalizing critics certainly feel the embarrassment of having to admit that a man as intelligent and cultured as Lewis was could also be as orthodox as he said he was. They must therefore find some method to explain away that orthodoxy. So they call upon all manner of rationalizations: Lewis used language in a sophisticated way; he didn’t really mean all the horrible things he said!

While this analysis of the liberal critique contains an element of truth, it remains a fundamentally inadequate answer, precisely because conservatives are not above a kind of wishful thinking of their own. It is easy for us also to gloss over Lewis’s deficiencies, and to view him as a more consistent champion of evangelical orthodoxy than perhaps he really is. And if the “real” Lewis does turn out to be more on our side than on that of our opponents who would also like to claim him, it still may be true that we need to read him more critically than some of us have done.

There is, for example, no point in our trying to pretend that Lewis believed in the inerrancy of Scripture. We rejoice that his outlook combined unabashed supernaturalism, an antipathy to all forms of relativism, and a healthy skepticism concerning the methods and results of modern higher criticism. But a problem arises: we are not used to finding this combination in people who do not accept the evangelical view of inspiration with all its implications, so it is easy to assume that Lewis’s usually consistent mind would have naturally moved from these attitudes to the dominical and apostolic teaching concerning the nature of Scripture and come out at the right place. It didn’t.

Lewis summarizes his view of Scripture in the chapter on “Scripture” in Reflections on the Psalms. The Bible is human literature—all kinds of it—that has been taken up into the service of the Word of God. There has been a “Divine pressure” upon it, its writers have been “guided by God.” This makes these books different from other literature, and gives them their authority; but God, as far as Lewis can tell, did not see fit to protect the writers from all error. “Naivety, error, contradiction, even (as in the cursing Psalms) wickedness are not removed.” The result is a Bible that is not the Word of God in the sense that any passage, taken in isolation, will necessarily give “impeccable science or history” (though Lewis thought the historical passages in the Bible were pretty accurate). It is rather “the overall message” of the Bible that gives us the Word of God. Lewis apparently never noticed the discrepancy between this rather fuzzy view of biblical authority and the attitude toward Scripture of his Lord, who ascribed the authority of his heavenly Father not only to the “overall message” but also to the jots and tittles of the Word of God.

This raises a difficult question. Why do American evangelicals tend to overlook in Lewis the deficiencies they resist among themselves?

One reason is that Lewis was a European, and we are generally more tolerant of doctrinal imperfections in Europeans. A high view of Scripture is so rare among them that anyone who thinks the Bible is trustworthy at all is hailed as a prodigious instance of potential reformation.

Further, two people may hold positions which, in isolation, look identical; but these positions may have an entirely different significance when viewed in the context of the orientation and tendency of two different minds. We may surely attach some significance to the difference between a man who, starting as an atheist, has come almost all the way to full orthodoxy, and one who has just begun the process of backing away from it. Though the positions held may be the same, the first case is cause for rejoicing and the second is ground for concern.

But most important, we forgive Lewis’s doctrinal imperfections because his heart was so obviously in the right place. Though his own view of Scripture fell short of inerrancy, he consistently lived and wrote as if the New Testament, at least, was for all practical purposes inerrant. He wrote to Dom Bede Griffiths (Letters, p. 242) that “Pascal does contradict several passages in Scripture and must be wrong.” The ease with which he makes the equation is instructive. We never feel that his failure to affirm inerrancy was motivated by the desire to squirm out of having to believe some hard teaching of Scripture that was out of tune with a modern world of which he was desperately trying to be a part. By contrast, some of the “evangelicals” who have come out against inerrancy in recent years seem to have gone out of their way to convince us that this does in fact describe their real motives for defecting.

But the issue raised by the liberal critics we sampled earlier—whether Lewis was “essentially” a conservative or a modernist—cannot be settled simply by pressing or excusing his failure to affirm the inerrancy of Scripture. Lewis’s loyalty to true Christianity and his value to the conservative cause lie in his statement and defense of positions even more basic than inerrancy. It was Lewis’s belief in the exclusivity of truth and his brilliant defense of it, that finally make nonsense of all attempts to reinterpret him as a modern man at heart. It is this that aligns him with conservative evangelicalism against all the watered-down forms of so-called Christianity that have tried, in various ways, to accommodate the gospel to modern relativism.

Lewis was very stubborn and very straightforward about the unbridgeable chasm that is fixed between truth and falsehood. He was always ready to appreciate truth wherever he found it, and to value even pagan sacrifices as a true, though corrupt vision of man’s need for atonement. But he harbored no illusions about the real and horrible possibility of being fatally wrong.

In his most popular book of nonfiction, Mere Christianity, he insists on the one affirmation that the liberal and semiorthodox of our day are least willing to make: that being a Christian means “thinking that where Christianity differs from other religions, Christianity is right and they are wrong.” Period. He writes to Dom Bede Griffiths, “your Hindus certainly sound delightful. But what do they deny? That has always been my trouble with Indians—to find any proposition they wd. pronounce false. But truth must surely involve exclusions?”

A passage that must really stick in the craw of modern theologians is Lewis’s analysis of liberalism in The Great Divorce, which points out that if truth is exclusive, “sincerity” cannot have the ultimate deciding value that moderns attribute to it. A liberal theologian is shocked to discover that he has been sent to hell on grounds of apostasy. He tries to defend himself to the spirit of his redeemed friend this way: “When the doctrine of the Resurrection ceased to commend itself to the critical faculties which God has given me, I openly rejected it. I preached my famous sermon. I defied the whole chapter. I took every risk. The point is that they were my honest opinions, sincerely expressed.”

His friend’s reply is instructive, and deserves to be quoted extensively: “Let us be frank. Our opinions were not honestly come by. We simply found ourselves in contact with a certain current of ideas and plunged into it because it seemed modern and successful.… When, in our whole lives, did we honestly face, in solitude, the one question on which all turned: whether after all the Supernatural might not, in fact, occur? When did we put up one moment’s real resistance to the loss of our faith?… You know that you and I were playing with loaded dice. We didn’t want the other to be true. We were afraid of crude salvationism, afraid of a breach with the spirit of the age, afraid (above all) of real spiritual fears and hopes.… We reached a point where we no longer believed the Faith. Just in the same way, a jealous man, drifting and unresisting, reaches a point at which he believes lies about his best friend: a drunkard reaches a point at which (for the moment) he actually believes that another glass will do him no harm.… But errors which are sincere in that sense are not innocent.”

No one has ever written a more damning or a more accurate critique of religious liberalism in all its forms; and the foundation on which this critique is erected is Lewis’s insistence that in religious matters as in all others, if truth exists apostasy must be possible, and that if truth is real, apostasy must have consequences.

Thus to call Lewis a “more poetic Bultmann” because he expressed Christian truth in original and creative ways, using sophisticated language and myth, is the height of absurdity. If truth is exclusive, if you are an absolutist and not a relativist, and if Christianity is true, then that truth is to be continually reexpressed and reapplied, but it is never to be tampered with: it “is what it is and what it was long before I was born and whether I like it or not” (Mere Christianity). It is objective, transcendent, and unchanging, and we—unlike Bultmann—are to accommodate ourselves to it, and not vice versa. Whether we like it or not.

These are not merely isolated passages. The theme they express underlies and informs everything Lewis wrote. It is this very opposition to relativism, this very insistence that truth is truth, that makes possible the high seriousness with which Lewis approaches the issues of salvation and damnation. It is this absolute refusal to compromise or accommodate the truth that finally aligns C. S. Lewis with fundamental, evangelical, orthodox Christianity against the modern world, and that enables him to write lines like these from his sermon, “The Weight of Glory”: “It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations.”

Who was the real C. S. Lewis? We may say with confidence that he was the Lewis whom conservatives have long known and loved and whom liberals find embarrassing and wish to explain away. He is also, perhaps, the Lewis to whose doctrinal deficiencies we have sometimes blinded ourselves. But above all, he is the Lewis who has helped countless numbers of us on the way to a destination where all joy will be fulfilled.

G. Douglas Young is founder and president of the Institute of Holy Land Studies in Jerusalem. He has lived there since 1963.

How will American evangelicals respond to the storms without and the stress within?

The mid-eighteenth century was in many ways a high point of European cultural development. It was the age of absolutism in government: centralized, absolute monarchy held sway—usually more or less benevolently—in all of Europe’s great nations. It was the age of rationalism and enlightenment: the philosophers were confident that mankind was coming of age and could be freed from the arbitrary tutelage of revelation and church authority. The 1770s—the decade preceding the French Revolution—marked a kind of turning point. In the world of letters, everything was in ferment. In German literature, this is known as the period of Sturm und Drang—storm and stress. Two who would shortly become great figures, Goethe and Schiller, were already on the scene, but they had not yet developed the maturity and sense of direction that within a few years would enable them to exercise such a great influence upon the spirit of an entire nation.

The history of the church and the history of literature seldom run parallel, and it would be artificial to try to draw a close comparison. But perhaps as we view American Christendom in the 1970s, and particularly American evangelicalism, we can borrow the metaphor from German literature in the 1770s and describe it as our period of storm and stress. Storm comes through outside forces, forces that once were favorable or neutral, which have begun to buffet evangelicalism in this decade. The stress, we may say, is from within, as once mild tensions, too long unresolved, threaten to fragment evangelicals’ thinly-glued unity, and as new leaders, new institutions, and new movements seek to be heard in an arena where the stars have hardly changed in three decades.

A Political Tempest In The Theological Teapot

During the 1950s and 1960s, biblical Christianity seemed to gain a new, or at least a renewed, standing in American life. The nation’s political leaders willingly accepted the homage and the exhortations of evangelical leaders at prayer breakfasts and even in the White House itself—but, unfortunately, without making any corresponding commitment to honor biblical values. In 1968, the election of Richard Nixon to the presidency brought to the White House a man who wanted it known that he was on intimate terms with the most prominent of evangelicals. While it is true that Nixon never publicly confessed faith in Jesus Christ, he clearly sought identification with Christianity, and especially with conservative Protestantism and its values. But the brief summer of political splendor that evangelicalism appeared to enjoy waned rapidly as Richard Nixon’s sun went into total eclipse. Evangelicals who had endorsed him and basked in his warmth were embarrassed and chagrined; the whole evangelical movement has succeeded only with some difficulty and with less than total success in disentangling itself and its reputation from this man who, it was thought, would at least restore morality if not Christianity to public life.

After the intermezzo of Gerald Ford’s presidency, candidate Jimmy Carter, who publicly identified himself as an evangelical, won the nation’s highest office. He was the first evangelical in this century to do so. Yet thus far, to some observers, Carter has failed to demonstrate any significant Christian influence on the federal administration, in spite of his noble-minded human rights campaign and unquestioned personal integrity. The disillusionment of many over the President’s performance has cast a shadow on evangelical hopes of influencing American life from the top down.

While evangelicalism was thus failing to win the leadership of America’s political institutions, despite its momentary appearance of success, America’s political machinery was beginning to make definite challenges to evangelicals and their religious institutions. Indeed, the new evangelical involvement in politics sometimes furnishes the pretext for an expanded governmental interference with religion and the churches. Evangelical institutions, for decades virtually ignored by mass media and by government, began to come fully into their own only in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Billy Graham’s mammoth evangelistic crusades gave national visibility and won fairly favorable attention in the news media for phenomena that have existed since before the founding of the Republic: mass evangelism and the revival. In CHRISTIANITY TODAY evangelicalism created for itself an organ of opinion that won respect in the U.S. and abroad.

Evangelical theological institutions, and to some extent evangelical colleges as well, began to match—and in some cases even to outshine—their liberal and secular counterparts. Such growth naturally commanded increasing attention from our “guardian democracy,” which began to ask itself whether the evangelical renaissance might not imperil its new secular doctrine of relativistic pluralism. This attention has increasingly caused government to attempt actively to tax, to regulate, and even to administer independent evangelical institutions, as well as those of other religious communities. A number of colleges, forced by unmanageable economic and political developments to depend on federal aid, have adulterated or abolished their Christian ties. Life for those who have not done so is being made more difficult. Even schools that have chosen to accept no federal aid, such as Grove City College (Pennsylvania) and Columbia Bible College (South Carolina), have been subjected to vigorous governmental efforts to influence their policies through one or more Health, Education, and Welfare, or Labor Department rules, programs, or regulations.

Religious journalism, in effect once subsidized by favorable second-class postal rates, has been seriously challenged by vast increases in those rates. Hitherto independent evangelical social service groups, such as hospitals and children’s homes, have been subjected to increasing interference by ostensibly impartial and well-meaning bureaucrats. In individual cases such interference may have merit; but it is increasingly burdensome to evangelical institutions of all kinds and the long-range effect will be to weaken and perhaps to suppress them. As the 1970s draw to a close, it is apparent that a full-scale battle between independent evangelical institutions—and those of other religious groups as well—and an all-encompassing government may be shaping up. The question is whether evangelical institutions will be allowed to maintain both their function and their integrity, or whether one or both will be sacrificed to government’s administration of all activity that takes place within its frontiers.

The growing concern of evangelical Christians for an influential voice in shaping the public policies of a nation in which they constitute a large and vital element is leading to increasing governmental sensitivity, and to governmental efforts first to intimidate, and subsequently to regulate or even to silence the evangelical voice. Evangelicalism may thus have moved from the apparent conquest of the highest peak of American political power—with the election of Jimmy Carter as President late in 1976—to a situation where evangelicals are virtually muzzled, and that within the space of a few short years. Such governmental pressure and potential muzzling is, for the moment, only dimly perceptible; but evangelicals must be alert to it, for while the machinery of government moves slowly, it moves inexorably, and it can crush anything that stands in its way.

Stress: Institutions

Although American evangelicalism boasts a number of institutions with longer histories, many of its present most important and vital institutions were founded or reorganized in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s: the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, the National Association of Evangelicals, CHRISTIANITY TODAY, Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, Campus Crusade for Christ, and several new or restored seminaries, to cite but a few. At least three significant evangelical seminaries were founded or reorganized in the 1960s: Reformed Theological Seminary (Jackson, Miss.), Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. In the 1970s, these institutions have been occupied in consolidating their gains and trying to maintain a clear course through perilous waters. The pressure for change and growth is increasing within existing evangelical institutions; new ones are no longer multiplying at the same rate.

During the 1960s, the aim of most evangelical seminaries and colleges, and of many evangelical publications, was to demonstrate academic integrity and to win intellectual acceptance. Today, as seminaries are filled with students whose desire seems not so much to prove their academic respectability as to win some significant spiritual battle for Christ, there is increasing pressure on these institutions to show that what they teach is practically meaningful and can be utilized effectively in the service of Christ. During the 1950s and 1960s, many evangelicals were zealous to demonstrate to the world that their institutions can be as good as secular or liberal Protestant ones. Now it is becoming increasingly evident that matching the secular world’s standards—if that is ever possible, given evangelicalism’s smaller internal resources—is not enough. The question increasingly asked of evangelical institutions by the young Christians who have flocked to them in such numbers is not, “Are you competent?” but “What difference do you make?”

People

How will American evangelical Christendom respond to the storms from without and to the stress from within? In 1979, there are fewer new faces among evangelical leaders than among representatives of almost any other social group. Most, if not all, of the leaders of 1979 were already famous in 1954. Most were young then, and all are 25 years older now. So many of the outstanding figures of evangelicalism in 1979 are near or even past retirement age that a fairly sweeping change of top leadership in the near future seems inevitable. Yet among second and third generation evangelicals standing behind the present leaders there are few who have gained the standing or displayed the gifts that would make them evident favorites to advance to the first rank. Perhaps in retrospect this will appear to have been a failing of the pioneers of evangelical resurgence. It may be that in the 1940s, as evangelicalism began to move, its leaders foresaw too short a timetable, thinking either that substantial victories could be gained or that the Lord would return before their own careers drew to a close. In 1979, however, as it becomes increasingly evident that the history of evangelicalism, like that of the church as a whole, must be marked by endurance as well as by bursts of enthusiasm, the way in which the mantles of evangelicalism’s Elijahs will pass to the shoulders of successors has not yet been established. Since many of the great battles of the 1950s and 1960s have been won by the present leaders—such as Carl F. H. Henry’s titantic struggle for the intellectual standing of evangelicalism—it is possible that the next generation of leaders will emerge out of a new series of conflicts and challenges that now, at the end of the 1970s, is beginning to mark evangelical life.

Battles

During the earlier decades of the evangelical resurgence, American evangelicalism directed its greatest effort toward the struggle with other strains of Christendom. It struggled with liberal Protestantism in the effort to establish itself as the authentic, intellectually respectable heir of Reformation Christianity, while having to fight a kind of rearguard action against some older fundamentalists, asserting that intellectual openness and social concern did not signify spiritual weakness. In both situations, evangelicalism was struggling to assert its rightful place within Christendom. It had not yet occured to many evangelicals that the existence of Christendom itself might be in question.

During the 1960s in America, liberal Protestantism, which typically had been at one with conservatism in supporting traditional morality and national, even jingoistic values, suddenly veered sharply in the direction of social and political criticism. Evangelicals suddenly found themselves standing almost alone on the front line of socio-political conflict, defending what had once automatically been assumed to be general American values. Not wishing to join the negative critics of America and the “American way of life,” many evangelicals now see themselves in the awkward position of trying to preserve certain national and social values while at the same time retaining the integrity to correct them. During the 1960s, hardly anyone doubted that America would survive as a nation, going on from strength to strength. Evangelicals only wanted to have something to say about making it a good nation. By the 1970s, not only liberals, but conservative Christians, too, were asking whether America could survive, and even whether America ought to survive.

Now, at the end of the 1970s, evangelicals face the question of determining whether, and to what extent, our society and its institutions must be defended, to what extent transformed or abolished. It is Francis Schaeffer, American-born and trained but for 30 years a resident of Switzerland, who is challenging American evangelicals to choose with care the new battles they will fight. In his sweeping, panoramic analysis of Western intellectual and spiritual history, How Shall We Then Live?, Schaeffer argues that Western civilization has lost its biblical, Christian base and is in the process of collapse. In his new series, Whatever Happened to the Human Race?, Schaeffer shows how this collapse is already resulting in the wholesale destruction of human dignity and freedom, and threatens, in effect, the abolition of man. He also charges that evangelicals, as they have become established in American society and have come to enjoy personal peace and affluence, have tacitly condoned this abolition by their failure to take action against it. Yet Schaeffer’s desire clearly is not merely to analyze evangelicalism’s failures, but to repair them. He ends his presentations by calling on audiences to do everything in their power to change the present situation of evangelical inaction, including, “if necessary, even removing our leaders.” Perhaps, then, out of the need to face new challenges and to fight new battles in the 1980s, will come the new leaders that evangelicalism still lacks.

Self-Definition

As we have said, evangelicals in the 1960s were fighting for their right to be recognized by the broader church and by secular America. In the process, they never questioned their own identity. In the 1970s a challenge to evangelical identity arose within evangelicalism itself. Originally, evangelicalism simply and straightforwardly defined itself over against both liberalism and neo-orthodoxy by straightforward acceptance of the absolute trustworthiness and authority of the Bible as the Word of God. Vis-à-vis separatistic fundamentalism, evangelicals distinguished themselves by greater openness on social and cultural issues and by greater readiness to engage in dialogue with liberals, but not by any significant doctrinal differences. By the later 1970s, however, as liberal Protestantism shifted from claiming to be the custodian of American culture-Christianity to being its critic—perhaps even its executioner—evangelicalism has found itself more and more identified with that culture-Christianity. Evangelicals are perplexed by the fact that while they do not want to destroy “Christian civilization” in America, they can hardly accept it as it is. When liberal Protestantism in effect abandoned its own battle with secularism and materialism, it left evangelicalism exposed on its left flank and, to pursue the military metaphor, evangelicalism appears as a whole to have shifted leftward—theologically and politically—in the effort to defend liberalism’s abandoned positions from militant secularism. This leftward shift has exacerbated the old tension between evangelicalism and extreme fundamentalism. The fundamentalists saw in the ongoing broadening of evangelicalism’s cultural base a corresponding weakening and adulteration of its claimed doctrinal integrity. Consequently, many evangelicals felt compelled to reaffirm their doctrinal base.

Evangelicalism, then, is being forced to ask itself whether it can continue much longer to express its own doctrinal integrity in the rather general terms that sufficed in the past or if it must consciously sharpen them in the direction of insistence on the inerrancy of Scripture. While many evangelicals consider the whole question of inerrancy divisive and wish it would go away, probably many more see it as a necessary, if socially awkward, duty to reaffirm the trustworthiness and indefectibility of the Bible as the Word of God in the strongest and least ambiguous language possible. This is a question that was not faced with such sharpness by the early pioneers of evangelicalism; whether they should have faced it then is now beside the point. There seems today to be no way to evade it. The probable consequence of the inerrancy dispute will be a paring away from the evangelical body of some conservatives who cannot accept the term and its meaning, and a consequent numerical weakening of the evangelical camp. The greater internal strength resulting from such clarification, nevertheless, may and should more than compensate for the numerical loss. Schaeffer asks whether evangelicalism can tolerate in its fellowship those who are unwilling to condemn abortion on demand; the inerrancy group is asking whether it can tolerate within its leadership those who will not affirm inerrancy. Such questions as these are awkward, and confront many middle-of-the-road evangelicals with dilemmas they would rather not face. But they are upon us in 1979, and the way they and others like them are answered will probably determine the character of evangelicalism in the 1980s.

Storm And Stress—Then What?

The storm and stress of German literature in the 1770s, to return to our metaphor, was followed by its greatest flowering. We cannot predict what political and social transformations may follow the storm and stress decade of American evangelicalism. But we may hope that these pressures, rather than crushing or crippling evangelicalism, will enable it to emerge stronger, richer, and more faithful than in the past. Evangelicalism is in flux. Let us hope and pray and work that the onslaughts from without and the tensions from within may combine to produce a fresh generation of gospel-believing Christians who are able to stand in the new conflicts no less firmly than the evangelical pioneers who have stood in those battles now passing from the arena of the present onto the pages of history.

G. Douglas Young is founder and president of the Institute of Holy Land Studies in Jerusalem. He has lived there since 1963.

Exploding some myths while clarifying some facts.

American evangelicals, accounting for one-fifth of the total population, representing 31 million of the nation’s adults, or 44 million if projections are extended to include the entire population, are clearly a powerful religious force in society. As a highly religious group dwelling in the midst of a society that as a whole is also highly religious, they share many of the same background characteristics. American evangelicals are most likely to be women, from the South, middle-aged, slightly less well-educated, slightly less likely to be college graduates, more likely to go to church, slightly less affluent, but better givers to church and religious causes. Like their fellow citizens in general, they believe in God, who observes their actions and rewards them and punishes them. They derive considerable consolation and comfort from their belief in God. They share with many nonevangelicals a common faith in the divinity of Christ; and in spite of their adherence to traditional beliefs, they are also subject to the secularizing influences of society: significant proportions among them are divorced or separated.

The CHRISTIANITY TODAY—Gallup Poll supports the legend that, when youth finish high school, they become church dropouts; but when they get married and have a baby, they drop back in. Evangelicals are least well-represented in the 18 to 24 age group; they are nearly caught up with the general profile at age 25 to 29 and remain at 4 percent above the general public from age 30 on. For evangelicals, at least, it can hardly be said that the churches are full of older people. The strong showing of evangelicals in the middle years (30 to 50) promises well for the leadership of the church in the eighties.

At over 60 percent of the total, women are clearly the backbone of the evangelical church (compared to 53 percent of the populace). A representative cross section of evangelicals will have half again as many women as men. One cannot help but wonder what will be the effect of this in a democratic egalitarian society if women are not allowed to exercise leadership in the church.

The preponderance of women in evangelicalism throws additional light on the age level of evangelicals. One would certainly expect this large representation of women to give evangelicals much more than their share of the aged in view of women’s seven-year longevity over men. Such is not the case, and we may expect that when the 30- to 50-year-olds reach 50 and above, the overall percentage of evangelicals within the general populace will increase accordingly.

Slightly more evangelicals are married, but an especially high percentage are married among the orthodox and conversionalists (82 percent vs. 67 percent of the general populace). In part, this, too, is a reflection of the high percentage of evangelicals in the 30 to 50 age group. Yet evangelicals, in spite of their strong commitment to the family and their stand against sexual laxity are only slightly less likely to be divorced (5 percent vs. 7 percent for the general populace).

As might be expected from the fact that evangelicals are more likely to be women and married and less likely to be aged 18 to 24, fewer evangelicals are in the “work force,” (50 percent vs. 61 percent for the general populace). They also tend to be less well-represented in business, the professions, and in manual labor, but are at the normal level engaged in clerical jobs and in the sales force. The sex and age of evangelicals are also reflected in their salary level. Fewer evangelicals are found in the highest bracket (above $20,000 annual income) and slightly more in the two lowest brackets (lowest brackets ($0 to $10,000). It is interesting that to $10,000). It is interesting that those who are both orthodox and conversionalist evangelicals are significantly more likely than those either merely orthodox or merely conversionalist evangelicals to be represented in the highest income brackets. If only men are considered, moreover, evangelicals turn out to be an exceptionally well-heeled group.

In the evangelical profile with which this section began, the careful reader may have noted with surprise the significant omission of white Anglo-Saxons. This study should lay to rest the myth that whites are more likely to be evangelical than blacks. Just the reverse is true. Among orthodox evangelicals blacks are represented in exactly the same proportion as whites, while among conversionalist evangelicals blacks are almost twice as likely to be evangelical as whites. Overall, blacks make up approximately 10 percent of the population but 15 percent of the evangelicals—half again as likely to be evangelical as whites.

That the South is more evangelical than the East will surprise no one. Indeed, the South, with 43 percent of the evangelicals but only 28 percent of the national population, is nearly three times as evangelical as the East (17 percent of evangelicals, 27 percent of population). Both West and Midwest rank clearly behind the South with evangelicals not quite holding their own in either area. In the West conversionalist evangelicals do better than in the Midwest, while orthodox evangelicals do better in the Midwest than in the West.

Evangelicals are Democrats, better than three to two, over Republicans. They are also more likely to be Republican (27 percent) than the general populace (20 percent), but less likely to be independent or to have no political affiliation.

The CHRISTIANITY TODAY—Gallup poll also explodes another myth of long standing—the suburban captivity of the evangelical church. This misconception probably arose because of a few affluent and highly advertised suburban churches. Actually, the suburbs, with only 16 percent of the evangelicals but 27 percent of the populace, are least evangelical. The inner city, thought by some to be barren wasteland as far as evangelicalism is concerned, does surprisingly well, with somewhat less than one-third of the evangelicals spread among the same portion of the total population. By contrast, nonmetropolitan cities (under 50,000), small towns (under 2,500), and rural areas contain the highest percentages of evangelicals, with half of all evangelicals residing in them (vs. 42 percent of the populace).

Evangelicals are slightly over-represented among those who completed only grade school and slightly under-represented among college and university graduates. This, no doubt, is like characteristics of regional, racial, and income patterns of evangelicals.

Evangelicals are a churchly people. Disillusionment with the organized church is apparently not characteristic of the American people as a whole, but it is certainly not true of evangelicals; 92 percent of them are members. Well over a third attend church twice or more per week by contrast with only 4 percent of the nonevangelicals. When it comes to attendance at least once weekly, the nonevangelicals do better. Their average jumps to something under one quarter, but contrasts with 82 percent of evangelicals who attend church regularly on a weekly basis.

While 34 percent of the general population claim to have had a powerful religious experience that changed the direction of their lives, nearly four-fifths of the evangelicals make such a claim. To Lutherans and many others in the “mainline” denominations, it will be no surprise to learn that one-fifth of the evangelicals do not claim such an experience and that a majority of 57 percent describe their experience as not sudden but gradual. Of all who ever had such a life-changing experience, including the general public, a full 95 percent maintain that it is still important to them, and 79 percent describe it as an identifiable turning point, which included asking Jesus Christ to be their personal Savior. Despite occasional highly advertised “converts” who later drop out, it is apparent that overall the dropout rate is exceedingly small. Conversions that bring a change in life direction do stick—in 95 percent of the cases.

Evangelical giving habits are amazing. Nearly half of all evangelicals (46 percent) tithe (give one-tenth or more of their income to the church or religious causes) by contrast with only 8 percent of nonevangelicals. Two-thirds of the evangelicals give more than 5 percent of their income to religious causes, whereas only 19 percent of nonevangelicals do so. And evangelicals share not only their money; they also share their faith. Three times as many evangelicals (44 percent) as nonevangelicals (15 percent) share their personal faith at least weekly with someone from a faith other than their own. By contrast, only one in six nonevangelicals do so. Still, more than 10 percent of the evangelicals never share their faith with anyone of a different faith, although the conversionalist evangelicals, as might be expected, do better on this point than do the orthodox evangelicals.

In spite of their belief in Christ and their full acceptance of biblical authority, evangelicals display no clear understanding of Christ’s deity. By definition, of course, they acknowledge that he is divine and repudiate the suggestion that he was merely a good man. But the barber on the street in ancient Constantinople had a sharper understanding of the deity of Christ than does the average evangelical today.

Approximately three-fifths of the evangelicals maintain that their greatest personal need is salvation or closeness to God, with physical well-being a very poor second (14 percent) followed by the need for love and affection and a need for purpose and meaning in life (at 9 percent each). Except for the clear-cut priority of salvation and closeness to God, the felt needs of the general public are amazingly similar. One quarter of them designate physical health as the first need but for them, too, salvation represents a prominent felt need (21 percent listed it first), with love and affection and purpose and meaning in life following in the same order as for evangelicals. This certainly explains both the ready response of Americans to invitations to turn to God or to come to Christ; it also shows why the ministry of physical healing becomes an effective accompaniment of some evangelistic outreaches.

Given the fact that evangelicals already comprise one-fifth of the population, contribute much more generously to the church than nonevangelicals, understand their own faith better, are far more ready to speak out to others about their faith, and place high priority on winning others to their evangelical faith, it is hard indeed to escape George Gallup’s conclusion that evangelicals will have much to do with how religion shapes up in the United States during the 1980s.

Where Do We Go From Here?

The CHRISTIANITY TOADY—Gallup Poll produced results that were both predictable and surprising with respect to evangelicals and the American public. Probably most significant is that so many are now in fact evangelical in their beliefs. What was inconceivable 25 years ago is now a reality by the grace of God. It is not the strength, virtue, or brilliance of evangelicals that accounts for this present ascendency. It is that in God’s timing the all too obvious failure of liberalism has coincided with a hunger for basic morality and a revitalization of fundamental Christianity. This has created a day of unprecedented opportunity for evangelicals to present the gospel to the world in which we live as well as to effect substantive changes for good within our own society. We must now show the world that evangelicals care and know how to translate theology into compassonate action.

The first section of the poll covered the rather broad area of theological beliefs in America. We have looked so far at only some general topics representing the whole. In later issues, CHRISTIANITY TODAY plans to move into more specific areas of theology and in greater detail in order to explore the best course of action to follow in the years ahead. We will begin by looking at the charismatic phenomena and the Holy Spirit, followed by an analysis of American attitudes toward the Bible and what place biblical knowledge plays in our society, coupled with a look at the educational task of the church in that light. Next will come an in-depth study of the American clergy, and finally, a careful analysis will be provided of American church life.

As the last two decades of this century begin, it is clear that God has given evangelicals an opportunity to do something. The CHRISTIANITY TODAY—Gallup Poll is suggestive of where we are, and this series of articles is intended to show where we ought to go from here.

A nation that believes rightly but …

The American people as a whole continue to be the most openly religious and traditional of all the Western technological societies, a fact frequently noticed by European visitors. It is not only that they profess religious beliefs that surprises some, but that their beliefs actually affect their lives. Throughout their history Americans have been religious, and the trend continues unabated; it is now more in evidence than ever.

The CHRISTIANITY TODAY—Gallup poll shows that 94 percent of the general public believe in God or in a universal spirit that in their mind functions as God. Only 4 percent explicitly deny the existence of such a Being. All this is significant, given three factors: First, American educational philosophy has rigorously tried to exclude any notion of God from the structure of its understanding and for over 50 years has given our children a steady diet of secular instruction. Second, the Supreme Court’s 1964 ruling that religious instruction and prayer must be kept out of the schools, in the eyes of many further secularized our educational system. Third, the “death of God” theology that flourished briefly in the 1960s, had, as most of us suspected, no visible effect on the religious beliefs of the American people as a whole.

In spite of all these influences, few people were moved to abandon their faith in God. The pronouncements of some social analysts, and some prominent churchmen as well, that America has become “post-Christian” and too sophisticated to need God anymore turns out to be grossly inaccurate. The fact is, the vast majority have always believed in God or a Supreme Spirit who rules and watches over them, and this is not affected by the amount of education a person has. It does not follow, as some erroneously assume, that the more education a person has the less likely he is to believe in God. The precise nature of the Supreme Being is another matter, but very few need to be convinced that he is there. Eighty-seven percent of those who say they believe in God find comfort in their belief, and about half say it gives them great comfort; so belief is not merely an abstract conviction: it is a source of strength in the midst of our increasingly complex and bewildering society.

The question that needs to be probed further is to what degree has this religious profession actually affected the moral structure of the American people. When asked to state their beliefs about Jesus Christ, only 1 in 10 say they do not believe him to be God or the Son of God, but only a great religious teacher. More than 8 out of 10 say they believe Jesus Christ was divine in the sense that God worked through him and that he was the Son of God, or that he is both fully God and fully man. There seems to be a bit of confusion in the mind of the average person as to precisely who Jesus is (a fact not in evidence among the clergy, who are very explicit on this point); but that he was not simply another human being is believed by an overwhelming number of American people, with 39 million adults (out of an estimated 155 million total) willing to confess that Jesus is fully God and fully man. Jesus continues to be The Man, par excellence, the One who eludes our definitions.

We Americans may not know exactly who he is, but we know who he is not: he is not just another one of us. As such, he is the subject of our pop musicals, hit songs, and the number one “Hero” to many college students, according to another recent poll. The need for evangelicals to say clearly who Jesus is—fully God and fully man and the only Lord and Savior of mankind—thus clearing up the confusion, is urgent, and essential to a truly biblical and consistently evangelical view of Christianity.

A Genuinely surprising fact that emerged from the poll is that 45 percent of the general public say personal faith in Christ is the only hope of heaven; (only 10 percent do not believe in life after death). This shows in a striking way how pervasive basic Christian doctrine is in American society. Almost half of the American adults are clear on how to get to heaven and are quite willing to say they believe it to be true. This does not mean, of course, that all of these people have truly made an ultimate commitment to Christ, but it does show how widely disseminated the gospel message is. It also shows how drastically wrong the pessimistic forecasts of a decade ago were when we were told that America had outgrown Christianity and was ready to substitute a secular society or a secular church for the fundamental truths of Christianity. The gospel, when clearly preached, will always have appeal to mankind, because the power of God is in it. The church must never forget that no matter how the fashions change, nor what the experts say, people are at least willing to listen to the truth.

In line with the belief that personal faith in Christ is the only hope of heaven, one out of every three say they have had a religious experience or awakening that changed the course of their lives, and 95 percent of those who had that experience say it involved Jesus Christ and that it is still important in their everyday lives. Of these, 79 percent are willing to call it an identifiable conversion experience in which they asked Jesus Christ to be their personal Savior. Individuals who are skeptical about the value of such experiences might well ponder these facts. We could wish that such experiences were translated into more ethical action, but the importance of such a religious phenomenon can hardly be dismissed as of no consequence. Indeed, the poll shows that the attitudes and behavior of those who have had such an experience differ in many respects from those who have not had a religious conversion experience.

Belief in biblical moral standards also continues to be high, with more than 8 out of 10 saying the Ten Commandments are still valid for today. Once again, the all too hasty sellout by some professional churchmen and theologians to the “postmodern” view of situation ethics about 15 years ago has not been so influential as we feared. At least in theory, the American people have rightly rejected a Watergate type of morality and general moral relativity. This holds true on college campuses as well. Student demand has led colleges and universities across the country to teach over 2,000 courses in applied ethics, with bioethics leading the way. There is also great interest in the ethical implications of law, business, journalism, public policy, engineering, and the social sciences. To our shame the general public and our young people are reminding us that slick systems of morality that fail to confront issues of right and wrong squarely and courageously are not going to be tolerated. These moral convictions also provide the base on which an evangelistic appeal can be made. People do have a sense of right and wrong and they can be reached on that basis.

The church as a formal structure within American society continues its gradual increase in importance. In 1950, 57 percent of the general public were church members; that increased to 63 percent by 1958, and today it is 67 percent. These figures do not reflect the precise place of the church in the public’s lives, however. Americans only attend church weekly or more on the average of just over one in three, with about half attending monthly or more. The other half only attend infrequently (such as on religious holidays) or not at all. When confronted by a spiritual or religious problem, 64 percent say they would seek out a member of the clergy. When testing their religious beliefs only 1 in 10 say they would go to the church first. Most prefer to go to the Bible or to the Holy Spirit directly.

All This seems to say that Americans are more convinced than ever that the church has a place in our society, but they are not sure the church is meeting all of their religious needs. The Protestant heritage of biblical authority is still quite strong. The organized church, however, needs to take a careful look at itself to determine why membership continues to increase, while the actual attendance continues to go down. It could well be that their trumpet is blowing an uncertain sound and what is needed is a return to fundamental biblical doctrine. This is borne out by the fact that it is the conservative churches that are growing fastest, while the liberalizing denominations are moribund. The United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. and the United Methodist Church for years have been losing between 75 and 100 thousand members a year, while most evangelical and Pentecostal groups are growing.

The most impressive statistic concerning the general public, though by now no longer a startling one, is that 20 percent of the adult Americans answer to the description of evangelical. Since this group will be discussed at length in the next section, nothing more needs to be said here except to observe that 31 million adults (or 44 million, if the entire population is under consideration) is a sizeable portion of our society. Few evangelicals would dare to claim that the day of the evangelical has arrived. Yet evangelicalism is growing and many evangelical teachings and attitudes still penetrate major portions of the population. Barring unforeseen factors, evangelicalism is almost certain to increase its influence during the next decade. Thus, evangelicals must make their influence felt in society at large now, or lose an opportunity that might not come again for another hundred years, if ever.

What are the religious beliefs of the American people? Which specific Christian doctrines do they accept and which do they reject? How does all this affect their social and political and ethical views? How does it affect their conduct? Who are the evangelicals? Where are they to be found? How pervasive are evangelical beliefs in American religious life? How do evangelicals’ convictions affect their conduct?

In seeking answers to these and related questions, CHRISTIANITY TODAY commissioned the Gallup organization and its affiliate, the Princeton Religion Research Center of Princeton, New Jersey, to poll Americans aged 18 and over. In accordance with its customary procedures, Gallup staff interviewed a representative sampling of the American population in scientifically selected localities. Interviewees responded to questions about their personal beliefs, practices, and attitudes. The findings of the poll are now tabulated and fill a bulky volume of 272 pages.

The hardest problem faced by the editorial staff in organizing the poll was how to determine who are evangelicals. After several weeks of serious consideration as to how this matter should be handled in the poll, the editor took the resulting definition home to his wife and discovered that by that definition she wasn’t an evangelical. In the end, the staff settled for two groupings, the first of which, for want of a better term, we called “orthodox evangelicals” and the second, “conversionalist evangelicals.” The magazine’s editors warn that neither of these should be construed as meaning that the term is the equivalent of “true Christian.” They simply represent segments of the Christian community which for purposes of this study are described as “evangelical” on the basis of adherence to a specific set of standards and beliefs.

Obviously, a poll cannot probe into an individual’s personal relationship with God; and, no doubt, many with quite orthodox views may have no truly Christian experience. Likewise, individuals may be quite orthodox in their view of Scripture but far from evangelical in their view of Christ or their understanding of the Christian doctrine of salvation.

With such cautions vividly in their minds, the editorial staff placed in the “orthodox evangelical” group all who identified themselves as holding that (1) Jesus Christ is the divine Son of God, or is both fully God and fully man; (2) the only hope for heaven is through personal faith in Jesus Christ; (3) the Bible is the Word of God and is not mistaken in its statements and teachings; and who (4) read the Bible at least once a month; and (5) attend religious services at least once a month.

Obviously, the staff did not mean to suggest that an illiterate person or a person immobilized and unable to attend church could not be an “orthodox evangelical.” On the other hand, they were polling twentieth-century Americans, and it seemed important to include some religious activity in a test of orthodox evangelicals.

The conversionalist evangelicals include those who read the Bible, attend religious services at least once a month, and who have had a particularly powerful religious experience that is still important to them, which they understand as a conversion experience that included an identifiable point at which they asked Jesus Christ to become their personal Savior.

Naturally, the overlap between “orthodox evangelical” and “conversionalist evangelical” was large, but by no means complete. Many Lutherans, for example, were completely orthodox but had no “identifiable conversion.” Many Methodists had an “identifiable conversion” experience of personal faith in Christ as Savior but did not pass the test of orthodoxy. On most items, however, the two groups are so closely in agreement that we found it practical to speak of “evangelicals” as a single unified group. Significant divergences between “orthodox evangelicals” and “conversionalist evangelicals” will always be noted.

We believe the results of this poll are very significant. So much so, that CHRISTIANITY TODAY has determined to devote a series of articles during 1980 to exploring the implications of this information for American Christianity. We are convinced that this information is not only significant for the understanding of American culture and of American religion. It is also immensely important for the understanding of American evangelicals who now constitute a sizable portion of the American public and an increasingly important segment of this nation. We believe, too, that the CHRISTIANITY TOADY—Gallup Poll is vitally important to evangelical agencies as they seek to win people to the gospel, or, for that matter, to anyone who seeks to influence the American public religiously, socially, or politically. During the coming months, CHRISTIANITY TODAY plans to analyze this immense body of data and report to its readers on a regular basis its significance for their Christian witness and their ministry.

How The Public’S Religious Beliefs Shape Up

Ten Findings that Will Surprise You

• One of every five adults 18 years old and over—31 million persons—is an evangelical.

• Almost one in five adults (19 percent) considers himself or herself Pentecostal or charismatic, but of those 29.4 million persons, 23.5 million have not spoken in tongues.

• Better than one-third of the adult population have had a life-changing religious experience. For 50 million people, this experience involved Jesus Christ, and for 39.5 million people this was a conversion that included asking Christ to be personal Savior.

• Almost half—69 million people 18 and over—are hoping to go to heaven only because of their personal faith in Jesus Christ.

• More than eight of every ten persons believe Jesus Christ is divine.

• Sixty-five million adults believe the Bible is inerrant.

• Fifty million go to the Bible first to test their own religious beliefs.

• Seven out of ten adults believe the devil is either a personal being (34 percent), or an impersonal force that influences people to do wrong (36 percent).

• Half of the adults in the U.S. believe God created Adam and Eve to start the human race.

• A whopping 84 percent—more than eight of every ten people—believe the Ten Commandments are valid today.

On the other hand, the public ran pretty much true to form on these religious matters:

• More than 100 million adults are members of a church or synagogue.

• Almost everyone (94 percent) believes in God or in a universal spirit.

• Nearly 40 million go to church weekly and 17 million go more than once a week.

• Only 11 percent read the Bible every day, compared to 10 percent who read it weekly and 7 percent monthly. Thirty-seven million adults never read the Bible.

• Fewer than three in ten correctly identify, “Ye must be born again,” as the words of Jesus to Nicodemus.

• Fewer than half (42 percent) can name at least five of the Ten Commandments.

• Barely over one-tenth of the public tests religious beliefs first by what the church says.

Who Are The Evangelicals And What Do They Believe?

As One Might Expect, According to the Christianity Today-Gallup Poll:

• More of them are female (62 percent) than male.

• One-fourth of them have completed college, while nearly one-fifth have a grade school education only.

• Nearly half (43 percent) live in the South, about one-fourth in the Midwest, and of the remainder, 15 percent live in the West and 17 percent in the East. Half live outside of metropolitan areas; nearly four in ten live in towns with less than 2,500 people.

• Roughly one in ten are professional or business people, while one-fourth do manual labor. By income, they are evenly divided between low, middle, and upper brackets, although 16 percent earn less than $5,000 per year. Fifteen million are not “working”—such as housewives, students, retirees.

• Nearly three-fourths are married; only 5 percent are divorced or separated. Nearly half have children in their households.

• Slightly less than half read the Bible every day; about one in five reads it weekly; about one-fifth read it two or three times a week—in short, approximately 85 percent read it at least weekly.

• They believe, by almost an eight to one margin, that God created Adam and Eve to start human life.

• Almost all (92 percent) are church members and nearly half give beyond the 10 percent tithe of their income to churches and religious organizations.

• More than one-third attend church at least twice per week, and eight out of ten attend church at least weekly.

• One out of five talk to others about their faith daily or more often, while nearly half do so at least once a week.

On the other hand, some unexpected facts were uncovered about evangelicals:

• Nearly four million of the total 31 million are Roman Catholics.

• More than one-third consider themselves Pentecostal or charismatic Christians. Of these, three-fifths (62 percent) have never spoken in tongues.

• Only six in ten can correctly identify, “Ye must be born again” as the words of Jesus to Nicodemus.

• Only half can name five of the Ten Commandments.

• Fifty-seven percent say their life-changing religious experience was “gradual,” not sudden.”

• Almost three in ten do not think of the devil as a personal being.

• More than one in five live in large cities (pop. 5000,000 or over), but only 16 percent live in the suburbs. Three in ten live in central city areas.

• About half again as many are Democrats as are Republicans. (This finding perhaps surprises northern evangelicals, who tend to identify Christians as Republicans.)

• Nearly eight out of ten evangelicals affirm to having had a life-changing religious experience. Of these, only 2 percent say this experience did not involve Jesus Christ, and less than 1 percent say this experience is not important now.

An interview with George Gallup, Jr.

George Gallup, Jr., and the art and science of poll-taking are synonymous all over the world. His expertise has been called on by those in the communications media as well as by leaders in business, education, politics, and religion. CHRISTIANITY TODAY interviewed Gallup, to answer questions about him and his work that readers may have in mind as they read the results of the poll in this issue. Our questions have also sought to delve into Gallup’s own interpretation of the data, so that an outsider’s perspective can be added to that of our writers.

THE EDITOR

Question: How pervasive is the influence of evangelicalism today?

Answer: I really feel that from the variety of survey evidence, the 1980s could be described as the decade of the evangelicals, because that is where the action is. The fact that 20 percent of all adults today are evangelicals—and their influence certainly extends beyond that number—and that we find in our surveys of teen-agers that they are more evangelical than their elders, all indicate that the movement will gain in strength. Given the fact that evangelicals give more of their time and money to their churches than do nonevangelicals, that they are more likely to want their pastors to speak out on social and political issues, and that they are more ready to speak to others about their faith, it is hard to escape the conclusion that evangelicals will have much to do with how religion shapes up in the U.S. in the 1980s. If evangelical ministers are able to mobilize the large number of evangelicals, their effect on the shape of the 1980s could be profound.

Q: Are evangelicals really beginning to have an impact on, say, the denominations as a whole?

A: Yes, because evangelicals are becoming more mobile, more “up-scale.” They constitute a higher proportion of opinion leaders and, therefore, they are having a greater influence. Also, in terms of speaking out on issues of public policy, evangelicals are having more influence.

Q: On the question of public policy, are there any indications that anybody in Congress, or among government leaders, is taking evangelicals more seriously?

A: I can’t answer that, really; I just don’t know.

Q: One of the impressions one gets from the CHRISTIANITY TODAY—Gallup Poll is the strength and vitality of evangelicals. Do you see any weak points?

A: Basically, I really feel strongly that the evangelical movement will grow because not only are youngsters leaning more as a whole in that direction, but also because the clergy are speaking out on public issues and getting involved not so much in social protest as in social action in a day-to-day kind of involvement. So, I don’t see any evidence that would make it go in the other direction. But there are some danger signals in terms of the things to watch out for. There are people, of course, who feel that the evangelicals’ approach is simplistic. There are strong objections to style, that some evangelicals come on a little too hard. There is a reaction, obviously, to certain evangelical television shows, and that is a potential problem. I think it is important for evangelicals who are witnessing to be very good listeners.

Q: Following through on your point about witnessing, do you see the country as being ripe for evangelism and church growth, or do you think hardness is setting in?

A: No, I really don’t think there will be a hardness setting in. I think young people are very receptive; and if the approach is right, they will be caught up in the spiritual surge. I know there are lots of reports that there is a trend toward hedonism and self-indulgence—self-centeredness in the “me” generation—but there are also very strong trends toward spirituality, if you will: wanting to get deeper, desiring to make a commitment, and desiring to help society. We can see that in their career choices. I don’t think there’s a turning away or a hardness, really. I know in the mainline churches there is some reluctance and lack of understanding of open expressions of piety, and a little bit of nervousness about it; it is just an uncomfortable feeling. That kind of thing needs to be broken down.

Q: By way of summary, would you add any other guidelines for evangelical action in the 1980s?

A: Speak out on issues, particularly close at home issues, such as alcoholism (from what we can tell in terms of lives lost, in terms of death, it would have to be the number one social problem), drug abuse, and reaching unemployed youths, too, because that is the basis for the crime problem. In witnessing, listen—that is an important part of it. Continue to do what is already being done; it is obviously meeting with great success. Person-to-person, practical Christianity has to have a real influence on society.

Q: Switching to your own faith for a moment, what is your church affiliation?

A: I am Episcopalian, a member of Trinity Episcopal Church in Princeton, New Jersey. I was with a smaller Episcopal church for about 15 years, where I was lay reader, sang in the choir, and taught Sunday school.

Q: You know how we struggled to come up with a definition of an evangelical for this poll. Do you fit any of those categories, or what label do you prefer to use for yourself?

A: I am evangelically oriented. I feel very strongly that a conversion experience is absolutely focal, whether it is gradual or a sudden growth experience. I feel it is extremely important to witness; if people feel this way and have had this kind of experience, it doesn’t make any sense not to tell others about it and let them share the same kind of joy. I would say that I tend to be orthodox. In terms of creation, for example, I accept the authority of the Bible, but I would stop short of a literal interpretation.

Q: Regarding one of the major findings of the CHRISTIANITY TODAY—Gallup poll, do you really believe that one of every five people you might meet on the street is an evangelical?

A: Yes, I do, because in terms of people’s belief in the literal interpretation of the Bible, we find half of all Protestants at least say they do. Now, quite frankly, there may be some problem with the wording of the question. That is probably one of the most difficult that we dealt with. What they may be saying in almost every instance is that they accept the absolute authority of the Bible, and I am sure they believe in miracles and all. Yes, I accept that finding; it doesn’t surprise me.

Q: As a pollster, how can you tell whether a person’s answer is an opinion or a real conviction—or can’t you tell?

A: You have to rely on the person himself. You can ask how strongly he feels, and you can look at his answer to other questions, and if he knows what he is talking about. You can’t do that so much in the area of religion, but there is a good deal of validity in people’s appraisals of themselves, because nobody knows a person but himself and God. That’s why an important question to ask is: How important is religion in your life? Regardless of the dimension of the answer, it is either very important or it isn’t.

Q: On a religious poll like this, as opposed to a political poll, what checks do you run periodically to stay on top of things?

A: We include the question, “How important is religion in your life?” (that’s a paraphrase) usually several times during the year. We also ask about church attendance and about church membership. We try to update our belief items whenever possible. In a given year we may ask 30 or 40 questions related to religion.

Q: Religious persons generally, and often evangelicals particularly, have been accused of taking little or no interest in things pertaining to this world. What do you have to say to this point?

A: Americans want a vocal church on spiritual, moral, and ethical matters. People of all faiths want churches and other religious organizations to speak out. However, there is a sharp divergence of opinion among members of various denominations and faiths when it comes to political and economic matters. This, of course, should not surprise us.

Interestingly, Catholics and evangelicals are most inclined to favor the churches speaking out on political and economic issues, as they are most in favor also of churches trying to persuade legislators to take certain actions. It can be assumed from the CHRISTIANITY TODAY survey results that there will be a continuing controversy in the 1980s on the key issue of whether or not the nation’s clergymen should take a stand on current political and economic issues. However, evangelicals appear to be of one mind and want the churches and clergymen to speak out.

Q: Does the CHRISTIANITY TODAY poll generally fit those other polls?

A: Whenever possible, we use trend wording to develop trends, but the CHRISTIANITY TODAY poll was the most comprehensive study we have ever done in the area of religion, because it included interviews with the clergy, too. I would say it is even bigger than the study we did for the Catholic Digest in 1952 and again in 1965. We did one for Ladies’ Home Journal in 1948. I don’t want to review them all, but there were several—Look, and so forth. We also did a big one a year ago on the unchurched American.

Q: Would you say that the validity, or accuracy, of the poll really depends on constant checking of both your demographics and your replies?

A: Absolutely. One of the best tests, of course, is matching up all our preelection survey results with actual election results. That’s really the acid test of a poll’s methodology. But there are internal checks all the time, of course.

Q: The same checks you use on the political polls are applicable to any other poll?

A: Absolutely.

If you have seriously heeded “The Chicago Call,” then no doubt you are deep into a study of the church fathers and looking for ways to share this wealth with others.

Have no fear, for Tradition House is here! We have prepared an exciting visual aids kit that will make the fathers and the councils as real and important as next month’s payment on the church building.

Heading the list of visual assistants is a quaint puppet named Aunty Nicene. She is an old lady with a broom, and she is forever digging up ancient things and making them look new. She is aided by several animal puppets, among them Augustine the Hippo and Polly Carp the fish. (Since the fish is an ancient Christian symbol, we felt it was important to include Polly.) There is also a family of aquatic birds known as the Ortho Ducks. They flock together and lament the fact that too many things are new. Occasionally one of them will dive to the bottom of the lake (not supplied in the kit) and come up with something he claims is a pearl.

Aunty Nicene has a pet basset hound who helps to teach people dogmatic theology. She also has a pet feline who handles the catechism. This delightful evangelical zoo is bound to create interest and excitement, even among those in the church who don’t brake for pets.

The kit also contains a set of priceless slides depicting the church fathers at work in those early centuries. A special feature is a long-playing record of ancient chants and songs, played on copies of the original instruments. On the record are new arrangements of songs by Bernard of Clairvaux, all tastefully done by Bill and Gloria Gaither. Add to these items a generous assortment of candles, a tin of dust swept from ancient ruins, several parchments, and three paint-by-number icons, and you can see that the kit is a bargain.

Tradition House is proud to offer this valuable teaching tool to the waiting public. Be the first in your town to lead your church forward—or is it backward? I keep forgetting. Well, at least you’ll be going somewhere!

EUTYCHUS X

Articulate

Roland Miller’s lead article “Renaissance of the Muslim Spirit” (Nov. 16) was the most articulate and succinct overview of Islam I have ever read. He has highlighted both facts and moods in the shifting, often contradictory tides of the Islamic renaissance. My only suggestion would be to add a reference concerning the impact of the Crusades on the Muslim outlook toward the West and toward Christianity in general.

PHIL PARSHALL

International Christian Fellowship

Wheaton, Ill.

Objective?

I wish that Ed Plowman’s news article “Is Morality All Right?” (Nov. 16) had been done with at least the semblance of objectivity.

No question that he is talking about some folks who aren’t altogether forthright in their intentions. But why not edit the piece to remove some of his more glaring prejudices? For example, what group would not “reject the accusation that they are reactionaries hopelessly mired in negativism”?

While I don’t agree with Ed’s politics, I must say that I am absolutely against the right wing religious-political alliances he refers to in his article.

WILLIAM KEMSLEY

Editor and Publisher

Backpacker Magazine

Bedford Hills, N.Y.

While it is good that Christians are speaking out on the issues, there is the danger of determining if one is a Christian based on his liberal or conservative political views rather than on the evidence of the grace of God in his life. “By their fruits ye shall know them,” Jesus said. Not if one votes conservative do we know if he or she is a Christian.

ROBERT SILLING

Smithfield, Va.

Muddies the Issue

I appreciate your editorial about the less than enthusiastic response to Francis Schaeffer’s new film series, Whatever Happened to the Human Race? (“Beyond Personal Piety,” Nov. 16). However, I must ask whether you muddy the issue with words like, “We are not advocating absolute rejection of all abortions,” and “Whether or not a one-day fetus is fully human life, it is at the very least potential human life.”

While trying to agree with Schaeffer’s premise, aren’t you qualifying and weakening your own stand with phrases like this? Abortion must be attacked for what it is and the sacredness of human life must be accepted with no qualifications.

REV. WILLIS SCHWICHTENBERG

Our Savior Lutheran Church

Milford, Ill.

In your November 2 news report on Evangelicals for Social Action (“Stacking Sandbags against a Conservative Flood”), you stated that “The Sojourners and Other Side constituencies tended to disengage from ESA after its 1977 reorganization.”

It is true that most of the staff of both magazines left the board of ESA at that time, but I don’t think our “constituencies” disengaged. Certainly our subscribers have not disengaged. A large part of the ESA membership comes from the mailing lists of the two magazines.

That is because we continue to work closely together. Both magazines have allowed ESA the use of their mailing list, The Other Side has recommended that its readers join ESA, we share office space with ESA, one of our coeditors (Al Krass) served a term on their board, and three of our four coeditors belong to ESA.

You also imply that one reason some of us disengaged from ESA was that we wanted to build radical alternatives and ESA wanted to change the system. That is inaccurate. The disagreement was over how radical a change we should call for, not over whether to do it by building alternatives or by working within the system.

But even then the disagreement was mild. We did not feel that ESA was making a bad choice. We just felt that we were called to something different from what they were called to.

JOHN F. ALEXANDER

Coeditor

The Other Side

Philadelphia, Pa.

Well-chosen Word

The editorial “The Indispensable Christian College” (Nov. 2) and the three articles on the Christian college were excellent presentations of the rationale for and impact of the Christian college today. Indispensable is a word well chosen to describe its role.

As I read these articles, I was struck that “Christian day school” could have been substituted for the words “Christian college” in almost every instance. It struck me how inconsistent some of us can be. When it comes to college education, Christian education is indispensable, but when it comes to our young children and our teenagers, secular education is somehow supposed to satisfy the need to develop in our children a Christian world-and-life view.

PHILIP ELVE

Editor

Christian Home and School

Grand Rapids, Mich.

Your editorial was very helpful. Could it be that one of the significant reasons enrollment in Christian colleges has increased above the national average is that financial aid for students has dramatically increased?

Federal and state student aid has increased 1,500 percent over the past ten years. Studies have shown that 40–50 percent of the students attending private colleges would have attended a state-subsidized institution if it were not for public assistance in the form of student aid.

Without federal and state financial assistance for students over the past 15 years, the Christian college would not be nearly as healthy financially as it is today. At many Christian colleges the public dollars students bring with them amount to 25–30 percent of the operating budget.

HAROLD A. ANKENY

Director of student aid and government relations

George Fox College

Newburg, Oreg.

Not by Power

Thank you for David Wells’s article “Prayer: Rebelling against the Status Quo” (Nov. 2). I especially appreciated the call to prayer based on the character of God, rather than the appeals to power so often heard. I too believe that prayer is an appropriate method of rebelling against the evil and injustice that mankind has introduced into God’s world.

KENNETH W. CAMPBELL

Association of Church Missions Committees

Pasadena, Calif.

Sensitive and Honest

I’m so thankful that Gerald Oosterveen’s sensitive, honest, and comprehensive piece “In Support of Parents with Handicapped Children” found a place in the October 19 issue.

As parents of a beautiful eight-year-old daughter who suffered massive diffused brain injury when she was but 18 hours old, my wife and I can attest to the psychological and spiritual turmoil parents of a hurt child experience.

And I have witnessed both intentional and unintentional discrimination toward families with handicapped children by many who should be sources of comfort, strength, and love.

STEPHEN I. KOSKA

Executive Director

Bethany Manor

Downey, Calif.

With this issue of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, we conclude not only the year 1979 but also the decade of the seventies. And what a decade! For evangelicals, the seventies represented greater change than the sixties. Former associate editor H.O.J. Brown assesses the gains and losses of evangelicals during these swiftly moving years.

The pièce de résistance in this issue, however, is the CHRISTIANITY TODAY—Gallup poll, for which we have waited long and eagerly. The poll consists of four main parts: (1) the religious views of Americans; (2) the religious beliefs and attitudes of evangelicals; (3) the religious beliefs and attitudes of American clergy; and (4) the social, political, and ethical stance of evangelicals.

During the course of the coming year, CHRISTIANITY TODAY will bring to its readers the results of the poll in a series of articles, begun in this issue. The editors will seek to provide some interpretation of the data, but even more they will encourage readers to draw their own conclusions from the facts brought to light by the poll. The first article introduces the poll and provides an initial survey of religious views of the general populace and some significant findings about evangelicals. We expect highly divergent responses. Some will see the doughnut; others, the hole. For example, shall we rejoice because more than half of the evangelicals share their faith with others at least once a month—or shall we weep that 10 percent never share their faith with anyone who is not a fellow evangelical?

“Of what value will all these data be to me?” you may ask. Remember the very Christian words of a well known anti-Christian thinker: “The point is not to understand the world, but to change it.”

In a final article Donald Williams seeks to adjust the halo over the head of C. S. Lewis that shines even more brilliantly than at his death.

We have made Christmas into a time of ballyhoo. In a modern “Christian” community Christmas is a fun time, an occasion when the family foregathers. Preeminently it is the festival of children. The kids visit stores with Father Christmas in attendance and hang up their stockings (or pillowcases) with gusto. Stores reap their annual harvest as people prepare to exchange presents. And when the great day comes it is celebrated with the consumption of prodigious quantities of food and drink. A visitor from a distant planet might be forgiven for concluding that Christmas is the festival of fun and self-indulgence.

Now, I have no objection to a festival of fun; there is far too much sadness and sorrow in our modern society. Anything that can lift our depressed spirits and introduce some genuine enjoyment into a sad old world is to be welcomed. It is the misunderstanding of a great Christian festival that troubles me. Christmas is too great and too important to be caricatured as no more than a fun time.

Traditionally, the church has seen things very differently. She has regarded Christmas as a time to think of the meaning of the Incarnation, the coming of her Lord in lowliness and deep humility. So solemn and significant is this that the church has set aside a whole month to get ready for it. The season of Advent (from the fourth Sunday before Christmas until Christmas Day) is meant to be a solemn season of preparation.

During Advent the church has thought it important to give emphasis to two great thoughts: Christ will come again, and Christ will come in judgment. There are other aspects of Advent, but let us think about these two.

Christ will come again. This thought is repeated again and again in the New Testament. I have read that this doctrine is referred to on an average of once in every 13 verses from the beginning of Matthew to the end of Revelation. Whether that calculation is exact or not, there is no doubt that the New Testament Christians came back to this doctrine again and again. It is the most frequently mentioned doctrine in the whole New Testament.

For the early Christians, it was wonderful to know that the Savior would return. They were but a little band. And they were confronted by strong forces of evil. Sometimes they were imprisoned for their faith, and there were martyrs among them. But the final victory would not lie with their tormentors; it would lie rather with their God and Savior. So they looked with eager longing for the day of his coming, the day when the kingdom of this world would be the kingdom of their God and of his Christ (Rev. 11:15). That day stood for the decisive overthrow of evil. It meant the triumph of good and of God.

It is extraordinary how the church has trivialized this great doctrine. Some of its members have argued that it was all a mistake. It arose, they have said, out of the unreal expectations of the early church. The first Christians expected that Jesus would return within their own lifetime, and the fact that he did not do so is held to discredit the whole doctrine.

It does no such thing, of course. To begin with, it is not at all clear that the early Christians did expect the Lord’s return quite so soon. They remembered the words of Jesus that he did not know when the coming would be (Mark 13:32). And if he did not know, how could they?

Sometimes Paul is brought in to bolster the argument. His words, “we who are alive, who remain, will be caught up” (1 Thess. 4:17), are said to prove that he thought that he would still be living when the Lord came. But by parity of reasoning, 1 Corinthians 6:14 shows that Paul thought he would be dead: “God will raise us up through his power.” Paul never claimed he would be alive at that day and he should not be quoted as though he did.

Neither the fact that the coming did not take place in New Testament days, nor the fact that it has not yet occurred, affects its truth. It is still in Scripture and it is still needed, for it expresses the precious truth that the evil we see in the modern world will not triumph finally. In the end, Christ will return and sweep it all away. This is a truth we cannot live without.

Evangelicals have often put their emphasis instead on particular views of the millennium. They have discussed the relative merits of pre-, post-, and a-millennial views. Such discussions are important—but they are not as important as the main fact. Christ will come again. In our world this great truth demands continued emphasis.

The other part of the Advent emphasis to which I would draw attention is that the coming of the Lord means judgment. He will come to judge the living and the dead. In other words, while the thought of the coming brings comfort as we reflect on the certainty of the final overthrow of evil, it does not encourage complacency. There will be a judgment of all, and Peter reminds us of the uncomfortable fact that judgment begins with the household of God (1 Pet. 4:17). We are accountable people; the coming means that one day we will give account of ourselves to God.

Our generation would do well to give this more heed. We are inclined to pride ourselves on our scientific and technological achievements and to overlook our considerable moral shortcomings. Indeed, we typically deny moral failure. We simply assert that in earlier days people were too straitlaced. We are more enlightened, we think, and our relaxation of standards is a mark, not of moral failure, but of enlightenment.

This is simply a failure to look clearly at what we have done with our world. A few years ago D.R. Davies wrote a book he called The Art of Dodging Repentance. In it, he refers among other things to “the generation of our blood-soaked, cruelty-ridden world.” He further says, “Of all the men who have lived and died since Calvary, we men of today can least pretend to the possession of superior virtue, of a deeper, finer, more responsible morality. The unnumbered millions done to death and the millions condemned to a living death in remote spaces scream denial of any such pretension. No century has more clearly recrucified Christ than the twentieth.”

No fair-minded examination of the world in which we live can deny the justice of Davies’s accusation. We live in a world where it is possible to produce abundance of food and where millions are starving. And while they starve, the governments of the world spend uncountable amounts of money on armaments, while the world (the nonstarving part) goes complacently on its way.

Is Christmas a fun time? The judgment of God stands over our modern world.

Leon Morris is principal of Ridley College, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.