Evangelicals Must Resist Mainline Protestant Trajectory

By Mark D. Tooley, Christian Post Contributor Monday, February 23, 2015

Demonizing America is closely related to the anti-Israel animus of the new Evangelical Left. Israel is seen as an extension of the American "empire" and therefore merits resistance. There is also acceptance of Liberation Theology's narrative that Christians are called to automatic solidarity with perceived oppressed Third World persons against wealthy Western imperialists, with Israel in the latter role and the Palestinians in the first role, while ignoring history and geo-strategic circumstances. Old Religious Right enthusiasm for Israel, often perceived to be motivated by end times Dispensationalist scenarios, is to be countered with an even more zealous activism for liberation, regardless of consequences.

Of course many evangelicals prefer a so-called "pro-Israel, pro-Palestine, pro-peace" stance that is ostensibly impartial. But its goal and consequence, an end to evangelical and American alliance with Israel, are hardly impartial. Yet many well intentioned, especially missions minded evangelicals, often funded by World Vision, or hosted by groups like Telos, are escorted on biased Mideast trips or hosted at slanted conferences that portray Israel, and not other obvious actors, as the primary regional villain and persecutor of Christians. In many ways these evangelical exertions eerily resemble the Mainline Protestant tours that escorted U.S. church people to propaganda visits to the Sandinistas' Nicaragua in the 1980s, where they were solemnly instructed that Reagan Administration aggression, and not Marxist dictatorship, was the primary threat to the Nicaraguan people.

The utopian vision of the world offered by a new generation of evangelicals, who profess to base their policies on what Jesus would do, also resembles the Mainline Protestants who cheerfully visited Bolshevik Russia in the 1920s; confidently they were seeing the future, as God ordained it. After all, didn't Jesus favor a classless society?

Nearly all of the troubling emphases of this new form of evangelical activism, which invariably defaults left, are rooted in deeply theological error, primarily an assumption, again like the early years of liberalizing Mainline Protestantism, that the world and its peoples are essentially good but tormented by corrupt and often wicked systems, like imperialism, capitalism, environmental degradation, greed, nationalism, or even Christian Zionism and homophobia, from which liberation is urgently needed.

The new evangelical activism rejects or minimizes that people as individuals are sinners needing personal redemption that is uniquely available through Jesus Christ, a message that has always been, is now, and will always be the most important, most controversial, most appreciated and most resisted message in the world. Much of the current evangelical reaction against old style conservative evangelical witness asserts that the world rejected both America and Christianity because of Bush era policies and wars that idolatrously nationalistic evangelicals unwisely supported. But Christianity, like its Founder, who was murdered for His message, will always be hated and resisted by many. No amount of strategic messaging can avert the scandal of the Gospel. As to American prestige and popularity in the world, opinion polls don't always accurately measure influence and success, and great powers, to retain their power, must often inspire more fear than love. The vocation of the state, American or otherwise, is not the vocation of the church, which evangelicals too often forget or decline to understand.

There is also in this new form of evangelical social witness a postmodern cognitive dissonance, which imagines that a government may simultaneously be disarmed and pacifist, ensure peace in the world, feed and clothe everybody, regulate the environment, eliminate crime, collect ever higher taxes, while never resorting to force or coercion, relying on good will by all. Such an immaculate society will exist in Heaven, but not in any temporal society this side of the Eschaton.

The patience and perseverance required to work for incremental and approximate justice while accepting that no society reaches social perfection until Christ's presides directly is increasingly alien to the new form of evangelical activism. It is increasingly revealing itself in the sexual liberalism emerging on the fringes of evangelicalism, which accepts the postmodern and gnostic assertion that individuals can escape physical reality and the communal needs of marriage and family by claiming ever more exotic sexual and gender identities, with all disapproval to be suppressed, even by the coercive hand of the state, despite its being pacifist.

Evangelicals who veer in this utopian direction of course have, by definition, left evangelical and orthodox Christian belief. They have become liberal Protestants, essentially like Episcopalians, but lacking their liturgy and good taste. Much of this emerging problem is self correcting. As with the Mainline Protestants, liberalizing post evangelicals, as they leave orthodox Christian teaching, will lose their evangelistic zeal and their audience. Despite their egalitarian rhetoric, they will become elitists, with less and less capacity for large market share.

Mainline Protestants have declined for decades yet survive however diminished because they had 350 years of history and often generous endowments, with extensive institutional networks. Evangelicalism is mostly a modern American phenomenon and, for better or worst, lacks Mainline ballast. Liberal post-evangelicals likely will not endure for many decades, unlike liberal Presbyterians and Congregationalists.

But before their demise, liberalizing egalitarian post evangelicals may wreak a lot of damage in the church, mislead a lot of people, inflict spiritual harm in society, and portray a disfigured face of Christianity to the world far more erroneous than any of the mistakes of old style rambunctious conservative evangelicals. For this reason, we are all called to avoid the passivity and silence of orthodox Mainline Protestants 80 and 90 years ago that were mostly too polite to resist the subversion of their venerable church institutions. The sad Mainline Protestant trajectory has already evinced the fruits of compromised Christian witness. Let's work hard to protect American evangelicalism, even its fringes, from a similar fate.

Prior to joining the IRD in 1994, Mark worked eight years for the Central Intelligence Agency. He is a graduate of Georgetown University and is a native of Arlington, Virginia. A lifelong United Methodist, he has been active in United Methodist renewal since 1988, when he wrote a study about denominational funding of pro-Marxist groups for his local congregation. He attends a United Methodist church in Alexandria, Virginia. Follow Mark on Twitter @markdtooley.