Preaching to Convert: Evangelical Outreach and Performance Activism in a Secular Age

2: Positioning Secular Age Evangelicalism

46 Chapter 2 Positioning Secular Age Evangelicalism ••• What’s going on with evangelicalism? Consider two perspectives on faith in the United States, one from an evangelical minister and one from a sociologist of religion. In the spring of 2009, Michael Spencer, an evangelical pastor and blogger known as “the Internet Monk,”1 posted a three-part series—part argument, part manifesto—entitled “The Coming Evangelical Collapse.”2 There Spencer sounds a grim alarm: “I believe we are on the verge—within 10 years—of a major collapse of evangelical Christianity.” Evangelicalism in the United States, he asserts, has doomed itself to marginality. Over-identification with partisan issue-mongering, failure to articulate a core theological orthodoxy, and an unproblematic adoption of numbers-based market mentalities for ministry have hobbled evangelicalism’s ability to present a compelling case to a culture increasingly disaffected with Christianity . As a result, he predicts, church membership will shrink by half, seminaries and parachurch groups will close, and popular intolerance of Christianity will grow. “This collapse,” he contends, “will herald the arrival of an anti-Christian chapter of the post-Christian West.” Spencer’s challenge sent shock waves throughout evangelical media. The Christian Science Monitor picked up an abridged version of his argument for their March 2009 issue (later naming it one of the top ten stories of 2009), and it subsequently saw widespread distribution via the Drudge Report. Soon, blog entries, radio shows, and podcasts lit up as pundits, pastors, Positioning Secular Age Evangelicalism • 47 bloggers, and readers began asking tense questions around Spencer’s theme: “Is evangelicalism collapsing?” “How long has the collapse been coming?” “Can it be prevented?” “How do we survive the evangelical collapse ?”3 As I will touch on later, Spencer’s article participates in an ongoing trend in evangelical discourse reacting to an ostensible twilight of orthodox US Christendom (i.e., evangelicalism). Such dire predictions stand in seeming contrast to the other assessment , which I take from Peter S. Berger, one of the more venerable scholars in the sociology of religion. Reflecting on his four-decades-plus career, Berger recently summarized his scholarly journey in terms of a reversal.4 At the beginning of his work studying the phenomenon of religious belief in a modern context, Berger, along with other sociologists of religion, confidently predicted that religion of all sorts would decline as the twentieth century progressed. Evidence-based scientific processes and rationalistic political procedures, he thought, would displace superstition and faith-based prejudices as surely an oven melts ice. Since that time, however, he and his field have rejected this “secularization thesis .” “As one looks over the contemporary world,” relates Berger (writing here with Anton Zijderveld), “it’s not secularization that one sees, but an enormous explosion of passionate religious movements.”5 In contrast to early assessments of religion’s inevitable retreat in the face of encroaching secularity, Berger finds that there now exist more, and more varieties of, religious faiths active in the world. In other words, he argues, modernity doesn’t secularize; it pluralizes. Moreover, and in contrast to his early predictions, this plurality alters but does not extinguish faith. Do the assessments of Berger and his colleagues—not secularization but plurality—mean that evangelicals err in predicting decline and collapse ? Are Spencer and his evangelical brethren crying wolf? After all, Spencer is hardly the first evangelical to prophesy the decline of Christianity . Doomsday predictions and jeremiads against backsliding form a subgenre of Protestant discourse as venerable as fire-and-brimstone sermons. And to many of my readers, the notion that evangelicals suffer from a lack of influence in US culture and politics likely seems laughable . What better way to galvanize the masses than by painting the big red devil of “coming collapse”? Two observations are in order. First, whatever the actual status of faith in US culture, evangelicalism (or at least a significant portion thereof) sees itself as weathering an unprecedented existential crisis. To a large extent, this sense of crisis influences evangelical outreach even more than non-evangelical sociologists’ studies do. I concede that some people 48 • preaching to convert (particularly on the partisan religious right) mobilize this crisis mentality toward political ends, but I would caution against facile readings of evangelical mind-sets that reduce them to little more than ideological manipulation by conservative elites. On the whole, I see little evidence that evangelicalism’s anxiety about its future is feigned or consciously...