On Substack Notes, I shared that I had read Bonnie Kristian's In Defense of Evangelicalism: A Response to Its Cultured Despisers. My assessment was that, while Bonnie had written a good and needed book, I wasn't, in the end, persuaded away from my very negative view of American evangelicalism.
That said, I don't want my criticism to be taken as despising evangelicals as human beings. I don't want to participate in what Bonnie rightly calls the "monstering" of evangelicalism. Especially since I've written a book with a chapter about this very psychology of monstering.
I don't write about evangelicalism very often because evangelicals aren't really my audience, though there are progressive-curious, or at least Richard Beck-curious, evangelicals who do follow me. My steady conviction is that if you criticize people outside of your readership, you're malforming yourself and your audience. You're just marinating in contempt, and that poisons your heart.
And so, I spend most of my time criticizing progressive Christians, as that's who most of my audience is. I do this so much that I expect many readers tire of being poked at so often and wish I'd stop and say some critical things about the other side. Yeah, progressive Christians are a mess. But what about those evangelicals and Trump supporters?
Well, dear progressive reader, if you've ever felt that way, here's a series for you!
After I shared my comment on Notes, Bonnie was kind enough to respond and ask me for some clarifications. Was I talking about evangelicals or evangelicalism? And what, concretely, would I recommend to evangelicals by way of improvement that wouldn't simply be asking them to become progressives?
I'd like to take this series to try to answer those questions by way of sharing my thoughts about Bonnie's book.
Since sharing my original Note, I had a clarifying conversation about Bonnie's book that helped me understand more clearly what I was looking for and what Bonnie is actually doing.
As I shared in a follow-up Note, I think Bonnie's book works best as an intervention in virtue ethics. How are we to engage in criticism, polemics, and prophetic indictment virtuously? Bonnie's book is excellent at helping describe and cast a vision for what virtue would look like in criticism, polemics, and prophetic indictment of evangelicalism.
What I wanted from Bonnie's book, however, was an engagement with mainstream evangelical beliefs. And that's not what she provides—a defense of mainstream evangelical beliefs. For example, to be concrete, Bonnie doesn't defend patriarchal beliefs. She does, however, defend evangelicals for holding patriarchal beliefs, as holding those beliefs with integrity and as a good-faith attempt to honor both God and the Bible. Which, again, isn't quite the defense readers like me would have wanted. And in Bonnie's defense, this is a frustrating thing many authors face: people reacting negatively toward your book because it's not the book they wanted you to write.
In short, this contrast between defending evangelicals and defending evangelicalism is important to understanding the book, as I now read it. I love evangelicals because God calls us to universal charity. But I do have a ferocious and aggressive posture toward many mainstream evangelical beliefs.
To be sure, it's hard to keep prophetic denunciation free of dehumanization. But this is the place where I find myself.
Let me make that distinction explicit. My original Substack Note wasn't about evangelicals as human beings. Evangelicals are made in the image of God and deserve all of my care and concern. And this is a live issue for me. Definitionally speaking—more on this in the next post—I work at an evangelical university, and I'm an elder at an evangelical church. And living as I do in West Texas, most of my neighbors are evangelical.
And I love them all.
And it's precisely here where I think Bonnie's book shines. Yes, evangelicalism has been implicated in and accused of many noxious things in American life, sometimes fairly and sometimes unfairly. But evangelicals are a large and diverse group. So we shouldn't despise this entire class of people. If you're a follower of Jesus, despising is not an option.
I'd also like to highlight a weird phenomenon among evangelicals, what Bonnie describes as a sort of "inverse hypocrisy." If regular hypocrisy is people saying good things while committing bad acts, evangelicals often say bad things but act in loving ways. I bear witness to that truth all the time. There are people I know, evangelicals, who espouse beliefs, political and religious, that I find wholly antithetical to Christianity. And yet, these same people are often the very first people to show up in the city to lend a helping hand. It really is the most perplexing and paradoxical thing about so many evangelical people. And I applaud Bonnie for drawing attention to the kindness and compassion of the so-called "deplorables."
That said, I find evangelicalism, as a Christian movement, to be a dumpster fire.
When it comes to prophetic indictment—and this is relevant to Bonnie's book—it is noteworthy that it is directed at institutions and nations rather than at individual persons. Collectives are called out. As with evangelicalism today, there were many pious and faithful Jews when Jesus declared the temple desolate. I feel that the movement of evangelicalism is deserving of the same sort of prophetic speech.
So while Bonnie's book isn't a defense of evangelical beliefs, there were two places where I felt her defense of evangelicals shaded into, or leaned upon, beliefs. These beliefs concerned gender roles and the beliefs that have shaped, and I believe malformed, evangelical politics. The issue of beliefs also raised questions about who, exactly, qualifies as "evangelical."
So, what follows are three posts reflecting on Bonnie's book. The first post concerns questions I had about definitions. Specifically, I think Bonnie's definition of "evangelical" is too broad, and thereby makes her defense easier. Next, I turn to how Bonnie describes gender roles within egalitarianism and how I think she's mischaracterized the situation in a way that aids her defense. And finally, I turn to how evangelicals have engaged in politics and how I think Bonnie's defense of evangelicals in the political realm is missing something crucial.
