Reflections on The Evangelicals

The following is a reflection I wrote upon finishing Frances Fitzgerald's The Evangelicals:

The subtitle of Frances Fitzgerald’s nearly 700-page work detailing the history of evangelicalism in America is telling: “the struggle to shape America”. First of note is that it is a struggle. Especially in the latter half of the book, the effort to win the culture wars and effectively mold the United States in the image of fundamentalist Christianity is revealed to be a massive undertaking. It consumes the lives of dozens of people at the top of the ladder of influence, and countless others at the grassroots level. But a struggle does not necessarily imply victory; indeed, if anything our present cultural moment indicates that by-and-large this endeavor was not victorious. A glance to the primary issues of the culture wars reveals the extent to which the all-consuming life’s work of many evangelical leaders has been undermined or, in some cases, totally defeated. Roe v. Wade is unlikely to be repealed (and many orthodox Christians do not believe it needs to be), and Obergefell v. Hodges has made gay marriage the law of the land. It seems this struggle has proven fruitless.

            The other part of the subtitle that is interesting upon further reflection is that word, “shape”. Truly this is what the evangelicals of the 20^thcentury were after: an America in their own image. Anything less than a country made to conform to the ideals of white, conservative Christian men would be a devastating loss. Also implied in this choice of words is Fitzgerald’s idea that the country needed to be shaped to be like this evangelical ideal – that is, it was not always so, and in order for the country to look like the Christian right’s intended goal, it needed shaping. This is an important point, given our tendency to look back with glossy nostalgia to a time that really never existed. In truth, the country was originally shaped mostly by deists, not Christians, and the idea that America ever was a Christian nation has little purchase if we take history to be our currency. Yet this was the goal of many of the men (and some of the women) whom Fitzgerald describes. 

            Two observations follow these points: first, that we can conclude from our current vantage point that the Christian right was deeply misguided. America was not intended to be a Christian nation, and all trends point toward its increasing secularization and pluralization. Arguably, this is exactly what the founders intended; a country shaped by commitment to pluralism and diversity, undergirded by beliefs in the freedom necessary to uphold these ideals. It’s certainly a belief system, and not neutral in the way many today think it is, but it’s a good system for the modern world. And yet, it isn’t heaven. Maybe that’s why so many Christian leaders in the last two centuries have demurred from the founders’ ideas and sought to shape the country after their image. The problem, however, is that the trajectory they were trying to shape was always working against them – at the risk of sounding overly cynical, it was ultimately a fool’s errand.

            A second observation is one borne out of years of gospel preaching and steeping in historic Christian orthodoxy; a persistent question I had throughout my journey through Fitzgerald’s long and arduous history of the ups and downs of American evangelicalism: is this a worthy goal? Must we leverage all our resources and mobilize millions of supporters in the service of a goal ultimately against the grain of the foundation of this country? Moreover, how does this goal comport with the life in Christ to which we are called?

            This second point requires further elaboration. If the goal of the Christian life is participation in God - in Christ and through the Spirit - and the grounds of our sanctifying fellowship with God is the justification accomplished through Christ’s sacrificial death and resurrection, what are the legitimizing principles of the Christian right’s efforts to shape America? I argue there are none. If the God who justifies us for participation in his life did so, in a sense, subversively rather than through conquest, why should our life in the world (which is itself enlivened by the Spirit) be characterized by conquest mentality? Though the culture war may seem a holy and just war, it radically contradicts the approach given us in Christ. This is the one who, “though he was in the form of God, did not consider equality with God a thing to be forcibly held onto, but emptied himself” (Phil 2:5, my translation). It is unbecoming of his followers to devote themselves uncritically to Machiavellian political grasping (“forcibly held onto”), because the power they seek is already securely held by the Lord they worship.

            What the annals of the Christian right show is the effect of long-term idolatry on a group of people – even on a system of thinking. As early as Billy Sunday Christian evangelists were conflating America and the Christian message – this was reinforced through cultural phenomena like post-war prosperity, McCarthyism, the SBC’s conservative resurgence, the presidencies of Nixon and Reagan, and 9/11 (a list far from exhaustive). When certain issues are politicized (e.g. abortion), other issues are coded with racist undertones (“states’ rights”), it becomes all the more problematic that they are bundled with conservative Christianity. Being wed to political and cultural positions, and linking them inextricably with one’s Christian faith, is in a real sense to put oneself at risk of incurring righteous judgment (sometimes by means of one’s secular neighbors). Indeed, there has been some reckoning with these issues in the past few years, and there is no reason to expect it not to continue. 

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            As I read, I was also struck by one of the themes that undergirds much of Fitzgerald’s work but is nowhere explicit: we are, in an important sense, products of our past. While this need not entail determinism, it does mean that many of the things which we accept as given, or which we perceive as being original to our own time and place, may actually have a longer history. For many evangelicals, the pro-life cause is intrinsic to being a conservative Christian. I do not wish to argue against this, but to suggest that such an issue being political is a relatively recent phenomenon. The things which are considered “liberal” or “conservative” almost a priori today are typically much more complex, and have a much longer history, than we are willing to consider. Faulkner was right: “The past isn’t dead. It’s not even past.” The individualism of America is excellent at disguising the fact that we all live and move and have our being within communities that have a shared memory, a shared story, a shared past. Failure to reckon with this results most often in a repetition of the mistakes our ancestors made, and an ignorance of the ways in which we might otherwise learn from them. 

            In this way, American evangelicalism has its roots in four big turning points: the second Great Awakening, the Civil War, the Fundamentalist/Modernist controversy, and the Moral Majority. Each of these events is multifaceted, and certainly evangelicalism today has many influences in varying degrees, but this complexity does not vitiate the significance of these events for our understanding of evangelicalism today. Indeed, Fitzgerald’s subtitle proves profoundly ironic: the struggle of American evangelicals to shape America was both futile (in that the country was not ever Christian in any meaningful sense, nor could it be) and also unnecessary (the history of America as a nation is inextricably linked to the history of evangelicalism; the country was already shaped by evangelicals).