Evangelicalism in Terminal Decline (Part 1)
About fifteen years ago, I sensed that I was dwelling within the vortex of a great falling away of the North American church. This intuition would soon receive some confirmation from Michael Spencer’s The Coming Evangelical Collapse, although I was more familiar with the longer version of his prognosis at that time.
While I do not subscribe to truthiness, truth according to the gut, such intuitions have usually been proven valid upon further investigation. However, it is not mostly through empirical evidence and statistical analysis by which I adjudge such intuitions. For declines in baptisms, church membership, and attendance are lagging indicators of spiritual enervation and theological waywardness. If membership in the SBC peaked in 2006, for instance, the decadence had begun some decades prior.
Moreover, statistics can be manipulated by lowering the standards of measurement to disguise true realities. How many genuine subscribers to the Catholic Faith are there really, regardless of the hyperinflated numbers based upon baby baptisms? I recall around 2010, when Ed Stetzer of Christianity Today boasted that Evangelicals constituted around 25% of Americans, others were positing that the numbers of true believers, those who premised their lives and conducted their actions upon that to which they subscribed,1 was only in the high single digits.
Nowadays, many of Spenser’s prognostications have proven correct, and is acknowledged as so, by a number of honest and astute Evangelical pundits. However, the current and prevailing diagnosis as to why this has happened, why Protestant Evangelicalism has long been in a state of freefall, remains quite superficial and elusive.
I think it's been happening for quite a while with the level of rhetoric that came along with political involvement. And so, in order to mobilize people, there had to be this rhetoric of imminent threat. And so, desperate times call for desperate measures. You're about to lose everything. The outside world is going to destroy you. And there are genuine challenges that people need to be equipped to handle. But that kind of rhetoric, I think, turned us into an apocalyptic people in all the worst kinds of ways and not in the best kinds of ways.2
One prevailing explanation, at least in America, is that of politicization of the church. While politicization has certainly played a role, it is merely a conduit of something deeper. The same spiritual enervation and theological/ideological waywardness in Protestant Evangelical churches have been playing out in my homeland (Canada), a body politic in which a dynamic towards excessive polarization has only recently become a palpable reality.
Moreover, what is now occurring in America in general and in the American church is but a belated replication of dynamics which had occurred in Europe in the last half of the 19th and first half of the 20th century.
It’s a typical American response that anything that happened before the United States is irrelevant to the history of the United States. You’re wrong. You’re so wrong. Let me show you how wrong you are.3
Historical and cultural illiteracy of the nations and cultures beyond the shores of America, and the inculcated ignorance of Evangelicals to things beyond its gated churchianity communities, robs any diagnosis of the Evangelical church from a larger context. Part of the blame can be laid at the lap of American Exceptionalism which posits that somehow breathing the American “air” produces a people unique and superior to all others, immune to all the existential realities and conundrums faced by every community since the dawn of human history.
The Enlightenment, which arose in the 18th century, was anticlerical in disposition, partly in response to the wars of religion and partly due to an all too cozy relationship between crown and church.
It would be self-delusional and disingenuous to deny that the various Christian streams have reasonable grounds to be concerned about this increasingly rabid secularist antipathy. For since the French Revolution (re: Drownings at Nantes, 1793–4), this antipathy has often erupted and overflowed into genuine persecution of the church as institution, clerics, and congregants alike (i.e., Spanish Civil War, 1936–9).
In response, the various Christian streams have consistently aligned themselves with conservative movements of various hues to serve as their protectors. Another more recent response has been various forms of ecumenicism in order to provide a united sociopolitical front against the forces of a triumphalist secularism. In the 1970s, Francis Schaeffer posited an American variant of ecumenicism, namely the doctrine of co-belligerence.
A co-belligerent is a person with whom I do not agree on all sorts of vital issues, but who, for whatever reasons of their own, is on the same side in a fight for some specific issue of public justice.4
Herein, Schaeffer sought to semantically distinguish between ally and co-belligerence in order to circumvent the scriptural sanctions against becoming unequally yoked.5 When I encountered this notion in the mid-1980s, I suspected that it would practicably prove to be a backdoor entrance towards that unequally yoked-ness with all the attendant travesties. Among these:
Evangelicalism would become publicly associated with any travesty committed by its co-belligerent partners.
The prophetic function of Evangelical churchmen would be muted, even neutralized, against travesties committed by its co-belligerent partners. (Voluntary loss of independent expression.)
Essential theological distinctives would eventually be devalued in importance, diluted (theological minimalism), and neglected in order to prevent offending co-belligerent partners and weaken an ever tightening sociopolitical alliance.
There is no disputing the ideological and sociopolitical threat posed by the hostile forces of triumphalist secularism. Moreover, this threat and its response within Christendom has a longer pedigree and broader context than a few American decades. It is in the timorous and wayward response to this ideological and sociopolitical threat that the fault of Evangelical Christendom lie.
“Woe to the rebellious children,” declares the LORD, “to those who carry out a plan that is not Mine, who form an alliance, but against My will, heaping up sin upon sin. They set out to go down to Egypt without asking My advice, to seek shelter under Pharaoh’s protection and take refuge in Egypt’s shade. But Pharaoh’s protection will become your shame, and the refuge of Egypt’s shade your disgrace.6
Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help, who rely on horses, who trust in their abundance of chariots and in their multitude of horsemen. They do not look to the Holy One of Israel; they do not seek the LORD.7
Like the ancient Hebrews, Evangelicals have demonstrated a practical lack of faith in the God that they claim to trust for their ultimate protection and provision. They have sought to lean upon other premises and forces.8
We are now tracking towards becoming a post-christian nation at a pretty rapid clip, which would have been unthinkable you know 25, 30 years ago. And when you think about that downward trajectory, you have a lot of folks who will say, “Well, it's because of the forces of secularism. It's because the culture has become hostile toward Christianity.” I think you and minority of voices are actually saying, “No, no, no. The problem here is not the secular world. It is in fact the Christian world. That our crisis of credibility has in fact harmed the witness for Jesus Christ in ways that have become sort of self-perpetuating and driven more people away from the church.”9
In reaction to the whoredom of much of American Evangelicalism with the Egyptians in order to stave off the Assyrian secularist hordes, Tim Alberta, Russell Moore, and their ilk have instead prostrated themselves before these Assyrian hordes. They minimalize and scorn the genuine threat posed from that quarter, “prophecy” against their now Evangelical antagonists, while mute criticisms against the travesties committed by their co-belligerent partners who sponsor them and give them public voice and prominence. Such Evangelicals serve as useful idiots.
Both Evangelical factions have become whores, a symptom and indicator of terminal and irredeemable Evangelical demise.
Luke 6:46–49
Russell Moore, “Top Evangelical Leader: “We’ve Lost Our Credibility to the Outside World,” Amanpour and Company, September 27, 2023, video, 6:26 to 7:07, (lightly edited).
Niall Ferguson, “Historian Niall Ferguson on the roots of today's political polarization,” Long Now Foundation, December 18, 2018, video, 0:52 to 1:07.
Francis Schaeffer, Plan for Action: An Action Alternative Handbook for ‘Whatever Happened to the Human Race? Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell, 1980, p. 68. Cf. Francis Schaeffer, the Church at the End of the 20th Century, Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 1970, second chapter.
2 Corinthians 6:14–16a
Isaiah 30:1–3
Isaiah 31:1
Psalm 20:7, 78:21–22
Tim Alberta, “Christianity Today’s Russell Moore on the Evangelical Church’s Future,” The Atlantic, October 4, 2023, video, min. 12:30 to 13:12, (lightly edited),