Is there an evangelical crisis appearing on the horizon?
About 20 years ago, the eminent sociologist of religion, Christian Smith, coined a useful and resonant phrase, describing evangelical Christianity in the post-1960s United States as both “embattled and thriving.”
By this, Smith meant that evangelicals had maintained an identity in a secularizing country that was neither separatist nor assimilated, but somehow mainstream and countercultural at once.
Smith’s description still holds up. The story of U.S. religion lately has been one of institutional decline, of Mainline Protestantism’s aging and Catholicism’s weakening and the rise of the so-called “nones.”
But there has been an evangelical exception. Evangelical resilience is the main reason why religious conservatism retains an intense and active core.
The question is whether this resilience will survive the age of Trump. Some think not: Whether the subject is the debauched pagan in the White House, the mall-haunted candidacy of Roy Moore or the larger question of how to engage with secular culture, there is talk of an intergenerational crisis, a widening disillusionment with a Trump-endorsing old guard, a feeling that a crackup must loom.
U.S. evangelicalism has always contained a number of tendencies:
It’s home to rigorous heirs of the Reformation, seeker-sensitive megachurches, would-be ecumenical “mere Christians,” prosperity preachers and hard-edged Christian nationalists.
During the 2016 Republican primary, it was easy enough to argue that Donald Trump was exploiting these divisions, winning Fox News-watching cultural evangelicals and prosperity-gospel types while losing churchgoers who cared about character and orthodoxy.
Then in the general election, it was possible to argue that the latter groups came around to Trump reluctantly, out of fear of contemporary liberalism’s anticlerical streak and that their relationship to his identitarian nationalism was transactional and didn’t reflect any deep congruence.
If this is right, then the alienation of younger evangelical writers from Trumpism’s court pastors could indeed be a signifier of a coming crackup.
But it’s also possible that evangelical intellectuals and writers, and their friends in other Christian traditions, have underestimated how much a serious theology has ever mattered to evangelicalism’s sociological success.
If so, then this would imply that white Christian tribalism and a very American sort of heresy, not a commitment to Scripture and tradition, has kept evangelical churches thriving all these years. And if the God-and-country, pray-and-grow-rich tendencies sweep aside orthodox resistance, the evangelicalism that emerges might be more coherent and sociologically resilient, in the short run, for being rid of hand-wringers who don’t think Baptist choirs should set “Make America Great Again” to music.
This is a sobering idea, and one I hope is wrong.
But it is a paradox of this strange time that serious evangelicals probably should be rooting for a real post-Trump crisis in their churches — because its absence will tell them something depressing about where their movement’s strength lay all along.
White Christian tribalism could be at play.