In the introduction to Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis uses the image of a hall leading to various rooms to explain the relationship of the various Christian communions and traditions with one another and with the fundamental and indispensable commitments that define the contours of Christianity. The hall, according to Lewis, is the entryway to the faith defined by the ecumenical creeds. The rooms astride the hall represent the Anglicans, the Roman Catholics, and the Methodists. These rooms are where “there are fires and chairs and meals.” The hall, according to Lewis, “is a place to wait in … not a place to live in.”
That illustration is one that was probably quite tidy in a place with relative cultural and social homogeneity like England when Lewis made the observation. American Christianity has always been complex and more diverse in ways that are foreign to Europeans, especially the English. From its inception as a nation, America has lacked an established church, so unlicensed shamans and holy men and evangelists and cult leaders have thrived in the U.S. in ways that would be impossible in the Old World. As a result, Lewis’ hall, at least in America, has become a tent city. There are abandoned lean-tos, burned-out campfires, and assorted refuse scattered among tents that are often mistaken for rooms. There is not much order in the hall, and many of the campers appear not to know very much about why they are there, not to mention where any of the doors lead.
Enter now Megan Basham’s controversial book Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda. Basham’s work has landed in the tent city like a bomb, and the reactions to the book could not be more polarized. The book has elicited impassioned screeds that cannot be taken seriously, but equally unserious hagiographic tributes disguised as reviews. I am not, for the sake of this essay or otherwise, chasing Basham’s footnotes. I don’t have any basis to form an authoritative opinion as to whether she is a “real journalist.” All of that was taken up elsewhere at Religion & Liberty Online. What I do know is that she gives voice to many valid critiques of evangelicalism that are intuitively obvious to any honest observer—the political, social, and theological left has more influence in evangelicalism today than it did 20 or 30 years ago. And even those who most vociferously defend themselves cannot escape the fact that they did say the things she claims, even if they want to argue about context. Are there conspiracies? Maybe. Read the book and follow the footnotes. Are there bad-faith actors inside of evangelical churches and institutions? Almost certainly, but again—read the book and follow the footnotes.
My concern is that Basham has not really struck at the root of the problem with evangelicalism. In many ways, it is like a firefighter entering a burning home, only to be horrified that the plaid on the throw pillows clashes with the floral sofa. Those who are praised and the people who are critiqued in the book share more in common with one another in terms of their approach to ecclesiology, authority, and personal piety than they will ever admit. They just differ with regard to their postures toward and positions on social and political issues. In Basham’s defense, a definition of “evangelicalism” has proved to be elusive. This is because “evangelical” has morphed from being a descriptor of groups within Lewis’ various rooms to being a pseudo-tradition in itself that is squatting in the hall. It lacks the doctrinal or confessional substance to be itself a tradition. At best, “evangelical” is a label that describes the cultural character of a church rather than the content of anything that members believe. This includes worship styles and music, but also things like vocabulary and lingo. A church that calls a Sunday service a “mass” probably has little in common culturally with one that calls their service “The Gathering,” with the “t” stylized as a cross.
I run the risk of oversimplification to make the claim that evangelicalism is the first expression of Christianity that is neither doctrinally nor ethnically driven. While other expressions of Christianity have been influenced by various aspects of modernism, evangelicalism itself is the modernist expression of Christianity. People moved from asking, “How do we respond to what we know to be true?” to asking, “How do we know what is true?” The shift from metaphysics to epistemology as the “first philosophy” that marks modernism has led to a lot of subjectivity in the interpretation of Scripture, theological method, and the dynamics of personal faith. The Christian “testimony” up until yesterday was “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again”—along with the implicit or explicit acknowledgement that the confessor was part of the community awaiting his coming again. But starting today, that testimony is the recounting of a subjective experience unique to each person.
Please note: I am a fan of discerning the “plain meaning of Scripture,” but a “Jesus, me, and the Bible” approach to theology simply will not produce a durable, reliable, and consistent theology. The Christian faith is about conformity to Christlikeness in thought, word, and deed, and not inner peace, personal confirmation in our “heart of hearts,” or any other appeal to a subjective feeling or impression. Subjective feelings and impressions are subject to all types of influences, but the virtues that are defined by Christ’s example are stable and fixed.
When I say that evangelicalism has not been a doctrinally driven expression of the faith, I mean that it would be difficult or impossible for a worshipper to tell much difference between an evangelical Baptist, Methodist, or nondenominational church by character, culture, or “vibe.” Many of these churches that are a part of a denomination started dropping that from their names more than a decade ago. The churches of the Reformation led by Calvin and Luther split (or were expelled) from the western Church because of doctrinal disagreements. This is not the case with evangelicalism writ large. There are evangelical groups and inflection points in evangelical history that have beendoctrinally driven, but these events do not define “evangelicalism.” They define a group of Christians (like the Fundamentalists or the Modernists of Presbyterianism in the 1920s) who may or may not eventually adopt an evangelical ethos. Also, evangelicalism is not tied to a particular people in the way that Polish or Italian Catholicism or Bulgarian Orthodoxy is. The Poles, Serbs, Bulgarians, Italians, and English have all been shaped by and in turn shaped the practice of specific and unique expressions of Christianity.
Evangelicals have also adopted a whiggish approach to church history—an understanding of history in which “the church” started out great and has just been getting better and will continue to do so until the return of Christ. The next trend, the next song, the next experience is going to be better and more relevant than the last. The Christian tradition or, more broadly, salvation history becomes a crescendo that culminates in me. After all, “like a rose trampled on the ground, [He] took the fall and thought of me, above all.” However, the tradition as previously understood is something that each generation inherits as trustees, participates in as the church militant, and leaves to the next generation that has hopefully been catechized to receive it.
Given these weaknesses, it is not a surprise that evangelicalism would be vulnerable to absorbing the Zeitgeist. If Methodists and Baptists can build churches with indistinguishable cultures and worship styles, why is it a surprise to find churches with identical cultures and worship styles that celebrate Pride Month or buy carbon credits for mission trips? If groups properly described as “evangelical” can wildly disagree on things like baptism and predestination, why not on cultural issues, too? Evangelical self-identification, it seems, has little to do with doctrinal content beyond what is already in the hall and everything to do with the culture internal to the faith community, which is, in turn, influenced by the culture of the larger community.
Even adopting Bebbington’s Quadrilateral as the classic definition of evangelicalism, the two marks of evangelicalism that are most clearly doctrinal—the authority of the Bible and the centrality of the cross—are applicable to many types of churches that can accurately be described as evangelical no matter how they come down on social and political issues like environmentalism, or even theological issues like the mode of baptism. Without the creeds that form the walls, floor, and ceiling of the hallway, none of the Bebington markers mean anything. One cannot properly access the creeds without appeal to tradition. And tradition means absolutely nothing if the final arbiter of faith is subjective personal experience. The creeds, of course, are not scripture. They were written by men, so any appeal to them is an appeal to a traditional, historical interpretation of the faith and an implicit subjugation to an external authority.
These are the primary reasons that American evangelicals are simply unable to build institutions in the way that other traditions have built them. Serbs owe their ethnic identity to the Serbian Orthodox Church more than to any other institution. The modern political borders of the German-speaking people were influenced by 500-year-old tensions between German Catholics and German Lutherans. And French and Italian ethnic identities are rooted in unique expressions of Catholicism that are compatible but different in important ways. This makes holy sites, holidays, and institutions important from generation to generation in particular places and even in diaspora communities. But evangelicals with beards and smoke machines laugh at the quaint naïveté of evangelicals who wear suits, celebrate Freedom Sunday on the Fourth of July, and wear choir robes, even though those evangelical churches are where many of them were born and raised. There is no evangelical Notre Dame (cathedral or university), and there never will be. Vulnerability to the winds of culture simply does not create fertile ground for anything to grow that requires generational solidarity, which itself requires a conscious, sustained effort to pass on knowledge—catechetical and confessional knowledge—and not merely worship style or experience from one generation to the next.
Basham has named names and provided copious footnotes detailing public comments, tweets (or now “posts”), and other bits of the record. She goes after powerful and popular figures like Tim Keller, J.D. Greear, and Rick Warren. I really have no reason to believe, however, that any of it is done in bad faith, despite accusations to the contrary. I have every reason to believe that she cares about Christian witness and the translation of the faith into a faithful response to the challenges of the world. But as it stands, her critiques are not all that helpful in terms of calling American Christians into a posture that truly allows them to be a durable and sustainable force for the preservation of civilization.
This is not to say that non-evangelical expressions of Christianity marked by some sort of church order or hierarchy of accountability are without problems. There are myriad problems within those rooms that open from the hall. But they are very different problems. One of the clearest examples of methodological and theological difference that I have ever witnessed was a conversation between a notable Episcopal bishop paired with an evangelical who were both defending same-sex marriage. The bishop’s arguments consisted of claims about the Christian tradition and the interpretation of Scripture with which, to be sure, I did not agree. But the evangelical reached the same conclusion without any reference to Scripture or tradition. He only cited his subjective beliefs with no accompanying evidence about what a “loving God” would or would not do. Manipulation of tradition by progressive Christians is hugely problematic, but the solution is not to do ethical analysis by subjective intuition.
For American Christianity to exemplify the illuminating power of light and the preserving power of salt, the tent city must go. Charlatans, those most likely to be willing to name a price, are much more likely to thrive in the hall than in a room—any room. While there are certainly arrogant priests, Mark Driscoll could never have been a priest because he could never have submitted himself to the authority of a bishop or an order. While there are active and ongoing examples of clergy abuse in the Anglican church, Robert Morris’ failures would never have inflicted as much personal or institutional damage had he been subject to an ecclesiastical tribunal like an Anglican priest or bishop would have been. After all, there are no statutes of limitations in ecclesiastical courts, so some sort of justice would still be within reach for his victim. A large part of the outrage regarding clergy abuse in the Roman Catholic and Anglican worlds is that the ecclesial institutions that were designed to avoid or address these abuses failed.
One admonition that Lewis gives is that those who are in the rooms should be kind and charitable to those still in the hall, and that is wise advice. And there are many individuals in the hall who are pious, sincere, and faithful. But Christianity that is potent enough to preserve and cultivate civilization requires institutions and leaders, not merely individual believers, who are subject to authority, rightly understand tradition, and are marked by genuine humility and an openness to being wrong. While many ordinary evangelicals and evangelical leaders fit that description personally, the institutions they attempt to build simply do not. So Megan Basham may very well be right about a lot of things, but it just isn’t clear to me why anyone should be all that concerned about the deck chairs on the Titanic.
