Evangelicalism: Accommodating, or Just Adapting?

Social scientists have long contented that modernization—the process of economic and social change from a pre-industrial, agrarian society to an industrial, technological society—tends to make traditional religious beliefs less plausible and religious symbols less influential in the social structure and culture. How then, asks James Hunter, can conservative Christianity “survive and even thrive” in modern industrial America?

Hunter argues that two factors explain why evangelicals—those who believe the Bible is God’s inerrant Word, that Christ is divine, and that individuals must accept Jesus as Lord and Savior—have prospered in America in recent years. On the one hand, they have remained relatively isolated from the forces of modernity, and on the other, they have accommodated their world view, and especially their cultural practices, to modernity. Complaining that evangelicals are frequently stereotyped but rarely understood, and that few scholars have seriously studied this movement, Hunter uses the results of the Gallup polls conducted for CHRISTIANITY TODAY in 1978 and 1979, and recent literature written by evangelicals to analyze this movement.

Hunter insists that the collision of religion and modernity does not simply destroy religion. Rather, out of a sort of bargaining comes “mutual accommodation, mutual permutation, or even symbiotic growth,” which occur at both the institutional level and the level of the world views. Hunter’s analysis, however, frequently contradicts this statement. In American Evangelicalism, the influence flows only in one direction: from modernity to religion. Religion appears to be an inert substance that reacts and responds but rarely initiates or evokes. Religion is constantly being shaped by, and accommodating itself to, modernity, but it seems to have little effect upon the modern world view or institutional structure.

Drawing upon the work of sociologist Peter Berger, Hunter attempts to show how the processes of rationalization, cultural pluralism, and structural pluralism force religious world views to make accommodations. The rationalization process, which rests upon a naturalistic world view, undermines the credibility of religious assumptions about life and the universe and encourages people to see the world in mechanistic terms. Cultural pluralism divides society into subunits with distinct cultural traditions, thus challenging the universality of traditional religious views. Pluralistic societies deprive people of the constant social confirmation they need to sustain their beliefs about ultimate reality. Structural pluralism separates life into public and private spheres. It confines religious symbols and authority to the private dimensions of life—church, family, and leisure—while public institutions and structures—politics, economics, education, media, and the like—come to rest upon secular values.

After providing a demographic profile of contemporary evangelicals and assessing their beliefs and practices, Hunter attempts to explain how evangelicals make concessions to rationalization, cultural pluralism, and structural pluralism. Although they have sharply resisted pressures to rationalize their theological doctrines, their world view has become highly formulated and systematized. In Hunter’s view, evangelicalism has responded to modernity by “becoming packaged for easy, rapid and strain-free consumption.” Both evangelism and spirituality have become highly structured and usually follow very precise methods.

The influence of cultural plurality, Hunter insists, has made contemporary evangelicals more tolerant than their forefathers ever were of conflicting views. Although the doctrinal core of evangelicals’ world view remains essentially unchanged, he says, “it has been culturally edited to give it the qualities of sociability and gentility.” The more offensive elements of evangelical faith such as innate evil, sin, the wrath of God, and eternal suffering in hell are not frequently mentioned.

Structural pluralism has also shaped contemporary evangelical character, Hunter argues. Its pressures to confine religion to the private sphere of life have prompted evangelicals to be more subjective and to emphasize how Christianity helps solve personal problems of worry, tension, depression, and loneliness. In Hunter’s judgment, these accommodations have been purchased at a great price. Indeed, he is convinced that evangelicalism is being divested of the “energy and force necessary to sustain it over time.”

Hunter concludes, then, that the current evangelical renaissance will be short-lived. Evangelicals have been able to resist modernity thus far chiefly because they are demographically most distant from its most powerful agents: university education, the higher socioeconomic classes, urban culture, and the professions. Although evangelicals have been able to retain their doctrinal orthodoxy, their cultural style has become very different from (and implicitly inferior to) that which characterized their forefathers. Disagreeing with Jeremy Rifkin and other more optimistic seers, Hunter maintains that a third Great Awakening is “a virtual sociological, not to mention legal, impossibility under the present conditions of modernity.” Hunter predicts that the popular support, socio-politicization, and ideological purity of evangelicalism will all diminish in the future as the pressures of modernity grow and evangelicals are more and more exposed to them.

While Hunter’s analysis offers us many helpful insights, it has several weaknesses. The first is methodological. Hunter attempts to assess the emotional, psychological, and spiritual development of the average evangelical principally by analyzing books on these subjects issued by the eight leading evangelical publishing houses. In my judgment, this source is too limited. To discover what the typical evangelical is taught and believes in these areas, is it not necessary to sample sermons of evangelical pastors, to examine major evangelical magazines such as CHRISTIANITY TODAY, Eternity, Moody Monthly, and Christian Life and, even more significantly, to survey the attitudes and behaviors of evangelicals nationwide? Far too often when trying to portray typical evangelical attitudes, Hunter relies on Jerry Falwell, Tim LaHaye, or others who speak for the fundamentalist right wing of evangelicalism.

The second problem is theoretical. Hunter suggests repeatedly that religion, specifically evangelicalism, can do little to affect or alter American society. Secularization seems inevitable and almost irresistible. It is his belief that the forces of modernity will smash everything in their path that makes Hunter pessimistic about evangelicalism’s future. Yet, it is possible, as Thomas O’Dea and others have shown, for religious movements such as evangelicalism to modify or even halt the advance of these processes. The recent history of several colleges, businesses, and some individual moral and social practices suggests as much.

Third, Hunter makes no distinction between accommodation and adaptation, between modifying one’s message in response to alternative viewpoints and adapting one’s message to changing cultural conditions. As cultural pluralism has replaced Protestantism’s dominance over American culture, evangelicals obviously have been forced to adjust their cultural style. Throughout the church’s history, Christians have sought to make the gospel message relevant to their time and place. Their basic message has remained remarkably stable while the focus and style of its presentation has changed. Yet, Hunter does not allow for a distinction between doctrinal and cultural capitulation and adjustments that allow Christians to speak more appropriately and effectively to their culture.

Finally, in contrasting present-day evangelical attitudes and beliefs with those of their forefathers, Hunter tends to portray earlier evangelicals as much more monolithic about issues than they were. In my judgment, he exaggerates their emphasis upon hell, sin, and God’s transcendence, and minimizes the extent to which they stressed this-worldly benefits of Christian belief, the intimacy believers could enjoy with God, and God’s immanence and involvement with his world.

In sum, Hunter’s study sheds new and disturbing light upon contemporary American evangelicals. It clearly shows how modernity has modified evangelicalism’s message and style in several significant and potentially enervating ways. But Hunter’s assumption that religion has little power to resist modernity and reshape culture prevents him from investigating the possibility that evangelicals and the modern secular world have been engaged in a more genuinely mutual relationship.

American Evangelicalism: Conservative Religion and the Quandary of Modernity, by James D. Hunter (Rutgers Univ. Press, 1983). Reviewed by Gary Scott Smith, assistant professor of sociology, Grove City College, Pennsylvania.

Five Romans On Their Christian Neighbors

The question of how the Romans perceived the early Christians has perhaps not received as much attention as it deserves. Robert L. Wilkens, professor of the history of Christianity at Notre Dame, has conducted an engaging opinion poll, as it were, among five prominent Romans. The results yield insights into the pagan mind, church and ancient history, and the development of apologetics. Written for both the general reader and specialist, the book also raises questions about the way Christians relate to their critics even today.

Pliny, a governor of Pontus, received complaints from the citizenry about Christians. He referred to them as a hetaeria, a “club,” a term also used of potentially disruptive organizations. Wider perceptions of Christians were often drawn from extremist Gnostic groups, much as if some future revisionist historian used the Guyana cult as his model. Christians in Pliny’s day were regarded as superstitious, even “atheistic.”

Galen, a philosopher, saw Christianity as another philosophical “school.” He considered both Christianity and Judaism objectionable. However, Wilkens states that “his [Galen’s] curiosity helped prepare the way for Christianity to be taken seriously in intellectual circles … a momentous development.”

Celus, “a conservative intellectual,” wrote of Jesus as a kind of magician, and jousted with early Christian apologists. He saw Christians as “privatizing” religion. But he was not the most learned critic. That title belongs to Porphyry, who proffered arguments from history and literary criticism. His Against the Christians occupied such theologians as Jerome, Eusebius, and Augustine. Some modern writers contend that “Porphyry has never been answered.” Perhaps someone will. His approach has “a modern ring to it,” including the view of Jesus as a “good man.”

Julian, the emperor, played Judaism and Christianity against each other. Author of Against the Galileans, he was himself raised in the faith. Then, as now, the bitterest enemies of Christianity came from within its ranks.

“When the critics were most vocal,” Wilkens observes, “they did not speak in a vacuum. There was a geniune dialogue, not simply an outpouring of abuse.” Such dialogues were possible because, to their credit, “Christians were willing to meet their critics on common ground.”

Since Wilkens’s five Romans are hardly the elusive “man in the street,” and since they dealt mainly with Christian beliefs, what of the average Roman’s view of Christians as people? One critic opines that their success “was less due to what they believed than to the way they lived.”

Though repetitive in parts, Wilkens’s book encourages because it shows that the ablest critics of Christianity often, in the long run, serve to help the Christian cause. Jesus Christ, after all, is still followed and worshiped the world over. Pliny, Porphyry, et al are, for the most part, forgotten. The church is an anvil that has worn out many hammers.

The Christians As the Romans Saw Them, by Robert L. Wilkens (Yale Univ. Press, 1984; 214 pp., cloth, $17.95). Reviewed by Lloyd Billingsley, a writer living in southern California.

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