This article first appeared on Good Faith Media on February 4th, 2025. The long unredacted article can be found below.
My father pastored a small town non-denominational church in northern Wisconsin. In the 1990s, Tomahawk’s economic existence consisted of two paper mills and a Harley-Davidson plant. I’ve frequently described my father’s parishioners as Flannery O’Conner characters. I mean that as affectionately as one can. They were, quintessentially, salt of the earth people.
As a non-denominational entity the church largely owed its identity to my father’s theological proclivities. Those were formed by three things. My parents migrated from the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church into the Charismatic movement in the 1970s. That conversion, my father’s Vietnam military service, and his admiration for Reagan era politics discovered each other as natural bedfellows in Evangelicalism.
Because non-denominational churches often exist as a kind of institutional mutt they lack the privileges of denominational affiliation and support. As such, my father shopped for that identity from time to time. For a while he considered Jack Hayford’s Foursquare Church, then John Wimber’s Vineyard movement, but the closest he came to committing to anything was when he discovered Ted Haggard’s Association of Life-Giving Churches. Haggard’s New Life Church in Colorado Springs enjoyed a large constituency of active duty soldiers from nearby Fort Carson. As president of the National Association of Evangelicals in 2004, Haggard was credited for rallying Evangelical support for George W. Bush. Though I rarely remember my father using the term Evangelical, self-descriptively or otherwise, Haggard’s unique cultural pedigree fortified my father’s ecclesiological existence. He was, we were, Evangelicals.
I packed that faith experience in my bags as I left for a small private baptist college in Minnesota. There, at Bethel University in Arden Hills, my commitment to Evangelicalism began to unravel. The theological curriculum exposed me to the father of liberal protestant theology, Frederick Schleiermacher, Albert Schwietzer’s quest for the historical Jesus, and the cognitive assault religion experienced from the Enlightenment. And while my head was reckoning with those critiques my heart was being formed by Mennonite Pastor Greg Boyd who, one year into America’s war with Iraq, preached a six week series on non-violence that cleared 1,000 members from his congregation.
After graduating with a business degree and plenty of questions, I took my curiosity to Truett Theological Seminary, which is housed within the flagship Baptist institution Baylor University. In seminary I made my home in orthodoxy, a set of theological suppositions defined by the classic creeds of Christianity without the cultural commitments of Evangelicalism. After I graduated I took a job as a Baptist pastor in the south, which is not to be confused with being a Southern Baptist. The church I pastored, University Baptist, most closely aligned with the Emergent Church movement before that dissolved and then maintained an identity the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, a national organization of moderate to left leaning Christians.
While my own theological identity continued to evolve it became further estranged from Evangelicialism. I inherited the view that women could lead in every facet of ministry from my dad who regularly welcomed women into his pulpit, but I became a student of feminism because it became clear the church at large hadn’t. I was a pro-lifer who acknowledged the complexity of abortion before I learned to prioritize a woman’s right to choose. In 2019, the church I pastored went through a discernment process before deciding to become affirming of LGBTQ persons.
If my exodus from Evangelicalism began while George W. Bush was governing as a compassionate conservative who took us to war with Afghanistan and Iraq, it was finished when a third of President Trump’s vote came from Evangelicals in 2016. I couldn’t understand how a man who covered up his affair with Stormy Daniels, mocked a reporter with a disability, and made vulgar comments about assaulting women to Billy Bush continued to get full throated support from a base that defined itself by its concern from what the scriptures say. This is to say nothing of the MAGA platform and its obvious contradictions with the Kingdom of God which Jesus talked about at length in the gospels.
But here’s the thing, even as I was departing Evangelicalism and in the years after I left, I always felt like I understood their theological positions and the logic behind them, even though I disagreed. We were, in my mind, both committed to the teachings of Jesus even if we interpreted them differently. And while I suspect their big tent didn’t have room for my convictions, I had no problem finding room for theirs under mine.
Part of the challenge of discerning one’s relationship to Evangelicalism is deciding how to define it. Perhaps the most serious attempt has been made by historian David Bebbington and his quadrilateral, a fourfold description of Evangelicalism’s core identities. Those are activism, biblicism, conversionism, and crucicentrism, a term that describes the central role that atonement plays in Christian theology. You might say that they were four corners that held up the big tent of Evangelicalism, especially in its initial 20th century expression.
To understand Evangelicalism’s origins it’s best to start with the fundamentalism of the early 20th century. If one were looking for a watershed moment to define that fundamentalism, it would likely be the Scopes Monkey Trial. As more American theologians came to accept higher criticisms, Darwinsim, and liberal theology, fundamentalists dug in and became argumentative and entrenched in dogmatism. Looking to mediate that divide figures like Carl F. H. Henry, who is probably most famous for his role as the founding editor of Christianity Today, began articulating something convicted by traditional tenets of Christian theology, but generous of spirit.
If Evangelical theology had stayed faithful to that original intention the world might look different today, but that all changed in 1979 when Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority and married conservative cultural christian values with the power of the republican party. Slowly Bebbington’s theological distinctives have yielded to a generic identity that has become synonymous with conservative political fidelity regardless of the party’s platform.
For the past twenty five years I have watched this slow erosion of Evangelical identity and wondered when it had lost its meaning. That ambiguity was clarified definitively last Tuesday as Evangelicals began posting public responses to Reverend Mariann Budde’s homily given at the National Cathedral’s inaugural prayer service. Kristin Du Mez has documented a near exhaustive list of the usual players so I’ll only highlight a few here. Franklin Graham said that President Trump is a truth-teller and that Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde is a liar. Speaker Mike Johnson, who I consider to be the most vivid expression of Evangelicalism’s religious-political amalgamation, tweeted that Bishop Budde’s homily was “shameful” and that she “hijacked the national prayer service to promoter her radical ideology.”
These reactions might be considered part of the typical left-right squabbles had the Bishop not used one word in particular.
Mercy.
Note what the Bishop did not ask of President Trump in naming both immigrants and the LGBTQ communities. She did not ask him to consider that his political positions were wrong. She did not ask him to change his policies. She did not even condemn his policies. She asked him to have mercy. One might even note that the word mercy allows for the presupposition that the groups she identified are in the wrong, a notion that neither I nor Bishop Budde I hold, but still the lexical possibility exists. And since I’m already exploring perverse possible meanings of the word mercy, one might note that the word could have had the effect of stroking the ego of President Trump because it concedes the power is his to dispense. But President Trump’s response to the word mercy is not my concern because I don’t expect him to know any better.
But as for Franklin Graham and the like, this is a historical moment of scathing flagrancy. Here’s why. Ever since Saint Augustine codified the mechanics of Christian anthropology in the 4th century, Christian theology has maintained that all humans have inherited a sin nature and are in need of God’s grace. The way this grace is extended to humans is through God’s mercy. This is also why David Bebbington includes conversionism in his list of distinctives. To be Christian is to be one who recognizes their need for mercy which makes possible transformation.
In Saint Paul’s letter to the Romans he’s taking up the topic of the contentious relationship between Jews and Gentiles. In effort to stress to the Jews, who fear that Paul’s message is vanquishing the fidelity of God’s covenantal relationship with them, Paul takes up the issue of mercy when he quotes God speaking to Moses in Exodus 33, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.” Point being a primary characteristic of mercy is its indiscriminate nature. To then advocate a position that regrets the extension of mercy for anything, whether or not one agrees with the pardoning that that clemency brings, is so profoundly unChristian I dare say it is heretical.
I no longer understand American Evangelicalism.
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