Evangelism Is Not Enough
Winsome apologetics can win souls, but it can’t run cities or drive successful outcomes in other high-stakes domains.
As follow-ups to my major essay in First Things on the lack of an evangelical elite, I have a number of pieces planned that drill further into this topic.
Before I get into today’s first installment, I want to give a personal preface.
Of the three major evangelical groups that I’ve identified - culture warriors, seeker sensitive, and cultural engagers - the group I have the most natural affinity with is the cultural engagers. I spent most of my adult life in the big cities of Chicago and New York. I share the cultural orientation of people in those environments; I read The New York Times, attend the opera, etc. My work for over a decade has focused on key cultural and public policy trends, including the study of cities themselves.
Yet, the evangelical cultural engagement world has not been a backer of my work, having provided little to no material support or promotion. While often quite personally friendly to me, it’s very obvious that the people in this movement by and large do not view my work as aligned with what they are doing, and in fact often see me as some type of threat. As a result, I’ve ended up getting much more support and engagement from Catholics, Jews, and even elite mainstream publications than from this group of evangelicals and their institutions.
However, this group is, realistically, by far the most likely demographic base to produce any future evangelical elites, should they ever emerge. Achieving this will require them to make some changes in order to expand their impact in that direction. Hence, much of my writing on a future evangelical elite will of necessity focus on the cultural engagement group.
Not having much in the way of personal or institutional ties to these people, I’m free to say whatever I want about them. So I’m going to use that freedom to offer my best perspectives on how they can become larger producers of the leaders our society needs. Perhaps they won’t appreciate it. But I’m going to offer what I hope is constructive engagement that they will incorporate it at some level, even if they never say anything about me in the process.
Now, onward.
John Ehrett wrote an interesting essay on how the dispute between the various evangelical factions is actually a class war. To me, it illustrates something important, namely the dominance of the evangelistic impulse, even in the cultural engagement world. And how strategies for evangelism end up displacing other forms of cultural engagement.
Ehrett highlights three different people doing evangelical ministry on the campus of what I believe is Yale in 2017.
A thirtysomething man in a dingy polo shirt stands at the corner of one of the busiest campus intersections, holding a bullhorn and displaying a ten-foot banner proclaiming EVOLUTION IS A LIE. Over and over, he declares the realities of sin and judgment, so loudly that his proclamations can be heard even from several blocks away.
A well-dressed, sixtyish pastor, hailing from a prominent New York City church, sits on a university-provided stage across from a former dean of the university’s law school. They are there to discuss the academic’s recent book, a theological-philosophical argument for Spinozistic pantheism over against traditional Christianity and secular materialism alike. Before an audience of several hundred students and faculty, the pastor delivers a distinctively Christological critique of the volume.
A middle-aged man in a business suit stands along the edge of a busy roadway. He says little, but at his feet is a box of Gideon New Testaments, and he’s handing them out to anyone, student or townie, walking past who will accept them. (He even gives one to a runner sprinting by.)
These are roughly representatives of my three evangelical groups. Person #2 discussing Spinoza, we learn, is pastor Tim Keller.
What’s interesting about Ehrett’s choice of examples is that they are all at some level evangelistic in intent. Ehrett certainly treats them that way.
While certainly not limited to this, my impression is that Tim Keller’s cultural engagement was heavily shaped by an evangelistic impulse. Much of what he did was oriented around showing educated urbanites that Christianity was something they should take seriously.
This is important work.
Consider JD Vance’s experience at Yale. Vance was from an evangelical background, but became an atheist as a young adult because it seemed like that’s what successful people did. At Law Yale, however, Vance encountered people that made faith seem credible to someone in his socio-economic position:
Mormons and Catholics at Yale Law School, who were really smart and successful, were engaged with their faith. There was a moment when I was like, “Maybe it is possible to have Christian faith in an upwardly mobile world.” You can be a member of your faith and still be a reasonably successful person. That’s not the world I grew up in, but maybe that’s true.
Vance ended up converting to Catholicism. While it’s wonderful he became a Christian, as a Protestant, I can’t help but be disappointed that there did not appear to be any Protestant presence at Yale Law that made the same impression on him as the Catholics and Mormons did.
What Keller was doing at this Veritas Forum event at Yale was trying to provide that impression. Not that the substance of the discussion at the event was irrelevant, but its most important impacts were not about Spinoza. Rather, Keller was demonstrating that it’s possible for an evangelical Christian to belong on the stage at Yale, to discuss intellectual topics in a serious way, and be taken seriously by a secular Ivy League professor that was willing to share the stage with him. The winsome style helps with his, and also shows that Christianity doesn’t have a come in a culture war stylistic package.
When I first watched Keller’s 2010 address on why cities matter and how to reach them at the Lausanne conference in Cape Town, it was perhaps the most impactful evangelical talk I’d ever heard.
