What's wrong with evangelicals, & what's right?
My friend Aaron M. Renn makes a very strong case, in “The Problem with the Evangelical Elite,” over at First Things, that such an elite can hardly be said to exist. Rusty Reno, the editor at FT, graciously allowed me to respond: In the century or so since the “fundamentalist” versus “liberal” split in the Protestant churches, the “liberal” elites rose to the heights of American life, whereupon they promptly self-destructed, both religiously & sociologically, while the “fundamentalists” accepted a kind of retreat into the hinterland, but eventually became politically important as part of the Reagan coalition.
Aaron’s recommendations, however, seem to me to lead to weakening the only strengths evangelicals have, according to him: Politics & business. Accordingly, the most important man in the evangelical elite in America goes entirely unmentioned in what is a long essay: Charlie Kirk! Instead, Aaron offers us a provocative statement, to embrace defeat with Mitt Romney.
The future evangelical elite should worry seriously about politics and look to its strengths in organization, as Charlie did with Turning Point. It’s useless for evangelicals to try to cultivate a counter-elite at Yale. Yes, Catholics excel at that, for precisely the historical & theological reasons Aaron presents, which do not favor evangelicals. Men like Charlie & men he inspired are going to be the cadre of the evangelical elite. Charlie’s mix of unusual intelligence, voracious reading, & dropping out of college is almost a recipe. As to business, evangelicals should embrace social media & technology to give the new generation a chance to make a future for themselves.
To get to the crux of the matter: I largely agree with Aaron’s presentation of our situation, yet I entirely disagree about what to do. My guess is, Aaron thinks the American elite of the mid-21st c. will very much resemble the elite of the early 21st c. He makes statements to that effect. I believe that’s not so. Now, if evangelicals want a future, they should bet on change—they should bet on their own strengths, so they shouldn’t follow Aaron’s suggestions but something closer to mine. I’m not evangelical, it’s not my fight, but Charlie was, & I think his activity should matter.
I had more things to say about Aaron’s piece, but they didn’t fit in the confines of a ‘letter to the editor.’ I’ll mention one of them here: I vehemently disagree with Aaron about the issue of female ordination. Evangelicals must fight it with all their might—keeping the women out of church authority is incredibly important if evangelicals want to avoid the very vices Aaron deplores about the Main Line Protestants, i.e. that they’re Progressive atheists who get sentimental about any number of fashionable causes but are profoundly unserious morally.
I’d like to add another bit of friendly criticism. My friend Colin Redemer also reviewed Aaron’s important book for Ad Fontes. Colin’s recommendations are similar, imitate the Catholics & Jews. This strikes me as largely impractical, the proposal of an ‘intellectual.’ Colin phrases it this way: “Think like a minority community.” Well, which minority? What relationship to national character makes a community a community, how would that work for evangelicals? Catholics had solidarity in America for similar reasons to the Jews, they had ethnicity going for them, & they had doctrinal continuity, because they had priests. As Colin says, Jews have yeshivas to study Judaism; it goes without saying, Catholics have seminaries. Evangelicals have neither ethnic solidarity nor a specially-trained priestly class! This isn’t going to change now, neither Colin nor Aaron nor anyone I’m aware of has suggested otherwise.
Evangelicals must look instead to Ronald Reagan. Yes, it’s a much worse situation now overall, Christianity is, as Aaron says, in a “negative world,” elites despise God-fearers & ordinary people don’t love’em either. But evangelical Christianity used to be in a much worse situation from the other point of view—mid-c. America was dominated by elite liberals who thought they were achieving world-transforming Progress, so you can imagine how they looked at someone like Reagan, who was not an intellectual, didn’t have the credentials of any elite institution, & didn’t have some kind of national reputation. Reagan’s virtues are not too unlike Charlie’s—great public speakers who made their reputations through organization. Rather like Trump’s rallies, too. That’s the way to go. It’s not so useful to imitate liberal institutions that are collapsing at this point; it would be smarter to bet on strengths rather than weaknesses, to push toward organization through digital communities. The problem, of course, is you have to put your trust in someone & pay him-
As someone raised evangelical-leaning Presbyterian, heavily involved in undergrad years with a major evangelical organization, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, who attended Keller's Redeemer in the aughts, and who now is Anglican (ACNA), much about these discussions feels...curious. In my late 50s, and having paid little attention to most trends in the "evangelical world" since my early 40s, I still nonetheless feel that somehow, near-every public-intellectual discussion of things evangelical, is almost always just...off. It's way off when it comes from non-conservative intellectuals, but even many conservative ones seem to lose their footing on this topic.
I in some ways consider myself "ex-Evangelical," for certain ACNA/church-tradition reasons, even though Renn wants to insist on my denomination being a "splinter" of evangelicalism, and I won't deny our roots, and especially my own, in evangelicalism. That's part of why I'm often made a tad defensive, or just outright puzzled, by what I hear others saying about evangelicals. Are they--or as I'd say in the past, we--SO difficult to understand? After all, certain Catholic writers like Douthat and Bottom did it well enough.
This Renn piece...I dunno. It's scattered...he tells "Protestants" to do five things at once, among them to get more united and also to get more accepting of the intra-Protestant stratification and variance. He knows a lot and mentions a lot of major figures, and while he makes a number of good points, I don't detect much continuity here b/t his thinking, and books of my young evangelical years such as Evangelical Essentials (Stott). I don't sense familiarity with the kinds of things, including many political ones, that the early-net blog Evangelical Outpost exhibited as a matter of course. And there are a number of off statements, for example, say, when Renn talks about how deep the theologians of the Episcopal church and other mainline denominations have been, and what evangelicals ought to learn from them, once they see the need to build bridges to them. Uh...if we're talking about certain stayed-mainly-orthodox mainline church leaders of say, the 1970s or 80s, that's one thing, but to write as if the leaders of today's mainline denominations have much in common with evangelicals or evangelical-rooted ACNA-ers, and to do so without documentation showing that unexpected developments are underway...wow. If he can make an error that big, that disconnected from ABC realities of church life, it doesn't surprise me that Titus has to school him on the way women's ordination is bad news, and I could report to him how the slightest prospect of it repels serious Z-sters in the ACNA.
Also, as someone who's been reading E. Digby Baltzell on just how generally Wonderful that late19th/early 20th-century WASP establishment was, in addition to being rather obviously drifting away from serious Christian faith, as if what Kierkegaard railed against were a friggin' Road Map to excellence, I have more reasons yet to shy away. Renn's obligatory quick-mentions of WASP establishment shortcomings do little to cloak his obvious wanting to look to it as a model.
And I'll add this: the FOREIGN-NESS of this whole how-do-we-get-another-Protestant-elite discussion from the actual typical talk I do hear from my fellow ACNA-ers, or from full-on evangelicals I know, is striking. "Patronage-structures?" I mean, some of this is in continuity with older authors like Noll and Keller, but I'm telling you, this is nowhere on the list of topics that come up in my church, or with evangelical friends. Maybe it should come up sometimes, maybe that's Renn's big point, and maybe when, say, the ACNA starts founding colleges it will come up, but sorry, it feels like Renn is not in touch. That he's only really talking to a set of academics or political analysts. Most evangelicals and most ACNA-ers would be amused to learn that "the Protestants" is becoming a hot topic, or that a guy like Renn might be led by his theory to want the members of my church's vestry to try to reach out to our local Methodists so as to explore Protestant Commonality.
I've seen Renn be smart on certain political topics, but as for this touted Christianity expertise of his, something feels weak. I'm not saying evangelicals don't need to think more about their relation to America, nor denying that at a certain point, that naturally leads to thinking about evangelical elites. Someone Renn-influenced might have a point were he to say, "Evangelical parents have many kids, but they doom them to having to submit to secular elites over their lives, because they prepare no institutions, besides the most narrowly religious one, for them to be in charge of. They play by the progressivist elite's rules and bow to their initiative, and errantly tell themselves this is 'Christian humility' or 'not being too political.'" There's something to that. But what our Renn-influenced critic cannot admit is that some of the a-political and anti-status-seeking patterns of American evangelicalism stem back to a reaction against the way the WASP emphasis on elite Society, at its best an emphasis on elite leadership, reliably led away from orthodox belief! Led to the merely nominal Christianity Kierkegaard warned against! Led also to Riverside Church and Reverend Fosdick!
Anyhoo, another thing that bugs me about Renn's essay is that ALL "let's plan out our elites" talk feels strange and out of touch these days, and especially to the extent it denies the radical corruption of most American higher-ed, which I talked about in my "Honor Charlie, Ditch Existing Universities" essay (which Titus mentions in his own way when he says "It’s not so useful to imitate liberal institutions that are collapsing").
P.S. Titus--minor thing, but I don't think Reagan works the way you want him to in this. He was important for being a political ally to evangelicals, for openly inviting them into the tent, but near nobody in the evangelicalism of that time took him that seriously as an example of lived faith, and of how to combine it with political commitment, the way many now do with Kirk--and rightly so.
I think I've seen the same "Evangelicals need to create elites" article a thousand times by now (not trying to take away from Aaron's good writing). I'm glad you were able to strongman the counter arguments that I couldn't quite articulate.