After Evangelicalism: The Sixties and the United Church of Canada by Kevin N. Flatt (review)

Kevin Flatt endeavours to explain when and how the United Church of Canada parted ways with the evangelical heritage of its Methodist and Presbyterian forebears. Scholars such as Ramsay Cook argue that these churches jettisoned evangelical theology and embraced liberalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Others, such as Mark Noll, contend that the United Church did not reject evangelicalism until the 1960s. Flatt incorporates elements of both positions in a new, more convincing argument.

He claims that as early as the 1930s, many United Church leaders and prominent clergy had embraced “modernism,” that is, they “regarded a higher-critical view of the Bible as normative and were skeptical of the literal reality of ancient … Christian concepts such as the virgin birth and the second coming of Christ” (12). At the same time, few of these leaders or clergy gave voice to their modernist views, and they continued to embrace the institutional practices of evangelicalism: Christian education programs aimed at Christian conversion and nurture of children and youth; evangelistic crusades aimed at securing conversions; and moral reform campaigns (e.g., against alcohol consumption). This pattern of “quiet modernism” combined with “loud” evangelical practices continued to the beginning of the 1960s (20). By the 1960s, however, a new generation of leaders and clergy spoke openly about their modernist views and systematically rejected the institutional practices of evangelicalism. In doing so, they permanently altered the direction of the denomination, from a church with a public evangelical identity to a church with an explicitly liberal orientation.

While the first two chapters centre on the United Church’s era of “quiet modernism” and “loud” evangelical practices beginning in the 1930s, the remaining five chapters explore the church’s thoroughgoing transformation from the 1950s to the early 1970s. This transformation was evident in the public statements of United Church bodies (such as the Committee on Christian Faith, which rejected the idea of eternal punishment in 1959) and prominent officials and clergy (such as E.M. Howse, the denomination’s moderator, who publicly denied believing in Christ’s bodily resurrection). More importantly, the author explores the fate of evangelical institutional practices within the denomination. In his two substantial chapters concerning the United Church’s controversial “New Curriculum” for Sunday schools, developed in the 1950s and launched in 1964, Flatt shows that its content was explicitly modernist and that its framers rejected an earlier conversion-oriented approach to Christian education. Furthermore, while the United Church had supported Billy Graham’s evangelistic campaigns in the 1950s, Flatt observes that in the 1960s, the denomination repudiated its support for evangelistic crusades, especially those of Graham. Church officials such as J.R. Hord of the Board of Evangelism and Social Service were eager to distance themselves from conversion-oriented biblical “literalists,” and instead endorsed a “new evangelism,” which was often indistinguishable from secular social activism. Finally, Flatt argues that in the 1960s, leaders such as Hord rejected the moralism of earlier United Church officials (notably J.R. Mutchmor), and instead advocated liberal positions on issues such as premarital sex and abortion. Taken together, Flatt argues, these changes constituted “a profound destabilization and transformation of the public collective identity of the United Church in the 1960s” (237), a process which, he concludes, “was likely a significant factor in the numerical decline of the United Church from the 1960s” (246).

Although After Evangelicalism is a work of impressive scholarship overall, Flatt’s analysis is problematic because it is predicated on a stark dichotomy between the categories of “evangelical” and “modernist.” Such binaries fail to account for the fact that many church leaders, including several whom Flatt discusses, adhered to elements of both evangelicalism and modernism. For example, William Berry, a prominent church official, believed in the atonement and deity of Christ and was a strong proponent of evangelism. However, because Berry argued that evangelism should not result merely in...