Still Christian: Following Jesus out of American Evangelicalism by David P. Gushee (review)

This book is of interest for a variety of reasons. First, this memoir traces the spiritual journey and intellectual development of one of the most influential voices in Protestant ethics of the last thirty years. Second, like a character in a John Irving picaresque novel, Gushee is not only a witness but also one of the principal players in the modern history of U.S. evangelicalism. Finally, this short book is worth reading for its deeply personal yet historically significant diagnosis of the ideological turmoil and cultural intolerance currently plaguing American evangelicalism.

David Gushee was raised Catholic but converted to evangelical Protestantism in his youth. The Baptist faith he encountered in his teenage years provided a language and intellectual framework for questioning and making sense of his religious experiences in an affirming environment. Rather than the passive Catholicism of his upbringing, Evangelicalism represented dynamism as his entire life was framed in terms of before and after: “You didn’t know Jesus, and then you did. Once you did, everything was different” (8). This new perspective accompanied Gushee to the College of William and Mary a public state university in Virginia. This was in marked contrast to the Baptist college education most Southern Baptists received at the time, but a decision that proved pivotal in his eventual decision to pursue Christian ethics as a vocation.

Studying religion at a public university, he was methodologically influenced by a non-confessional “religious studies” approach, receiving a strong foundation in the academic study of religion even as he struggled with intellectual challenges to the Southern Baptist literalism of his teenage conversion. Rather than avoid this struggle or escape it into a confessional “safe zone,” he viewed these intellectual challenges to his fundamentalist faith as an opportunity for growth. This intellectual foundation served him well: first, as he completed a master’s degree in religion at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, the flagship seminary for the Southern Baptist denomination, and then, in a surprising turn, through doctoral studies in Christian Ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York, the bulwark of Protestant liberalism and liberationist thought in the U.S.

In his student years at Southern Seminary (1984–1987) Gushee witnessed first hand the ideological tensions that have fractured U.S. evangelicalism and eventually drove him out of the Southern Baptist Church. Moderate members of the faculty at Southern were eventually pushed out so that by 1993, when David Gushee began his academic career, a bloodless coup, had in the course of a few years, established an ultra-conservative, fundamentalist culture within the Southern Baptist Convention contributing to his eventual departure in 1996. During his three years on the faculty at Southern Gushee developed a solid academic reputation on the basis of his first book on the Holocaust; he received many invitations to lecture and started a long career of public ethics writing, which included drafting statements (including one on racial reconciliation) for the Southern Baptist Convention, which garnered national media attention. Slowly he was developing a reputation as a strong evangelical voice of conscience whose personal politics leaned a little left of center.

Now ensconced at Mercer University, it was his stance against government-sponsored torture (Gushee co-wrote a declaration against torture with his mentor, Glen Stassen in 2006) and his later very public efforts at LGBTQ inclusion—impacted by his sister’s struggle to embrace her sexual identity—with the publication of Changing Our Mind (2015) that led to his being ostracized and shunned by the conservative evangelical community. Ultimately, Gushee concludes American evangelicalism is “deeply damaged” (146), but anyone reading this memoir closely can see that the fragmentation began long ago and no one person, however erudite, could have prevented it.