Everyone Hates Evangelicalism. Is It Even Worth Salvaging?

I love books. Twelve times a year I hit a peak of euphoria as I plan out next month’s reading plan. But I rarely devote a full article to just one book.

However, after reading an advanced copy of Bonnie Kristian’s In Defense of Evangelicalism, I asked Bonnie if she’d wanna do a written interview.

I once heard an acquisitions editor say that no one, not even the upper echelon of the publishing strata, can predict how or why a book takes off. But even keeping that in mind, I’d be shocked if this one doesn’t.

For some context, Bonnie is my point editor at Christianity Today. She gatekeeps all my writing’s characteristic buffoonery from making its way into the hallowed pages of America’s flagship evangelical publication. So it was lovely to turn the tables on her for once and edit her words (which I didn’t actually have to do, because of her whole actually being a professional writer thing).

Let’s get into it.

Bonnie: Yes and no. I spend half a chapter on this because it’s such a big question, and I explain my aim as describing more than defining, and describing evangelicalism as a movement—or, yes, a vibe—with a knowable center rather than hard edges. Think more or less evangelical, rather than is or isn’t.

That said, the short and necessarily inadequate answer that I’ll give in interviews like this is: Evangelicals are creedally orthodox Protestant Christians who have a shared history and culture dating to the First Great Awakening, who generally attend church, and who maintain in action and belief alike the four emphases of scholar David Bebbington’s well-known quadrilateral, which I recently wrote about for Comment: conversion, activism, Bible, cross.

But again: more or less. There are people and groups who fit most of that description, but not all, or who have other emphases too, and yet are still substantially evangelical. As for you, from what I know of your writing and background, I think you’re squarely evangelical, even if the label feels weird.

Bonnie: Some of it is as basic, I think, as an inverse of the comedy practice of “punching down” (i.e., making a joke at the expense of an easy target). By just about any measure or definition, evangelicals are very numerous in America, so where it’s obviously rude and gross to go after a tiny religious minority, the same skewering of us might feel okay. And if we’re talking about actual comedy, then sure, that may be true. We should be able to take a joke!1

But I do think the first joke isn’t the same as the 5,000th, and there’s a darker edge here as well. I’d point to someone like Jennifer Welch, an enormously popular podcaster whom I wrote about for The Free Press. Extremely prominent Democrats, up to and including Barack Obama, go on her show—and she routinely calls evangelicals a “cancer,” a “cult,” the “worst people” in America. She’s said evangelicalism is a “dumb factory” and “white trash, magical thinking, dumb people bull****.”

Can you imagine Obama doing a podcast with a host who talked that way about Catholics or Muslims or Jews? No—and that’s good! Evangelicals deserve the same courtesy.

Bonnie: In some ways I didn’t! I’m not afraid of a taking a controversial position—you can’t be, as an opinion journalist—but I’m not someone who really courts controversy, especially not for its own sake. You don’t find me out picking fights on social media.

When my editor and I first discussed the idea, in fact, I had to seriously think it over. Like: Do I want to be that person? And I realized a few things: One is that, to most of the world, I kinda already am that person. I mean, I work at Christianity Today. I’m a member of an evangelical church and a graduate of an evangelical seminary. My beliefs are not exactly a secret.

Another is that while I do care about my own reputation—and Matthew Lee Anderson has some great developing work on the theology of reputation that has been very helpful to my thinking here—if people are mad at me because I liked this huge swath of the church too much, well, okay. I can live with that.

And then finally, as I recently wrote in a Substack post explaining the history behind the book’s subtitle, the more I thought about it, the more I felt compelled to do it—that this stuff needs to be said. I’m equipped to say it, and I came to feel both a freedom and a duty to do it and do it well. As Paul says about other matters of Christian dispute in Romans 14:16, “do not let what you know is good be spoken of as evil.”

Bonnie: That’s wild, right? I touched on this a bit in that Comment piece too—and it’s hard to say this without sound condescending—but I think it’s basically low-information voters. People get things wrong.

Even a lot of actual evangelicals aren’t totally sure what the word means; historian Thomas S. Kidd describes it as a word more native to journalists and academics than most of the people it describes. I think it’s even more unfamiliar to people outside Christianity, so if they only ever hear it in political contexts, then it makes sense that they might mistake its meaning to be something like “religious and Republican” or even just “Republican.” Ryan Burge wrote the definitive article on this subject for The New York Times.

I so appreciate and often rely on Ryan’s work, but the point I want to drive home is: Those people are wrong. It’s interesting and informative to think about why they made the mistake they did, but evangelicals are necessarily Christians. There is no such thing as an evangelical Buddhist, for instance, and a few Buddhists’ confusion here does not override hundreds of years of history and millions of Christians’ practice of faith. That isn’t how words work.

Bonnie: Some of both! Evangelicalism isn’t a static movement—and this is true on many fronts. Brad East wrote a great piece about this for me at CT a while back, expanding on a post he’d done on his blog the year prior. Weirdly, none of the changes mentioned (i.e., shifting opinions on alcohol, tattoos, gambling, church calendars, and raunchy movies) are political. Even as that basic description of evangelicalism I sketched above remains consistent and recognizable—not only across decades but centuries and also continents—there’s always going to be change.

One change I’m thankful for is the move off purity culture in the last 20 years. It was well-intended, I think, and, as Katelyn Beaty recently wrote, an understandable reaction to an era of pop culture prone to gross sexualization of young girls. But also, I have a daughter and am so glad she’s not going to hear about how premarital sex would leave her indelibly dirty, like a piece of used chewing gum or a manhandled rose. That’s literally sub-Christian, undermining the work of Christ and limiting his power to save us from our sin, and it’s good that evangelicals have learned there are better ways to teach biblical sexual ethics.

In the political space, again there’s both real change and changes in perception. And here it’s vital to be distinguish which evangelicals we’re talking about. There are very prominent and powerful people like James Dobson who, in my view, directly and knowingly reversed themselves on questions like whether character counts when picking a president. That gets bad PR because it is bad.

But there are also tens of millions of ordinary evangelicals who simply did not make a decision of that same weight, knowledge, and responsibility, and it’s unjust to sweep them into the same pile as the prominent people who did. I go into this in far greater detail in the book because it’s an incredibly important question.

Griffin: That kinda reminds me of my undergrad logic courses, where we learned about this thing called the “fallacy of composition.” It’s basically the logical error made when we mistake what’s true for a part of a system as what’s true for the whole of a system. Is this kind of like the mistake we make with evangelicalism?

Bonnie: Tossing me a softball here! Yes, in fact, I made just this analogy in an email the other day. The person I was corresponding with likened my book and some of the books I critically engage to that parable of the three blind men encountering different parts of an elephant and mistaking the parts for the whole.

I replied and said I think there’s something to that—but let me specify that the part the critics have found is the tail. I grant that there’s a tail. But I reject that an elephant is just a thin, bony string.

Bonnie: Because it has real goods, real faithfulness, real gifts for the church universal—and all that is neither negated by nor reducible to the real foibles and wrongs also present in the movement.

Alan Jacobs put it wonderfully in the foreword:

I’m glad because, in spite of everything—and if you don’t know what I mean by “everything,” this book will tell you—I remain an evangelical. One of the people Kristian interviews says of evangelicals, “They are my people.” Well, they are my people also, because they brought me out of a dark place—what that proto-evangelical John Bunyan called the Slough of Despond—and up to a higher ground where the sun shines on the green grass. Almost all that’s good about me comes from my immersion in the world of evangelicalism, and I must honor my sisters and brothers in the faith for all they’ve done for me. Yes, sometimes—well, often—they drive me nuts, and when they do so in the future, as they certainly will, and when I start to forget the debts I owe them, as I certainly will, I’ll have this book to help me remember what’s what.

Bonnie: Partly because, as I said, it’s absurd. We’re talking about normal people here: people with jobs and kids and mortgages who are not, in fact, a lurking menace. Talking about them this way is ridiculous conspiracy theorizing that flies in the face of common sense—a modern, secularized update to Know Nothing ravings about Catholics’ supposed Papist conspiracies to seize power in Washington and submit the Constitution to the whims of Rome.

But also, I’m confident to say it because I’ve observed a great deal of evangelicalism both personally and professionally. I grew up in evangelical churches—a lot of them, in fact, because we move around quite a bit: Southern Baptist, Pentecostal, Independent Fundamental Baptist, Christian & Missionary Alliance, Methodist, Mennonite, Anglican, and nondenominational churches from New York to Texas. I’ve attended evangelical schools and seminary, too.

My work at Christianity Today brings me into contact with American evangelicalism all day, every day, including the ugly stuff. And for this book, I did extensive research, cross-country reporting, and dozens of interviews with scholars and ordinary Christians alike.

Bonnie: Some of it may be evangelicals failing to study our own history—we do need to be better about that—and in some complementarian circles that could include a deliberate neglect: After all, if you don’t think women should teach or preach to men, you probably won’t be eager to tout histories of people putting women in positions of theological authority. (It bears noting here that most evangelicals are egalitarian now, including me.)

In some cases, though, I suspect evangelicals have been a little too eager to believe caricatures about ourselves. As I’ve begun telling people about this book, I’ve encountered a real eagerness for it in some people—like they’re hungry for permission to be openly happy about their own tradition.

These are generally evangelicals who have a vague sense that they should feel bad about being evangelical even though evangelicalism has been a positive thing in their lives. They’re in a good church every Sunday, but out in the discourse, they’ve absorbed the idea that evangelicalism is kind of shameful, backwards, something for which you need to apologize. And someone in that frame of mind might not even know to go looking for history like this, which I honestly find very sad.

Bonnie: The first thing I’d say is that I get it. As is obvious from that quote, I tend to share those frustrations. At that level of lifestyle and culture, I am in many ways pretty atypical for an evangelical, especially a middle-aged evangelical mom.

But the part of me that wants to detail for you here and now how much better my taste is—that is not a good part of me! Indulge it too much and I could all too easily be a “cultured despiser” myself.

But (as I said in a recent conversation here on Substack) in my better—more gracious, kindlier, more Christ-like—moments, I want to say that having good taste does not reliably correspond to the imitation of Christ, and that having bad taste is never a justification for looking down on someone, and that I think it has become too common to cover distaste for evangelical tackiness with a gilding of political and/or theological superiority and pretend it’s solid gold all the way through.

That’s what I’m against, because there are many deeply tacky old church ladies who have done more in love of God and neighbor than I can ever hope to do. Far be it from me to dismiss the importance of aesthetics, but we can have and propagate good taste without plunging into an attitude of Can anything good come out of Nazareth?

Bonnie: I think there’s a place for going either way on this, and in the context of specific relationships and ministries, it might be prudent to jettison the word: “I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some.” As I said above, plenty of evangelicals don’t even know the word themselves. You don’t have to call yourself an evangelical to be one, and this label certainly not the measure of salvation.

And yet: I don’t want to distance myself from the people in those pews. I’m not embarrassed of those people. Annoyed with them sometimes? Oh, yes. But embarrassed, ashamed? No. I’ve read the history and grappled with the theology and argued about the politics and still come to the conclusion that there are real goods here in evangelicalism, that these are my people, that we are doing our ever-inadequate best to follow Jesus in the same way, together.

Griffin: Lovely, thanks so much for taking the time to respond to all these questions!

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