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Religion: American evangelicals, once considered monolithic, are fragmenting

Evangelicals are neither as numerous nor as uniform in their beliefs as once thought. And they are not immune from the shifting of American culture.

By CHRISTINE WICKER

Special to the Star-Telegram

That loud crack heard throughout the evangelical world when national research showed that more than half of American evangelicals believe people of other religions can go to heaven wasn’t thunder from an angry God.

This crack came from the rock upon which the modern American evangelical movement sits. It was splitting right down the middle.

There is both rejoicing and lamentation.

I am among those rejoicing.

The universalist/evangelical finding, which came from the Pew Forum’s U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, was one more sign that American Christianity is entering the most exciting era in our lifetime. Some people believe a new awakening is at hand. Others believe a reformation is in the making. No one knows how long it will take or how far it will go.

What’s clear is that people in the pews are taking back their faith, wresting it from leaders who helped sell the idea that only the most fundamentalist brands of Christian belief could succeed and that their words alone represented that belief.

As an evangelical from Corsicana wrote recently about a powerful evangelical leader, “I found myself not wanting to be this ventriloquist’s dummy anymore.”

Southern Baptist Convention leaders were among those lamenting. So they did their own study, which showed that only 20 percent of evangelicals think people of other religions will get a go-to-Heaven pass.

That would be good news for them, except Southern Baptist researchers didn’t use the same criteria in picking their evangelicals that the Pew study used. The Pew study counted anyone who called themselves an evangelical or some variation thereof. That standard reliably returns 25 percent of Americans.

The Southern Baptist researchers used only those believers who espoused a set of beliefs that have traditionally defined fundamentalist evangelicals. This definition is based on one by pollster George Barna that shows only 8 percent, not 25 percent, of the American population is evangelical.

Why would Southern Baptist researchers use a definition of evangelical that would disqualify 17 percent of the American population? Perhaps because every good study of those 25 percent of Americans shows that they don’t believe as evangelicals are expected to believe and they don’t act as evangelicals are expected to act.

That 25 percent is giving evangelicals a bad name. Or a good name depending on whom you’re talking to. I think they’re one of the big reasons to be optimistic about Christian faith in the United States. Unlike fundamentalist evangelicals who grab the headlines, these Christians aren’t using their Bibles to hit each other and everyone else they can reach.

They’re admitting what their own studies show — that evangelicals almost never convert a native-born American who wasn’t raised in a church. That most evangelical growth comes from stealing the sheep from other denominations. And that they’ve stolen about all they can.

They’re also admitting that most evangelicals won’t evangelize. And if they did, it wouldn’t get them anywhere because the usual methods don’t work. They don’t work first because they usually rest on the idea that Christians are the only ones saved. In today’s religiously equalitarian culture, that assertion causes evangelicals to seem distastefully holier-than-thou.

Conversion tactics also focus on telling people the Good News as though no one else knows it. But most everyone has heard it. Again and again. The trouble is that they aren’t convinced. They aren’t scared of hell. They aren’t hoping for heaven. And Christians haven’t been good at giving anyone better reasons than that for following Jesus.

They have reasons. They just aren’t telling them. They need to.

From outward appearances, Christian faith doesn’t change behavior for the better.

Evangelicals divorce, do drugs, drink alcohol, have sex outside marriage, have abortions — you name it, they do it, at the same rates as everyone else. At the same time, they are well known for espousing political policies that favor the rich over the poor, would deny equal rights to gay people and support war.

Whether these position are right or wrong, the culture at large judges them to be un-Christian. So the evangelical witness sinks even further.

But that’s not the worst of it. Stories of great evangelical faith don’t convert people either.

I learned that when I wrote a book laced with such stories, and every single commentator ignored them. Astonished, I asked why. I was told that such stories discourage typical Christians and don’t impress nonbelievers. Both see such faith as odd and unreachable.

Evangelicals need to do something fast.

One response says the movement must tighten up. Evangelicals need to hew even more closely to the most conservative and literalist standards of the Bible. They need to stop making nice to attract seekers. They need to unload the slackers.

This contingent, often composed of Calvinists, caused the Southern Baptist Convention, which claims 16 million members, to declare in June that its 43,000 churches should clean their rolls of deadwood. Hardliners suggested striking 6 million members who don’t live in the same towns as the churches to which they belong.

At the other end of the spectrum is a group sometimes called the emerging church.

They don’t always know exactly what they are. They’re emerging. Part of that can mean reaching out to unbelievers in ways that more fundamentalist evangelicals never could. For former megachurch minister Spencer Burke it meant writing a book called The Heretic’s Guide to Eternity that says everyone is going to heaven unless they opt out.

For Seattle Christian Jim Henderson it meant rejecting what he calls “beliefism,” in favor of the idea that behavior matters more than belief. His organization, Off the Map, bid for the “soul” of an atheist a few years ago and won it for $500. Instead of trying to convert the atheist, Henderson took him to megachurches and asked him for critiques. A book ensued.

Brian McLaren, named one of Time magazine’s most influential evangelicals, suggests that people might be followers of Jesus even if they aren’t born-again Christians.

That sort of idea is being taken up by many young people who eschew the title evangelical or even Christian. For them, doing the work Jesus advocated is more important than doctrine. They favor small groups that often have no statement of faith at all. Their faith is about serving the poor, often internationally.

Raised by traditionally evangelical parents, these kids have traveled all over the world on mission trips. They’ve witnessed the plight of the poor. Ideas that appealed to their parents — that saving souls is more important than saving lives, that giving to a church building fund matters more than feeding a child, that supporting war while opposing abortion is coherent theology — don’t work for them.

In between the new Calvinists and the emergent churches are mainline Christians, traditional Southern Baptists such as those in the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and other moderate evangelicals. This is a big crowd.

Some of them believe that instead of calling their reading of the Bible “the truth,” they need to admit that their doctrines are merely their understanding. They need to be humble before God and humanity. They need to stop selling Christianity and engage nonbelievers in open, non-dogmatic and respectful friendships that don’t have scalp-collecting agendas.

Some of their pastors are adopting universalist ideas even from the pulpit.

Last year, when a Dallas pastor told his Baptist congregation that Jesus’ death redeemed everyone because it was a gift to the world and as a gift didn’t require anything from anybody, not one person protested. In fact, one of the church’s longtime leaders told him, “That’s what I’ve always believed.”

Marv Knox, editor of the Texas Baptist news journal The Baptist Standard, responded to the Pew finding with an editorial saying the high number of universalist evangelicals could be correct.

Baptist faith has always been stronger on relationship than on theology, he wrote.

As communities have become more multicultural “Baptists have formed friendships with people from all over the world, whose faiths are different, but whose values are similar,” the editorial said. “And following the historical pattern, Baptist relationships may have overwhelmed Baptist theology.”

That pattern is the hope of American Christianity. Let’s hope it is getting stronger.