Is Evangelicalism Really Broken?

Peter Wehner’s bracing piece in the Atlantic is sparking healthy conversations about the prophetic witness of the North American church in the wake of widespread political idolatry. It’s been a while since an article has been as relentlessly foisted on me. I’m glad it was! I’ve done some foisting of my own—you know who you are.

It’s worth pointing out that Wehner withholds a working definition of evangelicalism. Given the gravity of his diagnosis, this can’t come across as anything but a glaring omission. However, I think Wehner’s aim is to avoid getting lost in the weeds as he points to the major shortcomings on display in congregations that would broadly be classified as evangelical. I’ll take the same tack here and save the conversation on definitions for another blog or podcast.

Instead, I’d like to focus on an interesting point of tension in the piece that I believe helps to elucidate the larger predicament of so many of our congregations. Wehner quotes James Ernest, vice president and editor in chief at Eerdmans: ““The evangelical Church in the U.S. over the last five decades has failed to form its adherents into disciples. So there is a great hollowness. All that was needed to cause the implosion that we have seen was a sufficiently provocative stimulus. And that stimulus came.” Ernest is one of many incisive voices included in the piece, each one trying to make sense of what’s happening to our churches.

Not all of these voices are in perfect agreement, of course. Historian Mark Noll, best known for his book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, weighs in on the occasion of that book’s re-release, lamenting the “intellectual self-immolation of recent evangelical history.” But is the problem really anti-intellectualism? I’m not convinced. I think Ernest is closer to the truth when he points to discipleship as the missing ingredient in our congregations. In fact, if I wanted to offer a catchy sound bite, I’d say, the problem is not the “scandal of the evangelical mind,” the problem is the scandal of the evangelical heart.

Thanks to Mark Noll and countless other world-class Christian scholars, there’s no shortage of excellent resources to shape our intellectual pursuits. The problem is not that we don’t think well. The problem is that we’re not men and women of character. That’s the missing piece. Dallas Willard called this “the great omission.” If we want to recover any kind of prophetic witness, we need to cultivate virtue. In a word, we need to be Christ’s disciples. It’s the basic call on any Christian life at any time. We’re just in a unique position to appreciate how crucial it is, and I’m not entirely convinced that’s a bad thing.