Evangelicals: Out of the Closet but Going Nowhere?

Are evangelical Christians facing an identity crisis at just the time America is experiencing a religious awakening?

On one hand we see the extended impact of the Graham crusades, burgeoning enrollments in evangelical colleges and seminaries, and the cumulative influence of magazines like CHRISTIANITY TODAY. In addition, we see the stimulus provided by the World Congress on Evangelism and the Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization.

But on the other hand, will evangelical indecision and disagreement nullify these spectacular advances?

We can expect prophecies of such a fallout from certain quarters. Humanists and secularists consign biblical faith to cultural obsolescence. Others see its decline as a corollary to a neo-Protestant renewal of ecumenical fortunes.

But prophecies of an approaching evangelical upheaval come also from within the so-called evangelical establishment. The editor emeritus of CHRISTIANITY TODAY, for example, tells us in The Battle for the Bible that a massive revolt against biblical inerrancy is sheltered by evangelical colleges and seminaries, and that many institutions firmly committed at midcentury to a consistent evangelical faith now have theologically divided faculties and accommodate destructive critical views.

The controversy over the Bible will not go away. It seems, rather, to be building toward a day of institutional upheaval. On one hand, the new International Council on Biblical Inerrancy is preparing a massive program of literature on the subject of scriptural inerrancy. On the other hand, stung by innuendos about false evangelicals, a cadre of mediating scholars from various conservative campuses is preparing a major Bible commentary series that combines extensive biblical criticism with broad evangelical positions.

A second internal controversy surrounds the nature of legitimate evangelical social involvement. Some young evangelicals, critical of secular capitalism or of mounting militarism, have been alienated by a swift branding of their views as communist or socialist. They are turning for support outside the evangelical arena to avowed ecumenical leftists whose theological deficiencies they reject but whose social protest they share. Evangelical leaders themselves are increasingly divided to the point of controversy over the issue of evangelical social concern and political involvement. In the absence of powerful intellectual analysis by institutional leaders and other spokesmen who hold the reins of evangelical power, a restless vanguard tends to divide and subdivide into conflicting camps prone to question each other’s biblical adequacy and even authenticity.

Advances Since the 1950s

This time of ferment is all the more foreboding because of the evangelical movement’s remarkable growth and impact since midcentury. Unbiased observers of the religious scene agree that since 1950 evangelical Christianity has come out of the American churches and tabernacles onto the streets and into the marketplace with phenomenal energy, and it has moved notably beyond radio into television.

Much of this momentum from the subculture to cultural centers came initially through the countercultural Jesus movement, which has now passed its peak, but which made a public issue of many prevalent values. Thousands of high school, college, and university students came to personal faith in Christ despite the fact that radical secularism held center stage on most campuses. While ecumenical student work dwindled, evangelical collegians emerged as probably the most vigorous vanguard in the American religious arena, and they have entered conservative seminaries by the thousands to prepare for pastoral, missionary, and educational careers. Today denominations within the National Council of Churches sponsor less than 8 percent of the U.S. missionary task force.

American evangelicals meanwhile are intensifying their world missionary concern by focusing on the more than 16,000 subcultures where no Christian church yet exists. The charismatic movement has ventured into evangelism by daily television programs centered upon personal experience, along with a sometimes not-so-soft-sell promotion of tongues, multiplied miracles, and even fresh revelation. In the big American cities the churches that thrive tend to be evangelical ministries that involve outreach enlisting a dedicated laity.

The advance of evangelical interests since 1950, however, is not due solely to the young. Evangelical religion also has won a kind of cultural respect even among many Americans whose basic commitments are secular. Evangelical vocabulary has gained public acceptance and intelligibility, even if the mass media secularize and corrupt the terms; the Washington Post, for example, reported, “Down in the hollows of Briar Mountain (Virginia) … the ‘likker’ business is being born again.”

In the face of idleness and theft among employees, many employers welcome evangelical workers, whom they can trust to give an honest day’s work and not to pilfer from their employers. In a day when problems of sex and drugs plague high school campuses, even some parents having no religious preferences are sending their children to Christian schools as a means of preserving family respectability.

The wave of interest in Asian cults (whether Zen, transcendental meditation, or others) has lent to evangelical Christianity a new aura of acceptability among parents who prefer that their teen-agers take up with the Jesus movement or with the charismatics rather than join the Moonies, because these evangelical movements promote love of family rather than alienation, and at least reflect the American religious heritage. Evangelical Christianity has gained wide public acceptance even in a secular society that hesitates to make a biblical religious commitment.

Advances More Apparent than Real

But all this is far from being an effective evangelical penetration of public mood and conscience. A close look at politics, business education, and mass media shows this.

Admittedly, we have an evangelical in the White House—an evangelical with moral sensitivity, whose simple faith in the Bible sometimes motivates bold personal initiatives. But that devotion is not without a theological ambiguity that reflects the doctrinal imprecision found in many professedly evangelical churches where the end results are problematical. Nor is the presidency devoid of concern for personal image and political ambition. For all that, Carter has brought more spiritual lucidity to the White House than many of his predecessors, though his retinue leaves much to be desired.

We must also concede that competent evangelicals are found in the world of business, but their influence registers far more aggressively in personal evangelism than in moral analysis that shapes ideals in the world of economics.

Further, while we have evangelical professors in prestigious colleges, the most influential classroom thrust on mainstream campuses today comes from radically secular humanists who disown supernatural beliefs.

We also have evangelical personalities and programs in the mass media, but the main media mood reinforces the tide of contemporary permissiveness, giving the impression that biblical values are archaic.

Lack of wide-scale penetration of our society by evangelicals suggests that we need to implement two priorities. First, the evangelical movement must place worldly culture on the defensive. It will remain on the margin of national life and public conscience until it does this. Evangelicals need publicly to argue the case that present cultural commitments lead to a life that is neither wise, good, nor happy; that the biblical alternative can offer people and nations a profound vision of truth, fresh resources of moral and spiritual power and a devotion to justice and decency, and that it can give an aimless and declining society new direction and hope.

Second, no less do we need a well-formulated statement of evangelical goals in contemporary society, and an elaboration of strategy and tactics for moving beyond principles to policies and programs that enlist the movement’s resources for specific objectives. This does not devalue the need for increased devotional life. Sustained prayer has gone out of many churches, and is all too meager in the frenetic home life of our century. Further, the great Bible conferences of a generation ago have all but vanished as evangelicals have channeled their energies into this or that cause. We must admit that no extension of evangelical influence will long survive the loss of devotional realities. But devotional vitality of itself will not compensate for the lack of orderly vision and cooperative engagement.

Destructive Trends

In the absence of such evangelical advance, the mounting signs of trouble within the evangelical movement are too disturbing to disregard.

1. Southern Baptists. This largest predominantly conservative denomination in the United States, with 13 million members, not only faces a decline in the number of baptisms, but is now also losing 1,000 pastors from the ministry annually. Further, biblical criticism and theological dilution in many seminaries and colleges have become a denominational issue. Forces either supporting or opposing biblical inerrancy vie for denominational leadership.

2. Authority. Evangelicals must cope with the possibility, according to Harold Lindsell, that not more than a handful of their interdenominational seminaries and colleges remain truly committed to full biblical authority. They must weigh the consequences of the theological dilution of their most prestigious divinity school, Fuller Theological Seminary, and of other evangelical enterprises.

3. Mass evangelism. The Graham crusades continue to garner the largest public display of evangelical cooperation. But they have yet to achieve their initially announced goal of permeating American churches with evangelistic vitality that restores the initiative of community evangelism to the local church. Moreover, the loss in follow-up of those making public decisions remains a matter of deep concern among sponsoring committees almost everywhere. Admittedly, this evangelistic thrust produced a greater evangelical impact during the past generation than any other single element. But it failed to penetrate the core of mainline World Council denominations. Methodists, for example, have lost more than one million members in the last 10 years; one member of the General Council of Ministries sees the prospect of losing another million in the next decade.

4. Mass Media. TV and radio have been used most prominently by charismatic Christians who present the claims of the Bible mainly in terms of inner experience; but they tend to neglect a systematic presentation of Christian truth. Many listeners are confused by the proffered prospect of constant miracle and by the erroneous impression that tongues-speaking validates an authentic Christian experience.

5. Secular education. Public high school, college, and university classrooms remain predominantly committed to radically secular views of man and the world. Many campuses are more open to evangelical Christians not because of their theology, but because in today’s proliferation of religious cults evangelicals seem less extreme. Their views are largely ignored in the current environment of naturalistic evolutionary assumptions about life and the world. The campus, along with television, tends to shape a natural climate of thought that places inherited Judeo-Christian values on the defensive. Parental influence that Protestant and Catholic Christians—and for that matter, orthodox Jews—exert on children in the home is swiftly challenged and eclipsed by community influences.

6. Politics. Evangelicals have no philosophy of social and political involvement; rather, they tend to be cynical about the role of law in society, and pay little attention to governing policies and specific programs that channel political power in support of social righteousness. We can trace this failure to four causes: a tendency to regard evangelism as the only morally significant force in national life; a stream of theology resigned to inevitable historical decline until Christ’s return; a disposition to view world political power as ultimately in the service of Satan rather than God; and a broken confidence in divine providence in the life of the nations.

7. Literature. The surge of evangelical materials that brought a wide new market to religious publishing houses and bookstores seems to be leveling off. To be sure, CHRISTIANITY TODAY is enjoying its highest circulation; its content now serves a broader range of lay readers while it seeks under editor Kenneth Kantzer to maintain the magazine’s distinctive role as a thought-journal. Other magazines, like Moody Monthly, Christian Herald, and Eternity, continue to be widely read. But readers face rising subscription rates due to increased printing and postal costs. They also have less to spend due to inflation and to budget cutbacks rising from a simplified lifestyle. Bonuses often artificially balloon the number of subscribers by temporarily attracting readers with no real sympathy with for magazine.

Tyndale House Publishers, with large overruns of the Living Bible, has been forced to cancel its projected Tyndale Encyclopedia of Christian Knowledge despite an extensive financial outlay. Other publishers have been caught with large overruns of volumes intended to exploit the “born again” motif. Publishing costs are driving up book prices; in inflationary times, scholars are beginning to show interest in books with permanent value. By contrast, for the most part lay theological interest tends to remain more at a popular than an instructional level.

Some book clubs thus simply reconcile themselves to a perpetual demand for accounts of spiritual rescue from a sordid life of drugs, crime, or sexual permissiveness.

Present Strengths that Justify Hope

Despite such lacks, one must not overlook the dramatic, even surprising penetration of evangelicals into areas of personal and public concern.

1. Humanitarian interest. A decade ago few dreamed that evangelicals would ever respond as compassionately to pleas concerning world hunger and poverty as to pleas for evangelism. But in 1978 Christians gave $58 million to World Vision International for famine relief, child care, and development; this equals the amount they gave to the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association for evangelistic purposes. Now the World Relief Corporation of the National Association of Evangelicals with 30,000 related churches is projecting a broadly similar humanitarian program under the aegis of World Evangelical Fellowship, Evangelical Foreign Missions Association, Interdenominational Foreign Mission Association, and the recently integrated Development Assistance Services. World Relief Corporation has already been sharing in the resettlement of refugees with a program that by the end of 1981 may involve one in five NAE churches. Yet for all their commendable funding of Graham Association enterprises and World Vision projects, America’s 40 to 50 million evangelicals averaged less than a dollar per person to each organization.

2. Political interest. A vanguard of young evangelicals has entered the legal profession. Specializing in political science, they are gaining valuable experience at various levels of state and national government, and are increasingly giving leadership. For many evangelicals the right-to-life movement provides a one-issue banner under which to learn the public use of political power for registering moral conviction. But as a whole, evangelical interest in politics involves little more than pulpit exhortation and support of single issues and personalities.

3. Scholarship. An emerging network of evangelical scholars is increasingly gaining recognition in the world of liberal learning that has lost consensus concerning God, truth, and values. Many publishers are issuing scholarly Bible commentaries and major theological works (some are retailing at less than four cents a page); the public media are beginning to recognize these works.

Leading evangelical seminaries continue to funnel competent graduates into mainline universities for doctoral studies. These scholars are particularly moving into linguistic and Near Eastern disciplines, pursuits that nonevangelical scholars seem to be forsaking. Trinity Evangelical Divinity School alone has 26 graduates from its Old Testament department working on doctorates in European and American universities. Some evangelical colleges report a lessening of the Jesus movement outlook that dominated campuses for much of a decade; more reflective engagement is taking hold as courses in philosophy and theology once again command interest. But evangelicals have shaped no great nationally recognized university, and collegiate interests are correlated more and more with evangelistic enterprises than with comprehensive liberal arts learning.

4. Local evangelism. The phenomenon of lay witness for Christ that emerged during World War II has escalated through church growth movements. It has produced many evangelistic programs geared to involve every church member. While the National Council of Churches tried to capture lay activity for social change, evangelicals preserved it for evangelistic outreach. Here lay interest has been particularly valuable since clergymen number less than one out of every 200 American Christians, and thus find little opportunity for personal evangelism. Though even the most active programs for lay witness enlist only a minority of evangelical church members, they have brought remarkable evangelistic vitality to local congregations. Many churches consider lay witnessing the next major framework for evangelical advance.

Focus for the ’80s

Beyond Present Gains to New Achievements

Such encouraging signs suggest the next steps the evangelical movement should take under the Holy Spirit’s guidance. By these steps it can move into broader usefulness in the only world it can serve.

1. Missions: Beyond present missionary gains to untouched major groups. We need to reorient world missionary objectives in terms of geography and ideology. As Ralph Winter emphasizes, national Christians everywhere need help in reaching across cultural lines to the hidden peoples. Just as Wycliffe Bible Translators try to make Scripture available in every known dialect, so the missionary task force must try to evangelize not simply where churches already exist, but especially in cultures yet unreached.

But the call to deal with resistant groups leads us to a concern over resistant forces often linked to such groups. The Christian mission must appraise powerful forces that reorient the national and international loyalties of great masses of people. We must vigorously challenge pagan misstatements of the Western biblical heritage. These emerge in the radical secularism now creating the climate of major universities.

Marxist theologies of revolution and liberation pose another concern. We must patiently weigh the opportunities as well as the difficulties of Christian evangelism in Communist lands. Fully as important, we need accelerated spiritual engagements in the Muslim world, which sweeps more and more African and Asian nations into its orbit and is hostile to the very idea of religious freedom.

2. Discipleship: Beyond lay evangelism alone to responsible church membership. The church growth movement must stress this goal along with evangelism if it is to meet the requirements of biblical discipleship. As people discover their gifts and abilities, they should be given opportunity to use them. Ordinary men and women should help in local church life and leadership. The 1981 American Festival of Evangelism to be held in Kansas City will emphasize such a balance.

3. Apologetics: Beyond experiential emphasis alone to demonstrate that belief in Christ is intellectually credible. Some observers fear that present existential, experiential, and charismatic emphases may lead to an equally objectionable overcorrection in the form of arid orthodoxy. While that may be a possibility, it is not presently a threat. What must we do? We must stress something more than that Christianity is a faith; the intellectual world today grants that it is, and catalogues it with dozens of other religious faiths. The question today concerns the intellectual credibility of Christian commitment.

So evangelicals should present evidence and warrants that accompany faith in the self-revealing God and Savior of sinners. Christianity insists that reason is on the side of biblical teaching, that spiritual commitment does not ideally build on contradiction, and that all the reasons cited against faith in the living God are but rationalizations. The world needs to hear this claim and be confronted with its persuasive supports, particularly in an unreasoning and existentially-oriented age. It is noteworthy that the Society of Christian Philosophers has recently been formed with the American Philosophical Association.

4. Bible: Beyond controversy over the Bible to an unleashing of its authority. The Bible must come to new centrality in the churches, not as an object of controversy, but because of its comprehensive truth, transforming power, and stimulus to witness and world engagement. We must not allow present debate over inerrancy to conceal two equally important facts: First, no movement can hope to speak convincingly to the world if its leaders constantly question the integrity of its charter documents. Second, no movement will unleash the power of the Word in the public realm if it uses its energies only to defend scriptural authority and inerrancy. In a society that has lost intellectual discrimination and moral power, the Bible must be known not only for new translations but also for its abiding truth and life-giving power.

5. Public Affairs: Beyond preaching on private affairs alone, to Bible exposition declaring that the Lord of nations holds society accountable and offers hope in public affairs. Evangelical churches renowned for forceful pulpit ministries are disconcertingly few. Evangelical proclamation, even what passes for Bible exposition, is inexcusably thin and powerless. While the great biblical realities are proclaimed, often they seem to be exhibited like archeological ruins unearthed from the ancient past.

Further, sermons apply biblical truth mainly through a plea for internal decision and existential response. They virtually ignore God’s external activity amid the tumult of our times. But he is the God of nature and of nations, who works decisively in present-day history. Consequently, he addresses the mind and conscience of those outside the churches, too, and holds them accountable worldwide. Biblical truth becomes introverted when the pulpit does not show how it arches forward into our age, to speak to our society. The text is seldom allowed to open for public no less than private affairs a hopeful way into the future.

6. Stewardship: Beyond generosity to voluntary sacrifice (without legalism) in the use of resources. American evangelicalism is being spiritually thwarted by its affluence. No group of Christians has been more generous: few groups have more to learn about sacrifice.

Yet some are implying that only one lifestyle—one not too far above the poverty level—is authentically Christian. Others, equally extreme, concentrate only on the new birth and personal evangelism, totally ignoring economic issues. Some discussions appear legalistic, proposing graduated tithing or particular abstentions or negations. However, not one but a number of lifestyles are compatible with Christian conscience.

Yet, obviously, some lifestyles are clearly non-Christian if marked by greed, extravagance, self-gratification, or lack of compassion for the needy. It is probably safe to say that evangelical lifestyle in America today often compromises the biblical doctrine of stewardship, and needs to be adjusted in view of humanity’s severe difficulties. Evangelicals too readily forget that many of our economic blessings are a fruit of biblical virtues and, therefore, as the gift of God are at his disposal and not simply something we have achieved by ourselves.

Many congregations are still much too building-oriented rather than people-oriented. Even so, homes and possessions could be used for spiritual ends to a much greater degree. If each of us added to his present commitments a sum equivalent to less than the cost of a tankful of gasoline, we would more than double evangelical giving for evangelism and humanitarian effort.

Inflation and shortages of energy are forcing changed patterns of living upon both Christians and non-Christians. The real test of spiritual commitment is in voluntary obedience to Christ rather than in obligation or necessity in altering one’s lifestyle.

7. Pastoral concerns: Beyond general interest in counseling to practical church programs that cultivate emotional balance, psychological wholeness, and wholesome family relationships. Suppose a Christian under emotional stress walked into a Christian group. How could its members help him? Ordinary laymen should be able to minister to one another at least on an elementary level, through cell groups, for instance. And a church must find a way to put to work those to whom God has given counseling gifts, perhaps even using them to establish a clinic overseen by a specialist and offering help to those with somewhat more complex problems. All thoughtful help need not come from the pastor.

8. Ecumenism: Beyond a defensive attitude toward World Council Churches ecumenism to vigorous advocacy of a convincing Bible ecumenism. Especially in these days of a moribund WCC, the declaration of biblical thinking is critical. This should be applied to practical areas so evangelicals can act in unity around a core of accepted biblical essentials while being magnanimously tolerant of secondary differences.

9. Summary: Beyond vast potential to orderly vision and coordinated strategy in accord with God’s worldwide sovereignty. Seldom in history has the evangelical movement had such potential for world impact. It has resources in people, in possessions, and in established institutions and widely dispersed movements. These constitute a vast reservoir of spiritual hope and moral power. Yet what is often missing is a comprehensive sense of evangelical family, of unified mission and coordinated strategy, of the Spirit’s overwhelming empowerment, of confidence that God and not earthly Caesars govern the daily fortunes of history.

Worse yet, life in the big inner cities seems daily to be turning more pagan, while evangelicals tend to withdraw to the fringes of involvement. Organizational complexes such as at Wheaton, Illinois, can easily spawn misleading impressions of prominence and priorities, even as modern ecumenism discovered at 475 Riverside Drive in New York.

Beyond the Visible to the Active

Our task remains that of lighting and salting an otherwise darkening and putrifying world. In a generation for which SALT has become an acronym for Soviet-American adjustments in a vicious arms race, and LIGHT is a phenomenon that scientists computerize in interplanetary correlations, even Christians easily forget that lighting and salting is their mission to the world.

We are not charged, of course, with launching millennial solutions—we are not in the business of shaping utopian programs. That is God’s work, and not even he is presently engaged in that. But at this point in history, God has a purpose for both church and civil government. We control neither but are called to make responsible Christian choices and obedient commitments while we leave the rest to divine providence. That course will deliver us from both lethargy and social enthusiasm.

Each of us can exercise influence through lifestyle, through evangelistic engagement, through political participation. In many parts of the world lifestyle is not a matter of decision but of survival, and political policy is a matter of dictatorial determination and not of national option. We in America are free to demonstrate what the lordship of Christ implies for the whole of life, free to do so at a moment in history when such freedom is ebbing away. It is high time to realize that fulfilling Christ’s mandate lies not in international talkathons. It lies, rather, in individual response to opportunities for decision and deed that crowd our calendars day after day after day.

Evangelicals seem to be in a holding pattern, sometimes approaching a long-awaited landing, then circling round and round a cooperative objective, even at times moving exasperatingly away from it. We perform a series of maneuvers whose outcome is complicated by gathering storms that may divert us to an unforeseen and unintended destination.

Major dialogues are being held, some polarized on the far right, some characterized by confusing pluralism, some concerned with institutional image and opportunity. All too few manifest a call to intellectually powerful analysis of the cultural crisis and the task it implies for vital evangelical impact.

Evangelical Christianity in our generation has come out of the closet. It has yet to discover what it means to come confrontationally and creatively into the culture.

Carl F. H. Henry, first editor of Christianity Today, is lecturer at large for World Vision International. An author of many books, he lives in Arlington, Virginia.

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