Adapt or batten down the hatches? Recent shifts in evangelicalism

In biology, punctuated equilibrium is the idea that a species can change little to not at all for a long time, then suddenly develop rapidly once a tipping point is reached. It's a useful concept in a number of fields (social history one of them). And I'd argue that it's a good way of understanding what's been happening in evangelicalism on both sides of the pond in the last couple of years. The relatively stable evangelical culture I was part of as a young Christian is shifting rapidly - because its mechanisms for suppressing or exiling dissent no longer work.

Go back, if you will, to the long-gone days of early 2011, when Rob Bell's alleged universalism (Bell's Love Wins had not been released yet) inspired an infamous three-word tweet from John Piper. That anathema from the man they call the Calvinist pope formed part of a by now pretty well-rehearsed script: declare someone 'controversial' for transgressing doctrinal boundaries, declare they're no longer an evangelical, and tell your flock to boycott their works. It's how the evangelical aristocracy excommunicates its discontents, and they've developed a taste for it.

But that strategy of marginalising dissent no longer works. Certainly, technological change plays a part in that, but there's another factor: increasingly, those evangelical leaders try to push out push back. They find allies. They get published. And they refuse to stop calling themselves evangelicals.

No-one illustrates this better than Rachel Held Evans. Growing up in the Bible Belt, Held Evans is no outsider to evangelicalism, and her writing is full of love for and commitment to the evangelical tradition. But she's also an egalitarian who rejects biblicism. In opening her blog to a huge variety of voices of different faith traditions, she applies a radical inclusiveness that conservative evangelicals find suspicious. And then there's the fact that she's a woman, so conservative leaders consider her unsuited to teaching and have to overcome scruples to engage with her at all.

But attempts to expel her from the evangelical fold have been unsuccessful. Christianity Today, the closest American evangelicalism has to a central publication, put her on their list of '50 Women You Should Know' (much to the chagrin of Denny Burk). Conservatives attacking her during the 2012 Imbroglio of the Two Wilsons ended up with egg on their faces - like Douglas Wilson's daughter Bekah, who described Held Evans as being in 'a fever of feminist fury', having 'transitioned into her squeaky voice, and we all know what happens when a woman gets squeaky' and 'stamping her little foot over there on her blog'. Bizarre, that, as Rachel Held Evans is gracious and level-headed in her writings.

She's representative of a much larger trend of openness and honesty. Singer Jennifer Knapp came out of the closet in a Christianity Today interview in 2010 (followed by a debate with a conservative pastor on national television). Justin Lee, founder of the Gay Christian Network - which unites LGBTQ Christians both celibate and in relationships - and author of Torn: Rescuing the Gospel from the Gays-vs.-Christians Debate, is a prominent figure in the emergence of openly gay evangelicals. Writers like Pete Enns on evolution and Christian Smith on biblicism are challenging other evangelical shibboleths from within the tradition.

This opening up, along with wider cultural shifts on social issues, has created room for senior evangelical leaders to be honest about their own position even where it conflicts with dogma. Evangelicalism in Britain, the Christian subculture I'm a part of, may be tiny compared to its North American counterpart, but Steve Chalke's recent affirmation of LGBTQ couples in churches made waves on both sides of the pond. It's the bigger picture that fascinates me, though. Chalke's thoughtful and gracious article was published by Christianity, a far from liberal evangelical magazine, and the responses from conservatives were far more muted and respectful than one is used to.

Steve Clifford of the Evangelical Alliance disagreed with Chalke amid familiar phraseology of 'sadness and disappointment', but reminded Christians they should 'disagree without being disagreeable [and] listen honestly and carefully to one another'. Steve Holmes (battle of the Steves!) critiqued Chalke's hermeneutic, but entirely without the warnings of 'caving in to secular dogma' and the flames of hell that have tended to mark evangelicals' responses to dissent. It's an actual debate (which wouldn't have happened five or ten years ago), and I'm incredibly hopeful about it (please don't dash those hopes, guys).

In this new environment evangelical leaders, who used to judge the people - the gatekeepers, as Fred Clark aptly calls them -, are faced with a dilemma: engage change and perhaps change yourself or batten down the hatches and retreat into what Michael Clawson calls 'neo-fundamentalism'. The current paradigm shift in evangelical Christianity seems to be accelerating existing trends, leading to noticeable radicalisation.

That's certainly the case with John Piper, who is becoming more conservative as he's nearing retirement. In the above video, he argues that complementarianism - the soft patriarchy in which men and women are equal but 'gloriously suited' to different roles: that is, men should command ('biblical headship'), women should obey ('submission') - is a first-order, quasi-gospel issue. Traditionally, evangelicals treat it as a second-order issue like infant baptism, eschatology or spiritual gifts, i.e. something we can agree to disagree on - a privileged perspective, as women can't just walk away agreeing to disagree about their rights.

In recent podcasts, he seems to endorse young-earth creationism on the grounds that not accepting Adam or his descendants as historical would be to reject the Bible, and he's becoming more vocal about his anti-abortion activism. He's also begun to address criticism (which evangelical leaders tend to ignore) with an ill-advised follow-up post to a rightly criticised video on domestic violence. Culture warriors like Al Mohler are following similar trajectories.

The other possible response, of course, would be for evangelicals to reassess their position. Alas, so far it's mostly lip service of the 'I can't be racist because I have black friends' variety: quite literally, as when Rick Warren defended himself against accusations of homophobia by saying that 'I have many, many gay friends'. (Cue backlash from the Religious Right, who disapprove of being friends with gay people.) Tim Keller often appears more open than Piper or a shock jock like Mark Driscoll, yet there he sits with Piper and D.A. Carson, arguing that egalitarians pick and choose from their Bibles.

Fundamentalism is predicated on the hopeless proposition that you can fix a set of acceptable beliefs, social relations and behaviour once and for all, occasionally kicking out the discontents. But the evangelical tradition is much broader than that. It has welcomed change, realising that the man from Galilee is a living saviour, and that serving him in real, historical contexts means living in those contexts, in all the wonder, complexity and yes, uncertainty of real life. My hope is that evangelicals will test change, and hold on to what is good.

Some soundbites from the Coalition for Marriage

Having recently come across the homepage of the Coalition for Marriage - a pressure group composed of representatives from conservative Christian institutions - I thought I'd dissect some of their soundbites. 'Soundbites', aye: I'll just tackle the stuff on the front page, the barely connected bits that are intended to sway casual visitors the campaigners' way. I'll take them in turn.

'Marriage is unique'

Throughout history and in virtually all human societies marriage has always been the union of a man and a woman.

Unless you count polygamy in all sorts of societies, including the elite of ancient Israel. Or same-sex unions of various kinds. Or concubinage. Or the profound changes marriage underwent in the sixties and seventies, from a system in which (very broadly) a woman was passed from her father's control to her husband's, to one of egalitarian partnership - arguably a more profound revolution than marriage equality. (This is a general problem for advocates of marriage discrimination: if marriage is about partnership not property, patriarchy and legitimate procreation, an essential argument against same-sex marriage falls.) Above all, though, it's an appeal to tradition: lots of institutions (slavery, absolute monarchy, religious intolerance, human sacrifice...) have been traditional without being good.

Marriage reflects the complementary natures of men and women.

Guys, you're not doing a great job of hiding the fact that your arguments come from Christian complementarianism, the hot & sexy new version of patriarchy that conservative churchmen cobbled together from the corpse of the old thing back in the seventies. In that view, men and women are separate but equal have different but equal roles: specifically, the man's role is to be in charge and the woman's is to obey. (How's that different from patriarchy, I hear you ask? Exactly.) The C4M sentence above is, anyway, an unsubstantiated assertion that does not follow logically from the previous statement. No-one has ever been able to explain to us what male and female nature consists of in a way that doesn't just retell nineteenth-century bourgeois European ideals.

Although death and divorce may prevent it, the evidence shows that children do best with a married mother and a father.

Sleight of hand, our old friend! Why, of course if you eliminate single parents and precarious family situations from the equation, you'll find that 'children do best with a married mother and father'. But comparing like with like, there is in fact no difference between opposite-sex and same-sex couples.

'No need to redefine'

Civil partnerships already provide all the legal benefits of marriage so there's no need to redefine marriage.

The right to be married and recognised as such is a legal benefit of opposite-sex marriage, although UK law is otherwise better than some countries'. But: if civil partnerships are equal to marriage in everything but name, why would anyone still push for marriage? Inventing a separate but equal institution for gay people is unfair and frankly mean-spirited, and viewing their state as somehow not marriage has real consequences. Making sure the separate school for black people is just as nice as that for white people does not remove white supremacy.

It's not discriminatory to support traditional marriage.

Another non sequitur, and palpable nonsense too. Declaring that only certain couples should be permitted to marry and others should be excluded is the very nature of discrimination. The C4M's website does nothing but ineffectually make the case for discrimination. If they're scared of being called discriminatory because it sounds nasty, well - doesn't that tell you something?

Same-sex couples may choose to have a civil partnership but no one has the right to redefine marriage for the rest of us.

This feeds into the next section and will be dealt with there. For now, I'll refer you to the dire consequences gay marriage will have on your freedom.

'Profound consequences'

If marriage is redefined, those who believe in traditional marriage will be sidelined. People's careers could be harmed, couples seeking to adopt or foster could be excluded, and schools would inevitably have to teach the new definition to children. 

Yes, indeed: this paragraph is nought but the guilty conscience of folks who realise that they've destroyed gay people's careers, stopped them from adopting and fostering children, and forced them to listen to offensive views. But, like the racist worried about white people becoming a minority, that guilty conscience turns to aggression: we must hold the gays down lest they do to us what we did to them.

If marriage is redefined once, what is to stop it being redefined to allow polygamy?

Sorry, but I'm all non-sequitured out.

'Speak up'

People should not feel pressurised [sic] to go along with same-sex marriage just because of political correctness. They should be free to express their views.

That doesn't actually mean anything. By 'political correctness', these respectable people mean the consensus that being a bigot is a bad thing. And people are free to express their views. Isn't that why C4M is able to broadcast their vitriol freely, rather than having to smuggle anti-gay tracts into the country in potato crates?

That's that, for now. It's a rancid mess of illogical soundbites indeed: the consequence of taking what is preached from conservative Christian pulpits and picking out all the Bible bits to make it more palatable to a religiously plural audience. Turns out that leaves only the flimsiest of non-arguments.

Let me close with the immortal words of Rev. W.A. Criswell, admittedly on the other side of the pond, on our inalienable right to not have to rub shoulders with gay people:

Don’t force me by law, by statute, by Supreme Court decision... to cross over in those intimate things where I don’t want to go. Let me build my life. Let me have my church. Let me have my school. Let me have my friends. Let me have my home. Let me have my family. And what you give to me, give to every man in America and keep it like our glorious forefathers made it—a land of the free and the home of the brave.

Oh, hang on. Turns out he was talking about racial segregation. Oh well.