A narrative running through countless news articles over the last eighteen months goes something like this. Over the last 20 years, evangelicals, led by Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, could be counted on to vote Republican and focus on a couple of hot-button issues such as abortion and sexuality. Today, the movement’s younger generation, represented by Rick Warren, has a broader set of concerns which include care for the environment and social justice issues. As a result it is less rigid and more likely to vote Democrat. We might even look forward to the end of the ‘culture wars’ conflict. This, however, is an unfortunate oversimplification.
First, how do we define evangelicals? Let’s take it broadly to mean Protestants who believe in the full authority of the Bible and who don’t take the creeds metaphorically, but think Jesus was pre-existent God, he did die for sins and rise physically from the dead, and you must be born again through faith in him. If we define it that way, then I am knee-deep in the next, younger, more multi-ethnic generation of evangelicals. I pastor a church in Manhattan with several thousand of them—mostly singles in their 20s and early 30s and I rub shoulders with the next generation of pastoral leaders. And here is what I see.
It’s true that these younger orthodox believers are broader in their political concerns than most of the last generation. They are less defensive toward the culture, more concerned about the common good of their cities and the poor. But that doesn’t mean they are slowly morphing into mainline, liberal Christians. The kind of Christianity growing rapidly around the world today is of a robust, orthodox kind. Don’t get me wrong. There are always people on the edges of a movement who are on their way out and make a good interview. But, in general, younger evangelicals are not moving from a Republican view of the world to Democratic one. It’s much more complex. If anything, as they read the Bible, they are coming to positions more in line with Catholic social teaching. They continue to support traditional Christian views of abortion, sexuality, and family, but now they also care more for the environment and racial justice, while being more reticent to use military force than were their elders. They hold to both traditional conservative and traditional liberal positions. This is why they will be increasingly unhappy with either of the straight party lines.
Behind some of the articles on less-conservative-evangelicals is the assumption that religious believers will inevitably become less religious and more secular as they receive more education and contact with the wide world. That is a condescending theory, and it doesn’t appear to be proving true. Exhibit A is the surprising number of cutting edge scholarly books, in all kinds of fields, written by believers who defend theses that elites of last generation thought were in the dustbin of history. Here are just three examples.
Nicholas Wolterstorff, emeritus professor of philosophy at Yale, has just written Justice: Rights and Wrongs which makes the case that it was not the Enlightenment but Christianity that produced our understanding of human rights, and that no account of rights makes sense without the existence of God. It has already been called the best book on justice since John Rawls. The sociologist Christian Smith edited The Secular Revolution, a volume overturning the idea that the secularization of society was the inevitable outcome of modernization. It shows it was the achievement of people who removed all religious reasoning from the public square in order to gain more power in cultural institutions.
Richard Bauckham, of St. Andrews University, has written Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. For 150 years most academic Bible scholarship viewed the New Testament gospels as oral traditions, shaped and revised to fit community needs and written down many years later. Bauckham shows that they were not oral traditions but rather oral histories, preserved intact and taken down from the mouths of living eyewitnesses who were named in the texts. Bauckham’s volume will make generations of Biblical scholarship obsolete.
Out in society, the ‘person in the street’ still thinks that religion is the enemy of human rights, that the Bible is a lot of legends written down years after the real events, and that becoming modern, educated, and secular are the same thing. But there are now high-level arguments that refute all of these ideas. Will these books and religious beliefs win the day? I don’t look for that. However, they, and many other books like them, will create the foundations for a continuing, significant, and growing orthodox religious counter-culture that will insist on speaking out of its convictions in public discourse, and will do so in increasingly sophisticated ways.
In his New York Times column (“‘Religious Right May Be Fading, but not the ‘Culture Wars’” Feb 16, 2008) Peter Steinfels says that we are at a very ‘strange juncture’ in our society. As evangelicals like Rick Warren are calling for a broader public agenda, and just when writers like Nicholas Kristof urge us to stop demonizing religious believers and work side by side on the world’s problems, we are barraged by a wave of books that not only say that all religion is poison, but that even respect for religion is bad. Every new book trumpeting the glories of strong secularism seems to become a best seller.
Secularism and orthodox faith are both growing while moderate, mainline religion is withering, as Mark Lilla powerfully argues in The Stillborn God. Neither side, therefore, should expect the other to go away. Each side is strengthening. If anything, it seems to be the secular voices that now are the most strident, disdainful, and self-righteous. Just when many orthodox believers seem to be extending an olive branch to secular people, the public rhetoric against them has been turned up louder than anyone can ever remember it. I hope that won’t continue.
Dr. Timothy Keller is author of the new book "The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism." He is founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City.
