Living Faithfully and Neighborly

The challenge of contemporary evangelicalism is a political reality for everyone

Jesus Cross by Claudio

In 2020, Tim Keller and I coedited a book called Uncommon Ground. The book convened a group of evangelical and evangelical-adjacent friends to reflect on the question of how Christians can live faithfully in a world of difference.

Since that book, working with my friend Eboo Patel and others, I have slightly reframed that challenge: How do Christians live faithfully and neighborly in a world we don’t control?

I have been thinking a lot about this question across much of my work: in my partnerships with Eboo (including the Newbigin Fellows and other initiatives), in my work with the Legal Vocation Fellowship, and in much of my speaking and writing. As we begin another election year, the posture and engagement of Christians in this country feels as urgent as ever.

In the News

On Christmas Day, The Atlantic ran an article by Tim Alberta drawing from his new book, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism. Alberta called attention to Christian leaders who “have spent 50 years weaponizing the gospel to win elections and dominate the country, exploiting the cultural insecurities of their unwitting brethren for political, professional, and financial gain, all while reducing the gospel of Jesus Christ to a caricature in the eyes of unbelievers.” As he noted, this longstanding problem has only intensified in recent years.

Alberta continued:

The resulting collapse of the Church’s reputation in this country—with Sunday attendance, positive perceptions of organized religion, and the number of self-identified Christians all at historic lows—leaves evangelicals estranged from their secular neighbors like never before. Unbelievers might well prefer it this way. They might be tempted to shrug and move along, assuming that the crack-up of evangelicalism isn’t their problem. They are mistaken.

And he concluded:

No matter your personal belief system, the reality is, we have no viable path forward as a pluralistic society—none—without confronting the deterioration of the evangelical movement and repairing the relationship between Christians and the broader culture.

In My Head

To those watching closely, Alberta’s book is part of a growing number of connect-the-dots autopsies of contemporary American evangelicalism, including Russell Moore’s Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America, Beth Moore’s All My Knotted-Up Life: A Memoir, and Jon Ward’s Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Failed a Generation (I interviewed Jon in a recent post).

These books in some ways follow and build upon earlier critiques like Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, Jemar Tisby’s The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism, and dozens of journalistic articles written about white evangelicals during the Trump era.

The key difference from these earlier critiques is that Alberta, the (unrelated) Moores, and Ward all write as insiders: They are all part of the tradition they critique. Other insiders like David French, Tish Harrison Warren, and Karen Swallow Prior have also highlighted widespread abuses of power, racism, and sexism within parts of evangelicalism.

I appreciated Alberta’s Christmas Day article because, like the thematically similar epilogue to his new book, it argues that evangelicalism’s flaws are not simply a problem for insiders. Self-identified evangelicals represent a massive segment of our country—tens of thousands of churches and tens of millions of voters—with political consequences for everyone.

Alberta is right to assert that the only path forward to a pluralistic society, at least in the near-term, is by “confronting the deterioration of the evangelical movement and repairing the relationship between Christians and the broader culture.” This is about numbers as much as anything else—there are too many evangelical and evangelical-adjacent Americans for an American pluralistic society to ignore (though as Ruth Graham and Charles Homans noted earlier this week, the definition of “evangelical” these days is extremely complex).

The effort that Alberta calls for will take an enormous amount of time, money, and effort (to say nothing of prayer). There is no political campaign strategy, public advertising campaign, or philanthropic initiative that will move the dial anytime soon, and certainly not before the next presidential election. The disfunction of modern evangelicalism is a matter of formation—it has unfolded over decades, and it will take decades to undo.

I am increasingly convinced that those serious about reforming evangelicalism should focus on younger generations—Millennial and GenZ evangelicals who still see themselves as insiders but who are far more comfortable with pluralism and difference than many of their parents and grandparents. But contrary to some standard evangelical playbooks, the focus should not be on preparing the next generation of leaders but the next generation of listeners. In the coming decades, Millennial and GenZ evangelicals will need to partner with—and sometimes follow—people of other faiths and no faith. That partnership will also need to extend closer to home, with progressive Christians who don’t share all of their moral values and non-white evangelicals who bring different theological insights and cultural priorities.

But this is not a one-way street. Non-evangelicals have their own part to play in what Alberta describes as “repairing the relationship between Christians and the broader culture.” The burden in this direction will fall disproportionately on elite segments of culture like journalism, higher education, and progressive politics whose messaging is too often tone-deaf to its own insularity and sanctimony. If large segments of this country really believe that some parts of evangelicalism pose an existential threat to the future of this country, then they will need to partner strategically, charitably, and generously with evangelicals seeking to live faithfully and neighborly, even while disagreeing with them over other important issues. If the future of democracy really is at stake, this is not the time for purity tests and narrow coalitions.

In the World

Tim Alberta’s The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism is a must-read to begin to understand the current political landscape. Alberta’s personal and professional observations highlight the lamentable state of American evangelicalism and its political consequences. He includes sharp critiques of leading evangelical pastors and politicians like Robert Jeffress, Eric Metaxas, Mike Pence, and Josh Hawley. He also highlights more hopeful stories about nationally known figures like Russell Moore, David French, Vince Bacote, and Rachel Denhollander, and lesser-known pastors and leaders working to lead, form, and reform their local congregations and institutions.

Alberta ends his book with a Bible verse well-known to many Christians but forgotten by quite a few others: “So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” That indeed is the challenge for the next generation of evangelicals and the political landscape that they will continue to shape.