When I was a student in apologetics at BIOLA they cautioned us that as we gained success in engaging the culture, the Liberals may ask us to come to the front of the bus. We were taught to be cautious of such an offer, not to forget where we came from.
My experience is that many evangelical leaders and communities in the south suppress ambition, intentionally or not, by frequently condemning selfish motives, the trappings of success, the evil of pride, etc. Young people receive a message that a quiet, upstanding family life is morally superior to making sacrifices necessary to excel professionally in a highly competitive field. This suppression of ambition is definitely a factor impacting talent development in evangelical churches.
Oddly, this doesn’t apply to sports. In sports, evangelicals are all-in and ambition is not a concern at all—kids (especially young men) are overtly encouraged to push themselves to perform to the utmost of their ability, make sacrifices, and achieve as much as possible. My sense is that evangelicals are well-represented (if not over-represented) among the ranks of collegiate and professional athletes, potentially confirming that attitude toward ambition matters.
If this thesis is correct, evangelicals need to develop more sophisticated ways of talking about ambition to channel the same zeal to excel into music, fine arts, literature, scholarship, civic engagement, etc.
An interesting and thought-provoking article. I do agree in parts but disagree in parts. Here's a few thoughts, in no particular order. (PS- I’m writing these while they’re fresh and I’m leaving out a lot of nuance, so please take all of these with a grain of salt):
-I feel like there’s an easier way to create more evangelical elites than Renn describes. In both the New Testament and the early church, we see the followers of Jesus gain elites to their movement through conversion. We see centurions, elite rabbis, scholars, and eventually an Emperor all convert to Christianity. That doesn't mean evangelicals shouldn't also build their own institutions, but working for conversion might be a lot easier. When I was a freshmen at my secular college, I had an agnostic/atheist philosophy professor. To challenge his beliefs, I did not go into philosophy, but I did pray for him. Now, two decades later, turns out he converted to become an evangelical Christian, and is leading a Bible study for other faculty and staff at his college! God loves doing stuff like that--taking the Sauls and turning them into Pauls.
-There is an open question of whether seeking “elite” status is ever a worthy pursuit for followers of the carpenter from Nazareth. Every evangelical who takes the Bible seriously (if not literally) will need to wrestle with the words of Jesus to "take up their cross", among other challenging commands. God may call some evangelicals to elite status. But most people seeking elite status are doing so for impure motives, and I'm not sure we should encourage them.
- Peter Turchin has argued that America is already facing a social crisis due to "elite overproduction"; I'm not sure throwing more evangelicals into that overly competitive mix will help with that.
-As other commenters pointed out, nowadays being an "evangelical" is more of a style and culture than a clear theological category. I think there already are Catholics, Orthodox, and other Christians who functionally are "evangelical" elites, even if they may not claim that label.
I used to go to Tim Keller's services on the Upper West Side. He would get 10,000 people every Sunday. But when his assistants filled in they were awful. The problem is that Keller's worldview didn't hang together intellectually -- and thus didn't scale. He was a fundamentalist who liked to quote Nietzsche and Camus. Well ... it doesn't work. You have to choose. There is no fundamentalist elite because the worldview can't speak to anyone who is not a fundamentalist -- which is most people. The Mormons pull it off but they are Machiavellians and kind of psycho.
I have long held that the word Protestant has no value in the USA. Who is a Protestant? I consider myself first and foremost a Christian, as baptized in 1953. My Baptism happened to take place in an ethnic Catholic parish in Milwaukee. Subsequently, I became a Lutheran through an accident of history for a woman who ultimately left the church and left me. I had a career in emergency medicine and higher education while maintaining my Lutheran identity by being Ordained a Pastor in the LCMS.
With that brief introduction to me, how does that make me a Protestant? The Roman Catholic Church is a shell of what it was in the USA say, in the 1950’s when I was growing up. The only place I ever heard the word Protestant was in the Catholic Church, where anyone other than us was a Protestant. As a Lutheran I was referred to as a Protestant in the military when someone asked me to consider getting a commission as a Chaplain, but I was too old to qualify.
My point is that no one refers to themselves as a Protestant anymore. The preferred term is Christian. The subset of those who have left mainline (another term of no significance) to join what I affectionately call big box churches. Often entrepreneurs, pastors of these churches may have a seminary degree, but it is not a requirement. Sometimes the church is owned by the pastor with his family as the board that makes decisions. Even the new denominations like Calvary Chapel, The Vineyard have a structure which makes them denominations. Some mainline congregations have rebranded themself as Community Churches to try to attract new and younger members.
Bottom line: find a new word for “Protestant” to identify congregations or networks of congregations, or whatnot.
You're absolutely right! The only time I hear the word "Protestant" even today is when a Roman Catholic is speaking. I believe it was a derogatory term when it was coined post-Reformation by the enemies of the Reformers.
When I came to faith in college, I joined an evangelical student ministry and went to an evangelical church. I felt out of place, but being a young Christian I accepted it as dying to oneself. Likewise, as you touch upon in your article, my impression of other protestant denominations is that they were unbiblical as evidenced by the pride flags flown by the mainline churches around campus.
One of those things that made me feel out of place was the suspicion they had toward ambition. I recall particularly zealous students (and their mentors) believing that academic success was tantamount to idolatry. This attitude, along with changes in my theological convictions, drove me out of evangelical churches and into the Anglican.
The issue with an evangelical elite is that it seems generally true that to become elite means to cease to be evangelical. The origin of these attitudes can be traced to the anabaptists. It's my impression that evangelicals see any relationship between their church or faith with powerful institutions as having a corrupting effect on themselves and not a purifying effect on culture. To them the church is a bottom up organization and therefore to evangelize culture it starts at the individual and not at the culture making institutions.
Another issue is that the term evangelical is, at this point, meaningless. Reading your article I found myself confused as to what exactly you mean by evangelical. You wrote "tomorrow's evangelical elites will most likely come from their historical origins, the high-status churches..." but also say "The breaking down of barriers between mainline Protestant and evangelical laymen would help in this regard." I'm confused what evangelical means to you or to anybody for that matter. I tend to agree with Redeemed Zoomers view that Protestants and evangelicals are distinct groups. However, I agree with you that at the national level we probably can't afford to be counter signaling each other.
Thanks for opening up the comments and talking about this often overlooked issue. It was your appearance on the Theology Pugcast that initially put me onto your work so cheers!
From the perspective of a young evangelical, the article does not provide compelling motivations to pursuing elite status. The benefits are dispersed (building a better society), while the implied costs are concentrated (moving to an urban center, taking on demanding work, separating from other evangelicals, all with a lack of support). Interestingly, this is not unlike the servant-leader language in the context of marriage criticized by Renn in a prior article. Perhaps a future article can be devoted to inspiring young evangelicals to aim higher.
From my perspective, having grown up within mainstream conservative Evangelicalism and having made the now-usual pilgrimage through the Episcopal church into the Roman Catholic church, I feel like you explained the problems quite accurately, even if I disagree with your optimistic ideas for solving them. I do think that you accurately laid out the conundrums facing Evangelicals, which are deeply rooted in their theology (or lack thereof in key areas) and lead them into ways of seeing the world which actively mitigate against what you're asking them to do. As one way of illustration, I grew up both in and near Wheaton, then spent from '95-2010 basically in international development work but having to raise donor support through a Christian ministry. Towards the end of that time we wanted/needed to get back into working with artists, designers and the Arts, overseas, and when we excitedly communicated that to our donors our income literally overnight cut itself in half -- and, in talking with many of them, learned that they had always thought we had been doing something more like church planting, in a country where it's simply not possible -- or necessary. Quite a strange experience, and quite a hard lesson, but it epitomizes everything you describe.
As a solution, you talk about the need to be more like Roman Catholics and lead with a religious identity. Actually, that is precisely the problem of late and why Evangelicals are finding it increasingly difficult to get any cutural traction, unless they're of a more liberal persuasion: they have politicized their religious identity to such a degree and aligned themselves with MAGA and Trump such that they have largely destroyed any possibility for a positive impact within the general culture. I'm not going to argue the validity, or not, of the reasons for having done that, but it's having become almost entirely identified with that political project which has caused the problems. As an aside, but it's pertinent here, I was glad to see you mention my parish, Church of the Advent, here in Boston, which in some ways avoids that identification while remaining orthodox and conservative.
The larger problem, however, as I see it, is the "theological genetics" of the whole Evangelical project, which you laid out quite well, and which, in my experience make it almost impossible to change how the Evangelical world both looks at and interacts with the rest of the world. As you well know, the Evangelicals were their own reaction to the Fundamentalist movement, but both of them rejected the "mainstream" focus on doing good works in the world and not having (in their minds) a sufficient focus on verbal evangelism. And this continues, as you describe, to be the case -- it's in the core DNA of the movement, and is what gets Evangelicals accused of always setting out a quid pro quo when they're doing good things in the world: "we'll teach you English, if you let us do it using the Bible" for example. As our (my wife and me) own experience across 70 years has shown us, there is no interest in any sort of dialogue or conversation between them and anyone who is different (and why should there be, because "we" are right and know the Truth). The necessity for and central motivation of evangelization and convincing others of the Truth trumps all. There is also something of a "holiness" worldview within the Evangelical world, which doesn't want to allow undirected conversations to happen as it can be "unsafe". Yet in order to have a cultural impact, one must be somewhat curious, and open to open-ended dialogue, which again just isn't in the genetics of the Evangelical worldview in any way shape or form.
Consequently, for at least the above 2 or 3 reasons, I don't see the possibility of any change happening. The theological roots go too deep, and are so intertwined with the identity of those involved. And Lord knows, I've spent a large part of my life trying to at least engage in dialogue, because, as a thoughtful person and someone involved in the Arts who takes their Bible seriously, I cannot live in this world as a Christian/follower of Christ without a solid incarnational and sacramental theology and acknowledgement of Natural Law. None of the latter exists within most of the Evangelical world. It's incarnational theology which fundamentally places value on this life and pushes one to get on with living, as it's usually considered. It's sacramental theology which inheres the spiritual dimension of life within the physical. And it's Natural Law which can move one beyond simple moralizing and proscriptive criticism of modern culture towards a thoughtful critique with prescriptive ideas for fixing things.
Wait. . . your example of someone doing this well is. . . Mitt Romney?
If that's what you're hoping an "Evangelical elite" might accomplish, then we'd all be very much better off if such a thing never emerged. He's a card-carrying member of the anti-populist, NeverTrumper GOP Establishment.
Same goes for Francis Collins. Elite? Sure. But "Evangelical"? You'd never, ever know it by looking at his actions as director of the NIH. Here was a guy perfectly placed to apply Christian ethics to the biomedical field. If there is even a single example of his explicitly allowing such a perspective to influence an NIH program or policy, I am unaware of it. And that's even without looking at the COVID debacle or his decision to lift the ban on gain-of-function research.
Tim Keller is another really problematic example in this context. Keller, and particularly his acolytes, have been at the epicenter of a lot of sturm and drang in the PCA, even to this day. Sheep who made friends with the wolves, and do everything they can to make sure nobody in the flock does anything that would make the wolves upset.
The reason there is no "Evangelical elite" is because the Regime is actively hostile to theologically orthodox Christianity. At every level. There are any number of ways that a prestigious employer can gatekeep Evangelicals during the hiring process. Heck, it's been almost two decades since the Obama Administration started using "background checks" to filter out anyone who wasn't ideologically aligned with the Regime. Going to a Christian college or being associated with any kind of conservative think tank, etc., was basically guaranteed to get your application put straight in the trash for unspecified "security" reasons. All the applicant would know is that they didn't get an interview.
This is a great start to an important conversation.
Speaking from my own experience as an evangelical that went to a top 25 US secular university, I noticed a lot of my Christian peers would form a majority of their friend groups within the church. They would then spend a lot of time serving the church in various capacities (leading small groups, joining worship team, etc.). When they finished college, while they got their degrees they lacked influence and a skillset to navigate through the real world, because most of their college experience was inside this Christian bubble.
This is going to sound like a bit of a pat on the back, but I specifically rejected calls on me to lead small groups and things like that. While church pastors framed those as "leadership positions", I saw them as little more than low level coordination/facilitation roles. Instead, I invested my time in a large 100+ student run club and eventually ended up as the president for that organization. That opened doors where I interacted with other leaders within the school community that actually affected people at a larger scale.
I've thought a lot about the divergence in experience I had vs my 20+ years as an evangelical Christian, and I think it boils down to:
- Theologically, evangelicals have a weak understanding of how to interact in the world. Their theology boils down to being saved by grace and then waiting for Jesus to return. It's very passive. Perhaps this is a difference between dispensationalism (evangelical) and covenant theology (mainline).
- Socially, evangelicals lack confidence to interact with the real world, and much prefer the safe space of the church and church roles. I think this extends from theology: we're taught about the kindness and graciousness of God, but there's not a lot of emphasis on shaping the world. Contrast this to Redeemed Zoomer, who has a very forward-looking and high agency approach to how he plans to shape the world through retaking the mainline denominations. I've become very inspired by his work.
- Culturally, evangelicals are afraid of secular culture (Don't watch this/that movie because it's a bad influence). The Catholics I knew were much more open to that stuff, even if I found their faith a bit more nominal than that of evangelicals. Those Catholics ended up rising up to much higher leadership positions in college and beyond.
In any case, my wife and I just moved to a new area and we're now exploring mainline churches and not evangelical ones, with the mainline posture towards the world (more forward-facing, high agency) as a significant reason why.
I liked your essay, but why did you have to do St Thomas dirty like that. There aren’t even any rich people there lol. They might be a little light on doctrine, but they’re more of a tourist trap and children’s music school than an actual… church. Divorced people go there to have their kids baptized.
53rd and 5th is solely a tourist and commuter intersection. I do not observe that the area contains a disproportionate amount of rich people, who are more likely to be partying in Bushwick lofts. I see high school kids walking to Free Friday at MOMA.
I struggled to think of an image to use. I was afraid anyone or anybody I put on there might be perceived as being personally negatively talked about. I chose that image more for the street sign.
But I have to say, I've visited St. Thomas and I loved it. The 11am service is wonderful in particular.
Just finished the article in First Things. Great piece of work! I wonder if evangelicals aren't swimming upstream when trying to engage as elites. One thing I don't think we can minimize is the culture and origins of evangelicalism in America. Much of evangelicalism in America was born out of those immigrants from the English borderlands who settled in much Appalachia (Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia and surrounding parts). They were a clans-like people very much into self-reliance and independence with strong kin-based loyalty and suspicion of elites. Unfortunately, their positive traits hardened into negative behaviors that I believe are still ingrained in many of today's evangelicals. Honor hardened into vendettas, independence led to a suspicion of education and bureaucracy, loyalty led to insularity, and suspicion of elites led to distrust of institutions. Those are cultural traits that are difficult to overcome. Unfortunately, those who are amenable to engaging with elites are self-selecting out for options like Catholicism. You face a lot of ostracism and opposition as an evangelical trying to engage with the elites. Unfortunately, I saw that in some of the criticism of Timothy Keller. I don't think we can ignore examining this aspect of evangelicalism when assessing why there are not more evangelical elites or evangelicals engaging with the elites.
“someone needs to write a Plutarch’s Lives of elite Protestants in American history who serve as the kind of role models we’d like people to imitate.”
The only issue with this for evangelicals is that such a book would overwhelming be about the liberal Mainline Protestants and Unitarians that occupied most of the elite positions in American history (at least north of the Mason-Dixon).
Yes, they would be mostly mainline. I'm actually not totally averse to highlighting liberal Protestants, so long as their theology genuinely animated their actions (e.g., John Foster Dulles). There aren't any liberals of that type around today that I know of.
But evangelicals have essentially amputated their greatest contributions to America by refusing to affirm the mainlines. There is a Protestant social teaching, for example. It was called the Progressive movement.
I believe defining the terms would help here. In the general sense, "evangelical" can mean any sort of protestant, but in the more commonly applied sense, "evangelical" is more of certain type of protestant.
For instance, I would associate with the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, but you would not catch me in an Evangelical Lutheran Church.
When I was a student in apologetics at BIOLA they cautioned us that as we gained success in engaging the culture, the Liberals may ask us to come to the front of the bus. We were taught to be cautious of such an offer, not to forget where we came from.
My experience is that many evangelical leaders and communities in the south suppress ambition, intentionally or not, by frequently condemning selfish motives, the trappings of success, the evil of pride, etc. Young people receive a message that a quiet, upstanding family life is morally superior to making sacrifices necessary to excel professionally in a highly competitive field. This suppression of ambition is definitely a factor impacting talent development in evangelical churches.
Oddly, this doesn’t apply to sports. In sports, evangelicals are all-in and ambition is not a concern at all—kids (especially young men) are overtly encouraged to push themselves to perform to the utmost of their ability, make sacrifices, and achieve as much as possible. My sense is that evangelicals are well-represented (if not over-represented) among the ranks of collegiate and professional athletes, potentially confirming that attitude toward ambition matters.
If this thesis is correct, evangelicals need to develop more sophisticated ways of talking about ambition to channel the same zeal to excel into music, fine arts, literature, scholarship, civic engagement, etc.
Interesting follow-up article by Kruptos: https://www.seekingthehiddenthing.com/p/why-are-there-no-evangelical-elites
An interesting and thought-provoking article. I do agree in parts but disagree in parts. Here's a few thoughts, in no particular order. (PS- I’m writing these while they’re fresh and I’m leaving out a lot of nuance, so please take all of these with a grain of salt):
-I feel like there’s an easier way to create more evangelical elites than Renn describes. In both the New Testament and the early church, we see the followers of Jesus gain elites to their movement through conversion. We see centurions, elite rabbis, scholars, and eventually an Emperor all convert to Christianity. That doesn't mean evangelicals shouldn't also build their own institutions, but working for conversion might be a lot easier. When I was a freshmen at my secular college, I had an agnostic/atheist philosophy professor. To challenge his beliefs, I did not go into philosophy, but I did pray for him. Now, two decades later, turns out he converted to become an evangelical Christian, and is leading a Bible study for other faculty and staff at his college! God loves doing stuff like that--taking the Sauls and turning them into Pauls.
-There is an open question of whether seeking “elite” status is ever a worthy pursuit for followers of the carpenter from Nazareth. Every evangelical who takes the Bible seriously (if not literally) will need to wrestle with the words of Jesus to "take up their cross", among other challenging commands. God may call some evangelicals to elite status. But most people seeking elite status are doing so for impure motives, and I'm not sure we should encourage them.
- Peter Turchin has argued that America is already facing a social crisis due to "elite overproduction"; I'm not sure throwing more evangelicals into that overly competitive mix will help with that.
-As other commenters pointed out, nowadays being an "evangelical" is more of a style and culture than a clear theological category. I think there already are Catholics, Orthodox, and other Christians who functionally are "evangelical" elites, even if they may not claim that label.
I used to go to Tim Keller's services on the Upper West Side. He would get 10,000 people every Sunday. But when his assistants filled in they were awful. The problem is that Keller's worldview didn't hang together intellectually -- and thus didn't scale. He was a fundamentalist who liked to quote Nietzsche and Camus. Well ... it doesn't work. You have to choose. There is no fundamentalist elite because the worldview can't speak to anyone who is not a fundamentalist -- which is most people. The Mormons pull it off but they are Machiavellians and kind of psycho.
Reading the comments up to the present moment in time, I propose a new alliance between the ACNA, LCMS, NALC for the transformation of our society!
I have long held that the word Protestant has no value in the USA. Who is a Protestant? I consider myself first and foremost a Christian, as baptized in 1953. My Baptism happened to take place in an ethnic Catholic parish in Milwaukee. Subsequently, I became a Lutheran through an accident of history for a woman who ultimately left the church and left me. I had a career in emergency medicine and higher education while maintaining my Lutheran identity by being Ordained a Pastor in the LCMS.
With that brief introduction to me, how does that make me a Protestant? The Roman Catholic Church is a shell of what it was in the USA say, in the 1950’s when I was growing up. The only place I ever heard the word Protestant was in the Catholic Church, where anyone other than us was a Protestant. As a Lutheran I was referred to as a Protestant in the military when someone asked me to consider getting a commission as a Chaplain, but I was too old to qualify.
My point is that no one refers to themselves as a Protestant anymore. The preferred term is Christian. The subset of those who have left mainline (another term of no significance) to join what I affectionately call big box churches. Often entrepreneurs, pastors of these churches may have a seminary degree, but it is not a requirement. Sometimes the church is owned by the pastor with his family as the board that makes decisions. Even the new denominations like Calvary Chapel, The Vineyard have a structure which makes them denominations. Some mainline congregations have rebranded themself as Community Churches to try to attract new and younger members.
Bottom line: find a new word for “Protestant” to identify congregations or networks of congregations, or whatnot.
You're absolutely right! The only time I hear the word "Protestant" even today is when a Roman Catholic is speaking. I believe it was a derogatory term when it was coined post-Reformation by the enemies of the Reformers.
When I came to faith in college, I joined an evangelical student ministry and went to an evangelical church. I felt out of place, but being a young Christian I accepted it as dying to oneself. Likewise, as you touch upon in your article, my impression of other protestant denominations is that they were unbiblical as evidenced by the pride flags flown by the mainline churches around campus.
One of those things that made me feel out of place was the suspicion they had toward ambition. I recall particularly zealous students (and their mentors) believing that academic success was tantamount to idolatry. This attitude, along with changes in my theological convictions, drove me out of evangelical churches and into the Anglican.
The issue with an evangelical elite is that it seems generally true that to become elite means to cease to be evangelical. The origin of these attitudes can be traced to the anabaptists. It's my impression that evangelicals see any relationship between their church or faith with powerful institutions as having a corrupting effect on themselves and not a purifying effect on culture. To them the church is a bottom up organization and therefore to evangelize culture it starts at the individual and not at the culture making institutions.
Another issue is that the term evangelical is, at this point, meaningless. Reading your article I found myself confused as to what exactly you mean by evangelical. You wrote "tomorrow's evangelical elites will most likely come from their historical origins, the high-status churches..." but also say "The breaking down of barriers between mainline Protestant and evangelical laymen would help in this regard." I'm confused what evangelical means to you or to anybody for that matter. I tend to agree with Redeemed Zoomers view that Protestants and evangelicals are distinct groups. However, I agree with you that at the national level we probably can't afford to be counter signaling each other.
Thanks for opening up the comments and talking about this often overlooked issue. It was your appearance on the Theology Pugcast that initially put me onto your work so cheers!
From the perspective of a young evangelical, the article does not provide compelling motivations to pursuing elite status. The benefits are dispersed (building a better society), while the implied costs are concentrated (moving to an urban center, taking on demanding work, separating from other evangelicals, all with a lack of support). Interestingly, this is not unlike the servant-leader language in the context of marriage criticized by Renn in a prior article. Perhaps a future article can be devoted to inspiring young evangelicals to aim higher.
From my perspective, having grown up within mainstream conservative Evangelicalism and having made the now-usual pilgrimage through the Episcopal church into the Roman Catholic church, I feel like you explained the problems quite accurately, even if I disagree with your optimistic ideas for solving them. I do think that you accurately laid out the conundrums facing Evangelicals, which are deeply rooted in their theology (or lack thereof in key areas) and lead them into ways of seeing the world which actively mitigate against what you're asking them to do. As one way of illustration, I grew up both in and near Wheaton, then spent from '95-2010 basically in international development work but having to raise donor support through a Christian ministry. Towards the end of that time we wanted/needed to get back into working with artists, designers and the Arts, overseas, and when we excitedly communicated that to our donors our income literally overnight cut itself in half -- and, in talking with many of them, learned that they had always thought we had been doing something more like church planting, in a country where it's simply not possible -- or necessary. Quite a strange experience, and quite a hard lesson, but it epitomizes everything you describe.
As a solution, you talk about the need to be more like Roman Catholics and lead with a religious identity. Actually, that is precisely the problem of late and why Evangelicals are finding it increasingly difficult to get any cutural traction, unless they're of a more liberal persuasion: they have politicized their religious identity to such a degree and aligned themselves with MAGA and Trump such that they have largely destroyed any possibility for a positive impact within the general culture. I'm not going to argue the validity, or not, of the reasons for having done that, but it's having become almost entirely identified with that political project which has caused the problems. As an aside, but it's pertinent here, I was glad to see you mention my parish, Church of the Advent, here in Boston, which in some ways avoids that identification while remaining orthodox and conservative.
The larger problem, however, as I see it, is the "theological genetics" of the whole Evangelical project, which you laid out quite well, and which, in my experience make it almost impossible to change how the Evangelical world both looks at and interacts with the rest of the world. As you well know, the Evangelicals were their own reaction to the Fundamentalist movement, but both of them rejected the "mainstream" focus on doing good works in the world and not having (in their minds) a sufficient focus on verbal evangelism. And this continues, as you describe, to be the case -- it's in the core DNA of the movement, and is what gets Evangelicals accused of always setting out a quid pro quo when they're doing good things in the world: "we'll teach you English, if you let us do it using the Bible" for example. As our (my wife and me) own experience across 70 years has shown us, there is no interest in any sort of dialogue or conversation between them and anyone who is different (and why should there be, because "we" are right and know the Truth). The necessity for and central motivation of evangelization and convincing others of the Truth trumps all. There is also something of a "holiness" worldview within the Evangelical world, which doesn't want to allow undirected conversations to happen as it can be "unsafe". Yet in order to have a cultural impact, one must be somewhat curious, and open to open-ended dialogue, which again just isn't in the genetics of the Evangelical worldview in any way shape or form.
Consequently, for at least the above 2 or 3 reasons, I don't see the possibility of any change happening. The theological roots go too deep, and are so intertwined with the identity of those involved. And Lord knows, I've spent a large part of my life trying to at least engage in dialogue, because, as a thoughtful person and someone involved in the Arts who takes their Bible seriously, I cannot live in this world as a Christian/follower of Christ without a solid incarnational and sacramental theology and acknowledgement of Natural Law. None of the latter exists within most of the Evangelical world. It's incarnational theology which fundamentally places value on this life and pushes one to get on with living, as it's usually considered. It's sacramental theology which inheres the spiritual dimension of life within the physical. And it's Natural Law which can move one beyond simple moralizing and proscriptive criticism of modern culture towards a thoughtful critique with prescriptive ideas for fixing things.
Thanks for sharing - very insightful
Wait. . . your example of someone doing this well is. . . Mitt Romney?
If that's what you're hoping an "Evangelical elite" might accomplish, then we'd all be very much better off if such a thing never emerged. He's a card-carrying member of the anti-populist, NeverTrumper GOP Establishment.
Same goes for Francis Collins. Elite? Sure. But "Evangelical"? You'd never, ever know it by looking at his actions as director of the NIH. Here was a guy perfectly placed to apply Christian ethics to the biomedical field. If there is even a single example of his explicitly allowing such a perspective to influence an NIH program or policy, I am unaware of it. And that's even without looking at the COVID debacle or his decision to lift the ban on gain-of-function research.
Tim Keller is another really problematic example in this context. Keller, and particularly his acolytes, have been at the epicenter of a lot of sturm and drang in the PCA, even to this day. Sheep who made friends with the wolves, and do everything they can to make sure nobody in the flock does anything that would make the wolves upset.
The reason there is no "Evangelical elite" is because the Regime is actively hostile to theologically orthodox Christianity. At every level. There are any number of ways that a prestigious employer can gatekeep Evangelicals during the hiring process. Heck, it's been almost two decades since the Obama Administration started using "background checks" to filter out anyone who wasn't ideologically aligned with the Regime. Going to a Christian college or being associated with any kind of conservative think tank, etc., was basically guaranteed to get your application put straight in the trash for unspecified "security" reasons. All the applicant would know is that they didn't get an interview.
YIKES, I think you are on to something here…..
This is a great start to an important conversation.
Speaking from my own experience as an evangelical that went to a top 25 US secular university, I noticed a lot of my Christian peers would form a majority of their friend groups within the church. They would then spend a lot of time serving the church in various capacities (leading small groups, joining worship team, etc.). When they finished college, while they got their degrees they lacked influence and a skillset to navigate through the real world, because most of their college experience was inside this Christian bubble.
This is going to sound like a bit of a pat on the back, but I specifically rejected calls on me to lead small groups and things like that. While church pastors framed those as "leadership positions", I saw them as little more than low level coordination/facilitation roles. Instead, I invested my time in a large 100+ student run club and eventually ended up as the president for that organization. That opened doors where I interacted with other leaders within the school community that actually affected people at a larger scale.
I've thought a lot about the divergence in experience I had vs my 20+ years as an evangelical Christian, and I think it boils down to:
- Theologically, evangelicals have a weak understanding of how to interact in the world. Their theology boils down to being saved by grace and then waiting for Jesus to return. It's very passive. Perhaps this is a difference between dispensationalism (evangelical) and covenant theology (mainline).
- Socially, evangelicals lack confidence to interact with the real world, and much prefer the safe space of the church and church roles. I think this extends from theology: we're taught about the kindness and graciousness of God, but there's not a lot of emphasis on shaping the world. Contrast this to Redeemed Zoomer, who has a very forward-looking and high agency approach to how he plans to shape the world through retaking the mainline denominations. I've become very inspired by his work.
- Culturally, evangelicals are afraid of secular culture (Don't watch this/that movie because it's a bad influence). The Catholics I knew were much more open to that stuff, even if I found their faith a bit more nominal than that of evangelicals. Those Catholics ended up rising up to much higher leadership positions in college and beyond.
In any case, my wife and I just moved to a new area and we're now exploring mainline churches and not evangelical ones, with the mainline posture towards the world (more forward-facing, high agency) as a significant reason why.
I liked your essay, but why did you have to do St Thomas dirty like that. There aren’t even any rich people there lol. They might be a little light on doctrine, but they’re more of a tourist trap and children’s music school than an actual… church. Divorced people go there to have their kids baptized.
53rd and 5th is solely a tourist and commuter intersection. I do not observe that the area contains a disproportionate amount of rich people, who are more likely to be partying in Bushwick lofts. I see high school kids walking to Free Friday at MOMA.
I struggled to think of an image to use. I was afraid anyone or anybody I put on there might be perceived as being personally negatively talked about. I chose that image more for the street sign.
But I have to say, I've visited St. Thomas and I loved it. The 11am service is wonderful in particular.
I was trolling you. Yes, I understand it's hard to pick an image because of the offense that it may cause.
Just finished the article in First Things. Great piece of work! I wonder if evangelicals aren't swimming upstream when trying to engage as elites. One thing I don't think we can minimize is the culture and origins of evangelicalism in America. Much of evangelicalism in America was born out of those immigrants from the English borderlands who settled in much Appalachia (Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia and surrounding parts). They were a clans-like people very much into self-reliance and independence with strong kin-based loyalty and suspicion of elites. Unfortunately, their positive traits hardened into negative behaviors that I believe are still ingrained in many of today's evangelicals. Honor hardened into vendettas, independence led to a suspicion of education and bureaucracy, loyalty led to insularity, and suspicion of elites led to distrust of institutions. Those are cultural traits that are difficult to overcome. Unfortunately, those who are amenable to engaging with elites are self-selecting out for options like Catholicism. You face a lot of ostracism and opposition as an evangelical trying to engage with the elites. Unfortunately, I saw that in some of the criticism of Timothy Keller. I don't think we can ignore examining this aspect of evangelicalism when assessing why there are not more evangelical elites or evangelicals engaging with the elites.
“someone needs to write a Plutarch’s Lives of elite Protestants in American history who serve as the kind of role models we’d like people to imitate.”
The only issue with this for evangelicals is that such a book would overwhelming be about the liberal Mainline Protestants and Unitarians that occupied most of the elite positions in American history (at least north of the Mason-Dixon).
Yes, they would be mostly mainline. I'm actually not totally averse to highlighting liberal Protestants, so long as their theology genuinely animated their actions (e.g., John Foster Dulles). There aren't any liberals of that type around today that I know of.
But evangelicals have essentially amputated their greatest contributions to America by refusing to affirm the mainlines. There is a Protestant social teaching, for example. It was called the Progressive movement.
I believe defining the terms would help here. In the general sense, "evangelical" can mean any sort of protestant, but in the more commonly applied sense, "evangelical" is more of certain type of protestant.
For instance, I would associate with the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, but you would not catch me in an Evangelical Lutheran Church.
Me too!