It's Almost a Sin for an Evangelical to Be an Elite

From "Radical" to "Seashells": How evangelical rhetoric downgrades "secular" vocations to second-class—or worse

As I wrote in my recent First Things essay, there are remarkably few evangelicals in elite positions in America for a movement that accounts for about a quarter of the national population:

The problem with the evangelical elite is that there isn’t one. All too few evangelical Christians hold senior positions in the ­culture-shap­ing domains of American ­society. Evangelicals don’t run movie studios or serve as editors in chief of major newspapers or as presidents of elite universities. There are no evangelicals on the Supreme Court. There are hardly any leading evangelical academics or artists. There are few evangelicals at commanding heights of finance. The prominent evangelicals in Silicon Valley can be counted on one hand. There are not even many evangelicals leading influential conservative think tanks and publications, despite the fact that evangelicals are one of the largest and most critical voting blocs in the Republican coalition.

I note that politics and business are two exceptions that prove the rule, although evangelical business elites tend to be clustered in profitable but prosaic industries with little cultural leverage.

One reason for this is that under the influence of dispensational theology, evangelicals have tended to overwhelmingly focus on saving souls, sometimes to the extent of deeming it the only thing of value. This development and its impact on approaches to vocation were traced by sociologist Andrew Lynn in his excellent academic book Saving the Protestant Ethic. I can’t do the book justice here, but at one point Lynn writes:

With the dire state of unsaved souls looming large in the imaginaries of the laity, those who dedicated their full-time work to spreading the gospel seemed to exhibit a higher and holier Christian life than those constrained by full-time non-ecclesial work. Fundamentalist writers endorsed what was effectively a two-tiered understanding of Christian vocations, severing their own beliefs from Luther’s spiritual egalitarianism….The result of such thinking was what might be called a “new clericalism” of fundamentalism, one that elevated evangelists, ministers, and particularly missionaries. Christian labor falling outside these occupations—and here, writers often explicitly included domestic and unpaid work—were only engaged in secondary callings.

…

But setting aside these efforts to steer conservative Protestantism in a different direction, there is strong evidence that vestiges of the fundamentalist work ethic persisted well into the twentieth century and even remain salient today.

Reading or listening to some famous evangelical books and sermons really illuminated for me that in evangelical culture, not only are “secular” vocations second class, but almost sinful to pursue. In this environment, an evangelical who aspires to achieve a top position in anything other than the soul saving business is probably being a bad Christian, if indeed he’s a Christian at all.

I want to highlight three of these today: David Platt’s Radical, Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon’s Resident Aliens, and John Piper’s “Seashells” sermon.

Radical

David Platt is presently the pastor of McLean Bible Church in Virginia. He comes from a Southern Baptist background, and was previously the head of their very large international mission organization. His 2010 book Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream became a huge bestseller. It is listed as having sold 1.4 million copies as of 2019, and certainly many more since then. The book spent 105 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

I don’t follow Platt regularly, so don’t have the full context of his ministry or teaching. He may or may not have updated his thinking since this book was published. But given that many people surely encountered him only through this book, I want to take a short look at what it has to say.

Platt criticizes Christians for pursuing the American Dream of middle-class bourgeois comfort, in favor of going all in on evangelism and poverty relief. He writes:

For the sake of more than a billion people today who have yet to even hear the gospel, I want to risk it all. For the sake of twenty-six thousand children who will die today of starvation or a preventable disease, I want to risk it all. For the sake of an increasingly marginalized and relatively ineffective church in our culture, I want to risk it all. For the sake of my life, my family, and the people who surround me, I want to risk it all.

…

In the faith family I have the privilege to lead, I am joined by wealthy doctors who are selling their homes and giving to the poor or moving overseas; successful business leaders who are mobilizing their companies to help the hurting; young couples who have moved into the inner city to live out the gospel; and senior adults, stay-at-home moms, college students, and teenagers who are reorienting their lives around radical abandonment to Jesus.

One thing I’ve noticed about evangelical rhetoric is that it often avoids declarative statements that could be subjected to analytic scrutiny, and instead relies on patterns of language that invite the hearer to draw certain conclusions without actually stating them.

That’s the case with Platt here. I did not see him directly state that desiring a middle-class American lifestyle is objectively sinful, though he comes close with statements like “we have seen how the American dream radically differs from the call of Jesus and the essence of the gospel.” But everything he writes makes it seem like a bad choice.

Given that evangelicalism is a middle-class movement, that’s where he focuses his discussion. He didn’t say much about elite positions as such. But as we can see from this passage, he definitely includes higher end occupations in his critique. Wealthy doctors are selling property and giving the money to the poor. Businesses are reorienting to “help the hurting.” We don’t hear about, for example, a doctor whose research at a top medical school cured a terrible disease or who aspires to rearchitect the US healthcare system to bring down costs.

We see it as well in his example of a man who owns an accounting firm:

When I sit down for lunch with Steve, a businessman in our faith family, it’s obvious we have different callings in our lives. He’s an accountant; I’m a pastor. He is gifted with numbers; I can’t stand numbers. But we both understand that God has called us and gifted us for a global purpose. So Steve is constantly asking, “How can I lead my life, my family, and my accounting firm for God’s glory in Birmingham and around the world?” He is leading co-workers to Christ; he is mobilizing accountants to serve the poor; and his life is personally impacting individuals and churches in Latin America, Africa, and Eastern Europe with the gospel.

In this telling, the man’s actual core accounting profession is not emphasized at all. It’s how he can somehow use that for evangelism and poverty relief.

Platt also stresses the imperative of every Christian prioritizing evangelistic mission work.

Jesus commands us to go. He has created each of us to take the gospel to the ends of the earth, and I propose that anything less than radical devotion to this purpose is unbiblical Christianity.

…

It’s not uncommon to hear Christians say, “Well, not everyone is called to foreign missions,” or more specifically, “I am not called to foreign missions.” When we say this, we are usually referring to foreign missions as an optional program in the church for a faithful few who apparently are called to that. In this mind-set, missions is a compartmentalized program of the church, and select folks are good at missions and passionate about missions. Meanwhile, the rest of us are willing to watch the missions slide shows when the missionaries come home, but in the end God has just not called most of us to do this missions thing. But where in the Bible is missions ever identified as an optional program in the church? We have just seen that we were all created by God, saved from our sins, and blessed by God to make his glory known in all the world. Indeed, Jesus himself has not merely called us to go to all nations; he has created us and commanded us to go to all nations. We have taken this command, though, and reduced it to a calling—something that only a few people receive.

This reminds me of a line I once heard at the Willow Creek Global Leadership Conference: “You are one of three things - passionate about doing missions, passionate about funding missions, or disobedient.”

Platt also appears to adhere to the theory that we change the world via conversion.

Regardless of what country we live in, what skills we possess, what kind of education we have, or what kind of salary we make, Jesus has commanded each of us to make disciples, and this is the means by which we will impact the world.

Whatever the merits of Radical in inspiring people to care more about the worthy causes of foreign missions and poverty relief, it’s hard to imagine someone under its influence aspiring to achieve some elite position in society in order to directly create tangible outcomes in the domains of creation. The general message of Radical is that this would be a bad and possibly sinful thing to do.

Resident Aliens

I couldn’t find sales figures for Hauerwas and Willimon’s 1989 book Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony. It was likely far less than Radical, but still into the six figure range. It too was very influential, especially with more intellectually oriented Christians across both the mainline and evangelical worlds.