Evangelicals are strivers

Plus: a new book review and Q&A, a little-known C.S. Lewis essay, and more

Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and here’s this week’s post. As a reminder, I’m writing a new book this fall. Please read about it, and:

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Evangelicals are strivers

(via)

This week, searching for some tidbit or another about American evangelicals—that’s pretty much my whole life now—I ran across a 2024 post from Aaron Renn on how Vice President JD Vance “rejected evangelicalism.” It provided the perfect occasion to toss out an idea I’ve been mulling for a while: Evangelicals are strivers.

This is not exactly Renn’s conclusion, but bear with me. Let’s start a 2016 Washington Post interview Renn highlighted. The speaker here is Vance describing his then-recent revival of attraction to Christianity:

Back home, kids who grew up to be relatively successful tended to abandon their faith. All of my close friends growing up were all really religious but, with the exception of one of us, we all considered ourselves nonreligious by age 25.

At Yale, I was exposed to faith groups in which that didn’t seem to be happening.

Mormons and Catholics at Yale Law School, who were really smart and successful, were engaged with their faith. There was a moment when I was like, “Maybe it is possible to have Christian faith in an upwardly mobile world.” You can be a member of your faith and still be a reasonably successful person. That’s not the world I grew up in, but maybe that’s true.

“Once [Vance] saw that it was possible to be Christian in the world of the elites, it became interesting and credible to him again,” Renn comments. But note, he adds, “that it’s Catholics and Mormons who are key to this, not any sort of Protestants,” and certainly not evangelicals.

Vance would later convert to Catholicism, and Renn notes that this kind of elite Catholic conversion shouldn’t be dismissed as selfish ambition. It’s not careerism so much as the fact that “when you are embedded in a particular milieu, it’s very hard to avoid being affected by it.” And if your milieu is an intellectually and culturally elite place like Yale, evangelicalism probably won’t feature prominently.

Regular readers may recall that I quoted Renn’s taxonomy of what he dubs the striver class and the middle class in a piece for Christianity Today earlier this year (that’s an unlocked link). He and I both place ourselves squarely in the former: inclined to measure success in terms of recognition, to describe our ambitions as more social than material.

Renn returns to this taxonomy in the Vance post, arguing that smart, young, conservative people who are raised in evangelical churches are apt to cross the Tiber because evangelicalism does not appeal to strivers:

There’s also something in evangelicalism that’s just off-putting to a lot of people like Vance. It’s not just the working class Pentecostal congregations like the one I was raised in (which was very similar to Vance’s experience). The average suburban megachurch is also incredibly cringe.

I like to distinguish between middle class and striver class. Evangelicalism appeals to the middle class, but much less so to the striver class. And the elites of our society are either people from the upper classes, or strivers like Vance.

With the loss of the mainline churches and the de-Protestantization of elite American institutions, there’s no longer a high status Protestantism in America for those people.

This is all correct, I think, but it misses a poignant irony: Modern evangelicalism was born of striving. We are a striver culture. The very adoption of the label “evangelical” (originally “neo-evangelical”) was a striver move. It was a self-aware, image-conscious shift away from the characteristically prickly purism of fundamentalism. Of course, evangelicalism is much more than striving. Yet it is not less.

I'm writing another book!

Much of my book research to date has concerned how to define evangelicalism and interpret its history. All this is debated ad nauseam. But across the spectrum of my reading so far, from evangelicalism’s own to its most vehement critics, no one disagrees about this foundational striving, though they cast it in different lights. Here’s a selection of examples I’ve recently encountered (all bolding mine).

Thomas S. Kidd in Who Is an Evangelical?:

“Evangelicals” took a different path than fundamentalists did. […C]onservative Protestants began to disagree among themselves about the merit of partnering with organizations that included theological liberals. Fundamentalists insisted that they would not cooperate with theological liberals, or even cooperate with theological conservatives who associated with modernists.

Some observers today use fundamentalist and evangelical as synonymous terms, but doing so is incorrect. One way to tell the difference is to ask whether the conservative Protestant in question approved of Billy Graham, who cooperated with modernists and Catholics. If conservative Protestants admired Graham, they were probably evangelicals; if not, they were likely fundamentalists.

By the early 1940s, a number of evangelical leaders worked to move beyond fundamentalism to craft an intellectually robust, culturally engaged form of conservative Protestantism. These neo-evangelicals remained concerned about modernism, but they also partnered with diverse Christian groups in order to present the gospel in a forceful yet winsome way. […]

[Christianity Today founded editor Carl] Henry summoned evangelicals out of their fundamentalist ghettoes, exhorting them to enlist against “social evils [such as] aggressive warfare, racial hatred and intolerance, the liquor traffic, and exploitation of labor.”

Ross Douthat in Bad Religion:

In an effort to escape the mad accretions and endless civil wars of fundamentalism, Billy Graham and others had preached a more stripped-down Gospel, emphasizing the core tenets of orthodoxy and downplaying the application of strict litmus tests in secondary matters.

Kristin Kobes Du Mez in Jesus and John Wayne:

[The National Association of Evangelicals aimed to] distance itself from more reactionary elements, and it was at this time that “evangelical” came to connote a more forward-looking alternative to the militant, separatist fundamentalism that had become an object of ridicule. But evangelicals never entirely abandoned a combative posture, and even as evangelicals worked to bring a new respectability to their “old-time religion,” fundamentalists fought to define the contours of that faith.

George Marsden in Evangelicals:

Through the first half of the 1970s, “evangelicalism” was not a widely used term in American parlance. The “new evangelicals” associated with the founding of the National Association of Evangelicals in 1942 had succeeded in reviving the term to a degree, especially among conservative Protestant leaders in various denominations and parachurch movements who were becoming uncomfortable with the term “fundamentalist.”

The rise of Billy Graham to national prominence after 1949 gave wide visibility to this movement. By the 1960s, it was common for insiders in a large network of loosely connected revivalist-oriented Protestants to call themselves “evangelical” if they favored Graham’s more open approach to sympathetic mainline Christians.

“Fundamentalist,” which had been the most common term for conservative conversion-oriented American Christians in the 1920s and 1930s, now became the term for a smaller group of more militant conservatives who typically demanded separation from churches and organizations that tolerated any degree of theological liberalism.

And while I have serious disagreement with Anthea Butler’s White Evangelical Racism, she not only reiterates that founding dynamic but gestures, albeit in ungracious language, toward the striving tendency too:

Between 1945 and 1970, newly born evangelical groups emerged from institutions such as Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. Magazines like Christianity Today promoted a forward-thinking Christianity that was not as staid as the fundamentalist versions of earlier times. In a striking shift, these new evangelical believers were willing to engage the world, media, and scholarship. […]

Evangelicals hold old resentments about being shut out of the power-broker positions mainline Protestants traditionally held in America. Evangelicals were not well-heeled Presbyterians or Episcopalians. They could barely call themselves white Anglo-Saxon Protestants before the rise of Billy Graham. They longed for the institutions and prestige that the tall-steeple-church pastors had.

This last phrasing is more cynical and critical than mine would be. Yet Butler’s identification of a certain longing and, sometimes, resentment (or at least disappointment) rings true. Since that mid-century self-conception, evangelicals have always wanted to participate in the larger cultural conversation. Naturally, we are unhappy when we sense we are not wanted there.

So Renn may well be right that strivers like Vance tend to leave evangelicalism behind. But that irony he neglects produces a twofold tragedy.

For those who go, their striving is likely—at least in some small part—the result of having grown up evangelical. Maybe striving is mostly nature; it feels that way to me. My parents did not inculcate this tendency. But American evangelicalism is an environment that could well nurture it. Our striving may itself teach some of our best and brightest that they can do “better” than the faith of their youth.

As for those who stay, it’s clarifying to view our angst around our tradition, its departures, and its discontents through this striving lens. Here is a movement with an ambition for the gospel, a movement designed to avoid social missteps that could be an obstacle for evangelism or a distraction from the goodness and redemption of God.

But nearly a century on, we’re “incredibly cringe.” Tacky. Off-trend. Still getting hit with warmed-over versions of that probably apocryphal Gandhi line about liking Jesus but not his folks.

If anything, in popular culture, the evangelical-fundamentalist line is blurring. “When I used the word [“evangelical”] to describe myself in the 1970s, it meant I was not a fundamentalist,” author and pastor Tim Keller wrote in 2017. “If I use the name today, however, it means to hearers that I am.” And if you’ve spent much time on Reddit lately, you know the internet term of art for insulting evangelicals is “fundie.”

Now, getting lumped in with fundamentalists is not the worst that can happen—my CT colleague Matt Reynolds wrote a great column earlier this year about the goods of fundamentalism. And it may be that evangelicals are significantly to blame for our own exclusion from polite society. That’s what Butler would say, I believe, and I would substantially disagree, but in any case it’s a question for another day.

Here I only want to note the continued reality of that exclusion. Evangelicalism was conceived as a deliberate turning away—maybe even repentance—from the self-isolation and unpopular rigidity with which fundamentalists were associated. But after a century of striving, we’re still on the outs.

Maybe that strikes you as pathetic. It strikes me as a bit sad, somewhat reminiscent of watching a kid struggle to find a welcoming seat in the cafeteria. A striver myself, I understand the frustration of striving unsatisfied. It’s good news, then, that the good news does not depend on how well we strive.

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Odds & ends

Housekeeping note: Two weeks ago in this section I shared an article about “Christian AI” company Gloo, noting that the article had an in-progress correction notice and that my comments were about the elements that did not appear to be in dispute. I think I delineated those fairly but want to note here that the article has since been retracted, which is a rare and weighty remedy for journalistic error.

• New from me at Christianity Today, a Q&A: “AI Bible: ‘We call it edutainment’” (don’t miss the part where I ask about getting people to actually read the Bible and go to church, and his answer is about needing clearer branding)

• Also new from me at CT, a book review: “A woman’s mental work is never done”

• New podcast interview:

• Current research reading:

  • White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America, by Anthea Butler

  • The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis, by Karen Swallow Prior

  • Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda, by Megan Basham

  • The Body God Gives: A Biblical Response to Transgender Theory, by Robert S. Smith

• “Willing slaves of the welfare state,” by C.S. Lewis in 1958. I’ve seen bits and pieces quoted around but had never encountered the full piece. (This is the most readable version I’ve found online; the site looks a little sketchy but I’ve confirmed the text via other sources.)

• Sen. Rand Paul: “JD ‘I don’t give a shit’ Vance says killing people he accuses of a crime is the ‘highest and best use of the military.’ Did he ever read To Kill a Mockingbird? Did he ever wonder what might happen if the accused were immediately executed without trial or representation?? What a despicable and thoughtless sentiment it is to glorify killing someone without a trial.”

• “Americans don’t actually like Trump’s bad guy posturing on immigration and the military,” by Matthew Petti for Reason

Like many politicians before him, Trump seems to have radically overestimated his own mandate. People vote for strongmen because they want someone to end the chaos. They don't want their strongman to cause more chaos by picking fights. The immigration debate shows that dynamic clearly. Americans overwhelmingly want to deport violent criminals, which is what Trump campaigned on. They don't want to round up immigrants who have lived in America for years without any problems, which is what Trump is doing.

• “The four fathers of Four Mothers,” by Darbe Saxby for

  Natal Gazing

• “America’s moral inflection point,” by Philip Bump (h/t to Joel Mathis)

• “The priesthood of all chatbots?” by Zac Koons for The Christian Century (h/t Brad East), raising a question that now seems so obvious that I can’t believe I’ve never seen anyone else say it: Might God dislike an AI-generated prayer?

[W]hen compared to extemporaneous prayer, or even to contemplative silence, is what [the bot] is offering here really an improvement in any way? Is a more articulate, more accurate prayer inevitably better than the subtle and near silent groans of the Spirit? Which prayer do you think would delight God more to hear?

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